Big Tent Judaism

Sound and Fury from the JOI Conference

A huge thanks to our friend Jay Michaelson—someone who has long been pushing the Jewish community to recognize, rethink, and expand its boundaries on issues of inclusion, sexuality and spirituality—for coming to our Judaism2030 Conference this past week with microphone in hand to extract some of the thoughts and ideas of our presenters and participants. Check out his recap on Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, which includes quotes from JOI’s own Senior Director of Training Eva Stern; Adam Segulah Sher, Program Manager at Isabella Freedman Retreat Center in Falls Village, CT; Rabbi Olivier Ben Haim of Bet Alef Meditative Synagogue in Seattle, WA; and Daniel Sieradski, Director of Digital Strategy at Repair The World.

Speaking of Daniel Sieradski, he was kind enough to upload his fantastic presentation “Jeuromancer: Transhumanism, Bioethics & the Dystopian Jewish Future,” which, perhaps more than any other at our conference, directly utilized futurism projections and related it to Jewish concerns. Be sure to click the tab under the slide that says “Speaker Notes on Slide 1” to follow along with his notes, it’s really quite a mind-expanding experience.

And today eJewishPhilanthropy.com completed their week-long series of thought pieces written by presenters at our conference, which you can see collected onto one page of their site. We hope these resources begin to give a taste of the topics and issues we at JOI encourage the entire community to grapple with in order to proactively address a positive Jewish future.

Why I am Optimistic about the Jewish Future!

We have just completed our fifth North American JOI Conference called Judaism2030: A Working Conference for a Vibrant Jewish Future. I walked away even more optimistic about the Jewish future than I did when the conference started, albeit realistic about the challenges that face us that we have to meet and transcend. Now that the conference is over, the hard work begins. But I wanted to thank the over 200 participants and nearly 50 presenters who joined with us to imagine the future and chart a path to getting there. Click here to visit eJewishPhilanthropy.com and read what some of the conference presenters addressed during their sessions.

I also wanted to share some of the visions of the future that emerged from the final session (see below.) (more…)

The Term “Welcoming” — A Clarification

We at the Jewish Outreach Institute have argued for the past decade that there is a divide in the Jewish community. While some may argue that the divide is between those who are intermarried and those who are in-married, and would expect us to agree with that bifurcation given our sensitivities and many of our programs, we actually don’t agree. Actually, we argue that the big divide is between those on the inside and those on the outside of the organized Jewish community and its institutions. (And, by the way, we fear that as the divide grows larger, it becomes less relevant to both groups.) Moreover, we argue that one of the things that keeps outsiders from entering the inside is what we call “welcoming.” In other words, our institutions have not been sufficiently welcoming. And if they were, more people might enter them—and want to return after their first visit.

Now some will mistakenly conclude that “welcoming” is all about a pretty smile and an embrace, encouraging people to enter an institution or be affirmed for doing so. At JOI, welcoming begins way before a person even sets foot in a Jewish communal institution and concludes after a path has been charted for that person to fully engage with it. Welcoming includes an inviting attitude but is not limited to it. It is perhaps best described as a process of positive engagement: meeting people where they are; accepting them for who they are; and assisting them in determining who they might become, by providing the deep and meaningful Jewish content that can only be received when a newcomer is not just accepted but embraced. That’s why we at JOI spend a lot of time helping institutions to understand the broad scope of what it means to be welcoming and what changes may need to be made in order to be so. That was one of the motivations behind the establishment of a Big Tent Judaism coalition, which now numbers over 450 member institutions, and the 10 principles to which its members ascribe to implement in their institutions.

So for those who think that welcoming is limited to the intermarried, or for those who think that the term itself is limiting, I would welcome you to broaden your perspective as we have and introduce such an approach to the Jewish community you most care about. After all, even if we are successful in motivating those on the outside to enter into the institutions in our community, if they don’t find a welcoming presence, they—and the institution—won’t be there much longer.