Bryan Schwartzman: From my home studio, welcome to Evolve, groundbreaking Jewish conversations. (singing) Deborah Waxman: At my interview for one of my former teachers, Rabbi Ivan Kane asked me, "Most of our students don't really think of themselves as Reconstructionists. I'm wondering how you feel." I said, "Rabbi Kane, whatever I do is Reconstruction." (singing) Bryan Schwartzman: I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman. I'm basically here to tell you I'm turning the mic over today to Rabbi Deborah Waxman, who is the president and CEO of Reconstructing Judaism. Rabbi Waxman is also the host of the podcast, Hashivenu, Jewish teachings on resilience. If you haven't listened yet, you can find it anywhere podcasts are downloaded. It's a different show, really interesting. Bryan Schwartzman: This season, Rabbi Waxman is co-hosting with Rabbi Sandra Lawson, Reconstructing Judaism's Director of Racial Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. They're really going into racial justice issues and how it relates to resilience in Judaism, lot of very frank and off the cuff conversations. Check it out, Hashivenu, Jewish teachings on resilience. Bryan Schwartzman: So today, Rabbi Waxman, or Deborah as everybody refers to her around the office or in Zoom meetings, is interviewing her teacher, mentor, and friend basically of 30 years, Rabbi Jacob Staub. Both of them are PhDs. Jacob is currently the executive producer of this show, so another person I report to, and director of Evolve, Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations, the whole project from which this show springs. Bryan Schwartzman: Earlier this year, actually at the end of the last academic year, at the age of 70, Jacob retired from teaching at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where he'd been on the faculty since 1983, and first enrolled as a student in 1972, which was before I was born. So rest assured, he's still very much involved in the Evolve project, and getting this show out there to you. Bryan Schwartzman: On this one, I'm talking a lot now, but I just get to sit back and listen to two people I admire and always learned from discuss Reconstructing Judaism, as well as Jacob's career and contributions up to this point. In fact, I think by listening to and learning about Jacob's life, career, intellectual history, we learn a lot about the development of Reconstructionist Judaism over the past half century, so buckle up for this ride. Bryan Schwartzman: Just know, on the Evolve site, evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org, you can find a number of essays that were written in tribute to Jacob, including pieces by Deborah Waxman; Elsie Stern, who's the immediate past Vice President for Academic Affairs; Rabbi David Teutsch, a former president of the college. It's a long URL so we'll put the link in the show notes. You can just go to Evolve.ReconstructingJudaism.org and search Jacob Staub, and you should find the whole collection. Reading these pieces will give you a deeper sense of the impact Jacob's had on the movement and the broader Jewish world. Bryan Schwartzman: So with that said, I am going to sign off now and turn the show over to Rabbi Deborah Waxman. Here we go. Deborah Waxman: Hi. I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, the President of Reconstructing Judaism. I am so honored to sit in as the guest host of this podcast for Evolve, Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations. Deborah Waxman: Let me explain to you why this came to be. This past year, Rabbi Dr. Jacob Staub stepped down from the faculty of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College after decades of service. We looked for many ways to honor him. There are many ways, including an honorary degree that he will receive at graduation this coming year, and a series of beautiful tribute essays that are on the Evolve website. Deborah Waxman: We wanted to use this vehicle, as well. We wanted to take some time on the Evolve podcast to hear about Jacob's life and about Jacob's contributions. As one of the hosts and one of the producers of this podcast, he couldn't really do it himself, so I get the great delight of stepping in as his interviewer and conversation partner. Deborah Waxman: Jacob, I am so happy to be with you today. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Thank you for that introduction. I'm really happy to be here talking with you. Deborah Waxman: Yes. It is a recorded version of many, many, many conversations we have had over, it's been almost three decades. I'll share with everyone who's listening that when I enrolled at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College as a student in 1993, Jacob was the Dean. Then later, he was elevated to the Vice President for Academic Affairs. Deborah Waxman: I don't think his work changed. I think the title just more accurately reflected the work that he had done. He was the co-author of the book that I and so many others read to introduce me to Reconstructionism. It's called Exploring Judaism: A Reconstructionist Approach. Deborah Waxman: We've had the opportunity to be in relationship with each other as many ways. You were my teacher, and my dean, and my co-worker, and my boss, and now I'm in this role. I know that this will be such a rich conversation for everyone. Deborah Waxman: I thought we'd start at the beginning. Will you talk a little bit about how you found your way into Reconstructionist Judaism? Rabbi Jacob Staub: Yes. I was raised in an Orthodox family. I went to an Orthodox day school, yeshiva. I had a 12 year old crisis of faith right before my bar mitzvah, to which I'm grateful for Max Dimont's book, Jews, God, and History, which somehow was on a shelf of my father's. I don't think I read past the first page, but I did open it and read the first page. In it, on the first page, Dimont described Abraham's "lech lecha," "Go forth to a land that I will show you," epiphany in naturalistic, historical context. I said, "Oh." Rabbi Jacob Staub: My entire framework collapsed in an instant. I could go into- Deborah Waxman: So, from supernatural revelations to an approach informed by history, informed by rationalism. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Well, no. At 12, not. Deborah Waxman: Yeah. I made the leap against the collapse. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I went into a number of, I wasn't Jewish anymore. I gave it all up. I wouldn't sing Shalom Aleichem at my parent's table. I didn't go into a synagogue for four years. I was out doing too much, too many stages in the journey. I realized at a certain point, end of high school, that I couldn't give up Judaism all together, but I didn't know how to approach it. Rabbi Jacob Staub: When I discovered Kaplan, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, I was really excited and ecstatic because he had been raised in an Orthodox home, and he had made meaning out of all of this stuff without compromising his intellect, or his beliefs, or his world view. Deborah Waxman: Where was your first exposure? Rabbi Jacob Staub: I had a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Middlebury, Vermont during college. Another kid who had a scholarship, I remember his name; Eric Paul Tessler. I said, "What are you going to do? Are you going to go to graduate school in English like I was planning to?" He said, "No, I'm going to go to the Reconstructionist Seminary in Philadelphia." I'd never heard of Reconstructionism at that point. I was impressed. He was a student from Antioch. He was cool. Rabbi Jacob Staub: So it stayed in my mind. Then, here's a real moment. When I was taking a course on Chaucer the following fall. Chaucer comes in a [inaudible 00:09:34] with modern English on one side and medieval English on the other side, so you could learn to read the original. There was a certain point at which, middle of the semester, I learned to not need the modern English translation anymore, and I started reading fluently into Assyrian English. It hit me really clearly that I would always be a tourist in Chaucerian England, that I'd rather do this in Hebrew. Rabbi Jacob Staub: So, I wrote, I had learned to drink beer at the writers' conference. I wrote a beer-stained, five whole loose leaf letter, "Dear Sir, I am confused about my Jewish identity. What is Reconstructionism? Sincerely yours, Jack Staub," and put it in an envelope that said, "Reconstruction Seminary," I guess, "Philadelphia, Pennsylvania," no address, no zip code. Deborah Waxman: And it got delivered? No way! Rabbi Jacob Staub: I got a flood, I got multiple page, single spaced letters from Rabbi Ira Eisenstein, and Rabbi Arthur Gilbert and Rabbi Fredric Kazan. Deborah Waxman: So those are, just for all listeners, the founding president, the founding dean, the director of admissions, I guess. Rabbi Jacob Staub: The dean of students. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I don't know what, I didn't say I had a Yeshiva education or knew anything about Judaism. They knew nothing about me and they really wrote stuff up. They also sent me a subscription to The Reconstructionist and a catalog to The Reconstructionist Press. As I'm a book hoarder, even then, I bought all of Kaplan's works and I read them in a very cold Buffalo winter. I don't know how much I absorbed, but I just kept reading. Deborah Waxman: Again for our listeners, The Reconstructionist was the journal that helped to bring Kaplan's theoretical ideas to life. It both explicated how to do it, and reported on and furthered some of his thinking. It was probably not bi-weekly anymore by the time you got it, but probably monthly. Rabbi Jacob Staub: It was monthly, yeah. Rabbi Jacob Staub: When I went home, I remember going to a Shavuot service in June, at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. Deborah Waxman: The first Reconstructionist congregation. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I was very disappointed because the service itself was not very much unlike, it was like a Young Israel service that I grew up with. So, I was really uncomfortable, as I had always been. Rabbi Jacob Staub: And then Rabbi Alan Miller, then the rabbi spoke. After him, as was traditional in those days, Rabbi Kaplan responded to Rabbi Miller, speaking much longer than Rabbi Miller had spoken, but I was looking around and they were saying all of these things that would have been heretical in my, from where I came from. Everybody was not at all surprised. You can actually sing "El Adon al kol ha-ma'asim," one of the songs of the morning service for Shabbat, and believe what they're saying. There's a way to put this together. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Pretty much, I was convinced. I guess that would have been the end of my junior year. I applied in my senior year to RRC. What I wanted was to relearn everything, just learn everything from a different perspective so I could own it and I could live it. As we used to say back then, I wouldn't have to leave my mind at the synagogue door. Deborah Waxman: Just to set the stage a little bit for our listeners, the Reconstruction-- when did you start? In '72? Rabbi Jacob Staub: '72. Deborah Waxman: '72. So, RRC was, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, was four years old in 1972. It was- Rabbi Jacob Staub: It was three years when I applied. Deborah Waxman: Three years when you applied. It was a bold experiment with no guarantee of success, I think. Is that safe to say? And still being established in really critical ways, right? Rabbi Jacob Staub: Completely. Completely. I do not understand how, my parents didn't have a lot of say over what I was doing in those days. They didn't know. It was like applying to a school that wasn't accredited, and had no endowment, and didn't even have the five years of its five year program established yet. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I don't know how much I was aware of that. What I was aware of was I applied to Hebrew Union College, the reform seminary in New York, as a safe school. Deborah Waxman: Which was about 100 years old at that time, almost precisely. Rabbi Jacob Staub: It was completely established. It was very clear that I couldn't go there. It just wasn't culturally and tonally where I wanted to be. I couldn't go to Jewish Theological Seminary. I wrote for an application there and they sent me back a questionnaire about my Shabbat and Kashrut observance. I said, "I can't go there because I'm not going to a place that's going to look over my shoulder about ritual observance." Rabbi Jacob Staub: What RRC, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, offered, was a community in which you daven with intention in the middle of taking this historical, contextual, naturalistic view of Judaism and that's what I wanted. I wanted both of those and that's what it gave me. Deborah Waxman: Now, our tagline relatively recently is "deeply rooted, boldly relevant." I think we came to that language because I think that's really expressive of who we are. It feels to me like in shorthand, that's what you wanted, and that's what you found, and that's what you had to build, also. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Right. So that's how I came to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. I did not think I was going to be in a congregation. I didn't go because I wanted to be a rabbi. I went because I wanted to relearn everything. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I first started as a professor after graduation. Deborah Waxman: Also, when RRC was founded, there was an aspiration that our students would get secular degrees. It's interesting that you talked about Chaucer, because you stated that, that era- Rabbi Jacob Staub: I can't explain why I'm a medievalist, but I am somewhere in my soul a medievalist. So when I was in my biblical year, the first year at RRC I wanted to be a biblical scholar. The second year I wanted to be a midrash scholar. The third year, I wanted to be a medieval philosophy scholar, and then I stayed there. Deborah Waxman: I had the same thing. I'm a modernist. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Modern. Deborah Waxman: So, I had the same experience. Rabbi Jacob Staub: One of the wonderful things about what I was studying for my PhD at Temple University Department of Religion was, I felt that I found in the Rambam, in Maimonides, the person about whom I wrote my dissertation, a spiritual lantzman in the 12th, 13th, 14th century. They were questioning, they were completely reinterpreting, what Torah was, what revelation was, what prophesy was, what miracles were. Rabbi Jacob Staub: They did not believe that God intervened supernaturally in the world. That was a relief, to know that- Deborah Waxman: This was an ancient impulse. Deborah Waxman: I want to pause a second, partly for our listeners, but also, I guess we've talked about this, Jacob, but it's worth reflecting on. If Kaplan put forward the idea of the conceptualization of Judaism as the evolving religious civilization, it's one of the reason that I ended up at RRC also is because the rabbinic curriculum is built on that insight and that opportunity to start at the beginning, to go deep and wide, and look at the breadth of Jewish civilization, and how it unfolds, and how it's in conversation with each other to this day. Deborah Waxman: It's completely what drew me in and it worked. It lived up to its promise. It both shaped me and fed me. I think that you got that at a very early stage, and then you helped to really build that out, both through your writing. You emerged relatively quickly as a major expositor of Reconstructionist Judaism, and then also in the reinforcement of that, in the deepening of that in the rabbinical curriculum. Deborah Waxman: So you want to talk a little bit about- Rabbi Jacob Staub: Before I get to that, I want to reflect on your reflection. It seems to me that, that works, the key to evolving religious civilization continues to work in ever new ways. That means that we don't have to focus only on Ashkenazic culture or on the color of Jew's skin because there are many cultures in Jewish civilization and many ethnic groups. When we study things that way, we really capture some of the breadth and variety of what goes into being Jewish. Rabbi Jacob Staub: That prepares us to face the 21st century and all of the intersectionality that we have, the multiple identities that we have to face in terms of who is a Jew today. Deborah Waxman: I think that's right. I think we are ideologically well prepared, even as we fall into our own biases and act with blinders, it is yet another tool and yet another prompt to push us to do what you just described. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Right. So to your other question, I came back to the faculty five or six years after I was ordained in 1983. I'll never forget. At my interview for that position, one of my former teachers, Rabbi Ivan Kane asked me, "Most of our students don't necessarily think of themselves as Reconstructionists. I'm wondering how you feel." The chutzpah, I was about 32 years old. I said, "Rabbi Kane, I was a student here. I am a Reconstructionist rabbi. Whatever I do is reconstruction." Deborah Waxman: It's true and it's not lacking in confidence. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I just couldn't stand the agonizing about what's Reconstructionist, what isn't Reconstructionist. It just wasn't a very organic kind of conversation. Deborah Waxman: That was about a decade before I started. I'm a product of the Conservative movement. I felt like when I got here, because it's true that it took about 30 years until children of Reconstructionist congregations started to enroll at RRC. I felt like so much of the energy, the Reconstructionist movement, Kaplan was on the faculty of the Conservative Seminary, the Jewish Theological Seminary. Deborah Waxman: So much of it, I felt like we were looking over our shoulder to the Conservative movement. I felt like from the outside, no, this has to be about building up Reconstructionism, not just being in reaction to where we emerged from. Deborah Waxman: So, it was still very present 10 years later. I'm sure it was even stronger. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Yeah. Yeah. Rabbi Jacob Staub: When I returned, I returned not only to be a full-time faculty member at RRC, but I also took the editorship, was appointed editor of the Reconstructionist magazine, which had not been published for four or five years after the former editor, Ira Eisenstein, had retired. I was given a mandate, very exciting mandate to really present all the exciting things that were happening, both intellectually, theologically, and in terms of what was going on in congregations, and in an attractive layout, and to bring new voices in. Rabbi Jacob Staub: So, I really think I got the job in June. I was coming back to Philadelphia in August, and starting at RRC in September. But from the moment, the moment in June that I got it, my mind never stopped. Oh, the things that we could do. I had a really great six year run editing the Reconstructionist magazine at that time. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I'll say, I also was then asked to co-write Exploring Judaism, A Reconstructionist Approach, as you mentioned. I'll talk about both of those things concurrently which was, we were trying to figure out how this grand vision of Rabbi Kaplan about "peoplehood," and the organic Jewish community; all of these concepts on the page could be implemented in concrete congregations and for individuals in the 1980s. Rabbi Jacob Staub: There were a number of challenges. One was, there was no Jewish people. There was no organic Jewish community. There were individual communities. So, together with David [Teutsch, my boss as the Executive Director of The Federation of Reconstructionist Congregations and Chavurot. Deborah Waxman: Yeah, congregational union has had many, many name changes. Rabbi Jacob Staub: The magazine was a product of that organization, was to imagine what would make a community compelling, or influential, or something. How belonging to a community could affect my life, if I don't believe in Torah from Heaven, and revelation, and halakhah. Rabbi Jacob Staub: If I think that I'm choosing to be Jewish, where is the obligation? Where is the responsibility to others? Deborah Waxman: I want to pause. I want you to remember there are other things you want to talk about. But we've never had this conversation in the context of the Reconstructionist, the journal about communicating outward. I think it is such an essential element of a Reconstructionist approach that distinguishes it from the Reform movement, which is a question a lot of people will ask. If the Reform movement was established on individual autonomy, what the individual has to say, and obviously there are Reform synagogues. Deborah Waxman: But I think part of Kaplan's genius was to say yes, individual, and yes, community, and that both are equally important, and that the community has to make space for the individual. In that making space, the community's going to be transformed. Deborah Waxman: I love hearing about this wrestling about how to draw individuals into community life. It's still a deep commitment and preoccupation of ours to this day. Please say more. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Right. So, we're talking about what makes a community compelling and what would make me submit or be influenced by what other members of the community are doing. I think I'll give two approaches. I think we had a lot more. Rabbi Jacob Staub: But one was, if I a really in community with a bunch of people and they have certain dietary practices, I could be influenced by that. They'll explain to me why it's meaningful for them and maybe it'll be meaningful for me. Maybe not and there's no pressure. Or Shabbat observance or that kind of stuff. Rabbi Jacob Staub: One of our mottos then, I think still now is, every generation has the obligation to reconstruct. So, we ran symposia on Israel. We ran symposia on chosen-ness, with people arguing both ways, and explaining what Kaplan had taught in more compelling ways than he had, speaking the language of the '80s. Rabbi Jacob Staub: We ran pieces on the synagogue as a support system network, building community in that way. It's not just attending synagogue, but if parents of teenagers need to get together, and parents in a sandwich generation need to get together. People who are having chemotherapy or otherwise impaired need their community members to feed them, and drive them, and support them. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I think Harriet Finer wrote the preeminent piece on this. She was a member of the Reconstructionist Congregation of the North Shore, I think might be one of its founding members. Deborah Waxman: Yeah, she was. She was. Rabbi Jacob Staub: She was. Rabbi Jacob Staub: So, just explaining how do you make community. Another was an issue of sanctuary. How can a synagogue declare itself a sanctuary for undocumented aliens and protect them from the immigration service when not everybody in the congregation agrees to that? How do you form a community where not everybody agrees with any policy? Rabbi Jacob Staub: So, I think Beth Israel Media under Brian Walton worked out, there was a sanctuary havurah within the congregation that did that, so not everybody had to be associated with it. Rabbi Jacob Staub: So, we were really exploring what does it mean to be a community at a time when you don't have to belong to a community. Deborah Waxman: Yeah, it's a choice. It's a choice. It's a cultural choice, even. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Right. Deborah Waxman: Listeners to this podcast, and they're aware probably that Evolve, the website expression and also these podcasts are the next iteration on that. Deborah Waxman: There's this expansiveness that you can have about this rich dialogue, this conversation across difference, respectful conversation across difference. How do you go from that? I'd love to hear you reflect on going from that really expansive, multi vocal demonstration of a Reconstructionist approach to the synthesis of Exploring Judaism which, even as you co-wrote it with Rebecca Alpert, really tries to boil it down to key principles. Can you talk about that journey, that process? Rabbi Jacob Staub: I guess you're correct in your characterization of Exploring Judaism, but I don't think that I thought that was what we were doing. Deborah Waxman: Yeah. I think that the magazine and then Evolve are a demonstration of Reconstructionism, and Exploring Judaism is an explication of Reconstructionist Judaism. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I shuddered, but I insisted on, I'm doing kashrut again on a line in Exploring Judaism that said, "If your great, great grandmother, going back a few generations in your family, you have pork chops or baked ham for Rosh Hashanah, that could be a choice you make. We all come from different backgrounds and have different associations." Rabbi Jacob Staub: Now, that wasn't the preeminent one. That was a little sentence at the end of a paragraph. We were trying to explain, what does it mean to live in Jewish time and seeing the world through Jewish colored lenses, and how ritual observance, and prayer, practice, and community participation all get you to live from Shabbat to Shabbat, from Passover to Shavuot, from Jacob to Joseph in the Torah reading cycle. Rabbi Jacob Staub: We could, even though we didn't live in Jewish civilization as a primary civilization that we could construct a life that was meaningfully and significantly colored by my Jewish eyes rather than my American eyes, and so that I could make decisions about how to relate to non-Jews, even, or to other Jews, Jews who disagreed with me from an authentic Jewish vision and viewpoint. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I think that's how I might characterize Exploring Judaism. Deborah Waxman: Yeah, that's great. I don't think this is a point you make in Exploring Judaism, and I know I'm pretty confident that you were my teacher of this, so I'm going to repeat something back to you, that I think you taught me. I hope that feels like kavod, that feels honoring that part of the work of that shift from the medieval period even as there was Reconstruction going on there, into the modern period. Deborah Waxman: This is why I remain endlessly interested in it is that our ancestors, this religion explained everything for them and it was deeply authentic. It was the only thing they knew. It was very thick and it's what they lived in. We, over the last several hundred years, we live with many, many, where it's much more shattered. There are many more options and that Jewish identity has gotten thinner and thinner in certain ways because of all those options, and for other reasons as well. Deborah Waxman: The Reconstructionist project and the work of those of us who choose to take it on is about, it's about that choice, about rebuilding, reweaving, not just reconstructing, but rebuilding, reweaving, re-centering the Jewish framework on our own terms, but in a way that artificially creates that authenticity that once was naturally created. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Yeah, perfectly. Perfectly. I completely agree. What I would add is, and probably also said in that class, that, that's what Jews have always been doing. The myth of monolithic Judaism that goes back to Sinai is, that's one of the things we discover when we study Judaism from a civilizational point of view. Whatever Jews do, they attribute back to Sinai or back to the rabbis, unaware that the Mourner's Kaddish is only 1,000 years old, that the bar mitzvah ceremony's less than 500 years old. Deborah Waxman: That, that tune to Adon Olam is only 50 years old. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Right. Right. Rabbi Jacob Staub: We should, the project of Reconstructionism Judaism today is to keep that always in mind and not worry about how, not be inhibited by looking over our shoulder, afraid that we're going to go too far. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I remember being part of a series of panels representing Reconstructionism, before our movement in the 1980s, in response to Rabbi Yitz Greenburg's article, Will There Be One Jewish People in the Year 2000? It came out as a result of the Reform movement's acceptance of patrilineal descent. Rabbi Jacob Staub: The fact that we had accepted patrilineal descent before that didn't - Deborah Waxman: -1967, yeah. Rabbi Jacob Staub: 198-what, '3 or something, the Reform movement did. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I remember getting up in front of hundreds of people, one at CAGE and at other conferences and say, "I'm not worried. I'm not worried. If patrilineal descent is a bad idea, then patrilineal descended Jews will disappear. If it's a good idea and in 30 or 40 years, they're coming back and want to be part of the Jewish community, I have confidence in the Jewish community that we will find a way to readmit them, or to admit them, to acknowledge them. That's what's going to happen." Deborah Waxman: I hope you feel vindicated. That's precisely what did happen. It was not easy along the way and that is the moment in which we find ourselves. Rabbi Jacob Staub: The other thing I'd like to say is, we probably only know 1%, maybe 10% of all the innovations that Jews have made over the centuries because they survived and then became traditional. We don't know about all the bad ideas that didn't survive, so - don't worry! Bryan Schwartzman: Okay. Bryan Schwartzman here. Can't let too much show time go by without hearing my voice, so here I am. Just wanted to let you know, if you wanted to support these groundbreaking conversations on the podcast, on the website, or if you'd like to honor Rabbi Jacob Staub, and his career, and accomplishments, go right ahead. I won't stop you. In fact, I'll encourage you. There's a donate link right in our show notes. Every gift matters and every gift bring our show forward. Bryan Schwartzman: So, thanks for listening and thanks for your support. All right, now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Deborah Waxman: I think it's challenging for people like you and me for people who have really devoted not just our careers, but our lives to Reconstructionism to distinguish between the ideology and the biography. I think for both of us, I think I would say the ideology has enlivened our lives, that there's a reason why it's an organizing principle. Deborah Waxman: I feel like we could talk for hours about Reconstructionism. I want to take us back more to your biography a little bit. I think we'll just move us forward a little bit in time because if that was the project of the '80s, when I was in rabbinical school, a lot of the work you were doing was around creating the new field of Jewish Spiritual Direction, a really big innovation that emerged here at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and has very significantly impacted the wider Jewish community. Deborah Waxman: Many have, but this one really lept into the mainstream relatively quickly. So, want to talk a little bit about that? Rabbi Jacob Staub: Sure. When I became Dean in 1990 or so, 1989, one of my objectives was to help remake the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College into a place for spiritual formation and spiritual growth. Because until then, it had more or less been primarily a graduate school. What you did when you studied Bible, or Talmud, or anything else was, you studied it as if you were at a graduate department. There was no room in the classroom for reflection on meaning and spiritual development. Rabbi Jacob Staub: So, for almost 10 years with the ongoing funding of The Nathan Cummings Foundation, we kept trying to figure out how to do that. I won't go into all of the various stages of things that only worked for a year or two, but then, thanks to Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer who came into my office one day and said, "We keep looking for spirituality, but down the road at Chestnut Hill College, they have a Department of Spiritual Direction. Maybe we should find out what that is." Deborah Waxman: It's a Catholic college. Rabbi Jacob Staub: A Catholic College. So, we had a consultation with three sisters who were in habits and Hal Taussig, who had been teaching Christianity for us for a number of years, our required course in Christianity. We discovered this practice that first of all, did not entail people believing in any particular thing. He didn't say, "You have to believe in God." Rabbi Jacob Staub: But that allowed for a diversity of spiritual paths. We said, "Okay, we'll write another grant proposal to The Nathan Cummings Foundation." I bet you're the one who wrote it, at that point. Deborah Waxman: Indeed. I was the college's grant writer those years. Rabbi Jacob Staub: We spent a year, our initial thought was, we were going to have to "Juda-ize" a Christian practice. That wasn't the problem. The problem was naturalizing a supernatural practice. When they said, "The Holy Spirit moves you," what did that mean for us? Rabbi Jacob Staub: So, we developed an approach that really worked, really well, really quickly, and continues to work so that, though the program is voluntary, and any given year 75% of RRC students enroll voluntarily because it is so helpful. Rabbi Jacob Staub: In very, very brief, the practice is, you sit with a director who doesn't judge you, and who mostly is there to be 100% to you and you are the center of intention, listening for what divine echos and mysterious echos are coming through your narrative, and helping you to notice them and to cultivate them. Rabbi Jacob Staub: It works for people who are spiritual intellectually and like to study science or Talmud, and devotionally, and like to chant, and sing, and act evistically, find spiritual meaning in doing acts of loving kindness or repairing the world. Actually, I love the fourth one most of all. I'm not going to leave it out. Deborah Waxman: Me, too. Me, too. Rabbi Jacob Staub: You can be spiritual iconoclastically, like Abraham was when he smashed all of his fathers idols. Some people are spiritual by pointing out the idolotrous nature of everybody else's attempts to define the undefinable. Rabbi Jacob Staub: So, in brief, that's the practice and that's the program. But the impetus was, how do we, as Reconstructionists, as naturalistic Jews, live a spiritual life between Shabbat and Shabbat? Not in the synagogue. How do we notice, you get to decide what you want to call it. How do we notice God, or the divine, or the mystery, or the process in our every day life, and not only in sunrises and childbirth, highs, but also in the dark places? Where is God when I am in pain? How do I get support when I'm mourning, or I'm going through this relationship breakdown, or I've lost my job? Rabbi Jacob Staub: I have found, and many people have found that, I've written a few articles about this. You can develop a personal relationship with a non personal God. I don't have to believe that God is a person in order to relate to God personally, because I'm a person. You do that by building a relationship. Just like you have to build a relationship with any human being, you build a relationship with the divine. Rabbi Jacob Staub: For me, that initially meant picturing God in the form of my mother holding me and comforting me, so feeling the comfort of the universe, and being free to use whatever images work for you, in terms of invoking that which you know is beyond description. Which is, after all, what happens in the cedar and everywhere else in Jewish life. You don't really think God is king. You don't really think God is a doctor. Rabbi Jacob Staub: We can go through our days finding the divine in when we're shopping in the supermarket, if we're doing that; when we're in traffic; when we're sitting at a meeting. What is the invitation in this? What is the opportunity in this? What am I being called to do now? Being called to do sounds supernatural like, "Who's doing the calling?" Rabbi Jacob Staub: In fact, the last exchange I had with Rabbi Eisenstein before he died, I had written an article, God As Comforter. He wrote to me and said, "Jacob, it's brilliant as always. But how can you have comforter if no one's doing the comforting?" I tried to explain it to him, not expecting him to accept my explanation. Rabbi Jacob Staub: But you can find God as a source of comfort, a source of inspiration, not only positive things, as the source of judgment and self-recrimination. God is infinite. When God overflows to me, I am open to whatever aspects I have developed a relationship with. It really can work. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I should have started by defining spirituality. Spirituality is an exercise in reaching upward or inward, deeply inward, to find the source that we are connected with. Spirituality is the way that we relate to the cosmos, aware that all things are interconnected. Then spiritual direction is that which helps you to make those connections and live with that kind of consciousness. Deborah Waxman: I know that there are a lot of people who feel like they're allergic to the term spirituality and I remember all the debates. I remember when we were working hard to articulate that definition that you just offered. I think the thing that feels the most essential to me about not giving up on spirituality and making certain that it infuses religion, which is often more about either institution, or doctrine, or practice is the humility that it demands, that we are more than just our atomized individuals with our brains that are so big and also so limited. It pushes toward that interconnection. It pushes toward a humility that is, I think both sustaining, and at times, also correcting, self or other correcting. Rabbi Jacob Staub: One of the key moments in my journey with my spiritual director was, I came in and I was a real mess. Without going into detail, I just didn't know what to do. I was in a lot of pain. She said, "Ask for help." I said, "I can't." She said, "Why?" I said, "Because I don't believe in a God who helps." She said, "Ask anyway." I said, "No, I can't." Rabbi Jacob Staub: This took a while, but eventually I was able to say, "I need help." That was so hard for me to say, "I need help," and everything transformed mentally and emotionally like, "I'm not in this alone." Deborah Waxman: I have the same exact experience, also really shaped by spiritual direction where, when I, I have a physiological experience of when I'm totally stressed out and when things are feeling overwhelming, I will feel very trapped and very enclosed. I remember, you introduced this spiritual direction program my last year of rabbinical school. I was one of the first year participants. I was getting ready to graduate, and I was trying to plan my graduation party, and it wasn't unfolding very well. Deborah Waxman: I remember that feeling of closeness coming in. One of my favorite verses is from the Halle, one of the Psalms that's in the Hallel of "min hametzar karati ya," from a narrow place I called out to you. "Anani v'amerchav ya," you answered me from a wide open place. I remember having talked to my spiritual director. I think I was trying to rent tables for the party. It was June. I was too late, sitting there like, "What am I going to do?" Deborah Waxman: I remember just saying, "Help! I'm buried with this thing." I just remember all of a sudden, I was in that wide open space. All that narrowness, at least for the moment, lifted and I could breathe better. I could draw my shoulders back. I had access to more options and greater equanimity. Deborah Waxman: It was about acknowledging my limitations and then somehow, somehow, it's not like I was superhuman or anything. It's just that I was, the way you just said it, I was no longer alone. Rabbi Jacob Staub: So important, to me anyway, what you just described is, in naturalistic terms, a divine intervention. It is an angel helping you. I believe that's what they meant. Rabbi Jacob Staub: So, we can readopt the words, though not believing exactly the metaphysical reality that they are, they are conveying. And it really works. So it's not like, "I have to go back and be a traditional Orthodox Jew to have access to this kind of spiritual resource." Deborah Waxman: I have an eye on time because I think we're running long. I want to take us, I think we just hit around 2000. But I think I want to wind us down. I have a closing question, but before I ask it, is there anything that you want to share before I do a wrap up question? Rabbi Jacob Staub: Is the wrap up question about Evolve? Deborah Waxman: The wrap up question I was thinking about asking is about you as an editor and as a writer. When you started your journey into Reconstructionism, you made reference to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. I was thinking about how writing is a through line throughout all of this; your own writing, and helping people find their own voice. That's happened through not just Exploring Judaism, but other influential articles that you've written. Your essay explaining patrilineal descent in the early 1980s was really essential in the wider world, and certainly within the Reconstructionist movement. Your monograph on Shabbat, A Guide To Jewish Practice is such a gorgeous piece of writing that stands alone powerfully, as well as amplifying and enriching that three volume collection. You are, even as you're continuing to write in your own voice, helping others find their voices in a more powerful and more poetic way through your work editing Evolve. Deborah Waxman: I wanted to just ask you to, in a summative way, to reflect on all of that or some of that. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I remember in my senior year of rabbinical school, when I was trying to decide what I wanted to do after rabbinical school, I decided that when I was 70, which I happen to be now, I'd be very old and looking back, I would rather count the number of books and articles I had written, rather than the number of weddings and b'nei mitzvah that I had officiated at. Rabbi Jacob Staub: So, I took that turn. I went into academia and did not love it. Coming back to RRC allowed me to put both of those together in many ways. All the sudden I was the editor of a monthly magazine. All the stuff I learned, I was a fiction writer as an undergraduate. All the stuff I learned from John Barth, my fiction writing teacher about how to write clearly came to good use. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I knew how to write. I think I also learned a lot from one of my assistants of the editor, now Rabbi David Stein, who was just merciless with his red pen. Deborah Waxman: He still makes his living as an editor and a copy editor. Rabbi Jacob Staub: That's good. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I'd written poetry all along. I really love to write. Back before I learned how to speak, and I should mention that I almost didn't go to rabbinical school because I'd never spoken in public and I couldn't imagine ever speaking in public. Deborah Waxman: Huh? I did not know that. Rabbi Jacob Staub: I wrote everything out, including "scratch your head," "giggle." I scripted because I was so petrified. Deborah Waxman: Wow. Rabbi Jacob Staub: But when I wrote, my ideas got formed. I couldn't think clearly without writing them. When I wrote them, new things came up. I just think that has been a wonderful practice for me. I continue to write. I'm in a writer's group. I continue to write short stories and get critiqued by my group. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Two nights ago, I spent some time with someone who had written an absolutely brilliant piece on Judaism and the environment that was just impenetrable. This was someone who doesn't know a lot about Jewish sources. It's a thrill to help such a writer rewrite in a way that people will be able to read and take an important message from that, that they would just not do without the editing process. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Ike Fell. I am so happy to solicit a graduating senior or someone's who out just a couple years and encourage them to write their first piece, and helping them along with that, and knowing that they can do it so they'll continue to write. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Sometimes I wonder whether this is going to be an anachronistic skill, but I'm not worried yet. People do still read. Deborah Waxman: Yeah. I think it's about how the writing is delivered more than the act of writing. Which is why we no longer publish The Reconstructionist and why we have Evolve as a platform, multi media and multi vocal. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Right. It's such an honor to, here I am. I've retired from teaching at RRC, but I'm not retired from editing or from writing. I hope to continue to do that forever, as long as I can. Because it is, people say, "What are you going to do in your retirement?" Or my husband, Michael says, "I thought you were retired. What are you doing up there?" The answer is, "I'm writing," or, "Editing," because it gives me such satisfaction. Deborah Waxman: I think it's a beautiful place to end because I think, even as you are still an active contributor, this is a moment of reflection. This is looking at legacy and your role as teacher, and as guide, and as expositor, and as interlocutor, and as creator, and as a springboard. You have and continue to reconstruct Judaism. You have and continue to train others and to guide others in their work of reconstructing Judaism. Deborah Waxman: It's been- Rabbi Jacob Staub: Thank you. Deborah Waxman: This hour has been a delight. These 30 years have been such a blessing to me. Rabbi Jacob Staub: For me, too. Deborah Waxman: And to so many other people. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Thank you. Deborah Waxman: Thank you. Thank you. To be continued. Rabbi Jacob Staub: Concretely, this conversation is going to be continued next month on the Evolve, Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations podcast, when you will be the guest, not the host, discussing your essay, Beyond Antisemitism, and we really look forward to that. Deborah Waxman: It'll be a great honor to return in that role. This has been wonderful and I look forward to that as well. Bryan Schwartzman: Thanks so much for listening to this special episode, focusing on the career of our executive producer, Rabbi Jacob Staub. Thank you to Rabbi Deborah Waxman for guest hosting this show and leading such an incisive interview. Bryan Schwartzman: So, what'd you think of today's episode? We want to hear from you. Anything is on the table, except maybe that we should dump the host. Definitely don't write that. Bryan Schwartzman: Evolve is about curating meaningful conversations and that includes you. Send me your questions, comments, feedback. You can reach me at my real e-mail address, bschwartzman, S-C-H-W-A-R-T-Z-M-A-N, @reconstructingjudaism.org. We'll be back next month with an all new, kind of a flip side episode. If you enjoyed this one, next month, Rabbi Jacob Staub and I will actually turn the tables and be interviewing Rabbi Deborah Waxman about her recent essay, analyzing the big picture of anti-Semitism and where we're at today. So if you enjoyed this one, you should be into next month, as well. Bryan Schwartzman: Evolve, Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam [inaudible 01:02:43]. Our theme song, [01:02:44] is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and I and the whole team will see you next time. Bryan Schwartzman: (music)