Bryan S.:	From the recording studios of Reconstructing Judaism, welcome to Evolve:Groundbreaking Jewish conversations.


Rachel Weiss:	Most people don't identify only one community as primary. The multiple layers of our identities necessitate being part of multiple communities. A synagogue community or a Jewish community and a school community and a social community and a political community. And so the synagogue can't be imagining itself to be the center, because quite frankly, there is no center anymore.

Bryan S.:	Welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish conversations. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman. And we have a great show for you today. Our guest is Rabbi Rachel Weiss, and we'll be discussing her Evolve essay, 21st Century Judaism, Re-imagining Synagogues and Communities. Before we get started, I want to tell you a little bit more about the show, since this is our first episode. The podcast is an offshoot of the larger Evolve project. So, what is Evolve? Evolve is a multichannel initiative of Reconstructing Judaism that sparks respectful, sacred conversations about the urgent issues faced by Jewish people today. Issues like gender, spirituality, antisemitism, why live a Jewish life, technology, identity, community, race, justice, and Israel/Palestine. You can read essays, watch videos, and explore learning curricula about these topics on the Evolve website, evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. And I should say all the essays discussed on this show are available to read for free on the Evolve website, evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org.

Bryan S.:	All right. Let's welcome our first guest, Rabbi Rachel Weiss, who is a 2009 graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and spiritual leader of Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Illinois.  2009 graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and spiritual leader of Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Illinois. In her Evolve essay, “21st Century Judaism: Reimagining Synagogues and Jewish Communities,” Rabbi Racheel Weiss challenges the assumptions of how a synagogue should operate. Weiss describes approaches taken at Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Illinois. It highlights multigenerational programming, interfaith activism and social and political relevance. If you haven't had a chance to read her essay, now's a great time to press pause and go check it out. We have a link right in our episode description. All right, welcome. Welcome, Rabbi Weiss. We're so glad to have you.

Rachel Weiss:	My pleasure.

Bryan S.:	Terrific. So we are here to discuss your essay for Evolve, 21st Century Judaism, which revolves a lot around your ideas and things you've implemented at Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Illinois. So I think before I get into the specifics, I read ... In a lot of ways, I read your piece as a defense of synagogues, or a defense of congregations and what they could be and how they could be re-imagined and revitalized. And this probably sounds like an obvious question to ask a rabbi, but I guess I wanted to start with why care about congregations so much? Why are you so invested in it? I mean, as we've seen, there are other ways to express Judaism and experience Judaism.

Rachel Weiss:	Sure. I mean, there're as many ways to be a Jew as there are Jews. And yet, there are very few organizations, systems, institutions, or even spaces that span a multi-generational, multi-interest group of Jews. And one of the things that a synagogue or a congregation has the capacity to do is really bring together people who wouldn't necessarily gravitate toward one another, but have something to give and to take from one another. Yes, people can form Jewish communities that are just based in the people that they know and the common interests that they have, but one of the magical things about a really ... About a congregation is the capacity to come together and show up for each other and support one another, and to do multiple things at the same time that also give people an opportunity to be exposed to elements of Judaism that they may not have imagined they were interested in. So it's really an opportunity to bring together the collective sparks.

Rachel Weiss:	There's a lot that we talk about these days in terms of post-denominationalism or the next generation doesn't relate to institutions in the same way that previous generations did. And that's absolutely true. We don't relate to institutions or even institutionalized Judaism in the same way as the past. That doesn't mean that we have to do away with the institutions. It means we have to reconstruct and keep them growing and changing so that they meet the needs of who we are today.

Bryan S.:	So you write about how the last major reshuffling or re-imagining of the American synagogue happened in the early 1950s and the post-World War era. I guess I would ask just how do you understand or define either the challenge or the problem of synagogues today? I mean, most people seem to be in agreement, there is a synagogue problem or there is a synagogue challenge, but what exactly is it? Or how do you understand it?

Rachel Weiss:	Yeah. I think in that time period, and even continuing to the more recent past, we have tended to think about having one place in our lives that is the anchoring institution or anchoring place. And for many Jews, that was the synagogue. Their personal, spiritual life revolved around it. Their social life, their children's friends, their life cycles, often their business contacts were all related, revolving around the synagogue as a central institution. When Judaism stopped being exclusively neighborhood based and became more diverse and more varied and Jews spread out across all different places geographically, not having one center being the synagogue was less compelling.

Rachel Weiss:	On top of that, I think today, one of the things that we are ... One of the defining characteristics of this moment is that people don't just have one identity. They don't just have one primary institution that they're engaged with. They have a racial identity, an ethnic identity, a religious identity, a sexual orientation, a gender identity, a community, a socioeconomic identity. All of these different identities are layered together, and we recognize the complexity, that is not just about having only one place. And so if we continue to think about a synagogue as being the center of the community that fits everything for everyone, our Jews don't relate to anything that way. Most of us have a synagogue community or a Jewish community and a school community and a social community and a political community. And there are so many different ways in which they overlap and intersect.

Rachel Weiss:	Most people don't identify only one community as primary. Many of us recognize that the multiple layers of our identities necessitate being part of multiple communities. And so the synagogue can't be imagining itself to be the center, because quite frankly, there is no center anymore. So what if we re-imagined the synagogue as being one of the primary anchoring institutions or gathering spaces or wells of information, of knowledge, of sustenance, of nourishment in a person's life? And recognize that it has to work in concert with a lot of different other kinds of places just like that.

Bryan S.:	One thing you mentioned in your essay that resonated for me was even those who are engaged Jewishly, especially among millennials, there's a propensity to engage in different Jewish institutions, to do your studying here or your activism here or attend service here. And the idea of putting all your eggs in one basket, or just supporting one institution and having to choose is really ... Just really seems counterintuitive. And I don't know if, as a Jewish community, we've figured out a way around that, where somebody could pay one membership to all Jewish institutions and pick and choose, but ...

Rachel Weiss:	I mean, I think the financial issue is a reality because everyone is struggling for the same dollars and the same nonprofit organization. And by and large, there are issues in the community that when someone's looking to donate their funds, may feel more compelling and more critical than maintaining say, synagogue membership. We have to understand that being all things to all people is too heavy for anyone. We need to figure out how do we partner with one another? I am thrilled when I hear that a young Jewish person in my community is studying at Svara, and protesting with IfNotNow, and coming to JRC for some of our services, and maybe getting together twice a year for a synagogue social, and having a vegetarian potluck Shabbat dinner in their home, and maybe is an alum of Avodah, and maybe is exploring teaching at another synagogue. That's fabulous. That's incredible engagement, because it means that they're touching on lots of different parts of the Jewish world, and what it requires from all of us is to do what Moses was being taught, which is to give up your ego. To say we can't be all things to all people. How do we maintain ourselves as an open well that people can come and drink from and contribute to and be part of? And that will change and evolve over the lifespan.

Rachel Weiss:	Our 20, 30-somethings are thrilled to set up the Purim Carnival and the games the night before with pizza and beer and hang out with each other, and leave the Purim Carnival because they remember it from their childhood, which is every elementary school parent's nightmare. Everybody hates the Purim Carnival when you have small children, because it's crazy and you're running your children around. You don't have time to volunteer. The young adults, the 20, 30-somethings are ready and excited to do that. The parents are excited to bring their kids and walk them through, and maybe have a lechaim in the morning. The older community is excited in the evening to have a café where there is an adult-themed Purim spiel, and people bake hamantaschen together.

Rachel Weiss:	We don't have to be all things to all people at once. What we do have to do is find multiple ways for people to touch in, and then find ways that we can cross-pollinate those touch points so that they also expose people to new ideas, and they help and feed, and help with some of the heavy lifting.

Bryan S.:	So I think this is a follow-up to that. You talk about implementing, utilizing, design thinking, which in my understanding requires ... In a sense, it's this form of social entrepreneurship and it requires, in a sense, knowing what people I could say your potential customers are interested in, what they want. So there may not be a secret sauce, but how do you know what ... Both what your existing community wants and what future potential members, congregants, customers, what they want? How do you learn that?

Rachel Weiss:	Over the last couple of years, I have become a student of design thinking. And I'm still a student, and still learning what it is and how we can use it. The three words that are, I think, as close to the secret sauce that you might get in design thinking are the words "how might we"? Rather than saying we have this problem, let's figure out the solution right now, it involves an act of imagination of identifying where would we want to go and how might we do this differently? How might we explore? It's an expansive opening question.

Rachel Weiss:	So we've been doing this with our religious school for the last two years, thinking about how might we change from a traditional, supplementary after-school model to something that actually feels engaging and relevant and Reconstructionist, and changing its shape and its form? This is an iterative process. You come up with an idea. You talk to a lot of people, and you get feedback, and you ask people what their hopes and their dreams are, and what they might like. It's community organizing from the inside. And then you prototype. You try something small, you see how it goes, you evaluate, you try something bigger. It's constantly not being invested in a particular outcome, but really being invested in the process, in what does it mean to engage people all along?

Rachel Weiss:	So this past year, I had been hearing rumblings as had various committee chairs and board members, that many of our members who were aging at JRC, who had been former committee chairs, and past presidents, and board members, who had done the heavy lifting and the schlepping for many years, whose kids were out of the house, maybe they were empty nesters, they no longer found exactly where they fit. They didn't particularly, in their words, need the synagogue right now, meaning nobody was sick. Their parents either were healthy or their parents were gone. They were thinking about how do I still connect and how do I engage? What do ... And to figure out what the needs of that group was.

Rachel Weiss:	So I hosted a bagel brunch called "Growing Older With JRC: What Do We Want To Create Together?" And it was basically a very large parlor meeting to help people imagine and dream and also say what their needs are. We used our database, we use ShulCloud ... And we used our database to send a targeted, direct, personalized email to every member of our congregation whose birthday we had who was 55 and older. 87 people RSVP-ed and showed up. That's a huge number of people. We had brunch, and we discovered a couple of things through an exercise of saying what are the things that you're looking for that JRC isn't providing? Or what are the things, the needs that you have now? Rather than saying what can we do, we asked what do you need?

Rachel Weiss:	And so once we had an entire dry-erase board that was full of ideas of what people need and what people like and what people hoped for ... And by the way, one of the primary things that people said that they needed was exactly what we were doing, an opportunity where they'd know they could come and socialize and see their friends. They didn't necessarily need more. They needed a defined space to just come with all your people and talk. Then, we flipped the board over and said, "All right. How might we accomplish some of those pieces?" And we basically took notes. How might we do that? People explored ideas from expanding play bridge to game night. People explored, well, we have a Shabbat, we might have a scholar in residence, how might we expand that to have yoga and meditation and study and lunch? And what if we had a whole day shabbaton? Which by the way, we've scheduled this year, hopefully in concert with our scholar in residence.

Rachel Weiss:	How might we engage with the religious school students? Which has now led our religious school committee to be talking with folks who are interested in volunteering in the classrooms or interested and have expertise as former teachers, or parents who have experience to give insights to the community and to the religious school community, who they normally wouldn't interact with. There are many different ways and different ideas that came out of that, but asking the question, what are the needs that you see? And then doing a collective brainstorm got people's voices engaged, and got people to the table.

Bryan S.:	You mention aging boomers. Once upon a time, I was the 20, 30-something young professional. Now, I'm the parent with kids. I had always assumed that the Jewish infrastructure, the boomers were the ones taking advantage of it. They were the ones who had time to go to the Tuesday night book club or the Saturday morning Torah study, but yet I'm finding in a lot of spaces boomers have actually ... Who may be long time members of congregations are actually feeling neglected, and maybe that their long-time congregations aren't the place for that anymore. I mean, you touch on that in your essay. What's your thinking on that? How are you ...

Rachel Weiss:	I mean, I think baby boomers and every generation, people want to feel seen. Religious school parents are exhausted. They're at the height of their active parenting life. They are at one of the most expensive times of their lives, where they're paying for religious school, and life cycles like b'nai mitzvah and summer camp and ballet and hockey and circus arts and all the other crazy things that our children do. And they are often ... More often than not, two parent households that are full-time and working, or single parent households that are working. We no longer have this idea that somebody is at home whose job is to just manage the family.

Bryan S.:	I'm nodding big time. Listeners can't see that, but ... Hitting home.

Rachel Weiss:	Absolutely. This is the most active time, and people are exhausted. And people are saying no, I can't join this committee. So our response is to say okay, lay leadership looks like something that is totally inaccessible to you, but we want your involvement and we need your involvement. How could we change the way leadership in the committee structure to be something manageable for you? We changed our dues structure for our under 35-year-old, where they pay $18 a month, and it just gets charged to their credit card every month, because the structure of how most 20, 30-somethings live their lives is that everything is monthly. Your student loans, your rent, your gym membership. All of those things. It's just part of what you do monthly. If you ask that population to make a $500 contribution at the beginning of every year, the answer would be absolutely not. I can't afford that. But if you structure it the way everything else is structured, then people can figure out ways to make it manageable.

Rachel Weiss:	One of the things that we talk a lot about in our congregation is getting people to sign up for things, is how can we do it so that you can make an appointment or do what you need to do from your phone. Every other religious ... Every other school system or community program sends you an alert, or you can fill out a form on your phone. How do we do that so we can better communicate with people in that generation? And it can't be the only thing we do. This is the complicated part about synagogues, because we're dealing with three or four different generations who all communicate and all learn about things and all have different needs at the same time.

Bryan S.:	Right. And you ... In the essay, you place a high value importance on intergenerational activities and coming together. So I want to ask why, and I want to ask for some examples how you've managed to do that?

Rachel Weiss:	Sure. So one of the most poignant moments in our b'nai mitzvah service is we chant four liyot of Torah on a typical Saturday morning in our main Shabbat morning service, which is led by the cantor and the rabbi, and the bar, bat, b'nai, brit mitzvah of the week, depending on the gender identity and choice of the student. So we have ... It's basically a service in which there is a life cycle ritual happening. We also concurrently have a member-led Shabbat morning service, a Shabbat minyan that happens that is entirely lay-led and adult focused.

Rachel Weiss:	We chant four aliyot of Torah in our main service. Two of them can be assigned by the family. The third one is when the child gets called to the Torah for the first time as a Jewish adult and becomes officially bar, bat, b'nai, or brit mitzvah. And then the fourth aliyah is for all adult members of our JRC community, which for the very first time includes that child, now adult. So the first mitzvah that the kid participates in is to be called to the Torah with their community. And one of the things I have the kid do after the whole community who's there, whoever they are, is to turn around and say you know some of these people because you've known them your whole life, because they're your parents. You have known them because you've been in religious school with them. You might know them because they're your neighbors.

Rachel Weiss:	And some people who are standing up here around you, you may have never seen before today. That's what showing up means. And to see how better to model what an engaged adult Jewish life looks like than to see regular shul-goers who come to the bat mitzvah of a child they've never met before, because they want to show up for that child. And now, they've met one another.

Rachel Weiss:	We also encourage our kids and our families with children to attend shiva. In the pre-b'nai mitzvah year, they're required to go to 10 services, and they can't all be the b'nai mitzvah services of their friends. They ... It's a choose your own adventure model. So four of them can be Shabbat ... You can count four of them as Shabbat morning services. One you can count the Shabbat morning lay-led minyan. You can count a service at camp, or at the beach. You can count a Yom Tov service. You can count a high holiday service where you're in the entire adult high holiday service. And you can count a shiva minyan.

Rachel Weiss:	And so we encourage people to go to a shiva minyan even if they don't know the person or the family, because first of all, it's a great way to teach kids about what our customs are, and it's really important to teach them when they're not necessarily emotionally affected by the loss. It's a lot easier to teach kids "this is what we do for shiva" when you're showing up for someone and you're not also in the state of mourning. Most children will attend shiva for the first time when they lose a grandparent or a family member. And then they're in the middle of it from a feeling place, but if they've never seen what happens before, they have no idea what to expect.

Rachel Weiss:	I was at a shiva last night for the father of one of our members. Two of our 13-year-olds told their parents that they were on their way. The parents said, "Well, we might miss the service." They looked at their parents and they said, "Isn't the service what we're going for?" That's remarkable. And to really encourage folks to do that, when we have folks who need support, to be there in active ways.

Rachel Weiss:	We do family learning days in our religious school in which ... They're really for the whole community, and we invite adults to join with our oldest kids to really get into good high level discussions. We have a day on Israel/ Palestine. We had a day last year that was on racial equity. They are opportunities where we cross-pollinate. Our immigrant justice task force had an evening talking about the difference between being an immigrant, a refugee, and an asylum-seeker. And they put together various speakers, including a woman who is a member of our congregation who has come to the United States five years ago as a refugee from the Republic of Congo. And she was going to tell her story. We put that talk on a Friday night, the same night that the sixth graders were having their family potluck.

Rachel Weiss:	The sixth graders also, in their curriculum, study immigration, and they do a project called My Story, where they look at how are all of the different elements of their story coming together? And how does immigration play a role in that? But we put it all together on one night, and then we have a service that is about immigration with a social justice viewpoint and lots of adults who come, but also sixth graders and their families.

Rachel Weiss:	So there are ways that we set up in partnership. One of the experiments we tried last year was to say that just about every one of our programs, adult ed programs, social justice programs, all different kinds of learning opportunities, had to be cosponsored by at least two different groups. What that means is that the racial equity task force was sponsoring a program with the library committee to talk about the history of the integration of our local public schools and the racism that's present there. And that means that not only do you get two committees that are sharing in the budget and sharing in the advertising and sharing in the schlepping and the setting up. it means that you have two different populations that are also going to bring two different groups of people to attend the program. And that one program is going to be more robust, rather than having two small programs that will have a very focused attendance group.

Rachel Weiss:	They're things we're trying. We're prototyping. Some of them work. Some of them don't.

Bryan S.:	I mean, certainly in my experience, those two events you mentioned would be on different nights in the calendar. That's what we expect. So what's the experience been like putting them together? I mean, do either side feel like their event is being diluted? Or do they really feel like there's been a multiplier effect?

Rachel Weiss:	It's definitely a multiplier effect. It definitely is exponentially stronger when different populations are there. First of all, parents are going to bring their children to their class-sponsored potluck and not have a lot of bandwidth for anything else, right? If they're coming on this night, and people coming to a program one night on a weeknight are going to come to that one program and not have a lot of bandwidth for anything else. We've pretty much discovered that if you put an adult education program on a Thursday night, nobody's coming to services on Friday night, because people don't come to synagogue two nights in a row. Their lives are just too busy.

Rachel Weiss:	So if you put that adult education program on Friday night after the service, and you advertise that the potluck dinner starts at six, the service starts at 7:30, and the program starts at 8:30, then people know. And some people have Shabbat dinner at home, and they come at 8:30 for the program. Some people come just for Shabbat dinner and they leave. Some people come for dinner and services. Some people just come for services and the program. It's a little bit choose your own, but it really allows for us to consolidate and conserve our energy. Every congregational rabbi I know and every synagogue is doing the ambition/capacity dance. We have great ideas. We have a lot of passion. We have very limited capacity. How can we use our resources more effectively? And that goes for our congregants too. People are exhausted. And if you say, "Bring your kids. This will engage your kids and this will engage you," that's a win for everybody.

Bryan S.:	I mean, I feel like the planning ... I imagine the planning to really successfully execute an integrated evening like you described, the planning just has to be enormous. And we always say let's try things and if we fail, we fail. But if you fail putting that much effort into it, it's got to be deflating in some ways.

Rachel Weiss:	We have ... So one of the things that we've done, and this was a prototype ... We tried it last year. It was not so successful. We tried it again this year and it's been so far so good, we hope really successful is we have a leadership meeting with all of the committee chairs of all of the committees and task forces. We get everyone together for an initial meeting and we say, "All right. We're going to try this. As you start thinking about your budget requests for next year, which have to be in by March, think about what you want to do, and think about what kinds of resources you're going to want to do."

Rachel Weiss:	Then, we set up a Google spreadsheet that says, "Please share ideas for programming that you have for the coming year in your taskforce. Throw them all up." Even if they're just a pipe dream, maybe they're let's go see this play, but we're not sure when it is. Maybe it's ... It would be great to have a coffee between parents of young children and retirees. It could be we want to have a letter-writing campaign. It could be I want this speaker to come. Whatever it is. And we create an enormous Google spreadsheet that we share with one another. After the budget is passed in early June, we have a calendaring meeting, where we literally print up poster-sized prints of every month of the calendar, layered on already is the entire ritual calendar, the entire religious school calendar, and our fundraising and development calendar, because those things are harder to schedule and can't change.

Rachel Weiss:	And then we give everybody post-it notes and we say, "All right. Here's the entire calendar. Here's when all the religious holidays are. Here's when we're closed. Here's when we can't have custodians. Here's when we have a rental." All of those pieces. And we say, "Please write your programs on post-it notes. Take your post-it notes and put them up." And then, we look at all the different post-it notes together and we say, "Wow. Could we combine this? What would it look like if we decided to have a book fair and the release of the congregation's self-published book and the latke-making party on the same day?" Because then you get the congregation's book, recommendations for children's books about equity and racism and all of the different ways that we want to boost our kids' Jewish and secular libraries, and it would be Sunday morning before Hanukah and it's during religious school, and we're going to make latkes."

Rachel Weiss:	And the whole thing comes together to say, "Here's your Hanukah celebration." And all of a sudden, you have four or five different populations in the building on the same day. It's definitely an experiment, but I think it's designed to really bring more member ownership over our programming, and also to encourage everybody to see what everybody else's programs are, say, "Wow. That sounds like something I'm doing. Can we partner on that?"

Bryan S.:	I love the post-it notes.

Rachel Weiss:	Yeah.

Bryan S.:	Low tech is great sometimes.

Rachel Weiss:	Exactly.

Bryan S.:	So even if I wanted to totally avoid the Jewish elephant in the room, you mentioned Israel/Palestine earlier. You mentioned it in your essay. So I wanted to sincerely ask, I mean, there is a value ... It's certainly a value in the Eeconstructionist movement of everybody being together in one community and in one tent. I mean, you strongly argue in favor of certainly your community being a home for folks who identify as Zionist, Progressive Zionist, non-Zionist. How do I phrase this? But we ...

Rachel Weiss:	How does it work?

Bryan S.:	First, before I get to how does it work, because I really want to know that, we're talking potentially about people being in community with ... Who hold values that are really different from them. Pick your analogy. Pro-life, pro-choice. I mean, it might not be that stark. There's obviously continuums on any belief system. I mean, I guess I want to ask the "why". Why is this so important? I mean, practically, I understand it's important because we need functional communities and there're probably not enough of us to just splinter off into ideological silos, but why ... I guess why, philosophically, is this a goal to shoot for when some of these differences really can be core to our sense of ourselves in the world?

Rachel Weiss:	So in the first chapter of Genesis, it talks about us being created b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of the divine. And b'tzelem Elohim is plural. Elohim. Our ... Being created in the image of the divine, the divine does not look one way. We have no idea what the divine looks like, but it somehow looks like all of us, and we certainly don't look all the same way. And the fundamental principle, that all humanity is created equally and equitably with all of our diversities to be here together, is, I think, a founding principle. No one's humanity is more important than anyone else's humanity.

Rachel Weiss:	And so we start with that. And that's the loftier goal. I think the reality is that if we were to search out places in the world in which everyone agreed on everything, we would be ultimately standing in a room alone by ourselves. We are human beings. We have really different ideas, and we have really different life experiences. The life experience of someone who is queer, or someone who is black, or someone who is an immigrant, or someone who is all three of those, or someone who has all of those different multiple identities that all of us have, they're really different. And we are going to have different needs. We are going to do a lot of coalition building and partnering with lots of different communities, within the Jewish community and within the larger community.

Rachel Weiss:	We're not going to agree on all elements of everything. I think that's the danger we've gotten ourselves into with pluralism is to say we need to find people who can partner with us 100 percent. I think that's an unrealistic goal. And I actually don't think that's the goal. I think the goal is to say there are some things we can partner on. We can partner with our local Catholic church on refugee issues and immigrant justice. We're not going to partner on LGBTQ inclusion and reproductive rights. That's not a part of the Catholic Church's platform right now that agrees with ours, and that's okay. That doesn't mean that we ... It's all or nothing.

Rachel Weiss:	And I think it's dangerous around Israel/Palestine, when we start to say it has to be all or nothing. We get into this purity of ideas, but the recognition that everyone's shared experience is different. How can we have conversations about Israel/Palestine if we don't start from the basic understanding that a small percentage of people have very strong opinions, a small percentage of people have no opinions, and a lot of people have ambivalent opinions. And that's very much the case in our congregation. How can we also recognize that we have 50 plus years of history together as a community, and that that's really important too.

Rachel Weiss:	And so can you have a conversation, a discussion, a difference of opinion about Israel/Palestine, and then can you still show up at the person you disagree with's shiva the next week? And you would sit in a room together and confess your sins and realize that everyone is complicit in some sort of hatred or some sort of racism or some sort of sin in society, and that we're all complicit in some way, even though the things that we might be apologizing for personally might be different. If we come together out of a place of shared humanity and say we have a lot of different opinions, and still have respect for the humanity, I think is vital.

Rachel Weiss:	We have members of our congregation who are active members of AIPAC, J Street, IfNotNow, JVP, and others. And we have a lot of people who couldn't tell you what those acronyms mean. We are, though, able to be in a room together where some of our religious school teachers are Orthodox and feel very, very strongly about very, very strict interpretations of Zionism, and we have some who very actively cannot understand how we could not teach about Israel as an oppressor. And they're colleagues, and together, they're leading a program with our members about Israel/Palestine for people to talk to one another, because at that, people can raise their hands and say where they are, and people can then talk to each other. It's not only radical, but I think it's necessary.

Rachel Weiss:	We have a covenant that our congregation developed during a very tumultuous year that was largely rooted in Israel/Palestine, but also in politics of how people come together when they disagree, and when they feel hurt by one another. And it's a covenant of Kavod Sikhah. A Brit Kavod Sikhah, which literally means ... Brit is covenant. Kavod Sikhah means respectful speech. And it recognizes that inherently in our communities, we are different, and that sometimes we are right and sometimes we are wrong and sometimes we are also right. So we come to a place of saying it is our responsibility to listen, to ask questions, to disagree, to apologize, to be silent, to speak up, to recognize that fundamentally, there are differences in the room.

Bryan S.:	So can you tell our listeners a little bit about the program you referenced where these differences were addressed head on?

Rachel Weiss:	Absolutely. So every year, we do a family education day that is an Israel/Palestine family education day, in which we invite all of the religious school students, their parents, and any adults in the community to join us, where we talk about the differences in understandings and learnings around Israel/Palestine. We usually start with some sort of liturgy in which we are having a service together, we're singing songs, we're recognizing the many layers of Israel/Palestine. One of the things that we did in our program this past year was to teach about the fact that when we speak about Israel/Palestine in our liturgy and in our texts, we're often coming from a place of mythology and a place of longing and a place of desire for a [inaudible]. That's very real, and that need for that desire is the kind of expression that has been part of keeping Jewish hope alive.

Rachel Weiss:	However, there's also ... That's one layer of thinking about Israel/Palestine. That's the mythological layer. It's the dreaming layer. It's the liturgical layer. It is very much in anticipating, with the recognition that we're not there yet. We haven't gotten to the promised land, we have this dream and this desire and this name that is binding us together. Second layer is the historic layer. It's the layer that talk about where have the Jewish people gone? Where have we found homes? Where have we been forced to leave homes? What's the experience of diaspora? How has the intersection of antisemitism and violence and hatred against Jews contributed to the need, historically, to create what now would be called the Land of Israel? How has that played in the historic events of the past to lead up to this country?

Rachel Weiss:	And then the third layer is the contemporary political. Israel is a contemporary, political state that has all of the same kinds of problems and challenges that every other political state has. The challenge that we have is often when we say the word Israel, or Israel/Palestine, we fire all three. We fire mythological, historic, and contemporary political. And because we don't separate them out, we're applying an ancient mythological longing to a contemporary political situation, which challenges our contemporary political values and beliefs.

Rachel Weiss:	So even by naming the fact that when we are looking at occupation, when we're looking at gender politics, when we're looking at racism, or economics, when we're looking at the authority of who is a Jew in the state of Israel, we have to look at it through multiple layers and lenses, and we have to parse those out. And we have a conversation about that. From there ... That was our opening program for adults and our older students, and from there, people went to different stations to explore, love, and critique, and learn about different kinds of diversities in ideas.

Rachel Weiss:	There was a station about water. There was ... In which we talked about what's the remarkable technology that Israelis have developed for making the desert bloom or for providing water and growth in a country that's primarily desert? And then, we talked about ... And how that can be applied, that technology can be applied and then celebrated, but we also talked about what happens when those who are in occupied parts, who are living under occupation are denied water. And who's denying them water? And how does that break down not only the society, but break down human beings and human rights?

Rachel Weiss:	We did a station in the kitchen where we made our own za'atar blend, but we learned about what's this spice and what's this flavor and where do they come from and what are the many different cultures? And when we created our own blends. So it was hands-on. We wrote six-word poems with people's ideas. We had a place where people could write all over the walls things I love, things I wrestle with. And it was really an opportunity for people to be in the conversation and open themselves to being in conversation with people who think differently than them.

Bryan S.:	So much to digest and think about. I am told that this show should not go for three or four hours. And I don't think you've got that much time blocked out in your day, but ...

Rachel Weiss:	Well not today, but we all should keep talking to one another. I mean, I think that's the beauty of the Reconstructionist movement, is that Reconstructing Judaism is an organization and we both, as Reconstructionist rabbis and as congregation have the luxury of being a relatively small movement. Sometimes that's a challenge in many different ways, but we're a small movement with a loud voice. And because we're a small movement, we easily can access one another. And the more that we reach out to our colleagues and our fellow congregation, to not reinvent the wheel and to actually brainstorm and play off one another, that's when the best ideas happen.

Bryan S.:	So I think I wanted to close by reciting a quote from your essay, and ask if you would expand upon it a little bit and explain what it means. This really struck me. "Our hearts must be soft, open, and compassionate, and our arms outstretched and entwined with one another."

Rachel Weiss:	Human beings were not designed to be alone. And Judaism was designed to be a communal experience. The graphic art that I created upon my graduation from rabbinical school to honor the 10 of us that became rabbis together, the class of 2009, has the quote around it that says, "Asara sheyoshivim veoskim ba-Torah, ha-Shekhinah sheruyah beineihem." From the Mishnah. It means "When 10 people sit and occupy themselves with Torah, the presence of God is among them." And I think allowing ourselves to be in a place where we're vulnerable, having open hearts, this is the place where we come when we've had the most devastating of losses. We come to our synagogues. We come to our Jewish communities. We ugly cry in our living rooms in front of people who are there to comfort us because we understand that loss is profound. And we don't pretend that we're okay in those moments.

Rachel Weiss:	We open up our hearts to say I'm so thrilled with joy and sharing it when we march down the street in a Pride parade. We let ourselves really feel our feelings in these communities. And we don't do it alone. We can't do it alone. We are risking enough. We're daring enough to show those feelings and to show those painful places and sensitivities and extreme joys with one another. And so when we reach out our arms, we want to make sure that somebody's going to be there and reach back. We want to make sure that if we're going to be vulnerable enough to open our hearts, that somebody else is going to to see that and recognize that and not judge us for that.

Rachel Weiss:	It's really hard to be alive in the world. This is a painful place to live right now. It's a painful country to live in right now. And then it's an extraordinarily beautiful, miraculous place to live in right now. If we can't share that with other people, then it's as though it's not here. It's as though we're really not living it fully. And I hope and I dream that we get to be a Jewish community, or a network of Jewish communities in which we are open to receiving each other and we're reaching out for each other, and we're vulnerable enough to let everyone see that we're not perfect. As we say to our b'nai mitzvah kids every week, this is not about being perfect. This is about being real. And we've got to be real with each other.

Bryan S.:	Well, thank you so much for this conversation, for your thoughtful answers, for your essay, and for the work that you do. It was a pleasure having you on the program.

Rachel Weiss:	It's my honor to be on the podcast and to keep talking and listening.

Bryan S.:	Great. Hopefully we'll do it again some day.

Rachel Weiss:	Thanks so much, Bryan.

Bryan S.:	Thanks so much for sticking to the end of my interview with Rabbi Weiss. If you enjoyed our conversation, please be sure to check out her essay, 21st Century Judaism, on the Evolve site. You might also want to check out a whole batch of essays on the topic of Jewish community found on the Evolve site, Evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org.

Bryan S.:	So what did you think of today's episode? We really want to hear from you. Evolve is about curating meaningful conversations, and that includes you. So send us your questions, comments, feedback, whatever you've got. You can reach us through the contact form on the website or reach me directly at bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org. Who knows? We may even read your question on the air and get an answer from Rabbi Jacob Staub, our Executive Producer. We'll be back next month with Rabbi Ariana Katz to discuss her essay, "Here We Are: Congregation Planting in Baltimore," which is a nice compliment to Rabbi Rachel Weiss's essay, and a little bit different perspective on building and sustaining Jewish communities.

Bryan S.:	Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub, and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song, Ilu Finu was composed by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and we'll see you next time.