The Hidden Promise of Generational Politics

New from Mishkaneer:

Creative multi-generational solutions are quite attainable. We tend not to attain them because we tend not to look for them in the first place. With the young-adult generations being relatively undetermined at present, with regard to organized Jewish community and what it's good for, yet eager to be challenged to leadership, I see a golden opportunity to propose the challenge of imagining functional multi-generational models.

Read the complete piece: l'Dor v'Dor

multi-generational Judaism generational consumerism

The Intimate Dance of Devekut and Halacha

B"H



Welcome Rabbi Avram Davis to the Blogosphere, and in bright green, at that! In his inaugural article, Reb Avram has posted some beautiful, and juicy for thinking thoughts on the nature of Devekut and its relationship to Halachah.

http://wisdomhearttorah.blogspot.com/

Check it out -- intimate to the greater conversation of being joyously jewish, joyously human, joyously divine.

Why Web 2.0 Is Good for the Jews

The emergence of Web 2.0 as a (arguably the) widespread posture within the zeitgeist of Internet technology opens a world of potential for the future of Jewish community in North America -- especially with respect to the younger generations, now in their 20s and 30s, who have fled the conventional synagogue organizations en masse. Why?

Web 2.0's central message is that the individual "average citizen" has a story to tell; and, furthermore, the story is publishable, with relative ease and lack of special knowledge of trade or technology. A tidal wave of self-expression from previously anonymous individuals has enthusiastically answered this bid to dignify and empower their voices.

This is good for Jewish community because its younger demographic's disaffection is directly attributable to the very experience of not having a voice, relative to the overpowering presences of the Boomers who reinvented Judaism for the consumer economy and their parents who survived the War and the Shoa. The "blogosphere" in particular, and Web 2.0 in general, has become a haven -- and a hotbed of creative activity -- for the same younger Jews who are absent from synagogue membership rolls, and this Jewish community-in-exile is conspicuously gaining momentum and numbers.

A strategic and respectful application of maggidut, the Jewish tradition that philosophically parallels Web 2.0 in valuing the individual's narrative as a critical component of the grand sweep of history, bears the potential at this moment to bring this Jewish energy incubated in the Internet back into integration with the rest of North American Jewish community. In other words, where the maggidic ethos and modalities of Web 2.0 are incorporated into our community organizations, dynamic young Jewish adults are very likely to follow.

thoughts on training up maggidim

B"H

A friend and mentor maggid asked me to write up my thoughts on requirements for training maggidim. As it is relevant to the conversation of just what a maggid is, and how maggidut differs from rabbinics, I'm posting it here. Some editing has been done to protect issues of confidentiality. All comments welcome!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
B”H

(--------), shalom shalom.

In my reply to your email I suggested that the first place to start for maggidic requirements is the ability to define what a maggid is. I wasn’t being funny. This is so important, without it I think a maggid is really dead in the water (so to speak.) In this reemerging field of maggidut there is a wide range of opinion about what exactly is a maggid, with each teacher/ school claiming its own definition. Storyteller? Rabbinic Pastor? Facilitator of Sacred Autobiography? Outreach Worker? Melamed? Personally, I think they are all true, since maggidut, like rabbinics or hazzinut, is A PROCESS. This is a very important statement, so important I’m putting it right up here at the beginning. Maggidut is a process that constantly informs the way that a maggid operates in the field. Understanding this from the start is crucial, as it also informs the way that a maggid learns the tools of the trade. When I study rabbinics, I am doing so through the eyes and needs of the maggid. I am learning (and teaching) the material from a different perspective than I would if I was studying to be a rabbi or a hazan, or possibly even a rabbinic pastor in the sense that institutions like ALEPH define that role. (Keeping in mind that there is a tremendous amount of crossover between the roles of rabbi/ hazan/ maggid/ pastor… and that the best rabbis are also maggidim, eh?)

What does this mean? A maggid’s primary job is to “Relate” to the people. To Relate. Everything must come through this perspective. When I am learning new material, I am constantly thinking about how to apply it in the field. Maggidut is not about performing, as can be the case with cantorial soloists, and not about executing, the case with rabbis who must form and hold the communal structure. The maggid must be a general practitioner whose skill sets and ability to perform on demand legitimate the maggid’s presence as a spiritual teacher and act as a vehicle for teaching. The maggid’s skills are not an end in themselves, but are vehicles to a higher end—being a relational mechanism between HaShem, the Jewish spiritual path/ tradition, and the everyday reality of people’s lives.

continued...

A Reminder of Why We're Here

Jewish blogger David Kelsey has opened a plaintive yet articulate discussion that should serve to remind us of just how urgently we need to bring our people and institutions out of the malaise of consumerism. In "Fading Judaism" David describes, in frank autobiographical detail, how for "many Jews who don’t marry, particularly [baaley tshuvah], there is often a slide away from religiosity over time," a tragic inversion of the inspirational thrill so many young Jews experience in "returning" to a Jewish religious practice that authenticates the experience of Jewish identity, only to find down the road that the spiritual and social rewards of this practice feel increasingly shallow.

What do you do when you have never regretted any move away from observance? But only regret you had not made the change earlier?

What do you do when you find every brake you press for the sake of observance has an annoying and debilitating effect on your life, replete with resentments and little or no payoff?

(Emphasis mine.)

Without fully developing the ideas here, I think it is worth noting some assumptions about the current State of Judaism that guide the work of Moshav HaAm:

• In the Modern Industrial Age, the overwhelming majority of Jews are more or less free to choose our religious affiliations and lifestyle, like choosing an employer to work for, a city to live in, and a make and model of car to drive.


• In this culture of Consumer Choice, the survival of power centers (be they communities, leadership figures, or institutions) is a function of Brand Loyalty, which is generally secured either by spectacle (arrest the consumer's attention with something shocking/exciting/etc.) or by monopoly (eliminate the consumer's other options) or, often, both.


• The latter marketing approach has rendered Jewish life a landscape of increasingly narrow orthodoxies. That is, "movement" Judaism tends to make the appeal that our movement is right while their movement is wrong, or that this lifestyle is authentic while that one is hollow, in order to ensure loyalty to the brand because there is no conscionable alternative. (Among these "movements," I am including humanistic secularism, which is the least institutionally organized within [Diaspora] Jewish community, probably because it is the best supported by host-culture institutions. It is distinct from the host culture itself, though, in that the religion being spurned is religious Judaism, not Christianity.)


• Consequently, division and provincialism characterize Jewish identity politics to a considerable degree, and creative communication between Jewish subcultures is systematically discouraged.


• For the born natives of any given Jewish "movement," the experience of this insularity is often one of security. However, it is just as often an experience of stagnation, lack of vitality, inflexibility, even claustrophobia. For those who have this experience, there is a very high incidence of jumping ship from one "movement"'s orthodoxy to another's.


• What is perhaps inadequately understood by those who market one orthodoxy to those disaffected with another is that, in the long run, the pickings aren't really so easy as they seem. Those who are open to abandoning one orthodoxy over its limitations will typically be of the sort who would abondon another orthodoxy over its limitations. Even if one would not abandon a second orthodoxy, disenchantment with orthodoxy itself is generally an intractable personality trait, and will manifest one way or another. (For this reason, orthodoxy-based power centers usually push new joiners to start families or otherwise establish covenantal ties that will make it difficult to leave after the honeymoon is over.)

As "Ilana B." writes in the poignant comments thread following David Kelsey's piece (emphasis mine):

For many of us (in addition to many "frum" from birth), we are fed up with doing some of the mitzvos over and over, and guiltily feeling empty.

[...]

Is it any wonder why so many of our brothers and sister who were raised Traditional or Orthodox just walk away? These are not stupid, un-intuitive people. Walking away from it, for some, is the only way to stay sane. I know it sounds harsh, but it's true, and we need to figure out what the hell to do about it, and now.

The first step in addressing the problem is, of course, to understand it as fully as possible. Moshav HaAm is fundamentally an organization concerned with application and action, but with the Maggidic goal that, whatever form of engagement we undertake, the product should be a more complete understanding of the Jewish narrative as it unfolds through our people's lives. There is very much to be studied, learned, and written about the ramifications of Industrial Market Consumerism in Jewish life*, and all Moshav HaAm associates are already dedicated in various concrete ways to addressing the problems we see. But it is worth taking specific consideration of our need to simply hear (and remember) the experiences of disillusionment, loneliness, and alienation that we all experience in community, and that some feel profoundly.


*In Spring 2005, I wrote drafts of some relevant pieces on Mishkaneer:

• Paper or Plastic?: A Rumination for Pesach 5765


• The Case Against "Modern Orthodoxy"


• On Consumerism and Religion

post-denominational Judaism orthodoxy consumerism

On Uniformity In Halakhah

From a very interesting comment in a lengthy discussion of peoplehood unity as a direct goal in Jewish-legal ruling on Mah Rabu:

Also in recent thought I have been struggling as to whether halachik constraints, which flow from this idea of uniformity, have normative value today. (note, value, not authority). As Rashi puts it “to prevent Israel from becoming groups and groups (agudot agudot) and it will seem like two Torot.” The notion and goals of conformity are dependant on multiple variables, including the present religious situation, as mitigated by cultural as well as spiritual factors. The goal of conformity is always unity; in this case the goal is to have one Torah not two. In those times they were able to accomplish unity by creating one standardized normative practice for all groups, even when already they were geographically separate, the goal was to keep a strong solidarity and communion through regulating culture and religious practices such that they reflected a similar manner to those in Jerusalem.

Today, I do not think that such conformity creates unity. Rather, perhaps it is becoming the case that a higher level of unity is being driven for today, one that creates unity through dialogue back and forth; in the way that Talmudic dialogue is modeled. And just as in Talmudic dialogue there is often no synthesis, which conforms the two previous opposing sides to one position, but rather the sugya is always pushing itself forward with questions in a search a new level of truth, one only gained through a never-ending dialectic, which will settle for no synthesis. For unlike Hegel, spirit can never become settled and captured in any one synthesis.

Holonic?

Holon (philosophy)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Holonic)


In the philosophy of history, a holon is a historical event that makes other historical events inevitable. A holon is a controversial concept, in that some reject the inevitability of any historical event. A special category of holon is technology, the view that technology dictates history.

In some versions of holism and systems theory, a holon (from the Greek holos, "whole") is something that is simultaneously a whole and a part. The term was Coined by Arthur Koestler on p. 48 of his book The Ghost in the Machine (1967).
A holon refers to a system (or phenomenon) that is a whole in itself as well as a part of a larger system. It can be seen as systems nested within each other. Every system can be considered a holon, from a subatomic particle to the universe as a whole. On a non-physical level, words, ideas, sounds, emotions – everything that can be identified – is simultaneously part of something, and can be viewed as having parts of its own.

Since a holon is embedded in larger wholes, it is influenced by and influences these larger wholes. And since a holon also contains subsystems, or parts, it is similarly influenced by and influences these parts. Information flows bidirectionally between smaller and larger systems. When this bidirectionality of information flow and understanding of role is compromised, for whatever reason, the system begins to break down: wholes no longer recognize their dependence on their subsidiary parts, and parts no longer recognize the organizing authority of the wholes. Cancer is a good example of this breakdown in the biological realm.

This hierarchy of holons is called a holarchy. It is a natural hierarchy in the sense that it is objective rather than subjective.
Ken Wilber comments that the test of holon hierarchy is that if you were to remove a type of entity from existence, then all other entities of which it formed a part must of necessity cease to exist too. Thus an atom is lower in the hierarchy than a molecule, because if you removed all molecules, atoms could still exist, whereas if you removed all atoms, molecules would cease to exist too. Wilber's concept is known as the doctrine of the fundamental and the significant. An hydrogen atom is more fundamental than an ant, but an ant is more significant.

The same test is true for letters and words, or people and countries. This natural hierarchy contrasts with other types of hierarchy (such as human leadership) which are dependent upon consensus and may be subject to dispute or change.
[edit]

Emergent Community Models

My fellow Seattleite R' Dov Gartenberg, one of two Conservative-affiliated Seattle rabbis who has gone from conventional pulpit to independent community innovation in the past year, just attended S3K's "Working Group of Jewish Emerging Sacred Communities" conference in NYC. In response, he has written this piece on Emerging Sacred Communities, in which he contrasts his own Panim Hadashot against crosstown non-rival Kavana Cooperative to distinguish two different emergent community models.

Happy Birthday Moshav HaAm

B"H


Next week marks the end of the first year since the Moshav was birthed into the Universe. We Officialy launched the Moshav erev Tisha B'Av, but prior to that, this project was quietly incubating in coffee houses up and down the West Coast. One year. So far we've aquired participants, held a maggidic summit, planned for another winter summit, set the beginnings of an agenda into motion, networked all over creation, and started this Blog. Are these humble beginnings? Maybe. Maybe we will always be a humble organization. This is okay, in fact we specifically decided during the summer summit, to allow the community and the project to unfold organically and not to try to rush the details of it's final shape or form. To be a model for creating and sustaining midrashic communities means a willingness to publicly share our own process as we evolve this sacred community-- and that means our failures as well as our successes.


Back to our Roots!

When the Moshav was first started it had four stated goals:

1) Resource Center for communties and maggidim in the field.

2) Web Site for the maggidic community and extended chevre

3) Jewish Free School for the host community

4) Maggid Field School


Goals of the Moshav as they look today:

1) Resource Center for communities and maggidim in the field

2) Web Site and Internet Technology for the maggidic community and extended chevre

3) Land based Intentional Community operating as retreat and education center

4) Maggid Field School


Working Principles of the Moshav, so far:

1) The Moshav as an organization that is also a sacred community uses Midrashic organizing principles in developing communal relationships and structure

2) The community has a life of it's own, a soul that must be honored

3) The Moshav is not only a think tank, but an active laboratory in the field


In the next upcoming posts I will ellaborate on each of the goals of the Moshav, as well as our operating principles. This will also help me respond to the very excellent conversation opened up by Shawn Landres, of S3K.


Blessings to you all for a fruitful and reflective Elul.

The Taxonomy of Exile, Diaspora, and Jewish Community Organizations

A new tributary has opened to the ongoing conversation between Moshav HaAm and Shawn Landres, in reference to my first attempt to articulate the Difference Between Diaspora and Exile.

Bikkurim

This is interesting. "Nuturing innovating Jewish projects from start-up to sustainability." I hadn't heard of them before.

http://bikkurim.org/

Hat tip to Jewish Fringe.

The "Jewish Emergent" Paradigm

In our internal conversations, we often describe Moshav HaAm as an effort to build infrastructure to catch the rising groundswell (lest it flood, make a big mess, and evaporate), but obviously it is necessary to identify, as best we can, just what the supposed groundswell is. Shawn Landres has made a respectable stab at defining the Emerging Spiritual Paradigm in Sh'ma magazine:

Three broad streams of Jewish leaders and communities are emerging: independent minyanim, "parashuls" (analogous to parachurches), and congregational communities of practice. The independent minyanim tend to be organized around lay-led Shabbat worship, while the parashuls are led by charismatic entrepreneurs creating connections beyond traditional institutional boundaries; leaders of the third type, whether they admit to it or not, are reinventing or replacing the synagogue. [...]

Though its leaders exhibit a rich diversity of approaches and philosophies, they do share the values they practice and an emerging vision of Judaism as a relational conversation aimed at spirituality in intentional community.

This article makes a number of interesting claims, all of which bear significantly on the recently-erupted and B"H ongoing conversation between Shawn and Moshav HaAm, as well as upon the very emerging mandate of Moshav HaAm itself.

Discuss.


intentional community | Judaism | synagogue

First Notes of Theory

B"H

Well, still on the road for a few more days before I get to settle into home for a stretch, so I admit to being lax on the writing front (Yoel Natan has blessedly been translating our work into Moshav postings-- thank you friend!) Anyrate, just to prove I do in fact exist in this conversation, here are the beginnings of tonight's notes-- if you can read them, you're welcome to them. (Click on photos to enlarge)

Non-Institutional Organizational Models: Jews In the Woods

I first learned of the East Coast-based Jews In the Woods from organizer, activist, and RRC rabbinical student Joe Berman, who was a centrally-involved "Fruity Jew" during his undergraduate years at Wesleyan. This is how one learns about the Fruity Jews: from someone who is involved. They have no web site, but not because they aren't on the internet. They maintain their network and conduct organizational communications online with listservs and wikis, but without any centralized public portal. Now, Jay Michaelson writes in the Forward, As Jews in the Woods Grows, It Weighs Whether to Open Its Doors:

[...] this striving for authenticity also led the group to restrict entry to people who already knew at least one current attendee - a decision that remains one of its most controversial. Indeed, the organization can seem almost shadowy. Practically every young Jewish leader knows someone who’s been involved, but there is no Web site, no formal organizational structure and no agreed-on set of guiding principles. As the group’s prominence grows - with alumni graduating into central roles in professional Jewish life - some participants have begun to press for more openness and accountability.

What are the pros and cons of the Jews In the Woods model heretofore? For what sorts of organizations is it most conducive and appropriate?

Moshav Mission, re: Midrash and Mishkan

To develop and deploy models for dwelling in Jewish community according primarily to a midrashic rather than (or in tandem with?) an halakhic organizing principle.