NORTHBROOK, Ill. (JTA) – I can confidently say that I am one of the first Jewish professionals to have used e-mail.
At one of the first college student conferences I ever ran, a student approached me on the last day to suggest that on the following year's application, we also ask for e-mail addresses.
"Sure," I replied. "What's e-mail?"
That was the start of my encounter with the joys, frustrations and dangers of this medium. And since the day I first started by dialing a number, hearing a long tone, waiting several minutes to connect and waiting even longer to have e-mail pop up on the monitor, I have been receiving e-mails predicting the imminent demise of the Conservative movement.
That was about 18 years ago, and the e-mails keep coming.
Now, of course, the predictions also appear in listservs, on Web sites, in podcasts and blogs, in news releases and notably in the Jewish press. They come from sociologists, demographers, professors, clergy, synagogue presidents and people at the Kiddush table and in the parking lot. It is not unusual for many Jewish reporters to "objectively" refer to the movement as "beleaguered" or "under siege."
So first, here's the bad news. Our numbers are shrinking. Our members are getting older. We're being battered in the press. Our institutions are faltering under the weight of old governance systems and the global economic crisis. We're fighting among ourselves. [Add your own critique here.]
Now for some good news. More people are learning and studying Jewish texts, Jewish history and Jewish culture. Kids are still going to Israel with USY and Ramah. Our day schools and camps are experiencing what we hope is a temporary decline, but it is clear that they are no longer just for the rabbi's children. Women are not only in leadership positions, they're also on the bimah. Laypeople – not just the younger ones (and yes, there are younger ones) – are reading Torah. Conservative Jews are involved not only in their congregations, they comprise much of the leadership of federations and other Jewish organizations. A large number of student Hillel leaders come from Conservative backgrounds. And no matter what they call themselves, many of the independent minyanim are Conservative – they use Conservative siddurim and chumashim and approach text using methods championed by the Conservative movement. [Add your own good news here – I know you have some.]
So if things are good, why are they bad?
Our problems are real, for sure, and we must approach them seriously. The Conservative movement has contributed much to American Jewish life. I do not consider it a failure if one of our own becomes involved in another denomination or organization. It means we're doing our job – it's the natural outgrowth of Schechter's klal Yisrael.
But it does trouble me that we have not successfully created Shabbat communities in most of our congregations. It troubles me that most students do not find the level of commitment in their home communities that they do in USY or Ramah or Koach. It does trouble me that if they do find it, it's likely not in the Conservative movement, so they may become involved in other communities not by design but by default. And it does trouble me that our clergy and laity become more concerned about institutional viability than about motivating themselves and others to live fully Jewish lives.
What can we do about it? It's easy to assign responsibility, but it's courageous to shoulder it. If I were speaking to the key leaders of the movement, professional and lay, I would start by handing each of them a mirror and asking them to take a long, hard look.
It's easy to blame the institutions – and there is plenty of blame to be assigned to them all. But how many rabbis tell their president that in order to be a more effective leader, the two must study together for an hour every other week? How many presidents tell their rabbi the same thing? How much time do we spend teaching and encouraging people to observe Shabbat or to keep kosher, compared to the amount of time we spend making the bar or bat mitzvah schedule or collecting membership dues?
The business side is important, to be sure, but your shul should be more than a business. Yes, I know your congregation is different. But really it's not.
If our institutions are out of touch with our members, know that this didn't happen yesterday. And if you've only complained about it, then stop complaining because complaining alone won't help.
I know people might suggest that because I am employed by one of these institutions, perhaps I am naive, perhaps apologetic, perhaps defensive. Certainly our life experiences color everything, including our opinions. I accept and understand that. I also have to look in that mirror because there are times when I, too, get lost in the politics. So let this serve not only as an admonishment to others but as self-indictment as well.
We all have a lot of work to do. United Synagogue, Women's League, Men's Club, Ziegler, JTS, the RA, CA, JEA, JYDA, NAASE, Masorti, Mercaz, Schechter – all of us. We can form coalitions, make demands, threaten, cajole and continue to fight it out in the press. It's all a smokescreen and doesn't confront the real issues.
Those e-mails have been coming for 18 years. I predict they will come for another 18 years and beyond – until the technology becomes ancient and something takes its place.
The bottom line is, we can all get along. I'm looking in the mirror and I invite you to join me. We have a lot of work to do.
(Richard S. Moline is the director of Koach, United Synagogue's program for college students.)
---'With a heavy heart we will soon say Kaddish on the Reform and Conservative movements," Rabbi Norman Lamm, the distinguished chancellor of Yeshiva University, recently proclaimed in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. "The future of American Jewry is in the hands of Haredim and the Modern Orthodox."
Lamm's triumphalistic prediction has, unsurprisingly, elicited strong and angry responses from Conservative and Reform leaders who consider their movements youthful and vibrant. For a historian, though, the prediction cannot help but call to mind earlier attempts to divine American Judaism's future.
When Lamm was young, those who followed trends in Jewish life expected to say Kaddish for Orthodox Judaism. A careful study in 1952 found that "only twenty-three percent of the children of the Orthodox intend to remain Orthodox; a full half plan to turn Conservative." The future of American Jewry back then seemed solidly in the hands of Conservative Jews.
Years earlier, in the late 19th century, Reform Judaism expected to say Kaddish for other kinds of Jews. The great architect of American Reform Judaism, Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, titled his prayer book "Minhag Amerika" — the liturgical custom of American Jews — and given the number of synagogues that moved into the Reform camp in his day, his vision did not seem farfetched. Many in the mid-1870s believed, as he did, that the future of American Judaism lay in the hands of the Reformers.
Before then, of course, those with crystal balls expected to say Kaddish for Judaism as a whole in America. One of the nation's wisest leaders, its then attorney general, William Wirt, predicted in 1818 that within 150 years, Jews would be indistinguishable from the rest of mankind. Former president John Adams likewise looked to the future and thought that Jews would "possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians."
All these predictions made sense in their day. All assumed that the future would extend forward in a straight line from the present. All offered their followers the comforting reassurance that triumph lay just beyond the horizon.
And all proved utterly and wildly wrong.
Lamm's prediction is unlikely to break this depressing streak of failures. Admittedly, Conservative Judaism today faces significant financial, demographic and ideological challenges, but Reform Judaism faced greater challenges 75 years ago, when it was by far the smallest and most divided of our three religious movements. Yet it successfully reinvented itself, winning over to its ranks many Jews whose parents might never have considered Reform Judaism an option. Conservative Judaism, with its new and more youthful leadership, could stage a similar comeback. Orthodox Judaism, ironically, serves as the poster child for what a beleaguered religious movement can accomplish. Its revival over the past 50 years is one of the great stories of postwar Judaism.
At the same time, and notwithstanding the abundant evidence that Lamm might muster on Orthodoxy's behalf — its prodigious birthrate, its expansive day school movement, the success of Yeshiva University, the remarkable spread of Chabad and more — Lamm's triumphalism flies in the face of a history that has humbled so many would-be prophets, and glosses over American Orthodoxy's all-too-real challenges.
Five challenges are especially worth noting:
First, Orthodox Judaism in America has had trouble retaining its members. According to demographer Sergio DellaPergola of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, it loses more of its members over time than any other Jewish religious movement — understandably so, since it is harder to be Orthodox than to be any other kind of Jew. Since Orthodoxy represents, even by the most generous estimate, only 13% of those who define themselves as Jewish in America, that represents a significant demographic problem.
Second, Orthodoxy in America is suffering from a severe leadership crisis. The greatest of its 20th-century leaders — Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Rabbi Aharon Kotler, Rabbi Moses Feinstein, the Lubavitcher Rebbe and others — have all passed from the scene. Their successors, who do not carry the mantle of the great pre-war European yeshivas, have not achieved the same breadth of acceptance. Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, who is Soloveitchik's son-in-law and now the rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion in Israel, has bemoaned "the current dearth of first-rank gedolim," or giants, in America. Historically, religious movements that cannot count on indigenous leadership to direct them have not fared well in America — at least not for long.
Third, American Orthodoxy is experiencing a significant brain drain. It sends its best and its brightest to Israel for long periods of yeshiva study, and unsurprisingly, many of them never return. One can think of multiple examples of remarkable Orthodox men and women who might have had a profound effect on Jewish religious life in America but preferred to cast their lot with the Jewish state. Can a movement that sends its most illustrious sons and daughters to Israel truly expect to triumph here in the United States?
Fourth, American Orthodoxy remains deeply divided over the issue of how to confront modernity. This is not a new problem; tensions between "accommodators" and "resisters" in Orthodox life date back to the 19th century. But now, in the absence of broadly respected leaders, the fault lines between Modern and right-wing Orthodox Jews have deepened. The question is whether Orthodoxy can survive as a very broad "big tent" movement or whether, like Conservative Judaism of an earlier era and like so many non-Jewish religious groups that have faced similar challenges, it will ultimately polarize. Big tents have a bad tendency to collapse and split apart, especially in the absence of a strong center. The fact that Orthodox Judaism does not have any strong institutional ties binding together all its factions makes the danger of schism all the greater.
Finally, American Orthodoxy is facing its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The crushing losses experienced by some of its most generous philanthropists, the billions of dollars in endowment lost in the Madoff scandal and the projected collapse of numerous day schools suggest that Orthodoxy's best days may be behind it.
In the world of religion, smugness and self-assurance are usually risky. As Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism and Mainline Protestant denominations have discovered, success in the present provides no guarantees for the future. If anything, saying Kaddish for other religious movements has often been the first sign of a movement's own impending decline.
___
Jonathan D. Sarna is the Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University and the author of "American Judaism: A History" (Yale University Press, 2004).
Dear Chevreh,
I'm writing you with an urgent request. There is a member of our community, a devoted husband and father of two young girls, Jon Galinson, who is battling Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. Jon's best hope for a cure is a stem cell transplant. I'm inviting your community to cosponsor this Marrow Drive taking place at Netivot Shalom on Sunday, June 14, 1:00 – 6:00 pm. Cosponsoring only entails spreading the word. You can, of course, also choose to contirbute to the expense of the registry, but this is not our expectation. Please help us find a match for Jon and for thousands like him by coming to our drive and joining the national donor registry. (There is also going to be a "Be the Match" registry at the Israel in the Gardens Festival, Sunday, June 7 at Yerba Buena Gardens. http://www.sfjcf.org/gardens/2009) And please join me in registering yourselves.
You can help save the life of a member of our Bay Area Jewish community. Attached, please find both a useful BLURB for circulation (also pasted below in this email), as well as a PDF flyer. If you can help us by committing to spread the word, please RSVP to Jane Sperling Wise at janesperling@yahoo.com or on her cell: 415-305-7224. Jane is spearheading a team of hopeful friends, and will be the best help in this process.
My thanks, chevreh, for considering this urgent act of Piku'ach Nefesh, of Saving a Life.
Congregational budget-makers frequently divide into two camps that approach the task in different ways. The first camp is likely to include children of the Great Depression, experts in finance, elementary school teachers, and persons anxious about their own money situation. Their first priority is to make sure that the budget balances and that the congregation makes no plans or commitments it is less than 100 percent certain it can meet. They squint over budget sheets like bookkeepers of old with their bright lamps and shoulder garters—I call this camp the Green Eyeshades.
The second camp typically includes young clergy, upscale decorators, Baby Boomers, college professors, and commission salespeople. They firmly believe that with God (or even without God) all things are possible. They say, "We are a congregation, not a business." This camp can be identified at budget meetings mostly by their absence. When shanghaied into talking about money, they glaze over. Staring at a distant sunrise, they float over the surface of numerical reality—I call them the Rose-Colored Glasses.
The division between the Eyeshades and the Glasses is as old as Mary and Martha, Moses and Aaron, Job and Job's wife. It is as deeply rooted in our culture as the duality of secular and sacred, temporal and spiritual. There is nothing wrong with it, so long as people see themselves as members of one team and value one another's contributions. But too often, the division becomes rigid—one group always thinks of ways to spend more money; the other always says we can't afford it. It certainly forms part of the tension between clergy called to transform lives and boards elected to control purse strings—especially when they understand their roles that way.
The budget process often sets up friction between the Glasses and the Eyeshades. Typically the word goes out for each program unit to request a budget for next year. Knowing how these things work, program committees (full of rosy thinkers) ask for more than they expect and then some. A finance committee (strapping on their eyeshades) puts all of the requests onto a spreadsheet as a "dream budget." Usually even the dream budget gets trimmed quite a bit, making it resemble the Green Eyeshades' own, fiscally-sound dreams.
The fund drive naturally falls short of the "dream" goal. How could it not? Calling a goal a dream almost guarantees that you'll fall short. The finance committee sharpens its pencils and begins grinding the dream down to a practical nub.
The program people rise up, asking "How can we say we can't afford what God has called us to accomplish?" The finance people answer, "Good stewards live within their means." The Green Eyeshades with their pencils and their spreadsheets go to battle with the Rose-Colored Glasses, armed with blunt-end scissors, opera glasses, and pink feathers. It is not a pretty picture.
Sometimes the Roses win the day until they've run up deficits and the Greens come like an exasperated crew of parents to clean up after them. If the Greens win too consistently, the Roses trade their glasses in for blinders and quit dreaming. Sad.
Nothing can do away with the division between Green and Rose; it is too deeply rooted in the temperaments and histories of the players. But if we can't change human nature, we can at least stop setting up the budget process to bring out the worst in us. Here is a budget process that can help narrow the divide:
Instead of starting by inviting program units to submit budget requests to the finance committee, this process begins with the governing board. Their first task each year is to define not a budget but a statement: A Vision of Ministry. The Vision is a short list of the new and different ways this congregation plans to transform lives over the next one to three years.
Why a short list? Because if you have a long list of priorities, they are not priorities! The fact that something does not make the list does not mean that it won't happen. The Vision is a short list of things the board means to accomplish no matter what. While creating it, the board will bank a number of ideas for the future: pieces of a long-term vision to which the board is not prepared to make an iron-clad commitment this year.
The board may create the Vision by itself. Or, better, it may ask a varied group, including staff and clergy, to join them in creating a statement for the board to authorize. The Vision of Ministry confronts directly the question that most budget debates are about indirectly: What aspects of our mission will be our top priorities?
The board votes a new Vision of Ministry each year. It also adopts, and less frequently revises, written Budget Policies defining the core principles that will guide budgeting each year. The principles will likely include fair compensation, adequate building maintenance, a financial audit, adequate insurance, and a strong mandate to maintain high standards of health, safety, and accessibility.
After the board adopts the Vision of Ministry and the Budget Policies, these form the basis for the annual call for budget proposals from the program units. The request is not for a "dream" budget but for a budget that will accomplish the Vision and comply with the Policies. The board, not a finance committee of Green Eyeshades, determines the actual proposed budget.
The annual fund drive, then, communicates the Vision of Ministry over and over again. Contributors are asked for amounts which, if about half of them say "yes," will make the Vision possible. The board, clergy, and staff make it clear that the Vision is not something the congregation plans to shoot for but that it intends to accomplish. Year after year, the people learn that when this congregation asks for gifts, it means it. If they give what is asked, the results promised come to pass. Over time the fund drive becomes easier, more pleasant, and more popular.
One reason for this is that the division between Green Eyeshades and Rose-Colored Glasses, while it never goes away, is addressed in creating the Vision of Ministry. The fund drive comes, not in the middle of the argument, but after it has been resolved.
TEL AVIV — When Gabrielle Pollack sought to say kaddish for her recently deceased grandmother, the young female soldier found that in the Israeli Army, it can be daunting to be a Conservative Jew.
And the army, for its part, found it can be daunting to accommodate one as non-Orthodox Jewish movements increasingly jockey to break the Orthodox monopoly over official religion in Israel.
Pollack, 19, is part of a 15-strong group from the Conservative youth movement Noam serving together in Nahal, a military division that combines army service, civil service, and work for their movement. But the military chaplaincy, like all of Israel's official Jewish religious
agencies, is an Orthodox institution that does not recognize a woman's right to be counted and participate equally in formal prayer.
As a result, Pollack, whose grandmother died earlier this month in upstate New York, was told she could not recite the Jewish prayer of mourning for her at her Army base's regular Orthodox minyan. According to Conservative Rabbi Debbi Grinberg, the Noam group's spiritual leader, the base chaplain initially agreed instead to let her organize an alternative, egalitarian minyan at the base's sanctuary where she could do so — but then reneged, apparently after an Orthodox soldier on the base protested.
After days of impasse, related Grinberg, who acted as Pollack's advocate during the dispute, the chaplain gave Pollack keys to a classroom to hold a gathering where she could say kaddish but formally requested that she not hold an actual prayer service there. He suggested the participants instead recite psalms and the kaddish prayer, but indicated she could do as she wished once there.
Pollack went on to hold two egalitarian services in the classroom, Grinberg said, and recited kaddish. But she was unhappy with this outcome.
"This is not a solution, because he didn't say she could pray in the synagogue," said Grinberg. "What? The synagogue is for Orthodox people, but not for her because she wants to pray in an egalitarian minyan?"
Army rules prohibit soldiers from being interviewed by the news media, making it impossible to speak with Pollack herself. But the IDF spokesperson's office confirmed the outlines of Grinberg's account in a prepared statement.
"Several solutions were offered to the bereaved soldier which, on the one hand, conformed with the rules of her particular strain of belief, and yet maintained accepted base protocol," the statement said.
"It was agreed that the soldier would hold an all female minyan in a separate room, in accordance with her beliefs. The soldier has been conducting a minyan of this nature for several days.
"It should be stated that The IDF works to the best of its ability to allow its soldiers their freedom of religion, in accordance with their different beliefs."
Military sources voiced exasperation with the fact that Conservative movement leaders in Israel had taken the event public. Earlier in May, one said, members of the military Rabbinate met with Conservative movement rabbis about accommodating the needs of soldiers in their community. Following this, they said, the Conservatives approached the military rabbinate about Pollack's specific problem, and chaplains agreed to resolve the matter.
But Conservative spokesman Shmuel Dovrat said, "We did not get to any conclusion" in the meeting with the IDF Rabbinate. "It was a nice, a good conversation, but with no bottom line, the beginning of what we hoped would be a communications channel."
The IDF Rabbinate's slow and unsatisfactory response to Pollack right afterward showed that channel was "futile," he said.
For Israel's tiny Masorti movement, as the Conservative Judaism movement is known in Israel, the episode offered an opportunity to once again make its case against Orthodox Judaism's monopoly of the Jewish state's governmental religious institutions. Under settled arrangements governing religion and state in Israel, all Jewish religious appointments and places of worship under state jurisdiction rest in the hands of the Orthodox. This includes army synagogues, which are used exclusively for Orthodox services, and the army rabbinate, which is staffed only by Orthodox chaplains.
Israel's Reform and Conservative movements have long been keen to change this status quo. The two non-Orthodox movements have long battled the government on issues like state funding for synagogues, which they began to receive for the first time last year. On May 19, The High Court ruled that the state must also fund conversion classes operated by the Reform and Conservative movements, breaking an Orthodox monopoly on this.
Last September, the Conservative movement cast its attention on the army. In a letter to the IDF chief-of-staff, Masorti officials demanded that non-Orthodox rabbis be brought into the army rabbinate — a request that was turned down.
Stymied at changing the chaplaincy's makeup, Masorti leaders sought, instead, to break the Orthodox monopoly over army synagogues, attempting to hold Conservative services in them, too. Pollack's kaddish dispute, in fact, follows a disagreement last Yom Kippur, when Pollack tried to hold an egalitarian service in the synagogue only to be stopped by the chaplain.
"We are saying that Conservative soldiers should receive the same attitude from the army that Orthodox soldiers do," Conservative movement spokesman Shmuel Dovrat told the Forward.
Orthodox rabbis give short shrift to this complaint, claiming no injustice was done. Pollack was allowed to assemble recite kaddish elsewhere, they noted. Synagogues should be reserved for "prayer according to the majority," said Benny Lau, a leading modern-Orthodox rabbi who is familiar with this dispute.
There are about 40,000 Conservative Jews in Israel. Meanwhile, even discounting Haredim, who do not serve in the army, around 700,000 Israelis — one in 10 — are traditionally observant — or in American terms, Orthodox. Roughly another 700,0000 define themselves as religiously traditional, usually meaning that on occasion they attend an Orthodox synagogue.
That is still a minority. But the Conservative movement is unlikely to experience much support from the secular Jewish majority. Secular Jews often decry incursions by Orthodoxy into the secular arena. But where there is a place for religion in government or society, such as in army synagogues, they expect it to be Orthodox.
These disputes come as the IDF Rabbinate is also under fire on a separate front. After the Gaza campaign, it came under criticism for distributing booklets to fighting soldiers with an overly zealous right-wing agenda. The criticism was not only from nongovernmental organizations, but also from the Ministry of Defense. Following the incident, the IDF Personnel Directorate released a document limiting the military rabbinate's involvement in educational activities.
As far as Grinberg is concerned, the conflict over synagogue usage is part of a broader battle to have Conservative religiosity recognized by the IDF as equally legitimate to Orthodox religiosity.
IDF rules state, for example, that soldiers must be clean-shaven, except for those who grow beards for religious reasons, When three male Conservative soldiers from Pollack's program stopped shaving, as per tradition, from Passover to Lag B'Omer, they were told by their superiors the army rabbinate did not view theirs beards as religiously motivated facial hair. They were later given license to grow beards — but only after Lag B'Omer (May 12) when they had planned to resume shaving anyway.
Contact Nathan Jeffay at jeffay@forward.com.
--- Wednesday May 20, 2009 JPost.com: "No Ayatollahs for Israel" Rabbi Andrew Sacks Many years ago, shortly after the first McDonald's restaurant opened in Jerusalem, I spoke with a group of Jewish youth visiting from the States. They lamented the fact that the restaurant was not Kosher. This led to a discussion where over half of the participants felt that Israeli law should require restaurants - at least in western Jerusalem - to be Kosher. No Big Macs with cheese. "This is a Jewish State and the laws should reflect Jewish values and traditions," one opined. Iran is a theocracy with some signs - however ersatz - of democracy. Israel (L'Havdil, as we say in Hebrew) is a democracy with theocratic elements. Striking the balance in day to day life can be a challenge. In the past few days we were witness to Supreme Court decisions that moved toward clarifying this dilemma. Israel's Supreme Court unanimously ordered the government to stop discriminating against Reform and Conservative conversion institutes in favor of Orthodox ones with regard to funding. The government was not obligated to fund conversion classes, the court stated, but as long as they did so, Masorti and Reform conversion classes could not be denied. Now I can already hear the vicious talkbacks that will follow this blog claiming the fallacious, and deceitful, nature of these non-Orthodox movements. But Israel is a democracy and it is the norm in democratic countries that the civil courts protect the rights of minorities. Funding must be color-blind. It must be allocated to groups who meet established criteria. In addition, Israelis are voting with their feet. Although they have no material advantage to gain by converting with the liberal Movements - many are choosing to do so. This is all the more so as the Orthodox establishment (which also excludes the modern Zionist Orthodox rabbis) keeps its doors all but locked to those who seriously seek to enter. "The declared intention of these conversion institutions is to integrate the new immigrants who want it, into the ranks of the Jewish people, while learning and becoming familiar with the Jewish religion, its principles and customs, while taking an active part in the life of the Jewish community," Judge Beinisch wrote, quoting from the petition to the court. Beinisch opined, "the exclusion of the Reform and Conservative movements violated fundamental principles of the democratic system, that is, freedom of speech and pluralism." The Supreme Court will soon decide about funding for Brit Milah (ritual circumcision) of non-Orthodox converts, the use of Mikvaot for conversion and brides (ritual immersion baths) by the non-Orthodox, and funding for non-Orthodox rabbis to serve as municipal employees. The Masorti Movement opposes the continued financing of an official Chief Rabbinate, along with its thousands of State funded employees. But as long as the institution continues to exist we will insist on funding that is fair and equitable. The court noted that the majority of Jews in Israel and in the world are not identified with the Orthodox Movement. It is high time our Rabbinate took note. This decision came only days after the Supreme Court called upon the Rabbinic courts to show cause why they should be allowed to retroactively annul the status, as Jews, of those who long ago entered the faith. Yesterday I joined in a demonstration held opposite the home of Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman. The news has reported that he was planning to increase the powers of the rabbinical courts to let them rule on matters relating to money and children in divorce cases. This would be a tragic step toward the already ugly discrimination these rabbinic courts demonstrate toward women. But, I am grateful that we indeed live in a country where the civil courts may keep the religious institutions from overstepping their authority and violating citizen rights. We may be witnessing the dawn of an era of religious pluralism where Masorti and other streams will be granted their rightful places. So, in the end Israel is not Iran. Women may choose to wear pants or a dress, to cover their hair, or not. Halacha [Jewish law] must be respected in Israel. The rights of those who live by Halacha must be protected. But the Judaism that I see emerging will be as colorful as the rainbow. |
'Kaddish comment presents opportunity for inter-Jewish dialogue'
Controversy aroused by an interview in The Jerusalem Post that pitted Orthodoxy against Conservative and Reform Judaism could be used as a springboard for cross-denominational dialogue, according to Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, incoming executive vice president of the Conservative Movement's Rabbinical Assembly.
Schonfeld was reacting to an interview with Chancellor of Yeshiva University Rabbi Norman Lamm in which he predicted the imminent demise of the Conservative and Reform movements.
"With a heavy heart we will soon say kaddish on the Reform and Conservative movements," said Lamm in an interview that appeared in the Post last Monday.
"Rabbi Lamm's interview and the controversy it has sparked should be a reminder that the future of the Jewish people lies, above all else, in maintaining constructive dialogue among all streams of Judaism," Schonfeld said in a telephone interview from Chicago on Thursday night.
"We and our esteemed Orthodox brothers and sisters share a common commitment to practice and mitzvot. And I believe that both sides can learn - they from us and us from them."
Schonfeld called to take advantage of the flurry of reactions Lamm's remarks sparked in the blog world and in the Jewish media to foster more cooperation among Orthodox, Conservative and Reform streams of Judaism.
"The assembly and the movement are always interested in cooperation with Orthodox Jews, whether it be support of Israel, efforts to build world Jewish communities, or on the local level - learning and celebrating our Judaism together," said Schonfeld.
The incoming executive vice president of the worldwide association of Conservative rabbis, who will take office this summer, also pointed out that Lamm's forecast was wrong.
"He is simply incorrect, not only about Conservative Judaism, but also regarding the Reform Movement. Both are full of vitality and full of interest in every aspect of Jewish life and continue to celebrate their growth."
As an example of the Conservative Movement's vitality Schonfeld pointed to the establishment of Hekhsher Tzedek, which sets ethical criteria for kosher supervision, such as fair pay and moral treatment of workers, as well as strictly ritual criteria.
"The enormous popularity and success of Hekhsher Tzedek has captured the interest of the Jewish community at large, including many of Rabbi Lamm's Orthodox constituents who are in agreement with my colleague, Rabbi Morris Allen's call that we take ethical mitzvot as seriously as ritual ones in the preparation of kosher food."
Hekhsher Tzedek was established after suspicions were raised of serious violations of workers' rights at Agriprocessors, a slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa under Orthodox kashrut supervision.
"The most inspiring moral voice heard when the Agriprocessors story broke was [Conservative] Rabbi Morris Allen's. It is regrettable that others did not make their voice heard as well," Schonfeld said.
"But this is proof that the Conservative Movement has a role in emphasizing the ethical as well as the ritual aspects of Jewish observance."
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1242212387812&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull
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Less than two weeks after naming a Washington, D.C.-area rabbi as the head of its new Office of Public Policy, the Rabbinical Assembly has named another rabbi from the Washington area as the director of a new Washington initiative.
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt, from Congregation B'nai Tzedek in Potomac, Md., will head up the RA's new Israel Advocacy Office. Weinblatt is active in a variety of local and national Jewish organizations, including AIPAC, Israel Bonds and the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington.
"The rabbis of the Conservative movement have traditionally played an important role strengthening the relationship and fostering the sense of partnership between the American Jewish community and the people of Israel," said Weinblatt in a statement. "I look forward to the opportunity to build upon that foundation and to further develop our ties and advocacy at this critical time."
The complete RA press release is after the jump:
Head of Israel Advocacy Office of the RA
The following letter is a response by Rabbi Julie Schonfeld to Norman Lamm's recent interview with the Jerusalem Post on saying kaddish for the Conservative Movement.
A RESPONSE TO RABBI NORMAN LAMM
By Rabbi Julie Schonfeld
Incoming executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly
New York, NY (May 13, 2009) – One week ago today, I returned from the AIPAC conference in Washington, DC energized not only by the thrilling program but by the realization that out of the 200-plus rabbis in attendance, more than half were my colleagues, ordained by the Conservative movement and now standing at the helms of the leading Jewish communal organizations of the day. They came with delegations of committed Conservative Jews from their congregations and institutions.
During my time in our nation's capital I also met with the Conservative rabbis who were heading up our new Office of Public Policy and Office of Israel Advocacy, respectively. These initiatives are part of a five-platform agenda of the Rabbinical Assembly which includes Social Justice Partnerships, Interfaith Work and Hekhsher Tzedek -- a star project of the Conservative movement which is focused on creating an ethical certification process for kosher foods.
The enormous popularity and success of Hekhsher Tzedek, which has captured the interest of the Jewish community at large, including many of Rabbi Lamm's Orthodox constituents who are in agreement with my colleague, Rabbi Morris Allen's call that we take ethical mitzvot as seriously as ritual ones in the preparation of kosher food. The message we are hearing loud and clear is that the American Jewish community is quite literally hungry to lead lives where the ritual is bound up in the ethical underpinning.
This contribution and others, however, have sadly eluded the notice of Rabbi Norman Lamm, chancellor of Yeshiva University, who felt moved to publicly declare the need to recite Kaddish for our allegedly-dying movement in a recent Jerusalem Post interview.
It seems that Rabbi Lamm has been so busy making funeral arrangements that he has missed the news of our movement's great and global vitality. Our seminaries are respected houses of religious learning and pastoral training, drawing new and committed students to the rabbinate. There are exciting congregational developments around the world, especially in Israel and Europe. Our presence in Latin America is critical. Our warm and welcoming synagogues throughout the United States and Canada offer proof that our movement occupies the very heart of Jewish life in North America.
And our camping and school system could not be stronger and more in demand. If any of our schools are feeling the pinch, it is an indication of the nation's economic crisis as a whole… not our movement's failure.
As I prepare to assume my post as executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly this summer, I am excited and optimistic at this very moment of transition into new leadership. With Chancellor Arnold Eisen directing the Jewish Theological Seminary and Rabbi Steven Wernick heading The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, we are prepared to energetically bring the Conservative Movement forward into the new century.
My advice to Rabbi Lamm is -- save your Kaddish. The imminent demise of Conservative Judaism is a tired and false mantra. Instead, I would suggest that you direct your attention to working cooperatively within the Orthodox community to build for the Jewish future. This, and not eulogizing the institutions where Jews live their lives, ought to be the work in which we jointly and cooperatively engage.
Rabbi Julie Schonfeld
Incoming Executive Vice President
The Rabbinical Assembly
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Three influential leaders and thinkers of Conservative Judaism will probe the changes required if Conservative Judaism is to speak confidently and authentically to a new generation in a new century. The program, "Conservative Judaism: The Next Generation," The Jewish Theological Seminary's Henry N. Rapaport Memorial Lecture, will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 3, at JTS, 3080 Broadway (at 122nd Street), New York City.
Panelists will include New York City rabbis Elliot J. Cosgrove, senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue; Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed; and Joanna Samuels, former rabbi of Congregation Habonim. JTS Chancellor Arnold M. Eisen will moderate.
The discussion will focus on the future direction of Conservative Judaism and address such questions as: should Conservative Judaism be thought of as a set of beliefs and practices or is Conservative Judaism more akin to a conversation, a language and grammar for thinking and living Jewishly in our time?
Rabbi Cosgrove began his term as senior rabbi of Park Avenue Synagogue in July 2008. Previously, he served as rabbi of Anshe Emet Synagogue in Chicago. Rabbi Cosgrove, ordained by JTS in 1999, earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in the History of Judaism.
Rabbi Kalmanofsky is rabbi of Congregation Ansche Chesed. Before assuming that pulpit in 2001, he served as assistant dean of The Rabbinical School of The Jewish Theological Seminary. He was ordained by JTS in 1997, where he was a Wexner Graduate Fellow.
Rabbi Samuels served from 2002 to 2008 at Congregation Habonim, where her leadership was instrumental in revitalizing the synagogue. Rabbi Samuels, a Wexner Graduate Fellow, was ordained by JTS in 2002. She is currently working on a book about gender and the contemporary rabbinate.
Professor Arnold M. Eisen, one of the world's foremost experts on American Judaism, is the seventh chancellor of JTS. Since his inauguration in 2007, Chancellor Eisen has met with world leaders, engaged in prominent interdenominational and interfaith dialogues, and directed a fundamental transformation in the education of the next generation of Conservative leadership.
Admission is free but reservations and valid photo identification are required. Attendees are asked to arrive at least fifteen minutes prior to the program. For more information and to register, please email or call the JTS Department of Public Events at (212) 280-6093.
By Lynda Waddington 5/11/09 11:34 AM 
One year after revelations of exploitative and abusive work practices at the nation's largest kosher meatpacking plant made national headlines and shook the consciousness of the Jewish community, Uri L'Tzedek (Awaken to Justice), an Orthodox social justice movement, is publicly launching an ethical seal for kosher eating establishments.
"After seeing the pain and suffering inflicted by our own kosher industry on the stranger and the poor, the very people the Torah demands we protect, we realized we needed to be proactive and make a change," said Shmuly Yanklowitz, founder and co-director of Uri L'Tzedek. "We asked ourselves how we, as Orthodox Jews, could create a system to protect the standards that Jewish law and ethics demand."
According to Yanklowitz, recent studies of New York City food establishments have revealed that thousands of restaurant workers are denied minimum wage, overtime and withstand abuse and harassment.
"We believed the Tav HaYosher would be a concrete, strategic way to make postivie change in the lives of the strangers within our gates — something demanded by Jewish Law," he said.
In order to receive the Tav HaYosher, kosher restaurants must meet specific guidelines designed to protect fair pay, fair time and a safe work environment. The standards include pay at or above minimum wage for tipped and non-tipped employees, overtime and break time allowance. Display of the seal will also inducate a work environment free of abuse, harassment and discrimination.
"Our campaign is a postive one," said Ari Hart, co-director of Uri L'Tzedek. "We're looking to offer the carrot, not the stick."
The American ethical seal developed by Uri L'Tzedek mirrors a similar campaign in Israel, known there as Tav Chevrati. The Israeli campaign has awarded its seal to more than 350 restaurants, and has trained compliance monitors to inspect restaurants every four to six weeks.
A similar U.S. movement — known as Hekhsher Tzedek — is a shared effort between the Rabbinical Assembly and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, and specifically targets kosher food manufacturers. The seal would be placed on manufactured kosher food products, along with the traditional kosher certification seal, as proof that the food was manufactured with ethical standards. The Hekhsher Tzedek anticipates a formal launch in either late summer or early fall.
When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali's basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.
The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A's end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent's attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent's end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren't all that tall. They couldn't shoot. They weren't particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, "little blond girls" from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. "It was really random," Anjali Ranadivé said. "I mean, my father had never played basketball before."
David's victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan ArreguÃn-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. ArreguÃn-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. "I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it," he said (in Robert Alter's translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, ArreguÃn-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David's winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath's rules, they win, ArreguÃn-Toft concluded, "even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn't."
Consider the way T. E. Lawrence (or, as he is better known, Lawrence of Arabia) led the revolt against the Ottoman Army occupying Arabia near the end of the First World War. The British were helping the Arabs in their uprising, and the initial focus was Medina, the city at the end of a long railroad that the Turks had built, running south from Damascus and down through the Hejaz desert. The Turks had amassed a large force in Medina, and the British leadership wanted Lawrence to gather the Arabs and destroy the Turkish garrison there, before the Turks could threaten the entire region.
But when Lawrence looked at his ragtag band of Bedouin fighters he realized that a direct attack on Medina would never succeed. And why did taking the city matter, anyway? The Turks sat in Medina "on the defensive, immobile." There were so many of them, consuming so much food and fuel and water, that they could hardly make a major move across the desert. Instead of attacking the Turks at their point of strength, Lawrence reasoned, he ought to attack them where they were weak—along the vast, largely unguarded length of railway line that was their connection to Damascus. Instead of focussing his attention on Medina, he should wage war over the broadest territory possible.
The Bedouins under Lawrence's command were not, in conventional terms, skilled troops. They were nomads. Sir Reginald Wingate, one of the British commanders in the region, called them "an untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle." But they were tough and they were mobile. The typical Bedouin soldier carried no more than a rifle, a hundred rounds of ammunition, forty-five pounds of flour, and a pint of drinking water, which meant that he could travel as much as a hundred and ten miles a day across the desert, even in summer. "Our cards were speed and time, not hitting power," Lawrence wrote. "Our largest available resources were the tribesmen, men quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence, knowledge of the country, courage." The eighteenth-century general Maurice de Saxe famously said that the art of war was about legs, not arms, and Lawrence's troops were all legs. In one typical stretch, in the spring of 1917, his men dynamited sixty rails and cut a telegraph line at Buair on March 24th, sabotaged a train and twenty-five rails at Abu al-Naam on March 25th, dynamited fifteen rails and cut a telegraph line at Istabl Antar on March 27th, raided a Turkish garrison and derailed a train on March 29th, returned to Buair and sabotaged the railway line again on March 31st, dynamited eleven rails at Hediah on April 3rd, raided the train line in the area of Wadi Dhaiji on April 4th and 5th, and attacked twice on April 6th.
Lawrence's masterstroke was an assault on the port town of Aqaba. The Turks expected an attack from British ships patrolling the waters of the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Lawrence decided to attack from the east instead, coming at the city from the unprotected desert, and to do that he led his men on an audacious, six-hundred-mile loop—up from the Hejaz, north into the Syrian desert, and then back down toward Aqaba. This was in summer, through some of the most inhospitable land in the Middle East, and Lawrence tacked on a side trip to the outskirts of Damascus, in order to mislead the Turks about his intentions. "This year the valley seemed creeping with horned vipers and puff-adders, cobras and black snakes," Lawrence writes in "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" of one stage in the journey:
When they finally arrived at Aqaba, Lawrence's band of several hundred warriors killed or captured twelve hundred Turks, and lost only two men. The Turks simply did not think that their opponent would be mad enough to come at them from the desert. This was Lawrence's great insight. David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.
Vivek Ranadivé is an elegant man, slender and fine-boned, with impeccable manners and a languorous walk. His father was a pilot who was jailed by Indira Gandhi, he says, because he wouldn't stop challenging the safety of India's planes. Ranadivé went to M.I.T., because he saw a documentary on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was in the nineteen-seventies, when going abroad for undergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the release of foreign currency, and Ranadivé camped outside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he got his way. The Ranadivés are relentless.
In 1985, Ranadivé founded a software company in Silicon Valley devoted to what in the computer world is known as "real time" processing. If a businessman waits until the end of the month to collect and count his receipts, he's "batch processing." There is a gap between the events in the company—sales—and his understanding of those events. Wall Street used to be the same way. The information on which a trader based his decisions was scattered across a number of databases. The trader would collect information from here and there, collate and analyze it, and then make a trade. What Ranadivé's company, TIBCO, did was to consolidate those databases into one stream, so that the trader could collect all the data he wanted instantaneously. Batch processing was replaced by real-time processing. Today, TIBCO's software powers most of the trading floors on Wall Street.
Ranadivé views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of degree. "We've been working with some airlines," he said. "You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn't, they actually know right away that it's not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don't have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it's in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems—and they're all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn't show up." Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn't make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn't make the plane). The lag is why you're angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there's no lag. "What we can do is send you a text message the moment we know your bag didn't make it," Ranadivé said, "telling you we'll ship it to your house."
A few years ago, Ranadivé wrote a paper arguing that even the Federal Reserve ought to make its decisions in real time—not once every month or two. "Everything in the world is now real time," he said. "So when a certain type of shoe isn't selling at your corner shop, it's not six months before the guy in China finds out. It's almost instantaneous, thanks to my software. The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government's way in your house, then every few months you'd turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house." Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. "It can all be automated," he said. "Look, we've had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we've got it wrong every single time."
You can imagine what someone like Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke might say about that idea. Such people are powerfully invested in the notion of the Fed as a Solomonic body: that pause of five or eight weeks between economic adjustments seems central to the process of deliberation. To Ranadivé, though, "deliberation" just prettifies the difficulties created by lag. The Fed has to deliberate because it's several weeks behind, the same way the airline has to bow and scrape and apologize because it waited forty-five minutes to tell you something that it could have told you the instant you stepped off the plane.
Is it any wonder that Ranadivé looked at the way basketball was played and found it mindless? A professional basketball game was forty-eight minutes long, divided up into alternating possessions of roughly twenty seconds: back and forth, back and forth. But a good half of each twenty-second increment was typically taken up with preliminaries and formalities. The point guard dribbled the ball up the court. He stood above the top of the key, about twenty-four feet from the opposing team's basket. He called out a play that the team had choreographed a hundred times in practice. It was only then that the defending team sprang into action, actively contesting each pass and shot. Actual basketball took up only half of that twenty-second interval, so that a game's real length was not forty-eight minutes but something closer to twenty-four minutes—and that twenty-four minutes of activity took place within a narrowly circumscribed area. It was as formal and as convention-bound as an eighteenth-century quadrille. The supporters of that dance said that the defensive players had to run back to their own end, in order to compose themselves for the arrival of the other team. But the reason they had to compose themselves, surely, was that by retreating they allowed the offense to execute a play that it had practiced to perfection. Basketball was batch!
Insurgents, though, operate in real time. Lawrence hit the Turks, in that stretch in the spring of 1917, nearly every day, because he knew that the more he accelerated the pace of combat the more the war became a battle of endurance—and endurance battles favor the insurgent. "And it happened as the Philistine arose and was drawing near David that David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine," the Bible says. "And he reached his hand into the pouch and took from there a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine in his forehead." The second sentence—the slingshot part—is what made David famous. But the first sentence matters just as much. David broke the rhythm of the encounter. He speeded it up. "The sudden astonishment when David sprints forward must have frozen Goliath, making him a better target," the poet and critic Robert Pinsky writes in "The Life of David." Pinsky calls David a "point guard ready to flick the basketball here or there." David pressed. That's what Davids do when they want to beat Goliaths.
Ranadivé's basketball team played in the National Junior Basketball seventh-and-eighth-grade division, representing Redwood City. The girls practiced at Paye's Place, a gym in nearby San Carlos. Because Ranadivé had never played basketball, he recruited a series of experts to help him. The first was Roger Craig, the former all-pro running back for the San Francisco 49ers, who is also TIBCO's director of business development. As a football player, Craig was legendary for the off-season hill workouts he put himself through. Most of his N.F.L. teammates are now hobbling around golf courses. He has run seven marathons. After Craig signed on, he recruited his daughter Rometra, who played Division I basketball at Duke and U.S.C. Rometra was the kind of person you assigned to guard your opponent's best player in order to shut her down. The girls loved Rometra. "She has always been like my big sister," Anjali Ranadivé said. "It was so awesome to have her along."
Redwood City's strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out of bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually, that's not an issue, because teams don't contest the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Redwood City did not. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she's guarding, to impede her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played in front of their opponents, to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn't guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater, who could serve as a second defender against the other team's best player. "Think about football," Ranadivé said. "The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it's still damned difficult to complete a pass." Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn't make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé's girls were maniacal.
The second deadline requires a team to advance the ball across mid-court, into its opponent's end, within ten seconds, and if Redwood City's opponents met the first deadline the girls would turn their attention to the second. They would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and "trap" her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She'd sprint over and double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she'd steal the ball. Maybe the other player would throw it away in a panic—or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle. "When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything," Anjali said. "So my dad said the whole game long, 'Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.' It's the best feeling in the world to steal the ball from someone. We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them."
The Redwood City players would jump ahead 4–0, 6–0, 8–0, 12–0. One time, they led 25–0. Because they typically got the ball underneath their opponent's basket, they rarely had to take low-percentage, long-range shots that required skill and practice. They shot layups. In one of the few games that Redwood City lost that year, only four of the team's players showed up. They pressed anyway. Why not? They lost by three points.
"What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses," Rometra Craig said. She helped out once Redwood City advanced to the regional championships. "We could hide the fact that we didn't have good outside shooters. We could hide the fact that we didn't have the tallest lineup, because as long as we played hard on defense we were getting steals and getting easy layups. I was honest with the girls. I told them, 'We're not the best basketball team out there.' But they understood their roles." A twelve-year-old girl would go to war for Rometra. "They were awesome," she said.
Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak—the railroad—and not where they were strong, Medina. Redwood City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one. Lawrence extended the battlefield over as large an area as possible. So did the girls of Redwood City. They defended all ninety-four feet. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those "quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets were movement, endurance, individual intelligence . . . courage."
"It's an exhausting strategy," Roger Craig said. He and Ranadivé were in a TIBCO conference room, reminiscing about their dream season. Ranadivé was at the whiteboard, diagramming the intricacies of the Redwood City press. Craig was sitting at the table.
"My girls had to be more fit than the others," Ranadivé said.
"He used to make them run," Craig said, nodding approvingly.
"We followed soccer strategy in practice," Ranadivé said. "I would make them run and run and run. I couldn't teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That's why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you're going to get tired." He turned to Craig. "What was our cheer again?"
The two men thought for a moment, then shouted out happily, in unison, "One, two, three, ATTITUDE!"
That was it! The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.
"One time, some new girls joined the team," Ranadivé said, "and so in the first practice I had I was telling them, 'Look, this is what we're going to do,' and I showed them. I said, 'It's all about attitude.' And there was this one new girl on the team, and I was worried that she wouldn't get the whole attitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, 'No, no, it's not One, two three, ATTITUDE. It's One, two, three, attitude HAH ' "—at which point Ranadivé and Craig burst out laughing.
In January of 1971, the Fordham University Rams played a basketball game against the University of Massachusetts Redmen. The game was in Amherst, at the legendary arena known as the Cage, where the Redmen hadn't lost since December of 1969. Their record was 11–1. The Redmen's star was none other than Julius Erving—Dr. J. The UMass team was very, very good. Fordham, by contrast, was a team of scrappy kids from the Bronx and Brooklyn. Their center had torn up his knee the first week of the season, which meant that their tallest player was six feet five. Their starting forward—and forwards are typically almost as tall as centers—was Charlie Yelverton, who was six feet two. But from the opening buzzer the Rams launched a full-court press, and never let up. "We jumped out to a thirteen-to-six lead, and it was a war the rest of the way," Digger Phelps, the Fordham coach at the time, recalls. "These were tough city kids. We played you ninety-four feet. We knew that sooner or later we were going to make you crack." Phelps sent in one indefatigable Irish or Italian kid from the Bronx after another to guard Erving, and, one by one, the indefatigable Irish and Italian kids fouled out. None of them were as good as Erving. It didn't matter. Fordham won, 87–79.
In the world of basketball, there is one story after another like this about legendary games where David used the full-court press to beat Goliath. Yet the puzzle of the press is that it has never become popular. People look at upsets like Fordham over UMass and call them flukes. Basketball sages point out that the press can be beaten by a well-coached team with adept ball handlers and astute passers—and that is true. Ranadivé readily admitted that all an opposing team had to do to beat Redwood City was press back: the girls were not good enough to handle their own medicine. Playing insurgent basketball did not guarantee victory. It was simply the best chance an underdog had of beating Goliath. If Fordham had played UMass the conventional way, it would have lost by thirty points. And yet somehow that lesson has escaped the basketball establishment.
What did Digger Phelps do, the season after his stunning upset of UMass? He never used the full-court press the same way again. The UMass coach, Jack Leaman, was humbled in his own gym by a bunch of street kids. Did he learn from his defeat and use the press himself the next time he had a team of underdogs? He did not.
The only person who seemed to have absorbed the lessons of that game was a skinny little guard on the UMass freshman team named Rick Pitino. He didn't play that day. He watched, and his eyes grew wide. Even now, thirty-eight years later, he can name, from memory, nearly every player on the Fordham team: Yelverton, Sullivan, Mainor, Charles, Zambetti. "They came in with the most unbelievable pressing team I'd ever seen," Pitino said. "Five guys between six feet five and six feet. It was unbelievable how they covered ground. I studied it. There is no way they should have beaten us. Nobody beat us at the Cage."
Pitino became the head coach at Boston University in 1978, when he was twenty-five years old, and used the press to take the school to its first N.C.A.A. tournament appearance in twenty-four years. At his next head-coaching stop, Providence College, Pitino took over a team that had gone 11–20 the year before. The players were short and almost entirely devoid of talent—a carbon copy of the Fordham Rams. They pressed, and ended up one game away from playing for the national championship. At the University of Kentucky, in the mid-nineteen-nineties, Pitino took his team to the Final Four three times—and won a national championship—with full-court pressure, and then rode the full-court press back to the Final Four in 2005, as the coach at the University of Louisville. This year, his Louisville team entered the N.C.A.A. tournament ranked No. 1 in the land. College coaches of Pitino's calibre typically have had numerous players who have gone on to be bona-fide all-stars at the professional level. In his many years of coaching, Pitino has had one, Antoine Walker. It doesn't matter. Every year, he racks up more and more victories.
"The greatest example of the press I've ever coached was my Kentucky team in '96, when we played L.S.U.," Pitino said. He was at the athletic building at the University of Louisville, in a small room filled with television screens, where he watches tapes of opponents' games. "Do we have that tape?" Pitino called out to an assistant. He pulled a chair up close to one of the monitors. The game began with Kentucky stealing the ball from L.S.U., deep in L.S.U.'s end. Immediately, the ball was passed to Antoine Walker, who cut to the basket for a layup. L.S.U. got the ball back. Kentucky stole it again. Another easy basket by Walker. "Walker had almost thirty points at halftime," Pitino said. "He dunked it almost every time. When we steal, he just runs to the basket." The Kentucky players were lightning quick and long-armed, and swarmed around the L.S.U. players, arms flailing. It was mayhem. Five minutes in, it was clear that L.S.U. was panicking.
Pitino trains his players to look for what he calls the "rush state" in their opponents—that moment when the player with the ball is shaken out of his tempo—and L.S.U. could not find a way to get out of the rush state. "See if you find one play that L.S.U. managed to run," Pitino said. You couldn't. The L.S.U. players struggled to get the ball inbounds, and, if they did that, they struggled to get the ball over mid-court, and on those occasions when they managed both those things they were too overwhelmed and exhausted to execute their offense the way they had been trained to. "We had eighty-six points at halftime," Pitino went on—eighty-six points being, of course, what college basketball teams typically score in an entire game. "And I think we'd forced twenty-three turnovers at halftime," twenty-three turnovers being what college basketball teams might force in two games. "I love watching this," Pitino said. He had a faraway look in his eyes. "Every day, you dream about getting a team like this again." So why are there no more than a handful of college teams who use the full-court press the way Pitino does?
ArreguÃn-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn't fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in ArreguÃn-Toft's database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times—and lost a hundred and nineteen times. In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish straight up and lost; in 1816, the Georgians fought the Russians straight up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the British straight up and lost; in the Kandyan rebellion of 1817, the Sri Lankans fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, the Burmese chose to fight the British straight up and lost. The list of failures was endless. In the nineteen-forties, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedevilled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare—and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict's early stages. "As quickly as he could," William Polk writes in "Violent Politics," a history of unconventional warfare, Washington "devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war."
It makes no sense, unless you think back to that Kentucky-L.S.U. game and to Lawrence's long march across the desert to Aqaba. It is easier to dress soldiers in bright uniforms and have them march to the sound of a fife-and-drum corps than it is to have them ride six hundred miles through the desert on the back of a camel. It is easier to retreat and compose yourself after every score than swarm about, arms flailing. We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It's the other way around. Effort can trump ability—legs, in Saxe's formulation, can overpower arms—because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination.
"I have so many coaches come in every year to learn the press," Pitino said. Louisville was the Mecca for all those Davids trying to learn how to beat Goliaths. "Then they e-mail me. They tell me they can't do it. They don't know if they have the bench. They don't know if the players can last." Pitino shook his head. "We practice every day for two hours straight," he went on. "The players are moving almost ninety-eight per cent of the practice. We spend very little time talking. When we make our corrections"—that is, when Pitino and his coaches stop play to give instruction—"they are seven-second corrections, so that our heart rate never rests. We are always working." Seven seconds! The coaches who came to Louisville sat in the stands and watched that ceaseless activity and despaired. The prospect of playing by David's rules was too daunting. They would rather lose.
In 1981, a computer scientist from Stanford University named Doug Lenat entered the Traveller Trillion Credit Squadron tournament, in San Mateo, California. It was a war game. The contestants had been given several volumes of rules, well beforehand, and had been asked to design their own fleet of warships with a mythical budget of a trillion dollars. The fleets then squared off against one another in the course of a weekend. "Imagine this enormous auditorium area with tables, and at each table people are paired off," Lenat said. "The winners go on and advance. The losers get eliminated, and the field gets smaller and smaller, and the audience gets larger and larger."
Lenat had developed an artificial-intelligence program that he called Eurisko, and he decided to feed his program the rules of the tournament. Lenat did not give Eurisko any advice or steer the program in any particular strategic direction. He was not a war-gamer. He simply let Eurisko figure things out for itself. For about a month, for ten hours every night on a hundred computers at Xerox PARC, in Palo Alto, Eurisko ground away at the problem, until it came out with an answer. Most teams fielded some version of a traditional naval fleet—an array of ships of various sizes, each well defended against enemy attack. Eurisko thought differently. "The program came up with a strategy of spending the trillion on an astronomical number of small ships like P.T. boats, with powerful weapons but absolutely no defense and no mobility," Lenat said. "They just sat there. Basically, if they were hit once they would sink. And what happened is that the enemy would take its shots, and every one of those shots would sink our ships. But it didn't matter, because we had so many." Lenat won the tournament in a runaway.
The next year, Lenat entered once more, only this time the rules had changed. Fleets could no longer just sit there. Now one of the criteria of success in battle was fleet "agility." Eurisko went back to work. "What Eurisko did was say that if any of our ships got damaged it would sink itself—and that would raise fleet agility back up again," Lenat said. Eurisko won again.
Eurisko was an underdog. The other gamers were people steeped in military strategy and history. They were the sort who could tell you how Wellington had outfoxed Napoleon at Waterloo, or what exactly happened at Antietam. They had been raised on Dungeons and Dragons. They were insiders. Eurisko, on the other hand, knew nothing but the rule book. It had no common sense. As Lenat points out, a human being understands the meaning of the sentences "Johnny robbed a bank. He is now serving twenty years in prison," but Eurisko could not, because as a computer it was perfectly literal; it could not fill in the missing step—"Johnny was caught, tried, and convicted." Eurisko was an outsider. But it was precisely that outsiderness that led to Eurisko's victory: not knowing the conventions of the game turned out to be an advantage.
"Eurisko was exposing the fact that any finite set of rules is going to be a very incomplete approximation of reality," Lenat explained. "What the other entrants were doing was filling in the holes in the rules with real-world, realistic answers. But Eurisko didn't have that kind of preconception, partly because it didn't know enough about the world." So it found solutions that were, as Lenat freely admits, "socially horrifying": send a thousand defenseless and immobile ships into battle; sink your own ships the moment they get damaged.
This is the second half of the insurgent's creed. Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is "socially horrifying"—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coördination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn't do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be "an exceeding dirty and nasty people." He couldn't fight the establishment, because he was the establishment.
T. E. Lawrence, by contrast, was the farthest thing from a proper British Army officer. He did not graduate with honors from Sandhurst. He was an archeologist by trade, a dreamy poet. He wore sandals and full Bedouin dress when he went to see his military superiors. He spoke Arabic like a native, and handled a camel as if he had been riding one all his life. And David, let's not forget, was a shepherd. He came at Goliath with a slingshot and staff because those were the tools of his trade. He didn't know that duels with Philistines were supposed to proceed formally, with the crossing of swords. "When the lion or the bear would come and carry off a sheep from the herd, I would go out after him and strike him down and rescue it from his clutches," David explained to Saul. He brought a shepherd's rules to the battlefield.
The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. "Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition," the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn't being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.
"In the beginning, everyone laughed at our fleet," Lenat said. "It was really embarrassing. People felt sorry for us. But somewhere around the third round they stopped laughing, and some time around the fourth round they started complaining to the judges. When we won again, some people got very angry, and the tournament directors basically said that it was not really in the spirit of the tournament to have these weird computer-designed fleets winning. They said that if we entered again they would stop having the tournament. I decided the best thing to do was to graciously bow out."
It isn't surprising that the tournament directors found Eurisko's strategies beyond the pale. It's wrong to sink your own ships, they believed. And they were right. But let's remember who made that rule: Goliath. And let's remember why Goliath made that rule: when the world has to play on Goliath's terms, Goliath wins.
The trouble for Redwood City started early in the regular season. The opposing coaches began to get angry. There was a sense that Redwood City wasn't playing fair—that it wasn't right to use the full-court press against twelve-year-old girls, who were just beginning to grasp the rudiments of the game. The point of basketball, the dissenting chorus said, was to learn basketball skills. Of course, you could as easily argue that in playing the press a twelve-year-old girl learned something much more valuable—that effort can trump ability and that conventions are made to be challenged. But the coaches on the other side of Redwood City's lopsided scores were disinclined to be so philosophical.
"There was one guy who wanted to have a fight with me in the parking lot," Ranadivé said. "He was this big guy. He obviously played football and basketball himself, and he saw that skinny, foreign guy beating him at his own game. He wanted to beat me up."
Roger Craig says that he was sometimes startled by what he saw. "The other coaches would be screaming at their girls, humiliating them, shouting at them. They would say to the refs—'That's a foul! That's a foul!' But we weren't fouling. We were just playing aggressive defense."
"My girls were all blond-haired white girls," Ranadivé said. "My daughter is the closest we have to a black girl, because she's half-Indian. One time, we were playing this all-black team from East San Jose. They had been playing for years. These were born-with-a-basketball girls. We were just crushing them. We were up something like twenty to zero. We wouldn't even let them inbound the ball, and the coach got so mad that he took a chair and threw it. He started screaming at his girls, and of course the more you scream at girls that age the more nervous they get." Ranadivé shook his head: never, ever raise your voice. "Finally, the ref physically threw him out of the building. I was afraid. I think he couldn't stand it because here were all these blond-haired girls who were clearly inferior players, and we were killing them."
At the nationals, the Redwood City girls won their first two games. In the third round, their opponents were from somewhere deep in Orange County. Redwood City had to play them on their own court, and the opponents supplied their own referee as well. The game was at eight o'clock in the morning. The Redwood City players left their hotel at six, to beat the traffic. It was downhill from there. The referee did not believe in "One, two, three, attitude HAH." He didn't think that playing to deny the inbounds pass was basketball. He began calling one foul after another.
"They were touch fouls," Craig said. Ticky-tacky stuff. The memory was painful.
"My girls didn't understand," Ranadivé said. "The ref called something like four times as many fouls on us as on the other team."
"People were booing," Craig said. "It was bad."
"A two-to-one ratio is understandable, but a ratio of four to one?" Ranadivé shook his head.
"One girl fouled out."
"We didn't get blown out. There was still a chance to win. But . . ."
Ranadivé called the press off. He had to. The Redwood City players retreated to their own end, and passively watched as their opponents advanced down the court. They did not run. They paused and deliberated between each possession. They played basketball the way basketball is supposed to be played, and they lost—but not before making Goliath wonder whether he was a giant, after all.
Michael Fullan, who writes primarily about public education and business, describes change as a nonlinear, usually chaotic process. "Change cannot be managed. It can be understood and perhaps led, but it cannot be controlled."1 Given the chaotic nature of change, linear, step-by-step processes which attempt to manage it are problematic. They do not allow the process of change to unfold in its natural way, and they present an illusion of control that is unrealistic. Even though the proponents of those processes most often discuss their circular nature and warn against trying to follow them too rigidly, the very fact that the process is discussed in steps leads to an overly mechanistic view of organizational change.
An additional difficulty with these linear processes is that they run counter to the culture of most congregations—usually all but the largest ones, which, because of their size and more hierarchical, controlling structures, have developed a corporate mentality that makes the illusion of control easier to fall into. The organic nature of organizations is more apparent in most congregations, however. There is great informality in the way decisions actually get made; there is a reliance on more casual conversation and the building of consensus. Therefore, linear planning processes placed in the hands of a few most often seem alien to congregations, if not an out-and-out imposition. People may go along, because they want to be cooperative or because they do not know what else to do. Most often, though, these step-by-step processes do not produce the desired results. We've all heard the stories about the months spent crafting a purpose statement that gets hung on the wall or printed in the Sunday worship bulletin but has no discernable impact on the ministry of the congregation—it's the kind of thing that happens when congregations rely on a linear process to enable organic change.
The difficulty a congregation has in resisting the use of a linear process is often compounded when it seeks assistance from judicatory leadership or outside consultants. Many of these people work in a corporate culture in which more disciplined planning is essential, and they often rely on being able to share usable "tools" with congregations. What they fail to recognize, however, is that what is essential for their purposes is often detrimental to congregations.
Fullan, in contrast to steps, talks about the components of change. The challenge of leadership is to develop the various components so that they are apparent within the organization. Once that is accomplished, meaningful change can take place in its own nonlinear, often chaotic way. The components Fullan lists as essential to meaningful change are:
The presence of these components in the life of a congregation will encourage positive change. At times the change will be chaotic. At times there will be conflict. But these components set a tone that makes positive change possible.
If this approach to change were taken in a congregation, there would be no formal engagement in a step-by-step change process. Instead, these various elements would be introduced over time:
Approaching change in this way takes time. It also takes constant attention to the ways everything in the life of a congregation can be used to further the change needed to lead the congregation more faithfully into the future.
1. Michael Fullan, Leading in a Culture of Change (San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), 33.
2. Ibid.
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Adapted from Heart, Mind, and Strength: Theory and Practice for Congregational Leadership by Jeffrey D. Jones
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A Memorandum of Understanding was signed recently that integrates Baltimore Hebrew University's programs into Towson University, effective July 1, 2009.
A letter recently went out from Towson's administration welcoming BHU students to the school.
The merger still has to be officially approved by the University System of Maryland Board of Regents and the Maryland Higher Education Commission. According to Marina Cooper, assistant to the president for communications at Towson, Towson hopes to complete the process sometime next month. At that time, she said the president will officially comment on the matter.
"The deans and provost are working diligently on the transition," said Ms. Cooper.
Under the merger, BHU will continue to offer a master's degree in Jewish studies, a master's in Jewish communal service and a master's in Jewish education. The programs will be offered under a new entity called the Baltimore Hebrew Institute (BHI) at Towson University. They will fall under Towson's graduate offerings at its College of Liberal Arts and College of Education.
"This is a real historical accomplishment," said Erika Pardes Schon, BHU's interim president who will become the new director of the BHI and its community liaison. "We are setting a new precedent. It is a bold move to give up independence but still preserve our identity within a large university."
According to Ms. Schon, all of BHU's existing master's degree programs will transfer intact, and the school's professors will continue to teach graduate students. She said seven BHU faculty members will continue at the BHI.
Current BHU students who are pursuing doctoral degrees will be grandfathered into Towson's program. At the same time, Towson will have to apply for separate approval with the Maryland Higher Education Commission if it chooses to include a doctoral program in Jewish studies into its mission. Because of this, BHU is not recruiting doctoral students at this time.
Currently, BHU has 70 students in its masters' and doctoral degree programs.
"This provides an opportunity for programmatic expansion," said Ms. Schon. "It gives us the ability to draw and attract students from Towson, and provides us with a very strong base to build our graduate program."
As part of the integration, BHU's Joseph Meyerhoff Library will move its extensive and prestigious collection to Towson, where it will be housed in a designated space on the second floor of Towson's Albert S. Cook Library. The Meyerhoff Library has more than 80,000 volumes and includes a rare book collection, as well as books acquired from the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Organization after the Holocaust.
In recognition of the importance of making its collection accessible to area patrons who are unable to drive, Ms. Schon said BHU is in the process of working out details with the Pikesville branch of the Baltimore County Public Library to provide interlibrary loans between the two institutions.
The school also plans to offer its continuing adult learning and Hebrew language options at central locations around the Baltimore metropolitan area. The first such effort is an introduction to Biblical Hebrew, which will begin later this month and be held at Stevenson's Chizuk Amuno Congregation. BHU will continue to look for new venues to hold future programs.
On May 20, BHU will celebrate its 90th anniversary at a fund-raising gala, honoring the legacy of the late Dr. Louis L. Kaplan, who served as the school'ss president for 40 years. The event will be held at BHU, 5800 Park Heights Ave., and will raise money for future scholarship funds. The next day, the school will hold its last graduation as an independent entity.
Leonard Fein, founder of Moment magazine and the group MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger will be the commencement speaker. Both events are open to the community. Mark B. Terrill, president of the Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore, will receive an honorary doctor of human letters.
"The entire transition could not have been done without the support of the Associated," said Ms. Schon.
By Eric Fingerhut · May 1, 2009
The Conservative movement's rabbinical arm will now have a D.C. address. Rabbi Jack Moline has been named the Rabbnical Assembly's first director of public policy. Moline says the position will be an extension of the political advocacy and activist work he's been doing as an individual rabbi for the last 25 years, and he's "anxious to use the connections I've cultivated" to advance the RA's agenda. The rabbi said the "part-time, volunteer" position is "open-ended," and he hopes to get the office "up and running" while it evolves into something that can "sustain itself." Both the Reform and Orthodox movement have strong presences in the nation's capital, but the Conservative movement has never had a similar operation.
After the jump, the RA's press release announcing the position:
In a move that articulates the bold new focus of the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative movement, incoming executive vice president Rabbi Julie Schonfeld recently announced the creation of a first-ever RA Office of Public Policy in Washington, DC.
"The creation of this position is an organic outgrowth of the facts on the ground," said Rabbi Schonfeld, who assumes her new position on July 1st. "Conservative rabbis are already a predominant force in Jewish communal life, filling many key leadership positions. This effort aims to build on this reality by reaching both within and beyond our denomination to mobilize the community in order to do important advocacy work."
To head the new position of director of Public Policy for the RA, Rabbi Schonfeld has named Rabbi Jack Moline, a Conservative rabbi who is already considered a Washington insider. In addition to being the spiritual leader of Agudas Achim Congregation in Alexandria, VA, a pulpit he has held since 1987, Rabbi Moline just completed a two-year term as vice chair of the Interfaith Alliance -- a national coalition of leadership from various faith communities -- and has been named a top influential rabbi by Newsweek magazine.
As the new Washington representative for the rabbinic group, Rabbi Moline shares the vision articulated by Rabbi Schonfeld. "As Conservative Rabbis," Moline noted, "we bring a point of view that combines the particular and the universal, and turns our deep knowledge of Jewish tradition out towards the world. Our point of view brings great 'value-added' to discussions of public policy."
Rabbi Schonfeld further explained that the model which the RA is pursuing is one in which program-driven partnerships are created. For instance, one of the first projects on the agenda is related to issues of food distribution, security and sustainability. Work is already underway with Mazon and the American Jewish World Service, and this project will launch in the fall of 2009. "By partnering with existing Jewish organizations we can maximize our effectiveness while eliminating duplication of efforts," she said. "Focusing our efforts is not only necessary in this time of economic constraint but it is the only way that we will be able to respond effectively to the pressing issues of the day."
Rabbi Schonfeld detailed a five-point agenda, which will include Social Justice Partnerships; The Washington Public Policy Office; Israeli Advocacy; Interfaith Work; and Hekhsher Tzedek, a star project of the Conservative movement which is focused on creating an ethical certification process for kosher foods. Rabbi Schonfeld said that the projects undertaken by the RA's new office of Public Policy will have a universal reach, while being rooted in Jewish ethics.
"What we have learned from the enormous success and popularity of Hekhsher Tzedek is that the community is quite literally hungry to lead Jewish lives where the ritual is bound up in the ethical underpinning," explained Rabbi Schonfeld. "That holistic integration of idea and action is at the heart of our initiative…as well as everything that the Rabbinical Assembly will undertake as it goes forward. And forming partnerships is key. The best energy is synergy," she said.
Visionary, Prophetic and Proactive
The establishment of the RA's Public Policy office builds on the tradition of the timely and relevant resolutions which are passed yearly by the voting members of the Assembly, typically in the course of their annual conventions. In recent years, the Conservative rabbis have debated and voted on resolutions dealing with such matters as the war in Iraq, the dissolution of the Chief Rabbinate in Israel, affordable health care, and carbon neutrality. The resolutions of the RA are a matter of public record and can be viewed at http://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/living/social_action.html.
Rabbi Jeffrey A. Wohlberg, president of the Rabbinical Assembly and rabbi emeritus at Adas Israel in Washington, DC termed Rabbi Schonfeld's leadership "visionary" and the appointment of Rabbi Jack Moline to the position of director of Public Policy for the RA "inspired" and "natural."
"Rabbi Moline is that perfect combination of smart, well-connected, socially-savvy and thoroughly conversant on the issues of the day," he said. "In addition, he knows and ins and outs of the Washington world. His appointment ushers in an exciting new era for the Rabbinical Assembly and Conservative Judaism."
By creating this position, Rabbi Schonfeld demonstrates an approach he describes as "prophetic and proactive," he said. "Rabbi Schonfeld is working within a great rabbinic tradition to bring about much needed change."
