Synagogues Reimagined

Rabbi Sharon Brous 0 Comments

Once there was a beloved king, teaches Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, whose court musicians played beautiful music before him.  The king loved the music and the musicians felt honored to be able to use their talent to bring him joy.  Every day for many years the musicians played enthusiastically, and the king and the musicians developed a deep love for one another.  But eventually, after years of dedicated service, all of the musicians died.  Their children were called into the king’s court to take their parents’ place. Out of loyalty to their parents, they began to appear every morning to perform.  But unlike their parents, the children did not love the music.  While they could play basic tunes, they did not understand the hidden power […]

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From Synagogue Centers to Intentional Spiritual Communities

Rabbi Sid Schwarz 0 Comments

In my book, Finding a Spiritual Home, I profiled four congregations, one from each of the major American Jewish denominations. Each had a track record attracting serious Jewish seekers who tended to avoid conventional synagogues. What emerged from the study were four principles that these congregations seemed to share and which suggested an exciting new paradigm for American synagogues. I’ve come to call this paradigm “intentional spiritual community” and I have worked with dozens of congregations helping them move from the older, synagogue-center paradigm, whose appeal is fading, to this newer paradigm. This work in the field has allowed me to fine-tune the four principles which I believe can help American synagogues become better suited to the contemporary realities of American society. Mission Driven and […]

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The Tent Peg Business, Revisited

Rabbis Noa and Lawrence Kushner 0 Comments

A. Almost thirty years ago (1984), when I wrote “The Tent Peg Business” for the first issue of New Traditions (it went belly-up after the third), we were pretty clear about who was a Jew (Jewish mother, conversion); we knew who was a rabbi (HUC, JTS, yeshivah—Recon was just an infant); and we knew what a congregation was (building, dues, rabbi). Now we’re unsure about how to define any of those categories. Indeed, even a print media journal like this may be on the way out. But, if you think that’s challenging, try living in San Francisco. Here, nine out of every ten Jews are unaffiliated. At The Bagelry near my home, the young woman flips the bacon with chopsticks. We ain’t in Kansas anymore.—LK […]

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People of Faith Standing with the Suffering

Rabbi Michael Latz 0 Comments

Last month, rabbis, pastors, priests and imams gathered together in Ferguson, Mo., a city rife with racial violence and pain. Along with my rabbinic colleagues from Truah: The Rabbinic Call for Justice, I decided to join together with the people of Ferguson in their struggle for justice.  I went with the intention of teaching protesters and police alike how to forge a new path for justice. I realized that I had the wrong idea: This wasn’t about clergy teaching anyone anything but about our bearing witness to a movement. After 18-year-old Michael Brown’s death at the hands of a police officer, the youth of Ferguson are demanding that he, and they, not be forgotten. Rabbis went to Ferguson to hold ourselves accountable. We participated in […]

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Want to Build a Healthier Jewish Community? – Nourish Informal Social Networks

Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum 0 Comments

Eight years ago, a group of individuals in Seattle began asking the question: If we were to create a new kind of Jewish community, specifically designed to meet the needs of 21st century Jews, what would it look like and how would it be organized? How would it meet the increasing gap between the needs and mindset of today’s generation of Jews, and the structure of traditional Jewish communal organizations? The answer this group came up with was the Kavana Cooperative: a pluralistic, non-denominational, and cooperative Jewish community. Influenced by Seattle’s start-up culture, co-founders Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum and technology executive Suzi LeVine aimed to create an organization that was simultaneously open and experimental as well as thoughtful and strategic. Most of all, Kavana would be […]

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From Sea to Sacred Sea

Rabbi Michael Lezak 0 Comments

Sixty 15 year-old Jewish campers from L.A. are on a three-day hike through the Santa Monica Mountains.  No mattresses.  No stereos.  No showers.  No hair dryers.   Not an easy task for these pampered kids from the Valley and West L.A.    It’s their last summer as campers.  The summer before they become Counselors-in-Training.  They stay up late.  Telling silly stories around the campfire.  Singing their favorite camp songs.  Eyeing that summer’s crush.  On the last night, these campers and their beloved counselors sleep on a beach in Malibu as the sounds of the waves crashing help them to feel profoundly alive.  They wake up, dip their feet in the ocean and walk en masse along Pacific Coast Highway back to camp.  As they amble into the […]

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Changing Communal Culture in Synagogues

Rabbi Amy Wallk Katz 0 Comments

When I became the rabbi of Temple Beth El (TBE) in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the summer of 2008, two congregations were merging: Temple Beth El and B’nai Jacob. Temple Beth El was a large Conservative congregation showing signs of a growing malaise. Membership had declined from about 900 to 600 member units, the physical facility felt neglected, and the classes and programs that had once been quite successful were no longer particularly well-attended. Many congregants seemed disengaged, the congregation relied heavily on its professional staff, and it was challenging to recruit and sustain committed volunteers. Still, when interviewing with the members and the leadership I sensed a deep love for the Temple and a powerful desire to rebuild. B’nai Jacob was a very different congregation. […]

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Re-Thinking Synagogue Dues

Rabbi Dan Goldblatt 1 Comment

In the summer of 2007, we carried our Czech Memorial Trust Torahs from the Congregational church that had hosted us for ten years and celebrated a glorious shehechiyanu moment in our beautiful synagogue home perched on a hill overlooking the lush San Ramon Valley.  We added a lovely pre-school wing and expected to grow and flourish.  Little did we know that the subprime mortgage crisis was about to hit the country like an economic tsunami and many people in our community would lose their jobs and some could no longer afford living in our upscale suburb. We lost scores of members who could no longer pay synagogue dues and watched as the percentage of remaining members on “dues subsidy” skyrocketed from a little over ten […]

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Synagogues: Thinking Big

Rabbi David Steinhardt 0 Comments

I serve as the senior rabbi of B’nai Torah Congregation, a Conservative synagogue in Boca Raton Florida. During my 20 year tenure the congregation has doubled in size to approximately 1400 families. The growth has been fueled in part by demographics. But it also has been a result of a conscious decision to reach out to every segment of our synagogue population and beyond our walls. When I first arrived the programming was fairly conventional and it reflected the interests of a small leadership group. I believed that if we wanted to attract a wider cross-section of Jews in our area we needed more diversity in our programming. I especially wanted to introduce programming that would appeal to a younger generational cohort. My specific area of focus was […]

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The Vendor Trap: Why Selling Spirituality Doesn’t Work

Rabbi Michael Wasserman 1 Comment

Michael Sandel, in his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, argues that the two decades since the end of the Cold War have been an era of market triumphalism. As winners often do, we have over-learned the lesson of our victory. The vindication of free markets has led us to assume that markets ought to govern practically everything. The reach of markets, and market-oriented thinking, into aspects of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms is one of the most significant developments of our time. Consider the proliferation of for-profit schools, hospitals, and prisons, and the outsourcing of war to private military contractors . . . the reach of commercial advertising into public schools; the sale of “naming rights” to parks and […]

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