Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
Is there a boundary around saying, "the ideology of you don't belong here because you're different than I am" or, "I really disagree with you"? How do we lovingly set that boundary in our communities so that we stay and have these charged and passionate and painful and raw conversations together?

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. I am so delighted to welcome two guests today, colleagues, friends, teachers of mine.
First, I'm so happy to welcome Rabbi Elliott Tepperman. Elliott is a 2002 graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and is the spiritual leader of Bnai Keshet in Montclair, New Jersey. And Rabbi Rachel Weiss is a 2009 graduate of RRC, and she is the rabbi of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Illinois. Welcome to both of you.

Rabbi Elliott Tepperman:
It's a pleasure. Really great to see you both in this moment and to hear your voices.

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
Thanks for being in conversation. This is really delightful.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
It's really exciting. I am coming in from Modi'in, Israel. I am here after a meeting of the Board of Governors of the Jewish Agency for Israel and am also visiting with Reconstructionist rabbis here in Israel. And we are coming together to have a conversation about covenantal community in general and also about how principles and practices associated with covenantal community can help to support and hold conversations and community dynamics around Israel and Palestine and challenging conversations in general.
Because I'm in Israel, my control over the environment is a little bit different than usual, so I apologize in advance for any kind of background noise or interruptions. Thanks you guys again for coming in for this conversation.
I want to just begin by checking in with you about your understandings of covenant and sharing with you some of my thinking when I talk about taking that noun and that concept that is so resonant across Jewish history and applying it to kehillah, to community, which is also such an essential building block in Jewish life.
And each of them have their own significance and resonance, and I have been very energized by the prospect of putting them together in ways that they long have been and in new ways to speak to this moment. So when you teach about brit, when you talk about covenant in the community, like on Shabbat or at other settings or at the ceremony of brit, what is it that you raise up? What is some of the most important Torah that you teach when you're talking about covenant?

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
So at JRC, one of the things that we do that I think is really special is whenever we have a B'nai mitzvah ritual, we after the third alliyah, which in our community is when the teen is called to the Torah as a Jewish adult for the first time, the fourth alliyah is for all adult members of JRC, which for the first time includes this teen.
So the very first mitzvah that they participate in is to be called to the Torah with their adult Jewish community. And one of the things that I always say in our blessing to the community after the alliyah is finished is to have the kid look around and say, some people you know in this group because they've been part of your life your whole life, like your family members or your classmates or your classmates' parents and some people you may have never seen before today.
And we talk about the really essential mitzvah in our community showing up of being present. And sometimes you show up for people that you know and you love, and sometimes you show up for people that you don't know and you've never met before. A covenantal community is not a dinner party or a gathering of your best friends.
It is a community that is obligated to show up for one another because you can't be Jewish alone and we need each other. And so when we're celebrating, when we're mourning, when we're struggling, we need each other and we try to model this every Shabbat morning. And we model this in all different kinds of ways.
So for me, I think this idea of covenantal community is about crafting a space where people feel like they belong, whether or not they even know somebody intimately well, but knowing that there are people who are obligated one to the other based on common values and who are committed to actually putting those values into action with their body, with their presence, with their soul, and showing up. And that is something that we try to raise up throughout everything that we do.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Oh, Rachel, I love that so much. I mean, one of the reasons that I think covenant is so... Relationship is at the center of covenant and that throughout so much of in the Torah and other treatments, it's a very hierarchical, it's a very vertical relationship.
And part of what, in a very Reconstructionist way, we're talking about is this horizontal relationship and that the covenant is that we're bound up in each other and that it is binding across time. It's binding across challenge.
And I think that this idea of asking, inviting, even commanding, however we reconstruct that term, the people to develop a sense of commitment and obligation to other people, which sometimes means submerging our individual interests in the service of something larger. It's such so beautiful.

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
It's a beautiful image of people who come up not only every week do we add a new Jewish adult. So every week, that community grows by one more thirteen-year-old on the bimah, but also people who come forward. Some people are invited guests and are dressed up. Some people went to meditation and are still in their yoga pants.
Some people are sitting in the room because they're checking it out and they didn't realize that they were going to be called up to the bimah. And I say, "You. No, you out there. I know you, you come up to the bimah." And people are surprised. And it's this really loving way of people looking around and saying, yeah, we're all here for each other.
It's a very tangible reminder of how we show up, especially because so many of us have had experiences in congregations or in our Jewish lives or our secular lives of feeling so deeply alone. And to actually model this is a place where that doesn't have to happen is very, very powerful.

Rabbi Elliott Tepperman:
I really appreciate a lot of what you're saying. It's interesting because for me, one of the things I was thinking about is the other end of the life cycle event, which is what it means for people to show up at each other's shiva and the need to over and over again, teach people that we do this even for the people we don't know.
And it's one of the most tangible ways that our community actually starts to understand that they're part of a community. I think that you were just speaking a moment ago, Rachel, about the loneliness that a lot of people feel, but there just aren't that many institutions left where people say, I'm going to intentionally build relationships of mutual obligation other than family.
And the synagogue is one of those few places, and yet people are so wired towards individualism that we have to remind them over and over again. What makes this a special location is that we actually feel some level of obligation one to the other.
And so obviously, a shiva minyan is the place where people most often able to say, I got it when suddenly people, I didn't know where in my living room. But for some people, they get it when there's another kind of crisis in their family and somehow or another or in their personal life and somehow or another congregation is able to support them in that moment.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
I have a story that illustrates that so well, Elliott. My younger brother and his late wife, the family is members of Havurah Shalom, the Reconstructionist congregation in Portland Oregon, and they have a very active [inaudible] hesed you know, caring committee.
And my late sister-in-law was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer while she was pregnant, late stage pregnancy of their first child. And so the first couple of months of Sam's life, Jesse was in very intense treatment. And I went often and I would show up on a Friday morning and stayed till Monday and I was there and I'd spent the morning with Jesse in the middle of chemo and my nephew, Sam, who was about to graduate from high school but was an infant at the time, and my brother got home from work on a Friday afternoon, and we were very excited to see each other.
And as he and I are greeting each other up, walks this woman carrying a bag of groceries with a challah sticking out, sees that she's interrupting something intimate and just thrusts a bag of groceries into my brother's hand and says, "Shabbat shalom." And turns on his heel.
And my brother has this very arrested look on his face and he turns to me and he said, "I have no idea who that person was." He said, I just burst into tears of gratitude that he was part of this community that supported their family well at this really, really, really challenging time.

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
Well, talking about covenantal community, I remember being at RRC as your student when that was happening and hearing that story in real time.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Yeah, I still got chills and want to cry every time, it was such was just... I feel like this is Elliott. You talked about the radical individualism and Rachel, you talked about the loneliness, which I do feel that this epidemic of loneliness that we're in the midst of is we know it's tied to the individualism.
We know it's also tied to social media, and it's this way that I really believe that ancient Jewish wisdom is very countercultural to the moment and ever more essential trying to find ways to both conceptualize it for people and then also to demonstrate it.

Rabbi Elliott Tepperman:
I think that one of the things that's interesting about the topic we're heading towards of talking about how our congregations are incorporating this into the current situation in Israel and Palestine is the way that it enlivens this question. So we teach Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, meaning every person, every Jew, every Israelite, every God's wrestler is bound up, one with the other.
But I think that in general, walking around in America, maybe you feel that a little bit like, oh yeah, I always feel a connection when I meet somebody Jewish or whatever. But there's very little sense of what Jews are doing someplace else really matters because it will impact me. And there's a lot of feeling like we can have the synagogue we want and if there's a synagogue that wants to do it differently, they can have the synagogue they want. And I'm not that synagogue, I'm this synagogue.
But when we have discord or heartache or broken dreams related to Israel, we see in really concrete ways that we are indeed bound up with the fate of what's happening there. People I think understand that with half of the Jews in the world living in Israel pretty much at this point, that we can love Israel or we can hate Israel, it doesn't really matter, what happens there reverberates and impacts what it means to be a Jew around the world.
And some of that is because of antisemitism. Some of that is because of ignorance, but the sense the experience of being implicated and bound together is quite visceral and visible to people. And I think it's very much at the core of how a lot of these conversations happen.

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
And I think can we react as you're saying in such a visual and visceral way and each have our own individual reactions as so many are having within our congregations or from congregation to congregation? And to circle back to the shiva piece, can we still then say, but I'm also obligated to show up for shiva for you.
So can we create these communities, whether it's within our individual congregations movement wise or across the Jewish world-wise, where we say, I profoundly disagree or I'm struggling with what you are saying politically, but absolutely you have a loss and I'm going to be in your living room for shiva because that's my obligation to you regardless.
And how can we make sure that we are maintaining that sanctity of our covenantal obligations one to the other so that it doesn't allow for these individual divisions to destroy the concept of peoplehood and being obligated to what we need, which is to be there for each other.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
I want to put a pin on what you mentioned, peoplehood in passing. I really want to shine a spotlight on the fact that when the term, the English phrase, peoplehood was brought to speech by Mordecai Kaplan and the circle gathered around him in the 1940s. Obviously, they were tapping into deep and ancient concepts of Am Yisrael and all the ways that we are connected to each other.
But what they were trying to do when they were doing that conceptualization was they were talking about peoplehood as a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself. And so that peoplehood just as a catchphrase, it's not adequate in and of itself. It's like how it gets brought to life, how it gets enacted. And I think what you're talking about each of you in these local settings is exactly that.
This is what peoplehood needs, not just like, oh yeah, you're a Jew, check. But it's the wrestling and it's the supporting each other in the hardest possible times. And ideally, it's also lots of opportunities to celebrate as well.

Rabbi Elliott Tepperman:
I think it's one of the ironies that we have lots of congregations, it's a common story that people will tell that the one place they don't want to talk about what their feelings about Israel and Palestine is their synagogue or else they go there because they happen to be in a synagogue where they feel completely ideologically aligned, but there's no tension and people are so afraid of that tension.
The fear comes from not wanting to lose what Rachel was discussing, showing up for each other in all the other ways we do it. But then the failure to get good at it means that we then can't manage the tension when it arises. One of the things that I feel grateful for at Bnai Keshet is that I just saw this as a really young rabbi and I didn't want to be a part of it.
And somewhere along the line, I started teaching that one of our obligations is to listen to one another, that we should think of that like a mitzvah, that one of the ways we could interpret shema Yisrael is as a commandment, that we listen to one another and that it's absurd that for a place that is so central in Jewish life, whether again regardless of your politics, that the one place you wouldn't be able to discuss it is within your closest Jewish community.
It should be the opposite. It should be the one place where you are fully free to say, I have a wild idea. Is this absurd? I don't understand your opinion. Why don't I understand it? I love your kids. I love being at your child's bat mitzvah. How come we don't see eye to eye? It should be the one place that happens.
And so at least for us, it made a big difference as we approached all of the hardship since October 7th, just talking about the kind of internal synagogue politics that we had some practice. We just had some practice of saying we are a community that can handle listening to each other and can handle hearing diverse opinions about these questions.

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
Similar to what you're saying, Elliott, you know, JRC in our history has gone through a lot of transition and trauma around talking about Israel-Palestine, and in an interim year before I came to JRC, a group of people met to really think about how do people with very passionate feelings and strong differences of opinion coexist in the same congregation and actually wrote a covenant of speech which outlines many of those.
It's our covenant of kvod tzicha, of respectful speech, that is read before every board meeting. Now it's read before every committee meeting and it's guiding principles exactly talking about what those pieces are and what we're dedicated to. We often talk about, and we did this as we were starting to crack open our hearts and our minds around racial equity and racial justice, when we were looking to the synagogue to be a place where we could actually openly be vulnerable and wrestle with what we were struggling with.
We bring all sorts of very open, painful things in our life cycle practices out into the open. When we have a painful loss, whether it's an unexpected death, a suicide, an illness, something really tragic, we bear that in a way that often we don't vulnerably share in the rest of the world, but we often share that in our communities.
We should ugly cry on Yom Kippur afternoon over the things that we're confessing when we stand and face each other and say very real things that people confess out loud, we can hold that because that's what Jewish community is designed to do. And so how do we transform that conversation which we started to do around racism and looking at white privilege in our mostly adult white population of the congregation.
And then to move that to talking about Israel and Palestine and say, how do we also bring, and I love that opening to say, I have this radical idea or I don't know. To say I don't know what I think about Israel and Palestine in a synagogue can be a very scary thing to do and to say where do we need to go to learn more? What do we need to push each other or expose each other to? I think is really the sacred work that our communities are actually designed for.

Rabbi Elliott Tepperman:
I'm really glad you brought up race and dealing with white privilege because the thing is that, and again, I try to point this out when we're doing it, the muscle that allows us to have thoughtful conversations about racial equity is the same muscle that allows us to talk about differences around Zionism in Israel. And when we are strengthening one, we are strengthening the other. So we're making room for other kinds of important conversations.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
So a couple of things. One is, Rachel, the norms, I'm calling them norms-

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
The covenant of speech.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Covenant speech that the JRC developed, can we share it? Is that something that we can share with other?

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
Absolutely. It's on the JRC website and I will send it to you to be able to share out as an example, it was created entirely by lay folks who were coming from radically different places and both coming from places of very deep pain and thinking about how did they use a process together to create the kinds of spaces that would allow people to process ideas and still hold each other in respectful, loving, chesed or compassion filled space.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
So for listeners, you'll be able to find it in the show notes and I want to, it's so fantastic. We're having this conversation in part because I hope this is an evergreen resource, and also there will be a convening, a Reconstructionist movement convening on the shorthand is the Israel convening, that's what we're calling it.
And Elliott mentioned the Talmudic teaching. Every Jew is responsible for one another. And it is a movement wide conversation about Israel and Palestine and how we talk about it and how we build community together and how we struggle and we will have norms for that gathering even though it's an all virtual gathering.
And for me, that's the really essential, all beautiful kinds of talk, whether it's historically significant or in really contemporary language about covenantal community. The way I think it really gets brought to life is in the interactions with each other through norms that we co-create together the Reconstructionist movement.
We consider ourselves post-halakhic, we take Jewish law, we study Jewish law very, very seriously, but we don't consider ourselves bound by it. And I think these norms that every community, whether it's a pop-up community like the one will be on December or these abiding communities that both of you are leading, that the norms are the contemporary expression of how we walk know halakha means walking.
So I have a question for both of you to think about it, which is the department of Reconstructing Judaism that works with your communities and other Reconstructionist communities called the Department of Thriving Communities. And when we think about a thriving community, we talk about it. We want it to be a place of belonging. You were talking about that. We want it to be like with the image we often use as a place of home and the Yiddish heimish like warm and comfy and cozy.
And so we're talking about comfort and I don't want to give up on that. And at the same time, I don't want it to only be about... It can't only be about comfort. It also has to be about comfort is optional. Comfort is about a mandate and it has to also be, I think, about the capacity to develop those muscles, including whether it's the discomfort of not knowing or the discomfort of disagreeing.
So I am wondering how you guys manage that, if you could reflect on how you manage those things that are separate sides of the same coin, I think. But sometimes they're really in conflict with each other.

Rabbi Elliott Tepperman:
I'll start, but it's a big, big question that you're asking. So when I teach about us being intertwined with the fate of Israel, the fate of Jews in America and around the world, I also sometimes try and teach a kind of humility that we often have discussions amongst ourselves as though those conversations will impact what is happening there.
And that is almost in fact never true. Our ability to impact the facts on the ground are very, very limited, but we are certain we can be almost a hundred percent certain that how we have the conversation will impact the facts of our community. So that's one part of that that I think is very important.
And I spend a lot of time rabbinically gauging when it's useful for me to share my analysis of what's happening there as something that will open the conversation or when it's useful for me to take a public stand. I don't know, signing onto a statement of Truah or J Street that might actually, my name might make a little bit of difference in trying to enact some use power to change something.
And when my saying something will instead might feel really good and righteous for myself, but might ultimately be alienating for some members of the congregation in such a way that I will be shutting down part of the conversation or they will feel like they are maybe outside of what the norms are or they will be less likely to really engage with me the next time we have a chance.
And I find that to be so hard. I find it to be so hard, and I've tried really hard recently to stop thinking about threading the needle and to try and when I'm having to find my words, just think about all the people I love who have disparate points of view and how I can say those words as lovingly as possible and I'm mostly really suspicious of blame. So I'll pause there.
But one more thing that I want to say that I think is so just hard about this right now is that it's now been over a year since October 7th and it's been over a year of the War in Gaza and it is beyond tragic. And I sometimes wonder if my concern with effective community leading is missing the impact of how hard this moment has been on our Jewish souls.
And so I sometimes worry that in my concern for not making people unnecessarily uncomfortable for no good reason, am I failing to really name the discomfort that a lot of us are carrying in our souls with how horrible this year has been.

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
Elliott, I so resonate with what you're saying about that decision about what to sign and what the impact will have and what really is the question and where our power is and what our role as rabbis are in this moment. And this idea that we are carrying this trauma that is unresolved and does not have a clear path forward is both exhausting and also the toll that it is taking in this way.
I so resonate with that and see that in my own self and in my own community. And Deborah, I want to pick up on what you talk about with this idea of the model of home or something that feels warm. And I think we often, when we talk about wanting to create synagogues that feel like places where people are home, we lift up an idealized version of what that might be.
In the same way that when we talk about family and people say, oh, an idealized family, right? We're recording this the week before Thanksgiving, where that thinking about bringing people together is perhaps exciting or terrifying in the same place.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
How much mashed potatoes are going to get thrown across the table?

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
All the parts. And I think that in the same way when people say, well, we're looking at concepts of family, show me a family that is only ever warm and heimish and loving and cozy, or show me a home that doesn't have any conflict in it and you can't find one in reality.
If you look at our examples of our biblical ancestors, whenever I teach Torah, they're as much if not more so examples of how not to act with one another and how not to set up our relationships and act out our stuff on one another, then they are and really more mirrors of what actually happens here.
So part of this I think is actually saying if our synagogues are going to be like the family systems that they actually are for a lot of people, then can we be transparent about the fact that there's room for conflict, there's room for pain, there's room for loss, there's room for not knowing a way forward and hopefully, room for those really unexpected sweet moments over pie where you say, even though I really didn't like what you said there, this is delicious.
And to be able to actually have those real moments as opposed to the idealized moments of what we think it should be because we don't live in where it should be. We live in where we are.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
And also I think the thing part of home is also about growth and growth is growth. One of my favorite teachings that Christina my wife teaches all the time, and I probably have said it on the podcast many, many times is she's an amazing gardener and starting seedlings in greenhouses, they learned that they need to have fans blowing on those little seedlings as they burst through the soil so that they're encountering resistance.
Because if they grow them in really perfect sterile, idealized, the ones that are intended to be planted outside, if they haven't encountered things to push up against, they just flop over. So I do think that it's a lot of privilege to be wanting only comfort and we also know how growthful it can be in really, really productive and important ways. As you were saying earlier, develop the muscles.
It's such a rich conversation and I'm so grateful to both of you. I have a whole presentation I sometimes do in congregations about characteristics of thriving communities and also practices and principles and practices that can help foster covenantal community and anava, humility. Elliott, you mentioned that earlier. I think humility is so incredibly important.
And when you said that you were suspicious of blame that I think I am most suspicious of is certainty. Because I think one of the practices, one the characteristics is curiosity. And you were talking about the commandment to listen, to be listening, to really hear and see and be open to what the other person is saying rather than listening just to either dismantle or to make your own point.
These are practices that we have to teach them and we have to develop them and we have to acknowledge when we're not getting it right and want to try again and do it better.

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
I want to say something here about language that feels salient in that questioning and being curious and listening to each other. One of the things that I have noticed in the last year as I've had hundreds of conversations across both within the JRC community and out in larger communities is what do we actually mean when we say Israel and which of course, could be its own podcast.
But the idea this was from a sermon I gave on the high holidays about trauma a number of years ago, was this idea that when we say Israel, we're simultaneously meaning I think three things and that we say Israel and it's the place in the land of our prayers, of our liturgy, of our longing, of our spiritual and mythological word when we say Israel or Yisrael in liturgical or Torah sense.
It's the place of refuge from very real historic antisemitism of this was a place that was created and a destination and a longing to return in real contexts of the kind of antisemitism that caused people to literally flee their homeland and need to go someplace where they could be guaranteed safety. And Israel as the contemporary political nation state.
And when we say the word, I actually think we fire all three of those things simultaneously. And so we are emotionally, historically, fearfully and contemporary politically referring to all sorts of things jumbled together in one word. And I think one of the things that gets us into trouble in our communities is that we don't always mean the same thing when we're saying that or having a reaction to something that says the word Israel.
And I think when we slow down and say, "Well, what do you mean by that and what are you talking about in this context?" It's a really useful way to parse out what we actually mean because we have both emotional, intellectual, historical, individual and communal responses to something that often is conflated with many things at once.
And this idea of being able to give each other the time and space to sit together, ask questions out of curiosity, what did you mean by this? Where did that come from? Tell me more of your story, which we've started to do much more in the JRC community.
"What's Your Israel-Palestine Story" is a program that we do where people sit and talk to each other and get a chance to actually say, well, my experience here was this. Well, mine was this. Well, I've never been, but... And actually listen has been really useful in this really fraught time where we often make a lot of assumptions and assumptions about each other.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
And that's actually going to be in a structured way. I think that will be an element of the convening is to try to ask people to reflect on themselves in the conversation rather than whatever the political constructs are or whatever just the visceral reaction is.

Rabbi Elliott Tepperman:
I think the language is so important and I think it's especially important because so many of the words in the conversation have become polarizing. So the Zionism that anti-Zionists hate, I also hate. The anti-Zionism that Zionists hate, I also really don't like, I really hate that too.
But if you then say to the Zionists, what do you believe in? I actually mostly agree with them most of the time, and I'm talking within my congregation and you say to the person who thinks they're an anti-Zionist or says I'm an anti-Zionist, and they say about why, a lot of times I'm like, yeah, I agree with a lot of what you're saying.
I don't agree with the caricature of it, but I agree with the heartfelt reasons that people have. And again, I mean maybe this is a little bit cheating, but I don't pray at the synagogue for a ceasefire or I don't pray for a bilateral ceasefire with return of the hostages. I just pray for violence to end. I say, "Please God, may the violence end, please God, make everybody who feels unsafe feel safe."
And for me, it's almost a spiritual practice to try as hard as I can to not use the rhetoric that is so often defining the conversation because it becomes so laden with people's assumptions about it and presumptions that if you say this word, if you say ceasefire, you're obviously mostly aligned with the Palestinians. And if you say hostages, you're mostly aligned with the Israelis, which is a completely false paradigm on every level. It's certainly not true in Israel, but it's not true here and it flattens our conversations.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Well, that's exactly it. I say it, I think we all say a lot, reconstructionism, it's an approach that's about complexity and nuance. And this is not a time for shorthand. This is a time that it really is about making the time in the space and have the norms and have the commitment to really have the conversations, which again, is not what Twitter is about, not what social media and status updates are about.
But to develop these practices and this orientation that allows us to really avoid the caricatures and both talk about substance and foster relationships, whether it's to the divine or to each other. But there's something very, very redemptive about it if you commit yourself to it, if you get over what we just so easily and automatically slip into.
So we're going to start to wind down though this is such a fantastic conversation and I feel like I could talk to both of you about this and many other things for hours and hours and both of you contributed in incredibly powerful ways to the last time the Reconstructionist movement came together in 2022 at our convention B'Yachad that we're going to have another one in March of 2026.
And we can put a link to that in also in the show notes. And one of the highlights of the convention was a plenary panel, so a panel that we did for absolutely everyone on Friday morning on creative inclusive communities. And I told Elliott this many, many times. He was a panelist. It was a very diverse group of contributors on the panel.
And Elliott, you told this unbelievable story. We can put a link to the whole thing into the show notes as well. And you told this unbelievable story about when someone really violated the norms of when things fell apart, when things fell apart. And part of your point was that there's always the possibility of teshuvah and that when people exceed the norms or accepted boundaries, there's a pathway back in.
As Reconstructionists, as a general rule, I say a lot, probably the line I've said the most often in my presidency is in an era in a time of contested authority, boundary maintenance is not generative. And my focus is so much on what we can create. And I do think boundary conversation is this conversation does push us to at least consider it.
And we're living in a time when lots of people are saying, no, no, you've exceeded those boundaries. Zionists are saying anti-Zionists can't come in and anti-Zionists are creating communities and Zionists can't come in. And all of the destructive ways that you were just talking about the flattening of that language.
So there's both the hard boundaries that people are proposing and then there's this permeable boundaries and the idea that you spoke so eloquently about in that anecdote, Elliott, of when someone exceeds the boundaries and when there's a pathway back in. So tough conversation in general, especially, I think for reconstructionists, what's the Torah that you have to offer about when it gets really, really hard?

Rabbi Elliott Tepperman:
I think there is such a tendency, maybe it's a Torah of anti-purity, part of what leads to, for lack of a better term, cancel culture kind of vibes is a feeling that we can't touch somebody who gets it wrong and that when somebody makes a mistake, we will be infected by that. And it's quite painful in a million ways, but it's just completely debilitating to our ability to have thoughtful conversations.
So I guess part of my Torah that I've tried to teach is about how do we lovingly rebuke? Yes, we need to let somebody know when they get it wrong or if something hurts us or if they're saying something that doesn't line up with our way of understanding what it means to be an inclusive community. But we almost can't do it too lovingly. We are all such fragile creatures that whenever anybody says to us anything that has a whiff of you got it wrong in a way that really matters, we just tend to crumple.
And that might not be right and it might be annoying to deal with whatever the overly sensitive white man who's talking too much yet again and that they need to be put in their place. And we, there's certainly is a place for anger and for frustration, but we're all going to be on the other end.
If we're actually a growing thriving community, we're all going to be on the other end of needing to receive that critique at some point. And so we just have put ourselves into trying to do that as kindly as possible. Not because we're trying to be easy on anybody, but because the fact is that our kindest version will still take resilience for the other person to hear.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Beautiful.

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
I'm thinking about JRC's Israel-Palestine working group, which is a group of 12 of our members who we convened on October 8th last year and intentionally created as a sample representation of our congregation of people who are diverse across age experiences.
We have people in their 20s and people in their 70s across political affiliations or ideologies, people who identify very strongly as Zionists, people who identify very strongly as anti-Zionists and people who identify as non-Zionists and people who aren't exactly sure what those labels mean. People who grew up in the congregation, people who joined it later.
We have people from Israel, people from the United States and how we didn't want to say anything in the beginning. We said, this is a group that is here to hold the congregation and to do programming and education and to listen. And about three days in, that convening group said, "No, actually I think we have something to say."
And it took about six weeks to create a congregational statement that ultimately the congregation voted on and published. That was about initially, the first three people who sat down to write it together vehemently disagreed with each other and would write these thousands of emails over the span of a week that went back and forth that would make anyone want to read something and say, "Oh no, I'm going to delete that or walk away." Or, "How could I keep talking to you?"
And what they modeled was this loving engagement of, okay, hold on, I really don't like that. Let me take a breath and think about what about that I don't like and where this is coming, and then stay in community. And then that process got multiplied by several hundred people as we had about 200 people in conversation around it. And I think this idea of saying, are there things that we can all agree on and where are the things that we don't?
And are we in a place where we can, as Elliott said, love each other and respect each other and hold each other enough to say it would be too painful for any of us to leave. And to also do the hard work to say, where are the boundaries around if somebody is actually espousing, if you say this, I can't be here with you, is that actually a boundary we aren't willing to cross, right?
Is there a boundary around saying an ideology is perhaps different than mine, but is there a boundary around saying the ideology of you don't belong here because you're different than I am, or I really disagree with you. How do we lovingly set that boundary in our communities so that we can stay and have these charged and passionate and painful and raw conversations together and hold each other to do that?
It's very hard to figure out where that boundary line is, right? If somebody is not willing to agree that all human beings have value and deserve dignity and rights, that's a pretty clear boundary. And getting someone to agree to what they're saying or what they're proposing violates, that is not an easy thing to agree on.
So I think part of that is how do we create the boundary and the norms that say, this is how we're all going to do this together. Not yes or no, you can or can't be here because I don't know that that's actually our role in our congregations as these vessels of community transformation and transformation of Jewish traditions and upholding of our values. But it's messy.

Rabbi Elliott Tepperman:
Rachel, what you're saying is so important. I think there's a tendency to try to define the conversation by its boundaries rather than by its center. So on the one hand, I think just as an example, I think every single person at my synagogue, regardless of their quite varied politics, a hundred percent upholds the human rights of everybody from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan Valley.
They understand that those human, what the real practical reality of how you implement that, they might have arguments about policy. But the value, they're not in disagreement about. And we miss that. I think sometimes it's like couples counseling. In a couple, there's always polarization that happens. So you could have a couple where they're pretty much aligned. One person likes to watch Netflix four times a week and the other person wants to watch it five times a week, and they're almost exactly the same.
But it will happen that the person who wants to watch it five times a week always seems like the person who wants to watch it. And the person who only wants to watch it four times, it will seem like they're always the person saying, "I don't really want to do that tonight, can we do something else."
And suddenly it will seem in that couple, there's this real diversity, but it's not, they're actually quite close, but they're comparing themselves to each other. And that happens in our congregations, and it certainly happens in the reconstructionist movement.
We are so aligned on the things that matter most about what is happening right now in Israel and in Palestine, but we pay a disproportionate amount of attention to the places where one of us is four out five and the other is five out of five or 4.5 out of five, and that suddenly gets exploded. And it's not useful. We have so much to gain from...
I mean it's useful in that we want to explore that so we can understand where our differences, but it's not useful in terms of our self-conception of ourselves as a community. We need to really start with how often our values are aligned.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
So Ellie, you've just done such a beautiful job of re-articulating what you said to me last May when we first started to think about this convening. And I think that really is the kind of animating impulse that we're bringing to the convening.
And I want to quote our colleague, Rabbi Maurice Harris, raising up that some of the conflict that we see across the Reconstructionist movement is how we prioritize, and not the universe of values.
And I think one of the things that we see happening in the flattening is that some of those principles, some of those values getting weaponized against what each other. And Rabbi Dr. Mira Wasserman, who's the acting vice president for academic affairs at RRC and the director of the Center for Jewish Ethics, she taught me that an ethical conflict is not when something's really clear and obvious and compelling and something isn't, it's when too or more really compelling things are in conflict with each other.
And so some of that's the prioritization, and I think that what we're trying to talking about is trying to create the container that allows, holds all of that. I'll wind us down with this really beautiful story that comes exactly out of a conversation about Israel and Palestine and Zionism and anti-Zionism. Years ago I was in conversation with a lay leader who it was right as J.D.P to the Jewish Voice of Peace emerged on the American Jewish scene.
And it was right as there was a lot of focus on boycott divestment in sanctions, and I was a baby president. There's so much learning that there's so much learning happens at all times. But I was trying to keep this person who tends to be much more center, to not draw her attention away from that happening in the world and in the Jewish community.
And it didn't serve me or the conversation, or frankly, I think the movement well. And when I finally sat down and had a very forthright conversation with her just about all the challenges she was so where I thought she would be judgmental or she would be mean. I had all kinds of fears and she was so constructive and she was so helpful.
I said this to her, I said, "I want a mistake. How much I would've benefited if I sat down and had this kind of conversation with you from the very, very beginning." And she, a non-Rabbi, had the most rabbinic response where she said, "Deborah, I might disagree about a million things politically, but at the end of the day, I'm trying to create a Jewish community where all of us can come together on Yom Kippur to recite Kol Nidre together."
And I'm not even certain, I think think she understood how profound that was that before we say Kol Nidre, we say we are all sinners, that none of us, it's that radical humility that none of us are free from some kind of fault or bias and that we own that. And what that liberates us to do to come together and constitute community on this holiest and most important of days.

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
I think what you're talking about in such a beautiful way is about thinking about relationships and that our synagogue communities can't only be places where we come together when this bubbles up in this way or major issues come and come to a head and cause everyone to say, oh wait, there's something important now I have to engage.
We have to have actually created the landscape that makes us want to be there in the first place. We've been saying in the Evanston Interfaith Clergy and Leaders Organization, our interfaith group in town here, that we show up for every single rally or vigil or lament or public outcry. And the community didn't do a good job of that last year. And we called them in and said in that loving talk of how way, where are you? And after a year of repair, we did that. But we're starting to say we actually need to have an interfaith dance party.
Something that is not related to the reason that we're all so compelled to come in and say, "Wait, but now I have something to say." Because we actually have to build the muscle of something that is joyous and loving and nurturing and meaningful and spiritual and holds us so that the container is whole and not just when we need it in these moments that are agitating us or calling us to something particular.
So that we don't only focus on that, that we actually are nurturing enough of the relationship so that the relationship is there and we can lie down in it and let it hold us. And so that it's strong enough to hold these moments in time because this is a very long road and we need that comfort and that complexity to hold us all the more.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
So beautiful. Elliott, is there something you want to... Rachel, I'm going to take that as your closing-

Rabbi Rachel Weiss:
Please do.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
... offering. And Elliott, is there something that you would want to?

Rabbi Elliott Tepperman:
I just want to thank you for convening this conversation. I think for bringing us together. I've been surprised at what an emotional conversation it's been for me. And I think that often when I try and give a hard talk about something related to this like Israel or antisemitism, I will stop as I'm speaking to the congregation and invite everybody to take a breath and notice what story are they telling in their head.
Notice it with they're holding tension and just remind them that right here, we're in our same congregation. However dangerous the world might be, this is not a terribly dangerous place and we can be with each other. And I guess I'm remembering that myself as we have this conversation that we just hold so much love, hope, heartache around these issues, that it's a real privilege to be able to talk about them with colleagues like the both of you.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Listeners, you get to hear our voices and we are actually recording with a visual feed as well, and we've been smiling and beaming at each other. For me too, the so nourishing, and I hope for listeners as well that there are pathways. These we are living in challenging time and there are pathways and there are practices, and there are communities that can create spaces where there are people who are walking with us on these challenging journeys.
So thank you. Thank you so much. I want to thank all of you for joining us today in this conversation with Rabbi Elliott Tepperman and Rabbi Rachel Weiss. And if you're interested in learning more about our event, the Reconstructionist Movement's event on December 15th, the precise title is, all of the people Israel are responsible for one another, reconstructionist values and principles that shape our relationships with Israelis and Palestinians.
We said we can't flatten things. We said we were committed to complexity and nuance. You hear it even in the title, which was Elliott can attest, carefully negotiated. If you want to learn more about it, we put a link to the event webpage in our show notes, and you can also find it on the events page at reconstructingjudaism.org.
As always, you can find more information about today's episode on Hashivenu's website, which is hashivenu.fireside.fm. There are many rich resources on reconstructingjudaism.org. On that event webpage, there'll be lots and lots of resources around the Reconstructionist Movement's engagement around Israel, and also we have a whole Israel section and just always want to call attention to the resources that are on ritualwell.org and on our site, evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org.
Evolve is groundbreaking Jewish conversations. I want to invite you all to subscribe, rate, and review us in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again, Rachel. Thanks again, Elliott. I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu, Jewish teachables on resilience.