Questions from the National Gathering
Rabbi Eli Rose Kukla, Danforth Jewish Center—Toronto, Canada
Visions of a Covenantal American Community
Leah Mundell, Congregation Chaverim—Tucson, AZ
Learning About Myself at K’hilot K’doshot
Matthew Kennedy, Congregation Tifereth Israel—Columbus, OH
Our Own Prophetic Voices
Michael Ramberg, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College—Philadelphia, PA
Questions from the National Gathering
Rabbi Eli Rose Kukla, Danforth Jewish Center, Toronto, Canada
“Where do you come from?”
“What brings you here this weekend?”
“What inspires you to do this work?”
“Will you tell me more about your story?”
Last month I traveled with three leaders from my congregation, the Danforth Jewish Circle in Toronto, to the K’hillot K’doshot National Gathering. The four of us were the lone international representatives and had come from north of the border to learn more about what Congregation Based Community Organizing is all about. From the moment I arrived I noticed that it was questions and not answers that made this “gathering” different from a conference. After each session, over meals and in the hallways, everyone we encountered had questions. They had questions about what social justice work was like in Canada, what brought me here, what keeps me awake at night and what makes me angry.
I am a newly ordained rabbi and in 2006 (in my final semester of rabbinical school) I took part in the Jewish Funds for Justice rabbinical student fellowship in community organizing. Over the past year at the Danforth Jewish Circle I have been struggling to translate that abstract learning into action by helping leaders from my synagogue run a Listening Campaign. When we came to the gathering we were already mid-way through the campaign and had reached close to 100 members through one-to-one conversations. We had built some powerful relationships and were beginning to see major changes in the way people related to each other in our congregation. However, we still had lots of concerns about how to tackle winnable issues.
When I asked the leaders from my synagogue what they got from the national gathering all three of them answered: “questions.” They had questions about the other participants’ communities and about how CBCO can help our congregation and the world. At first this answer worried me. After all, as a new rabbi, I am struggling to feel like I can begin to offer my congregants some concrete answers, but I soon realized that questions are the point of CBCO. Questions are the way we learn from each other. Questions show that we are listening.
Asking questions is hard, because it makes us vulnerable to hearing other people’s stories. However, when I take the time to listen to the answers of my own community, I discover the power that exists in each of us to transform the world. And I slowly begin to trust the strength of my own story. We left the gathering with more questions than answers, but I have begun to believe that questions are the only way we can begin to change the world.
Rabbi Eli Rose Kukla is the rabbi of the Danforth Jewish Circle in Toronto, Canada. Eli has been a writer and community organizer for more than a decade and writes and teaches widely on racial, economic and gender justice. Eli was ordained by Hebrew Union College in 2006 and trained in community organizing by the Jewish Funds for Justice.
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Visions of a Covenantal American Community
Leah Mundell, Congregation Chaverim, Tucson, AZ
Last month, as I packed my bag for K’hilot K’doshot, the national gathering on congregation-based community organizing, I wished that the gathering might have come at a different time. It was less than two weeks before a major community summit that I was helping to organize with the Pima County Interfaith Council. The summit, titled “Inequality and Opportunity in the New Economy,” aimed to bring together religious leaders, social service organizations, businesses, educational institutions, and public officials to build a broader constituency for fighting poverty and inequality in Tucson. I was anxious about leaving town when we had so much preparation left to do.
But as soon as K’hilot K’doshot was underway, I knew that this gathering would help lay the foundation for my work back in Tucson. In her keynote address, Rabbi Toba Spitzer introduced a concept that reflected the goals for our Tucson Community Summit perfectly: covenantal community. Her explanation of the idea was deeply personal. Rabbi Spitzer explained that she had grown up in a close-knit havurah in Los Angeles, a group that slowly moved apart after children had grown and left home. When her father died a few years ago, however, the members of that community each took their turn as part of the chevra kadisha, sitting with her father’s body through the night and comforting Toba despite their years of separation.
Rabbi Spitzer described that sense of holy obligation as “covenantal community,” a commitment to supporting one another at times of deepest need, regardless of differences that might otherwise separate us. This is at the root of the Jewish notion of tzedakah. But Spitzer argued that this vision of covenantal community also stands at the very heart of American democracy. Our obligation, then, as members of American society, is to hold our nation’s leadership accountable for maintaining that covenant. As we work to create nurturing Jewish communities, neighborhoods, and families, we also must ensure that our government does not abandon responsibility for the health and welfare of its citizens.
Many worry that this sense of public responsibility has already largely been lost. Jacob Hacker argues that our country’s ethos has shifted from an ideal of social insurance to a policy of personal responsibility and risk. In The Great Risk Shift, Hacker documents the increasing economic instability and sense of anxiety experienced by families across the economic spectrum as the costs they bear for health care, child care, education and retirement have increased and public investment has declined.
What Hacker is describing is a society that has lost its commitment to covenantal community. At the Tucson Community Summit, Ernesto Cortés, Jr., Southwest Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, argued that American democracy has, since its inception, been sustained by the notion of shared prosperity. Our country has experienced remarkable political and economic stability because its citizens believed that, even if they experienced a personal economic downturn, they would not be allowed to fall too far, that a system of social supports was in place to protect them.
Cortes reminded us that we don’t have to look far into our history to find models for the kind of social insurance that was once taken for granted. My grandfather, like so many first generation American Jews, received his bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College. As a resident of New York, his tuition was entirely free. For the city of New York, providing free education was an excellent investment in the integration of new immigrants and training of needed skilled workers. How different the situation is today, where even public universities have become unaffordable for many Americans and inaccessible to many immigrants. Arizona passed an initiative last November that denies in-state university and community college tuition to all undocumented students, a move that will deny educational opportunities to thousands of Arizona residents.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reminds us that tzedakah is composed of two complementary elements: tzedek and mishpat, translated as retributive and distributive justice. In the eighteenth chapter of Genesis, God says that Abraham must “keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just (tzedek u-mishpat).” Sacks explains that mishpat signifies the rule of law, “a set of rules, binding on all, by means of which the members of a society act in such a way as to pursue their own interests without infringing on the rights and freedoms of others.” But even a law-governed, orderly society such as our own may not necessarily be a just society. “There must be justice not only in how the law is applied, but also in how the means of existence – wealth as God’s blessing – are distributed. That is tzedakah.” (To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility p 33.) And that is the challenge that the broad-based assembly at the Tucson Community Summit embraced last month.
Community organizing teaches that in order for change to occur, we need to experience a tension between the world as it is and the world as it should be. This means we must face clearly the injustices of our society but it also means that we must have a clear vision of the society we hope to create. Kehilot K’doshot helped to remind me that we have brilliant models for the world as it should be within our own tradition. Now the challenge is to develop the leadership and strength to apply that Jewish vision to the American society in which we live.
Leah Mundell, Ph.D., is Research and Development Coordinator for JobPath, a skills training program in Tucson, AZ, which was created through the work of the Pima County Interfaith Council (PCIC), an Industrial Areas Foundation affiliate. Previously, her research focused on community organizing for public school reform in Philadelphia, PA. Leah is a leader in Congregation Chaverim, a Reform congregation in Tucson, which is a member of PCIC.
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Learning About Myself at K’hilot K’doshot
Matthew Kennedy, Congregation Tifereth Israel, Columbus, OH
K’hilot K’doshot was a remarkable experience for me. Thirteen people representing five synagogues from my home of Columbus, Ohio were able to attend, thanks to the generosity of the Columbus Jewish Foundation. One of my greatest learnings from K’hilot K’doshot, is that relationships are the key components in our life. We each have a relationship with God, with family, with friends, with our community, and with all people of the world. Each of these relationships is bound by the threads of spirituality, humanity, and by justice. I feel now more than ever that what defines me as a Jew (and as a person), is not trying to daven perfectly, or to learn to speak Hebrew, or to stop eating shellfish, although all of those are fine goals. What defines me as a Jew and as a person is how I foster and nurture all of my relationships and seek to infuse each with spirituality, humanity and justice.
The best thing I can do is to get people to get to know each other, to learn about each other, to care about each other—by talking to one another. We all have similar stories, challenges and successes. By developing deeper relationships with each other, we will care more for each other and want everyone to be treated fairly and to be spiritually fulfilled. If we care about everyone in our relationships, then we will be more willing to come together as a collective soul and raise our voices to call for changes that are needed to fight injustice and oppression, whether the injustice is towards family, friends, neighbors, fellow congregants, people in our community, or even those in other countries.
The support our delegation received from the Columbus Jewish Foundation was very meaningful to me. It is essential for Jews of all backgrounds to realize that doing justice is more than writing a check to charity; it is about confronting injustice head on. To me, then, working against injustice is as important as understanding the Torah. It IS our faith. Through their support, the Columbus Jewish Foundation demonstrated its understanding of the importance of fighting injustice. By sending a delegation from five synagogues, the Foundation also underscored the importance that this is a requirement of all Jews and that only by working together we will make a difference.
Being Jewish, we accept the covenant between God and Israel. We were chosen to be a model nation for the rest of the world for how to develop a deep spiritual relationship with God, and with the other nations as well. This covenant also charges us with the responsibility of fighting the injustices of the world, no matter how large or how small. In other words, God has charged us to be more Godlike in order to fulfill our part of the covenant. As a Jew and a human being, I am humbled by this task and I take it very seriously. As one person, I can make a small difference. But as one of a collective Jewish soul, large and powerful, we can be both a model for others and fight injustice. Organizing allows us to do what we cannot do alone. It allows us to do what we have been commanded to do but cannot do alone. It allows us to be more Godlike, to have a collective power and soul. However, even as we raise this collective voice, we must remember how God wants us to be Godlike. We must fight injustice with mercy and love. We must be spiritual and strong, yet remain kind and loving.
Attending K’hilot K’doshot opened my eyes as to why I felt called to fight injustice. I have always tried to be involved in helping the less fortunate, but I never really understood why. Nor did I allow myself out of my comfort zone in what I was willing to do in the name of fighting injustice. But at the gathering, I was able to see that my involvement is not about me feeling good. It is really about me answering a spiritual call, a call from our ancestors to remember and honor our covenant with God. I was blown away and quite shaken by the experience. However, I was also energized with the strength to do the things that I was uneasy about before. Also, attending with so many fellow Jews from my congregation and from Columbus gives me a cherished and wonderful strength to draw upon and foster. And now I understand that fighting injustice is more than essential to being a Jew, it is the essence of being a Jew.
Matthew Kennedy, Ph.D., is a Molecular Geneticist in the Center for Molecular and Human Genetics at the Columbus Children’s Research Institute and an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Matthew is a leader at Congregation Tifereth Israel, a Conservative synagogue in Columbus, Ohio, which is a member of BREAD, a DART affiliate.
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Our Own Prophetic Voices
Michael Ramberg, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, Philadelphia, PA
Although I didn't grow up with any awareness of the biblical prophets, I heard plenty of prophetic voices at home. They came from my parents. During law school my father spent a summer working for Charles Evers in Fayette, Mississippi, and after graduation Dad moved to Mississippi for good, practicing civil rights law and poverty law and generally making a stink about all kinds of local injustices. My mom served as the first president of the Mississippi ACLU and organized feminist consciousness raising groups and played leading roles in improving Jackson public schools.
I took my parents' words and their example to heart. The desire to make a positive difference in the world has always been one of my principal motivations. After my college graduation, I set out into the "real world" intending to live out the examples and words of my parents.
It did not go as I dreamed. I lived in Peru for a year and I never found a way to act on my hopes of calling attention to what I saw as my government's exploitative, cynical foreign policy. After returning to the US I worked for a farmworker union and though I learned a tremendous amount I left feeling burned out and eager to try something new. I did door-to-door canvassing for progressive organizations and again learned valuable skills but did not develop a passion for the work.
Fortunately, my parents didn't only speak in prophetic voices; my mother always said she just wanted me to be happy. Over the course of several years, I found my way to the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where I started my studies this year. Ever since I got the idea of becoming a rabbi, I dreamed that working for justice would form a part of my rabbinate, but I had to admit to myself that the more involved I became in Jewish life, the less time I had for justice. Then I started hearing about Congregational Based Community Organizing. This year, for the first time, RRC hosted a class and moreover, Jewish Funds for Justice subsidized my participation in the K'hilot K'doshot national gathering in Santa Clara, California. I experienced the three day conference and the class I'm in as something of a revelation.
Rabbi Toba Spitzer's opening address at the gathering made me realize that what had been missing from my previous engagements in working for justice were covenantal relationships, the close personal connections that I had found elsewhere but not in the contexts where I worked for justice. Now I know one way I can help myself realize the dream of working for justice: work in relationship with my partners in this struggle, not just alongside them.
At the gathering and in the classroom at RRC, CBCO leaders and organizers repeatedly stress the importance of participants acting out of their self-interest. Up until now, I had always thought self-interest was a bad word so I'd never even tried to pinpoint mine. I have learned a new way to look at it, though. Now I define self-interest as the way between selfishness and martyrdom and I see it as the launch pad for sustained, passionate engagement in tikkun olam.
Now that I've been asked to examine my self-interest, I can see that it brought me to where I am now: in rabbinical school not only do things that make me a better person, better able to be the change I wish to see in the world, I also get to do things that I love, studying texts and learning songs. I have started to see self-interest as a new kind of prophetic voice. I, and all of us, have a prophetic voice within, the voice that calls us to be our best selves: for our sake, for the world, for any divinity we revere. The prophetic voice within me echoes my parents' voices, and the ancient voices of Judaism, but it speaks with a unique accent, from the depths of me. If we listen to our own prophetic voices and work in relationship with the prophetic voices of those around us, we will build the power to make our visions a reality.
Michael Ramberg is a first year rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, PA. His interests include community organizing, interfaith work and congregational work.
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