CCAR Press and Women of Reform Judaism have recently copublished Covenant of Justice: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations from Women of Reform Judaism. This powerful collection amplifies the voices of female, nonbinary, and genderfluid contributors, addressing vital topics such as racial equity, climate justice, gender equality, and reproductive rights. Grounded in the Jewish value of tikkun olam (repairing the world), the book serves as both an inspiring resource and a call to action.
In this excerpt from the volume, Rabbi Laura Novak Winer shares her blessing for those who work in the food industry.
A Blessing for the Laborers
As Jews, we often say a blessing before eating a meal, known as HaMotzi. We thank God for bringing us bread, food, and sustenance. Yet, it is not only God who brings us this sustenance. Shouldn’t it be incumbent upon us to also remember and offer blessings upon those who labored to grow and harvest this food? With these laborers and farmers in mind, I suggest we offer these additional words of thanks and gratitude in our daily prayers and/or as an addition when reciting HaMotzi.
מִי שֶׁבֵּרַךְ אֲבוֹתֵינוּ וְאִמּוֹתֵינוּ יְבָרֵךְ אֶת הָאֲנָשִׁים שֶׁעוֹבְדִים בְּשָֹדוֹת בַּפַּרְדֵּסִים וּבְבָתֵּי חֲרֹשֶׁת לְהָבִיא .לָנוּ אֶת הָאֹכֶל הַטָּרִי וְהַבָּרִיא הַזֶּה Mi shebeirach avoteinu v’imoteinu, y’vareich et haanashim she-ovdim b’sadot, bapardeisim, uv’vatei charoshet l’havi lanu et ha-ochel hatari v’habari hazeh.
May the One who blessed our mothers and fathers bless the people who work in the fields, in the orchards, and in the factories in order to bring to us this fresh and healthy food.
CCAR Press and Women of Reform Judaism have copublished Covenant of Justice: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations from Women of Reform Judaism. This powerful collection amplifies the voices of female, nonbinary, and genderfluid contributors, addressing vital topics such as racial equity, climate justice, gender equality, and reproductive rights. Grounded in the Jewish value of tikkun olam (repairing the world), the book serves as both an inspiring resource and a call to action.
In this excerpt from the volume, Rabbi Heather Miller shares her poem, which presents planting as a metaphor for tikkun olam.
Planting Evermore
There is earth under my fingernails. Just like the ones who came before me and those who came before them as well.
We are a people who work the land. Tilling it with swing after swing of sharp objects under the blazing sun.
We are committed to the blistering work, dedicated to the process of opening things up. Dedicated to transforming hardened land to soft earth ready to receive seeds. The seeds of all that we wish to grow. Seeds of compassion. Seeds of intellect. Seeds of justice.
We tend the land knowing that it demands of us the keenest of attention. We remember when once something else got in the way. And our labors were lost. As if erased by entropy encroaching in.
And so we plow and till and plant and tend. Diligently. The seeds of compassion, intellect, and justice. And we wait patiently for the fruits of our labors, sweet peace, to ripen on the branch, for all children to taste.
I was born in Miami, Florida in 1946. Schools, lunch counters, and bathrooms at downtown department stores were as segregated as elsewhere in the South, with signs on the bathrooms (and drinking fountains) designating them as “White” and “Colored.” My family and my synagogue, Temple Israel of Greater Miami, co-founded by my grandparents in the mid 1920s, were deeply involved in the struggles for integration, social justice, and voting rights. Our TIFTY youth group did voter registration in the Liberty City Black ghetto in Miami, paralleling the efforts of the Mississippi summer volunteers in 1963. These issues and causes were discussed at the Seder table and at Shabbat services. We were also involved as a family and synagogue community in later struggles for justice and equality for women, for the LGBT community, farmworkers, and Haitian refugees, as well as in active opposition to the Vietnam War in particular, and militarism in general.
These same values inspired me to become a rabbi and to continue to express my Jewish identity in the way I was taught and raised. At HUC-JIR, I led protests from day one—against an unfeeling attitude toward rabbinical students and required enrollment in the military chaplaincy—and in favor of curricular reform and the first year in Israel program.As an intern in the office of the Reform Movement’s Social Action Commission, I wrote curricula for camps and schools on the theme of Judaism and the Indo China War and Organizing Your Synagogue for Anti-war Activity.
While living in Jerusalem between 1970 and 1972, part-time as a grad student and part-time working as a journalist, I became exposed to the issues of social justice there, both internal to Israeli society and between Israel and the Palestinians living in the recently occupied West Bank and Gaza. While there, I worked on preservation of the delicate environment and urban scale of Jerusalem. I was one of the key organizers of the Action Committee for a Beautiful Jerusalem (Vaad Peulah L’maan Yerushalaim Yafah), which prevented or altered many development plans in the area of West Jerusalem, preserving the open space that become Gan HaPaamon (Liberty Bell Park).
From my work travels on the West Bank, it became clear to me that there were two peoples living in Eretz Yisrael and that self-determination for one required self-determination for the other. From that time to the present, I have organized in support of mutual recognition of the right to self-determination for both peoples (Jewish and Palestinian,) helping to initiate Breira, New Jewish Agenda, and Rabbis for Human Rights-NA (now T’ruah,) each of them advocating for human rights in both the US and Israel/Palestine. I served as the founding chair of the RHR-NA Board for eight years until 2010. I am now working to build support for the joint Israeli-Palestinian organization A Land for All (Eretz L’kulam).
Most of my professional career (28 years) was spent in Hillel work on campus. While in Hillel, I led efforts to form a union to protect the rights of Hillel workers. I next served for eight years as an associate rabbi in Temple Shalom in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Later I worked part-time as the spiritual leader of a small independent congregation, and simultaneously, worked as the executive director of a new non-profit, Clergy beyond Borders. Before retiring in 2020, I continued to do work in promoting interfaith harmony through six years as executive director of the Interfaith Council of Metropolitan Washington.
I continued to be as involved as I could with other progressive Jewish organizing efforts. I played a role in the early stages to create Jews United for Justice (in DC), and Jewish Fund for Justice (founded in DC and ultimately a national organization that became Bend the Arc), and Friends of Peace Now that later became Americans for Peace Now.
I have essentially been doing what I was taught and raised to do by my family, especially my mother, who was a devoted activist her entire life, serving on the National Commission for Social Action. She supported every effort to aid the vulnerable and to liberate oppressed groups locally, nationally, and internationally. I was also influenced by many rabbis (including Temple Israel’s Rabbi Joseph Narot, z”l) and ministers such as Martin Luther King Jr. and William Sloane Coffin. I have never wavered that this is the core of my spiritual identity as a Jew as well as my calling as a rabbi.
Rabbi Gerald Serotta is celebrating 50 years as a Reform rabbi. We look forward to celebrating him and more of the CCAR’s 50-year rabbis when we come together at CCAR Convention 2024.
Rabbi Andrue J. Kahn, editor of The Sacred Earth: Jewish Perspectives on Our Planet, reflects on the inspiration behind the project, the unique approaches taken by the book’s contributors,and why Jews can play an essential role in the fight against climate change.
How did you get interested in the topic of climate change?
I have always found nature to be a source of spiritual richness. Growing up in Tacoma, Washington, a particularly beautiful part of our country, I sought out the sense of gravity, mystery, and wonder in our parks and beaches. As I grew older, I maintained that sense of connectedness to wild spaces, but never really considered the place of Judaism within that nexus. As associate rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, I was approached by a particularly passionate congregant, the indefatigable Peg Watson, who wanted to push our community to get more involved in environmental justice. She connected us with Karenna Gore at the Center for Earth Ethics, and through many conversations and much planning, it became clear to me that the best way to awaken our community towards greater commitment to and involvement in protecting our ecosystem was to cultivate resources for individuals to connect their Jewish identity and practice more closely with the more-than-human world of plants and animals, mountains and oceans, and forests and deserts.
What can readers learn from The Sacred Earth?
The most important lesson within The Sacred Earth, reiterated throughout every page, is that Judaism has always seen humanity as part of the intricate web of intermeshing life on this planet, and that God is the creator of the entire system. Many have posited that Judaism has no Earth-based ethic due to our exile from the land of Israel, the geographic locus of our genesis as a people. In reality, this volume helps us see that our state of exile has given us a valuable viewpoint on humanity’s relationship to the planet. Our presence in every ecosystem—and our ability to be contributors and partners with others in guarding and tending the land—has given us a global perspective well before globalism became the norm.
Can you describe some of the different approaches taken by contributors to The Sacred Earth?
The Sacred Earth is as full of approaches as it is of contributors! From poetry, to reflective biographical essays, to halachic thought, to kabbalistic mysticism, to practical guides for ritual practices, each chapter is its own gateway into more deeply understanding our role as Jews on our shared planet.
Why is it important that we, as Jews, engage in environmental activism?
Just as is true with so many other justice causes, environmental activism is deeply important for the Jewish people to engage in both for our own interests, and for the wider interests of the world. We are part of the wider network of communities that links all people and places throughout the planet, and are therefore responsible for maintaining that system. Beyond our universal commitments, the truth is that Jews all over the world are and will continue to be deeply impacted by the ongoing climate shifts. Even our ancestral and spiritual homeland itself is at deep risk of being uninhabitable within my lifetime if we continue trending towards greater rise in global temperature. Finally, our Torah teaches us that humanity was charged with the responsibility of guarding and tending the world, and there is no better way to maintain our connection to this mitzvah than to join with our fellow humans in working to protect against further destruction.
What gives you hope that we can rise to the challenge of addressing climate change?
When I look at the history of our people and our resilience in the face of thousands of years of challenges, it becomes clear that the Jewish people’s ability to survive and thrive everywhere and everywhen is undeniable. The unsustainable practices that have led to climate change will inevitably lead to their own demise. Our beautiful planet is incredibly resilient, if on its own timeline rather than a human timeline. Ultimately, the question is whether we as a species are willing and able to change how we approach our planet, our relationship to its inhabitants, and our modes and methods of consumption before we are forced by the ongoing shifts to make the changes under duress. What gives me the greatest hope in the face of these challenges are the many people who are devoting their lives to changing minds, hearts, and systems. The Sacred Earth is full of the thought and passion of just these kinds of people, tzaddikimin our midst, and I believe that whether we change by choice, or change by force, these tzaddikim will continue to work towards a better, more just world.
Rabbi Kahn and select contributors to The Sacred Earthare 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).
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 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 Earthare 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).
[2] Machado de Oliveira, Vanessa. Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, 46–47. North Atlantic Books, 2021.
Tuesday, March 14, 2023, is Equal Pay Day, marking how far into the year women need to work to earn the same amount as men earned in 2022. Rabbi Liz P. G. Hirsch, recently named incoming executive director of Women of Reform Judaism, shares her contribution to Prophetic Voices: Renewing and Reimagining Haftarah: a contemporary haftarah reading—WRJ’s 2015 “Resolution on Pay Equity”—and accompanying commentary for Equal Pay Day. In addition to alternative readings for the traditional haftarot, Prophetic Voices includes new haftarot for each Shabbat, holiday, and many events on the American Jewish calendar.
From “The Women of Reform Judaism Resolution on Pay Equity,” 2015
Given the profound injustice of unequal pay, Women of Reform Judaism reaffirms its commitment to achieving pay equity and calls upon its sisterhoods to:
Urge the swift adoption of legislation that would provide women who face sex-based wage discrimination with a straightforward, accessible path for recourse, including but not limited to:
Barring retaliation against workers who disclose their wages, so that workers can more easily determine whether they face wage discrimination, and
Ensuring the right to maintain a class action lawsuit, providing women with the same remedies in court for pay discrimination as those subjected to discrimination based on race or national origin.
Work with synagogue leadership to enact just compensation policies for clergy and staff at all levels, or, where they already exist, to ensure that these policies properly guide the compensation, interviewing, hiring, firing, and promoting of clergy and staff.
Implement sisterhood or congregational programs to empower women with tools to address pay inequity they may face in their professional lives outside the synagogue.
Take a leadership role to advocate for pay equity in their Jewish community and in their broader local community by forging partnerships with Jewish, other faith, and secular organizations in those communities.
You Shall Not Defraud Your Fellow
Rabbi Liz P. G. Hirsch
Not unlike our Jewish holidays, EqualPay Day is not fixed to one calendar date of the year. It moves according to the specific calculations of the wage gap each year. Black EqualPay Day, Latina EqualPay Day, and Native EqualPay Day are consistently later in the year, emphasizing the wider wage gap due to greater pay discrimination faced by women of color in the United States.
As the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism notes, “EqualPay Day is not a holiday to celebrate, but rather a day we use to bring attention to the ongoing injustice of pay discrimination in the United States . . . mark[ing] how far into the new year women must work to receive in wages what their male counterparts earned in the previous calendar year.” The haftarah reading for EqualPay Day is an excerpt from the Women of Reform Judaism’s 2015 “Resolution on Pay Equity.”
Our values, principles, and resolutions are the roots of the Reform Movement. With our text, we affirm our sacred commitment to gender equality and economic justice.
There is much work to be done. According to an analysis by the National Partnership for Women and Families, as of March 2020, “women in the United States are paid 82 cents for every dollar paid to men.” The resolution first calls upon us to take a legislative strategy, supporting current bills and policies that work to reduce the gender wage gap. We can look to the work of our Religious Action Center for the most current legislation in need of our advocacy. Significantly, the resolution also requires us to hold up a mirror and examine the policies and practices of our own institutions to ensure we are modeling pay equity in every way. To that end, seventeen organizations have joined together to form the Reform Pay Equity Initiative, which is developing best practices for addressing the gender wage gap.
As we learn in the Holiness Code, the heart of our Torah, “You shall not defraud your fellow. You shall not commit robbery. The wages of a laborer shall not remain with you until morning” (Leviticus 19:13). May we work toward a day when all people are paid equally and justly.
Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz is the author of The Book of Proverbs: A Social Justice Commentary, new from CCAR Press. In this Q&A, he discusses why he chose to write about Proverbs and what readers can learn from the book.
You previously published two social justice commentaries with CCAR Press, on Pirkei Avotand Jonah. Why did you choose Proverbs as the text for your third commentary?
I believe the Book of Proverbs is one of the most overlooked books in the Tanach. And yet, its simplicity can speak to the complexities of our moment. In the twenty-first century, our identities, relationships, and choices are often more complicated than ever. As we grow in our complexity, it is imperative to remember the moral foundations on which our lives are built. For me, in this generation, Proverbs is about getting back to basics and returning to simple truths.
Many Jews might ask, “What even is the Book of Proverbs?” Contained in the Writings, the final section of the Hebrew Bible, Proverbs is a work of ancient but timeless wisdom traditionally attributed to King Solomon. Dealing more with morals and ethics than the Divine, it can be of immense value to believers and non-believers alike. When I teach Torah, I try to pass on a version of the tradition that encompasses both the study of ideas and the translation of those ideas into real-world action. The Book of Proverbs offers us an excellent bridge between those ideals.
Proverbs is a very different text from Jonah and Pirkei Avot. Did your writing approach differ for this volume?
Absolutely. These three books are very similar in that they are all interested in translating ancient holy texts into relevant moral replies. But they are so different. Pirkei Avot is rabbinic, the Book of Jonah is a narrative, and Proverbs is from the wisdom literature. In the first two, I viewed my role as simplifying the complicated. But here, I viewed my role as complicating the simple. Proverbs distills our Jewish values down to their very essence and it reinforces our commitment to the integrity of a Jewish path. The texts can inspire us and challenge us to do more and live differently.
Did writing this book change any of your perspectives?
My main ideas did not change, but the book has the potential to transform us in subtler ways. For example, in a society that feels unforgiving and has us convinced that one mistake by ourselves or others makes us irredeemable, Proverbs reminds us that “Seven times the righteous one falls and gets up” (24:16). I paused to think about resilience, forgiveness, and redemption at a time when our society is struggling with extreme binaries.
Which proverb did you find most meaningful?
The book reinforces the notion that Judaism is about spiritual and ethical work and learning to grow in responsibility. Instead of providing indisputable answers, Proverbs often supplies us with contradictory lessons. For example, Proverbs 26:4 teaches: “Do not answer a fool in accord with his folly, else you will become like him.” This is a useful lesson in the age of online mudslinging. Yet the very next verse tells us the complete opposite: “Answer a fool in accord with his folly, else he will think himself wise.” The reader is trusted to work out the application on their own. In an era where so many feel they have it all figured out, how do we engage, resist, or walk away from those we view to be destructive?
What do you want readers to take away from the book?
In a world that tangles and muddles our ideas of what our lives should be, the Book of Proverbs helps us return to the foundational questions regarding our relationships with good and evil, life and death, joy and sorrow. Our culture rewards our being compliant and undisruptive, but Proverbs drives us to take moral and spiritual action with clarity and courage. It challenges us to make distinctions between laziness and productivity, foolishness and wisdom, cruelty and justice. By studying this text, we confront the fact that we are constantly making decisions (consciously or not) about what kinds of people and Jews we are going to be. In today’s rapidly changing and exhaustingly overwhelming world, we can experience a great deal of fear and worry. We need to weather these storms together and hold each other closer. Only together, with grace and humility, can we courageously evolve. In the end, more than wanting readers to master the Proverbs from the Bible, I’d like to see them inspired to write their own proverbs that can help guide their lives.
How did you come to serve as the coauthor of Recharging Judaism?
I had partnered with my synagogue rabbi, Rabbi Judith Schindler, for more than a decade on civic engagement initiatives, plus chairing synagogue committees, serving on the board, and representing the synagogue in the community. What started as our memoir about collaborating with churches in the Bible Belt became instead a national research project demonstrating how civic engagement strengthens synagogues, empowers us as Jews, and brings more justice to our country––the thesis of Recharging Judaism.
What is your most important advice for institutional leaders who want to enlist their community members in advocacy efforts?
Don’t pick your issue in a conference room. Talk to the members of your community to discern the issues that matter to them—not through a survey, but with thoughtful conversations one-on-one or in small groups. The advocacy issue will emerge, as will passionate volunteer leaders who will be critical to executing the work.
What was the most challenging part of writing this book?
Rabbis and lay leaders think differently, which enriched our book but also challenged us as we started the writing process. My coauthor drafted paragraphs to inspire; I wrote logical arguments and detailed instructions. Eventually, we found our joint voice––more specifics than in a sermon, but less dry than a how-to manual.
Recharging Judaism was published in 2018. Do you think that the book speaks differently to us today?
Recharging Judaism offers timeless counsel to leaders of Jewish institutions: Travel upstream to address the sources of crisis in your community. Step outside your synagogue walls to build community with Jews and people of other religions. Respond thoughtfully to congregants’ complaints with lessons from Jewish teachings and with the realities of other congregations’ experiences.
What do you want readers to take away from the book?
Build a choir of voices seeking change, both within your synagogue and in your community. Mobilizing your congregation requires your rabbi as soloist and a diverse choir of lay leaders. Singing together with other choirs requires relationships in your community across boundaries of faith and race, and the willingness to trust a conductor whose experiences differ from your own.
Judy Seldin-Cohen is available to teach on topics in the book. Email bookevents@ccarpress.org for more information.
Judy Seldin-Cohen is a community advocate and author. After working in the business sector, she spent many years working on social justice issues with Rabbi Judith Schindler, her then-synagogue rabbi and now her coauthor. Together, they have collaborated on Recharging Judaism: How Civic Engagement Is Good for Synagogues, Jews, and America (CCAR Press, 2018) among other projects.
Rabbi Dr. Shmuly Yanklowitz is the author of The Book of Proverbs: A Social Justice Commentary, new from CCAR Press. In this excerpt from the introduction, he discusses what we can learn from Proverbs.
The Rabbis taught that most of the Israelites did not leave Egypt during the Exodus. Indeed, for some—perhaps most—people, the familiar state of “slavery” is much more comfortable than unknown “freedom.” Today, our world changes faster than ever before in human history. There is a lot of fear of change, fear of loss. We need to weather these storms together and hold each other closer. Only together, with grace and humility, can we courageously evolve. As spiritual seekers, we have unique opportunities each day to continue to reflect on the ancient wisdom of our tradition and how it can be made relevant to our moment.
Spirituality is not simply “fun” or “meaningful.” There is far too much at stake. If we do not elevate our spiritual consciousness, we will destroy ourselves. More than a political revolution, we need a global spiritual awakening to the oneness and the interconnectedness of all life! How will we get there? What intellectual and spiritual resources will help us all move forward? Which of those resources will be brand-new and which ones will be ancient?
The Book of Proverbs—a book of ancient wisdom—is one of the most profound works found within the Hebrew Bible, but one that is not often explored in a truly spiritual, accessible, and relevant way. The language of the book is often vague, and its words and lessons are often open-ended and shrouded with literary ambiguity, qualities that make it hard to digest for the contemporary reader. Still, the wisdom that is contained within the Book of Proverbs is timeless, and readers have much to gain by learning from its ancient precepts.
Those of us who live in a world of paradox might find the Book of Proverbs—known as Sefer Mishlei in Hebrew—to seem a bit binary and simplistic. However, the book pushes us to remember that actually much of life is quite binary! We are confronted with good and evil, life and death, joy and sorrow. The challenge is to see which moments require us to view situations with nuance and embrace paradox—and which moments require our fervent and robust moral and spiritual action. In the latter moments, we should not try to find intellectual excuses, but rather respond with clarity and courage. In the Book of Proverbs, we find the productive and the lazy, the wise and the foolish, the just and the unjust—and we know where we want to find ourselves on that map!
The Book of Proverbs is the second book of K’tuvim (“Writings,” the third section of the Hebrew Bible) and consists of only thirty-one chapters. As part of the biblical “wisdom literature,” the book discusses moral values and proper conduct. The collection is divided according to its different authors.1 In fact, one might divide the book into seven different books merged into one, similar to a contemporary anthology consisting of seven chapters written by different authors. Other books in the Hebrew Bible of the same wisdom literature genre include Ecclesiastes and Job.2
Due to the lack of references to the Divine, the content of the Book of Proverbs is accessible to a broad readership, believers and nonbelievers alike. Proverbs is not a typical biblical book. God is mentioned here and there, but the content of the book is mostly focused on human learnings and wisdom. As one might say today, the book is “spiritual but not religious.” It appears to have been written not for an intellectual elite interested in theology, but as a moral guide for all people. It is not an exclusively “Jewish” book, but speaks to universal concerns. It does not address the needs, interests, and challenges of a specific community, but rather seeks to provide guidance for an individual—any individual.
Learn more and order the book at proverbs.ccarpress.org. A free study guide by CCAR Press Rabbinic Intern Ada Luisa Sinacore is available.
1. “The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel” (Proverbs 1–9); “The proverbs of Solomon” (Proverbs 10:1–22:16); “The words of the sages” (Proverbs 22:17–24:22); “These also are by the sages” (Proverbs 24:23–34); “These too are proverbs of Solomon, which the officials of King Hezekiah of Judah copied” (Proverbs 25–29); “The words of Agur” (Proverbs 30); “The words of Lemuel, king of Massa, with which his mother admonished him” (Proverbs 31). It is important to note, however, that it is possible to view these other authors as nicknames for Solomon.
2. Two other books are generally included in the genre of the wisdom literature that were excluded from the Tanach but included in the Apocrypha: Wisdom of Solomon and Wisdom of Ben Sira (or Ecclesiasticus).
