Claudia Horwitz:    Every time we're reaching out to build community, we're feeding the individual soul work and the communal soul work of the people gathered in that moment. And I also feel like we're saying to the larger culture, "This is what's real and this is what's right." That we actually can come together in that community of equals, heart to heart, face to face, breath to breath, and be there for one another.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. My guest today is Claudia Horwitz, who is a practitioner, a trainer, a writer. I met Claudia because she began to counsel us and then eventually to advise us on a grant-funded program, Reset, that you may have heard me speak about. From our first encounter, which was well before we received the grant funding, Claudia offered up tremendous experience, a lot of wisdom, and just a radiant heart. And it's been a pleasure to continue to encounter her and work with her and develop a relationship. And I'm just so excited to be in conversation with you today, Claudia.

Claudia Horwitz:    Oh, thanks Deborah. It's so great to be here. I felt a kindred spirit with you from that first conversation. So it's been fun to have it grow over time.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    Yep, for me too. Claudia, when someone suggested that I meet her, one of the first things I did was order a book that she had written called The Spiritual Activist: Practices to Transform Your Life, Your Work, and Your World, and this is a book that Claudia wrote almost 20 years ago that really talks in a general way about how to work both on inner work in order to be more effective to do the outer work. Am I right in saying healing and justice as a holistic paradigm?

Claudia Horwitz:    Yeah, definitely. I think it speaks to my commitment and fascination with how individual liberation and collective liberation are intimately linked and inextricably bound up with each other.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    Yeah. Yeah. So that book just was so interesting. Reading it as a Jewish teacher, to recognize practices, for me it was helpful as I was educating myself on resilience and seeing ways to think about shaping this podcast and other work on resilience, to both draw from tradition and strip it of traditional approaches to make it more accessible, and to take other practices that are supportive of that kind of holism and that kind of interconnectivity and also Judaize or sometimes re-Judaize it. So it remains a really strong resource. I'm going to read a little bit from your introduction. One of the things you said is, "The idea is that as we develop spiritual and reflective practices within the context of our personal lives and the pursuit of social change, we create a more solid and secure foundation for a new world. We build lives with greater expressions of love, more authentic relationships, and a deeper articulation of truth." I love this line, this next line, "We become less afraid of fear and less afraid of life." Can you unpack that a little bit more? You summarized it so beautifully there.

Claudia Horwitz:    Sure, yeah. Thanks for sharing that. I think it's funny that was, like you said, almost 20 years ago, and even more so today, given the rapid acceleration of our lives with technology and connection, a lot of life is lived at or close to the surface of things. Our bodies are sort of always rising up to meet the next moment. We're taking in so much stimulation and information and possibility, and some of that is amazing and exciting. It's rich. And it doesn't take much to get to "overwhelmed".

Claudia Horwitz:    And I think of practice, I always think of that image of dropping the stone into the pond and allowing it to sink. And I think with any kind of good awareness practice, whether it's coming out of Jewish chant or text, prayer, whether it's meditative, more body-focused, I think that's what it allows us to do it. It's a portal into that deeper space within ourselves, that we drop down from head to heart and into the belly is one way I like to think about it, and there's so much strength and wisdom there as well as courage and resilience, and we get to connect with that, which is always there, but we're not always operating from that place.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    It's so interesting. I do a daily gratitude practice. I chant Modah Ani every morning, and then after I say the Hebrew words, I try to tick off 10 things that I'm grateful for. It's always interesting to me, some days it's so easy and it's 15 or it's 20, and other days it's like I'm straining and I'm going to my pre-established list. But one of them almost every day is practice. Because I have a couple of practices that, some things are really hard but some are just really pretty non-negotiable, and I think that you point to it. It is so unlike the rest of my life, which is just so go, go, go, go, go all the time. And that's part of what practice does is have ... I'm still. I stop. I step out of time a little bit.

Claudia Horwitz:    Yeah, right, it becomes a ritual in that way that it's marking a different kind of time. And I would even invite folks as they're listening to just keep some of their attention on the breath in their belly, for example. We can practice anytime. Listening to a podcast, we can sort of drop some of the attention into the breath and know that we can still listen and engage with the content of a conversation. We can do that in the rest of our lives too. And that willingness to take some of that time every morning that you're talking about, it has so much benefit. I love that it's called practice because we're not trying to get good at something. We're not trying to make progress necessarily. We're really just coming back to what is most real and most able to infuse the rest of our lives with that real authentic stream that flows underneath the kind of go, go, go that you're talking about.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    I like that image a lot. Religiously, I don't believe in a personal God intervening in our lives. My mother sometimes says that she ... For her, God is the old man with the white flowing beard sitting on the throne. And for me it's the...God is the source of the universe. God is the wellspring of life. God is, in Mordecai Kaplan's terms, the power that makes for salvation. So that stream flowing under everything is such an evocative image.

Claudia Horwitz:    Yeah, I love it too. And I think as Jews, there is this mandate, this beautiful ethical mandate to participate in the repair of the world in some way. And we all find our own way to that. And I was an activist and organizer, really deep in the work for a long time. And as a result of that, came to a series of addictive behaviors and depression and headaches and physical symptoms, and then quickly noticed that a lot of my fellow activists were struggling with similar things. And it's not unusual for people who are really engaged in the suffering of the world to want to work many hours a day towards the relief of that suffering. And so then, whatever individual suffering you might have can be really quickly exacerbated by that constant cycle of of work.

Claudia Horwitz:    And it's not just the work. It's the anger at the system, it's the feeling of urgency in the nervous system. All of it contributes. And so for me coming to realize as an organizer that the pace of life was not sustainable, there was no way I was going to be able to keep doing this work into my forties, fifties, into elderhood. And now I would say this is a requirement, and more and more activists and organizers I think are saying this as well and I think it's true for anybody who's participating in the world in a full-hearted way. It means we are brokenhearted all the time. And the practice is part of what enables us to sit with that brokenheartedness and to be able to provide some balm. And then to let that flow back out into what we're doing in the world.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    I think that's right. I remember when I first started to meditate, which was more than 30 years ago, not that I've had a sustained practice through those 30 years, but I remember saying, "Even if I just do it for five minutes a day, it's the five minutes a day where I am ... " It's the wrong word, I want to say like controlling what happens around me. "That's the one thing I'll be able to count on." One thing is that I would commit to this practice. And because it is now, I'm very committed to a daily practice. What I say when my brain is busy ... So sometimes it's about my broken heart and sometimes it's just about my busy brain, and when I'm making lists or thinking about the meeting or something like that, I think, "This is the one interlude ..." I usually try to meditate at least 10 minutes and more, but like, "This is the one interlude where no one is asking anything of me. Put it down. Why are you doing this to yourself?" And in a way that feels not like a rebuke, but an invitation. Put it down.

Claudia Horwitz:    Very good. There's compassion in there.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    Yeah. That feels so essential. Compassion.

Claudia Horwitz:    Yeah, I agree. We're a little bit lacking it on the sociopolitical level right now, so it's even more important that we find ways to exercise it in our day-to-day interactions. And I would say that about practice as well. I think after I started my own meditation practice, which was very much focused on relief of stress for myself, I really quickly got interested in what this might mean for the collective. And I think there's a lot of power in collective practice. So, you have your oasis, your island of time in the morning that you've committed to, and so do I, and so do many of us, which I agree with you, there's part of that that is a non-negotiable. And I am just eternally curious in how we can bring more of that into our work in the world, into our organizational life, into movement life, into family life, into community life. And I don't think it takes a lot. I think it can be small things.

Claudia Horwitz:    There's this phrase like, "Just one drop." Just one drop. What does it mean to bring five minutes of silence or prayer into anything else that you're doing? The start of a class you're teaching, the start of a service you're leading, the start of a meeting you're running, so that people can really, even on a fundamental level, just collect themselves. We're pulled in a bunch of directions, literally and metaphorically. What does it mean to just have a moment to touch back with ourselves and kind of regather some of those parts? And I think what's so fascinating about this is that the work then flows so much better. I think people think that this can be like avoidance or a time waste or whatever, we all have our own mental models about that, but what I've seen over and over again is that a little bit of practice in a communal setting changes the whole energy field of how people are able to show up, offer their gifts and their talents, their ideas, their energy, and come together around something. So it's something that I feel is really essential right now even more than ever.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    I think that's right. And I think that this is a critical commitment and an insight of traditional Judaism that has also broken down. Judaism is organized around the concept of minyan. It's organized around the concept of a community of at least 10, traditionally 10 men, and in an egalitarian setting, 10 people, and that there are certain things that can only happen, certain prayers that can only be said with that minimum, with that quorum. So there are some lessons that you can say individually, but these ones where we're called to worship, we are mourning, certain prayers that we say, like orienting in the Amidah, in the silent meditation, orienting ourselves to the Divine, require other people around. And I really feel like that command to gather, to be in mutual support is an incredibly important correction to an overemphasis on individuality, and then how to do it and in ways that I think the original intent was there. Because I think at this moment in time, too often the traditional services are a barrier rather than the aid in the service of what you were just describing.

Claudia Horwitz:    Yeah. I think that's right. And I want to say, as somebody who has less of a daily Jewish religious life or spiritual life than probably many of your listeners, certainly than you, one thing that I have found so powerful when I'm working in Jewish space is starting with a niggun. A niggun, it brings people into a different relationship with themselves and with other people. And it's so easy to fold your voice into a niggun. Literally anybody can do it and it can go for as long or as short as you want. And you don't have to know Hebrew. You don't have to be able to carry a complex tune usually. I'm always just so bowled over by the quality of space that gets created when we join our voices in that way.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    Yeah, I think that that's right. You were talking about the depth that comes personally and I agree completely. And as a rabbi, I'm always trying to create those entry points. The opportunity and the challenge is that there's so much more richness within Judaism and I want that to be a beginning and an invitation rather than an end in and of itself. So how to support that and how to sustain that is something that I and other liberal rabbis work constantly. Because the turn toward the rational, the turn toward the industrial, the turn toward the individual and then the turn toward the secular all have worked against in diminishing and pushing away from that depth, from that richness.

Claudia Horwitz:    I think that's so true and I think there's been such an emphasis on the intellect, generally, in this kind of era. But I think in Judaism, and there's so much in Judaism that is actually so heart-based and has the capacity to be body-based and of course it's spirit-based, and I think for folks who are leading in a Jewish context, really encouraging people in a simple way to take a thread sort of beyond the intellectual and just see where it goes. Follow a thread of practice. I think this is what you all are really working with in the Reset program. I know it's such a big part of Reconstructing Judaism. And I think just in general right now, helping to simplify what somebody can do and what it looks like and encouragement for that, that is a really powerful portal given the complexity that folks are dealing with in so many parts of their life.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    That's one of the reasons with every podcast, on the website we also have suggested entry points from our really wonderful website, Ritualwell. If it's poetry, this might grab you. If it's ritually-based, this might grab you. We always have additional reading if it is indeed the head. But I think you're right. I had a really wonderful breakfast conversation with a board member this morning and we were trying to think about what's the next paradigm for the Jewish community. And I think it is what you just said. It's some kind of reintegration of head and heart and somatics and body and spirit in a way that is about nurturing the individual, about nurturing the community, and about nurturing the planet. So justice has to be a part of it, mutuality has to be a part of it. Ideally, mutual obligation voluntarily assumed, as opposed to like an Orthodox mandate. And with space for individual preferences, so what it looks like for you and what it looks like for me, it's just going to look really different for all of us, but that there's the support and the celebration of all of that.

Claudia Horwitz:    Yeah. I think it's beautiful what you're saying. And I want to just bring in this piece around resiliency because I know it's such a core part of how you're approaching this. The idea of resiliency is really how we are able to recover when things are difficult. The idea of resiliency is in the recovery. I think it can also be in the preparation, in how we enter into something. And I've been sitting recently with the work of a professor named Jem Bendell who's been doing this work on what he calls, "Deep Adaptation," in the context of climate change. And I just want to raise this because what he is saying, which is a very difficult message, but a really important one, is that we are potentially 10 years away from social collapse.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    (sigh)

Claudia Horwitz:    I know. It's so intense.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    And you live on the coast.

Claudia Horwitz:    I live on a coast, but the truth is every part of the planet is being affected. Whether it's drought or fire or earthquake or hurricane, we're all experiencing it in one way or another. And it's so painful to think about this, and of course the abdication of responsibility that has led to it. I think there's also something really powerful and inspiring about it. And I thought about it when you mentioned sort of thinking about the future of Judaism, because of course as Jews we live in this global context of what's happening on the planet. And this idea of resiliency and thinking about that in a context that says we may not have a lot of time left before some really significant changes happen for us as a global community. What is our role in that and how do our practices of resiliency, spiritual leadership, spiritual sustainability, speak to these bigger sort of tectonic shifts that are happening?

Claudia Horwitz:    And he offers these three questions for humanity and I think they're sort of embedded in the way you approach so much of your work, Deborah. It's basically like, what do we most value? What do we have to let go of? And how do we restore what has been lost? I'm struck by... I think you are always thinking in these very macro terms and then you are able to do such a beautiful job of translating that back to folks. And so this idea of resilience, relinquishment, the letting go, and then the restoration, what do we need to bring back to soften the collapse? That is a lot of what I think so many innovators in Judaism are thinking about right now. There are these ancient, ancient technologies, the texts, the commentaries on the text, the practices, the rituals. How are we bringing those back in this era in a way that can just completely meet folks where they are.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    That's right. And I feel like also that larger framework, that's where if I take the lens of resilience and apply it to Jewish history, we've done that over and over again. Why has the Jewish people survived for 3,500 years? I have no idea, except that there's an unbelievable resilience in there, that there's been cataclysm where how we understand ourselves in relationship to each other, in relationship to the Divine, in relationship to the wider world is completely shattered and we have found ways, sometimes starting anew, sometimes recasting what we inherited and deploying in new ways.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    That's why this podcast is called Hashivenu. The original line "Hashivenu" comes from the Book of Lamentations, the first piece of literature after the First Temple was destroyed. When you think about the Book of Lamentations, it's essentially just like an extended cry of pain. But most people who have any experience in synagogues, they know the verse because 1,000 years later, more, it was lifted up from that original context and dropped into the synagogue service from when we put the Torah away. Which tends to be a joyful time, either because it's nice community or because we've just learned a lot or because we're almost ready for kiddush. It tends to be a happy time.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    And so I love that the verse itself has a dual nature. It both remembers a moment of catastrophe and yet has been deployed in a way that is vitalizing to the community, completely divorced from it. So those who know, understand the complexity, the richness, and those who don't just know it as a generative verse of "return us." Return us to ... Quoting from the professor, who used the term "restore." It really has got that sense of the word. I love that. I do think resilience is about recovery, and at the same time it is also about preparation. Well, that's what practice is, I think, to prepare us for whatever's coming. That's what being in community is about. When I make the case for people to join into some kind of community, you experience the worth of it most powerfully when you're saying Kaddish, when you're in mourning, when you're devastated. It's not so easy to build it up at that moment of crisis, so it's that investment that you make beforehand so that you can mourn, and also, ideally, celebrate together.

Claudia Horwitz:    Totally. If you think about all of the biggest lifecycle moments that we have, all of them happen in community. From birth to death. From birth to burial. And I think that it's so interesting, I have noticed more and more how much I have learned around death and dying from just being Jewish. And the necessity of community. And I learned a lot of it from my mom, who is one of these individuals in the world who just shows up. She shows up for everyone, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big ways. And this lack of fear of showing up for each other in the worst of times, I have that in my DNA from her and from being Jewish, and the more I have moved in a very interfaith, intersectional world ... There certainly are other communities that have that. The black community has its own version of that, many communities do. The Muslim community.

Claudia Horwitz:    I think dominant white culture is really very steeped in a more isolational frame for a bunch of reasons that are probably not as relevant to this podcast, but they have a lot to do with our economic system of capitalism, the way white supremacy functions, the domination of one group of people over other groups of people. And so for me, I feel like every time we're reaching out to build community, we're feeding the individual soul work and the communal soul work of the people gathered in that moment. And I also feel like we're saying energetically to the larger culture, "This is what's real and this is what's right." That we actually can come together in that community of equals, heart to heart, face to face, breath to breath, and be there for one another on a variety of levels. And that that kind of resiliency and potency that exists in community is so much more powerful than these structures that are kind of rooted in domination and profit and all the things that have wreaked a lot of havoc on the planet.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    I think also it's one of the ways that it's tangible and measurable, those aren't quite the right words for it, but like when we're working for systemic change, it's often slow, it's a long haul thing. But when you show up to make a minyan, when you show up to comfort someone, that's sufficient. There's still going to be need the next day, but that's something you can do this very moment. I'm going to quote you back to yourself again from the introduction of your book, where you were talking about understanding that, even as it's really grounded in theory, that on a certain level it's a how-to book, and you say, "We see how desperately we all need to know how. How to find that refuge where we can nurture our core, how to deepen the union we feel with others, and how to embrace life beyond our immediate experience."

Claudia Horwitz:    It's interesting hearing that back now because the one amendment I would make is I think we actually know how, and it's an act of remembering and reconnecting with what we know.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    Yeah. Yeah. Personally and communally.

Claudia Horwitz:    Yeah. Yeah. I think that there are acts of resistance that have taken on new meaning as violence and injustice kind of escalate. Our mandate to do that remembering, it grows.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    Yeah. Yeah. That's a whole other conversation we could have about the importance of memory and remember[ing] so that you can act in the Jewish tradition. As always, so wonderful to speak with you and to be with you, Claudia. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Claudia Horwitz:    You're so welcome. It was great for me too.

Rabbi D. Waxman:    Good. Good. Claudia has the best name for a website I've ever heard. It's called dontpushtheriver.wordpress.com, and we'll post a link to it on the website that supports the podcast. And you can also look on hashivenu.fireside.fm or find more rituals on reconstructingjudaism.org and ritualwell.org. Thank you so much, Claudia. I am Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu, Jewish teachings on resilience.