Casper ter Kuile: If you look at what people are doing, whether it's a song in the shower in the morning or a favorite book that they read, or a walk that they take, these are all the first step. And then what tradition can do is meet you there and take you further. That's the beauty of the wisdom of the ancestors. It's not to school you and make you feel small and stupid. 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 today to welcome my friend and my teacher Casper ter Kuile. Casper is the author of the newly released book, The Power of Ritual. He is the co-founder with some amazing people of The Sacred Design Lab. He's a fellow at the Harvard Divinity School, and you may know him as the co-host, the co-creator of Harry Potter and The Sacred Text. Casper, I'm so happy to be with you today. Casper ter Kuile: Thank you for having me, Deborah. I'm just so thrilled to join the illustrious company of the other guests you've had. I've seen lots and lots of friends that join you in conversations. So thanks for having me. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. It's been such a blessing to be in conversation with so many wonderful people. I want to name for our listeners that Casper and I are having this conversation in late March with an intention of releasing the conversation in late June. And so we are going to try to shape a conversation that is at once responsive to the moment we're in and also touches on themes that I think are really very abiding, and we hope that we're going to get it right. Casper ter Kuile: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. My hope is that these questions are enduring and perhaps even just more on top of our minds in this moment and these months to come. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I think that's right. I think that the things that brought us together initially really are coming to the forefront. So let's tell the story about how we met. I met Casper through his work on this amazing project that he initiated with a classmate at Harvard Divinity School called How we Gather. So can I- Casper ter Kuile: Yeah. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Can I ask you to tell that story? Casper ter Kuile: Absolutely. So I should say I was born and raised in England, which I think apart from perhaps Holland and Denmark is one of the most secular countries in the world. And like so many people in the UK, I wasn't raised with any sort of faith tradition. I went to a Waldorf school, so there were lots of kind of rituals and nature-based, singing, community but not nothing formal. Casper ter Kuile: And so it was a bit of surprise to my parents that suddenly also as a gay man to arrive in Divinity School. Everyone was kind of confused. But there I met my wonderful colleague and co-founder, Angie Thurston, who herself was also an unlikely candidate. She came from the world of theater. And both of us were - when you're students asking the questions of - it's really interesting to learn about these themes of connection, of ritual, of meaning making, and tradition. But what does it look like for our kind of people who aren't in a synagogue or church or a worship community? Casper ter Kuile: And so we've just started to ask people, where do you go to find community? What's the place where you find belonging? And we started with friends and friends of friends, and we started to participate in some of the communities they described. And what they named kept surprising us. So they would talk about fitness groups like CrossFit or the November Project. They would talk about arts groups or Maker Spaces. They would talk about justice groups or activist groups. They would talk about all sorts of places that were ostensibly secular. But when we looked at them more closely, what you would see in a congregation kept popping up in these secular communities too. And so what we wanted to write was sort of a kind of cultural map, a sort of landscape map of how people were doing religious things in secular spaces. Casper ter Kuile: And by that, I mean, the obvious ones like getting married, having funerals, people sitting shiva in a CrossFit box. People showing and sharing their talents within the community, playing cello for the first time, doing standup. People looking after each other in communities of care, bringing each other food, fundraising money if someone was diagnosed with cancer. And just kind of the even political and social justice engagement. People getting involved in campaigns around access to housing or combating sugar addiction and other health issues. So what we really wanted to do was to hold a mirror for these secular community leaders and say, what you're doing, secretly, without meaning to, is you're actually leading a congregation and that comes with beautiful opportunities, but it also comes with significant responsibility. Casper ter Kuile: Because if you're a fitness trainer, now, you've not been trained in pastoral boundaries. How do you navigate attraction to one of your congregants? How do you handle someone who's in grief? Famously, one of the stories we heard was how a soul cycle instructor was used to getting a text on a Sunday afternoon at 4:00 PM, from one of the people who spins and has been in class saying, should I divorce my husband? That's not something folks were prepared for. And yet those were the realities of their experience. Casper ter Kuile: So the project, that initial document, which was just a 20 page PDF. It was not rocket science, but I think what it did was really help kind of clarify- Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Crystallize. Casper ter Kuile: Crystallize, exactly what people have been noticing, but maybe not all those different strings together. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right. It's a wonderful, I mean, we'll post in the show notes that, because you've published several other- Casper ter Kuile: Kind of tracts or- Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah, monographs or something. I go to the first one a lot. I mean, we've used it a lot. It's so interesting. It reminds me when I was in my 20s and trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life. What I wanted to do, where I wanted to do it and who I wanted to do it with. All those open questions with a lot of angst. Casper ter Kuile: You figured it out, that's done. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I figured it out. I saw it in myself, I saw it and all my peers. I remember sitting in Brooklyn making a list, trying to make a matrix. And certain things did actually, once you figured one piece out, other pieces come together. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I mean, I remember was a little bit of a personal aside, but I remember I was in the process of coming out and I was also trying to figure out if I maybe wanted to make aliyah and move to Israel and trying to figure out if I wanted to be a rabbi. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And I remember once I decided that I was going to go to rabbinical school, I remember thinking, oh, I'm not going to move to Israel now, because -- now as a woman rabbi, as a lesbian rabbi, there would be opportunities for me, but in the early 90s, not at all. So it came together. But when I finally made the decision, I thought I was choosing between the rabbi and the PhD track. In the end, looking back, I was just sequencing it. But I didn't know that at the time. I saw that there were a lot of other places to make community. And one of the reasons I wanted to be a rabbi was because -- I wrote about this in my application essay, that it gave me access to a framework of meaning and vocabulary and practices and wisdom, that I could draw on in that community-building, community-deepening initiative. Casper ter Kuile: This is what was so surprising for us because honestly even when we wrote this little paper, Angie and I couldn't have told you the difference between the Presbyterian and the Methodist or someone who's in the Reform movement versus the Reconstructionist movement. I was so illiterate when it came to existing religious traditions. And what was so surprising to us was the interest in our work from within existing traditions. And so we ended up going on what really felt like a three year kind of tour of family reunions. We would join Rabbi Syd Schwartz and his gatherings, Kenissa gatherings of Jewish innovators. Casper ter Kuile: We would join Methodist ministers and bishops and Episcopalians. And all of these people coming together asking these big questions about what is the future of our tradition. And as they were looking forward, what we got to do was to look back into these traditions and to see the riches within them. Casper ter Kuile: And very, very quickly, we were like you know what? We've been looking at this secular innovation landscape. We need to widen the lens and bring spiritual and secular innovators together. And so that was kind of a bit of a risk for us. Because we didn't know how these two groups would play. Would they play nice? Casper ter Kuile: And it was just one of the joys of my life to bring together folks and see within hours that some of the gatherings we hosted, you couldn't tell who was who. And it was so mutually beneficial because the folks steeped in tradition felt like, oh, this is a way of -- whether it was talking about with language that really resonated in a contemporary world or a sense of relevance and an immediate connection. Casper ter Kuile: And folks who were really hot on Instagram were like, oh gosh, I don't have to make it up, all of it all the time, like actually there are things that I can draw on from history and tradition. And so we ended up doing a bunch of things that connected people. And so for example, we did a little elder matchmaking pilot where we put together someone who runs a gym or an arts group or a social justice group with often a retired clergy person. So for example someone running a taco truck community initiative in Texas was matched with rabbi Laura Geller. One of the first women ordained in the Reform movement. And they would have never found one another, but it ended up being this wonderfully mutually inspiring relationship where just over Zoom, people would speak for an hour a month and really learn from one another and kind of learn how to translate the riches of tradition. Casper ter Kuile: And so the way I've kind of shifted my thinking is this distinction between the secular and the sacred is so unhelpful because it's actually not at all representative of people's experience. And I've really loved shifting that divide of kind of a spacial divide between "one place is religious, and the other place is secular" to really kind of flip it by 90 degrees and have that there's a reality which can feel secular, but anywhere where you go deeper, you're always going to get to the secret. And that's what's happening in these communities too. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. I just want to pause for a second because I'm going to try to bring something to speech that I don't know that I've ever done before. So now I'm kind of putting on my academic hat. So part of the thing about modernity, part of the thing about the rise of Enlightenment thought and the rise of nationalism is that before the pre-modern era religion informed everything. Religion informed everything, and part of what modernity brought was a shrinking of the realm of influence of religion into an ever smaller circle to the point- Casper ter Kuile: Just to the building. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Just to the building, right. Or to the home. I've said before. I've written about that before. My great teacher on that is Dr. Rabbi David Ellenson, the former chancellor of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He's written a lot about the process of secularization. And then early Reconstructionists were so interested in reconstructing religion so that it could be relevant in every sphere of our lives. Exactly that shattering that we were just talking about, and that recognition that our lives are holy, our bodies are holy. We are holy. And so being in this world and finding ways within a way that accommodates science, rather than competes with science and nationalism to infuse our lives with holiness and with connection. Casper ter Kuile: 100%, 100%. This always strikes me when you hear scientists really at the edge of their field talk about their research. They're the ones who are most in touch with that sense of spirituality and the glory and awe and wonder... Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Awe. Casper ter Kuile: Exactly. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And humility. Casper ter Kuile: And humility. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: [inaudible] know the limits. Casper ter Kuile: Absolutely. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: The limits. I think for me, one of the things when I was in rabbinical school and I inherited this from the classical Reconstructionists, as they were trying to make the case for this new approach to religion. And they felt like they were combating supernaturalism. They consider that the old stuff was about a God who intervenes. Casper ter Kuile: Miracles who didn't ... Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right. And that they kept saying, you don't have to leave your mind at the door. But it was totally binary. And it was about rationalism and irrationalism. Rationalism and non-rationalism. And I think that the part of what allows this conversation and the insight that you have is that critical third category of arationalism, of mystery, of that which we simply don't know. And it steps away from the hubris that can creep in from the pride, that can creep in with a certainty that we know everything. Casper ter Kuile: Right. And I think that this is the thing that we found over and over again, amongst these communities. Well, two things I'll share. One of them was that a lot of the leaders ended up turning out to be the kids of ministers or rabbis. Or they'd been to the best summer camp programs or the best Jewish day schools. Casper ter Kuile: They had a rich experience of what it felt like to be in religious community. But they might change the language and some of the structure, but what they were creating was something that they knew how to make, because they'd experienced it. And I think more and more people, if you don't have the experience of that. Right. And so often now it's not just a case of people leaving religion. It's people like me who weren't born with anything. Right. Casper ter Kuile: So I'm not even actively rejecting something. It was just absent. And so there's this really interesting moment where I think it's not this battle of like secularism against religion. Or in my case whether it's an anti-feminist, anti-woman, anti-gay political agenda, versus the reality of my experience. It's not even that fight so much. It's just the sense of like, is this it, versus there is more. I think that's really the map that we were seeing was that people, if they feel safe to engage with tradition, they're hungry for it. Casper ter Kuile: I remember we introduced at one of the very first gatherings of all of these secular leaders, right? People doing all of this community work, but in a secular context. And the very end of the three, four day gathering, we invited everyone to share something that they were hopeful for. hat they were fearful of, and that they were proud of. Casper ter Kuile: And the first person to go around said, "I am not hopeful. I have faith in..." And it was just like, what? Suddenly all of this religious language was coming back, but people felt like they had ownership over it. It felt like it was authentically theirs. And this is something we've seen every time that once people from the secular world feel safe and there's an invitation that there's this like rabid hunger, like share more. I want to learn more. One of the co-founders of meetup.com, a wonderful platform that helps people meet up around double Dutch group or Spanish fluency class, whatever it is that they want. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Whatever it is. Casper ter Kuile: Whatever it is. I remember him just sitting next to an Episcopal priest. And just with all sincerity asking, "But what is God?" Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right, right. But how great to have that invitation of the conversations. Casper ter Kuile: How great. Exactly. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So great. And the thing is I find this all the time because the Reconstructionist approach to the divine is... I mean, look, every individual has their own God. But the work that we do is about, not so much about the personal God, but much more about Mordecai Kaplan, the founding thinker of Reconstructionism, talked about God as the power that makes for salvation. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And he meant that which allowed us to be our best possible selves and to engage in the world around us and to bring salvation together. I will talk about God as the source of life, the ground of being of the universe, mekor ha-chayim the wellsprings of life. For me, the natural images really resonate very, very powerfully. But the idea that it's something other than an old man with a long beard sitting in the sky, sitting on a throne judging us is revelatory to a lot of people. Casper ter Kuile: Absolutely. As it was for me, as it was for me. And to discover yeah, exactly. This freedom with language, I think is a really important point because one of the things that we know from, at least what I've learned from neuroscience, is that when we have an experience that we can't put into words, we have two choices: either to be completely bamboozled by it, which is very destabilizing, or to suppress the experience as illegitimate, and to maintain the stability of our worldview. Casper ter Kuile: And so, unless we have words to make sense of even the cliche of a beautiful sunset, right? - - But also just holding a newborn in our arms, feeling deep love with a partner unless we have language for that, we literally can't make meaning with it. And so I think one of the gifts of tradition is that there are words that we don't have to abide by completely. We can be playful and innovative with them, but there is something that we can hold onto. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right. Well, that's why I feel like why I'm in the progressive camp of religion, why I'm a Reconstructionist, because there is that invitation to be playful with the words and with the structures. I mean, we didn't make it explicit, but that's how I first met Casper. Casper ter Kuile: That's right. Long story. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: One of these wonderful gatherings. This is exactly what I wanted us to do. But one of these gatherings, and I remember saying at that gathering that it was only because I could... The Reconstructionist movement when I decided - - it's only been about 50 years that women could be rabbis. And this was almost 30 years ago that I was making this decision. So it was still pretty new. It was very new that women could be rabbis. It was very, very new that queer people could be rabbis. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And that it was the Reconstructionist community that allowed me to step forward and offer up my gifts. And that if that hadn't existed, I probably would have exited Jewish life completely, or just done little stuff on the side and given my energies elsewhere. Casper ter Kuile: Yeah, absolutely. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: That invitation for freedom feels essential to me. So all this amazing work that you continue, - I presume your association with Harvard Divinity School is kind of a through line? Casper ter Kuile: That's right. Yeah. No, it's been a wonderful base for us to be at HDS. And I've learned so much from being exposed to these wonderful academics and practitioners around me. Because that sense, and the thing I really, I hope my gift to the world can be as so many of us it is, but is to give people a sense of spiritual confidence. Casper ter Kuile: And that for mr came from professors saying to me, "Hey it's interesting, you're taking this the Hebrew Bible class." And I'm sitting there being like, well, this is interesting, but this text doesn't feel like it belongs to me. I didn't grow up with it. What are the narratives that I really grew up with? And I'm thinking about Lord of the Rings. Casper ter Kuile: I'm thinking about Sound of Music. I'm thinking about Harry Potter. And one of my professors said to me -- she's a professor of religion and literature, Stephanie Paulsell. And she was like, "Well, what about if we read Harry Potter as a sacred text, what would that be like?" And I would have never dared to do that. That's an absurdity, but when someone who is steeped in the tradition gives you that sense of permission and that creativity to say, it's good. You can trust this is such a gift. Casper ter Kuile: And that's really certainly what we sought to do with the podcast where literally we read chapter by chapter through the Harry Potter books, but we do hevruta. We do PARDES, we do Lexia Divina. We draw from Christian and Jewish reading practices. Because people were already doing it. People were already treating this book, like the sacred text. Turning to it in times of comfort, turning to it after a breakup or someone was diagnosed with- Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right. Exactly. That's totally my experience of it. Casper ter Kuile: Right. It's such a... I think child psychologists talk about Hogwarts as the place that a lot of kids say is the safe place that they go to in their mind in times of distress, which is slightly ironic because the amount of chaos that happens at Hogwarts, which suggests it's not- Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I know that's a whole conversation about the terrible pedagogy and all that. But home, but home. Casper ter Kuile: But home. It's home, exactly. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And growth and community. Casper ter Kuile: Exactly, exactly. And so to think about the things that we already do and then to bring these practices from tradition to them. And that's what brings me alive in the world. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So I think that that wisdom , I love that phrase, spiritual confidence, and I'll tell you a story and then I want to dive into the podcast a little bit. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And I know I'm sure it's a story you've heard over and over again. What it's like to move through the world as a rabbi. And so I'm not a priest. I don't wear a collar. Sometimes I wear a kippa when I want to be -- I have a whole- Casper ter Kuile: Identifiably Jewish. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I have a whole analysis that I really deeply believe that women's spirituality and women's religious leadership need not look identical to men. So I have a real resistance to wearing a kippa at all times, but that does really signal to people that I am Jew and usually a Jewish leader. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So when I was working as a hospital chaplain doing a unit of clinical pastoral education, I wore it all the time. And I remember when I went to visit our congregation in Pittsburgh, I drove out - -which met at Tree of Life Synagogue and was doing the HIAS refugee Shabbat and was targeted and I went out the day after, I wore a kippa that day. I had to drive to get there, to get to a community meeting. And as I parked by the church, I got out of my car. I remember this woman, there was someone who was drove by me, saw me, drove to the corner, got out at the stop sign, got out of her car and shouted out and said, "We are all with you. We stand with the Jewish community." Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I was so grateful that I was flagging "Jew." That she didn't know I was a rabbi. She didn't know I movement head. But that's not the usual reaction in quieter times. A lot of times when people find out that I'm a rabbi, I just get all of their ambivalence. I get all of their pain. "When I was seven in Hebrew school, the rabbi was mean to me. And therefore I never went back to synagogue." And it's so painful to me that they experience pain. It's painful to me that they experienced it. And it's painful to me that the retreat was so great. But what I do really hear in that enactment of ambivalence and that narrative of pain is the absolute lack of spiritual confidence. Casper ter Kuile: That's right. That's right. This sense of judgment. I mean, in the Jewish community, it plays out in so many people saying, well, I'm a bad Jew. In Catholicism it's its own version. I mean, everyone has their own special flavor of shame and sadness. Casper ter Kuile: So it's frustrating to me. And this is where I do feel resentment at .religious institutions because I'm like, do your job. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: That's exactly right. Don't be abusive. You have power. Use it wisely. Casper ter Kuile: Absolutely. Because it's like fire. Religion can warm you. It could be the heart, the center of the gathering place, a candle to light your way through life. But it can also burn your fricking house down. And it has for a lot of people, no doubt. When I'm on a plane and someone says, "Oh, so what do you do?" I often say, "I work for a small nonprofit." Rabbi Deborah Waxman: That's exactly right. I say, I have a PhD in American Jewish history and my wife is a professor. So I even fib a little bit and say, I teach at a little university, because I can fill in the details. Because I don't want to have the... Sometimes I want to have the pain. Casper ter Kuile: Absolutely. And sometimes you want to lean into it. And I also think that Brene Brown story when people ask her what do you do? She always says, I reset shame and I see you. Casper ter Kuile: But I think it's exactly right. It reveals this deep ambivalence and sense of a mix of both inadequacy, but also like aggression and it's well-earned is the first thing I want to say. Casper ter Kuile: And so then what do we do with it? And I think that the response is not to say, oh, you should learn the things better. Right? My instinct is always to say, well, tell me about your life. Right? What is it that you do do? And that was the ethos, both of the podcast project, and also for how we gathered research was to start with what are people already doing. Because my assumption about the human soul is that we are naturally seeking community and that we're naturally seeking meaning. And so if you can look at what people are doing, whether it's a song in the shower in the morning or a favorite meal that they cook on grandma's birthday, or a favorite book that they read or a walk that they take. These are all places that are the first step. Casper ter Kuile: And then what tradition can do is meet you there and take you further. That's the beauty of the wisdom of the ancestors. It's not to school you and make you feel small and stupid. And so finding the places where people... And this is often true with parents who are looking at their kids saying, "Oh my God, why aren't they going to shul? Why aren't they doing this? Why aren't they doing that." And it's like, yeah, but look at what they are doing. Let's stop there and then build on that. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right. Right. I think that that's so important. And one of my colleagues, Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, she wrote a beautiful book called Parenting as a Spiritual Journey. The original title was a quote from Emily Dickinson, in the first edition it was called Our Share of Night, Our Share of Morning. Casper ter Kuile: Oh, what a beautiful. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: It was so evocative. And then in the reprint, they published it jus- with the subtitles so that the people who really needed it. And it was about trying to secularize the routines and the rhythms of parenting. But I think you're right to adopt the... That's a very core reconstructionist approach that it's about adopting the affirmative, what are you doing? And how can we keep in it? And I think that that's the premise behind this podcast is one of the grounding principles is to invite people in and to say, look, we don't have to make it up. Well, what you are doing is amazing. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And there is a whole lineage that you can draw from. And that you don't have to compromise yourself. You can bring your whole self to the engagement. You have that permission to play with it. But you can join yourself in to the community that preceded. You can have a conversation with the horizontal community that surrounds us, and that's how we're going to make something meaningful for the next generation. Casper ter Kuile: Absolutely. I mean, as you said, we're recording this in a time of lockdown. Coming towards the end of week two of being at home. And I'm a big fan of the football team in the UK Leeds United which, the biggest story behind that, I went to boarding school and realized very quickly in my all-male boarding houses, a little weird kid. I was like, oh boy, I'm going to need a football team to survive socially. Casper ter Kuile: And I heard an interview with this one guy, David O'Leary who was Irish and had a very sexy accent. So I was like, "Oh, I'll support that team." That's how I support Leeds. Here we are 20 years later and it's still true. So and I've noticed like not having the regularity of sports [inaudible] -- I'm noticing how much of an anchor that is for me in time. Casper ter Kuile: And to realize like, gosh, that rhythm of life, that of course religion provides in many ways, but also these other things in our society give me a sense of where we are within a calendar. And all I want to do now is to kind of map out a sort of liturgical sporting calendar looking forward to the Olympics, looking forward to March Madness. These are things not just for my enjoyment, but my in-laws in rural Kentucky and I really connect during the month when UK, University of Kentucky is hopefully going to the finals. And without that, we don't have that opportunity for meaning and connection. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: That's exactly right. I am an Eagles football fan because -- Casper ter Kuile: I'm sorry. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: We had a good year, a couple of years. Casper ter Kuile: You did. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: But the main reason is because it gives me something to talk about with my brothers-in-law. And if I don't have, without that I would do everything I can to deepen those connections. Casper ter Kuile: Yes. And here we are. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: That's right, I know. But that's about I think, whatever, that's a different conversation. So one of the things that was so fascinating to me about - I love the Harry Potter podcast part because I love your relationship with your co-host Vanessa. And the interchange that you have. And I am a huge Harry Potter fan and definitely turn to it as a sacred text and a place of comfort. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Both the written versions and I'm such a huge fan of the Jim Dale recorded version. Casper ter Kuile: If you think about textual recitation. I mean, this is one of, another great spiritual technology, right? I think the reason why people love those books so much in part is because they hear it. People fall asleep to it. I'm a Stephen Fry version fan, but we can have that debate later. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I've tried, but I just think Jim Dale's mastery of the voices was more astonishing to me. Casper ter Kuile: So good. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: But I've also couple of different things. I follow the podcast also in part, because it's so fascinating to watch you take these sacred practices and apply them and introduce them to... as a rabbi, some of it has been new, but a lot of it has just been fascinating to watch you do it. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: But I've also been listening to watch the community that's growing. And it feels incredibly apt in this moment of pandemic. When - -here your first book, your first monograph was How We Gather. As a rabbi, I think the thing I've said more than anything in my 20 plus years of being a rabbi is the importance of community, the importance of coming together, the importance of leaning on other people, learning from other people, allowing for that transformation. What it means when you open yourself up to serving others and being supported by others. And that is really challenged. It's not off the table, but it looks and feels really different in this moment in time. And then, but you had this experience of building and sustaining a community entirely virtually. Casper ter Kuile: Yeah, it's been a remarkable experience because the podcast actually came out of an in-person class. We ran it at The Humanist Hub in Cambridge, Mass. for a year and it really was a little congregation. We had 30 people that came in week in, week out, people fell in love. They became housemates, visited each other in the hospital, fell out. The whole thing. And it wasn't financially sustainable. Casper ter Kuile: So many new initiatives, we needed the average of about $10 per class to make it sustainable. And the average donation was four and a half. And so we couldn't do it. And so out of necessity, we were like, okay, well, let's figure out a different model. Let's make it a podcast. Little did we know that it would grow so much bigger than an in-person class. Casper ter Kuile: But one of the things that I learned is the power of a kind of a mixed-media approach. So the podcast grew and suddenly we started to see local groups pop up and there's now more than 68 local groups that meet in person to do the practices that we do on the podcast. And there's a thriving Facebook group, et cetera, et cetera. Casper ter Kuile: But now as meeting in person becomes very, very difficult, and we need to minimize social contact or physical contact as much as possible, we're seeing those groups become little online hubs. We've started an online class. We're doing all of these efforts to still keep connected through distance. And I guess the two conclusions that I would draw from trying to build community online and offline in this way is that the first thing to say is, it's not the same. Casper ter Kuile: It's not the same. There is loss, you can't hold someone close, you can't touch them or hug them. You can't pick up on some of the subtle signals that you're able to when you're in person. I've figured out some good ways to sing together over Zoom, but you can't have a whole group singing together in the same way as easily. So that is absolutely lost. Casper ter Kuile: But the other thing that I've noticed is it also offers other opportunities. Firstly, because you're able to include other people who would otherwise not be able tonecessarily to be there in person. People are able to navigate, maybe kids can be involved more easily because it's their home. Sometimes having just audio allows for much more intimacy in terms of sharing. Casper ter Kuile: And so it's been really -- people feel safer because they're in their own space. And so like doing a dance party like we did at the end of our online Harry Potter class last night. We played Abba's Dancing Queen and you had 400 people dancing in their living rooms. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: That's fantastic. Casper ter Kuile: That's not so easy to do when you're with a group in person. So there are also opportunities. It's a heavy time that we're in and I suspect the world will not just return to how it was. I think we are really learning how to navigate this online-offline world -- in the same way that the secular-sacred division is not quite true. I think the online-offline devision more and more, it's just not true either. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right. I think that's exactly right. It's interesting. We've had this experience sometimes at work where this is before pandemic, where a group of us would be together in the same space, but we wanted to Zoom someone in who wasn't there. And we would make the difficult decision of all of us choosing to Zoom so that we all have the same experience rather than the larger thing. So it's interesting to see there are best practices emerging. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And I think you're right, that this is going to change our economy for sure. This is going to change our religious institutions. I hope that we are really mindful that we carry over the way that this has made, especially for people with disabilities to participate more That we are able to embed in the best practices and can keep them going moving forward. Casper ter Kuile: Well, one of the things I've also really learned, and particularly with my colleagues, Angie and Sue Phillips was how to think about ritual-making online. And one of the really easy things, when we think about moving things online is that it all becomes about the screen. That we're always looking at the screen, that the screen's looking at us. It's hard to do for a long time. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Exhausting too. Casper ter Kuile: Exhausting. Yeah, absolutely physically on our eyes and our concentration. So one of the things that we've really learned about ritual making is to use real things. Don't make everything virtual, use a real candle, use a real prayer shawl or throw. Use a real stone or bowls of water. And it's amazing how you can actually create real magic even online. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: You also have to be careful. I saw a video of... You're laughing, you know what I'm going to say. A video there's a Valley... pastor. I don't know. I didn't, I just looked at it, but who set himself on fire. Casper ter Kuile: Yes. Absolutely. Many people have blown wax all over their screen. You have to remember about the limitations. Casper ter Kuile: But it's not as if it's just a prison. There is actually still an opportunity for people to do amazing things. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Well, I think the embodiment is so important at this moment in time that we're not just talking heads or that we're more than just our avatars on the screen. My wife and I have been setting timers to make certain we get up and walk because I'm on a small campus, she's on a bigger campus. She usually gets, we wear step counter -- she usually gets 4,000 or 5,000 steps just moving around. Casper ter Kuile: Between classroom to classroom. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. And so I think it also helps to reinforce a kind of an integration that's really important. Casper ter Kuile: Yes, absolutely. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Well, so we have to wind down just for the sake of time, but so tell us about The Power of Ritual. Tell us about the book. Casper ter Kuile: Yeah. Well, in some ways it really covers the kind of things we've been talking about today. The premise is in a time of social disconnection, the rates of loneliness are going up, more and more people living on their own. Casper ter Kuile: And at the same time, the decrease in religious affiliation. More and more people are less and less traditionally religious. How can we find meaning and connection to the things that matter most? And so I really try and look at how people are already in their own lives building little rituals, even though they might not think about them with that particular word. And also some of these communities - the dinner party that helps connect young people who have experienced grief and loss. The ways in which people are kind of making a pilgrimage in all sorts of new ways. To really give a sense of, although our spiritual lives might not look like they used to, it's still a very rich experience that's happening for people right now. Casper ter Kuile: And then to gently introduce, particularly readers who might not be familiar with different spiritual traditions, with some of the great theologians and that these are wisdom traditions that still speak to us, if we can put on our glasses and be ready to translate a little bit. So one of the real joys for me was actually looking back at my own life and I share some stories in the book about my childhood and the way I was raised. And suddenly looking back and being like you know what? Yeah, I wasn't raised religiously, but actually here were all of these beautiful rituals, all of these amazing sacred traditions that was showing up. Whether it was my dad who would always carry the birthday child down the stairs, me and my three sisters on our birthday morning. Whether it was the Hungarian lodger who lived with us for a time who taught cooking classes, who instructed everyone to pretend to be the carrots before they started cooking carrots. Casper ter Kuile: All of these things that I look back at now, and I'm like, wow, actually my life was drenched in ritual. I just wasn't looking at it. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And intentionality. Casper ter Kuile: Exactly. Yeah. So I really hope that the people who read the book we'll kind of reassess their life and say, "Gosh, I actually have much more ritual, much more meaning-oriented practices than I thought I did. And if I can pay attention to them ,just my experience of life will be one of joy and connection." Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I think that that's right. I can't wait to read it and I know here in March I can pre-order it. I promise you I will. And it makes me also think about the website that we create and sponsor, ritualwell.org. Casper ter Kuile: Absolutely. I'm very excited to do a workshop with them. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Oh, that's fantastic. I'm so glad you'll do that. And where we're also seeing at this moment in time is that there is a really significant uptick, that in February, there were 25,000 unique visitors and already in March, there are 30,000. That people I think are hungering for it, especially -- of course, this is also here a challenge and opportunity. This is an opportunity for us to try to seek out meaning and try to seek out essential and elemental commitments. Casper ter Kuile: I think we're coming up against the limits of the kind of cultural narratives that we live in, right? That what matters is power and money and fame- Rabbi Deborah Waxman: And things. Casper ter Kuile: And things, and material objects. Yeah. And when those literally cannot be made available in the same way that they were, we turn to one another, but also kind of turn inward, just what really matters. What do I want to pay attention to? How do I want to live my life? And it turns out we aren't first generations to ask that. We can learn from those who've come before. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Right. And we can create containers that reinforce and that help us to live out those commitments. Casper ter Kuile: Absolutely. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Casper, it's so extraordinary as always to talk with you. Casper ter Kuile: Deborah, thank you for leading us. I so appreciate your wisdom and friendship. And especially in times like this, so thank you. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: Yeah. So mutual. I am so grateful to my guest, Casper ter Kuile for our wonderful conversation on gathering, on ritual, on meaning making. And I love the laughter. I love this podcast, but I love that we laughed so much at it. So I'm glad that we've made space for that, especially at this moment. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: For more information on this topic, you can look on Hashivenu's website, which is hashivenu.fireside.fm. We'll load up the PDFs of how we gather and the links to the other monographs that came out, and a link to the Harry Potter and The Sacred Text podcast if you haven't found it on your own. And you can also find more resources on reconstructingjudaism.org, and of course on ritualwell.org. And you can also find a lot of on Casper's thinking and writing and hopefully travels at some moment in time on his website, powerofritual.org. I'm pleased if you can take a moment to subscribe, to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you, Casper. Casper ter Kuile: Thank you again so much. Rabbi Deborah Waxman: So great to be with you. I am Rabbi Deborah Waxman and you've been listening to Hashivenu, Jewish teachings on resilience.