MUSIC:


Justin Rosen Smolen:
We have the muscle to navigate change or complexity. We have the muscle to navigate disagreement. And we actually don't have to look as far and wide as we might think to figure out how to negotiate all of this. We can go back to tool the muscles that we've been training up for.

MUSIC:


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. Shanah tovah, this is our first podcast of 5785. Can you believe it? We had a sparser year last year then we expected. I think you can probably figure out why. And our hope is that this is the first of several rich and interesting and engaging podcasts. The new year will have already started and we hope that it will offer you resources for your Yom Kippur and beyond, even as it has something of a timeless application, we hope. My guest today is Justin Rosen Smolen. Justin recently joined Reconstructing Judaism as the vice president for thriving communities and partnerships, and I am so very glad to work with him in that capacity. And Justin, I am so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu.

Justin Rosen Smolen:
Deborah, thank you so much for the opportunity to join you, to kick off the new year and the new season. Longtime listener, first time guest. Really a pleasure to be here. And in stepping into this role this summer to work with you and the really talented team at the movement. To provide resources and support to our 95 affiliates around the world and to do so in service of Reconstructionist approaches and values which are crucial in this very hard moment that we're navigating, coming into this new year has been a real joy.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Oh, we're all so happy to be working with you and to be learning from you and to be... It is such an intense moment. And I mean what listeners don't know is you have the one-on-one or occasionally two-on-one experience in this podcast. And we have an extraordinary team of people who work together with us at Reconstructing Judaism, including Sam Wachs, who is our producer and editor and helping to bring this to life.
And so what's really exciting about this moment is we spend a lot of our time and energy really trying both to meet the needs of members of Reconstructionist communities or folks who identify as Reconstructionists and also to advance what a Reconstructionist perspective can contribute to the larger conversation. And a lot of it's very action-oriented. And one of the things I do love about this podcast is it gives time to pause and reflect and think together.
And I think that's a tension that you and I are already encountering, is that we have so much work that we have to get done. And the to-do list is long and there's so much that we want to talk about. So it felt as the topic of this podcast came into focus for me, I relish the opportunity to start in conversation with you about this. And I know we'll have so many other conversations about the topic of covenant and covenantal community and many other things going forward. So let's dive in a little bit. I just introduced it a little bit, this idea of covenantal community. I'm going to reflect for just a second. It's very interesting to me to look back. I've been in this role for 11 years and we've been producing with Sam's help this podcast for seven years. And certain things that I'm talking about from different perspectives. And I can see it across my writing or my public speaking and then suddenly it kind of coheres in a new way.
That was certainly true about the founding principle of this podcast about resilience, as I think I was really kind of approaching it from a lot of different perspectives and using it, using a lot of different language. And then in 2017, really understanding that the category of resilience would be helpful. And I think that's equally true about the category of covenant. And that if I look back on how I've been bringing things to speech and introducing them, and I talked a lot about covenant often in the adjective form. I've talked about covenantal conversation. And in the last year especially, I've talked about covenantal community. And that's what I want to unpack with you and kind of dive into a little bit more deeply with you. So I think together, let's try to first lay out for our listeners what's this concept that... I think it's more than just a rhetorical flourish. I think it's a very deep and a resonant concept. And so let's try to unpack it a little bit. Do you want to talk about your understanding of a covenantal community might mean?

Justin Rosen Smolen:
Sure. And we've spoken about this before, but one reason why I find this idea compelling right now is actually how ancient it is. It's really timeless for us as Jews and for us who practice Judaism. We could go back and we'll be there in just a few weeks to our early sources, very early in the Torah where God makes a covenant with Noah following the flood, promising never to destroy the earth again. And then you see more Jewish particular covenants with our ancestors and Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And then of course you have the pinnacle of covenant in our sources, God's covenant with the people Israel on the whole at Mount Sinai.
And then of course our sources go into how many times we have breached that covenant or even times that God has thought about letting us down, maybe not fulfilling God's end of the covenant. And so the evergreen nature of it, and it's how ancient it is, but also how contemporary this idea is. And how stretchy it is as not just a concept but something that very imperfect human beings and sometimes a God who may not always be as capacious in compassion and understanding enter into. And I think that's a really nice template for us in a very divisive moment that we have sources that point to how to live in that tension in the framework of a covenant and really sticking with it. And we know what to do when that covenant is breached and how to repair it.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Yeah. Thanks for laying out the trajectory across the Torah, and I want to carry it forward also to the high holiday season that we're in the midst of my favorite prayer in the high holidays is Ki Anu Amecha v'Atah Eloheynu, "because we are your people and you are our God." And I feel like you just named the narrative moments across the Torah and that is this synthesizing of it into a variety of metaphors. And one of the things that I love about it is those moments in the Torah are pretty hierarchical and God is "other" than the people and very much in the kingship. In the rabbinical school I studied about the kingship covenants that ancient kings entered into with their people. And certainly high holidays are full of these images of God on high in a very remote way, like king or judge. And I love that prayer because it kind of flips that hierarchy onto the side. And it is, a lot of the images were intimate and living metaphors for ancient peoples. "We are your sheep and you are our shepherd," or "We are your vines and you are the one who cuts the vines back so that we can flourish."
And in my minyan, my wonderful minyan, we tried to come up with more contemporary languages that captured that interdependency and that interrelationship. So one of my favorites is like, "We are the words and you are the poetry." And so I think at the heart of covenant is relationship, is obligation, is mutuality, is interdependence. And I think that was true for our ancestors. And I think I'm choosing, I think I both know it's true on a very deep level for us and I'm also choosing to believe and act as if it's true in our modern postmodern times.

Justin Rosen Smolen:
And I love your high holiday tie-in, just perfect for this moment. We're recording right before Rosh Hashanah, and this will be something I'll meditate on going into the holiday. And you're pointing out for me that covenant is mutualistic, this idea that God needed to make a covenant with the people of Israel. Well why? If God is so removed entirely from the world's existence or human existence, why enter this relationship with this group of people or humanity in this way? And I think that carries out with how we might understand covenant in a contemporary framework. That when we choose to be in relationship with one another, when we choose to be in community with one another, we're doing so because we believe, rancor aside, division aside, the arguments of the particular moment aside, that we're going to be better off than we would be otherwise. That we actually need each other. And could that be something to rediscover in a moment where so much of the conversation and people with some of the loudest microphones are using their voices to edge people out.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Yeah.

Justin Rosen Smolen:
And that's not what this is about.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Yeah. Part of the task of making the case for covenantal community is, I don't believe literally in the God imagery of the Torah that you talked about or of our high holiday cycle. And I do believe in God, and it animates my every existence. And my definition of God and my experience of God and my convictions around God are so much more about the interdependence, the ground of being, the wellspring of creativity and also the immanent divine of whatever happens between us. The godliness that happens when instead of the God is healer, the doctors at the hospital or the healing that can emerge from the caring interactions between us. And also, and this is I think where the choice comes in, the consequences that are suggested in the Torah or in the high holiday liturgy of supernatural punishment in real time or in the afterlife, in whatever comes next. Where I live in a reality where there are consequences everywhere, but they are only lightly linked to behavior, far less so than many of us would like sometimes even as we have to make certain we don't create God in our own image.
And yet I don't think that having a different understanding of God or having a different understanding of the nature of obligation, I think it's intensely about reconstructing and reinvesting in them and not giving up on the concept of covenant rather than just casting it off. Then I think we're just lost at sea.

Justin Rosen Smolen:
Yeah, I very much agree with that. And I wonder sometimes when people say, "I want out," or "I no longer belong here because I don't see myself in this community," or "I'm not comfortable with this viewpoint in my community. This person doesn't belong." What I think is actually really interesting is that in a lot of ways people are just resolidifying the covenantal nature of community. There's this idea that somehow we do belong together. And I'm not comfortable, there's something about this moment that is making me uncomfortable with the realization or the rerealization that I'm not identical to everyone who's in covenantal community with me.
I don't get to control other people's feelings and ideas and questions, where perhaps my discomfort is sort of a projection of my own questions or ambivalence or confusion. And covenantal community, this idea that we're bound up with in one another, which is a perennial, an ancient Jewish idea, is the container for how to wrestle with that confusion, that pain, that discomfort. So we actually don't need to look to the outside and we don't need to write people off. We need to figure out as the context changes, how do we reengage with one another and how do we renew this covenant? And as with most things, we can go to ancient Jewish sources for models. How to repair when there's fallout.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
So I was taking notes. There's so much I want to dive into from what you said. It's so great. I do think that that's part of the thing that our ancestors, they didn't really, they understood themselves as a group and it was very hard to migrate out of. You were part of a group, whether it was the group you were born into or married into or converted into. And they didn't have the option of just the individual identity that has been an option since the modern era. And then of course, look, you and I are both queer. Is it okay that I said that? You and I and I are both queer. And there's so much more space for us in the fullness of our lives and to emerge as leaders. And that is, I absolutely believe, part of the benefits of the move toward individualism.
And it comes at such a high price. It comes at such a high price and especially in the way that I think consumerism has fueled the belief that we will find meaning in what we buy or how we perform, with what we're wearing or what we're doing. And that social media is just making it even worse. And so we have to remember that we had this communitarian ethos. We're facing this epidemic of loneliness, and it is constantly mystifying to me why liberal religion isn't more of an option. That folks who are suffering mightily and who are so very lonely. And there are a lot of different places to find community, but I think that the dance that we're constantly doing in this covenant that we have to renew is individually, we have to decide when to submerge our individual interests in the service of the community. And then also to ensure that the community makes space for us as individuals and that the community is living and evolving and open to change.

Justin Rosen Smolen:
I really appreciate the tensions that you're lifting up, and reminding me, reminding all of us that those tensions between an individual identity and politically a set of rights and a collective or corporate identity, are navigating that tension is what the modern Jewish project is about. Since the Enlightenment and the gradual emancipation of Jews in Europe. And of course the founding principles of the United States, of religious equality and there not being a corporate identity for Jews here. We for hundreds of years already, and the Reconstructionist movement is an outgrowth of that project, have been negotiating what it means to be invested in a corporate project in Judaism, in a collective that is thousands of years old.
And even if halakhah (Jewish law) is not binding in a Reconstructionist Jewish approach or in a liberal Jewish approach the way it might be historically or in an Orthodox one, we do believe that there is something binding about our people, about our history together, about our rituals, about our ideas, about our sources. And we're trying to square that with what it means to cherish and advocate for our rights as individuals and our rights to participate as individuals in a pluralistic society.
And that, even if that's the air we breathe, that's how we go about day-to-day life and may we be able to continue to do so safely in 2024 and beyond. When we stop to think about it, I think we were sort of placed with the reality like, "Oh, that is a lot to reconcile." And I'm heartened knowing that we're a tradition of reconciling ideas and conflict with one another.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
That's so great. I'm going to make two points. You pointed us forward like the next topic, but I want to linger a little bit longer. Before I started talking about covenantal community, I think I was talking about covenantal conversation. I wrote a lot about that as we were bringing online Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations. And to have conversations on really hard topics and to do it with norms, to say that we are going to stay in relationships, that we're going to voluntarily restrict ourselves from arguing for argument's sake. And that it's going to be in the service of building something together. And the conversation is constantly negotiated, and that's part of being in that horizontal authority such as it is, rather than a king who's mandating and policing, whether it's the divine king or whether it's secular government or a flesh and blood king. So the conversation and the relationship and the paying attention to the norms is one of the ways that we're constantly negotiating that over and over again. It feels to me like a very vitalizing path forward, and my hope is that more and more people will opt in rather than to opt out.

Justin Rosen Smolen:
Yeah.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
And I think that's due both to the content of the conversation and how compelling it is and the norms that we use. And then the successes we have to really bring people in so that they feel like they can be a part of it even if it's not identical.

Justin Rosen Smolen:
You asked earlier in our conversation, "Why isn't liberal religion growing? Why aren't people turning to liberal denominations, Jewish or otherwise, as a response to the real crisis of loneliness and the various political crises that we're navigating?" But something that comes to mind is that what we're talking about, this sort of grappling with different ideas, grappling with difference, figuring out how we're going to share communal space or share a society with people across divides that sometimes feel so enormous is a huge undertaking. And it can be very overwhelming. And so what a fundamentalist approach to religion or I think what we're seeing a fundamentalist approach to right-wing politics, sometimes with the veneer of religion or sometimes just secular, I think holds sway over people. Because it allows a retreat from what we're talking about here.
And as potent as that could be or appealing as that could be, in our darkest moments or when the going gets tough, that doesn't help us find a way forward. And so when you offer conversation a covenantal community, it's a way forward. It's very powerful. And what are the ways that we can share that message more widely as both an off-ramp from the fundamentalism, but also an on-ramp on what it means to build community together?

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Yeah, I think you and I are entirely in agreement about that. And I think that that's right. That part of what, and I think the media tends to play into it that when they think about religion, they think about a more fundamentalist approach and they don't do a very good job of covering. Because it's complex and because it is negotiable and it is relative. And if you are seeking certainty and if you are seeking orthodoxy, and by that I mean with the small "o," that's not what this is. And there is, you referenced it and look, you are the head of a department that's called the Department of Thriving Communities, and we want people to feel at home. And at the same time, I do think it's really essential for us all to develop greater capacity for living with discomfort and for understanding that that too is home. And that obviously it shouldn't always be just uncomfortable, but that if it doesn't fit perfectly, that doesn't mean that you should opt out.
Ideally, you have a voice and you have a place and you have a platform to make your case. And then also to agree to disagree and to get down to the hard work of not only changing the world and changing your community, but also taking care of the sick and feeding the hungry and making certain the children are flourishing.

Justin Rosen Smolen:
Yeah, I love that you brought up these other examples of what's incumbent upon us in Jewish tradition as practicing Jews. That no one thinks it's controversial to practice Bikur Cholim, visiting the sick, or to educate our children. We might disagree on what it means or how to go about that, but there are these beautiful tenets of what it means to be Jewish across denominations, across shades of tradition and practice that aren't controversial. Because we all agree more or less on those contours. And then there are moments like this one where we're forced to grapple with, "Well, what does it mean to be liberal American Jews and also be Zionist? What does it mean to look at the war in Israel in Gaza and assess it in terms of what it means for the future of Israel and the impact that it's had on Palestinians?"
These are all very weighty, important, big questions to ask. So when we see people coming to different conclusions, we kind of forget that actually we have a lot of common ground on all sorts of lofty important ideals. And we draw these lines in the sand to sort of distance ourselves from people who are otherwise in our community, rather than leaning into those hard conversations and questions.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
On the basis of the, drawing on the strength of the commonality, right, right. And the shared values. I think it's so important. And a lot of times when I talk about community and being in conversation and that how Reconstructionists are so much about process and that we value deeply the incredible inheritance of wisdom and practice from our ancestors. And we believe that every generation has the opportunity and even the obligation to reconstruct Judaism. And I talk about how we, it's a constant set of negotiations and we're doing it in the context of community. We're talking about the community that's gathered around us. So that's the horizontal community. And also the vertical community, the people who came before us and with an eye toward the people who follow us. One of the things that I'm really aware of, and I thank my friend and teacher Robert Banks, the CEO of American Jewish World Service for pointing this out recently, is that right now the Jewish community is navigating this particularly challenging time across five generations.
So we're not just talking about Avinu ve'imeynu, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Reecca, Rachel and Leah, or like my Bubby who was born in the old country. We are talking about the members of the silent generation who are still vital and active with us. Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and into Alphas. And we have different experiences. Not least the different experiences, different expectations, different aspirations, and I think holding the container of covenantal community and the idea that we are bound up in each. It is binding and that it lasts beyond even the hardest moment. And that there will be a moment after it where we will still be in this together is one of the ways for us to navigate this intergenerational reality that is playing out mightily around a deeply, deeply, deeply conflicted moment in a terrible...
This is a really hard time in the world, and this is a really hard time for the Jewish people. We've had many, many other hard times, it is important to remember. And I believe it is this concept of covenant that has helped us to navigate those hard times. And to remain generative and to remain creative even as we are contending with heartbreaking, even tragic situations.

Justin Rosen Smolen:
Thank you. I love that formulation so much, and I also appreciate you invoking our colleague and one of my teachers, Robert Bank, from whom I learned so much about leadership, about putting yourself in other contexts, about stretching and growing. And I'm so happy that you had that exchange and that you're formulating this idea. You're also reminding me when you say five generations. And I mean, what a gift that our world is such, and public health is such. And the vitality of the Jewish community. We don't often celebrate the vitality of the Jewish community. Let's celebrate the vitality of the Jewish community, that we can share and celebrate that we have five generations on this planet right now grappling with these really hard questions. And it reminds me of how I've wound up in the political center of my liberal Jewish family.
I have Gen Alpha children and Gen Z, or cousins and siblings who, one of whom is on the cusp of millennial and Gen Z. And then I have young baby boomer, almost Gen Xer parents. And of course my grandma, thank God, who's 89, and I'm very close with. We talk about all sorts of issues, and it's hard. It's hard because we've all come up in very different times socially and politically. My grandma is first generation American. Her parents are from Poland. And then as teenagers in New York City and sort of non-Orthodox, immigrant Jewish, I think it was a boat meetup or something for singles back in the twenties. And she got married very young in the Baby Boom to my grandfather.
They got married at 18 and 21 and had my aunt. She had my aunt before she was 20, and now thank God she's a great grandma and she has her gay grandson with his husband in the New York City suburbs raising two children. Navigating a really different world than she came up in and such a different world than her parents knew. And my grandma is one of the most resilient people I know and is incredibly forward-thinking. I'm actually seeing that she has a lot of capacity for dissension intellectually and politically. But it's just remarkable. And so when we take a step back and we wonder, "Why is this hard or why does this feel hard?" Because it's hard.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Yeah, yeah. You remind me of a story that our board chair Seth Rosen tells. He comes from incredible genes and his mother lived to be 103. And she was with it right until the end, and he went to tell her that he was either the board chair or he was the vice chair. I think he was the vice chair when the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College made the decision to admit and graduate rabbinical students who were partnered with non-Jews. And he told me that he was really dreading the conversation. She was in her late nineties at the time, maybe even had celebrated her centenary birthday already, and everything about her life suggested that she would be incredibly critical. And for sure that was a moment when a lot of generational arguments were breaking out over this decision.
And it's not that they've been completely resolved, even as in the nine years since we adopted it both Hebrew College and Hebrew Union College have followed our lead. And he was really startled and moved and opened up I think that she said, "Yeah, times change." And I don't know that it was a policy that she absolutely endorsed, but at a minimum she understood that.
And I remember talking to another long-standing donor who was probably 10 years her junior who said, "Look, this doesn't work for me at all, but I am a dinosaur and you are trying to create the Jewish future for people who are literally 80, 90, a hundred years younger than I am, so I trust you and your judgment." So this is, I think that... I never really said this or crystallized to this so much. I think one of the ways that I, as a leader ,ask people to extend me their trust is by saying, "Look, this is not a solo conversation." This is a conversation. This is covenantal conversation happening in covenantal community. Again, on the horizontal and the vertical axis. This is not freelancing. This is not an individual vision or a charismatic sect. This is this rich, intergenerational, hard conversation that hopefully we will all stay in the middle of.

Justin Rosen Smolen:
Yeah. No, that's such a beautiful vignette about Seth's grandmother and living to 103. And what it means to be an older person navigating generational change, political change, ideological shifts. I mean, that's something to experience in a lifetime and you're drawing a connection to... We believe this moment is very hard, and certainly it is. And what we as Jews experienced on October 7th. So few of us have ever experienced a tragedy like that for Jews in our lifetime. And that's really important to name and acknowledge, and that's a reason that this feels so hard.
It also feels hard because of the war that's followed and the death and destruction and the upheaval that that's caused. Both in Gaza and Israel and also here in the United States politically in the North American Jewish community. But when you remind us that the Reconstructionist movement navigated what does it mean to welcome qualified rabbinical students, irrespective of who their partner is and the background and the religious identity of their partner. That the Reconstructionist movement and others in term have openly admitted and celebrated LGBTQ rabbinical students to then go on and serve as rabbis. That once upon a time when this was controversial, the movement began ordaining women to serve as rabbis, and any of these shifts and changes also caused waves and made some people uncomfortable.
Now, those are different in the sense that they were really coming from a place of strength. The change proactively that you and the leaders who preceded you wanted to foster movement-wide. So the context is a little bit different, but it reminds me that we have the muscle to navigate change and complexity. We have the muscle to navigate disagreement. And that we actually don't have to look as far and wide as we might think to figure out how to negotiate all of this. We can go back to tools and muscles that we've been training up for.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
You mentioned like ancient Jewish history for sure, and there's also more recent Jewish history. I think that with an eye toward winding down... One of the things, and this was absolutely a part of our conversation around the non-Jewish partner policy, and I think it's equally apt at this really contested moment today, is that... I wish we had time for this long Reconstructionist history exploration, to talk about how Reconstructionism emerged at a moment... A major part of the Reconstructionist project was helping the American Jewish community come to terms with the diversity within it and valuing that diversity rather than drawing the lines, the boundaries that you were talking about earlier. And at the time, they used the language of diversity both to describe the reality and the strategy that they were trying to employ. And it was because they were helping to pioneer this alongside political scientists like Horace Kallen, who were developing the concept of cultural pluralism.
So ultimately the language cohered that diversity was the reality and the outcome and pluralism was the strategy for both fostering that and also managing it, navigating it in a healthy, constructive way. The other thing that was really happening in that moment was people tend to think of ethnicity as like a fixed category, but the word itself, I mean "ethnos" existed, but ethnicity as a category didn't really emerge until the 1940s, believe it or not. It first described New England Yankee Americans. And so Reconstructionism in talking about the importance of peoplehood and how belonging that one of the things that Eisenstein and other early interpreters of Kaplan used to say is that belonging precedes behaving or believing. That was part of this project of legitimating an ethnic identity that was extrareligious and also extraracial. That's a whole stepping out of the whole conversation about the color line and how challenging it was to be anything other than white.
And I think that part of our post-ethnic moment, part of what is informing this conversation is that belonging is not adequate. Belonging meant something different to your grandmother or Seth's mother. I grew up in a very dense ethnic enclave where everybody had two days off for Rosh Hashanah, whether or not you were Jewish, and especially if you had some sense, you absorbed it from the ether what Rosh Hashanah was about. That's not the moment we're living in. That's not, certainly not the moment that rabbis who are partnered with non-Jews grew up in. It's not the moment that not only young folks, or not only queer folks, but folks who say that they are anti-Zionists or who do not understand, resonate with a conceptualization of Zionism are living in. And what I think is really, really essential is the behaving piece, and not... When Eisenstein said belonging precedes behaving, he was talking about halakhic observance, and we're not talking about halakhic observance, we're talking about affirmatively acting in ways that are Jewish. You articulated some of the mandates earlier. We articulated them together.
I think that norms of behavior and norms of conversation are really essential. I think we develop them together. And again, it is hard work and we are tired. We are tired on so many levels, including just making enough money to feed our families, let alone... But I think at the end of the day, it's incredibly holy. It's incredibly important work, and I'm not certainly really to quote Pirkei Avot [Ethics of the Fathers], "We're not going to finish the work, but we don't have any choice other than to do it." That's how we choose life. Or just, we're reading the very end of Deuteronomy Nitzavim. "I set before you a blessing and a curse. Choose life so that you and your descendants can live."

Justin Rosen Smolen:
Yeah, what a beautiful kavannah, intention to go into the holiday season season with. And you're just painting a portrait for me of what really excites me about the Reconstructionist approach. And our diversity and the diversity of our leaders is such an asset, because the American Jewish community of today is not the American Jewish community of your childhood or even of my childhood, or certainly of my grandmother's childhood. And we need to be doing all that we can to help Jews and our loved ones across our movement and across Jewish life writ large have the vessel, the tools, develop the muscles to negotiate all of these challenges. And I think we have a lot of assets to really help us move in that direction together.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
Justin, there's so much more to say. What a fantastic conversation. I'm so excited that we get to work together and to continue to have these conversations offline. And we'll find ways for us to continue to have them online. I'm going to wind us down with excitement about what comes next and with wishes to all of you who are listening for a sweet and a happy and a healthy and a peaceful New Year. Shana tova u'metuka. I want to thank you all so much for listening to my conversation with Justin Rosen Smolen. And if you're interested in learning more about Covenantal Community or the projects of the Reconstructionist movement and how we try to bring it to light, there are a lot of resources online at reconstructingjudaism.org. We've put some of them into the show notes or on our website, Hashivenu's website, which is Hashivenu.fireside.fm.
And I think I mentioned earlier, Introducing Evolve Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations. That's a really important location for bringing this covenantal conversation to life, and that's evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. I never want to neglect mentioning Ritualwell.org, which just does absolutely beautiful work supporting poetry and ritual and liturgy, really demonstrating the breadth of diversity across the Jewish community. Please subscribe, rate, and review us in Apple podcasts or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Again, Shana tova u'metuka.

Justin Rosen Smolen:
Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation to reflect before Rosh Hashanah.

Rabbi Deborah Waxman:
So great. I'm Rabbi Deborah, and you've been listening to Hashivenu Jewish Teachings on Resilience.

Justin Rosen Smolen:
[foreign language 00:44:21]