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No. 62: Foundational Judaism: What is It, and How Do We Teach It?

The following is a transcript of Episode 62 of the Identity/Crisis podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
Hello everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, the show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer president of Shalom Hartman Institute North America. And we’re recording on Monday, July 12th, 2021. So many of you probably know, the Hartman Institute is a place where we discuss and debate the major questions facing Jewish life and especially political ones in America and in Israel and in large part about Israel. We have podcasts like this one Identity/Crisis and For Heaven’s Sake, which is a conversation about some of the big questions facing Israel and American Jewish relationship to Israel. We have our iEngage project. We have op-eds and blog posts by our scholars in North America and Israel. And obviously we’re proud institutionally to be the place that people turn to for wisdom and guidance on some of these really hard questions. And it’s a really heavy responsibility to help shape and guide a Jewish leadership to be both wise and courageous when it comes to the major issues of the day.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
But the core of the Institute, why we do what we do as a think tank and as an educational center is rooted in a bigger idea about Judaism, Jewish life and Jewish ideas that goes back to our founding. And it is not simply about being in the tennis game of Jewish politics today, but about something deeper. So the Institute takes as its starting point, the continued intersection, maybe a clash, maybe an encounter between the richness of Judaism as an inherited tradition on one hand, and the opportunities and challenge offered by modernity. And we’ve argued for a long time that this is not an intersection between Judaism and modernity that should not be avoided, but embraced. And that the real project of our time, I think the deep idea from which the Institute is born is that we are responsible to build an intellectually honest, morally rigorous and spiritually elevated Judaism that can compete for the Jewish people’s loyalties and its attention when being Jewish, especially for many of us here in north America is something that in itself can no longer be taken for granted.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
So for most of the Institute’s history, we’ve been engaged in that project, articulating a serious Judaism for the 21st century for the Jewish people to want to opt into. And that project has manifested in scholarship or in the form of trying to produce ideas, which some people call Torah to really help, to articulate a compelling modern Judaism, nothing less than that. A few years ago at Hartman, we started to codify this approach into a curriculum, not just a curriculum that would ask: how do I think about this particular aspect of Israeli history or this particular ethical or moral question? But a unified mega curriculum under a heading coined by Donniel Hartman, president of the Institute called Foundations of a Thoughtful Judaism. In many ways, the curriculum that had been taught in various Institute programs over a 30 to 40 year period. And so some of the work of putting together this curriculum was what you might call curation.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
How do I take this Torah taught at the Institute and this Beit Midrash over a couple of decades and turn it into something short distillable, teachable and learnable. And a lot of new content developments. Because even if you’ve been doing something for a long time, when you actually sit down to organize it and codify it, it takes a lot of work. Today I’m excited to share that the Institute is ready to go to market with this product Foundations for a Thoughtful Judaism, a mega curriculum consisted of a number of components, which we’ll talk about today. But more importantly, I’m excited to share this as part of Identity/Crisis, because it’s not merely a promo. We’re not here to simply talk about something that the Institute has created. I think we’re here to talk about an idea about what it would look like for us as North American Jews to reacquire or reacquaint ourselves with our tradition in an organized, serious, morally compelling way.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
That’s not broken down by denomination and that doesn’t predetermine that my understanding of Judaism leads me to necessarily be this or that kind of Jew, but because it’s the project of our time. And to talk this through with me is a project leader of this at the Institute, a previous Identity/Crisis guest, actually one of the co-hosts of For Heaven’s Sake, what I call our sister podcast. Dr. Elana Stein Hain is scholar in residence and the director of faculty at the Shalom Hartman Institute North America. Elana, first of all, thanks for coming back and Identity/Crisis. And tell me what I missed. Tell me your entry point into this curriculum that you spent so much of the last few years thinking about and working on.

Elana Stein Hain:
Sure, sure, sure. It’s great to be back and I really love the way you frame the project of our time. I think what’s most powerful to me about this curriculum. There’s two things that are most powerful to me. The first is that it’s philosophical, right? You can get an intro to Judaism course and good intro to Judaism courses in lots of different places. They’ll tell you how to light Hanukkah candles. They’ll tell you about the Exodus narrative. They’ll tell you about the founding of the state of Israel. But what we’re trying to do something different here, which is what are some of the big philosophical questions, dilemmas, challenges – and the challenges and the dilemmas that we talk about. So many of them are just human challenges and dilemmas, right? The question of what’s the relationship between your commitments to your own group and your commitments to broader humanity?

Elana Stein Hain:
What is the concept of holiness? What do intimacy and distance from God have to do with each other? And yet we’re responding to these questions that are often very “human searching for meaning” kinds of questions in a Jewish idiom. And we’re asking what we can find in the Jewish canon past and present. And even what’s being created as we sit here, right? And how those things respond. And a lot of what you get out of that kind of philosophical introduction, because really we did try and make it very accessible is a sense that, “holy cow, this tradition speaks to some of the most important questions of what it means to be a human being.” Like I always think God is in the details. God is in the details. If you know that the details have roots, that there’s something deeper down there. So we’re really we’re doing the roots.

Elana Stein Hain:
So that’s the first thing that really excites me about what we did here. And the second thing that excites me is that it’s pluralistic. What a weird idea to give an introduction or an entry point to Jewish thought that is not saying, okay, “I’m giving you this denominations version of it. Actually, what we try to do here is say, well, how have people grappled in the 20th and 21st centuries with questions of autonomy and obligation in Jewish life, and you’re going to see different answers and it’s not one of these pack, well, we’ll give you an answer from this movement and from this movement and from this movement, it’s not about checking boxes. So there’s something really exciting about this.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
That’s complicated, not because there are differences of opinion, but that those differences depending have consequences, right? Where you sit on the Jewish denominational map, for instance, when it comes to Jewish practice, the integrity of the notion of mitzvah to be actually obligated or commanded as they feel logical precept, but also in terms of shaping your whole life, there are real consequences to a, just to be crude call like a Reform or an Orthodox approach to Jewish practice. So maybe just give us like a little bit of a window into how you thought about what it meant to try to curate something that wouldn’t be irrelevant because it avoided those distinctions. But also wouldn’t trivialize those distinctions by saying, you know, okay, choose your own adventure. If you’re Orthodox, turn to page 14, if you’re Reform turn to page 19. So how do you navigate that?

Elana Stein Hain:
I actually think there are two ways that we shaped some responses to that concern. One is not every question has that kind of ramification, right? You brought up an example of, you know, the degree to which mitvot. Jewish ritual performances are commandments versus good deeds. Let’s say right. That’s one where you say, okay, got it. That’s going to impact your lifestyle tremendously. But sometimes you actually have thinkers who come from the same movement where you’re dealing with a question like I’m going to go back to intimacy with a distance from God or arguing with God and submitting to God. We’re actually, you have two people whose lives, they look similar Jewishly, and then they tell you what’s going on internally for them. And you’re like, wow, I didn’t even know. And that I think is incredible. So that’s one way the second is it comes through in our podcasts, we have several components to the curriculum.

Elana Stein Hain:
One, you have the leader’s guide, which is a written guide. It gives you this source sheet and it breaks everything down by volume and by unit and by class. And it gives information for whoever’s teaching. What good discussion questions, where do each of these sources come from? We also have the video guide. The video guide tells you how to teach each of these things walks you through step-by-step. But in this curriculum we have podcasts. And the goal of these podcasts was to take a couple of people who are either scholars at the Machon, have an affiliation with the Institute and say to them, tell us how this plays out in real life for you. So that it’s not just words on a page and it’s not just choose your own adventure. We want to know how it feels to live in accordance with this philosophical precept or that philosophical precepts, so that you avoid the idea of choose your own adventure means I don’t pay attention to the other version. I’m just doing this one because that’s who I am. We want you to pay attention to the value propositions of each one of these. And that really comes through when you hear the human story.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
Yeah, it reminds me of when Franz Rosensweig writes in his essay on Jewish learning, he says the real goal of the project of Jewish learning is that a person should say: nothing Jewish is alien to me. So that once you are an owner, I own this. I hold these stories, these traditions, even the tensions. It’s not that I then have to try to perform all of these different commitments, but I can say actively here are the commitments or the ideas in the Jewish tradition that I have decided not to embrace. But the fact that you know, them empowers you, you become an autonomous free agent in your own Jewish story in a way that’s very different than when there’s an ordered or set path of what you have to choose for your Jewishness.

Elana Stein Hain:
And I also think it connects you to other Jews, meaning it’s not just about self-understanding, it’s saying, well, that seemed totally alien. And now I kind of get that. I kind of get that. There’s something very Jewish peoplehood oriented about that.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
So we’ll come back to the podcast in a second and I want to talk also about audiences. But before that, I want to go back to something that you alluded to before, around simple ideas, straightforward ideas, serious ideas, but I’ll put up the sentence. You tell me if you agree or disagree in my mind as an educator, I think the best Jewish questions are universal questions. So it’s Jews asking similar human questions that other people have. And the most important Jewish ideas are the simplest. Now, some people will not like that because there are ornate Jewish ideas, unique, strange ones that are, of course enchanting, right? That never appear anywhere else. But in this piece of Jewish thought and Jewish literature, there feels to me something essential about being willing to say, I know that I’m teaching Torah. I know that I’m creating a curriculum, but I’m really trying to do is answer fundamental human questions with kinds of ideas that it doesn’t require of me. I don’t know, to be eccentric or strange in how I answer that. I’m curious how you think about that as a philosopher, as an educator, Elana, because you are, as a teacher, I’ve seen you take a piece of Talmud and just let people dwell in the complexity of it. But this is a project that in many ways is about simplicity. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Elana Stein Hain:
I don’t think that sophistication and simplicity have to be at odds with each other. I do think however, that simple ideas should serve as building blocks to create more sophisticated structures. So for example, if you’re going to ask, and there’s a great conversation that we have in one of our podcasts for Foundations for a Thoughtful Judaism, which we lovingly call FTJ, because everything at Hartman needs its abbreviation. There’s a great conversation between Aaron Koller and Ronit Irshai about whether Torah can make you more ethical and their conversation was well, it’s not necessarily that Torah makes you more ethical. It’s that Torah makes you think about ethics in a certain way. And they start giving examples about what simple, ethical ideas they have learned from Torah. And then they go on to complicate how you actually apply those ideals in practice. So I think that what happens is you have a basic idea, but then you look at how it’s going to play out in the world and you say to yourself, all right, it’s not so simple. It’s not so simple.

Elana Stein Hain:
Sometimes I’ll have two simple ideas that ended up clashing with each other when I’m in the midst of trying to make a decision, right? We have, we have a whole section in Foundations for a Thoughtful Judaism about making ethical decisions. That’s all about application. So I think it’s true. I think that simple ideas should be building blocks. And oftentimes when you unravel the structures of the different ways that people think and act in the world, you will find that the bedrock of those structures differ from each other significantly. And it’s those simple bedrock, foundational ideas, different from each other that actually leads to the whole change in the structure. So I think that’s the way that I would put it.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
One of my favorite Hartman texts, a text from the Babylonian tractate Menachot is when Moses goes up on high to receive the Torah in heaven finds God tying crowns on the letters and this, the line that Moses uses in that moment, when he encounters God doing this act of adorning, the Torah is the phrase, “mi meakev al yadecha” meaning kind of who are you doing this for? Right? God is not engaged in some sort of weird artistic hobby. God is obviously doing something to Torah in order for people on earth to be able to excavate, explicate, all of what that’s about. So Elana, let me ask that question to you. Who’s this project for? You’re engaged in a very ornate process of in some ways distilling Torah to these building blocks, these core ideas. Our curriculum has four elements, faith, practice, ethics, and peoplehood, and an enormous amount of content and Torah that’s in all of these pieces mi meakev al yadecha. Who are your imagined users?

Elana Stein Hain:
So let’s give three possible examples. One example is someone who’s new to Jewish thought. They might be new to Jewish thought because they’re in an interfaith family. They might be new to Jewish thought because they’re converting to Judaism. They might be new to Jewish thought because they are Jewish and they just have never really gotten the chance to think about it deeply. So that’s like one bucket. So you look at something that asks you a question, like what are the approaches to suffering in Jewish thought, given that somebody might’ve just gone through something really terrible and wants to know, like, how do I make meaning out of this? And you say, well, let me just still four different perspectives and what the ramifications are of those perspectives. That’s pretty clear, right? You’re inviting someone in to consider the ramifications of big ideas on their own lines.

Elana Stein Hain:
So that’s one. Another is somebody who’s been doing Jewish their whole life. And they say, you know, I’ve been doing Jewish by the way that I consume my general content seems more sophisticated than the way that I consume my Jewish content. And actually I want to think more deeply about this. So we’ve had people in their fifties and sixties who have said, I actually want to do a learning circle with my friends, and I want to sit and use this material and work on this. And I would say the third is for people who – you listed four areas, ethics, practice, faith, peoplehood, – people who seem to focus a lot on a couple of those areas, but haven’t really spent time in the others. So we did a great training with rabbis actually a few months ago. And one of the rabbis said, you know, it’s funny in my synagogue, I really know how to talk about peoplehood and ethics.

Elana Stein Hain:
Haven’t been able to really talk God in a while with my people, haven’t been able to really talk practice in a while with my people. This is really helpful. And we had rabbis who said the opposite, great at talking faith and practice, having a really hard time with peoplehood these days, really hard time with ethics these days. Thanks for giving us that. So that’s kind of the beauty of it. And it’s modular. You can do a choose your own adventure and say, I want to do a little in ethics. I want to do a little in faith. I want to do a little on this, a little on that. And what’s also nice is because this is going to be a tool in the hands of educators. They’re going to bring their own knowledge to bear on this stuff. What we’re offering is here’s a conceptual framework. Now you want to add to it. You want to embellish, you want to argue with it. Beautiful. We’ve just handed you a tool.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
Right. That’s the notion of foundations because whether or not these are already building blocks of Jewish identity that people hold and therefore you’re looking to articulate them, or whether they’re searching to actually create their own building blocks there’s no claim here of being a kind of total curriculum even introduction to Judaism, but it actually hopefully creates a holistic sensibility to be a serious Jew. You’re going to have to be able to dwell in or swim in these four big areas. And I guess we probably hope that people do mix and match and sample from the different arenas. You know, you may be a faith person, but those complimentary pieces can create a much more holistic identity.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
So Elana set the stage for us for the second half of today’s Identirisis, we are bringing to our listeners, one of the podcast elements, just to recap, there are four major units of foundations for thoughtful Judaism, faith, ethics, practice, and peoplehood. Within each of these, there’s a course which can be taught by a leader with sources and source material. There’s a video guide for the educators. And then there are these podcasts. We’re going to listen today to one of the podcasts that comes out of the practice in it. So why don’t you introduce this for us?

Elana Stein Hain:
Okay. So this is really fun. It’s Sara Labaton, our director of teaching and learning and Tomer Persico fellow at the Hartman Institute, who is our scholar and residents of the Bay Area for the last few years, they are talking about basically what motivates their Jewish practice and what grows out of their Jewish practice. And this is one of three podcasts in the practice unit. And in that practice unit, in those podcasts, what we’re probing is we’re asking questions about God and family and spirituality and tradition. We’re asking about Judaism as a cultural system or more of a legal system, autonomy obligation. And this is the first of those three podcasts. And I think it’s really rich.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
Well give this a listen. Thank you for being on the show today with us Elana. I really hope that those of you who are listening out there, well, not only listen to today’s Foundations for a Thoughtful Judaism podcast, but the many more half a dozen have already been released, we’re going to be putting more out. They can function autonomously that they also work really nicely as components of this curriculum. And we hope to see you on the other side of that learning

Elana Stein Hain:
Definitely. Enjoy.

Elana Stein Hain:
Hi Sara. Hi Tomer. It’s so nice to be here with you. We’re here to discuss as you know, Jewish practice, which we emphasize in our Foundations curriculum as playing an even more prominent role than belief or dogma in Jewish life and thought. And I just want to start off by asking each of you, what is the role that Jewish practice plays in your own life?

Tomer Persico:
I can start and I can start by saying that that role has been growing basically all my life. I would say, at least since I was on my own, I grew up in a very secular even atheist family and all Jewish practice seemed at the best folklore, and at the worst nonsense. And really for me, I came to the tradition or to appreciate Jewish practice and through a long process of, I would say, first of all, spiritual seeking that began in India. But I would say, for me today, Jewish practice is I would think three things. First of all, it’s simply participation in the Jewish tradition, which I hold dear and I feel responsible for. I feel that I want to be part of conserving this tradition. So first of all, just this sort of basic belonging to the tradition,.I would say, secondly, let’s say prayer, let’s say the actual daily prayers are for me a form of a religiousness that is not specifically catered towards spiritual ends. So I’m not praying in order to therapeutically transform my consciousness to a better state. Let’s say. And I would say, thirdly, if I may, if I may speak about God, just for a second Jewish practices, for me, are a way to be in a personal relationship with God. And I can elaborate on that. I don’t know if it’s allowed.

Elana Stein Hain:
It’s all allowed. Let’s let Sara get some ideas out onto the table. And then we’re going to revisit what you just said.

Sara Labaton:
It’s really interesting Tomer the places where I really identify with some of what you said and the places that I don’t identify with at all. I think for me, Jewish practice, it binds me horizontally and it binds me vertically. And I grew up in a modern Orthodox household on the Jersey shore in Deal, New Jersey. But in that modern Orthodox household, there were history of many different mixed marriages. So my father was a Syrian rabbi, but his parents were quite secular. My mother, her family is half Hasidic, we’re direct descendants of the Maggid of Mezritch and the other part of her family were upper west side business people, “real Americans,” I’m putting that in quotation marks, but you can’t see that. So I grew up exposed to a very wide range of Jewish practice in our extended families. Going to tisches on the one hand and then going out for Friday night dinner where the TV was on, on the other hand, but it was all kind of in the family.

Sara Labaton:
So I really do feel that Jewish practice binds me to my immediate family, to my extended family and families. And I see that as a parent transmitting Jewish practice and transmitting a certain fluency, comfort, even like a skill at Jewish practice has become important. And at the same time, trying to figure out how to simultaneously make it meaningful to them. So we tried my husband and I to do Friday night tefillot and it inevitably lead to frustration and annoyance and nobody wanted to do it. So now we just twirl around the room, singing a Shabbat song, and then we fling open the door to welcome in the Shabbat queen. And one of my kids always says, well, what about the Shabbat king? And you know, like at some point down the line, I would love to introduce a little bit of medieval Kabbalah to them and the roots of that practice, but it’s very much about connecting to the different concentric circles in my life, family, unity, and vertically to who came before me. I love the idea that my great, great, great, great, great grandparents from Aleppo could eat at my Shabbat table and my great, great, great, great grandparents from Romania could do that too.

Tomer Persico:
I mean, talking about your great, great, great, great grandparents. I mean the Maggid, that’s amazing. I really am excited about that.

Elana Stein Hain:
It’s interesting to listen to the two of you talk about practice because it’s almost like Sara, maybe I’m wrong, but it sounds like you start with the meaning or the search for meaning and Tomer you started with the interest in conserving certain practices that exist. And I’m wondering for each of you, where does it come from? Does it come from the search for meaning, and this is the container that you put it in, or is it the container of the Jewish practice that really takes precedence? So whether you’re feeling meaning in it or not, how do those two get negotiated?

Tomer Persico:
Yeah, I mean, I would say for me, certainly it’s first of all the container, which I just want to preserve. I think it’s important also for practical reasons. I think it has a lot of good ideas in it. It’s agreat contribution to humanity, but of course also it’s mine and it’s my peoples and I want to keep it. I want to keep it alive. And here again, I came to it later in life. I came to it after I had done a lot of things and inhaled a lot of things. Like I was already, let’s say a Vipassana, a Buddhist meditation practitioner and a very ardent one. Okay. So, so I had meaning and even spirituality from other sources, but then understanding that this is something that is me in a very deep way, and it is something that I want to pass on and to be able to preserve. So for me, it’s just that sort of loyalty and caring for something that is just a part of my life.

Elana Stein Hain:
Yeah. There’s an identity piece there. That seems very strong. Sara, what about for you?

Sara Labaton:
You know, I grew up with these structures. They were so deeply and rigorously embedded into my life that I think I’ve always had to struggle with pushing back against some of those structures in an effort to make them meaningful and also to make them work. I mean, as an example, to make them meaningful, you know, it’s a very poignant story in my life where my daughter, my middle child was born maybe six weeks after my father passed away. And of course, if she had been a boy, we would have had ritual circumcision or brit milah. But as it stood, we did not have any ceremony, any ritual, commemorating her birth, celebrating her birth. Nobody had those emotional reserves and time passed. And eventually we decided to make an upsherin for her. I’m not even sure, a hundred percent what the historical roots of this practice are.

Sara Labaton:
But I do know that in my Hasidic family, it is a really significant practice for boys where you don’t cut the hair of a boy until three years old. And in my family, they go to a place in Israel and Lag Ba’Omer and light bonfires, but it’s really not done for girls. And for me, I used that practice as a container and it felt familialy authentic because I knew that I had plenty of cousins, second cousins, third cousins who embraced it. And for me doing this practice was a way of marking my daughter of celebrating my daughter. We took one of my father’s Bibles and we drizzled some honey on it. This is kind of one of the customs. And she licked the honey off of the Bible to try to make the words of Torah sweet and the way in which it was individually and very idiosyncratically meaningful for me was that cutting her hair was a way of uncoupling, the experience of her birth from the experience of losing my father, where those two experiences were so bound up with one another.

Sara Labaton:
And I needed a way to sort of make sense of her birth as an independent event and the upsherin did that. So of course that’s not the meaning, the upsherin typically expresses it’s a custom it’s by no means experienced as a commandment or obligation. I think in any circles, it was something for me to use and I was able to make meaning out of it. And I think that there are other practices, which it’s not that they’re not meaningful, it’s that I find them problematic. And I’ve had to develop the fortitude to say, you know, this is not going to work for me. So I think like I’ve had to sort of struggle with the limits and how far I can push.

Tomer Persico:
Can I say, you began with saying that you had a daughter and so no circumcision was planned. And that immediately reminded me that this is maybe the single most difficult practice that I had to force myself, and of course my wife independently had to force herself, to do. And here I have two boys, the first one, it was obvious that we’re going to do it. It was something that I said, okay, this is a tradition. And it’s something that I’m just, I’m bowing my head in face of the tradition and we’re just going to do it. But the second one was even more difficult because it is, if I’ve already done the mitzvah, I’ve already cut off one boys, why do I need to do it again? It was even harder, you know, to explain to myself and to make myself agree to it. We did do it. But again, this is the most difficult practice I simply had to force myself to do.

Sara Labaton:
And that’s fascinating because I have two sons and I didn’t think twice.

Elana Stein Hain:
About your personal biographies, each of you, that really seems to inform your approach to practice and what is its primary valence for you? I want to go back and Tomer asked if he could elaborate on before. And I want to ask about this question of the personal relationship with God, because Sara, you mentioned the personal, is it going to work for me? And you mentioned the personal in relation to family, the personal in relationship to God told me, do you want to say more about that? And then Sara, talk about how that fits in for you?

Tomer Persico:
Yes. I will first give credit to a man named Eliezer Shore an Ultra-Orthodox man that I interviewed for my PhD on Jewish meditation long ago. And he’s the one that used this language when I asked him whether, I’m using a cliche here, if you’re more spiritual than religious, like if you’re in a personal spiritual quest, why are you dealing with all this Halakha stuff? Right. And he told me, I want a personal relationship with God. And it immediately resonated with me. And I knew this was the best answer he could have given. And, and this is the way it is for me, because there’s a lot of ways that you can live with, let’s say the divine, right? And if the divine is very abstract and sort of infinite the absolute it’s enough to be spiritual, right? It’s enough to – I’m meditating and I’m hiking in nature.

Tomer Persico:
And I’m here in California. And I guess a lot of other states now in the US you can smoke hash. And then I connect with the divine and that’s what I’m good. And I highly recommend recommended it. Of course, I think it’s very important, but there is another factor or another side or dimension in the divine in God, which is the personal persona, which you may or may not want to have a relationship with. And I do. And in the Jewish way, in the Jewish tradition, the way you have a relationship, it’s called the covenant with that personal God is through the Halakha is through the practice and wanting that relationship. I practice the practice. I do it. I’m not Orthodox by the way. I just want to make clear, but what I do.

Elana Stein Hain:
So here’s a follow-up: what does that even mean? To havea personal relationship with the divine. Like, how is Tomer Persico different as a result of having this relationship with the divine? What does it feel like? How does it express itself beyond taking on these practices?

Tomer Persico:
Wow, that’s an excellent question. And I would immediately have to say that, first of all, it is a relationship like other relationships. So how does it change me? It changes me that I have another person in my life that I am trying to communicate with, to be intimate, with, to understand, to wish for them to understand me. It’s that it’s simply, this one is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And now obviously it changes my life in terms of practice. Again, I, I pray, right. And I would like to think it also changes it in terms of morality and ethics and the way I conduct my daily life. I hope that’s true.

Elana Stein Hain:
Sara, what do you think about all this?

Sara Labaton:
Yeah, I don’t see – I guess I think God is the character that’s least relevant in my life right now. And I guess when I think about my Jewish practice and my relationship to Jewish ritual and to Jewish ethical practice, it’s not really about God. It’s about connecting to history. It’s about connecting to a community and it’s about a way of being in the world. It helps me walk through the world in a more organized way, if that makes sense, but it doesn’t, maybe I’m just not a very spiritual person. It’s not something that drives me. It’s not, it doesn’t fuel me. So yeah, that’s what I would say. And I’m like fascinated by Jewish practice and the different forms and manifestations that it takes. And I think that there’s, there’s so much richness there. Maybe one of the limits is that we get so caught up or at least I can get so caught up in the form and in the meaning that God can easily end up getting sidelined. I certainly don’t think that’s the intention of at least the original architects of this system.

Elana Stein Hain:
Do you think it’d be fair to use the word “culture” in terms of what you’re referring to as Jewish practice, that it builds a culture for you, for the communities that you’re a part of that capture something of it?

Sara Labaton:
Yeah. Yes, but I wouldn’t want to lose the individual pieces of Jewish practice because I think that’s a big part of this also. Just the unique, distinctive, almost individual habits that people have when it comes to their practice. My mom was just telling me about the piece in the Talmud about different rabbis and how they would prepare for Shabbat, you know, and one would wear these types of clothes and one would sit on a throne and one would make this and one would make that. And that speaks to me very powerfully that an individual can actually have a very robust individualized practice. And to me, culture carries more collective connotation. There is that as well, but I just wouldn’t want to lose the personal element.

Elana Stein Hain:
Are there parts of this that are not only about the idea that this helps you walk through life and it gives you an organized way to think, and not only about the interesting idiosyncrasies that different people come to in their religious lives, but also are there particular elements within Jewish practice that you say, you know, that value or that outcome pulls me is what compels me to do this? Or is it more well, this is what I grew up with and therefore I know it. And that’s why it happens to be my idiom. Can you separate those two?

Sara Labaton:
Yeah. I think that there are certain Jewish rituals where the values, the underlying values and ideas really speak to me. And I think by the way, just the idea of a ritual, just the idea of a ritualized practice. I think that a lot with charity, which is, you know, a bad translation, at least Jewishly for the word tzedekah, it’s not about charity. I think it derives maybe from the Latin caritas, which has more of an implication of generosity or magnanimous behavior. And I think that the idea of ritualizing giving and bringing that ritual frame to the idea of contributing, whether it’s money, whether it’s time, there’s something very powerful about that to me. And I also do think that every time I go through the Jewish year, there’s something new about the Jewish holidays that I find very, almost politically compelling. I guess it feels like something that’s either as an object or as a practice

Sara Labaton:
If we take it seriously can actually affect a certain type of change in the world. So maybe I’ll give an example of what, I mean, we had this experience where we were between two homes for a few weeks and we had to move out of one house and the other house wasn’t quite ready and we really didn’t have any place to go because of COVID. And it was like a very demoralizing feeling. And it happened to also be around the time of Sukkot. And a couple of people made the joke, well, if only there were some temporary huts you could move into. But it sort of struck me that this idea of a sukkah as simultaneously permanent and temporary, and that exposes our vulnerabilities. There was something really powerful about that, but it took the personal experience to sort of instantiate that ethic for me.

Elana Stein Hain:
Yeah. Just to raise up what I see as a headline here, it really is practice as idiom, meaning your practices, your way of speaking and living in the world and finding meaning and expressing it. And it stands in such interesting contrast to Tomer. When you’re saying I’m trying to conserve and preserve what it is that I’ve been given, you’re trying, Sara, to create. It’s very different and it’s pretty fantastic to see how people whose lives might look quite similar in practice are inspired in very different ways. I want to push on one last question. I want to push us to the collective because it is important to think about what kind of culture Jewish practice creates. And I’m wondering, you know, Tomer, when it comes to collective Jewish life, you are a citizen in a country where Judaism is the culture. And for some people it’s about culture.

Elana Stein Hain:
For some people it’s about law, right? For some people it’s, they feel bound to do this. And for other people, it’s like, you’re going to have Hanukkah songs playing in the supermarket. And I’m wondering for you as somebody who analyzes religion and thinks a lot about religion, is there a difference between those two? What is the connection between people who are looking at Jewish practices? Like this is the Jewish culture we’re going to eat donuts on Hanukkah, and those who are looking at it as I’m commanded to do this, this is my ancestral tradition that I’m answerable to.

Tomer Persico:
I think it’s a great thing to think about. Definitely there is a difference today. Some people do take these as commandments that they are commanded to do, and obviously obey in different levels. And for some it’s simply the atmosphere, it’s simply the water that they swim in when these holidays come about. And that’s just how it looks like in the public sphere. And there’s a very distinctive difference here. And what’s interesting is that I actually think that the latter Judaism as a culture is actually closer than what Judaism was for Jews 300 years ago and backwards. Like if you were a Jew living in a shtetl or a ghetto, somewhere, either in Europe or in Islamic countries, you would be living with other Jews, you would have your Jewish community and the law would be so assumed, so just the obvious things that you do, that it would much more resemble the culture in Israel today than the ultra Orthodox, or even Orthodox way of forcing ourselves into something that we believe and reinstate all the time as a law that we obey as a covenant that we take part in, right?

Tomer Persico:
Take Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye, right? The Tevye, a guy in Eastern Europe, 300 or 200 years ago, obviously he knew there are commandments, but he did his Judaism as just the obvious daily culture that he lives in. He wakes up, he prays. Why does he pray? That’s what the Jew does when he wakes up. Right? He eats kosher. He doesn’t think about it. That’s what Jews do. It’s yiddishkeit. It’s Judaism. So in a way, Israel recreates, in a way, obviously it’s not the same, but in a way recreate tat pre-modern self-evident atmosphere of just living Jewish, which I think is fantastic.

Elana Stein Hain:
Yeah. That’s fascinating. So culture is something that is more self-evident and less about personal choice and opting in. Now, Sara and living, learning, teaching, leading in American Judaism, what’s the role of culture and religious commitment. What is it? What do we do? What do you think about?

Sara Labaton:
I don’t think that New York or the tri-state area or places like LA and Miami are representative, but I do think we have some of that here. I’ll give an example. When right before our wedding, my husband brought his wedding suit to Macy’s or some department store, or maybe he was buying it and he said, oh, you happen to know if it has linen and wool. And the salesperson said, oh, do you mean shaatnez? Yeah. You could just leave it here. The rabbi will take care of it. I think she said, by the way, the rabbi prefers to be paid in cash. So I think that there is a.

Tomer Persico:
That’s Jewish culture!

Sara Labaton:
Yeah. It almost feels like from a majority perspective, from a position of power, the same thing. When I have to look up how to set my oven before Yom Tov to the Sabbath setting, and it’s right there, it’s built into the technology: Sabbath setting.

Sara Labaton:
The truth is though, is that I enjoy living in a place where, of course this has gotten a lot more complicated. I would say over the last few years where there’s a little bit more anxiety about living a visibly Jewish life. And I asked my kids to take off their kippot in public on occasion, but generally speaking, I actually enjoy the dissonance. I actually enjoy that. There’s something not entirely organic about my Jewish practices vis-a-vis mainstream America. That there’s something about living in those marginal spaces that I actually find interesting and exciting. It does come at a loss. And I think that, you know, there are limits. I think that what Jewish culture looks like or what Jewish practice looks like in Israel is a lot more creative than what it sometimes appears like in America.

Tomer Persico:
I’m surprised that Sara says that you think there’s more creativity about Jewish practice in Israel, because I mean, living here in the bay area, the panorama that diversity of minyans and congregations in shuls, all different kinds and spiritual and ecological reform, conservative reconstructionist. I mean, it is mind boggling it’s so gladdening, I mean, just to see that amount of different Jewish lives in congregations and communites is flourishing, and it’s very creative here. So just to say, I’m taking off my hat and kippah in front of what’s happening here in the bay area.

Elana Stein Hain:
What a rich conversation. Thank you both so much for helping bring to life questions about how practice helps people build their own personal culture, their family culture, their communal culture, and even the culture of the country that they live in. Really thank you so much for being with us.

Yehuda Kurtzer:
Well, thank you all for listening to our show and special, thanks to Elana Stein Hain, Sara Labaton and Tomer Persico. Identity/Crisis, the product of the Shalom Hartman Institute. It was produced this week byDavid Zvi Kalman and edited by Alex Dillonwith assistance from MiriMiller and music provided by So-called. To learn more about the Foundations for a Thoughtful Judaism curriculum, which was profiled in this week’s show. There’s tons of information on our website at Shalomhartman.org/foundations. We also want to know what you think about Identity/Crisis. You can rate and review us on iTunes to help more people find the show. And you can write to us at [email protected]. You can subscribe to our show on the apple podcast app, Spotify, SoundCloud, audible, and everywhere else podcasts are available. We’ll see you next week. And thanks for listening.

 

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