Sami: There are some Jewish spaces where I’ve been in, where I’ve been told, look at everyone around you who’s Reform or who’s secular. None of their kids are gonna be Jewish in 20 years.

Anna: Allowing for universalism and the ability to be open will allow people to figure out on their own why they do wanna be Jewish.

Yadid: What should we be doing tomorrow, a year from now and a decade from now to create this better Jewish future that we’re all imagining?

Yehuda: I want young Jews to say, I have what to offer to my community and to its thriving, and I’m gonna find the lane to do that.

Yadid: Welcome to Future Tense, a show that puts today’s biggest Jewish questions in the hands of the leaders of tomorrow. I’m Yadid Orlow.

Growing up at a Jewish summer camp. I often found myself reading books while everyone else was praying. As my friend sang with passion, and my counselors led tefillah with energy and conviction. I was lost in a world of fantasy and fiction.

It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy camp or Jewish life, I just didn’t believe in God. And no matter the language, translation, interpretation, or tune, the words of the siddur never really quite felt like mine. Did I enjoy reading? Certainly, but I did it because it was an infinitely more engaging and entertaining alternative to prayer. And as I felt an increasing sense of spiritual abnormality to my peers, a question began to emerge: Is there a Judaism that’s right for me? If there is, what does that Judaism look like, and what is it called?

As I transitioned from attending camp to working there, these questions continued to follow me, and now, as I leave the camp stage of life behind I still find myself wondering what I want my Judaism to look like. But as a slightly more future oriented decision maker, I’m now contemplating how to balance the things I want and enjoy right now. And the things I think will lead me to have the kind of Jewish life, family, and future that I believe in. I am no longer the child who reads for personal satisfaction, but have to look forward to what it will mean to be the parent of my own children.

Transitioning from considering which summer camp I will work at and where I’ll spend my Friday nights on college campuses to calculating which synagogue I plan on attending and where I’ll eventually send my kids to school signals a transition from personal enjoyment to sustainable value transmission. I highlight this distinction because, while I want a Judaism that can hold tradition and modernity side by side, I wonder if that’s a Judaism that I can actually raise my kids in.

While in theory, this harmony was conservative Judaism riding the line between Halakha Jewish law, and modern egalitarianism, practically, a majority of those communities don’t display that balance any longer. Across the country, those who tried to sustain both have, by and large, been forced to choose. Some congregants end up using cell phones in the hallway during services or driving during Shabbat, while others leave those communities in search of the few remaining spaces that still try to integrate both of these commitments.

And in this dissonance, I’m left asking, yet again, is there a Judaism that is right for me? If there is, what does that Judaism look like and what is it called?

I am turning to my co-host, Sami and Anna. Thank you both for joining me today.

Sami: Happy to be here.

Anna: Hello.

Yadid: So, Sami and Anna, I’m wondering—how do you imagine your personal Judaism of the future?

Anna: I think an ideal, which I’ve talked about with a lot of friends, even on Hevruta we’d joke about like a Hartman, commune, some version of like a really close knit community, a Jewish community, different people can practice different ways and they can go to different synagogues, but we have a central location to have events, to have meals, we raise our kids alongside each other. We enter each other’s houses, we’re part of each other’s families, but we are still close enough to outside areas for people to engage in the kinds of practice that they want.

I realize also a lot of these things follow along with what a kibbutz is, which at its foundation I think is a lovely concept and way of building community, and exposing your kids to different kinds of people that hold the similar value of love and respect and diversity.

Sami: I want what Anna has. I want what you want. That sounds great. I think maybe I would just add, I’ve loved the way I was raised. Shout out, gracias mama y papa, I think that the… being exposed to a diversity, sort of like a mishmash of Jewish ways of living and also non-Jewish ways of living, I, I really am someone who loves modernity and I’m like willing to take risks to sort of try and be exposed to the non-Jewish world in ways that I think other Jewish friends maybe aren’t, but I, I don’t know exactly how I would paint the picture of what I want my personal future to be like. I think what I can say though is I wanna raise my kids very similarly to how I was raised or try to reproduce it in a, in a similar fashion.

And so I think, you know, I’ll, I’ll tell you how I was raised. What my parents did for me and how I experienced it was. That they had a certain set of values that they instilled in me, and they had, you know, the practice that they, I think, ended up crystallizing in themselves that was doing Shabbat, you know, every week and revolving family visits to Mexico, where most of our family is, around Jewish holidays and, and making it, making Jewish holidays and tradition very important to us, but also allowing us to be exposed and actively exposing us to other Jewish traditions, to sending us to a Jewish school where most of the practice itself was very dissimilar from what we had at home.

And I think they were able to do that without feeling like I would stray too far from the tether. Because even if I did choose to become more observant or to marry someone, frankly, who wasn’t Jewish, or who was super observant, I think they would’ve been okay with it because they know they’ve instilled in me certain values, and that if I made a decision that was very different, it’s because I had a really good reason to do so.

I will say though that I’m a little bit worried about how reproducible that will be, because I think there are more risks now that I feel, for example, when thinking about sending my kids to Jewish schools and that they’re becoming—there’s a lot more polarity and division around Israel and Americans relationship to Israel around how it’s taught. I certainly am a little bit worried about exposing my future children to different ways of practice in a way that before would’ve allowed them to still not compromise on values. Now I think they’re gonna maybe enter spaces where potentially they’re gonna be meeting lots of value conflicts that might make them feel lost. So I’m not sure if I’ll actually be able to have what I imagine.

Yadid: Yeah, I mean, both of your answers are beautiful and incredible visions of the future. I think that this wrestling between—what was I raised in, what do I want for myself, what do I want for my kids, all comes into play and like the same as you said, this transmission of values feels really fundamental to that. It sounds like both of you has named—whether it be in a communal sense or in a school sense—the value of like the institution. And how there’s something about outsourcing Jewish development beyond the scope of your own parenting. That is really fundamental.

So I guess pushing a step further, I’m wondering like, how do you imagine, either in your own role or in large, the future of Judaism as an institution will change?

Anna: Hmm. I mean, I think, together with parenting, parenting and raising kids is not just about the parent, it’s also about the institutions that the parent is sending kids to. Ideally, the parent is almost as literate or as involved in the kid’s education and livelihood as the institution. So that, let’s say they go to an institution and they teach certain things, certain ideas or opinions that you don’t agree with, not, you know, a child is coming home saying they learned this stuff, and a parent saying, I have no idea about that. Or a child coming home and a parent saying, that’s completely wrong. But a child’s coming home and a parent’s saying, okay, let’s also learn other ways of looking at this, or other perspectives on the similar topic.

Especially thinking about like the way that I was raised, learning about Israel, I thought was very problematic. It was very like, black and white, and it was not expansive. And I think this is also just like a critique. Like there’s a way to teach an agenda that isn’t completely all-encompassing and degrading the ability to hold multiple perspectives, but it’s like being able to have those conversations with your kids in tangent with the things that they’re learning in these institutions.

Sami: Yeah. You know, I, I hadn’t thought so much about that sort of balance of, of parents being as literate as those institutions, ’cause I think in, in my experience, I did learn some things in school that my parents didn’t necessarily know about. And I think that was something that they considered, like do we want to send them to a place where like they’re gonna learn all these crazy things that we aren’t necessarily as involved in.

And actually that’s something that I really like about Hartman and I promise Hartman’s not asking me to say this, that I learned certain things on the Hevruta gap year program. A lot about sort of the, sociology and, and politics in Israel and the US in particular, where I came home and I felt like, man, I really wish my parents had a similar language to talk with me about this so that they could challenge what I learned and so they could sort of like guide me back.

And now they’re gonna go on a Hartman program and they’re gonna sort of have that same language and, and so I think institutions that are able to interact with both the children and the parents in a way that absolutely allows the parents to then respond to what the kids are taught and sort of still guide them in the way they want, that’s super ideal.

Yadid: Yeah, I mean, that reminds me of like, I know there’s institutions that exist, like I remember when I was in the West Coast, actually, there’s a great school there called Hausner, Gideon Hausner School, and I believe they do like kindergarten through eighth grade. And they’re very intentional to have learning opportunities for the parents. I think that’s really awesome, ’cause it’s actually saying, we know that we have a diverse set of parents, we know that you’re all bought into this ideology, we’re not gonna assume that you have these skills and this ability and this literacy, so we’re gonna offer it to you.

Anna: That’s really respectable. I think it’s also, it’s like, right, of course, part of it being like it’s both the parents and the institutions. It’s like, the reason I’m sending my kid to a school and not homeschooling them is I know I’m not fully literate in everything. I know I’m not capable. I know my strengths.

It’s also, it’s kind of like part of like—parenting and leadership, there are different things, but there are some overlaps in like knowing your strengths and knowing, like when you’re a leader, when you’re a parent, there are some things that are your responsibility in ways that you need to be able to talk to and care for your people and you recognize I’m, I’m not an expert in everything and so I bring other people as a part of my team to help my children understand the things that I can’t help.

But I think something that we keep going back to that’s important to recognize is those values. Values are not necessarily… they include parts of education and knowledge, but it’s—a value doesn’t have to be an opinion and a value doesn’t have to be. I’m gonna teach you the history of… I’m sorry, this is the first thing I thought of, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire. Like they’ll learn that in school.

But values of understanding multiple perspectives, values of understanding, maybe why we follow certain Orthodox practices. And even going back to the personal, I know for myself when I do eventually start a family and have kids like I grew up with keeping a kosher home and keeping a house that was shomer Shabbat and shomer the different chagim. I wanna have that for my kids too. And part of that is because I believe in the value of celebrating those holidays. I believe in the value of Shabbat. I think it’s my favorite part of Judaism. Not just because it’s like, I don’t know, ’cause we were told, we were told to do it. It’s like, I guess it’s good? It feels good?

But it’s like trying to instill your kids the deep understanding of even like the value of education and the value of learning from multiple sources is, is part of that. And how you can guide your kids in the way that they engage in those institutions.

Yadid: Yeah, I mean that’s fascinating. And thinking about these values and institutions and these conflicting almost forces, this feels like the perfect opportunity to welcome our guest, Yehuda Kurtzer. Yehuda Kurtzer is president of the Shalom Hartman Institute and host of the award-winning podcast Identity/Crisis. He’s a leading thinker on essential questions facing contemporary Jewish life with a focus on issues of Jewish peoplehood, the relationship between history and memory, and the questions of leadership and change in the Jewish community.

Thank you for joining us, Yehuda.

Yehuda: Thanks for having me.

Yadid: So this feels like a great opportunity to pass this to Sami, ’cause I knew you had a really great question.

Sami: Yeah. So I think Anna sort of finished our last conversation on a very positive note. I think it sounds like there’s a lot to be excited about, but what I had said earlier on was that I am a bit worried that it’ll be hard to reproduce what I was given, which was that we lived in this world where I could be exposed to many different types of practice, while not feeling like I’m gonna compromise my values. And that doesn’t mean not meeting people with different ideologies, I can do that, but I think I’m a bit worried to expose like young kids or even myself to places where we can’t really respect not only each other’s practices, differences, but our, our values.

And so do you think that there is a way for me as a future parent to transmit this value of openness that I liked being given without risking making my kid feel lost or like they’re gonna compromise the values that I care about?

Yehuda: Yeah, I, the answer is yes, there is a way to do it. And it’s just by deciding that those are your commitments and that’s the world that you want to build. And that sounds naive, but I think the reality is that as parents, as human beings, whatever ,relationships we have, we have a lot of agency over which values we care about and which ones we decide to emphasize. And you’d, you’d be surprised by the fact that you’ll find other people in the world who are eager for a more optimistic and positive vision of the future that you want to build than you might anticipate.

Now, I don’t wanna make light of the fact that, that, I agree with your assessment that there were aspects of previous eras of the American Jewish experience, that these were not quite the same challenges. I don’t, I don’t wanna pretend that like everything was great. I think that that’s not true. I think there are so many significant advances in and, and, and Stephanie and I talk about this a lot with our kids about certain basic, kind of moral norms were just not as good as they are today. So there’s been a lot of positive movement in the value systems that are available to our kids.

But there are areas where, okay, well, these communities are a little bit narrower and I’m choosing to be there as opposed to here where, I don’t know, this denominational choice feels imperfect, and this denominational choice feels equally imperfect, but for opposite reasons. There, those challenges are, are, are definitely there, but I, I kind of liked where you all started with what’s a vision of the Jewish life you want to create and produce for your families and partners and children or whoever else is in that story and friends. And if you, if you have a sense of that at your stage of life, great. What does it look like to actually get to work and bring it about?

Sami: I think I want to ask you, I liked your answer a lot, but I want to ask you to be more specific if I, if I could, because I think your answer maybe could apply to all Jews, but I’ve existed in, in a sphere around, we talked in a previous episode about Jewish adjacent folk and sort of being in, in a more secular Jewish environment, where I really liked this balance of feeling like I could live my life and explore other traditions and do all these things, but still feel tethered to my Judaism.

But there are some Jewish spaces where I’ve been in, where I’ve been told by the people who are there, who are maybe more Orthodox, look at everyone around you who’s Reform or who’s secular—none of their kids are gonna be Jewish. They’re not gonna be Jewish in 20 years. And I feel confident about my own connection to Judaism, but I mean, I’m worried that there’s some merit to them saying your specific version of Judaism doesn’t have a chance. And so I, I’m, I’m worried, like, is that something I should, I should be worried about?

Yehuda: I think that’s noise. I think it’s really noise. I think, look in general, anytime, if you look back at the last 250 years of Jewish history and said, let me pause the clock in 1840 and make demographic predictions of where the Jewish people are gonna be in 1890. So, take any spot in the last 250 years and project out demographically 50 years hence, all of your predictions would’ve been wrong.

And that’s partly because we’ve had very significant actual disruptions, antisemitism, the Holocaust, things like that. The creation of the state of Israel. There have been his significant historical events, but also because demography is widely understood by a lot of people as being about predicting the future, and at best it is a snapshot of the present, and oftentimes it’s a really imperfect snapshot of the present.

If you look at the Pew study over the last 30 to 40 years of Jewish identity in America, the biggest drop off, percentage wise, of “I grew up one way and I’m living a different Jewish life,” is from Orthodox to non-Orthodox. That is by far the biggest drop off.

Now I, I don’t wanna make light of the ways that assimilation sometimes moves people out of Jewishness entirely. That is very, very possible. But Reform has been dealing with this allegation and accusation since its founding. You’re doing a lightweight version of Judaism and it’s not gonna reproduce itself. Reform Judaism, I dun’t know, they just won the World Zionist Congress elections. Like they… I, I don’t know.

I just, I, I don’t, I feel like demographic prediction has this tyrannical hold on our communities and it allows people who feel really secure about the confidence of their own choices to mock and make light of other people’s choices. And I don’t, I don’t know why we wanna accept that. Why? What is it that’s pulling you or pushing you, or let me put it differently, and this is the harsh word, but what’s the insecurity that you have about your own choices around your identity that makes you want to believe that somebody saying to you that their choices are ones that are gonna endure in the future, and your choices are the ones are gonna be the ones that fail?

Sami: Yeah. Do, do you want me to answer that?

Yehuda: Yeah.

Sami: I think that… I said that I’m very glad that I was raised in a place where I could be very open to lots of different ways of being Jewish and non-Jewish alternatives to, you know, different facets of life. And I can’t exactly articulate what values or how certain values were instilled in me that made me so confident that I would continue being Jewish. I asked jokingly in a previous episode, like, why am I Jewish? It was a joke because I, I feel why I want to be Jewish and I, I know that that’s a very central part of who I am. And, you know, I’m a Mexican American Jew and have all these other facets of myself—Judaism’s pretty central to all of that.

But I do have a lot of friends who I think have had very similar upbringings to me and experiences who don’t feel nearly as confident that they want to be in a relationship with a Jewish person. Or they would, you know, happily have an intermarriage. And I know many products of intermarriage have been very committed Jews. But I feel like, if I can’t articulate to that person who’s accusing me of maybe being too light exactly what it is that’s making me as tied to Judaism as them, yeah, like maybe my openness would allow me to someday change my mind and say I actually, you know, I do have some issues with ethnocentrism and the nationality, I would… maybe the world will change. In other words, I’m more universalistic than particularistic and I know that that has risks.

Anna: I think, as a person which, sorry, I’m a person that was raised Orthodox and kind of dropped off a bit, but still like very much value and understand why that life is really good for people, my little brother just finished his second year of Yeshiva and he’s starting Hesder with, actually Yadid’s younger brother in the fall. And for him it’s wonderful.

I find it beautiful that different people are different people and we all bring different things to the table. I think it’s also, it’s difficult to say like, I want the Jewish people or my people or my community to continue. I also want people to get to exist how they are and exist in a way that feels best to them.

But, so it’s like maybe someone then deciding maybe Judaism isn’t… not for me, I don’t think is as terrible a thing as a lot of people do. And I think that allowing for universalism and the ability to be open will allow people to figure out on their own why they do wanna be Jewish. I, I think I had that for myself, like post-Orthodox institutions. Hevruta for me was a huge transformative experience of like, oh my God, there are so many other ways to do this. I don’t have to completely leave this identity or completely leave this community. I’m even like, I’m still a part of my Modern Orthodox community at home. I don’t go to things as much as I used to, but I still feel part of that community because I was able to see the various ways that I can exist as a Jew and still feel confident in my Jewish identity, even if it’s changed.

Sami: I also think it would be crazy for us not to mention the ways that politics around Israel is making many liberal, more secular Jews, they, they’re being forced to, sometimes inappropriately, to question whether, you know, they should be, can be Zionist and liberal. And then for a lot of Jews, Zionists and Jewish go hand in hand, and so they’re being forced to be in a uncomfortable position where they’re being told you can be Jewish or liberal.

Obviously, I don’t think that’s a correct division to make, but those are the types of questions that I think some Jews are being forced to reckon with. And I think the conclusion some people are gonna come to is, well, I just, I don’t wanna be [part of this complex identity that is making me feel like I have to be, you know, liberal and X, Y, Z in one place, but not in another place.

Yadid: Well just, Sami, you’re saying a lot of the language that you’re saying actually sounds like an episode from Identity/Crisis Yehuda that you did with Stephanie, where I remember you used language that sounded like, if you say to your kids, either you do this or you’re wrong, and then they do the thing that’s wrong, you lose your tether to them. And it feels like there’s… we’re having a lot of conversations in parallel about how we’re gonna be parents and how we’re gonna run institutions. And it feels like this is a testament to that, ’cause you have the, how are institutions gonna say this is what’s right and this is what’s wrong, and how is that gonna mean that they lose their tether to the kids?

Yehuda: Yeah. I think both Stephanie and I took the position, take the position with our kids, still, that we’re very clear about the things that we care about. And at the same time, our relationship with them is not contingent on them choosing to identify with those choices. And that’s a, you’re always in a, you’re always in a gamble.

I mean, this is, I may have even quoted this on that podcast, but the book Far From the Tree had a big impact on me. It’s worth reading if you haven’t read it yet, in which the author profiles, all these cases, each chapter is a case of, of children who make very different choices from their parents, and some of them are genuinely choices. I mean, even includes, I think it includes like children of law-abiding parents who are murderers. But then there are also cases where it’s not about choice, it’s about, you know, queer kids of straight parents. Or, and a kind of famous cases is deaf children of hearing parents.

And the kind of overall thesis of the book is that we tend to think that identity is conveyed vertically parent to child, but in many, many cases, identity is acquired horizontally. When you’re a person who realizes, the people who most resemble you, who help you understand who you are, are not your parents, but it’s peers who are having a similar experience.

And the radical thing I felt reading that book was, what happens when we treat our children as total strangers? Not all the time, but I mean as a lens. By that I mean, what happens when we offer them the curiosity of how we would relate to a stranger? The generosity of, wow, your choices are really interesting and they’re not my own. It’s like a really humbling experience because you wind up thinking that, and I find this as a parent all the time, like, I can’t understand why you would make the choices that you’re making. And then you take a moment and you’re like, oh, that’s because you are a different person than me, even though you, you kind of look like me and we share genetic material, you’re not, and, and actually, I found that to be like, unbelievable mussar, unbelievable like, like… take it easy. You’re not in the business.

Anna: It’s liberating.

Yehuda: It’s liberating. You’re not in the business of replicating yourself. The best you can do is say like, these are things that are important to me and you’re really important to me, and I wanna tell you why they’re important to me, and I want to hope that they inform and influence your choices, and if you ultimately decide to do something different, that’s not a judgment on me. It doesn’t mean I was a lousy parent. It means that you’re a different person who’s decided to chart a different narrative for the world.

Sami: Do you think that’s true even for the case of the law-abiding parents and the murderer child though? Like is there not a point at which you might say, man, like they’re doing so much that is beyond what I wish that they could do, that I want some control back.

Yehuda: What are you gonna do? Yeah, I mean, I would, I don’t think there’s anything that, God forbid, my children should ever wind up in prison, I don’t think there’s anything that they would do that would prevent me from visiting them.

Yadid: It just, it feels like this is, it’s like a means to an end. Like this reminds me, there was a rabbi at Yeshiva Orayta, where three of the four of us actually have ties to.

Anna: Woot woot. Our brothers were in Yeshiva together.

Yehuda: That’s where my kid is.

Anna: Oh, there you go.

Yadid: There’s a rabbi at Orayta, and he, actually, I heard this from Rabbi Dardik, and he was explaining to me that there was a, a lesson he got from Akedat Yitzchak that actually, we’re asked to treat every kid that we have as if they’re adopted. And as if that they’re not ours. And so if they act out or, and if something happens, it’s like, oh, maybe this was before I adopted them. Like maybe this is something that’s actually not something wrong with my parenting and so I’m gonna treat it with the utmost care and understanding.

I think the slippery slope of that, which is sort of, what if there are things outside of your control? And what if the world is changing in a way that you actually wanna pull them in closer and you want them to be more like you because you don’t like the way the world is going?

Anna: Yeah. So this brings me to kind of what we’ve talked about or talked around is the current political state, and how the immense amount of division that’s been happening and growing within the Jewish community, I see it at school, I see it online, I see it in public spaces, I see it in educational spaces. A really big division. The war is, I feel like intensifying it, more access to social media is also making things a lot more interface.

Just thinking about how this current state will impact, kind of the future of the Jewish people. And of course how the conflict is quote unquote “resolved,” saying quote unquote because I don’t know if it’ll ever be completely resolved, of course, that’s the ideal, will also impact this. But like, how is what’s going on right now in these tensions between Zionist Jews and anti-Zionist Jews, and the polarization of different peoples? What’s gonna happen?

Yehuda: Yeah, no. I’m very worried about the consequences of this war for everything that you’re talking about. And it’s on multiple fronts. It’s the war itself, it’s Israel policy, but it’s also the ways in which the war has changed the antisemitism conversation, rejiggered allies and alliances here in North America. And a lot of this has actually been percolating for a long time. I think it’s a myth that this was kind of triggered by the war.

Anna: It’s been happening.

Yehuda: It’s an accelerant. I’m particularly worried about the collapsing of important political calculations that Jewish institutions have to make vis-a-vis one another. And the relationships for individuals, families, and communities.

And this is just, it’s kind of a normal and natural thing that this happens, but I, I’ve taken pretty clear positions throughout the war that there has been a real alignment of the Jewish institutional landscape and that the result is that there are some institutions that were kind of, for a long time hanging around the left side of the Jewish community, but insisting that they were part of the Jewish community in one way and basically have located themselves outside of that story, and that that’s okay. That happens periodically in institutional, in organizational structures. That’s going to inevitably happen.

But I am worried when that bleeds into—well then that person is not my child. They’re not part of my family. I’m gonna sever personal relationships. Now those relationships can get tried by moments like this, and they kind of should be tried, and that’s the work of why relationships matter and why we push through to try to heal those relationships, why we try to make it work. But it’s normal that they’re gonna be tested.

Right now what I’m really worried about is not the institutional realignment, it’s the… it’s the bleeding over into the toxicity of personal relationships and it, it goes to what we were talking about before. My identity, the complexity of my identity is not the same as my ideology, the things that I believe in, and that’s not the same as the wide available network of relationships that I can cultivate in the world.

And what’s happened to us in this political climate is that we’re collapsing. All three of those we’re saying, I am not a complicated person—I’m a person who holds to these viewpoints, and therefore here, I’ve now circumscribed the limit of relationships that I have in the world. To be really human beings, you have to resist that collapsing. Here’s my complicated identity, and here are some things I believe in and some of those things that I believe in put me in relationship with others and some of them test those relationships, but those relationships bring things to my life that are beyond my ideological commitments. And they stretch our identities a whole bunch of ways. That’s an interesting conversation of how to grow as opposed to what feels now, which is so narrow.

Sami: And how do you, I mean, I think if someone listens to you say that perhaps they can be inspired to become that way if they’re already too siloed. And I think I’m very disposed to act in the way that you’re, you’re prescribing. But what do I do about those people that I see who are, are my friends, who I haven’t seen in a while that I now see online shrinking that circle, like what can I do to encourage people in my life in general to have people appreciate that level of complexity?

Anna: I also, can I also actually add onto that? Is also, I mean this is kind of, I’m gonna do a slight thing into like overlap of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism of seeing people post things or do things, calling them out on it and say, hey, you have crossed this line, and them not being willing to listen to you because of, because of let’s say your Israel stance. And then it’s like your, your Jewish identity, you know, is almost like irrelevant in that conversation because of your Israel stance.

Similar to… it’s like, how do we remedy that? How do I, how do I work to engage? You know, and it’s like I can try and be a person that is that middle ground or understands multiple perspectives, which is I think where I’m at right now. But still, how do you try to fix that and how do you navigate those conversations?

Yehuda: No shortcuts. There’s really no shortcuts. I mean, you know, over the span of the last two years, and like all of you, I’m sure I’ve had relationships tested, but like, have you ever had a situation where you had like a really unpleasant interaction with someone online? Sometimes in a public environment, you know, a comment on this or that, and then you kind of run into them and you feel sheepish? That’s like really instructive. It means that your interaction was mediated by inhuman conditions. You were having a, you weren’t really having a conversation with someone. You were having kind of like a competitive performance with them.

The way that you communicate online is not the way you communicate with human beings. I’ve had conversations over the past couple of years with colleagues who deeply disagreed with things that I wrote, or I disagreed with things that they wrote, and both of us, by the way, we’re doing our jobs, in a whole bunch of ways, and then when we actually got to sit together in person, there were phases of times where we couldn’t really look at each other, and then we cried together, a little bit, about this.

My colleague Sarah Wolf, who teaches over at JTS, she’s a Hartman fellow, described how even amidst the conflict and protest on the Columbia campus, she had students who were on opposite sides of the encampments who protected each other against doxing. And she was like, nobody sees that or understands that because those students actually have, you know, social bonds and tethers and relationships that don’t require of them to allow the political circumstances to pull them apart.

So there’s no shortcuts to any of this. I think… I think we, I think there’s so many opportunities for shortcuts when you think of the world and your relationships as comprised of ideological contest, then, you know, we just move into our camps, we fight about these positions.

What you’ve described about your experience in Hevruta was like, okay, now you all are stuck with each other. You don’t like what this person says, you don’t like their choices, but that’s what happens when human beings actually can really encounter the deep differences between them, but understand that maybe more, maybe there’s more that connects us to one another than we like to admit. And maybe we recognize that like the human heart is not really an ideological organ. It’s not what, it’s not what, like what human beings are supposed to kind of rely on. So I don’t know. I, it’s a long way of saying there’s no shortcuts, any of this.

Yadid: It feels like a lot of that question, at least you guys can correct me if I’m wrong, Sami, Anna, it’s coming from a place of like dread, almost of like, the world is getting really bad and scary and polarized. And I’m wondering, totally pulling a quote from an article that you wrote, Yehuda, when you announced the emergence of Wellspring. I’m not gonna say it verbatim.

Anna: Love Wellspring.

Yadid: Yeah. Wellspring is the best. Way too much of American Jewish education is predicated on fear of the Jewish future rather than enthusiasm for it. And I’m wondering, Sami, Anna, and I are three of like, the emerging Jewish leaders of the future. I’m wondering if in like a very tangible, real way, and actually moving away from the philosophical and the ideological, what should we be doing tomorrow, a year from now and a decade from now to create this better Jewish future that we’re all imagining?

Yehuda: Amazing. So some of it you’re doing right now, not just on this podcast, but in the ways that I’ve seen you preparing for this and talking to each other and when you’re talking, when the mics are off, even just engaging in a conversation of like, how, how am I gonna want to raise a family? What values do I wanna bring into that? The resistances that you all demonstrate towards the way that people misunderstand you, speak over you—like to fight against that, to insist that like adults talking about what young people, older adults talking about, what young people are and what they represent does not capture the totality of who you are.

I think the kind of dreams of whether, it’s like a kibbutz-like community, I don’t, you know, yeah… for better or worse, right?

Anna: For better or worse. I know it has complexities. It’s more of an ideal as opposed to real, but yeah.

Yehuda: Great. That’s an incredible way to, to, to think about your future. It’s, it’s not, I, I think that what, I think that one of the things that is really difficult about the way that the Jewish community is designed is that we have a totally different structure for what Jewish community should look like when you’re 18 to 22, than any other Jewish community in the world once you graduate college.

Between 18 and 22, you have basically one or two spaces on campus that are designed for a whole variety of Jews from different backgrounds to come together, observe Shabbat together, care for each other, et cetera. But you all belong to this larger community, which is a university campus. And then when you leave that you have to start making choices. Do I belong to this synagogue? Do I belong to that one? Most likely Jews between the age of 22 and 40 just don’t belong to any of them. And smart Jewish communities recognize that. Stop worrying about the fact that nobody comes and just say, we’ll catch them a little bit later. We’ll give them opportunities and pathways to participate in Jewish life, but not to get too worried about it.

But that’s like a terrible design. And if you’re able to be creative around—great, when I graduate college or a few years later, I’m gonna start thinking about what responsibilities I have to build my own Jewish community.

This was a big part of our young adult life. We didn’t find a shul that we liked. In fact, we found several that we found quite offensive. And we just started our own. And we had some of the skills and the leadership skills to do that kind of thing. But ultimately it was just we wanted to have Jewish community. And we knew we were in proximity of other people who also wanted Jewish community as well, and were willing to push past the fact that we weren’t really friends. We didn’t believe in all the same things, but we wanted to be together.

I think one other thing that’s worth thinking about, and it goes back to that whole ideology versus relationships thing, so where I am now, as kind of a dues-paying member of a synagogue, is obviously I spend a lot of time thinking about ideas and ideologies when I’m at work. Very passionate about them. I’ve become a lot less ideological when I think about the communities that I belong to as a Jew, because I’ve started to see that the old-school technologies that Jewish communities are predicated upon are about care. Am I with a group of people who I can care for when they’re sick, who will visit me when I lose a relative, whose kids I’m looking out for and they’re looking out for mine?

Like I know it sounds like it sounds small compared to the, “do they believe in the same things that I believe in,” but it has a lot more weight in the long run in terms of like, in terms of the stuff that makes you feel more human when you belong to a community. And you’re not like, great. My community is a rally. It’s like my community is the people who I care for and who care for me. And I, I don’t know. There might be something useful to be thinking about that now in life. What does Jewish community, what could Jewish community look like? Less about, what do people believe? What do they think about Israel? But like, how do we need each other? How do we depend on each other? Does that make sense? Does that resonate?

Yadid: Yes, and—I wonder how often or how many times, this actually reminds me of our conversation in the previous episode where we talked about like, the different spaces that we wanted to create. How many times can you make another shul before all the old shuls die out? And what does it mean that people are taking it into their own hands? And maybe, I know you’ve referenced this in numerous articles and podcasts like, a lot of people want community; not a lot of people wanna put their head down and become a rabbi to lead it. And there’s a lot of people that want things and want to consume things. And maybe this is a product of the 18 to 22, being a consumer, what should we be doing to produce?

Yehuda: Well, I’ll just tweak your sentence a little bit. It’s not how many new shuls can be created before the old ones die out? It’s actually “while” the old ones die out. These things, this is an organic process that’s happened in Jewish life for millennia, which is we create new things while other things run their course. And sometimes they don’t die fast enough. And sometimes you create a situation, there was a good, good situation on the Upper West Side where an emerging congregation ultimately merged with a shrinking congregation and now they share space together. That’s like a good story. There should be more of those types of things, more mergers and acquisitions in Jewish life.

But it’s important to not feel as I was oftentimes made to feel—you’re starting something new instead of joining something else; you are doing something wrong, right? You should be just belonging to something that sucks, as opposed to creating something that you want that’s just like a bizarre thing that we demand of people.

So when it comes to the leadership crisis, this is not just about rabbis. It’s about a larger concern that fewer and fewer young people are pursuing lives of public service and rabbis are just one example of that. Is it viewed as rewarding? Is it viewed as toxic? Do people actually want to be shapers of the societies that they’re in? I don’t think, it’s not like I go around telling all young people they should be rabbis. That’s insane.

What I, what I do think is that I want young Jews to say, I have what to offer to my community and to its thriving, and I’m gonna find the lane to do that. And if it’s being a rabbi because the work you want to do is pastoral and spiritual and educational—great. We need you and I want our community to be more upfront at saying, we actually need you. We want you, as opposed to, are you sure you wanna make that choice? And if it’s not that, if, if you’re passionate about going into finance—great. Be a great lay leader. Be a philanthropist. You could have a huge impact in Jewish life that way.

And there’s countless other types of examples. So we need to cultivate more of a conversation that’s not a—part of the reason to not be talking about fear of the future is because when people are scared of the future, they just won’t wanna be involved in shaping it. And if you basically say, like we talked about earlier, the future of Jewish life is totally different every 50 years, then, like, what might this look like is totally dependent on all of you.

And I guess I’m gonna flip this question back to all of you. Like you’ve done several of these podcasts, you’ve talked to each other, you’ve talked to other Hartman scholars. What are you thinking differently about?

Sami: I mean, it’ll take me some time, certainly, to process, I think, all that we’ve talked about. But I think something that you touched on about intentionality earlier, ot’s something I’m thinking about a lot, which is before coming into these conversations, I thought I wasn’t a very intentional person because I mixed up intentionality with assuredness. I thought, oh, to be intentional it means I have to know what it is that I want and to be able to pinpoint it, where really, I think, practicing intentionality is just making sure that you’re always exploring or trying to sort of think about those things, even if you’re not reaching conclusions that you always like.

And I think it also ties in a little bit to what you said about in-person contact being important, sort of across political divides. I think, I’m not gonna be a rabbi most likely, but I am very interested in conflict resolution and mediation and how American Jews relate to each other over conflict in Israel, and I’ve certainly felt that in-person contact is super important.

And I think there are some times where I’ve gone into a conversation, mostly in person, or online, that have gone poorly in person, that have gone very well or sometimes haven’t gone super well. Even the ones that haven’t gone well, or the ones where I felt like I didn’t make a new friend out of this, or we didn’t understand each other well, I don’t think I’ve ever had one that felt like I would regret having done this. I think I will always take the opportunity to meet someone I disagree with, you know, because I know that it’ll help me in sort of practicing intentionality and helping me figure out how I can contribute more to the Jewish world around me.

Anna: I was gonna say, kind of adding onto what Sami was saying is, I think I’m pretty good at having conversations with people I disagree with, but it’s something I wanna continue to work on and get better at.

And I think thats something that has come up for me a lot throughout this, is how important that is. And I think with certain issues, especially in conversations surrounding Israel, I feel like I have experience with people and communities and events on like complete opposite ends, and personal relationships with people on complete, both opposite ends. And so I feel like that’s a kind of thing where I can disagree with people, but I have a baseline of respect and understanding of why they think what they think, why they feel what they feel, and not to denigrate, not to denigrate it. There are some other issues where I don’t give people that same level of respect.

And I was thinking about the thing you use. You know, I have, you know, childhood friends who I see now who I love. They have some opinions that I strongly disagree with, but I still love and appreciate them. But there are other people who have those same opinions that I completely disagree with, and I’m like, they’re terrible people, I won’t talk to them. Why am I not giving those people that same level of respect? And so that’s something I wanna be better about.

And also tying to what you’re saying towards the end, like I also do feel very hopeful. I think I did before, but again, it’s being in spaces like this and being with my co-hosts and being with you, people who really care about a future of Jewish people, people who I know will continue to put in the work, whether or not these spaces already exist. I know that we’ve all been part of creating spaces like that already, or continuing to work on those spaces, like I think gives me a lot of hope for the future of Jewish peoplehood.

Yadid: Yeah, that’s fascinating, ’cause actually, when I think about the future, I’m actually very tense. Because like as I’ve thought about Judaism more, it seems more and more like an ecosystem and it’s very codependent and there’s almost like a perfect symbiosis that’s been achieved. And we’re getting very polarized as a world.

And I’m afraid that even though we’re having these conversations and they’re very rich, we are siloed in our conversations, and it’s great that we have pluralism and it’s great that we have these diverse conversations about deep and meaningful concepts, and we’re doing them in a studio as opposed to with thousands of people, and it’s frightening.

Yehuda: Look, hopefully this reaches thousands of people and, and I, I wanna say two things to what you all just said. One is I love the language around intentionality. We talk a lot in our work at Hartman about how sometimes the activity is the outcome. It’s part of a larger resistance against the notion that, you know, the distinction between means and ends, that you’re supposed to be so obsessed with the ends that it doesn’t matter what means you engage with, which is kind of at play in our democracies right now.

But the same is true oftentimes thinking about Jewish education and Jewish community. You wanna have an outcome where people talk respectfully to each other, where they engage across difference, where they can have Shabbat meals together—you do that, and then you have the outcome.

And that’s true here. You’re talking to each other, you are thinking out loud. You are taking risks in imagining your own future. You’re talking about networks of relationships and friends that you’re struggling with. That activity ultimately becomes an outcome. You start developing habits of ways of being in the world and then the world, at least around you, starts to accommodate that.

And I guess one thing, just to think optimistically about your ecosystem metaphor. I, I, first of all, that ecosystem’s never been that great, for what it’s worth. But maybe even just thinking, like, staying with the metaphor, there are times when in an ecosystem, parts of it are undergoing some desertification. So that’s, we know that, right. What was once a healthy part of the ecosystem is now struggling. How do I move to a different part of that ecosystem? Or what creative energy do I use to re-reverse some of that process?

The key point is to never lose a sense of agency about the Jewish future. The minute you get to that place of this is not in my control, these conditions are something that I can’t work with, the minute you make that choice, you are down a fatalist rabbit hole. And I guarantee you that that future will be exactly as bleak as you anticipate it will be. Never, you can never lose that. You just say, you know, and I say this a lot, we just don’t get to choose what era of Jewish history were born into. I would say this one is still pretty good compared to virtually every other time Jews have been alive.

Yadid: A golden age of sorts.

Yehuda: You don’t get—of sorts. You don’t get to choose what era of Jewish history you’re born into. You just get to choose what kind of Jew you want to be in that era. And once you, once you get to that place, you can say, great, now I have, I have a lot of control over who I am, what I want, and what I wanna see, and I gotta get to work doing it.

Yadid: Thank you so much for sharing that with us. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for joining us, Yehuda.

Yehuda: Thank you all.