Rabbi Sid Schwarz

Humanity’s struggle to adapt to technology is hardly new — it has been with us since at least the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. As early as 1936, for instance, Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” — his last silent film and one of the most iconic movies of all time — offered a commentary on the fate of humans in an age of industrialization, corporate greed and automation: In the film’s most famous sequence, Chaplin, playing the role of the “Little Tramp,” gets hired to work on an assembly line in a factory, where he quickly finds himself swallowed up by the gears of a massive machine.

I am the child of two parents who came to this country as refugees from Nazi Europe. I was raised with a sense of national pride that derived in part from the words of Emma Lazarus, engraved on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

I know that I am not alone in being impressed at how quickly the Jewish community was able to provide program content via the web as much of North America moved to “shelter in place.” As we begin to adjust to our new, surreal lives, more is being written about the shape of our post-pandemic world. My particular interest is the impact on spiritual communities in North America. For years I have been working with rabbis and synagogues to re-think how they can create more compelling spiritual communities.  In recent years, the main delivery vehicle for that training has been a two-year fellowship for rabbis called the Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI). CLI uses the discipline of adaptive leadership to equip rabbis with the tools to […]

We should appreciate David Cygielman for introducing the broad eJP audience to the notion of communal “thickness” in his 11/13/17 post. As was noted in the response by Rabbi Michael Holzman, this is not a new concept. Well before the David Brooks’ column in the New York Times, sociologists have sought ways to measure the depth of connection between the people who make up any given social system. The idea of thickness was first introduced into the lexicon of the social sciences by Clifford Geertz in his classic study, The Interpretation of Cultures, which was published in 1973. In my view, it is essential that those who care about the future health of the American body politic focus their attention on the nature of community. […]

Last winter I was at a first-of-its-kind gathering in Austin, TX. The leaders of more than ten national religious denominations came together to explore why their congregations were losing membership so rapidly over the last decade. The gathering included leadership from the Methodists, Episcopalians, United Church of Christ, Lutherans, Unitarian Universalists as well as top leadership from the Union for Reform Judaism, United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism and the Reconstructionist Movement. There were also a handful of consultant/thought leadership types who have created programs designed to better equip clergy to get ahead of the curve on the rapid changes in American society that are at the root of the declining market share of conventional religious institutions. One of the most important presentations at the gathering […]