Sid Schwarz:        So much of Jewish identity in the diaspora, including America, which has been a safe haven for Jews, has been an "us against them mentality," and that does not ring true for younger Jews. 

Bryan S:            From the recording studios of Reconstructing Judaism, this is "#TrendingJewish", the Jewish podcast about everything. I'm Bryan Schwartzman and with me is my awesome cohost Rachael Burgess. 

Rachael Burgess:    Hello, Bryan. 

Bryan S:            Hey, Rachael. 

Rachael Burgess:    Welcome to season two of "Trending Jewish". 

Bryan S:            Pretty good to be back. 

Rachael Burgess:    In beautiful downtown Wyncote 

Bryan S:            Yep. It's a downtown and it's beautiful. 

Rachael Burgess:    Please come see us in Wyncote. We've had a great first season where we got to talk to all sorts of interesting people doing some great things in the Jewish world, and so we have also been feeling out what is really trending in the Jewish world. What are Jewish communities looking like? What is Judaism and technology looking like today? We're pretty excited about the season. 

Bryan S:            I think so. We've lined up a bunch of interviews related to Judaism and technology, others on evolving spiritual communities. We've got a bunch of other topics down the pipe that we're developing and we're hoping we get sort of the same cool guests, the same fun hosts, right? 

Rachael Burgess:    Right. 

Bryan S:            Hopefully a little more focused look at what's happening and potentially what's going to happen in the Jewish world. 

Rachael Burgess:    Exactly. We hope that you will continue to stay tuned and make sure that you subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play Overcast, Castro, most places and it helps us if you rate us and five stars is awesome and so people can also find the show,  make sure that you're able to share this show with your friends and your family — and also, if you have questions or you have something that you're thinking about that's going on in the Jewish world and you'd like us to dive into it and explore it, make sure that you message us on our website on TrendingJewish.fireside.fm and you can also find us on Facebook.com/TrendingJewish. 

Bryan S:            We're trying to keep that up. 

Rachael Burgess:    Yeah. I think we've got a pretty good thing going there. You should definitely check out our message to Bryan for his birthday. The picture is precious. Have you seen it yet, Bryan? 

Bryan S:            No but probably when this airs, my birthday will be long in the past but we can talk about it. 

Rachael Burgess:    Because it-

Bryan S:            We can talk about your trip to California, too, going to Israel next week. 

Rachael Burgess:    Yeah. I am bouncing all over the world and getting to hear a lot of different questions from people in congregations and communities all over the place —  and this episode in particular I think is going to address some of those questions, I think, where some people that we've been seeing in different synagogues are saying the synagogue model is not working, and how do we bring in the next generation of Jews, and Judaism and Jewish community has changed so much — what is it supposed to look like in the future? That's not quite a question that we have an answer for yet. 

Bryan S:            Not yet but our next guest, our first guest of this season, definitely has about as good an idea as anybody, and I had sort of grouped this under the heading of evolving emerging spiritual communitie,s and we certainly talk about that, but as in conversation life, nothing really stays in silo. We sort of break out and get into a little bit into politics and discourse and the role that plays in Jewish life today, and how we can bridge divides, and I think the conversation really went in interesting unexpected ways. 

Bryan S:            I'm thrilled to introduce our next guest, thinker, rabbi, author Sid Schwarz, a 1980 graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He has been described as a social entrepreneur. He created and directs Kenissa, Communities of Meaning Network which is building the capacity of emerging spiritual communities across the country. He created and directs the Clergy Leadership Incubator, a program that trains rabbis to be visionary leaders, and he founded PANIM, the Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, an organization that was dedicated to inspiring and empowering Jewish youth to a life of leadership. He is also the founding rabbi of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, Maryland and he is the author of three books, most recently "Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future". 

Bryan S:            Welcome, Rabbi Sid Schwarz. I'd like to start out just kind of with a broad look at your career. Entrepreneurism, entrepreneurship is really a buzzword in the Jewish community right now. There's a strong focus on innovation. It's a required class now at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, your alma mater. You've been doing this, you've been thinking like an entrepreneur your whole career, and you've graduated from here a few decades ago. I guess I was wondering if you could tell us about your approach and why, at several different points in your career, you were driven, inspired to create new organizations and organizations of very different types. 

Sid Schwarz:        Interestingly enough, I graduated in 1980 and, at least for me, I didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. It wasn't part of the lexicon then and it didn't have the cachet that it seems to have right now. I think what did happen for me was I didn't find, in the organizations that were on the landscape and which were on the placement list, the kind of setting where I could do the kind of creative work I wanted to do. I would say that it was more a necessity being the mother of invention. I could start tracing entrepreneurship earlier on because even when I was at the college, I started at the journal of the RRA which was called Ra'ayonot, so I always had kind of the gumption to kind of get things going. 

Sid Schwarz:        When I was in my last year as head of the Jewish Community Relations Council in Washington, I very much wanted to start an organization that would build a bridge between the worlds of Jewish learning and the world of social activism. I had actually been in both worlds professionally as the rabbi of a congregation in Media, a Reconstructionist synagogue, the Beth Israel community of Pennsylvania. I'd also done a lot of activism work. I actually came to RRC initially having spent 25 years as a [inaudible] activist and my decision to go to rabbinical school was a last minute decision. As a senior in college, I had been planning to go to law school and enter into a career of politics. I always had the passion for activism and social justice but also a deep love of Judaism, Jewish learning and Jewish people. That's what got me into the rabbinate. 

Sid Schwarz:        It was odd that when I was in the position of fairly public prominence in Washington, heading up the JCRC, I found those two worlds were very much bifurcated. You had kind of the synagogue Jews. You had the Jewish learning Jews and then you had the activist Jews and those worlds didn't mix very much. It seemed to be quite odd and unnatural. I had this notion of what an integrated Jewish personality looked like and it felt like it needed both elements. I had the idea to create an organization which became PANIM, the Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, and our motto was integrating Jewish learning, Jewish values and social responsibility. That's an organization that I led for 21 years and we did some really cutting edge work, not only in integrating those fields which hadn't been linked before, but also we were among the pioneers of the whole Jewish service learning movement. 

Sid Schwarz:        I just want to say a word about what does it mean to be ahead of the curve. It sounds a little bit boastful but actually when you're an early adopter, there are significant downsides to being an early adopter. I recall getting a tongue lashing from the national director of what was in the umbrella of all the JCRCs around the country in my desire to kind of bring more Jewish content into the community relations field. He said, "You must not understand the job," and I several times got pushback from my own leadership saying, "Sid, if you want to do all this Jewish learning stuff, maybe you should go back to being a congregational rabbi." 

Sid Schwarz:        Yet 10 years later, after I created PANIM, I was invited to keynote a national conference of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which is the umbrella for all the CRCs in the country, on the integration of Torah and Tzedek. It's nice to kind of be around long enough to have your view carry the day but it doesn't always work that way and similarly, on the entrepreneurship level, I was very interested in helping to grow a Reconstructionist synagogue in the Washington area. When my wife and I moved down here from Philadelphia, we joined a liberal Conservative synagogue which was as good as it got, I suppose, for what we were looking for, but still I was kind of chomping at the bit and ringing in my ear was this notion which we heard even when I was back at RRC that, oh, if we only could seed congregations all around the country, Reconstructionism would grow and no one had ever done it. There just was a lot of lip service to it. 

Sid Schwarz:        I got a couple thousand from the RRC to do an outreach high holiday service, which I led along with Jonathan Kligler, who at that time was a rabbinical student, and that high holiday service lead to the creation of Adat Shalom which I wound up leading for eight years concurrently growing as our group PANIM. Here again, to some extent, my desire to have a place to dob in it, to be involved in the community and to raise my children and park my family, so to speak, led me to create a synagogue which I thought I would want for a couple years but what happened there was just so special and remarkable that I had a hard time pulling away and only did so when both PANIM and Adat Shalom started to grow in leaps and bounds and it was just humanly impossible to lead both so I stepped down from Adat Shalom. 

Sid Schwarz:        I've had the nice privilege of continuing to be involved there because I'm still in the community. Fred Dobb, who was my successor, had been my student rabbi and there's still the role that I can play at the congregation and gives me tremendous gratification. 

Rachael Burgess:    Among a lot of the projects and communities that you've started, one of the projects that you talk about you've stated was called Kenissa, the Kenissa project, Kenissa. What was the mission? What was the purpose of that organization and what did you learn in this process of creating this project? 

Sid Schwarz:        Okay. I want to kind of take the clock back a little bit further because I think to understand what Kenissa is all about, I think I need to say a word about the work that I've done for about 10 years now, actually more, in trying to help rabbis become more creative in the synagogues that they serve. That actually preceded Kenissa and you can't understand the Kenissa story without understanding that piece of it. If I may, in 2000 I published my first book which is called "Finding a Spiritual Home: How the New Generation of Jews Can Transform the American Synagogue". In that book, I profiled four synagogues, one of which was Adat Shalom, my own, but also an Orthodox synagogue, a Conservative synagogue and a Reform synagogue, including for each of those four synagogues two spiritual autobiographies of people who were true seekers, who would never have come to Judaism were it not for the way those particular synagogues functioned. 

Sid Schwarz:        I knew that at Adat Shalom we had attracted a lot of people who were never going to join a synagogue in their lives. This was not a typical American Jewish family that say, "Okay, when we have a family and our oldest child is seven or eight years old, we're joining a synagogue," and then they depart when their youngest child is 13 or 14 because they got their two or three B'nai Mitzvah. We were tracking true seekers who were looking into other forms of spirituality and religion. I profiled the four synagogues and out of it emerged what I argued was a new paradigm for the American synagogue, which I called at that time the "synagogue community" as distinct from the "synagogue" center which actually defined the synagogue of the post World War Two era which I think still typifies probably 90% plus of American synagogues. I've argued that they no longer work but I started to profile what does the synagogue community look like. 

Sid Schwarz:        I now had four case studies from each of the four movements and I argued and made the case that those four synagogues from four movements had more in common with each other than they had with the synagogues from their own movements. Since that book came out, I started essentially doing a lot of work nationally and as a consultant to synagogues and a coach to rabbis to help them move to a more creative model of how to lead synagogues and how to transform them. 

Sid Schwarz:        That work blossomed and when I left PANIM in 2009, I created something called a Clergy Leadership Incubator which is a two-year fellowship for rabbis on visionary leadership and change management, because what I recognized was that one of the stumbling blocks in helping synagogues transform themselves is rabbis don't oftentimes get a lot of training in understanding things like systems theory and change management, and that's something that I had schooled myself in, and we're now in the third cohort of that fellowship, which has really helped seed some very interesting new projects in America's synagogues, against, all across the denominational spectrum. This project is not just for Reconstructionist. We have rabbis from Orthodox, Reform, Renewal and everything in between. 

Sid Schwarz:        Among the rabbis in my CLI program, CLI is the acronym for Clergy Leadership Incubator and it's a play on the word "klei kodesh" because in Hebrew the word for clergy is "klei kodesh" so we call it CLI. Among the rabbis in the CLI fellowship are some rabbis who we call rabbinic entrepreneurs. Some are solo rabbis having their own pulpit. Some are assistants serving as a second rabbi in a much larger, better resourced congregation and some are rabbinic entrepreneurs trying to create new models of spiritual community. That's the area that I've been most intrigued about because frankly even my own experience, it's easier to create a new paradigm synagogue model from scratch than taking a synagogue that's been around 100 years or more and turn it around. That could be really challenging. 

Sid Schwarz:        Having had some success planting the seed for entrepreneurial synagogues and new models of spiritual community, I started to look at a large landscape and that actually is what led to my third book, I'm skipping my second, we can come back to it. "Jewish Megatrends" was essentially taking the same lens that I use to examine the American synagogue and finding the spiritual home and it said, "Look, what's unique about the Jewish community is that it's not simply a religious phenomenon. That's why Jews have such a hard time engaging in dialog with Christians because we're not counterpart to the Christian phenomenon. We are as Mordecai Kaplan stated 100 years ago, we're a multidimensional civilization and as a result, many Jews are involved in Jewish life quite intently who may never set foot in a synagogue. 

Sid Schwarz:        I wondered as a question, what does the rest of the landscape of the American Jewish community look like beyond synagogues and "Jewish Megatrends" looked at that model. In "Megatrends" I argue the following, that at the same time that over the past 20 to 30 years, the legacy institutions of American Jewish life, namely synagogues, Jewish federations, membership organizations and JCCs which make up large part of the organized Jewish community, while those institutions are more in steep decline, it would be erroneous to conclude that American Jewish life was unraveling. I argue that at the same time that was happening, that there was a concurrent explosion of activity in the innovation sector. Young Jews creating new models of Jewish identity and Jewish community and Jewish associations, which is redefining the American Jewish landscape. That's the book that led to Kenissa.

Sid Schwarz:        Now you understand why you were a little bit ahead of time to ask that question, but I had to give you that by way of background. The Kenissa project, and it's subtitled The Communities of Meaning Network, we're identifying new models of how Jews are now organizing to attract mostly younger Jews, although not exclusively younger Jews. I'm proud of the fact that while there's this mania about how you attract millennials, the phenomenon of what we call communities of meaning is not exclusively a millennial phenomenon. We have people, and we've been gathering for the past three years now, individuals who are the entrepreneurs creating new models of Jewish life in six different sectors, social justice, eco-sustainability, Jewish learning, spiritual practice, arts and culture and spiritual communities, meaning nontraditional synagogues, and that's the sixth area. 

Sid Schwarz:        As we gather these folks together, what's amazing is that a lot of these organizations that, some of which are only a few years old, are attracting Jews in ways that legacy organizations no longer can but they are seriously under-resourced and so the network we've created is a way for these innovative groups to essentially work together building a larger network and as the network grows, we are increasingly able to make the case to the mainstream community, in particular funders in the Federation system, that these organizations are not a fringe phenomenon. It is actually the new trend in Jewish life that needs to be supported and given more shelf space. 

Bryan S:            Can you give us some examples of the types of organizations you're working with and how they might be outside the proverbial box? 

Sid Schwarz:        Sure. Happy to. Let me do a ... We have a model which actually uses five themes. We've organized our Kenissa network into five themes. Let me say the themes and I'll give you one or two examples from each of the groups. The five themes are  Kehilla, which we use as a term for community or the term I like to use here is covenantal community, Tzedek,  social justice, Hokhmah] Jewish learning, Kedushah sacred purpose and Yetzirah, creativity. Let me give some examples and actually when we find organizations, they actually rank themselves or categorize themselves saying, 'What is your primary theme that you drive people coming to you and what might be secondary themes?" In the Kehillah area, I'll give you a few examples. 

Sid Schwarz:        It's interesting. Probably two of the best known that are out there today that are not so small anymore is Avodah and Moishe House, and I mention those because let's be aware that those organizations, Avodah  has been around for at least 10 years, probably a bit more. Moishe House is a little bit less than that but you have all the young people now graduating college who are having the experience of living in a communal setting. They're living in a joint house. What you walk away with is you understand community on a much deeper level than the experience that people have when they join a synagogue. 

Sid Schwarz:        What's interesting is that if you go to people in synagogues or talk to their rabbis, they'll use the same term "community" but ask anyone who's lived in an Avodah house or lived in a Moishe house and say, 'Is this like being a member of a synagogue?" They'll say, "No way, Jose. It's not the same. There's something much deeper going on in terms of obligation to mission, obligation to the other people in the house," and in my view, synagogues have to aspire to that level of what I call covenantal community where there's deep commitment to mission and to  one another. 

Sid Schwarz:        The kind of group that we've been finding in Kehillah, which is so interesting, there's a group that came for our last conference called the Living Tree Alliance in Vermont. These are folks who actually own a couple hundred acres and they're about to invite people to come in, build houses on the property in a co-housing arrangement, work the land and engage in Jewish practice with one another in a little, what might be called Israel moshav or kibbutz. 

Rachael Burgess:    Wow. 

Sid Schwarz:        Another fascinating project we came along is something called Alliance Community Reboot. This is fascinating to me because I'm trained as a Jewish historian. In the 1880s at the same time that thousands of Jews were going from Eastern Europe to Palestine to create a movement of Jews coming back to the land in Palestine and Eretz Israel, some Jews went to Vineland, New Jersey and created a agricultural settlement in Vineland, New Jersey. For almost 100 years, you had Jewish farmers and Jewish poultry industry, whatever else. It's been abandoned. The great great grandfather [sic]  of the founder of that last community of Vineland, New Jersey has now bought the property including the old synagogue and here again, inviting people to come move onto the land to create, again, a community in a place that had a community more than 100 years ago. It's kind of amazing. 

Rachael Burgess:    I have a question for you actually regarding these communities because they're very unique and when we think about a synagogue or we think about JCC or a Federation, we kind of have those financial models. We have that down to a system. We have membership. We have donations. There's a system in place to keep them financially stable but for some of these newer organizations, I think there's an aspiration for congregations to be as creative as these different organizations that you're working with but the idea of how do you keep that financially sustainable is a bit up in the air. How are these smaller communities finding themselves able to sustain themselves financially? 

Sid Schwarz:        Yeah, that's a great question and a huge challenge. The fact of the matter is we now have in our network, because we're involved in a national mapping project of these communities of meaning, we're up over 200 organizations we have found and what they have in common mostly is that they are severely under-resourced and furthermore, and I say this with as much understanding and compassion as I can muster, they're somewhat organizationally immature, by which I mean the fact that a person is passionate about some aspect of Jewish life and builds an organization or launches an organization to kind of advance that, doesn't mean they know how to build an organization and scale it up. because everything from fundraising and building a board and understanding mission and understanding marketing and things like that and they don't all have those skills. 

Sid Schwarz:        Part of what we're doing is actually we're creating a skill building network and community [inaudible]. That's why people come to us, help them in that regard. I also believe that there could be a partnership, in many cases between some of the legacy institutions that are having a hard time attracting younger Jews and some of these emerging communities of meaning that have captured young Jews in a very exciting way but are still looking for more organizational sustainability. 

Bryan S:            I'm 42. I'm not a millennial. I guess I'm a Gen-Xer. I've kind of thought of myself as hip but yet I keep meeting younger Jews in their 20s and 30 who just have totally different views of the world and frames of reference and assumptions than me and they're really interested in Jewish life and Judaism and certainly not in the way I or my parents would've thought about it. Reading through "Jewish Megatrends", I was really struck by the way you framed it as tribal Jews versus covenantal Jews. It seems as compelling an explanation as any I've seen as to a generational divide and I was wondering how you see if you could explain a little bit about what these groups are and how you came to that and also how you see tribal Jews and covenantal Jews interacting and understanding one another, collaborating together on this Jewish enterprise. 

Sid Schwarz:        Right. I appreciate the question. The model I use is this. "Tribal" has, to the modern ear, a slightly pejorative tone. I don't intend that because let me first say that I am a tribal Jew through and through. It simply means my way of labeling Jews who identify strongly with the past, present and future of the Jewish people and cast their lot in with those people. That's what makes you a tribal Jew. The reality is that most of the organized Jewish community was created by tribal Jews for tribal Jews. Unfortunately, many of the younger Jews ... 

Sid Schwarz:        Let me talk about my kids. I have three millennials. My kids are 32, 30 and 28. Now they may be exceptional like all the kids from Lake Wobegon, if can still use that analogy, but nonetheless, their peers, that cohort are post-tribal Jews. They don't respond in the way that my generation or certainly not my parents' generation responded who appeals based on "Remember the Holocaust. Let's fight for the state of Israel. The world's against us, let's pull the wagons around in a circle." So much of Jewish identity in the diaspora, including America which has been a safe haven for Jews, has been an "us against them mentality" and that does not ring true for younger Jews and as a result, part of why legacy institutions are suffering now is that their core message emerging out of that tribal assumption about" let's have ethnic solidarity because we need each other for survival" simply doesn't resonate with the experience of younger Jews. 

Sid Schwarz:        I use the term "covenantal Jews" because interestingly enough, as I spent most of my career working with younger Jews, Jews not even half my age but even less than that now that I'm in my 60s and what I saw is that they resonate to core ideas that go back to Mount Sinai, going back to Torah but it's not cloaked in tribal language, meaning that talk about the idea of seeing every human being in the image of God,  tzelem elokim —  that resonates deeply with people, young people, the idea of allying with the most needy. You spend time with tribal Jews, they'll tell you about all the Jews in need around the world, either poor Jews in our own country or Jews in Israel or an endangered community in France or somewhere else. 

Sid Schwarz:        Ask a millennial Jew, they say, "Jews are hardly the most vulnerable people on the planet. I care about Rohingya Muslims in Burma. I care about Syrian Muslims who are being shelled in Syria today with chemical weapons. That's what they're going to resonate to. Talk to them about the pursuit of peace and justice, the fact that Jews resonate to peace and justice issues even to the desire of Palestinians for a state in our homeland. In a lot of tribal settings, the sympathy for Palestinians does not ring true because they see that as running counter to our desire to create a safe and secure Israel. I don't think those two things should be antithetical or are antithetical. These are some things young people resonate to. 

Sid Schwarz:        I use the term covenantal Jews to describe Jews who are living lives that are aligned with core Jewish values and principles but whose loyalties and affiliations are maybe only a potential to the Jewish community. In my view, if we play our cards right, we create organizations that put mission first, put Jewish values first, put ethics first, put human rights first, we have a tremendous opportunity to capture that generation of covenantal Jews. The jury's out whether we can pull it off and many of the Jews that I'm meeting and pulling together in my Kenissa Communities of Meaning Network are, I would say, deeply ambivalent about whether they want to be tied to the Jewish community or not. It really depends how the Jewish community shows up for them in terms of the things that they care about.

Sid Schwarz:        Let me say one other thing to your question, Bryan, and this will sound harsh but I think it's true. You asked the question to what extent do tribal Jews and covenantal Jews understand each other and I would say almost not at all. Almost not at all. It is a very big divide and, because I have a foot in both worlds, I'm trying to build bridges between those worlds because we desperately need it, because if we don't build effective bridges there, we will lose the next generation in large part. 

Rachael Burgess:    How did you bridge that for yourself in your own mind? You say that you are very much a tribal Jew. Do you feel like that you've bridged that gap and, if so, how did you do it? 

Sid Schwarz:        I'll give you just a couple examples. You don't bridge it in your mind. You've got to bridge it in the way you walk the talk. When I was the head of the Jewish Community Relations Council in Washington, I was "The Man," meaning I would represent in the old '50s sense. I represented the establishment. Yet, during my tenure, there was a - Beit Mishpacha was the gay and lesbian synagogue in Washington which for years was trying to gain admission as an affiliate member of the Jewish Community Council and they were banned year after year. I helped them come into the organization because I said, "Why would you exclude a gay and lesbian synagogue?" This is before LGBT lifestyle was more accepted but we're talking about now in the mid 1980s. It was very controversial. 

Sid Schwarz:        Similarly, groups that were doing a lot of peace work in Israel-Palestine were groups that I also invited to come in and be involved in our conversation which was, again, very edgy and I took a lot of heat for that. On the one hand, I was representing the established Jewish community but I was trying to build bridges between organizations that were more on the margins. There was a time, I'll tell you one other anecdote, in my PANIM career, we brought through Washington over 20,000 young people who were the center called Panim el Panim where we used Jewish values to inspire activism for issues not only for the Jewish people but for the world at large. 

Sid Schwarz:        We had a very close relationship with AIPAC because we wanted to teach young people about activism. There isn't a better school than AIPAC, nor, in my opinion, a better cause than AIPAC. We had a strong alliance with AIPAC. They spoke to our kids [inaudible] but there was a day literally when I was on Capitol Hill doing lobby work with AIPAC in the morning and in the afternoon representing what was then Rabbis for Human Rights North America, now renamed T'ruah, the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. The same day I was on the hill with AIPAC in the morning, I was delivering a letter of protest to the Israeli embassy in the afternoon  protesting the home demolitions in Jerusalem, not because the homes were occupied by terrorists or the heirs of terrorists but because Palestinian families in East Jerusalem didn't have a permit to put on an addition to their homes in which they could sleep child number five, six and seven, not because they didn't file for a permit but because the Israeli authorities don't give permits to Palestinians to put additions on their homes and we felt that was wrong. 

Sid Schwarz:        I'm not schizophrenic. I'm the same person. I care deeply about Israel's safety and security, which is why I aligned myself with AIPAC. I also believe deeply that Israel, the Jewish homeland, should represent the highest values of the Jewish tradition and when it acts in various to those values, I will speak out. That is not easy road, easy line to kind of balance because you get criticized from both sides. The folks who are more on the progressive left will say, "What are you hanging out with AIPAC for?" AIPAC folks saying, "What are you hanging out with these lefties who always have bad things to say about Israel for?" It's hard to walk that line. I think that for me, I've always had deep sympathies with Jews on the margin but I also have tremendous respect for the community that a generation prior to mine built to create one of the most effective and organized [inaudible] communities that America has ever seen. 

Bryan S:            I wasn't planning to go deep into the Middle East today but I think you're hitting on something where it seems impossible to disentangle the tribal/covenantal divide with the current conversation or lack of on Israeli politics, on the conflict. Do you see that and I wonder how many people are there out there still like you who aren't schizophrenic but can sort of see both sides and work on different causes simultaneously? 

Sid Schwarz:        We're in a age of growing polarization and growing partisanship. It's been made worse by this administration so I think we're going in the wrong direction. I think a lot of people pay service to the need to talk across difference but it doesn't much happen. People are choosing sides all the time and I think we are a weaker community for it as a Jewish community and we are a weaker America for it. I worry as much as I wear a rabbi's hat, the kippah, so to speak, of the time, I worry even more for the experiment called American democracy because I think it is seriously at risk. 

Sid Schwarz:        I don't think we can be involved in our own Jewish cocoon thinking about how we build vibrant communities without asking what is our community's contribution to healing the heart of democracy. I use that phrase which is actually the title of a book by Parker Palmer, really one of the great prophetic voices of our time, who says that the crisis of America is not just a political crisis. It's also a spiritual crisis. I think Jews and rabbis who care about Judaism have got to care at least as much if not more about the experiment called American democracy which is so much at risk today. 

Bryan S:            I think we're running about out of time. We could probably do this all day. I'm sure you've got a full schedule. With so much hand wringing and concern for the future of the American Jewish community, I get a sense that you really more than hold on to hope, have a strong sense of optimism about the American Jewish future. Is that fair to say and where do you draw your optimism from, if so? 

Sid Schwarz:        It's funny because just last week we had our third national gathering of our Kenissa consultation and I have to say having spent most of my career running retreats, it is so exciting to be in a room with some of the most creative Jews I have ever met. What's even more exciting is the fact that unlike most Jewish gatherings, and I go to many, most people in that room, I asked a question when I first spoke to the group. I said, "How many people in this room know 10 or more other people in the room?" There were two hands in the air out of 50. The vast majority of people in that room didn't know more than two or three people in the room. We're bringing people in who are working sometimes in isolation from each other, who are seeing that there are other people like them who may not have the same spin on Jewish identity necessarily but are also trying to reinvent Jewish life in our moment, in our time. 

Sid Schwarz:        When I see young Jews putting so much energy into creating new forms of Jewish identification, which are succeeding in attracting Jews in ways that legacy organizations are not, how could I not be optimistic? It's only a matter of ... Although I said it before, they're under-resourced and need a lot of help but we're well on the way to doing that and because I've got substantial inroads into the organized community personally, my commitment in this network is to essentially help the organized community see how much they have to gain by investing very heavily in this emerging network of new communities of meaning. 

Bryan S:            I really appreciate all your time and thank you for all of your work that you do. It's easier to be optimistic about the Jewish future after speaking with you. I hope we have a long podcast run on the air and get to repeat guests because we'd love to have you back in the future. 

Rachael Burgess:    Absolutely. I'm looking forward to also [inaudible] all of these different organizations that, again, you are right at the cutting edge where you are the horizon's in front of you and we don't know what that destination's going to look like and I can't wait to talk to you against to see what kind of perspective you're seeing. 

Sid Schwarz:        Thanks for the interview and good luck to you. 

Bryan S:            Okay, thank you. 

Rachael Burgess:    Thank you so much. Okay. Thank you very much for listening and be sure to subscribe to our podcast. We are on iTunes, Google Play, Overcast, Castro. We're in most places so make sure that you subscribe. Tell your friends about us and we also would appreciate it if you would give us a five star and rate us. Give us a great review, helps people find the show and we also love to hear good things about us. We do want your questions, your comments, your ideas for episodes and people we should talk to so make sure you send us a message on our website, TrendingJewish.fireside.fm or you can also go to our Facebook page and send us a message there so that is Facebook.com/TrendingJewish. If you like this program and you like what you see from Reconstructing Judaism, your support is always appreciated. We encourage you, please, if you can make a gift to Reconstructing Judaism, just go to ReconstructingJudaism.org and click donate. Thanks and good night. 

Bryan S:            Lehit'raot