Deborah Waxman (00:00): I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. I'm joined today by my cohost, Rabbi Sandra Lawson. Hey Sandra, how are you?

Sandra Lawson (00:12): I'm good. How are you doing today?

Deborah Waxman (00:15): I'm good. I'm so glad to be with you. And I'm also so glad to welcome our guest, Dr. Amanda Mbuvi. Amanda recently joined the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College as our vice president for academic affairs and dean. She is an accomplished scholar and has extensive experience in nonprofit leadership. And she is the author of a wonderful book, published in 2016, called Belonging in Genesis: Biblical Israel and The Politics of Identity Formation. Amanda is also the first Jew of Color to lead a major American rabbinical school. It is such a blessing to work with her and to know her. Welcome, Amanda.

Amanda Mbuvi (00:59): Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

Sandra Lawson (01:02): Before we get started. I want to just check in with you, I want to see how you're doing. I know you and your family made the move from North Carolina and you bought a house and now you're in Philadelphia and you're getting acclimated to a new school and students. So, how's all that going?

Amanda Mbuvi (01:20): Oh, thanks for asking. It's going well, it's an adventure. I think the real challenge in some ways is for my family because I moved into this wonderful RRC community and it took a little longer for them to get sort of launched into the world and connected to new community and new people. So I'm really glad that the kids started school this week. I think that will be really important for them to be out and be meeting people and making connections.

Deborah Waxman (01:49): Yeah. Moving is so intense. And thereÕs such consonance, and there are so many ways where it's obvious that you're a good fit for the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and God willing, that's true for your family as well. And that this move that was motivated by you will work out for everybody as well.

Amanda Mbuvi (02:09): Thank you. I think it will. It just takes time.

Deborah Waxman (02:12): Yeah.

Sandra Lawson (02:13): The students I've talked to are just really excited that you're there and are looking forward to learning with you and learning from you and your guidance and leadership in the future.

Amanda Mbuvi (02:27): Thanks. It's been really fun spending time with them and especially last week getting to be with the incoming students and in a lot of ways, really feeling like one of them Ð not only because I'm new and I'm starting as they're new and starting, but I think also a lot of them were expressing this feeling of finding their place and finding their people here. And that's definitely been my experience and it's been very powerful and wonderfully confusing.

Deborah Waxman (02:51): Yeah. In the best possible ways. That's good. We hear that also... I mean this podcast, folks beyond the Reconstructionist movement listen, for sure. And we hear it also from folks who find their way into a Reconstructionist synagogue. Sometimes it's because of a lifecycle event, or some kind of program that brings them in. And all of a sudden they find their people and they find a sense of place, of both settling in, and also that pushes them and prods them in the best possible, the most growthful ways. And I think that's a beautiful vision of community. I guess I would add that we are a community, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, we know we will be transformed by you. That's one of the reasons we brought you in. And I think that community at its best, it both embraces and transforms, ideally with excitement or at least without a tremendous amount of resistance, that each new person expands and offers new opportunities for growth.

Amanda Mbuvi (03:53): Yeah. And that's one of the most exciting things and challenging, in some ways, things about colleges is that with each new class of students, the community changes substantially and there's always this work in progress. There's always this change, this evolution. And it's really exciting to experience that.

Sandra Lawson (04:09): So for our listeners who can't see us, Amanda and I are both people of color and more specifically, we're both Black women Ð in roles that I'm not sure initially have been done by women or particularly people of color. So, as the new dean of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical CollegeÉthe most recent Pew study came out. And I sort of look at the most recent Pew study on top of the one that came out a few years earlier, both of those articulate the changing demographics of the Jewish community, and this current Pew study in particular says, "15% of American Jews under the age of 30," which is a sizeable demographic at RRC, are Jews of Color.

Sandra Lawson (04:57): And the Jews of Color Initiative study that came out, in the survey and in its effort to sort of tell the stories of people of color, sort of asking the question, ÒWho are Jews of Color,Ó and also talked a lot about the experiences of Jews of Color, where it shouldn't surprise anyone on this call right now, that 80% of Jews of Color in the United States experience some form of discrimination, either racism or discrimination, in Jewish spaces. I'm saying all this to say, as a person in a leadership position, in a Jewish organization, how is that going to shape your leadership and what are your thoughts on that?

Amanda Mbuvi (05:40): Yeah, that's a really good question. There are a lot of levels to it for me. I think on a personal level, it's just really powerful to have moved to that space, [from] the space of racist opposition to my parents' marriage, through some of the things that I've experienced in communities with people, assuming that I don't belong or things like that. To not only being sort of accepted, but to be in a position of leadership, it's... I can't even find words for it. It's such a powerful experience. It's a powerful journey to have moved through all those spaces in that way. In terms of my leadership, one of the things I'm really excited to do is to open up and sort of nuance the thinking that goes into what it means to be a Jew of Color, because I think people are starting to be aware of that as a category, but in a lot of ways, I think the way in which they see that category is still really limited. So I think for a lot of people, when they say Jew of Color, they think about it like a child with divorced parents: on the weekends, you're Jewish and then during the week you're Black. It's like, you sort of go from one to the other, but not that you are both at the same time, in the same place, as the same person. I think that's just something people have had a lot of difficulty getting their minds around. And so it's exciting to be in a position to not only embody that, but to think about what that means for rabbinical education in working with students and thinking about how students think about themselves as rabbis and how students think about the communities they serve and how they help people in the communities they serve think about each other and about the world.

Sandra Lawson (07:24): Thank you for that. That is so powerful, because one of the things that I'm often telling people when I give talks or when I'm interacting with other members of the Jewish community who are not people of color, is that I'm a whole person. And I see my Jewishness filtered through, or I can't separate out my queerness, my Black identity. And also, sadly, I've had people ask me, ÒWhich identity do I care more about?Ó And they're all equal. It's just me and, I'm a Jewish person, a Black woman, a queer person Ð and not in that particular order Ð but sometimes, depending on the spaces I'm in, my Blackness will show up before my Jewishness, particularly in Jewish spaces because I'm not often tracked as somebody who's Jewish. But, yeah, thank you for that. And thank you for reminding me of it.

Deborah Waxman (08:23): Yeah. I was going to say itÕs also so powerful and it's so interesting because Mordecai Kaplan, the founding thinker of Reconstructionism, his project was to help the children of Eastern European immigrants retain their Jewishness as they became American. And he used to say, you could be a hundred percent Jewish and a hundred percent American and people would say... literally he would sometimes have challengers who would say," Your math is off." And he said, "I'm making a different point." So that's still true for sure, but the multiplicity of identities are so much more complex and we're really able to hold them more. And we still want all of them to be as powerful as they need to be, as powerful as we want them to be, and add up to that one hundred percent. And it's so powerful to hear you say it.

Deborah Waxman (09:16): And I think both the modeling for Jews of Color and the learning for folks who are not of color, but who are looking for a kind of holism, for a kind of authenticity in all of their different identity expressionsÉSo I want to ask you to share, what is the Torah that you want to offer? And from this vantage point of a leader, we are so happy and excited to provide this platform and to raise you up. And so, what is it? I know it's kind of an elaboration of what you just said, but more what it is you want to put out into the world?

Amanda Mbuvi (10:01): Yeah. I want to change the way people think about and live with diversity. I think a lot of the ways that that commonly happens, it's not very helpful. It's not very constructive and it makes it difficult for us to develop into the kind of communities and the kind of society that I think we really want to have. And so my goal is to help, and for me because I'm a text scholar, it's especially looking at Tanach and looking at sometimes other texts as well. But to think about how these texts that come from a world that's not our world, that don't take our rules for granted, can help invite us into fresh ways of thinking about how we see the world and how we see one another.

Deborah Waxman (10:47): Is there a text you could unpack for us as a demonstration?

Amanda Mbuvi (10:51): Sure. So I guess you may hear from my book title that I'm a big fan of Genesis. One of the things that I think is really interesting about Genesis in this regard is that it's so frustrating for someone coming in with modern expectations about identity, because we have this idea Ð there's even someone who wrote a book about it Ð that identity is a group of people in their place, that's what it means, a group of people in their land.

Amanda Mbuvi (11:20): And yet we have the book of Genesis and it comes to an end. We get 50 chapters of Genesis and Israel is still not fully a people and still not fully in its place Ð it spends all this time, somewhere else, somewhere kind of on the way, but not yet arrived. And I think it's really important to be with Genesis in that, and not just sort of gloss over it and not just try to use history or something else to import those categories from somewhere else. But to let the text help us think about a space where those things are not determinative and how we might inhabit it.

Sandra Lawson (11:59): Oh my God, I wish I was a student again, because I have spent my post-graduate life being a student of Exodus, because I've found that Exodus has helped me in helping the white Jewish community move towards anti-racism. I see it as a book of people moving from enslavement to liberation, freedom, and then we're still trying to get to redemption. But now I want to go back, which we will have the chance to do very soon, but to look at Genesis through this other lens.

Amanda Mbuvi (12:43): Yeah. And I think Genesis really sets up Exodus in that way. I think even right off the bat, in that first chapter of Exodus, we see Pharaoh talking about the Israelites, like the way I would talk about bugs in my house. It's like they're swarming, they're everywhere Ð this kind of horrified reaction, ÒWhat are we going to do about it?Ó And the language that Pharaoh uses is the language of blessing from Genesis. It's that same kind of fruitful, swarming language that comes right out of creation. And so for Pharaoh, he's only conceiving it as a problem, but it already sets up this conflict between Pharaoh's way of seeing the world where diversity is a threat, and this Genesis way of seeing in the world where there is this kind of interconnection and interdependence. And then through the book, we get this clash of the two different worldviews and how they play out.

Deborah Waxman (13:43): I love that. So I think you and I had already had several conversations about interdependence. And I feel like I am drawing on the Jewish past, I'm drawing on the Jewish teachings and texts on interdependence, because I think it's the only roadmap for going forward. Forget about thriving, we will only survive if we understand more deeply how interdependent we all are, how interconnected we are to each other, and to the earth. And so can you talk a little bit more about, I mean, that's just kind of like the counterpart of diversity, I guess, it goes hand in hand with a positive valuation, with embrace of diversity.

Amanda Mbuvi (14:35): Yeah. So the image that I like to use to think about how Genesis presents diversity is the image of a tree. And so if you picture a tree, especially if you picture a fruit tree, a fruit tree can only bear fruit if the branches diverge, while being connected to a common root. So you need both, you need the connection and you need the diversity and the difference in the spreading. And I think the structure of Genesis emphasizes that point because every time there's a distinction made, every time something happens that seems to call that point into question, the text reaffirms it. So when Abraham and Lot go their separate ways, immediately after that Lot gets in trouble and Abraham rides to his rescue Ð runs to his rescue. So things like that kind of throughout Genesis, anytime something happens where you might think, okay, we're not doing this anymore, the text reasserts it.

Amanda Mbuvi (15:27): And I think that's even why someone like Isaac plays such a small role in the book of Genesis, because he's the only person who doesn't have a rival. His rival Ishmael gets sent away. The ages are a little weird in Genesis, whether he's a young child and how old anybody is at the time, but Ishmael gets sent away. And so Isaac doesn't have a rival the way that Abraham had Lot, and Jacob had Esau, Sarah had Hagar and Rachel had Leah and everybody else had rivals. Isaac doesn't have one. And so he can't model that. And so he becomes kind of squeezed in between Abraham and Jacob who can model that more fully.

Deborah Waxman (16:07): That is so helpful.

Sandra Lawson (16:08): Yeah.

Deborah Waxman (16:10): Can you make the leap to how these insights from your scholarship will translate into your leadership? So, I mean, I want to let our listeners know Amanda has been in a job for two months. It is very new. She's a fantastic learner and it is very new. She wasn't prepared for this question and it just might be too soon, but do you have a sense of how to shift from these academic insights intoÉBecause it's more than an academic leadership. It's also about rabbinic formation. It's about raising up leaders.

Amanda Mbuvi (16:44): Yes. I mean, at this point, it speaks to things like how we think about what a Jewish education is, what a Jewish community is. It very much speaks to those things. It speaks to how we live with each other in community and especially at a time when COVID is bringing up a lot of challenges for people, as people need and want different things. And as people have different strategies and different ways of responding to the pandemic. All these kinds of things that get stirred up. I think there's a sense in which thinking about how we live together with our differences is very important.

Amanda Mbuvi (17:30): This may sound a little abstract, but I also think there's a sense in which, what it means to move on from the previous presidency and where we're living in a country that's really battered and fragmented in a lot of ways, where the very concept of a social fabric really came under attack. And how can we reestablish a sense of community? How can we continue to think about what it means to rejoin in places where we live, in the Jewish people, with people who disagree with us about really foundational political issues? Is that even possible? Is there a concept of working together for a common good or is it just about kind of hunkering down with our like-minded people? Is there a way that we can constructively inhabit those things? Is there a way that we can live into a sense of common purpose and community building? Or are we sort of stuck in our corners, articulating our talking points and rejecting each other?

Deborah Waxman (18:36): I think I want to ask Sandra how this ties into your work as our director of racial diversity, equity and inclusion and just observe really quickly, Amanda, that I think that very question really animates our project Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations and also our Joint Israel Commission, the premise that we can be in Ð I call it covenantal community Ð across difference. We must. It's so essential for us to move forward and we're coming up on the High Holidays. And this image that comes from a conversation with a layperson where she said, "I want to be able to say Kol Nidre with everyone in my community, whatever their politics are, wherever they stand." And it's such a poignant image that it's not just pray together on Shabbat, but on Kol Nidre, where we begin by saying, we are all sinners. We begin from such a place of humility, which is so different from that certainty that you were just talking about.

Sandra Lawson (19:40): Just before this call, I was finishing up a blessing, a closing blessing for a phone conversation Ð Zoom call. And one of the things that I said in there, and I'm still working on it, so the language may change, ÒMay we continue to have compassion for those who see the world differently than we do.Ó And recently a few months ago, I had a call from a Jew of Color in North Carolina. And a lot of things happened in that call, but one of the things that the person told me was that they can't pray with people whoÉactually, in this case, they can't pray with Zionists. And that makes me sad. I want a house for all peoples. Just like in Isaiah (thereÕs a quote in there somewhere).

Sandra Lawson (20:35): And there are people out there who believe that I should be a rabbi one particular way. And if I don't fit that mold, that might be a little challenging for them, or they want me to maybe be further on the left or further on the right, depending on who I'm talking to. And how I move through the world is, I always want to try to find commonality. That's one of the reasons why I became a rabbi, ÒLet's find common ground.Ó Why waste all this time arguing about the things we disagree with? LetÕs first find common ground and build from there. And a concern that I have is that there are students that I went to school with who are awesome rabbis and rabbinical students Ð and also I find sometimes have unbendable views. I think I worry that they don't allow themselves to see the fullness of human beings.

Sandra Lawson (21:34): And in your role as the dean, helping our students who need the help, not all of them do, but to deal with difference, because there's so much right now in our society that is telling you to not like X, because of whatever, to not like this person, because of whatever. And we have people that are coming into rabbinical schools and colleges that don't have nuance or can't see nuance. And what you said is like, I want our students, I want all people, I want us to find common ground. And to remember that we're all created in divine image. We all have a divine spark in all of us. And how do you teach students to really have compassion for the other? And that this is a society that we're growing, that we are coming into?

Amanda Mbuvi (22:34): Yeah. There's so much in that. I think part of it is sometimes the way we deal with problems is not really constructive. So sometimes what happens when somebody says, or does, the wrong thing, there's this kind ofÉwe excommunicate that person and then we're okay. And I think that sort of is an overreaction and an under reaction. ItÕs an overreaction because it acts as if nothing that person has to offer is of value because of this one thing. And it's an under reaction because it assumes everyone else is off the hook, that if we reject the right people, the rest of us are okay. And we don't really have to think about things or do any work. And that's one of the reasons I think it's so important to think about some of these issues around identity and the way that they're baked into the normal. It's not just the exceptions to the rule. It's just the everyday categories and things that we use are not helpful and are not structured to help us build a better community. So sometimes it's rethinking that normal and creating a new normal. In another direction, I also think something that really speaks to what you described is the example of the prophets and how they identify with the people they criticize. That even as they're articulating these really elaborate critiques, itÕs still always weak. And I think there's something really important about that, to be able to hold people in that way, even as everything in us is telling us that the choices they're making or the ways that they're going about things are wrong. ItÕs really hard but I think it's really important. Something that helped me especially through some of the worst things in the last few years is I would go walk or run in my community and just watching the news, IÕd get this view of the world and of the country and of what's happening thatÕs really discouraging. And then just being in the community and just walking by people and saying, "Hello," Just hello. Just waving to people and kind of realizing we can do this. We can be a community together. We can connect on a human level and we can work through all of this. And to think about how I experienced this just with people who live in my hometown, how much more for rabbinical students who have so much more binding them to each other? How much more for the Jewish people who have so much more binding us to each other, that we can draw on to find a way through to stick with each other?

Deborah Waxman (25:13): I wrote down, it's still always we, because it's so potent, it's so powerful. We're coming to the end of our time. And as I mentioned earlier, we're recording this the week before Rosh Hashanah, late in Elul. And I just thought we should wind down with a little bit of a taste of the High Holidays, a little bit of reflection. So, because we don't have all that much time, I was wondering for each of you, what about the High Holidays is really resonant for you? What's really at the front of your minds?

Sandra Lawson (25:50): One of the things that I wrote in this blessing that I alluded to a minute ago is that 5781 was in the same way that 5780. But thereÕs hope in our future. And this time of year should remind us to renew our energy, to be hopeful, to be mindful, to remember that we're all created in the divine image and to take care of ourselves and our health so that we can truly have the blessings of a new year. And that's what's on my mind right now.

Amanda Mbuvi (26:48): Yeah. This is an interesting time for me. I mean, I feel like so much of my life is sort of tracked through the High Holidays. Growing up most of my experience of Judaism came through my grandparents and I remember going to shul with them on the holidays and people had tickets and I didn't know where tickets came from. And so when I, as an adult I'm trying to find my way into the community, in some ways it was a symbol of the barrier, because I didn't know how that worked. I didn't know, can you just show up or how does this work? It was in some way the sign of the wall. Then later on, I think there was a sense in which having kids and raising them in a community in a lot of ways gave me what I missed by not growing up that way. It sort of took me through those life cycle stages. And it gave me this sort of deeper understanding that meaningful love is not just on an individual level, but what it means to stand together. What it means to be there as a people. And when I say be there as a people Ð weÕre standing together and we're davening and we're in the hall having a conversation and we're chasing a kid and we're doing all these things, but we're doing it collectively. It made me understand that in a different way than I ever had before. And now we're coming to the holidays again and I've just moved. And so with people I'm just meeting and with the pandemic, I'm not even sure we're going to be able to daven in person, so I'm not even sure what that's going to look like. So IÕm not with my community that I've gotten so close to, I'm not with the people who've watched my kids grow up. I may not even be in the room with people at all. And so what does it mean to engage the holidays from that vantage point? And I think there's invitation in there to kind of think through some of the resources in this tradition, thinking about things like exile and thinking about how people are wrestling with, how can we be the Jewish people, if we're not in our place with our stuff and our people? And to be without those things and what it means to drill down and to find something else and to be with the awkwardness of it.

Deborah Waxman (29:08): Thanks to you both, I resonate so deeply. For me, I have been trying to find the balance between looking really forthrightly on everything that is hard, and find resilience for sure, and even figure out how to bolster others as well. I've needed it personally and I'm aware as a rabbi and as the leader of the movement, that that's what I want to be putting out. And I think I was really deeply affected. I read this beautiful, amazing article called ÒGrief Belongs in Social Movements, Can We Embrace it?Ó It's in In These times, by Malkia Devich-Cyril. And I feel so grateful to be religiously oriented because I do feel like I'm part of a social movement. And we have all the tools and resources of religion available to us, including a willingness and the capacity to look straightforwardly at grief. And so for me, I think it's a lot about paradox. I think it's about being able to hold both the grief and loss and the potential and inspiration all at once. And for me, more than ever, I always love the sound of the shofar, but it's really been about imagining the shofar service on Rosh Hashanah and that tekiyah, and then into shevarim and brokenness, teruah and even more brokenness. It's like a complete and utter shattering. And then back to tekiyah, back to a kind of wholeness. And so for me, trying to really not just thrill to this really ancient, wild sound and how it makes my chest vibrate, but also feel like there's a message here. I can internalize this. I can take it in, I can do it for myself. I can do it with others. We can do it for our community. So that's, for me, what's really rising up. Anybody want to have any last words or thoughts?

Sandra Lawson (31:19): I'm just grateful to be in conversation with two amazing people. And I'm just really excited that Amanda is a part of our community and students are going to learn some amazing things from you.

Deborah Waxman (31:36): Absolutely Sandra. And thank you, Amanda. Thank you, Dr. Amanda Mbuvi. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Sandra Lawson (31:42): And for information on today's episode, you can look on the Hashivenu website, which is hashivenu.fireside.fm. You can also find more resources on reconstructingjudaism.org and on Ritualwell. And it goes without saying, please subscribe and rate and review us on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Rabbi Sandra Lawson.

Deborah Waxman (32:05): And I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu: Jewish Teachings on Resilience.