Dear CBI members and friends,
I’ve just returned home from my annual rabbinic study week. This year I spent my study week with my hevre (study partners / colleagues / friends) from Bayit: Your Jewish Home, the new nonprofit organization that I co-founded last year along with Steven Green and several other wonderful folks. If you’ve ever wondered what kinds of things I do on my rabbinic study week, here are some glimpses… and I look forward to bringing some of this work into completion in a way that will enliven and enrich Jewish life at CBI!
Blessings to all —
Rabbi Rachel
A week of learning, vision, and building with Bayit
July 06, 2018
Bayit‘s summer learning week together begins with Shabbes. We come together from all of our various home places, put on our Shabbes whites, and daven, walking outside with a guitar to welcome the Shabbat bride into our midst. When we gather around the dining table, our kiddush soars, and my soul with it. We feast and talk and laugh and sing the birkat hamazon (grace after meals). We walk to the beach under the just-past-full moon and swoon at the sparkling path of moonlight across the waves.
On Shabbes morning our davenen is long and leisurely. Leadership flows organically: someone picks up the guitar or begins to offer a melody and the rest follow. Rabbi Mike Moskowitz gives over some Torah, and we talk about Balaam, social justice, and when it is and isn’t someone’s job to educate those who mistreat them. Later we study when one can send a shaliach (messenger) on one’s behalf and when it’s important to do a mitzvah with one’s own hands, and social justice, individual, and community.
There’s beach time, text study, singing. There’s the indescribable sweetness of spending a full Shabbat with others who care as much as I do. There are long afternoon conversations, and singing around the table as daylight wanes. There’s havdalah outside, our hands cupped around the candle so the ocean breeze doesn’t blow it out. There’s late-night conversation about what it means for our building work to be a tikkun for what has been broken, and even later-night Pictionary with endless laughter.
And that’s just the first night and day.
We daven every day, gliding in and out of service leadership, singing in harmony. We dedicate hours to talking about Bayit’s mission and vision, about the projects that are already underway, about partnership and collaboration, about what we yearn to build. We cook meals and clean up from meals and walk across the street to the beach and lounge by the ocean and swim and bask in the sunshine. We dive deep into the nature of innovation, systems and structures, how to wisely do spiritual R&D.
We study Ezekiel with Dr. Tamar Kamionkowski from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, diving into difficult questions of theodicy, relationship, spiritual formation, privilege, bypassing, gender, and grief. We study the theology of the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy): how narratives and instructions from earlier in Torah are recast there, and what it means to hear God’s voice and study God’s word, and immanence and transcendence, and what the Deuteronomic God asks of us (learning and love.)
We study Shabbat and medical halakha and ethics with Rabbi Jeff Fox, the rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Maharat. There’s a text from the Nezer Yisrael — about Shabbat, oscillation between giving and receiving, and how divinity can be manifest in authentic relationship — that lights me up like a Chanukiyah. There are teshuvot (responsa) and texts that raise big questions about identity, disability, change, personhood, and the halakhic process. We talk and grapple and question and learn.
We spin blue-sky dreams about where we want the Jewish future to go and what we want to build, about curation and collaboration and innovation — and then we anchor those dreams in six-month and one-year and three-year and five-year plans. We talk about empowering folks to build an accessible, meaningful Judaism now. We talk about governance and publishing and the internet and spiritual seekers and “all ages and stages.” Then we set our work aside and immerse in the ocean, with joy.
We begin to brainstorm about how we might re-invent the second day of Rosh Hashanah. What is the spiritual journey of that day, and how is it different from the first day? What do our communities need on that day? What elements ask a new uplift? What is the valance of teshuvah (returning / “repentance”) on that day distinct from the day before? What kind of temporal and spiritual runway do we need so our communities can accompany us into the spiritual territory we want to explore that day?
One night we bring folding chairs to the beach and daven ma’ariv with a guitar, accompanied by the waves, beneath the spread of stars. No one has a siddur, but it doesn’t matter; we have the words and the matbe’ah (the service’s internal structure) by heart. We sing to the One Who placed the planets in their orbit and the stars in the heavens. Because it came up in conversation earlier that day that one of us loves “Hotel California,” we close with “Adon Olam” to that melody in multipart harmony.
When Bayit’s summer learning and visioning week comes to an end, I’m sad to leave this space of learning and visioning and holy play… and grateful to have such hevre with whom to do the holy work of building together. Deep thanks to The Jewish Studio, our fiscal sponsor, for making this week possible — and to my hevre, for dedicating their hands and hearts to the proposition that everyone can be a builder, and that a meaningful, accessible, renewing Judaism is ours to build together.
With [some of] my Bayit hevre: building toward the Jewish future together.
