Jacob Staub: It is our hope that we can have discussions that don't happen elsewhere because people are listening to each other, or are at least trying to listen to each other, rather than knocking each other down. [Music] Bryan Schwartzman.: From the recording studios of Reconstructing Judaism, this is Trending Jewish with... Rachael Burgess: I had to make sure I got the drum beats in before... Bryan S.: I totally lost my flow there. With Rachael Burgess. Rachael Burgess: And Bryan Schwartzman. Bryan S.: I guess we're supposed to talk, being as this is a podcast. There's not much ... I don't play an instrument, do you? Rachael Burgess: No, I don't. Just those drums that I usually play in the beginning when you say, "Live from the-" Bryan S.: A capella. Rachael Burgess: Yeah, that's about the extent of what I can do. So welcome to another episode of #TrendingJewish. Bryan S.: We're here to talk about Evolve today, right? But we don't ... Do we go into that? You gave me a look. Sam: Oh, did I? Bryan S.: Yeah. Sam: Oh, I was just like okay ... Oh we're talking about Evolve today, great. I was just writing it down. Rachael Burgess: There's also- Sam: I want to know what we're talking about today. Rachael Burgess: There is something really uncomfortable being in this seat with Sam, our producer, taking notes and you can't see what he's writing. It's almost like going into a doctor's office and you're wondering whether or not ... Rachael Burgess: There's a Seinfeld episode, too, whether or not we're being put down as a hostile patient... Sam: It's good stuff. 42 minutes phone ring. Rachael Burgess: There's probably other ... I'm a little suspicious. I wanted to know if there's other bits of wisdom. What if he's also sitting there while he's listening and writes these insightful quotes? I don't know. I think that there's probably a lot... Bryan S.: Did we follow your lead or were we talking away from the mic and doing all kinds of things we weren't supposed to? Sam: No, you were good. Bryan S.: We were good. We get a good grade today. That's excellent. Sam: [inaudible] Rachael Burgess: Please put a good note in your notebook about how good we were and how we follow directions. Sam: 4:03, hosts behaving. Bryan S.: Well, if we've been on for four minutes already, then we've lost our audience because we haven't done anything yet, but, all right. Bryan S.: So before we introduce our guest who is dear to both Rachael and I, I just want to remind folks, rate us, like us on iTunes, Google Play, Overcast, Castro, help people find the show. Spread the word about it. Tell your friend about it over a nice cappuccino. We know folks are listening to us out there so we'd love to hear from you and if you really are moved or like what you've heard or want to support us or the work of Reconstructing Judaism, feel free to go to www.reconstructingjudaism.org/donate. Bryan S.: How was that? Was that ... Rachael Burgess: That was great. I'm so proud. Bryan S.: Okay, all right. Rachael Burgess: I'm so proud of you. Bryan S.: So we have a great guest today, Rabbi Jacob Staub, who Rachael and I both know well. We were thrilled to have him on and talk in depth. So I'm here, I'm thrilled to introduce Rabbi Jacob Staub, Ph.D. Rabbi Staub directs Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations. Rabbi Staub graduated from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1977. He's served on the faculty here since 1983, and as a college vice president for academic affairs from 1989 to 2004. He was instrumental in developing RRC's Spiritual Direction program and has taught about this across the country. He served as the editor of _The Reconstructionist_, the legacy print publication, from 1983 to 1989. He's the author of _The Creation of the World According to Gersonides_ and _A Guide to Jewish Practice: Shabbat_ and the editor of a Zeek issue on "Reconstructionism: Denominationalism that Works?" in 2010. He is the co-editor with Jeffrey Schein of _Creative Jewish Education: A Reconstructionist Perspective_ and co-author with Rabbi Rebecca T. Alpert of _Exploring Judaism, A Reconstructionist Approach_. And Evolve, how do we find Evolve? At ReconstructingJudaism.org/evolve. Bryan S.: Thank you for being here, we're really excited to have you. Rachael Burgess: Thank you. Jacob Staub: I'm excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Bryan S.: We're here, primarily, I think, to talk about Evolve, which is this exciting new project under Reconstructing Judaism's auspices that you're spearheading. I think Director is your title of that. Rachael Burgess: I definitely want to go into what Evolve is about. So how did Evolve come about? Jacob Staub: So we are dedicated as part of, on the about page, what we are about. We're having conversations about groundbreaking issues, about difficult conversations that aren't happening, in a civil, respectful way at least, in other parts of the Jewish community. We welcome different opinions and our only requirement is that they be respectful and mutually open arguments for the sake of heaven. (Makhloket le-shamayim). Jacob Staub: And when I made my proposal to take on this project, I came in with a list of 10 subjects, topics, that I thought we should deal with. And very wisely, my colleagues said, "We don't want to do something that interests *you*. We want to do something that will be of interest more broadly." Jacob Staub: So what we did, first I had a dozen intensive conversations with a spectrum of members of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, being careful to have younger and older, East coast, West coast, congregational and other kinds of rabbis, and ask them "What are the urgent issues that your constituents are asking and are concerned about? What are the urgent questions?" And out of those a dozen conversations, I distilled 10 that kept coming up. We then did a survey of the entire RRA membership to see which were the most popular. And we came up with seven. Five, six and seven were close so we just said, let's do seven. Jacob Staub: And those issues were: 1) How to do justice work Jewishly? That is, anybody can do justice work in or out of a Jewish context. What makes it Jewish when we do Jewish justice work?. 2) How do we harness technology for the good of Jewish civilization? 3) How do we answer the question why be Jewish? 4) How do we approach the question of Jewish identities when there is such a demographic shift and confusion about who is and isn't a Jew in the 21st century? 5) Race and Judaism. 6) How to reimagine Jewish communities and 7) how to cultivate meaningful, respectful, constructive conversation about the issue of Israel/Palestine. Jacob Staub: Those are the seven that made it to the big seven. And what we did was we solicited, initially, one essay on each question. We targeted younger voices. I could have written all seven articles, so could a lot of other people. People, we tried, 10 years or less out from ordination and they wrote. And then we convened two web conversations, [to] which any member of the RRA was invited. So we had 14 web conversations, out of which came responses to the initial essays and materials that people had to contribute and are continuing to contribute. Those seven conversations are not over. Jacob Staub: We then, with the able and talented, I don't even want to say support, let's say leadership of Rabbi Ariana Katz, who put the website together and does a million other things to make all of this material accessible and attractive and meaningful. We got the site ready for rollout to the movement, the Reconstructionist movement, at the end of August and we now, in October, are rolling out to the wider Jewish world, little by little, organization by organization. Bryan S.: I've heard it described as a 21st century digital incarnation of the Reconstructionist, which you may or may not necessarily agree with, but I thought it made sense to explain to our readers ... I know you were the editor of the Reconstructionist for six years. I imagine you were a reader before and after that ... what that publication was, why it was so important and maybe what we're trying to recapture or how we're trying to recapture it now. Jacob Staub: Yeah. I am delighted with that characterization, though it's a bit of a high bar to live up to. I hope we can and we are living up the standards of The Reconstructionist. The Reconstructionist was founded, began, in the 1930s by Mordecai Kaplan and his followers. It grew out of the SAJ Review -- the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, the SAJ was the first congregation that called itself Reconstructionist and it was a very high level newsletter that tackled all the issues of the day that then got transformed into a Reconstructionist that was beyond the SAJ. The Reconstructionist in the 30s and the 40s and the 50s was the place for Jewish thinkers, intellectuals, rabbis, people who cared about the issues of the day to read and to write about the issues of the day. Jacob Staub: We now have -- even before the digital revolution, we had dozens of such publications that began to come forth in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s. But back then it was the first and it was radical. It was putting forth ideas in a mostly traditional world view of the organized Jewish community that were challenging the basic ideas of the time and was also pro-labor, pro-union, anti-corporation. It was politically radical as well as religiously radical. So many of Kaplan's initial ideas that Judaism isn't an unending tradition but is an evolving civilization and so on were put forth there. It was ... It came about after the publication of Judaism as a Civilization, the first book that he published, in order to promulgate those ideas. Jacob Staub: So my relationship with the Reconstructionist dates back to my being a college student and I wrote this really college studenty letter on five hole, lined, loose leaf paper that said, "Dear Sir, I'm confused about my Jewish identity. What is Reconstructionist Judaism? Signed Jack Staub" and put it in the mail to the Reconstructionist Seminary, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which I had heard about for the first time at a writers' conference in Middlebury several months before. Among the flood of materials that came back to me was a subscription from the women's division of the Foundation, I think, of the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation. And so I subscribed and I was just amazed and excited that people could be talking about the things that they were talking about in a Jewish publication. Jacob Staub: That was very important to me. And eventually led me to applying to RRC, to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. So when I got the opportunity in 1983 to become editor of the publication, I was very excited. I wanted it, though, to be different than it had been. We didn't need, at that point, a thought journal for a high-brow discussion. We were, by 1983, an expanding movement with 30 or 40 or 50 affiliated congregations and havurot and I was interested in making the Reconstructionist into a window into what was happening in the movement, so we had lots of articles on the synagogue as a support system network, about how intermarried couples were and weren't welcomed into the synagogues at that time, and to ways of developing new rituals and so on. And I went to lay leaders in the congregations to either write or to tell me who in their congregations should write about the various exciting things that were happening in their communities. Jacob Staub: We also, in every issue, had a thought piece, like a symposium on the chosen people and so on. But mostly we were interested in sharing the riches, letting people know just how exciting were the things that were going on in Reconstructionist communities. Jacob Staub: So now, with the opportunity to do the same thing digitally, there are new challenges. But they are also, in many ways, much easier. In those days, I put together eight 32-page issues per year for those six years. I had to solicit the articles. They had to come in on a deadline. I had to edit them, I had several editorial assistants, and then had to cut and paste and mock up pages. It was a very, very long process to produce each issue and it was fixed. And we could hope that we would get a few letters to the editor responding to what we were publishing. Now we put the articles, the essays, up and they're not just essays. We're having interpretations of biblical texts and study guides and curricula. We're putting them up and people are responding to them, writing their own essays in response and we don't have to ... I say the length of an essay should be 1,500 to 2,500 words, that's so that it will be readable. It won't be too long. In fact, we can put up an essay of any length. I don't have to cut the last 500 words out if it shouldn't be cut because it's digital. Jacob Staub: And we are able to and have held web conversations about these articles. People out there read the essays, most of the time, and then contribute to the discussions of the topics. It's much more interactive and the reach is much wider. Bryan S.: And you also have video and audio on the site as well. Jacob Staub: Right. Right. We do. That was part of my thrill. I could take my iPhone and put someone up against the wall and say talk for 30 seconds about why be Jewish. And people can do it. They can actually be concise and we're doing more and more of that. Bryan S.: You mentioned that you thought a little about this in advance, but it's your sense if this poll was taken during the days when you were editing the Reconstructionist in the Reagan era, the list of topics would have been very different? Jacob Staub: Yeah. They would have been an earlier version. So ... Like right now we are preparing two more topics, two more "buckets" for the winter/spring doing what we did with the seven again with two more. And we're talking about gender identity. And back then the issue of gay and lesbian rabbis, or how to welcome and include gay and lesbian people was really controversial. Very controversial. So it's amazing the difference 30 years makes. I think one of the editorials -- we had editorials every issue -- of the old Reconstructionist that I am most proud, was this long editorial called "The Best Interests of the Child" which argued for same sex couples to be allowed to adopt and it was mind expanding. My mind expanded and I think nobody was saying that back then. So the issues were different. Again, another ... The first editorial we wrote was a long one called After Begin. Menachem Begin had just died. Shamir had just taken over and we were getting ready for, we hoped, a return to the halcyon days of Labor Zionist leadership and we were talking about what it would mean if the pace of building of settlements on the West Bank continued and how that would change the scope of thing. Jacob Staub: That's not where we are now. Now we're talking about is a two state solution even possible? Things changed in the last 30 years. We were not talking about people of color, Jews of color. We weren't even talking about that 10 years ago, I don't think. That's a new issue that's really taken hold and is very important in the Evolve setting and in the broader world, the Jewish Social Justice Round Table and the RRA itself have held colloquia about these things and consultation. Jacob Staub: We were dealing still back then with "Was patrilineal descent going to end the Jewish people?" The question that CLAL put out in those days was "Will there be one Jewish people in the year 2000?" And I was the Reconstructionist representative very often on the "four flavors panel" where each of the movements addressed that problem and now we know. There isn't one Jewish people anymore and that's okay. Jacob Staub: I argued very strongly over and over again for the fact that there have been divisions in Jewish history in every generation and every place and the myth of "We Are One" is not a helpful construct in terms of moving forward with ongoing evolution. So those are some of the different issues that are different now than they were before. Jacob Staub: Another, one last one, is back then, back then 30 years ago, we were still touting peoplehood as a panacea. Like, "You don't have to believe anything in particularly, you don't have to do anything in particularly, you just have to belong to the Jewish people." This is something Kaplan put forward and belonging is prior to behaving which is prior to believing. And so there were a lot of people who were proudly not interested in religion or in ... Not that you have to be interested in religion, but there wasn't any content, ethical or spiritual content to their belonging. And Jeffrey Schein and I wrote together stuff on promoting an idea of spiritual peoplehood, one that had content and values. And that was a new idea then. It was like we were seeing that you couldn't just have "cardiac Judaism", "I feel Jewish in my heart". You needed content and now, 30 years later, that's a given. Jacob Staub: First of all you have lots and lots of people who do not feel that nostalgic attachment because they either weren't born Jewish, or their parents weren't very involved Jewishly, or we're a couple generations removed from a mass immigration, 1881 to 1924 and people don't have grandparents who knew Yiddish. And there are many people who aren't Ashkenazic. So the traditions of being Jewish because of bagels and lox and because of kneidlach and all the things that made you Jewish emotionally are still important but they're not central in the same way. Bryan S.: Many of us in society, in American society, in particular, we've forgotten how to talk to those we disagree with. We're also not participating in democratic, small d, organizations the way we once did. We're not used to sitting on committees and working through messy problems and having, sometimes living with results they don't agree with. Does the community behind Evolve face some of these same challenges? Do you see this as a needed model for civic discourse at an uncivil time? Is there a broader scope for this? Jacob Staub: Yeah, yeah, that's really one of the critical issues of our time. Absolutely. I'd say that the Reconstructionist emphasis on community and the value and importance of community is a place to start. So we have been working for longer than 30 years, 50 years from the old havurot working on models of participatory decision making. Is it okay to bring in kosher ingredients food into the communal kitchen from a non-kosher kitchen? Is it okay to take photographs of a bar or bat mitzvah service on Shabbat? Rachael Burgess: Or to stream services as well. Jacob Staub: Right. Rachael Burgess: That was a huge question as well for a while as well. Jacob Staub: Yes, that is actually a little bit easier halachically because you can just set it on and it turns on itself. Whereas a photographer actually has to be ... so less intrusive aesthetically, but yeah. Absolutely. But all of those. Jacob Staub: The approach we have put forward over the years has been called participatory decision making -- that is, the community is making a decision. People who are interested will join a committee, a sub-ritual committee or whatever you want to call it, that studies the sources and studies contemporary issues and comes up with a proposal that balances tradition and contemporary values, that then gets put forward for larger discussion among a larger group that makes the decision in the community. What that does, is it asks for an investment of time and interest and an acquisition of knowledge so that you're not [just] saying "Oh, I don't feel that way." You need to know why is that practice important or was once important before you discard it. And so it's a knowledge-based consensus that has worked pretty well in many, many of our communities in making decisions so that it's not "Oh the rabbi decided this and I don't like it and I'm leaving the community." You have a buy-in to the community. And the other payoff there is that a certain number of people learn a lot about kashrut or learn a lot about Shabbat observance that they would not have otherwise. They become more knowledgeable Jews. They become more committed. They have more of a buy-in. Jacob Staub: More recently, David Teutsch has put forward a more formalized version of that called "Values Based Decision Making." But it's the same process. Let's figure out what are all the values. Let's talk about them. Let's reach a consensus, which means that not everybody has to agree, just no one vetoes, so you can live with it. So that's the basis on which Evolve is now coming into this wild west world of polarization and acrimony and ad hominem attacks. Jacob Staub: It is our hope that we can have discussions that don't happen elsewhere, because people are listening to each other or at least trying to listen to each other rather than knocking each other down. So that means that opinions that are controversial, or not so kosher in other parts of the Jewish community, can appear on the website, on the Evolve site, because we're not endorsing them, we are allowing opinions to be expressed that can then be responded to. So the advisory board has come up with a set of traditional Jewish values that will govern these conversations. Jacob Staub: One I've already mentioned is makhloket le-shem shamayim, that you're arguing for the sake of Heaven, not in order to vanquish each other. Another is respect, kavod. Another is redifat shalom, pursuit of peace, which nowadays comes to mean compassionate listening. I want to understand what motivates you to feel so strongly about your position. I don't have to agree with it, but I can understand where you are coming from and we can make peace. You don't make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies, your opponents. So I can be empathic, an empathic listener and then maybe be changed by listening in that way to you. And most basic of all is that we are all created in the image of God and that nobody should be insulted, ridiculed, embarrassed, that's not what tzelem elohim, the image of God, requires of us. So wish us luck. So far, so good. Jacob Staub: This worked in the web conversations. It worked really well and values were put forth in advance and I was there as a classroom monitor. I was the facilitator, but I said, "I will intervene if it gets out of hand," and I never had to. Rachael Burgess: So you set up these values and I don't think that these were explicitly stated back in the Reconstructionist. I mean you have a printed format and it was more of a one way conversation. You said you were hoping that people would write back to respond through a letter to the editor. Did you have to state that specifically because this is digital platform that people are responding to? Did that have the influence or is it more of the times that we're in that we're very polarized. What really... Jacob Staub: Yeah, I would say both. The digital format means that we have to curate. Back then if someone wrote a letter and it was nasty I could not publish it or I could ... nobody would know the difference. But it's really important that we take ... we, the advisory board, the staff ... take responsibility for the menschlichkeit of any given comment. Jacob Staub: So Internet trolls and stalkers and all of the phenomena that we have to deal with now is addressed in some ways in the Harnessing Technology essay where Deborah Waxman and Nathan Kamesar talk about developing rules, values, that we should try to live by when we are on the Internet, like try to imagine what the face of the other person looks like even though you're not in the same room. Imagine that you're actually talking to her or him as you would if he were sitting across the table. So there's that. We have to deal with that because of the digital age. Jacob Staub: And, overhanging everything else is the acrimony that's just out there on news media, in every form. What would have been roundly condemned by everyone across the political spectrum now stands as a reasonable discourse when discussing issues. Bryan S.: All right, I think this is related and if it's not, Sam over there can just hit delete and no one will be the wiser. Anyone who's encountered me in the last month knows I've become obsessed with this Israeli historian philosopher, Yuval Harari. You don't necessarily have to have read him to answer this question, but I'm making my way through his first book... Jacob Staub: Homo. Sapien. Not homo. Sorry. Bryan S.: ... Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which it is what it says. It covers everything from the development of agriculture to commerce to genders, societies, technology, patriarchy, race. It's all in there and his main contention ... I'm sure it's not a new idea. It's not a new idea but the way he phrases is really interesting. That what really separates our genus and species from other human species that co-existed and preceded us and the animal kingdom is our ability to create --It's not a word I like, but he says, "fictions" that our cognitive powers and language are sophisticated enough that we can get people to cooperate together around an idea. It's not just to protect our band or protect my family. But we work together for Imperial China. We work together for the idea of Apple Corporation. We work together for Judaism and the Torah and everything we've inherited. Bryan S.: One way you can look at it that the Jewish enterprise is deeply human and in some ways it seems like it resonates with Kaplan's teachings on the idea that Judaism exists for the Jewish people and not the other way around. And on the other hand, I've been deeply disturbed. Maybe, I mean, I almost asked myself, is this all made up? What if we remotely accept that? How do we ensure that Judaism is something of a higher plane from all these other ideas that unite humans in common cause? I think that's my question. Did that come across... Jacob Staub: I can work with it. Bryan S.: Does that work with it? They teach you in journalism school to ask short direct precise questions. Jacob Staub: There you go. [laughter] Bryan S.: And so I violated every rule I've ever been taught but... Jacob Staub: Sure what I hear you asking about is narrative,, or what we used to call in the 60s, mythic structure. There aren't even facts. This is the postmodern perspective. There are just ways that you organize and narrate things that you perceive and that there's no one right way to do that. Jacob Staub: I was reading, I think, recently, an article about why people are so devastated, like if you lose a Senate ... If your team loses a Senate vote, it's not unlike what happens when your team loses the Super Bowl. Being part of a team means that your identity is invested in that team and you take personally, and are personally affected by that narrative of how that team fares. Jacob Staub: I think your question, I'll get to how it addresses the Jewish enterprise in a minute, but the ... I think the larger issue is there's such a thing as truth, as accuracy. And the answer is, I think, emphatically no. Is it truer to say that the Israelites at Mount Sinai had a transformative experience and Moses wrote this stuff down based on his understanding of the ethical and ritual needs of a people than it is ... Is it truer to say that, than it is to say God spoke at Mount Sinai and those words were literally heard? No. I don't think either one is truer. It's that we make choices about how to organize, narrate ... Harari is using the word "fiction" ... If he's using the word "fiction" like that, then fiction will soon have the same status as myth, which is not as false. Myth is really truthful. Myths contain truths and not falsehoods. So he's using fiction in that way. Jacob Staub: To give a shorter answer to the question, getting to Jewish stuff, there is ... One of the things I argued in those four person panels about "Will there be one Jewish people in the year 2000?" was that it was unhelpful for the non-Orthodox to ask the Orthodox to be pluralistic. (This is an example.) Because the very definition of Orthodoxy is that there is one way to do things and it's not a matter of how you want to observe Passover. It's "here's the way you do it" and we don't have ... It's not like it's up to me to make those decisions. Jacob Staub: So asking the Orthodox to be pluralistic, to admit that we all have viewpoints that are of equal value is to ask them not to be Orthodox. So we were experiencing them being intolerant of us when we were being intolerant of them. Actually it was mutual. Jacob Staub: So how we organize the data affects what we think is true and affects how we live. Kaplan's contention was that he came out of the pragmatist school. You judge ideas and beliefs according to their fruit. Jacob Staub: So if I believe in an all powerful God who knows my every thought and that's bad for my self image and doesn't allow me to achieve my potential, then that's not a good thing. If, on the other hand, there are plenty of people who believe that who thrive as human beings, so it's not ... Okay, so if the purpose of, he would say, Kaplan would say, if the purpose of a Passover Seder is to affirm the value of freedom from oppression, if that's the underlying ... We were slaves and now we're free. We are continued to be slaves in this generation. We have to continue to work for freedom. So he would say, if a Seder leads to people having a better sense of what it means to be free, either personally, individually and/or how to work against oppression and for freedom in the world, then that works. Jacob Staub: But if you go to a Seder and everybody comes out oppressed by the notion that oh my God, how am I going to fulfill all of the prohibitions of Passover, then he would say that's not a good myth to live by. So all we can do is adopt fictions, myths, stories, that promote what we think are the best values and live them out according to our stories. Bryan S.: Well if Evolve ever adopts a book club, I nominate that as one of the selections. But look forward to seeing where Evolve goes. Certainly the next topics ... You're the boss, are we out of time? Rachael Burgess: We are out of time, but thank you so, so much for coming in and sharing the evolution of Evolve. Jacob Staub: My pleasure. Rachael Burgess: Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations, which is a project from Reconstructing Judaism. Thank you very much. Jacob Staub: Great pleasure. I'm very excited with the project and it's a pleasure to speak with you. Rachael Burgess: Thank you very much, Rabbi Jacob Staub, and if you want to learn more about the Evolve project, check out the articles that were written [and] respond. You can do that by going to Evolve.ReconstructingJudaism.org and you can subscribe to more #TrendingJewish episodes using iTunes, Google Play, Overcast and Castro and other places where you can download and listen to podcasts. Rachael Burgess: You can also listen to podcasts and also see other resources on our website, trendingjewish.fireside.fm. And if you like Trending Jewish, you like the work that we're doing, please feel free, we would greatly appreciate it if you could help support our work and you can do that by going to ReconstructingJudaism.org/donate. Rachael Burgess: Thank you very much for listening and we look forward to seeing you next time.