Hartman Summer, Interrupted Transcript

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

Yehuda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer, we’re recording on Monday, June 16th, 2025.

So the plan for this week on Identity/Crisis was to open a window into the summer programs at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. We ordinarily release the show on Tuesdays, which is when this episode is coming out. By Tuesday night this week, I was scheduled to be on a plane to Israel where I would stay until late July. In that time, I’d be part of the faculty and team welcoming nine different programs over that six week stretch with close to a thousand participants from all over the world, mostly the United States and Canada coming to spend anywhere between a week to five weeks at the Shalom Harbin Institute.

Some years ago, as our Institute belatedly arrived in the digital age, we coined the stretch of time, #HartmanSummer. But even before then, we knew as an institution that the summer at the Institute was a host unto itself. It wasn’t just like a busy time of the year. It wasn’t just our high holidays here at Hartman with the kind of attendance you don’t usually get in one Jewish place the rest of the year. But it was a kind of moment on the Jewish map, a moment or a place in the Jewish ecosystem of something important and maybe even a little bit magical.

My flight for this week was canceled, as you could probably guess. We had sensed in the middle of last week that something was about to go down, and we began to make internal contingency plans and communications cascades for when we would have to communicate to our audiences and program participants about their plans and ours, sharing out when we would make decisions if necessary about program cancellations.

We were inundated around then by folks reaching out to us, and certainly by Friday after the war with Iran began, with all sorts of anxious questions about flights and hotel reservations and deposits on rental cars, but also with the stuff of relationship. Questions like, how are you all handling this? Is the Hartman team in Israel doing okay? And that wonderful question, is there anything I can do to help?

Those interlocking messages about their rental car reservations and about how everyone was doing reminded me of what makes real community work. Most of the time when you live in community with others, the fuel of relationships is material and technical, the ways we make a minyan together or contribute together to a meal or other ritualized moments in relationships. But the real glue of those relationships is located in the ethics of care.

By Sunday afternoon, we shared out our decision to cancel our board retreat, which was scheduled for next week in Jerusalem, as well as the first major program of the summer, our Community Leadership Program, a week-long seminar on major issues facing Jewish life for lay and professional leaders in the Jewish community. This year, 2025, we sold out the program for the very first time in its 30 years, and we had a waiting list of nearly 100 people, which is the single greatest problem a Jewish educational institution can have. We had groups coming as part of CLP from several major synagogues together with their clergy, hoping that the learning and inspiration from Jerusalem would help them think together, lay and professional, about the future of their congregations and some of the issues tearing them apart.

We planned a curriculum for CLP focused on three major questions that have become increasingly important in the last several years. Namely, first, what does the experience of rising anti-Semitism do to how we understand Jewish ethics and Jewish responsibility? And how do we prevent the culture of vulnerability and victimhood from cannibalizing our ethical responsibilities?

Second, how do we as Jews and Jewish communities recalibrate our relationships with our allies, even sometimes our family members, in light of all the political turbulence and division around us, especially since October 7th, when the categories of friend and foe have been so radically redefined.

And third, what does belonging mean in this age of autonomy and political division? As both democracies and communities experience an erosion in the structures of trust and consent that make us willing to belong to larger collectives, even when it feels risky to do so. As you can see, these were the light topics. At CLP, we also planned a dialogue between senior Jewish- and Palestinian-Israeli scholars at the Shalom Hartman Institute on the nature of loyalty in today’s Israel, a major conversation on the state of American Jewish philanthropy, small group learning on peace, truth, and justice, excursions to see the seams and sights of a traumatized and divided Israel trying to excavate the hope that will ultimately shape the Israel of tomorrow.

We had festive meals planned, a beautiful havdalah after a beautiful Jerusalem Shabbat together. My colleagues spent thousands of hours planning the program, recruiting participants, managing their relationships, developing curricula, and then poof, a decision that wasn’t really a decision, a decision that was an inevitability, and the program was gone.

To those that are listening to us that have plans to be with us in Jerusalem later in July, perhaps for our Rabbinic Torah Seminar, or for our Courageous Canada Leadership Trip, for our Wellspring Summit for Educators, these programs are not cancelled at this time. We are glued to the news, first and foremost, obviously, with care and concern for our loved ones, our colleagues, our friends, worried endlessly about their safety, and conscious that they have not slept for nearly a week through the constant sirens.

But second, we’re glued to the news in the hope that something might change, that the skies will open up, flights will resume, society will reacquire some semblance of normalcy. It will be permitted to have large gatherings once again, and we’ll all come flocking back to the courtyard at 11 Gedalyahu Alon Street in Jerusalem with our rabbis and with our educators for a little bit of learning. It’s a little bleak to think about, though.

Normalcy in this case, would involve re-entering into the existing conditions of war that preceded the outbreak of this war. What was characterized for a while as the foremost existential war in Israel’s history is now being recast as a secondary sideshow, that war in Gaza. It’s ominous and sad for those of us who fear the continuing of the Gaza war as it is. Maybe even it’s a cautionary tale about the overuse of the term existential.

Still, I hope we’ll get back to Israel at some point this summer. I hope to see a bunch of you there as well so we can get back to the normal business of studying our people’s most urgent questions and inspiring ourselves with the Torah that we need to hold ourselves and our people to the constant diligent work of moral, political, and spiritual improvement.

You see, that’s what Hartman Summer is supposed to be about. In isolation, each of our programs looks like a program, and each program has parallels in other educational institutions. It’s like, we have our executive seminar, as do other organizations, and we have rabbinic enrichment programs, as do some other institutions, and professional development opportunities and board meetings.

But together, the programs of Hartman Summer are not just programs. They offer a challenge, a provocation to the Jewish world, which is to say, amidst all the responsibilities you bear for your institutions and the people that those institutions serve, alongside all the work you do in supporting and sustaining communities. Amidst all of that, where do you go to think? And if you can’t answer that question, why would we have the confidence that our communities, our institutions, and our leaders would ever be able to adapt and evolve to meet the moment? I love the programs at Hartman Summer, but not just as their own programs, each with their own narrative arc and slightly different culture.

It does feel different, for instance, hanging around the courtyard with 200 rabbis than when you’re doing so with 250 lay leaders, sometimes for amusing reasons. But it’s not really just the programs. It’s the feeling that we get throughout the summer that the Hartman Courtyard and Hartman Beit Midrash are the place to be if you are a Jewish leader. Not like a sidewalk at the French Riviera to see and be seen with the beautiful people. No disrespect to our people.

But the reason to be there, because it is the place to be challenged and pushed and provoked. The place to be if you are going to continue to pursue the adaptive side of leadership. The posture of being a courageous leader, a learning leader. A place where leaning out of the day-to-day work of leadership is complemented by the feeling that you are simultaneously leaning into the kinds of questions that maybe motivated you to be a Jewish leader to begin with and the kinds of radical thinking that could motivate you to stay in this work, even when it is most challenging and frustrating.

I’m really concerned for Jewish leaders navigating this war moment with all of its layers, and especially without those precious hours in the Beit Midrash this summer. I’m concerned for our educational and intellectual team here at Hartman, myself included, who use this pinnacle of our year to develop the most cutting edge of our own thinking and who test ourselves in the crucible of that Beit Midrash, where people have traveled thousands of miles to push and be pushed.

I’ll miss, at least for now, the cornucopia fruit baskets that emerge from the corridors into that courtyard and the infinite tahini popsicles, because our institution shows its love to our learners not just in the content that we offer, but in the experience, the holistic experience that we try to provide.

I hope, like I said, to be back this summer. I hope I can welcome the rabbis, especially with open arms. But I admit, I’m really sad about this first loss of CLP amidst so many of the losses of these past few years. Just as I’m sad for the teens and college students who are already having their summer experiences in Israel canceled just a few years after losing parts of their middle school and high school experiences to the vicissitudes of the pandemic. And I hope we’re going to find ways as a community to make our leaders and our young people whole.

Later this week on the show, we’re going to hear the voices of Israelis amidst this crisis. Later this month, our show will include some of the kinds of analysts of the current moment who are often available on other podcasts as well. Those who are struggling with the strategic and military questions raised by the decision to go to war and whatever state of play it is at that time.

For now, I’m listening to my heart. I’m rethinking my travel plans. I’m trying to hold my team at Hartman here tightly. And I’m whispering to myself those words we recite when we finish studying a book or a tractate in our tradition. Hadran Alach, we will return to you and dreaming of the time when we’ll be together again.