by feygele · Thursday, April 17th, 2008
We’ve already mentioned the National Havurah Committee’s Summer Institute on Jewschool once or twice this year, but let’s make it a hat trick.
The Summer Institute is a week of learning and teaching with 300+ of your closest friends from across North America (and a few other places too). To quote BZ, “if a multigenerational Jewish community were inclusive of educated laypeople, respectful of individuals with or without families, and open to experimentation, would it be a place for 20-and-30-something Jews like [me/you/us]? Yes.”
And financial aid is available!
This year the National Havurah Committee’s Summer Institute has a significant amount of financial aidavailable! We are committed to making the Institute affordable for people of all ages and backgrounds, and encourage people to apply regardless of need level, through reduced fees and travel grants.
But please apply soon - the deadline for the first round of scholarships and travel grants is May 1. After May 1, less aid will be available and assistance will be based on available funds. Click here for more information about financial aid.
In addition, our amazing Everett Fellowship program has a May 12 deadline for applications. Anyone ages 22-32 can apply for Everett Fellowships, which are for “young adults who have demonstrated their potential to be advocates for Jewish causes and who are actively engaged in defining their post-college participation in the Jewish community.” It includes free tuition and room and board. More information can be found here.
As always, you can find the full Institute brochure available for download on the website.
We encourage people to register as soon as possible to ensure a place in the courses of their choosing.
Can’t wait to see you in August!
[Photos are of the 2005, 2006, and 2007 Everett Fellows.]
by BZ · Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
It’s not just the New York Times anymore — independent minyanim have merited a story on the influential progressive political blog OpenLeft!
Amanda Milstein of Living Liberally writes about how participants in independent progressive Jewish communities are being inspired through their communities to get involved in social justice work or (through the social networks connected to these communities, since the communities themselves are non-profits and can’t endorse candidates) political activism.
Joelle Novey is one of the people who helps run an independent minyan called Tikkun Leil Shabbat in D.C. Every time they meet someone from a social justice organizations speaks, and provides participants with ways of getting involved with the cause that they are working for.
“We’ve heard [talks about how we could repair the world] about security guards organizing, efforts to clean up the Anacostia River, the local fight for marriage equality, activism to stop the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, and…more… There are 150-200 folks at each of our gatherings, and almost 500 on our email list…We’re placing ongoing social justice work at the center of our Jewish community life in a way that feels unprecedented and important,” she said.
Full story.
by sarah · Thursday, March 13th, 2008
Indie minyaneers…get your accessories! My minyan (the Mission Minyan in San Francisco) launched this beaut of a bencher this morning. We don’t actually stand to fundraise that much with it, but we wanted to get more Shabbat shwag out there into a community that - let’s be honest - doesn’t see that many weddings in any given year (Yours Truly’s efforts notwithstanding.)
I have a fantasy that other minyans will follow suit, and I can put together a collection of minyan loot from all over the country. Get on it, ya’ll. I want my DC Minyan mousepad and my Hadar frisbee!
by shamirpower · Monday, January 7th, 2008
This past Shabbat afternoon, I enjoyed a sunny walk to the historic Kane Street Synagogue in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. While it may resemble your average Conservative shul in stature and empty seats, I was pleasantly surprised that the services were lay lead in the rabbi’s absence, and halfway through the (full kriyah) Torah reading, it was announced that one could opt to join a niggun circle or Torah reading upstairs.
This recent transplant from the upper west side has found quite an enjoyable shabbat community here in Brooklyn. While Crown Heights, Midwood, Flatbush and other neighborhoods toward the east are still primarily occupied by the Orthodox community, I’m pleased to say that egal minyan hopping in the Carroll Gardens/Park Slope area is quaint but sufficient.
After shul I joined a group of 8 folks, half of whom had made it to davening that morning. Following a delicious pescetarian (though vegan-friendly) meal, I retired to the couch to read up on the latest issue of Time Out New York. The theme, “Get Clean” focuses on New Year’s resolutions where a variety of writers (under pseudonyms) reflect on an area of their life they’d like to clean up. Sugar, antidepressants, and lateness make the list. What else would you imagine on this list? And if you saw the headline “No Religion” could you have anticipated that the “How to detox yourself” would prescribe Kehilat Hadar?
More »
by feygele · Sunday, January 6th, 2008
BZ already linked to one, but that’s just not enough! A big shout out to this month’s Zeek, which includes four articles on indie minyans.
Check them all out!
by BZ · Friday, December 14th, 2007
(Crossposted to Mah Rabu)
Last week I posted some initial thoughts on the Spiritual Communities Study survey results, and then ZT posted a second round. Since then, they’ve made some revisions to the report, incorporating suggestions from us and other bloggers, so the squeaky wheel has gotten the grease. As crazy as it sounds, I’m now posting a third round of commentary on the survey.
As Desh has pointed out, these results should silence those who claim that independent minyan participants are motivated by selfishness and narcissism, in contrast with conventional synagogues and their participants who are committed to the broader community. In addition to the data that Desh cites, the results show that independent minyan participants have higher “yes” rates than synagogue members on the questions “I have a strong sense of belonging to the Jewish people” and “I have a special responsibility to take care of Jews in need around the world”. (The report didn’t list the results for the question “I have a Jewish responsibility to care for people in trouble (as with Darfur or Katrina)”, which would also be interesting to see.) Moreover, though there are no comparable numbers for synagogue members, the survey also shows that 95% of independent minyan participants have been invited to a Shabbat meal by someone in their community in the last year, and 86% have invited others. These results come within a few days of another study showing that people are leaving conventional congregations because this sense of community is missing. (Of course, this isn’t true of all synagogues. Kol hakavod to any community of whatever structure whose participants are committed to each other and to the larger world.)
More »
by zt · Thursday, December 6th, 2007
Thanks to BZ for sharing his initial thoughts on the recent “Emergent” community study.
I’ll start by sharing two surprises.
Surprise 1: Lots of the Communities are in Places Other than NY or LA
Only 40% of communities in the study were in NY or CA. According to the 2006 Jewish Year Book about 2.8M of the US’s 6.5M Jews (43%) live in NY or CA. The numbers don’t quite match because the yearbook numbers aren’t by city, but it is clear that the popular myth that independent minyanim only exist in NYC is unfounded.
Surprise 2: They Used the Phrase Had Romance With a Non-Jew.
More »
by BZ · Monday, December 3rd, 2007
(Crossposted to Mah Rabu)
This will probably be the first of multiple posts about the Preliminary Findings from the 2007 National Spiritual Communities Study (by the S3K Synagogue Studies Institute and Mechon Hadar), since everyone has something to say about it. The JTA and Ha’aretz have already run stories summarizing the results, so I’m going to focus on color commentary here. For the play-by-play, I recommend going to the report itself.
The survey organizers have said that this report is just the beginning, and that more detailed analysis will be released later, including data about individual communities. This is good news, because even though this survey provides valuable information about a demographic that has not been studied quantitatively before, the value of lumping Kol Zimrah and Darkhei Noam together into the same pool is still limited. I eagerly await the fuller results, so that we can read about the diversity among independent minyanim, just as we have now had a chance to see how their populations differ from synagogue populations.
More »
by LastTrumpet · Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
In non-Annapolis news, the Times this morning reports:
Without a building and budget, Tikkun Leil Shabbat is one of the independent prayer groups, or minyanim, that Jews in their 20s and 30s have organized in the last five years in at least 27 cities around the country. They are challenging traditional Jewish notions of prayer, community and identity.
In places like Atlanta; Brookline, Mass.; Chico, Calif.; and Manhattan the minyanim have shrugged off what many participants see as the passive, rabbi-led worship of their parents’ generation to join services led by their peers, with music sung by all, and where the full Hebrew liturgy and full inclusion of men and women, gay or straight, seem to be equal priorities.
Members of the minyanim are looking for “redemptive, transformative experiences that give rhythm to their days and weeks and give meaning to their lives,” said Joelle Novey, 28, a founder of Tikkun Leil Shabbat, whose name alludes to the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, or repairing the world. It is an experience they are not finding in traditional Jewish institutions, she said.
In my mind, there’s nothing in the article most of us don’t already know, but hopefully publicity on this level will help the broader Jewish institutional world wake up a bit. That being said, while the Havurah movement has had notable impact on institutional Judaism, it is still around, and still countercultural. So who knows what the future will hold.
Full story.
by shamirpower · Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
From David Basior in the new media source, Jew-ish Seattle:
The oppression of Jews here is about our invisibility. Much of this is internalized, and we as Jews find ourselves not expressing our Judaism publicly — to our co-workers, neighbors, volunteer/activist organizations, for example. How it is experienced by those of us as “out” Jews is often by being tokenized or by confronting workplaces, communities, individuals, or educational institutions as entirely unaware of any Jewish culture, holidays or history in general, thus making it even harder to show ourselves.
Seattle Jews, weigh in!
Full story.
by YehuditBrachah · Sunday, October 14th, 2007
Over at Nextbook, one woman’s musings about the role of The Jewish Catalog (the first, need you ask?) in her life and on her parents’ shelf.
I like the way she describes the ubiquitous nature of The Jewish Catalog.
““On the ‘hip’ level,” she told me recently, “we were probably down in the negative range.”
But some things were, perhaps, unavoidable then, like inane news about Lindsay Lohan is today. By the time I was born in 1975, our house was punctuated with little emblems of the era; these shone for me like beacons. Despite my parents’ heavy Neil Diamond predilection, for instance, some Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel albums seemed to have fallen from a planet of fairies into our living room. My parents had chunky macramé plant hangers and trippy Marimekko hangings on the wall. And on their bookshelf was an oversized red volume called The Jewish Catalog.
The Jewish Catalog, a 320-page tome first published in 1973, was not necessarily a hippie artifact. But it had a profound effect on me growing up that I associated with hippie culture, subtly signaling that Judaism, like life, was a sort of groovy pursuit to be embarked upon however you wished.”
I had a similarly surprising experience while searching through my bubbie’s shelves a few years ago for a siddur; I found two copies of Gates of Repentance with High Holiday tickets from 1973 and, you guessed it, an original copy of The Jewish Catalog. My bubbie was even farther from the world of happy hippies and their handmade kippot; she was the one yelling at my mother to be in by 11pm when she was in college and at my father to cut his hair and get a job.
About integrating past experience with Judaism with a do-it-yourself spirit:
“Most of their friends had copies of The Jewish Catalog, and for my mother, it was a user-friendly guide to a Jewish life she had never actually lived. Suddenly making Shabbat dinners, she mined it for recipes and information on the order of blessings. Celebrating holidays other than Passover and Rosh Hashanah, she consulted it for instructions on how to, say, decorate a sukkah. For my yeshiva-educated father, who was well acquainted with much of the information contained in the Catalog, it was meaningful in a different way. Like many kids who grew up Orthodox in the generation following the Holocaust, he’d grown up thinking Judaism was a strict, dour affair, but the catalog was evidence to him that in fact it could be fun. Together, my parents used it to help craft an earnest, positive Jewish household. And when I discovered it on their bookshelf, The Jewish Catalog let me believe that somewhere out there beyond the cut lawns and latticework sidewalks of suburban Chicago was an even greater Jewish fantasy world where everyone really did sit around crocheting yarmulkes and sewing needlepoint challah covers, and they looked really happy doing it. Jews looking happy being Jewish. Amazing.”
What will our generation of thinkers and innovators’ contribution to this spirit be? Will it be a book? Will it be havurot that last? Will it be our blogs? And can this maybe move from fantasy to reality (or has it already done so)?
Full article here.
by YehuditBrachah · Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
For all you out there in the “Maybe Rabbis Club,” as my friends and I affectionately titled it (I left the club a few years later to join the “Future Rabbis Club”), now is the time to check out Hebrew College Rabbinical School.
I know I’ve written a little about the school and what we do, and I have a post I need to write about Art Green’s amazing convocation speech [you can listen to him talk about kabbalah on NPR's Fresh Air here], but here’s the deal: Hebrew College Rabbinical School is where the jam is. Seriously.
And for those of you contemplating service as your life path, but who might be nervous about lacking denominational affiliation, joining a new endeavor, job prospects, blah blah blah all the things I thought meant I couldn’t apply to Hebrew College, think again. It took major pushing from my mentor (you can see us celebrating her installation as Dean of the Rabbinical School below) to get me to apply, and now I couldn’t imagine going anywhere else to prepare myself to be a revolutionary in the empowerment-based, text-saavy, joyful, meaningful, creative, independent Jewish future I (and I suspect many of us) are working to build.
“What does a transdenominational rabbinical school look like?” many people wonder. It’s surprisingly simple. For those of us who have ever been to a pluiralistic Jewish retreat, gathering, or celebration, it looks like that. Period. People come, we learn together, we argue, we challenge, we try new things, and we are challenged to define our own spiritual and professional paths not according to denominational dogma but according to our own searching, through intensive education and with mentors and teachers from all backgrounds. It looks like any pluralistic day school, or yeshiva, or retreat. It looks like Limmud, it looks like National Havurah Institute, it looks like Jews in the Woods. Except all year long. And with common mission among students to change the world for the better and to bring about a new kind of Jewish communal life.
See for yourself. Come and learn with us, sing with us, pray with us, share with us.
Details on the flip. More »
by zt · Thursday, September 20th, 2007
Following up on the excited discussion stemming from Rooftopper Rav’s post on the new ArtScroll Siddur for women, Desh has written about what he’d like to see in a new siddur that would travel well, contain good footnotes, and not contain misrepresentations about prayers and halachah.
Go check it out and throw in your $.02 on what a new siddur should have if it wants to rival ArtScroll.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
“Survey finds rabbis pessimistic about future, shul attendance”
Seriously? Rabbis pessimistic about the future?
I don’t feel the need to comment further because we’ve written bookloads of words about how the mainstreams of Judaism don’t really get how vibrant Jewish life is…outside their very doors. But I just thought, “yes, rabbis pessimistic about the future. Jewish mothers, attempt guilt trip. Sun rises in morning.”
by YehuditBrachah · Monday, September 17th, 2007
But I got the goods right here!
The National Havurah Committee just began soliciting submissions for courses for next year’s Summer Institute. Because the info isn’t yet on their website, I’ll give you the abbreviated sneak peak version here. Institute 2008 will be August 11-17 at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, NH. Proposals are due Nobember 26, 2007, and you get to go to Institute for free (excluding $36 membership dues) as appreciation for your teaching dedication. Quoting the course committee’s materials:
The theme for the 2008 Institute is *Baruch she-amar v’hayah ha-olam* Blessed is the One who spoke the world into being (or, as ArtScroll translates it: Blessed is the one who spoke, and the world came into being). The Institute planning committee notes that this phrase resonates with our overall interest in turning speech into action and learning into doing, connecting torah with social and environmental justice. It resonates with creation themes, both ecologically and metaphorically, and opens the door to courses about worlds we create with our words. While we invite proposals for courses that speak to or draw upon the theme, we welcome proposals in all topics relevant to our community. Every proposal receives full consideration.
Include course title and 75-100 word blurb, lesson plan, bio/CV. For more info and details on submissions, write to courses at Havurah.org or call the NHC office at 215-248-1335.
by BZ · Thursday, August 9th, 2007
If there were a havurah stock market, and if insider trading were legal, then I wouldn’t be blogging right now, I’d be out buying 100 shares of my ancestral hometown, CHICAGO. This stock tip is for all of you as well; even though there’s no havurah stock market (and perhaps this concept deserves a post of its own) and we won’t be able to get rich financially off of this, the Chicago Jewish community is about to be enriched in other ways over the next few months.
This afternoon at the ‘tute, there was a workshop about creating and sustaining havurot, with people who have been involved in creating new grassroots communities over the last few years as well as people interested in creating the next bunch. It soon became clear that the most immediate results are going to come from the Chicago contingent, which is fired up and ready to return to the Windy City next week and build the next great independent Jewish community. You heard it here first. If you’re in Chicago, you can be part of building it too! I can’t wait to see what you create.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Thursday, August 9th, 2007
Boy, I’m feeling cranky today. Is it the news, or just the weather?
Yes, indeed, we are all to stand in awe of another Bronfman project to lead the Jewish world into the Future. According to JTA, “three dozen Jewish intellectuals are put in a swank ski resort for 48 hours and let loose on the question ‘Why be Jewish?’”
From July 29-31 the Samuel Bronfman Foundation ran a conference hosted by the foundation’s managing director, Adam Bronfman, son of philanthropist Edgar Bronfman, that “included French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, New Republic literary editor Leon Wieseltier, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion President David Ellenson, writer Anita Diamant and other rabbis, professors, artists, philanthropists and communal professionals.”
But even JTA itself noticed, “These rarefied, all-expenses-paid gatherings beg the question: ‘So what?’ What does it matter if a bunch of smart Jews sit around talking? Some in Park City wondered the same thing. ‘The take-away is there’s no take-away,’ said former Under Secretary of Defense Dov Zakheim of Washington. Some participants questioned the top-down premise. ‘There’s a presumption that we get to answer the question “Why be Jewish” on behalf of the “amcha,” ‘ or Jewish people, said Idit Klein, executive director of Keshet, an advocacy group for gay inclusion.”
In other words, even the grand old daddies (well, not Keshet, exactly) of institutional life are beginning to wonder, along with the rest of us, why there are all these conferences in which “important people” chosen by other “important people” sit around yakking about what the rest of us ought to do. I suppose it’s news that, at least in this case,
If some participants grumbled about the conference’s lack of tangible goals, organizers insisted that was the point.
“We’re not looking for ‘an answer,’ ” explained the foundation’s executive director, Dana Raucher. “We’ve gathered a rather eclectic mix of people, each of whom has something to offer. Each of these people has influence somewhere. Each of them will hopefully have been enriched by this and will take the conversation home with them.”
In other words, they didn’t come out of the conference with another program that doesn’t change anything, or more instructions that have nothing to do with actually living a Jewish life that we’re all to fall in behind with cash in hand. Perhaps that’s an improvement. Although I do have to draw breath at such pronouncements as, “In fact, as more than one conference attendee pointed out, the Talmud, the seminal text of rabbinic Judaism, emerged out of just such open-ended conversations among Jewish leaders.” Wow. I think our old friends the Greeks might have referred to this as hubris.
I think, though that the most important comment in the article is this:
Arthur Gross-Schaefer, a professor of business law and ethics at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, said the American Jewish community “needs a new myth” that can appeal to the younger, largely unaffiliated generation. That’s something this group, and others like it, can realistically tackle, he said.
It seems to me that this nicely sums up the attitude that hasn’t shifted amongst the cohort that is failing to engage those whom they ostensibly wish to engage. In other words, there’s you young people out there, not doing what we want you to do; we need to make up a nice story for you (yes, I’m aware of the Gillman idea of myth, eh.), so that you’ll fall in line with our priorities. Instead of actually talking to the young, affiliated, engaged people in their teens, twenties, thirties and forties - and even older folks who have helped build these alternative organzations, groups, minyans and institutions- who have built an entirely different way of relating to Judaism, just as vibrant (actually, IMO, more vibrant, and also healthier and more Jewish) as the old Holocaust, peoplehood, anti-semitism emphasis of the last thirty-five years.
There’s no shortage of young Jews engaging as “more observant” than their elders, of independant minyanim, trichitzas, potlucks for eating habits across the spectrum, social justice Judaism as an outgrowth of halachah, and organizations that are helping build these new foundations out of what are really, the old bricks that we had forgotten about for oh, so long while we were busy becoming American: how about JFSJ, JUFJ, JFREJ - well, you all know the drill, we talk about them all the time here.
Bronfmans: we’re waiting on you.
by LastTrumpet · Thursday, August 9th, 2007
So I’m here with the gang at NHC ‘tute, and not surprisingly there’s been a fair bit of discussion on “our generation” and why our Judaism looks so different from the previous generations. Day before yesterday, 40 or 50 of us looked at The Continuity of Discontinuity, a report about just that. We discussed the values of our generation demonstrated by the spectrum of organizations we represent, but I want to look at it from another angle.
Shortly before leaving home, I watched McLuhan’s Wake, a documentary on Marshall McLuhan, the father of media theory, and coiner of “the medium is the message.” One of the points hammered home in the film was that the tools we create, be they cars, hammers or laptops, end up, in a sense, creating us. That is to say, the technology with which many of us have grown up is inextricably linked to our expectations and desires for a Jewish community. Let me explain.
From Wikipedia:
The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes.
Full Article.
First, I think it’s important to note that we’re talking about web business here. This isn’t a model for a bricks and mortar business, but the net allows, even encourages, this model. That is to say, serving the many tiny niche markets is really where it’s at. The top few sellers may account for a significant percentage, but the one or two copies of rare books or movies that only a few people want to watch actually make up a larger percentage of sales as a whole (because selling 2 copies of 1000 books beats selling 1000 copies of 1).
We’ve grown up with the internet, and our experience of commerce and of consumption are both linked to that. My wife was explaining to me yesterday how when she’s shopping for clothes, she often experiences the desire to be able to sort items by price, ascending and descending, and by popularity, etc. Our experience of the web has altered our expectations of reality and the Jewish niche communities we create seem to follow a similar model.
So the way I see it, JCCs, Federations and Synagogues are the blockbusters, and the long tail is playing out in the myriad Jewish social justice orgs/minyanim/blog communities/whatever. Our tiny mission-driven organizations are not intended to be for everyone, but for a small segment of the population. But, given the ever growing number of small organizations, I think we can foresee a time when the tail will be populated enough to contain more of us involved in small organizations of a few folks than huge movements of thousands.
