Categories
gender equality Social Justice

Creating Workplace Equity that Reflects Jewish Values

Rabbi Mary L. Zamore, executive director of the Women’s Rabbinic Network, reflects on ethical employment practices and offers a variety of resources to help Jewish workplaces achieve these standards.

In the Jewish community, many frequently describe our places of employment as having cultures like family. However, if we really want to honor the dedicated people who serve as the backbones of our institutions, we must develop the most professional and equitable employment policies and procedures possible. We must ensure equitable hiring, supervision, and promotion; we must create safe, respectful communities. This will honor not only our employees, but also our volunteers, members, and participants. In this manner, we will create cultures in which all can flourish.

For secular employees in the United States, the gender-based wage gap persists. According to a Pew Research Center report, it has barely narrowed in the past two decades. In 2022, American women typically earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men; this ratio has remained almost the same since 2002, when women earned 80 cents to the dollar. The gap is much wider for women of color. For example, in 2022, Black women earned 70 percent as much as White men, and Hispanic women earned only 65 percent.

Unfortunately, the wage gap also persists in Reform Jewish congregations. The Reform Pay Equity Initiative (RPEI), a project of the seventeen organizations of the Reform Movement and led by Women of Reform Judaism (WRJ) and Women’s Rabbinic Network (WRN), gathers data from the five professional organizations of the Reform Movement. This aggregation reveals a gender-based wage gap consistent with secular data.

Professional and lay leaders in each Jewish workplace should examine the RPEI data in order to ascertain if their female-identified employees, as well as those of other protected identity groups, are treated fairly and equitably. The question is not just “do we pay our employees fairly?” but “how do we know for sure that we are creating equity in our workplaces and thus living up to our Jewish values?” This drive for equity also requires that hiring, supervision, and promotion are conducted in the most professional manner and result in unbiased employment practices.

To ensure equity in our Jewish workplaces, we must guarantee that all employees have access to paid family and medical leave. With federal laws failing to provide paid leave, the secular American workplace is an outlier among developing and developed countries. Although the situation is improving at the state level, religious institutions are exempt from these laws. Therefore, the moral imperative is on Jewish leaders to provide clearly communicated, robust paid leave for people of all genders who are growing their families or whose loved ones are experiencing medical challenges. WRN’s paid family leave resource provides accessible information and model language for employment contracts and employee handbooks. This free resource explains that every employee should receive twelve weeks of paid leave.

Finally, our congregations and institutions must be safe, harassment-free, respectful communities for employees and all who interact with these organizations in any capacity. Every congregation and institution should have an ethics policy, which is constantly broadcast to all who gather either virtually or in person. In addition, staff and board members must be trained in the procedures that support the policies. Admittedly, upholding good-quality ethics policies can be difficult. It may require standing up to individuals who otherwise are valued in our communities and letting them know that their harmful behavior will not be tolerated. It may even mean asking these productive perpetrators to leave our communities.[i] It is vital that boards and leaders plan and practice procedures and are prepared to act. The Union for Reform Judaism has a complete resource, as well as professionals and lay leaders, to help congregations study and write an ethics code. Sacred Spaces, an organization dedicated to preventing institutional abuse in the Jewish community, has created Keilim, an online, self-guided policy toolkit. In addition, the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ “The Clergy Monologues” and ARJE’s “The Educator Monologues,” with accompanying study guides (Clergy and Educator), are conversation-starting tools to reflect on gender bias in Jewish spaces.

When we describe our Jewish workplaces as “like family,” we unwittingly send the message that our synagogues and institutions do not need to uphold the highest professional standards for ethical employment as informed by our Jewish values and secular laws. As Reform Jews, we can apply our communal passion for egalitarianism and social justice to safeguard every Reform Movement employee and ensure their access to safe, harassment-free, respectful workplaces. Dedicating ourselves to this goal is the greatest way to honor and celebrate our workers this Labor Day.

Rabbi Mary L. Zamore is the executive director of the Women’s Rabbinic Network. She is the editor of The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic and The Sacred Exchange: Creating a Jewish Money Ethic, both published by CCAR Press.

[i] Productive perpetrators are professional or lay people who contribute to our communities through time, talent, money, knowledge, or social capital. Yet they harm others through bullying or harassment. See Harassment-Free Jewish Spaces: Our Leaders Must Answer to a Higher Standard (RavBlog).

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CCAR Press High Holy Days Prayer Technology

‘Opening Your Heart with Psalm 27’: What Will Season Five Bring?

It’s been four years since the publication of Opening Your Heart with Psalm 27: A Spiritual Practice for the Jewish New Year by CCAR Press. I have not only been blessed to engage in this work myself, but I also have been able to share it with my congregation and students around the world, sometimes in person, and more often and regularly, online. As Elul’s 2023 season of reflection and renewal begins, I am preparing to see this psalm and myself as new, yet linked eternally to the past. This is your invitation to the practice.

The month of Elul begins on Friday, August 18, and with it the daily practice of reading Psalm 27 for seven weeks—from the arrival of the month to the close of the festival season on Simchat Torah. With only fourteen verses and 149 Hebrew words (roughly two hundred in English depending on the translation), it’s a psalm to savor. Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav understood the danger of the twenty-first-century binge when he wrote, “…But even if you are not motivated to t’shuvah”—the spiritual work of turning, changing, being at one with oneself, others, and God—“. . . the regular recitation of Psalms will lead you to awakening; you will come to the gates of t’shuvah and find the key to open its closed gates. In this manner you will attain complete t’shuvah.”[1] It does not matter if we read or sing, in Hebrew or English. What matters is that we engage with Psalm 27 slowly over the seven week season; in this way, the psalm holds the keys to open the gates of the heart.

At this season of the year, I try to be a strict adherent of the poet Wendell Berry’s advice, “Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air … stay away from screens…”[2] It’s not easy to stay away from the phone or computer screens, but I am successful in staying away from television screens. I don’t watch much TV to begin with, but there are times when I miss an entire season of a show and binge-watch it to catch up. The seasons of TV shows, going back to school, even vacation, have become linked to frenzied rushed behavior rather than an embrace of the unfolding evolution of seasons in nature or the healthy pace of this sacred High Holy Day season in our Jewish tradition. Each season of the year is different, just like each year is unique, and so too our experience with Psalm 27, year after year, or for the first time.

Opening Your Heart with Psalm 27 was published in 2019, and Season 1 began with celebratory singing and chanting[3] at each private reading and public gathering. Season 2 launched in Elul 2020 as the COVID pandemic pushed us apart. Words of Psalm 27 shared weekly online were a light and a salvation,[4] and in those moments we were not abandoned.[5]

The Psalm 27: Opening Your Heart app arrived in time for of Season 3 in 2021, bringing photographs, music, multiple voices, and gentle guidance to the sacred work. There were still enemies roundabout[6] and each day was chaotic[7] but from our Zoom boxes we saw God’s face[8] in each other; this gave us hope and courage to continue to wait[9] until we could be together in person again. By the start of Season 4 we were confident that we could make our way along an apparent path[10]; each of us and each word of Psalm 27 could be new each day.

And what to expect in Season 5? Surely the original characters of fear and doubt will reemerge from their hiding places[11], and alongside them, courage and hope.[12] Season 5 is also Season 1, meaning it doesn’t matter whether you’ve been reading the psalm for five years or fifty years. In this 2023 season, it is: fresh and new, an invitation to rest on a rock[13], seek shelter in a sacred place[14], lift the head and raise the gaze[15], to offer an offering[16] in song or deed, to seek out a new upright road[17] and to continue to wait and hope, to do the spiritual work and find the keys to open the heart in this new year.

Any season was and is a great time to begin the practice, and any day is great. It is never too late and never too early, and there’s no need to catch up or cram. This season is a gift of our tradition, a time to lounge and linger with the language of Psalm 27, finding in it the keys to open the gates of memory and tears, of gratitude and faith, of t’shuvah and transformation.

Rabbi Debra J. Robbins serves Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, Texas. She is the author of Opening Your Heart with Psalm 27: A Spiritual Practice for the Jewish New Year and the app that accompanies it, Psalm 27: Opening Your Heart. Her second book, New Each Day: A Spiritual Practice for Reading Psalms, will be available from CCAR Press in December 2023.

[1] Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, Kitzur Likutei Moharan, PartII 73:1. Poetic translation by Rabbi Jonathan P. Slater.

[2] Wendell Berry, “How to Be a Poet (to remind myself),” in Given (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005), p. 18.

[3] Psalm 27:6

[4] Psalm 27:1

[5] Psalm 27:9

[6] Psalm 27:6

[7] Psalm 27:5

[8] Psalm 27:8

[9] Psalm 27:14

[10] Psalm 27:11

[11] Psalm 27:11

[12] Psalm 27:14

[13] Psalm 27:5

[14] Psalm 27:5

[15] Psalm 27:6

[16] Psalm 27:6

[17] Psalm 27:11

Categories
Israel Poetry Prayer

Praises in Peril: Singing Hallel during Israel’s Judicial Crisis

Liturgist and poet Alden Solovy discusses the challenge of praising God during a period of political distress and uncertainty.

A strangely festive undertone animates the weekly Saturday evening demonstrations against the so-called judicial reforms here in Jerusalem. I’ve attended many of these protests in the thirty-two weeks since they began in January.

The post-Shabbat protests outside the president’s residence have become a place to catch up with neighbors and friends, hear music, cheer for speakers, blow kazoos in call and response with a circle of drummers, and chant slogans with enthusiasm.

Most of the demonstrations across the country occur without incident, while some have been marred by police violence and attacks on protesters, typically when major news breaks about the government’s relentless attempts to eviscerate the Israeli justice system or when protesters seek out government officials at their homes or when they are out in the field on government business. Here in Jerusalem, the typical mood at the weekly demonstrations is a strange combination of upbeat enthusiasm and downbeat disappointment, anger, and fear.

This dichotomy is manifested by the costumes that some protesters wear. While some are humorous digs at the government—a clown on stilts and various wild animals, for example—others are deadly serious, like the women dressed as “Handmaid” characters from The Handmaid’s Tale, silently calling attention to the potential of the “reforms” to erode women’s rights.

Photo courtesy of Mike Sager

In spite of the onset of “protest fatigue,” people are still coming out to demonstrate. Each week, the protests take on a different tenor. Two weeks ago, around the country, the mood was more somber. In Jerusalem, the musical act was eliminated from the program in respect after a terror attack in Tel Aviv earlier in the day. We sang Hatikvah (“The Hope”), Israel’s national anthem, at the end of the rally and went home early.

The leaders have called the weekly protests a “festival of democracy”—a festival that comes hand in hand with dark fears for the future of the State.

Jews around the world will soon bring in the new month of Elul, beginning a forty-day period of introspection and change including the High Holy Days. Our traditional t’filah for Rosh Chodesh includes singing Hallel, psalms of praise and rejoicing.

How can we rejoice in the face of this deep fear, pain, and sorrow for the State of Israel? Much like the somber realities combining with the festive atmosphere of many of the protests, this year the traditional Hallel may need a more layered and nuanced set of emotions.

Two and a half years ago—in the heart of the pandemic—I asked a similar question in the context of COVID and the approaching Passover seders, during which Hallel is also recited. How can we sing Hallel with a full heart at socially distanced seders? I crafted an alternative called “Hallel in a Minor Key,” inviting singer-songwriter Sue Horowitz to compose music for the opening poem. Partnering with the CCAR, Sue and I offered the liturgy as a thank-you gift to the congregations, rabbis, cantors, and spiritual leaders who have used our work.

We offer this liturgy to you again in answer to a new question: How do we recite Hallel as we fear for the future of the State of Israel? You can download a PDF of the full liturgy, along with the sheet music. You can also download a recording of the music. Read about the spiritual and musical influences behind this liturgy in our original RavBlog post “Hallel in a Minor Key.”

We encourage you to add music or additional readings that would deepen the meaning of your worship. If you use this liturgy, we’d love to hear from you. Reach Alden at asolovy54@gmail.com and Sue at srrhorowitz@gmail.com.

Alden Solovy is a liturgist who made aliyah to Jerusalem in 2012. He is the author of This Grateful Heart: Psalms and Prayers for a New Day, This Joyous Soul: A New Voice for Ancient Yearnings, This Precious Life: Encountering the Divine in Poetry and Prayer, and These Words: Poetic Midrash on the Language of Torah, all published by CCAR Press.

Categories
Books gender equality Women in the Rabbinate

Eradicating the Concept of an ‘Ideal Rabbi’

The CCAR and the Reform Movement have recently celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of women’s inclusion in the American rabbinate, which began with the ordination of Rabbi Sally Priesand in 1972. As a part of this celebration, CCAR Press has published The First Fifty Years: A Jubilee in Prose and Poetry Honoring Women Rabbis, a heartfelt tribute to women rabbis and their indelible impact on all of us. The book features voices from across the Jewish spectrum—many of them pioneers themselves—reflecting on the meaning of this anniversary.

Rabbi Nikki DeBlosi, PhD, is one of the contributors to The First Fifty Years. In her piece, she addresses the term “woman rabbi,” discussing the beauty that differences bring to the Jewish community and why we should eradicate the notion of an “ideal” rabbi.

Simply declaring that I am “a rabbi, not a ‘woman rabbi’” does nothing to change the underlying structures and assumptions that continue to hold back our progress as a Reform Movement.

I want to be accepted and celebrated as a woman and a rabbi because I want to eradicate the notion that there is an ideal rabbi, a standard model—white, heterosexual, male, Ashkenazic, etc.— against whom all others are labeled lesser than, deficient, exceptional, strange. Erasing the specificity of my gender or any other aspect of my identity that does not fit a narrow stereotype of “rabbi” might open doors professionally. But at what cost? How much of myself must I leave at the threshold?

As Jews, we should know deeply that difference and distinction and variety are not the problem.

When we bless “separation” at Havdalah, we don’t say, “Thank God there’s Shabbat, so we only have to tolerate those horrible six days temporarily.” No! We say instead, “Thank God there are different kinds of time.”

I want to say: Thank God there are different expressions of sex and gender. Thank God for women rabbis, and nonbinary bet mitzvah students, and transgender cantors, and interfaith families, and folks who have chosen Judaism in myriad ways. None “lesser than.” None the “default.” None the “exception.” None the “distraction.” All feeling truly as though we belong.

Rabbi Nikki DeBlosi, PhD, is a freelance rabbi dedicated to connecting folks to the breadth and depth of Jewish tradition through inclusive, innovative, and insightful Jewish teaching, speaking, and ritual. You can learn more about her work at www.rabbinikki.com. Rabbi DeBlosi currently serves as Vice President of Varied Rabbinates for the Central Conference of American Rabbis. She is a contributor to The First Fifty Years: A Jubilee in Prose and Poetry Honoring Women Rabbis.

Categories
Books CCAR Press

Translating Martin Buber for Today: Rabbi Bernard H. Mehlman and Gabriel E. Padawer on ‘The Way of Humanity’

Rabbi Bernard H. Mehlman

Rabbi Bernard H. Mehlman, DHL, and Gabriel E. Padawer, ScD, z”l, are the two translators responsible for the new English edition of Martin Buber’s Der Weg des Menschen nach der chassidischen Lehre (The Way of Humanity: According to Chasidic Teaching). In this excerpt from the book’s introduction, they discuss the origins of Buber’s classic work and why they decided to undertake this translation project.

In April 1947, Martin Buber (1878–1965) delivered a six-part lecture with the title “Der Weg des Menschen nach der chassidischen Lehre” (The Way of Humanity: According to Chasidic Teaching) to the Woodbrookers at their convention center in Bentveld, Holland. The Woodbrookers (Vereeniging Arbeidersgemeenschap der Woodbrookers, Association of Workers Community of Woodbrookers), a Dutch religious-socialist workers’ organization with connections to English Quakers, and Martin Buber were no strangers; Willem Banning (1881–1971), Protestant pastor, cofounder, and some-time leader of the Woodbrookers Workers Community, had known Buber for many years and had been influenced by Buber’s socioreligious and philosophical outlook. When it became known in 1947 that Martin Buber would visit Holland as part of a seven-country lecture tour organized by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Woodbrookers invited him to be their featured speaker at a specially organized educational conference…

From his earliest years, Buber had been fascinated by the legends, traditions, and mystical teachings of the eighteenth-century Eastern European Chasidic rabbis. He chose a legendary tale from the Chasidic masters as a theme for each one of his six lectures and then expanded on these six tales to show their relevance to mid-twentieth-century thinking and sensibilities… A “Notice to Members,” found in the archives of the Woodbrookers Workers Community (now housed at the International Institute of Social History, in Amsterdam), notes that Martin Buber delivered his address on Sunday, April 20, 1947, in two sessions (at 10:30 in the morning and 4:00 in the afternoon) to an appreciative audience of about 150 listeners.

Martin Buber
The David B. Keidan Collection of Digital Images from the Central Zionist Archives

One of these auditors was Henri Friedlaender, who was a skilled calligrapher, graphic designer, and some-time poet who previously had published his writings on his own small press, Pulvis Viarum. Friedlaender was so much taken by Buber’s lectures that he approached Buber and was able to persuade him to let Pulvis Viarum publish the lectures as a German-language monograph with the title Der Weg des Menschen nach der chassidischen Lehre (The Way of Humanity: According to Chasidic Teaching). Friedlaender augmented Buber’s German lecture notes with a glossary explaining lesser-known terminology and place names and published it at the Pulvis Viarum Press in 1948.[1] To this day it is the only one of the sixty-odd lectures delivered during Buber’s seven-nation tour to have been published (and later translated into many languages) as a stand-alone monograph…

We decided to undertake a new English translation, based on the Pulvis Viarum 1948 German-language publication, for several reasons. The first was that the original (1950) English translation had been all too faithful to its German urtext, frequently resulting in complex and overlong sentences, with many nested clauses and parenthetical modifiers that were difficult to comprehend. One of us has had firsthand experience teaching the 1950 English text to young adults; they frequently had difficulties with the material and soon lost interest.

The second reason for a new translation was that we believed Buber’s work deserved a more scholarly presentation, including numerous notes about historical figures (included in the notes and glossary), references to biblical quotations, and explanations for some of Buber’s literary allusions based on themes from early twentieth-century Western European culture that would be unfamiliar to contemporary readers.

Third, we gave due regard to the importance of making our text gender-neutral, while preserving the literary and stylistic character of the work. To do this, we adopted the simple device of eliminating every occurrence of the pronouns he, his, or him, by transposing the sentence structure from the third person singular to the first or second person singular or else from the singular to the plural. Only direct quotations from external text sources were allowed to retain their gender-specific pronouns.

This translation developed over time. Our understanding and appreciation of Buber’s ideas deepened in the process. Our aim was to make the text and its ideas accessible to readers with an English sensibility by employing colloquial American English speech and usage. At the same time, we made every attempt to find English words or phrases that mirrored as closely as possible the meaning, both explicit and implicit, of Buber’s original German, so that Buber’s poetic melody and rhythm would not be “lost in translation.”

[1] Martin Buber, Der Weg des Menschen nach der chassi- dischen Lehre (The Netherlands: Pulvis Viarum, 1948).

Rabbi Bernard H. Mehlman, DHL, senior scholar at Temple Israel in Boston, Massachusetts, teaches midrash and homiletics at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York. Formerly, he was Distinguished Lecturer in Judaics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Gabriel E. Padawer, ScD, z”l, who emigrated to the United States as a refugee from Nazi persecution in 1938, was a registered professional engineer, a Fellow of the National Science Foundation, and a lifelong student of Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy.

Rabbi Mehlman and Dr. Padawer are the translators of the new English edition of Martin Buber’s The Way of Humanity, now available from CCAR Press.

Categories
Books Social Justice

Changing the Cycle: Jewish Tradition as a Response to the Climate Crisis

Rabbi Andrue J. Kahn, editor of The Sacred Earth: Jewish Perspectives on Our Planet, reflects on the traditional practice of the sh’mitah year, its applications to climate justice, and how we can build a sustainable future for all.

In New York City’s Union Square, if you look up right above Nordstrom Rack and Best Buy, you’ll see a series of red numbers counting down. Right now, it reads something like six years, some amount of days, and some amount of hours, minutes, and seconds. This is a climate clock, and others just like it exist in Seoul, Rome, Berlin, and Glasgow. These clocks are counting down to the presumed date at which our planet’s temperature will have increased by 1.5 degrees Celsius due to humanity’s carbon emissions. Climate scientists suggest that this temperature shift “could trigger a cascade of tipping points, which would irreversibly alter the global climate system and further exacerbate warming.”[1]

This viewpoint is steeped in the modern mindset. Modernity, the outcome of the European Enlightenment, focuses on a view of history as a continually straight line of progress charted on human timelines, centering ourselves, our lifetimes, and our goals. This is often viewed in the positive sense—that we, as a special species and a planet, are always progressing inevitably forward. But it is not quite how the biblical, or rabbinic, world understood the nature of history.

Our Torah teaches a practice of connecting to the land called the sh’mitah system, which in many ways runs precisely contrary to our modern sense of straight-line progress. It creates seven-year cycles of stopping work, stopping growth, and, after many cycles, returning all back to an original state, undoing anything that could be viewed as financial or wealth accumulation.

God tells Moses:

Speak to the Israelite people and say to them:… Six years you may sow your field and six years you may prune your vineyard and gather in the yield. But in the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath of complete rest, a sabbath of the Eternal: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. (Leviticus 25:2–4)

This cycle continues seven times itself, every forty-nine years. The seventh cycle of the sh’mitah year is the yoveil year, in which all things are returned to their original status. If land has changed hands between families, it goes back to the original families. If someone has become enslaved or indebted, that slavery and that debt are canceled. Every forty-nine years, the society returns to its starting point. The year 5782, or 2021–22 in the Gregorian calendar, was the last sh’mitah year. This major cycle of the Jewish calendar is aligning directly with the environmental countdown clock. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, the countdown clock at Union Square is also counting down to the next sh’mitah year, 5789.

One of the most brilliant Torah scholars of history, Moses ben Nachman (Ramban), sees within the sh’mitah practice of the Torah a symbolic system of cycles in time that point us towards not just human social structures, or human-centric histories and futures, but the underlying pattern of the cosmos.

He writes:

The six days of creation represent the duration of the world, and “the seventh day is a sabbath of Adonai your God” (Exodus 20:10). Just as the seven days of the week allude to what God created in the beginning, so the seven years of the sabbatical cycle allude to what will happen during all the rest of creation. That is why the text is so strict about it, invoking a penalty of exile for violating it. (Ramban on Leviticus 25:2)

Ramban is suggesting that our entire universe works in these cycles of seven, starting with six “days” of work, and then a seventh “day” of rest. This continues out fractally in time, forever. We have six “years” of work, and then a seventh “year” of rest, which then multiplies out to a seventh degree as well, with a complete societal reset every seven cycles.

This system of seven continues ad-infinitum, and the end of time will come at the end of one-thousand cycles of seven, in which the “World to Come”—the Jewish phraseology for the messianic era—will be established. There will then be one-thousand years of peace and prosperity, a Shabbat to end all Shabbats, which will then end with a total return to nothing, perhaps to start all over again.

In her recent book Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira writes about looking at stories so radically different from our normative modern viewpoint of straight-line progress through history, not for their literal truth, but as a process to think with.

She refers to this as worlding, using stories as a guide to how to be in the world. She writes:

Worlding stories invite us to experiment with a different relationship between language and reality. These stories do not require anyone to believe in anything; rather they invite you to believe with them. However, these stories cannot work on you without your consent. Taking worlding stories seriously makes possible a significant change in your ways of seeing, sensing, and relating to the world.[2]

So I invite you, now, to try worlding with this very different cosmology that the Torah and Ramban are putting forward. We have a little over six years until the climate countdown clock hits zero, and our next sh’mitah year begins. What this cycle of sevens brought to us by our tradition teaches us is that time moves in predictable patterns that we cannot change—but we, ourselves, can change our own behavior within the patterns. By reflecting on our own behavior within them, we are able to change the outcomes of the cycle.

The Sacred Earth: Jewish Perspectives on our Planet provides a multitude of ways to world with this idea—to find our Jewish footing in this system of cycles in order to change our behavior, and perhaps change the outcome of this cycle towards the tipping point of global warming. Each chapter of this book reflects on Jewish modes of understanding our relationship to God, the planet, and each other through different aspects of our tradition’s wisdom systems—from theology, to halachah (Jewish law), to prayer, to personal practice in nature. This volume seeks to be a key to a vision for a future perfect with nature and with the Divine rather than the straight lines of human-centered history.

As we look forward to our next sh’mitah year, and perhaps this tipping point of climate change, may each of us find within our tradition ways of worlding with our ancestors, our tradition, and our Torah, to build a future for all of us.

Rabbi Kahn and select contributors to The Sacred Earth are available to visit communities for speaker events and book clubs. For more information, please email bookevents@ccarpress.org.

Rabbi Andrue J. Kahn is Associate Director of Yachad and Adult Education at Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, NY. He is the editor of The Sacred Earth: Jewish Perspectives on Our Planet (CCAR Press, 2023).

[1] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/1.5-degrees-climate-change-tipping-points-2030#:~:text=As%20the%20planet%20rapidly%20approaches,in%20the%20next%20few%20years.

[2] Machado de Oliveira, Vanessa. Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, 46–47. North Atlantic Books, 2021.

Categories
Books CCAR Press Death

Regaining Grounding after Loss: Rabbi Lisa Grant and Cantor Lisa Segal on ‘The Year of Mourning’

Rabbi Lisa D. Grant and Cantor Lisa B. Segal discuss the motivation behind their new book The Year of Mourning: A Jewish Journey, the complementary digital app, and what they hope readers and users will gain from the project.

What inspired the creation of The Year of Mourning?

Rabbi Grant: During the months following my mother’s death I formed a “Kaddish club” at my synagogue where I invited other mourners to join with me in sharing memories of their loved ones, in studying Jewish sources related to mourning, in singing and praying together, and in being a supportive community to one another as we journeyed through our process of grief. The Year of Mourning grew out of these experiences and includes many of the same components that were part of those in-person gatherings.

The book and app are composed of seven units. Can you describe these sections and how they correspond to various parts of the mourning experience? 

The material is organized around seven themes that are common experiences of mourning (pain, brokenness, sadness, comfort resilience, acceptance, gratitude). Each theme includes seven units, which begin with a song, which can be listened to on the app version. This is followed by a question that sets an intention for exploring the materials to follow. Then there is a brief text to study with guiding questions, followed by a contemporary poem. Each unit concludes with the Mourner’s Kaddish, which also can be heard on the app. Just as mourning does not follow a predictable path, we invite mourners to use the materials in ways they find most meaningful.  

What makes the app different from the book? How can the two be used in tandem?

The book and the app are identical in terms of their content, but the app allows the user to carry it with you in your phone, and to access the materials in a variety of different modalities: reading, journaling, and listening to the music.

One of the major advantages of the app is the beautiful recordings that can be listened to as part of each given unit: one can explore a theme, or a kavanah or sacred source, and listen to the music connected to them. Alternatively, any of the musical selections can be listened to by pressing the Music icon, at any time or in any order. In addition, for those unfamiliar with reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, we also provide a recording to follow and to gain literacy and grounding in that experience.

To help you move through weeks of mourning, you can set daily reminders in the Settings menu and a notification will appear with a quote. As with the music, you can always just scroll through those quotes. There is also a handy option in the app to write reflections in a journal that can be saved or edited as you go along.

Music is a key part of The Year of Mourning. What role can music play for someone experiencing bereavement?

While our traditions offer so many deep and comforting texts and rituals created to hold us in our losses, for many mourners, music holds a special place. Music can touch our hearts and souls in ways that transcend words. Often, in the journey of mourning, we find ourselves unable to articulate or express a feeling or emotion, and music has the potential to touch those recesses to comfort us or help us express the inexpressible. There is an intentional repetition of a number of the songs as expressions of different emotions and themes, recognizing the fluidity of the way music can speak to us within varied emotional states. We hope that the musical choices we made for the app—in both text and style—connect to and enhance the units’ themes, kavanot, poetry, and sacred sources.

What are your hopes for this project’s impact? 

We hope that rabbis and cantors will recommend these resources to mourners in their communities who are looking for sources of support, wisdom, and comfort during this time of grief. These resources are intended to help individuals regain their grounding after the death of a loved one, by making deeper connections to memories and to the richness of Jewish wisdom and tradition.

The Year of Mourning: A Jewish Journey is available in print and as an Apple and Android app. Rabbi Grant and Cantor Segal can visit communities to teach on the topic; please email bookevents@ccarpress.org for details.

Rabbi Lisa D. Grant, PhD, is Director of the New York Rabbinical School program, Eleanor Sinsheimer Distinguished Service Professor in Jewish Education, and Coordinator of Special Seminary projects at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion.

Cantor Lisa B. Segal serves as cantor and is a founding member of congregation Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

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CCAR Press

The First Fifty Years: Opening the Door for All

Rabbi Hara E. Person is one of the coeditors of The First Fifty Years: A Jubilee in Prose and Poetry Honoring Women Rabbis, forthcoming from CCAR Press. In this excerpt from the introduction, she discusses the importance of acknowledging the joys, challenges, and complexities that have characterized the half century since women have been included in the American rabbinate.

In many ways, the genesis of this book began with the groundbreaking ordination of Rabbi Sally J. Priesand in 1972 from Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in Cincinnati. But we could also argue that it began with the ordination of Rabbiner Regina Jonas in Berlin in 1935. And further back again, this evolving story began with the many women who aspired to become rabbis throughout Jewish history, whose dreams were deferred by centuries of patriarchy, and who had to find alternative paths of service and leadership. 

For me, this book begins on a brownstone stoop in Brooklyn, when my rabbi told me the first woman was being ordained. Until that moment, I had never thought about the fact that women couldn’t be rabbis—it had just never occurred to me that that option wouldn’t be open to me if that was something I wanted to do. And in that moment I was determined to meet this pioneer, this first woman rabbi, who became my hero right then and there. While it was years before I finally met Rabbi Priesand, as a child on that Brooklyn stoop I could not have imagined what her courageous act of opening the door to the rabbinate would mean for me, both personally and professionally. That is an essential debt that can only be paid forward. I hope the publication of this book stands as part of that gratitude, and I am grateful to have Rabbi Priesand’s essay, fittingly, at its start. 

This collection serves as a mile marker along the journey, a momentary stopping place for reflection and commemoration. While we experience the evolution of women in the rabbinate as inevitable, that doesn’t mean it was easy. These pages likewise acknowledge challenges and complexities of these fifty years, identifying some of the detours and roadblocks that still lie ahead. Alongside tremendous gains and systemic changes, pain and inequity are not yet eradicated. Women rabbis still face bias, microaggressions, pay inequity, and other obstacles. Naming challenges is one of the ways that we are able to break through the barriers that keep us from getting to the goal of equity. 

The work continues. In a mere half century, rabbinic leadership effected a dramatic turning point in Jewish history, an acknowledgment that the voices that were silent or silenced, marginalized, unheard and unseen, are an essential part of the rich and variegated fabric of the Jewish story and must be included. We now claim a richness of experience that nourishes us all, individuals of all genders, identities, and roles in our Jewish communities. Becoming the most beautifully diverse, inclusive, and thriving community of our highest aspirations, we all need to know what has led us here on the path to a healthy, equitable, and flourishing future. 

Today we recognize that the rabbinate is made up not only of women and men but also rabbis with diverse gender identities. This knowledge, too, is grounded in Torah. For centuries, our scholars recognized that Genesis celebrates inclusivity: both heaven and earth and the heavenly bodies and angelic beings. God created humans and animals and everything in between. God created human beings in God’s image, a full spectrum of gender expressions and sexualities. Binary thinking has blinded us to a fuller appreciation of the beauty and power of God’s creations. The ongoing work of equity includes all rabbis of every identity, including the full spectrum of gender, sexual, and racial identities. One of the key learnings from these fifty years of change is that the door to opportunity and inclusion must not be opened just once with great fanfare, but must be held open continually for all who wish to enter. As Rabbi Priesand writes in her piece in this collection, “I would like to think that my opening the door for women in the Jewish community was a first step toward opening the door for all who would serve the Jewish people.” 

Rabbi Hara E. Person is the chief executive of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Previously, she was the CCAR’s chief strategy officer, publisher of CCAR Press, and editor-in-chief of URJ Books and Music. Alongside Jessica Greenbaum and Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell, she is coeditor of The First Fifty Years: A Jubilee in Prose and Poetry Honoring Women Rabbis (CCAR Press, 2023).

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LGBT Rabbinic Reflections

LGBTQ+ Rabbinic Groundbreaker Rabbi Eric Weiss: ‘The Great Deficit of Breaking Any Ceiling Is That You Have to Be Careful of the Shards’

This Pride Month, the Central Conference of American Rabbis is lifting up an important community within the Reform rabbinate: the groundbreaking LGTBQ+ rabbis who were amongst the first rabbis to express themselves openly, who paved the way—and often fought for—LGBTQ+ acceptance and inclusion in the Reform rabbinate and in the Jewish community.

Generations of LGBTQ+ Jews have lived closeted lives because of outright discrimination and more subtle forms of bias and rejection that have dominated much of Jewish history, including the history of our Reform Movement and the CCAR itself. We are committed to continuing to learn how to rectify the erasures of the past and to embrace all of our colleagues.

While the Reform Movement has advocated for LGBTQ+ inclusion for decades, for many queer rabbis, the personal experience of navigating sexuality in rabbinical school, or being the first out rabbi at a synagogue, in an organization, or even in their city or community, was a fraught, sometimes painful experience, often marked with judgment, shame, or even overt discrimination. 

We share these moments of truth, and we also share important moments of joy and hard-won milestones. We honor the experiences of queer Reform rabbis, their meaningful contributions, and above all else, we thank them for showing up as their authentic selves and bringing diversity and wholeness to the rabbinate and to their communities.

“Neitzei hasadeh—Let us go forth and let our message ring out, that God loves us all, that we love us all, and that love conquers all.” [Based on Song of Songs 7:12]

I was first admitted to rabbinical school, through the Hebrew Union College Los Angeles campus under the deanship of Rabbi Lenny Thal, in 1979, after my graduation from the University of California at Santa Cruz. I declined my admission, requested a deferment for a year, was granted the deferment to 1980, and subsequently declined the deferment. It wasn’t time.

In 1979, I came out as a gay man and moved to San Francisco, where I spent five formative years. During this time, I worked in law firms, attended Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, taught religious school with my sister at Congregation Sherith Israel, and relished the gay life of San Francisco. The era between the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 and the first reported cases of AIDS in the United States in 1981 was extraordinarily celebratory for gay men. We broke down paradigms and rebuilt them into new communal structures and relational interactions. It was a glorious era. In a heterocentric world, this period is frequently cast as one of sexualized abandon, with life and death consequences. Such homophobic and transphobic tropes have served to diminish sexual identity, gender identity, and otherwise maintain a level of heterocentric hegemony that has denied to this day a medical cure for AIDS.   

With the onset of the AIDS pandemic, I became among the first gay and lesbian hospice volunteers, first with the Coming Home Hospice and then with the Shanti Project, to serve primarily gay men dying of AIDS. These deeply spiritual experiences not only resurrected my interest in reapplying to rabbinical school but also stimulated my curiosity to learn more about spiritual care as a Jewish theological practice. In 1982, I re-applied to rabbinical school, through the Los Angeles campus, under the deanship of Rabbi Lee Bycel, and was accepted, this time as an openly gay student. I began rabbinical school in the fall of 1983.     

There were many points of great support along the way. In Jerusalem, when I wrote an essay that was gay-themed, I received it back with the same grammatical corrections as any other essay I wrote. I met gay Israelis, and, in what seemed an unofficial student mark of Jerusalem life, I had an Israeli boyfriend.

In 1984, upon my arrival to the Los Angeles campus, I had the great luck of landing into a class filled with love, kindness, and great humor. There, Rabbi Stanley Chyet, z”l, sought me out and in a private meeting assured me that my ordination would never be threatened. In 1986, in a private meeting on the Los Angeles campus, then-CCAR President Rabbi Jack Stern, z”l, made clear that the CCAR would welcome me as an openly gay member. My Los Angeles peers elected me to represent the student-body in rabbinical school admission interviews. I still remember an orientation evening with Rabbi Lee Bycel, the L.A. Dean, who said, “Never forget your peers, you will need each other over the years.” For me, his wisdom was prescient. I believe our collegiality is our individual health. Nobody knows what it is to be a rabbi but another rabbi. In 1987, on the New York campus of HUC-JIR, my peers elected me student body president. In the day-in and day-out life of HUC-JIR, it was my peers who gave me an abiding comfort and satisfaction in the midst of the challenges that we all face as we are formed into a rabbinic identity.  

But, there were terrible moments of crassness. A Talmud professor in Los Angeles spoke of a gay man sitting on a fire hydrant, and the sexualization that image invokes as a metaphor to explain the legal principle, shev v’al ta’aseh. Conversations, casual or formal, about officiation at “gay weddings” were filled with spineless and p’shat reflections from rabbi-professors such as “I am glad I have never been asked so that I haven’t ever had to say no.” Discussions of the efficacy of LGBTQI+ synagogues (the entirety of these letters did not exist then) were held as if the most important theological point was that “those people” only want the freedom to kiss one another with “Shabbat Shalom” at the end of a service. The most painful parts of this prejudice still are the extraordinary use of professors’ God-given minds to skew theology into pure prejudice. This cloak of prejudice derails, even to this day, rabbinic careers and causes great economic, social, and personal harm. That this remains without t’shuvah is one of the real stains on HUC-JIR. There were many nights, as I fell asleep, that I was grateful for the enduring power of my Gay-Jewish identity—an identity that was strengthened during my prior years in San Francisco—so that the bruises of prejudice never went deeper than my skin.  

San Francisco became a throughline in the years following my ordination. I spent the entirety of my formal rabbinate in San Francisco. Some might look from the outside and say “how lucky,” but in truth, I didn’t have a choice. I had one solid job offer when I was ordained in 1989, at the Bureau of Jewish Education in San Francisco. I got that job offer because I had gone through the Los Angeles-based School of Education. I then sought further training in clinical pastoral education and spiritual direction—a continuation of the spiritual path that began in those early years of the AIDS pandemic, but also an opening to new job possibilities to continue to be a rabbi. In many of these places I remained the first of something. In many places, I yearned to follow someone else. The great deficit of breaking any ceiling is that you have to be careful of the shards. 

I was able to serve as the CEO of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center where I helped build the Jewish healing movement. From my own self-reflective practice of Jewish spiritual care, I have had the chance to contribute to a vocabulary of Jewish spirituality and care, develop programs of Jewish spiritual support, and help to define the spiritual narrative in illness, dying, and grief. I have been able to help create spiritual frames for the experience of mental illness, communal spiritual supports, and the ways a spiritual narrative supports Jewish adult identity development in bikur cholim.  

I have had the rabbinate I wanted. I entered HUC-JIR with the desire to go into “pastoral care.” The language of Jewish healing did not then exist. I have also had a rabbinate that never formally attached to the Reform Movement. While I sat on the CCAR board, was asked to write two books from the CCAR Press, and have been honored to work with CCAR leadership, my rabbinate was never supported by the Reform Movement. Today, too many of us can say the same. Our devoted rabbinic contributions to the Movement we love is actually from the outside. And, like many, I would never be the rabbi I am without my husband or without colleagues.   

History, I learned from my HUC-JIR professors, is not neutral. What happened happened from different perspectives, and no history is ever fully true until all perspectives are known. This is why we learn that history is never about the past. All history is an evolving story of love, pain, disappointment, jealousy, relief, celebration, triumph. This is why history is also human intrigue. This is why our own Torah narrative is so abiding to our common identity. This is why, after the destruction of our Temple in Jerusalem, our rabbinic mind formed a Jewish life that would be contemporary to every time. We all know that the realization of one’s own b’tzelem Elohim happens over time. And so then does any history. As soon as I realized that I was gay, in 1979, I “came out.” I was admitted to HUC-JIR as an openly gay student in 1983. I was ordained in 1989. So many of us LGBTQI+ folks end up caught in the heterocentric notions of “coming out.” And yet, we all know the countless ways in which revealing oneself are marked in the range of time. We who fully understand marking time and space, need to shed these heterocentric frames of “coming out” and rather develop our own markings of LGBTQI+ milestones. This is the ultimate theological task. Our b’tzelem Elohim is a diversity which is a testament to God’s unfathomable creativity. We have always existed in the rabbinic mind. Ours is to frame the covenantal relationship to ourselves and the Transcendent as a matter of Judaism’s continual canon for a vital Jewish life.   

Rabbi Eric Weiss was ordained in 1989 at the New York Campus of HUC-JIR. He is formally trained in Jewish education, clinical chaplaincy, and spiritual direction. He is a co-founder of Grief and Growing: A Healing Weekend of Individuals and Families in Mourning and of Kol Haneshama: Jewish End of Life/Hospice Volunteer Training Program. He is the editor of Mishkan R’fuah: Where Healing Resides and Mishkan Aveilut: Where Grief Resides, published by the CCAR Press. He is a founding co-president of the GLRN: Gay and Lesbian Rabbinic Network, now the QESHET listserve. He is executive director emeritus of the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center, where he served for 26 years. He served on the board of the CCAR and is a past president of the Northern California Board of Rabbis. Currently, he currently serves as a CCAR/HUC-JIR Mentor, and he is the Interim Co-executive director of Shalom Bayit, the Jewish community’s central voice for domestic violence in the Bay Area. He resides with his husband of 31 years, Dan, in Palm Springs, California.

Categories
LGBT Rabbinic Reflections

LGBTQ+ Rabbinic Groundbreakers: Rabbi Denise Eger: ‘Speak Loud, Fight Harder, Be Proud’

This Pride Month, the Central Conference of American Rabbis is lifting up an important community within the Reform rabbinate: the groundbreaking LGTBQ+ rabbis who were amongst the first rabbis to express themselves openly, who paved the way—and often fought for—LGBTQ+ acceptance and inclusion in the Reform rabbinate and in the Jewish community.

Generations of LGBTQ+ Jews have lived closeted lives because of outright discrimination and more subtle forms of bias and rejection that have dominated much of Jewish history, including the history of our Reform Movement and the CCAR itself. We are committed to continuing to learn how to rectify the erasures of the past and to embrace all of our colleagues.

While the Reform Movement has advocated for LGBTQ+ inclusion for decades, for many queer rabbis, the personal experience of navigating sexuality in rabbinical school, or being the first out rabbi at a synagogue, in an organization, or even in their city or community, was a fraught, sometimes painful experience, often marked with judgment, shame, or even overt discrimination. 

We share these moments of truth, and we also share important moments of joy and hard-won milestones. We honor the experiences of queer Reform rabbis, their meaningful contributions, and above all else, we thank them for showing up as their authentic selves and bringing diversity and wholeness to the rabbinate and to their communities.

“Neitzei hasadeh—Let us go forth and let our message ring out, that God loves us all, that we love us all, and that love conquers all.” [Based on Song of Songs 7:12]

As we observe Pride in 2023, I am reflecting on many aspects of my LGBTQ+ rabbinic journey. I am particularly nostalgic as I am retiring from my pulpit soon. My entire rabbinic career has been serving the Los Angeles LGBTQ+ Jewish community.  

When I was ordained a rabbi in 1988 by Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, it was still a time when you could not be openly gay or lesbian and rabbi. (There was not even a discussion that transgender people could be part of this equation at that time!) The College–Institute did not ordain openly gay or lesbian people as rabbis.   

This was a burning question and issue in the mid- to late 1980s within Reform Judaism. What was the place of LGBTQ+ Jews in the community? Could LGBTQ+ Jews be religious leaders? And all of this against a backdrop of a horrible AIDS pandemic that was killing gay men in droves in this country. And in the midst of a political scene where the U.S. government did nothing to help. Ronald Reagan’s administration’s inaction and lack of truth telling about AIDS/HIV contributed to the number of deaths. The right wing of the Republican Party and the religious homophobes they courted called for concentration camps for gay men, and they blocked civil rights for LGBTQ+ people. 

My rabbinate unfolded against this backdrop, fueling me to become an advocate and activist for LGBTQ+ rights in society and LGBTQ+ rites in our Jewish world. There were many closeted LGBTQ+ people who were already ordained, but only a handful who were openly gay. As the Central Conference of American Rabbis and Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion were actively debating the ordination of gay and lesbian colleagues as rabbis, there was to be a resolution at the 1990 CCAR Convention in Seattle. In advance of the Convention, my coming out story ran in the Los Angeles Times, helping to give a face and name to the cause.  

There was no turning back.

From left: Rabbi Ross Z. Levy, Rabbi Denise Eger, Cantor Patti Linsky during High Holy Days 2022 at Congregation Kol Ami.

I stood at the bedsides of countless young men dying of HIV, feeding them and visiting them when they had no one, when their families still rejected them.   

I advocated for gay youth who were often thrown out of their homes.

I did training for Jewish professionals, social workers, and other community leaders about how to be more inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community. We made connections with the Israeli LGBTQ+ community supporting their efforts and worked with the first openly lesbian Tel Aviv city council woman, Michal Eden, who opened the LGBTQ youth shelter, Beit Dror, in Tel Aviv. We raised money for Beit Dror, as well as provided resources to train their social workers in Israel on LGBTQ+ issues for youth.  

These are but some examples of my rabbinate. 

Rabbi Denise Eger, right, with Reverend Susan Russell of All Saints Church in Pasadena, California in 2008, when the California Supreme Court ruled that provisions in the state’s marriage statutes banning same-sex marriages violated the California Constitution.

Over the course of the next thirty-five years, I would push the boundaries of inclusion for marriage equality both in our Reform Movement and the larger Jewish world and in society at large. I performed the first legal same-sex marriage in California in 2008 when the California Supreme Court found same-sex marriage to be legal in the Constitution. I would do over sixty weddings during that summer of love, before voters in November 2008 took away the right to marry until the federal government granted it again in 2015.  

I worked on many other issues of concern for LGBTQ+ people, including advocating for transgender rights and for the expanding understanding of gender expression alongside sexual orientation.  

There are many moments of memory, including becoming the first openly LGBTQ+ person to become president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 2015. One story from that moment that most people don’t know, is that even with all the progress on LGBTQ+ civil rights in society and in the liberal Jewish world by 2015, the day I was to be installed as CCAR President, a credible death threat was made against me. At the Convention, I had a bodyguard. My colleagues kept asking who the guy was that was trailing me everywhere. We couldn’t actually say as we didn’t want to draw too much extra attention to the situation, but there was an abundance of caution. I didn’t leave the hotel except once to go to dinner, where the bodyguard sat at the next table with a clear sight line to the door. It was frightening for me and for my family as my son was with me from college.  

The world had changed and yet not so much. There still was an expression of hatred and violence against me as an out lesbian, as an out Jewish lesbian. 

This wasn’t the first death threat I received. There have been many. 

And what worries me most today, is the climate of hatred and harassment and rolling back of civil rights for our LGBTQ+ community. The particular focus on the dehumanization of transgender people and trans children and their families in many states; the threat to marriage equality; the rolling back of hate crime laws; the attack on women’s reproductive health, hearkens back to the time when I became a rabbi.  

Our Reform Movement will need to stand strong and tall for LGBTQ+ rabbis and their families. Our Reform Movement will need to stand strong and tall for our LGBTQ+ congregants and members and in the larger society and use its power and voice and moral suasion to be the advocates we need.  

May this Pride Season inspire us to speak louder, fight harder for justice, and be proud of our queer rabbis, family, friends, and community. 

Rabbi Denise L. Eger is the founding rabbi of Congregation Kol Ami in West Hollywood, California. In March 2015 she became the 60th President of the CCAR, becoming the first openly gay or lesbian rabbi to hold that position. She served from 2015-2017. Rabbi Eger is also past President of the Southern California Board of Rabbis (the first woman and openly gay person to do so) and a past President of the Pacific Association of Reform Rabbis.

In 2020, she released Mishkan Ga’avah: Where Pride Dwells: A Celebration of Jewish Life and Ritual (CCAR Press), a groundbreaking collection of LGBTQ+ prayers, poems, liturgy, and rituals. Her latest book is Seven Principles for Living Bravely: Ageless Wisdom and Comforting Faith for Weathering Life’s Most Difficult Times.