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In a frenzied media cycle, Identity/Crisis creates better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. Host Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, talks with leading thinkers to unpack current events affecting Jewish communities in North America, Israel, and around the world, revealing the core Jewish values underlying the issues that matter most to you.

Can the Jewish Big Tent Hold After October 7? Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Claire: Hi, and welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the issues facing contemporary Jewish life. I’m Claire Sufrin, Director of Research and Publication at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, an editor of Sources: A Journal of Jewish Ideas.

I’m stepping in for Yehuda Kurtzer as the host of today’s episode, but don’t worry, he’ll be joining us on the other side of the mic. We’re recording on December 1st, 2025. 

17 years ago when my husband Michael and I were planning our wedding, I became obsessed with words, the words we would say under the chuppah, the words that would be said by our officiant, Bernie Steinberg, and the words that would appear on our ketubah. I reached out to various rabbis to find out what was absolutely necessary in the typical traditional texts versus what could be removed and what could be added without invalidating our marriage. I worried for my own sense of integrity and I worried on behalf of children we did not yet have, who might someday need to prove their Jewishness before Halakhic authorities. I worried a lot. 

Finally, Bernie looked at me, after I’d spent several minutes detailing my preferences, my concerns, all of the scenarios in which I imagined I need to have not only a marriage, but a valid marriage, and said, “Claire, people will know you’re married because they’ll see it in the way you live within your community. Marriage is not about a document or a ceremony.” Those words were incredibly freeing. 

There’s another very good piece of advice Michael and I got as we were planning our wedding. At the moment, the ceremony ends, before you leave the chuppah, we were told, turn around, stop, and look at everyone who is there. Look at the community that has assembled, for that exact group of people will never again gather again in the same way just for you. Take a moment to capture that image. 

Two ideas of community. That second one is very specific. These people, this reason, this moment, this place. The other one, the first one, is very general: community is the people who live where you live, who gather where you gather, some of whom you’ll care a lot about as individuals and others of whom you might barely know at all. What these ideas share though, and what I learned from them is that community is where you are seen and this being seen is a way of being known. 

There’s a Mishna in Tractate Shabbat that opens, habanim yotzim b’ksharim. Sons go out, meaning out of their homes, into the public domain, with knots. The immediate issue is that some might see this as a violation of the rules of Shabbat, which this mishna indicates it is not; it is a permitted practice. But why are they going out with knots? 

As the Gemara then explains, and later commentators expand upon, the knots this text is referring to are a way for a son to manage missing his father when he, the son, is away from home. When the father is alive, the text explains, he ties his shoelace on his son’s arm to get him through the day, get the son through the day until he returns home. But after a father has died, his son ties his shoelace on his arm, the father’s shoelace, to quell a longing that will not end when he returns home. 

The mishna is making a point about what it is like to miss someone. The way we miss someone when they have died is an extension of what it is like to miss them when we are apart from them just for a day. It’s an observation about how in the ordinary course of things, children come to separate from their parents, first for a bit, and then forever, managing the separation with the power of memory.

For the last two years it feels like we have all been walking around with knots on our sleeves, deep in a shared longing for specific people we may or may not have known directly, and for an earlier moment now, lost forever. These laces and knots, they let us show ourselves and show one another that we are grieving. They’re also keeping us tied to one another in a big, messy tangled web, tight in some spots, slack in others. 

In the summer issue of Sources, my colleague at the Hartman Institute, Rabbi Na’ama Levitz Applbaum, argued that it was time, as she put it, for us to, quote, “rise from our communal morning,” as a mourner rises at the end of Shiva, begins the transition back toward ordinary life. 

There are signs that the grief of October 7th is lifting, that the knots on our arms are loosening, that someday in the not too distant future, we won’t need them anymore. The living hostages are all home and the ceasefire in Gaza seems to be holding. In the last few weeks, leaders of Jewish organizations of different sizes have started to talk about the need to pivot out of crisis mode and back to longer term, more strategic thinking and planning. Emergency funds and other post 10/7 efforts are closing.

The newest issue of Sources fits this pattern. The theme is “Two Years Since 10/7,” and it includes sections on rebuilding on Zionism and anti-Zionism and on resisting polarization. It will soon be live sourcesjournal.org and print copies are nearly ready to enter the mailstream on their way to subscribers.

This issue of Sources is premised, in short, on the idea that it is time to untie and untangle our knots of longing. In order to do so, we must ask—what is normal? We won’t be able to answer that question well without addressing others. Who are we now? What do we know about ourselves, about our needs, about who we wanna be?

In the lead essay of this issue of sources, my colleague and friend, Yehuda Kurtzer, reconsiders Jewish community, which has been a source of comfort and of pain. His argument has two key parts. First, he argues that care is the purpose of community, and we would do well to center it as we rebuild, as long as we define the nature of care that each sort of Jewish community can provide. Second, Yehuda argues that communities must do a better job clarifying their values and expectations. Doing so, he claims, will make questions of membership and belonging easier. I’ll ask him to explain further in a moment. 

Yehuda, of course, is the Co-President of the Shalom Hartman Institute and the usual host of this podcast. Yehuda. I am excited to welcome you to the other side of an Identity/Crisis conversation. 

Yehuda: And thanks for having me. 

Claire: All right, so let’s dive right in. The title of your article is “Our Fragile Tents.” Can you unpack that image a little bit? 

Yehuda: Yeah, so the Jewish community has talked, I, I don’t know the exact intellectual history of where this came from, but the Jewish community has talked in the language of “big tents” for at least a generation. I think some of this emerges as part of that kind of pluralism moment in the eighties and nineties that I’ve written about, we’ve talked about before, of a recognition that for the Jewish community to thrive in an open society, it actually has to operate with something akin to a big tent. 

And one of the key areas that I think this comes from in Jewish traditional literature is the metaphor that’s used for Abraham and Sarah’s tent as a tent that is open on all sides. And as I note in the article, also Job’s tent, a tent that’s open on all sides, both for the gestures of hospitality that the hosts can demonstrate to those on the other end, but also as a means of creating a culture of welcoming and inclusion for everyone who’s gonna come in, and for them to be able to repay that hospitality with kindness back to their hosts. 

And I think that the Jewish community has used those metaphors to say big tents as opposed to kind of closed circles, big tents as opposed to communities that feel like they only belong to insiders and that outsiders have to be threatened by them. That in other words, the whole idea was to move towards a notion of big tents and I felt, really over the last two years that a couple of things have happened that have made those tents feel fragile. 

That on one hand, many of us have felt the need for something that feels tighter and more secure than the big tent. In other words, I need to close the doors, and we could talk about this, but that includes like the huge security apparatus that many of us have literally put around our institutions in moments like this. So “tent” feels fragile because it feels like it’s too weak. I actually need a fortress rather than a tent.

But also, our fragile tents because they don’t feel like they are as hospitable for outsiders as they once were. They’re places where there’s so much a sense of fear and erosion of trust between those who are already on the inside. So I feel drawn to sustain the metaphor of the big tent, and that’s a lot of what I’m trying to push right now, while also acknowledging that they’ve taken a beating over the last couple years.

Claire: So what does care have to do with all of that? Right? It’s entering, exiting. Like I get the metaphor that far, but how does care fit in?

Yehuda: Well, so going back to the Abraham and Job metaphors, there’s something very telling about the fact that the rabbinic tradition wants us to think that these places are not just places where people come to hang out, that our Jewish community doesn’t merely use a metaphor as like a place where people come to do Jewish things, but a place of deep human interdependency. 

And here, like that’s where it comes out of the Jewish tradition, but let’s not think about Jewish tradition for a second. Let’s just think about what the experience of community actually feels like when it works, and your analogy to standing at your chuppa and looking around and feeling that sense of love and pride that all of those people had for you, and that you presumably had for them in that moment as well, they constituted a community, not because they received an invitation to your wedding. They constituted a community because something magical was happening, even in this atmosphere of community created by consent, they agreed to come together. They agreed through your friendship to show up, but more was taking place there.

And I think we all feel this in the communities that actually work. Whether it’s my potluck crew that meets every four or five weeks for Shabbat dinner, whether it’s in my synagogue community, whether it’s my neighbors who I’ve gotten a lot closer to, non-Jewish neighbors, since October 7th. All of us are bound together sometimes by kind of necessity or geography, but usually and much more powerfully by a sense of obligation and responsibility you have to one another, and that shows up both in the ways that we feel cared for in communities that work, as well as in the nobility, that we are offered to be able to care for others. 

And I think that the more that community becomes construed as some sort of political mechanism to divide between insiders and outsiders, it takes our eye off of the prize of why we are in community to begin with.

Claire: When you say community is a mechanism, I’m not gonna remember exactly what you said, but it is a mechanism to divide, right, where we’re only talking about community in order to say, I’m in the community; you’re not in the community, or the community is this, the community is not that. 

That makes sense to me in terms of a lot of the conversations that I’ve heard over the last few years, been a part of. And it’s not that the community doesn’t have boundaries, but it’s that we could be spending time talking about and doing what we need to do rather than dwelling on the boundaries. 

Could we shift for a moment though, or for the first part of our conversation to the second part of your argument, about the difference between inclusion and platforming? And I just ask you to start by defining that difference and why you think it matters for belonging and membership. 

Yehuda: So I wanna just pick up the thread of where we were to be able to connect the dots here, which is to say that part of what I wanna see the Jewish Community Agenda reclaim is more of a conversation about what community is for and not just a conversation about boundaries. There are reasons why in times of fear, we talk more about who’s in and who’s out than we do about why we would have community to begin with. I just think it’s a terrible pathway for our people. It doesn’t make community an exciting place to be. It actually centers political conflict as what community is basically about. And then you’re talking about loyalty and membership, and you’re not really talking about the purpose of why I would wanna be part of that community to begin with. 

So I think that’s what happened over the last couple of years. I think some of that was actually quite useful, and we can unpack that, and some of it is dangerous if we become fixated constantly on questions of inclusion.

I’m trying to kind of shift the narrative back towards communities that are welcoming, inclusive, and rooted in care. Part of that, though, requires of communities to have a clear sense of what they stand for and what they’re about, and both to be able to make sure that they don’t get eroded by conflict and difference, but also so that they don’t have to spend as much time negotiating all of that conflict.

Like once you have some clarity about what you’re about, you can make that clear to insiders and outsiders and there’s something nice about them knowing that about you. I think so much of the conflict that emerged in Jewish communities over the last two years was like, October 7th happened, and oh no, we didn’t have a policy on Israel in our institution and now we have to like, write it on the fly. And that was fundamentally not an inclusive act. It wound up being experienced as an exclusive act. And it was done kind of like, it was like a surprise for some people in particular communities. 

But now we have those statements and we have positions that we held for, and we can kind of get back to the business of why we had this community to begin with.

I guess I’m looking for ways for communities to be able to articulate their values and then to try to be expansive. And the distinction between inclusion and platforming feels important to me because I think there are a lot more Jewish communal institutions that can house difference by tolerating a wide variety of views that people may hold, while, at the same time, having kind of official positions or commitments that they adhere to, which are the things that they are gonna elevate and put on stage. That’s what I call platforming. 

So you know, I know an example of a rabbi who took over a congregation that was deeply divided on Israeli politics, and one of the things that he did very effectively over the last number of years was he kind of slowly but ultimately quite firmly was able to establish that he alone has the power of the pulpit in the congregation. Like he’s the only person kind of permitted to give Israel sermons. In other words, he was saying, I’m only gonna platform myself for this purpose. But once he did that, it actually made it possible for people to be included who had a wide variety of opinions on Israel, precisely because they didn’t have to fear that they were basically competing to get that voice, to be the dominant voice in the congregation. So once the community has, like, a clear platform of what it stands for, in theory, it can make possible belonging in that congregation by a whole variety of people who hold different viewpoints. 

Claire: There’s a huge irony to that, though. And is your sense that that rabbi gets up and he speaks for himself and he tries to convince everyone or teach everyone? Or does he speak for the community at that moment? Like what is it? What does it mean to platform himself? 

Yehuda: I think that the art of leadership in that context is finding ways to speak to and for the community that are about values you want people to hold, and not speaking in a way that constantly asserts, tyrannically, that it’s my way or the highway. I mean, that’s where it shifts from being just a framework for thinking about leadership to actually requiring good leadership in turn. 

I’ll give you another example to this effect, and I, I’ve never studied this scientifically, but I’ve been around the block enough to notice it anecdotally. Where there have been conflict, especially in Hillels or other college campus environments, around controversial speakers, for instance, the controversial cases have often been either in environments where there is no leadership. There’s no professional at the Hillel, there’s an interim phase, or when the Hillel director has decided to abdicate their platform, and to say, great, this speaker will come, and students then rightly perceive that with the director not on the stage, not curating it, not facilitating it, the students rightly perceived there’s a leadership vacuum and they say, oh, that means Hillel endorses this speaker, or allows that speaker to represent the institution.

And the reason I’m mentioning that is you can have a very different approach where your Hillel director is constantly the voice who speaks on behalf of the institution and is the curator of a variety of different voices, and that can make possible a lot of different voices showing up in the context of the same institution, but it’s very clear where the platform of leadership and the institution ultimately resides. 

And we deal with this at Hartman as well, right? We have a wide variety of opinions of people who come learn at the Institute and scholars at the Institute, but the Institute stands for a set of pretty clear ideological positions. I think they still allow for diversity of views within those ideological positions, but they’re pretty clear. And as long as our participants and even our fellows and faculty and staff and board know the difference between inclusion and platforming, they oftentimes can find a happy medium of being an institution where their viewpoints can be tolerated in the classroom, but they may not always be the positions that are concretely articulated on behalf of the Institute.

Claire: So I think that model works particularly well when that position that the organization is platforming is very wide, so that the people in the organization, in the case of Hartman or of Hillel can find themselves in different points and, you know, expressing different views within that wide framework. I think it works less well when it’s a very narrow framework. 

And also thinking back to that original case of the rabbis. There is a set of shared values, right, in the way that you presented it, that his position is growing out of, well, we all share X, Y, Z other values, which lead me to think, you know, A, B, C, and you may think what you want, but this is the case I’m making based on what we share.

I think these are both insider takes on the issue, and I’m curious if you are part of a community or have ever yourself been part of a community where you are the person who’s uncomfortable with what’s being platformed and you’ve chosen to stay or to leave, but in this case to stay. 

Yehuda: I want to say one thing previously and I want to contest the premise.

Claire: Sure. 

Yehuda: The reason these are ripe questions is because they are specifically focused on the tension in liberal Jewish communities. When you have communities that are much more dogmatic politically, either on the left or on the right, there is no pretense of a big tent. There’s no pretense of pluralism.

I think what we struggle with in the liberal Jewish world is that our communities are, you know, Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox. They are basically big tents, ideologically and politically, and they’re striving to hold that together. And so yes, this is gonna be where those tensions lie. 

We had this experience when Stephanie and I started our congregation in Boston, now 20 plus years ago, where the first Shabbat that we met, we assumed that there were gonna be 10 people there, and that’s because we had literally counted who was gonna be there, and 65 showed up, and thank God, that community has kept showing up for 20 years, 15 of them were after we left. And the most amazing thing that happened was at the end of that first Shabbat service, we had a kiddush, and a whole bunch of people said to us, well, I really enjoyed this, but I feel like the outsider and everyone else is an insider, they all know each other. 

I don’t wanna deny that there are insiders and outsiders in every Jewish community, but there is also, I find, a weird bias that many people hold that assumes that their discomfort can be best attributed to the fact that there is an insider class and an outsider class, and they default to identifying as part of the outsider class because they’re uncomfortable.

So one of the things we have to do is we have to help people understand that in liberal, pluralistic, big tent communities, there are of course gonna be some insiders. We have to name that. And also, everybody’s kind of uncomfortable, and in that context, I’ve, I have felt like the outsider a lot. 

In fact, when I first moved from Boston, then to New York, and we had literally designed our own congregation, and then we had to move and pick, are we gonna go to the Modern Orthodox synagogue? Are we gonna go to the Conservative synagogue? And for a year, I was incredibly uncomfortable in both places because it didn’t get exactly the calculus that I like about observance, and the microphone, or egalitarianism, right? And it was uncomfortable because to identify, then, with a membership feels like you’re signing up for an ideological prescription—I’m part of this membership, therefore, I agree with everything.

And I’ve come to realize over now 15 years of belonging to a synagogue that I’m not in control of, that I at best volunteer for some minor commitments for, is that no, I’m not really signing up for the whole package, meaning, nobody can now pin me down and say, you doctrinally hold to everything that this congregation stands for. I basically signed up to be part of this community because, by and large, I feel it is a place of warmth. It provides more to me than I offer to it in return, and what started off as a transaction—I need a place to pray, I need a place to go—turned into something much more thick and much more robust, even if there were, and definitely still are moments where I’m like, yeah, well, I’m not the inside. 

And maybe sometimes that happens because we’re also unwilling to put in the work to be part of the inside where you then get to say, great, much more of what this community stands for, connects to what I would like it to represent in the world.

Claire: I think there’s also something else going on which you can’t change, which is, you’ve affiliated with a community that’s different than the community you grew up with. 

Yehuda: Mm-hmm. I think that’s right. 

Claire: Right, if you stick with the same community, you bring a certain shared education and childhood experience, and all of that. 

Yehuda: And by the way, that’s been a big story over the last couple years is, you know, there’s so much going on in affiliation and disaffiliation in the Jewish community. The stories that get the most press are, “I no longer can go to the synagogue because it’s pro-Israel in a way that I don’t like, and I feel that it’s excluded me because of my politics on Israel.” That’s the most prominent story. 

There are enormous numbers of Jews who have gone in the other direction, who have said, “I need to be in a place that feels like I can stand in greater solidarity with the Jewish people in the state of Israel at a moment like this.” We saw that in the first few weeks after October 7th, when Jews flooded synagogues, not because they, like, suddenly cared about the Conservative movement. They didn’t care about the prayers or liturgy. They wanted to stand in close proximity to other Jews, and they felt like that was the place that they should go do it.

We know the statistics also about more people converting, people who have been adjacent to the Jewish community, wanting to be part of it. So there’s so much fluidity right now around attachment and it’s not totally clear to me how much it is all ideological. There feels like there’s other kind of tendrils of stuff that’s actually going on here as well.

Claire: So I think if I were to ask you the question of, why should somebody who feels alienated from their previous community over Israel politics, why should they stay? Your answer would be they should stay as long as they’re getting all of these other, their other, let’s say creaturely needs taken care of, the warmth and a place to pray and someone to bring them food when they’re in need or whatever service looks like in that community. Is that fair? 

Yehuda: I suppose. I mean, I’ve been thinking about this more from the perspective of leadership, what we owe to our people. So I think part of the clarity of—what does the synagogue ultimately stand for?—is something that’s owed by congregation to its membership, and obviously it’s formed in relationship to its membership, you’re not gonna wind up like being completely, you know, outside of the framework of what people already hold and believe, and then there’s a decision that an individual has to make.

On the other side of that, of, does the fact that I don’t fully agree with this position that my congregation is taking mean that I’m being excluded? Are they obligated to me in terms of making me feel included? And that’s where that negotiation around inclusion and platforming comes from. If what you need out of your congregation is that it represents your viewpoint, you may not get that. But if what you need is to make you feel welcome knowing that you are kind of sublimating some of those political views in order to belong, then you can hold that community accountable if it fails to do so.

Claire: I think that’s helpful to recognize platforming as a need that some people have, of their main community or of one of their communities. 

I’m reminded of when I also lived in Boston, but on the other side of the river in Cambridge, and, we belonged to a minyan with a mechitza, which you won’t be surprised to hear, is very much not my thing. But it was a wonderful minyan and a wonderful community. It was in some ways the community I had married into, going back to my initial story. And I felt I should participate, you know, volunteer and take some responsibility. And I volunteered to be trained as a gabbai and the first thing I learned was that the gabbai’s first task is to hang the mechitza.

Yehuda: Wow. 

Claire: Right. It’s not just you get there early and you make sure the chairs are set up, but you get there early and you hang the mechitza because it’s temporary, it’s not a permanent thing. And I realized I couldn’t do it. 

And that was a really important moment for me, of being asked in a sense, not to platform, but to like literally to represent literally, physically enact this thing that I was… I was there despite it, not because of it. And again, we’re still in a very similar minyan here and I can’t, you know, I have two sons and a husband, so I sit by myself on the women’s side of the mechitza, and I often like, why is this our place? And it’s exactly, I think as you’re describing with words like, warmth, and our kids have friends, and so on.

Yehuda: Yeah, Claire, I had a… it was an interesting moment at some point over the last couple of years where I was attending as a guest in a different congregation, and I had taught in the program and I was around, and I noticed in this congregation when they said the prayers for the state of Israel, that there was a couple that was seated when that was happening. They clearly were not saying the words. And of course, I was so irritated, why are, why do they have to do that? And then one of the folks there, kind of leaned over and said, you know, I really appreciate the way that you teach. It made us feel really included, even though we have a really different attitude towards Israel. 

I was like, damnit, now I feel bad about myself. Correctly. Correctly. Because actually what these people were doing was not insisting that this congregation not say the prayer for the state of Israel, they were saying was like, we are enduring the fact that we wish the congregation did something different, but we’re gonna politely dissent to it and we’re not gonna try to take the congregation down, and they found ways to feel included, even on the things that wouldn’t have been their choice. And I was being intolerant in that moment and demanding more loyalty to the behaviors of the community than I was entitled to demand. 

And I think that that’s where some of the post traumatic work has to take place, where our attitudes towards membership in our own communities can actually be more expansive when we notice the nonviolent ways in which people are seeking to stay connected to us, right? 

I mean, it was legitimate, in the early phase, to, number one, go into kind of war mode. It’s totally understandable. We imported that sensibility. There was a sense of palatable danger, both in Israel and here. And also sometimes you have moments where you have to feel like you’re together with the people who are on the same side of the issue. And we kind of have to push back now, against the overreaches of that impulse and allow ourselves to get reacquainted to all of the beauty that comes with living in big tent communities, and especially when we can defang a little bit that sense of fear that has gripped our community for so long.

Claire: It’s really a call to reclaim the big tent. 

Yehuda: That’s right. That’s right. 

Claire: So one place where I’ve seen conflict around some of these questions of “who needs to agree with what” is around the question of who’s the mainstream? Which really has to do more with the political organizations of our Jewish community more than, I think, our synagogues and our prayer spaces.

But as I listen into various conversations at the margins of the Jewish community, further to the left or further to the right, I often hear groups that I think of as marginal saying, well, if only the mainstream realized we are actually the mainstream, and we cite the Pew study and percentages and, don’t they see our numbers?

So I think there’s two things I wanna ask about. One is, this is just echo chambers—that’s a yes or no question, but the other one is, at what point does the mainstream have to recognize it’s not the mainstream? Like at what point do those of us who think of ourselves as mainstream, have to sort of stop and say, if 30% of the Jewish community doesn’t hold my view, maybe I need to back off my platform a little bit, or I need to make a little more space, or maybe I’m wrong. 

Yehuda: Those are different things, right? Renegotiating the terms of a community are very different than saying that you’re wrong. 

Claire: Yeah. 

Yehuda: I mean, this goes back like 15, 20 years. Somebody asked Abe Foxman, then the head of ADL, something like, you know, the position you’re taking is not shared by, on whatever issue it was, probably Israel related, is not shared by the majority of Jews, and he was like, yeah, but it’s my job to lead. Which I found surprisingly honest. In other words, he was like, my job is to lead this institution based on what I, not just what I think is right, but what the historical mission of the organization is and what its stakeholders really are about, and a theory of the problem, and a theory of a solution, and it’s not to represent the Jewish community as though it’s a kind of democratic institution.

Now, by the way, Foxman knew by saying that, that if his base of support completely collapsed from the Jewish community, then he would never be able to do that work, and that would’ve been the definitive repudiation of that position. But that turned out to have not been the case. And it’s not usually the case in communities either. 

So I wonder what’s at stake when folks who are considered the marginal say, well, we actually represent the mainstream. Because what they’re not saying is, we’re right. They’re saying we’re the majority. And so I, I kind of wish, like, we could have those conversations on two different terms.

Now, if 70% of the membership of a congregation says we don’t wanna be part of a congregation that holds to X, Y, Z belief system, well, the whole point of a congregation is that it’s kind of majority rules. You have, the membership votes about the clergy and whole variety of other things, then that’s meaningful.

But this is why I think we have to distinguish between, like, the types of communities that we belong to and what they’re about, and allow those distinctions to dictate different relationships to community policy. So I say in the article, like, we should have different rules for thinking about questions of, of thinking about all these questions between, like, my local Jewish community versus what I expect of what’s called “the American Jewish establishment,” or the organized Jewish community. They’re just gonna operate by really different rules.

And the organized Jewish community is never gonna really say, let’s just poll the people, find out what they think about the state of Israel and its government, and follow it. That’s just not how they’re designed. That’s not the central values under which they’re organized. And if over time those values change because there’s pressure brought to bear to change those values, that is probably gonna be historically a good thing, but it’s not gonna be a majority rules question. Whereas in your local synagogue, it will be. 

Again, I don’t know what’s being asked with that question of “we are the mainstream” and “we are the margins.”

And last thing I’ll say is, nobody knows actually what’s going on. 

Claire: True. 

Yehuda: Nobody knows what’s going on. Because for every anecdotal representation that somebody who feels marginalized from the Jewish community will say of like, look, everybody I know is angry about the state of Israel, is becoming anti-Zionist. For every one of that, you have the whole state of Florida, right, which is trending in a totally different direction around Jewish identity, attachment to Israel.

And I, I felt this was so acute early on in the war when, when I went to Israel and right after October 7th, I saw Israelis and they were like, we can’t believe that we’re being abandoned by the American Jewish community. I was like, what are you talking about? They’re like, well, I saw this image of 250 people protesting in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington against the war. And I was like, but what about the 10,000 people at the rally that the UJA Federation did in New York four days after the war started that was completely not covered by the media? Well, they didn’t see that. 

So there’s so much distortion going on, and I think that partly the appeal towards telling stories about, we are the mainstream, or we are the majority, which by the way, the organized Jewish community does all the time too. “We represent the majority viewpoint of American Jewry” is an appeal to an authority that’s not actually a moral claim in any sort of serious way, right? And, and we gotta get out of that business. 

Claire: I mean, I think what we’re getting at is the word, using the word mainstream is a, it’s a cheater’s word. 

Yehuda: It is.

Claire: It allows you to avoid saying what you actually mean, whether it is… It’s a moral claim of what’s right, or it’s a democratic claim, or something else.

Yehuda: Yeah, and that’s why I’m interested in the effort by our communities, lowercase C, to both engage in some sort of values clarification and definition of how important certain issues are, how important Israel is to their mission. They had to do it, and now they can do it a little bit more thoughtfully. And then once they’ve done that, to get back in the business of trying to be bigger, tense and more inclusive and places of care, right? 

But the mechanisms by which they go about doing that are gonna have to recognize that their capacity to be big tent institutions are only gonna be possible if they do that business of values clarification carefully and thoughtfully, and with respect to who their people actually are in the communities that they currently live 

Claire: At the risk of pushing the metaphor too far, I think there’s another piece also, which is when your tent empties out, maybe you take it down or you redesign it. 

Yehuda: Yeah. Look, this has happened multiple times in the history of American Jewish communities. I mean, what, 40% of Conservative synagogues shut between, what was it, 1990 and 2020? 40%. And there are socioeconomic reasons for that, re-urbanization of American Jews, and there are also ideological reasons for that. The drop off from Conservative Judaism has largely been to Reform Judaism. I don’t mean drop off in, like, morally or qualitatively, it’s just the, when they, they’re listed differently in, like, the Pew study, so one goes down to the other. 

People have changed ideologically and they’re searching for other things. I don’t find it to be a kind of collective tragedy of the Jewish people when you see shifts in ideological commitments, or even shifts in denominational affiliations or how it hits particular Jewish communities.

Years ago at Hartman in the summer, I gave a talk about the changing identity, ideology, and institutions of American Jewry. To tell a story of what’s been happening for American Jewry that we haven’t properly encoded as real changes, we’ve just experienced them as like, oh my god, crisis or inertia. 

And after I gave this talk, and I used that Conservative movement example and talked about a bunch of other trends, a person came over to me and said, our congregation just shut down after, whatever it was, 70 years of thriving, and your talk helped us to understand that it may not have been our fault. And after you gave that talk, they literally, this was wild, iIt happened at the Hartman summer program, those of us who were part of that mintan went back to our hotel and we sat Shiva for our congregation, for the first time, because we felt we finally understood the story that we were a part of, which was a bigger story than just, you know, did we commit financial mismanagement? Did we hire the wrong rabbi? It might be, like, no, demographic trends and political trends overtook your congregation. You can’t be the same congregation anymore.

I think that’s gonna happen in some parts of the American Jewish community. There are gonna be some institutions that wanna stake a particular Zionist position, and they’re gonna lose their stakeholders, because it’s not nuanced enough or maybe it’s too left. And then there are gonna be other institutions that already have emerged in the last two years, that are synagogues for anti-Zionist Jews, or even now there’s a day school that’s opening up for anti-Zionist Jews who are making anti-Zionism a central pillar of what they stand for, and they’ll learn whether that’s a strong enough, clear value that they want to build community around. And they’ll also learn whether they can be big tents at the same time—I think it’s gonna be hard for them to do that. And if they succeed, it’ll just be another story in the evolution of the communal histories, the Jewish people. 

But it might be to the shared benefit of both Zionist institutions and anti-Zionist institutions, that there was a little bit of a parting of the ways, among those whose ideological convictions were so strong that they couldn’t live in community together with those who oppose that, those ideological positions. 

I think for most of us, if it’s done right, the Zionist clarification in this moment is gonna create enough space of a big tent to be inclusive of, even those who don’t hold those commitments as passionately to the kind of anti-Zionist curious to the Zionist ambivalent, I think if we do our work right, that will be possible to sustain as well. 

Claire: So two years ago you were talking about this same parting of the ways. And I’m curious if you feel that you’ve softened your view or changed it or whether you’re in the same place of feeling that anti-Zionist Jews perhaps should create their own communal infrastructure?

Yehuda: I think you might want me to say that I’m softening. But I—

Claire: No, I’m, I’m genuinely curious. Yeah, I think there’s a way of reading your piece that—

Yehuda: From two years ago. 

Claire: Reading your new piece, suggesting a softening and there’s a way of reading it where it’s not. So I’m curious how you read yourself maybe, or what you intended.

Yehuda: So, I’m happy to speak personally about this. I definitely know that over the past couple of years, I experienced my own kind of heart-hardening at various times. Some of it I think was correct, and some of it may not have been. 

On this issue, I actually felt, when I wrote a piece in the Forward in November of 2023 about the new political seams emerging in the Jewish community, I felt I was being descriptive more than prescriptive, but I know that that’s not how it was read. I think a lot of people read it as, like, you are engaging in a piece of heresy policing to designate people on the outside. 

But I actually felt like I was observing something, as it was taking place in real time, around the rally in Washington, around the fact that I saw some anti-Zionist Jewish organizations engaging with a very different kind of rhetoric, a different type of alliance building that they were creating with organizations outside the Jewish community, a deep antipathy towards Jewish community central institutions. I was like, oh, this is a big deal. 

And by the way, it was two phenomena because you also had the solidarity muscle that was being exercised by a whole bunch of Jews, we talked about this earlier, who had never stood in the synagogue in years, or shown up to a Hillel Shabbat dinner, or much less, you know, traveled a couple thousand miles to go to a rally in Washington. 

So you had, like, that solidarity muscle emerging in the kind of center of the Jewish community and a different solidarity muscle emerging on the left side of the Jewish community with its own type of consolidation. And I said in that piece, we may discover that there’s no capacity for a big tent to hold this anymore, because they’ve basically demarked themselves as inhabiting different tents.

 I felt that was descriptively right. It was interpreted by some as being like, you’re pushing us out. I thought the best response I got was, from David Klion in a New York Review of Books, who responded by being like, yeah. And then eventually Arielle Angel said the same thing in Jewish Currents, where she said, the left needs its own institutions.

Now, that critique is rooted in a sense that some of the institutions they’re leaving behind are morally corrupt and morally bankrupt. That means that those people don’t want to be in the same institutions that they’re leaving behind, and it’s not—for them, it’s… inclusion is not sufficient as platform, right? Or they just feel like, I don’t care about, you know, sharing a kiddush with all of you after services, if the people there are morally corrupt or the institutions stand for morally corrupt values. 

I think that that’s helpful. I think that’s okay. I don’t think schism is like the worst tragedy in Jewish history. I think it’s actually an accurate depiction of the fact that we are a people that doesn’t agree on a lot of stuff, and that one of the ways that we’ve accommodated ourselves to that over the years is by sometimes living in separate tribes and sometimes living in different denominations and sometimes living in different sects, and that might be okay today.

We’ve already been watching for years as Zionism has become a kind of denominational marking line in the Jewish community. And if some people feel like that means that I can only pray with my denomination, which is anti-Zionist, I don’t think that’s tragic. The softening is like, well maybe once that’s happened, can those of us who are not marking ourselves as “other,” or not exiting, find a way to now create an effective modus operandi and a moral one, and an empathetic one, so that it doesn’t continue to force people on the margins to have to identify on the outside. Right? That’s where I think the work, the soft work is right now.

What I fear is that all of that stuff hardens the heart at the boundaries of our communities, makes us obsessed with not just the security against outsiders, but security against the threat of people who might still be on the inside, and it continues to constrict and contract our communities to become inhospitable places for difference. That, I feel, will be really dangerous to us in the long term.

Claire: It’s literally a, a softening of the boundaries, in a sense. Like the making a little bit fuzzier…

Yehuda: Look, to stay with the metaphor, if you want, if those of you who have different notions of tents, maybe it’s a circus tent, maybe it’s like a commence—those tents that they have on the lawns at commencement. It’s open on all sides. But if somebody comes along and is like, I don’t want this tent pole here, and begins to uproot it from the ground, you are well within your right to believe that you are still a big tent, even if you pick that person up and throw them out. Now that person might say, I don’t think this pole should have been here, I think it should have been held up by something else, but it kind of doesn’t matter at that point. That’s the values clarification in the work of boundaries.

Should you then station guards around a whole tent, and prohibit people from coming in until they declare loyalty to your tent poles, you can’t really call yourself a big tent anymore. Or, should you walk around and then interrogate everybody in the inside of the tent, whether they agree with anything that was said by the people who you threw out, then you’ve brought that security culture inside the tent as well, and you can’t make the same claims about yourself that you did before. 

So my point is like maybe what happened over the last two years is that the tent pole breakers are not there anymore, and now how do we get back to the business of being a big tent?

Claire: Right. Or of keeping the tent up. 

Yehuda: Of keeping the tent up and keeping it open, actually. 

Claire: Up and open. Yeah, I like that. 

I have one more question for you, which is gonna take us right all the way back to the beginning, which is, I’ve been thinking a lot about how strongly we rely on Shiva as our model of the best of community. But Shiva is crisis, right? It’s community that comes together in a moment of crisis. Small, large, but it’s crisis. 

If we are, if I’m right, that we’re pivoting, beginning to pivot out of crisis mode and certainly that I think that we want to, I think we’re gonna have to let go of Shiva as our model of community. And other than the big tent, what do we have?

Yehuda: Yeah. I mean that’s the problem with Job as the key text for this. His whole… The reason he has a tent is because he’s constantly sitting shiva for the duration of the whole book. 

Look, it’s interesting when you, you were talking about this at the beginning. Getting up from Shiva, you quoted Na’ama’s piece and you talked about this emergence… Shiva’s this incredibly powerful technology that we have, which is a little bit of a deception, ’cause you think that by the time Shiva is over, okay, you get back to life as usual, but you don’t, you’re just left with the loss and not the kind of supportive infrastructure to manage your way through that loss. And I guess for that reason, I’m not sure I want to get rid of it as a metaphor, because I don’t think the crisis is Shiva. I think the crisis was the death. 

Claire: No, the crisis is the death for sure. 

Yehuda: And Shiva, I don’t wanna think of Shiva as like, that’s when community works, as much as, when Shiva works, it is the making most public and most evident what you did all the while to make community possible. Do you see what I mean by that difference?

Like, I don’t know. I actually think in the next few years, partly ’cause of the antisemitism stuff, partly because there’s so much residual trauma that Israelis hold, that Palestinians hold, that American Jews hold—on all sides, actually, of the Jewish community. It’s like there’s a lot of trauma deferred and residual sadness that’s being held. 

I remember in the first podcast, I talked about this, after October 7th, that I’d seen a friend of mine whose son was just being called up to the Army, and he was a psychologist and his job, the week following October 7th was that he had to keep the soldiers who he was treating in trauma so that they wouldn’t slip into post-traumatic stress. It’s like a crazy thing to think about, sustain them in a place of trauma because that at least doesn’t—

Claire: It postpones healing so that healing can’t go wrong. 

Yehuda: Well, but also you can function in trauma. You can’t really function in post-trauma, and they had to be soldiers. And I don’t know. I almost feel like the spiritual technologies that we need for community are gonna kick in even more powerfully when the Shiva phase is over. So if that’s the case, then when you say, what are we looking for? Well, now we’re looking for the normal stuff that actually makes communities operate. 

And you think about, like, what makes your synagogue community operate? Well, it’s actually like… I don’t know. There’s these two women in my shul who are the bikkur cholim committee. They make sure that all these people in our community, unseen, get phone calls every week and sometimes food deliveries. It’s like meal trains for people who have had a baby. It’s the check-ins. It’s anyone who’s suffered a loss, where people know how to speak to that person after Shiva is over in the ways that they feel are appropriate and non-voyeuristic to find out how they’re actually doing. 

Those are the strong indicators of the texture of community that we actually are gonna need now more than ever, because, I don’t know, the muscle memory of, like, organizing around Shiva. It’s like, oh, everybody’s busy and got, we got stuff to do. It’s the longer and more sustained stuff that makes community go round. And that’s really what I, I think I’m trying to talk about like how do we get back to the business of Jewish community, which also gets us away from being ideological all the time. Because that’s gonna be the thing that makes Jews wanna be part of Jewish life, not that the synagogue was there for them to show up for after October 7th, but that maybe the synagogue is there for them to be part of and contribute to in building a robust and vibrant Jewish life that’s not merely about trauma response.

Claire: So I’m thinking about somebody who has suffered, like, an unexpected loss, someone who lost a parent when they were young, or a parent that lost a child. And the difference between walking into a community where everybody knows that, or walking into a room where everybody knows that, and walking into a room where a very well-meaning person could ask them, how many kids do you have? Are you going to your parents for the holidays? That idea of being seen. 

And maybe that’s a little bit what you’re talking about, that October 7th will become for us—that the crisis happened. It can’t be erased. It’s changed who we are. But we walk into a room, we want to walk into a room where we all know it’s happened and that it’s changed us 

Yehuda: And, and maybe to your metaphor, like, it was kind of easy to cry and shul for the last couple years. You know, you didn’t have to, like, confront the possibility that—at least I didn’t—that like somebody was gonna be like, “what happened?” Like, what do you mean what happened? So like, I literally just stood on the side of the Hakafot on Simchat Torah and cried. And certainly on October 7th that was totally normal. And then a year later it was totally normal. And surprisingly, two years in, still pretty normal. 

Claire: Still kind of normal. 

Yehuda: Yeah, still kind of normal. So in some ways like that’s—communities as a place for care when everybody knows what we’re mourning and dealing with is level one. But level two is communities as places of care where we have to do a little bit more work to figure out what people are actually working through and where it’s actually comfortable to cry, even if it’s not the shared trauma and the shared experience. That’s where we’re gonna really be tested on, whether our communities are those kind of places. 

And to your metaphor, the shared tragedy represents one story, and now the diffusing of trauma and tragedy and the reintegration of that trauma and tragedy with all of the vicissitudes of our lives is gonna be the test of whether the solidarity impulse that we felt over the last two years actually turns into something that can endure for the Jewish community in ways that we desperately need. 

Claire: Thank you, Yehuda. 

Yehuda: Thank you.