Bryan Schwartzman:
From my home studio, welcome to Evolve, Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations.

Yehudah Webster:
This is building anti-racist muscle. Like going to the gym. Such that when you then go to do the work, then you'll be a much more effective force of that change.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I'm your host Bryan Schwartzman. Today I'm speaking with Rabbi David Jaffe and Yehudah Webster. We'll be discussing their essay, their Evolve essay, Racial Justice is a Path to Jewish Security. This conversation is a natural follow-up to an interview we did in January with Rabbis Sandra Lawson and Alex Weissman, who are my colleagues at Reconstructing Judaism and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. As we discussed in that show, RRC recently brought in Webster and Jaffe to work with its faculty and kickstart the curriculum that they developed, Dismantling Racism From the Inside out. And that was done through a grant from the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning. If you want to learn more, we will leave a link in these show notes. You can go back and take a listen.
We believe, "we" meaning the folks behind this podcast, that it's important to highlight this work as inclusion programs are being scaled back or cut entirely across higher education, as well as the corporate and government sectors. Settle in for an enlivening conversation that I think makes some concepts that might seem abstract. Our guests really have a way to illustrate them with stories and make them seem concrete. So this is a gem of a conversation on a really important topic.
Okay, before we jump in, each month I look forward really to getting the Evolve Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations newsletter in my inbox. It's one of the few emails I actually look forward to. It's the way that I keep up with everything that's going on with Evolve, including all the new essays and information on upcoming web conversations. And along with that, my friend and executive producer, Rabbi Jacob Staub always shares pearls of wisdom that kind of tie together everything that's happening at Evolve and what the platform is tackling. So if you want this delivered right to your inbox, only once a month, we'll leave a link in the show notes. Don't miss out. A.
Ll right, now to our guests, Rabbi David Jaffe is the founder and executive director of the Kirva Institute, Inside Out Wisdom and Action Project. He's the author of Changing the World from the Inside Out, a Jewish Approach to Personal and Social Change, which is a winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Yehudah Webster is a spiritual activist and community organizer that works as faculty at Kirva to animate and integrate anti-racist behaviors and cultures in communities. He supports the collective organizing, advocacy and direct service efforts to dismantle racism systemically. Rabbi David Jaffe, Yehudah Webster, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you both.

Yehudah Webster:
Thank you.

Rabbi David Jaffe:
Thank you. Good to be here,

Bryan Schwartzman:
Rabbi David Jaffe, I wanted to start by asking, what is the Kirva Institute? What does it do? And also just for our listeners, what does Kirva mean?

Rabbi David Jaffe:
Thanks, Bryan. So Kirva, the word means closeness, literally like karov, to draw close. And I was a young community organizer working with people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. And during that time there was a lot of good work we did there. And then times had really hit a place of despair when someone who finally got into a job then relapsed because of drugs or something else. And I remember one particular day having come out of the hospital visiting someone and just feeling really down. And I remember seeing one of the groups we used to organize with were Franciscan nuns. And I just noticed that some of these women seemed really old to me at the time. I don't know how old they were, but I was really young. And they had a joy about them and a persistence about them. And I was very attracted to that because I was really bought in. I wanted to do the social change work for my life, but how to actually do it and stay in it.
And so what do these women have? They have spiritual community and they have spiritual practice. And that really motivated me to want to find out, okay, let's look into Judaism and really see what practices could I draw on and how to really build my spiritual community to support this kind of long-term social change work. And that led to a whole life of yearning for that type of spiritual grounding for this kind of work that eventually led me to the disciplines of Musar, which is applied Jewish ethics and Hasidut, which is applied Jewish mysticism that really form what we do at Kirva.
So the Kirva Institute, Kirva is really about bringing together these disciplines and the work of social change. And we've been very fortunate to find other people who are yearning for this type of integration. And the Jewish community, we're an ethnic group and a religious group. So there are secular Jews. So the spiritual part is not always going to be there for everyone, but there's much, much we could bring in because as my colleague Toba Spitzer says, the sacred is a part of life. It isn't essential part of life for everyone. And so we're really trying to bring all that together. So that's what we do at Kirva.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So my understanding of Musar, and to the extent I've written about it, I've never practiced it, is that it's a series of practices, teachings, a methodology used to work on oneself with accountability. How am I behaving in the world, how am I acting? But you've turned it on some extent to how one behaves in society, if I understand that correctly, if there's a distinction. So maybe the question is what's the distinction between traditional Musar practice and what you do? What's the twist you're putting on it?

Rabbi David Jaffe:
The Musar teachers, and Musar is a tradition that goes back a thousand years to Spain, and then was picked up, became a modern movement in the 19th century in Lithuania. And Musar teachers throughout the generations were talking about interpersonal excellence and relationship with God. They weren't necessarily talking about systemic change out in the world. And one of the things I discovered when I was really learning these traditions in Yeshiva was that with a little bit of a nudge, these teachings could actually be about trying to make wider change in the world.
And so what we're doing really is a hypothesis that could be true. So we're taking things that were tradition and applying them in a place that they weren't necessarily originally applied. But we're finding through our work that there really is an application here and it seems to be really alive. And I'd love to hear, Yehudah, what you're seeing as well.

Yehudah Webster:
Yeah, thanks for the question and I could share just a little bit about me and this story that really brought me to Musar and to this work is that I was doing the work of community organizing in New York, and particularly around police accountability and trying to bring police budgets into balance with the other social services that the city and the government provides. And in that organizing, really striving to make that slogan, Black Lives Matter true, that our lives do matter.
I was constantly coming up against my own limitations. We have all these values that we speak to, these high-level values that we speak to somewhat rhetorically, and values of respect and nondisposability, and really holding folks accountable for their harm without canceling them. And yet when I reached to do that with others around me, we weren't very successful often and harm kind of just increased and folks would leave the movement and the effort.
And I just had a deep sense of knowing that, A, history is repeating itself in the little microcosm that I was in and also in the macro movements that I was witnessing of Women's March and Black Lives Matter and so on and so forth. And I was deeply in a place of yearning for a different way. And it's then that I experienced Rabbi David Jaffe's workshop at Tzedek Lab in, what is that 2018? And the first convening at the Highland Center that historically trained so many activists in the 50s and 60s and so on and so forth.

Bryan Schwartzman:
This is in New York?

Yehudah Webster:
This is in Tennessee actually, the Highland Center. And so Rabbi David had this workshop really bringing together Musar with social justice principles and I said, "This is it. This is exactly what I've been looking for." And it is a Jewish way, it's not the only way, but a Jewish way. And I'm deeply invested in Torah and Judaism and our values and principles. And so that just opened up a pathway for me to actually in a concrete manner with daily practice, be able to take the values that I have up here, the lofty values that we're trying to transform our city and state to reflect and put them into practice on a personal and interpersonal level. Because what I recognize is that if I can't live this, if the people around us can't live this, how can we hope to be effective forces of changing the city and state to reflect these values as well?

Bryan Schwartzman:
So is there an example of how this practice worked for you or what it did for you in terms of how you interact with others or are in comfort with yourself?

Yehudah Webster:
I'll say that Musar is, it is a practice and it's a discipline. And my experience of it is that it is certainly supported and helped me to grow in my application of how I want to show up in the world. And it's a lifetime journey. I certainly have not arrived. I'm not a master in any way, I wouldn't say. I've seen some movements in some places and then in other places it's like, "Oh, still needs to do some work here." I'll give you an example, a story. This connects to the particular topic of dismantling racism from the inside out of the curriculum that we built to and designed to really use Musar to help us live out, to strengthen what we call our anti-racist muscle, if you will.
Oftentimes, this is something that's happened throughout my life. I'm in a Jewish setting and European descent Jews, folks racialized as white will oftentimes want to probe and assess if I'm Jewish. And how are you Jewish? When did you become Jewish? Really trying to... It's coming from a place of curiosity in some places, but regardless it's inappropriate. And creates a feeling of exclusion and not being welcomed for many of us who are asked these questions.
And so Rabbi David and I, were at a retreat a few years ago and we were opening up the space and I just arrived and we're setting up, we're hosting the retreat and we're setting up the welcome table. And one of the employees came over and friendly conversation we're introducing ourselves and she asked me, she said, "Where are you from?" And I'm like, "Oh yeah, I'm from New Jersey and since then the third."
And then she said, "Well, where are you really from?" And that's always a signal that there's this underlying question of, well, how are you actually Jewish? How are you actually here? Are you Ethiopian? How is this happening that there's a black Jew helping to run this very Jewish retreat?
And I deflected because that's how I've been conditioned over the years. That's a defense mechanism that I've habituated that served me for time, but is not serving the work of anti-racism. And so I deflected in that moment and the conversation went on and when she turned away, Rabbi David turned to me and said, "Is that what I think that was?" I said, "Yeah, it was." He said, "Should we say something?" And again, it was another moment for me to say, "Yeah, you know what, we should probably disrupt this" because that would be living my anti-racist values out to disrupt that moment. And I said, ah, I had this false humility. I said, "Ah, I don't want to ruffle any feathers we just got here."
Would you know, she went and then asked every single black Jewish participant a similar question that week over the course of the week that we were there. By the end, many other folks were harmed. It became a bigger challenge and issue. If I had just actually taken up appropriate space, which is something that we learn in Musar around humility, around Anavah. If I had taken up appropriate space and actually disrupted that moment perhaps, and lived out my anti-racist values, perhaps we could have stopped that harm from being perpetuated throughout the week onto other people as well.
So it's moments like those that are indicators of our, in my mind, of my efficacy in being able to be an effective force of change on a city-state level, of doing racism writ large. And I'm happy to say just to close this loop and Rabbi David, please fill in your experience with that as well. But few years later, after working a lot on Anavah and my appropriate space, I had a similar situation that was quite public actually in a Jewish program and I had a very different response and was able to really disrupt it in the moment very publicly as well for many other folks. So that's where the rubber really meets the road for us with this practice.

Bryan Schwartzman:
It's one of the great challenges of life, isn't it? Saying the thing we need to say in the moment, we need to say it or doing the thing we need to do in the moment we need to do it, and having the confidence to do that. I don't know about you, I feel like half the time I'm like, "Oh, I just should have said this or should have done that." And I don't know how Musar comes into that either trains us to deal with those recriminations after or actually teaches us how to have the awareness to learn from past experiences and respond in the moment better.

Rabbi David Jaffe:
Yeah, I mean that's where Musar really comes in. Very helpful. And I would say I had the same learnings from Yehudah from that experience, but let me give you an example, Bryan, what you just raised as far as not saying the thing that you want to say and how do you learn. Musar is according to Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe a great Musar teacher of 20th century, he bases his Musar on an idea called the Hitlamdut, which is from the Hebrew word lamad to learn, for reflexive term. And it means taking a stance of learning towards everything. And we take a stance of learning. So say that situation happens, Yehudah described, didn't say the thing. You could go into a shame spiral there, like, "How could I not have done it?" And just start beating yourself up and go that direction.
What this practice of Hitlamdut has us do is say, "What was the learning? What was the learning?" That situation has a learning there. What was it? "Oh, great, okay. That's the learning from it. I'm moving on." And I have found that to be incredibly useful. Over many years, I've been practicing Musar for over 20 years of being able to short circuit that move into more intense self-criticism to what's the learning I'm taking from this? Oops, made a mistake, what's the learning?
And when Yehudah says work on a trait, one of the things we do, Musar comes to bridge the gap between our values and our behavior. And so let's take this trait of anavah, of humility. And then again, humility is a confusing word for us is English speakers. It has a lot of resonances around meekness and smallness. That's really not what anavah is about. Anavah is about responding from the word onel, anot, to respond, to answer the call. How are you responding to a situation?
And one way we work on that is we study Torah about the trait and learn some of perspectives like being right-sized as Dr. Alan Morinis writes in his book Everyday Holiness, no more than my space, no less than my place. You actually get to be right-sized. And then we have a series of practices, people know them more as mantras, but we call them focus phrases or phrases that you would repeat over and over to kind of get a trait and get an idea into your heart. So for, again, a big line for anavah is Hineni, here I am showing up. So you'd repeat that Hineni, Hineni, Hineni in the morning or before an encounter. And then you give yourself a challenge during the day, a small challenge. Like how am I going to try to be right-sized, maybe taking more space or less space in a meeting today.
When I used to teach high school, I would work with kids and I'd say, "You seem to talk a lot in history class. How about you take on a challenge of letting three people talk first before you go the second time" or something like that. A little challenge like that, not too big. And then finally we do something called chesbon hanefesh, soul reflection, soul accounting. How did I do? What did I notice about that trait during the day? Those things, those pieces that makes up Musar practice. And when you do that with a trait and you do it over time in the context of a group that's supporting you, things happen and you really do change. And it's such a difference from saying I'd like to be more patient to actually doing things that move you forward in the Jewish context. So that's when we say we work on it, that's what we're talking about when we say we work on it.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So how have the two of you adapted that to anti-racism work and what is dismantling racism from the inside out? I know we've talked about it on a previous podcast, but I'd love for you to tell our listeners a little or a lot about it.

Yehudah Webster:
Yeah, picking up on what Rabbi David just laid out of the practices and working backwards a bit. In the case of working on anavah we of humility, we look at the ways in which racism distorts our expressions of anavah, of our humility and the ways in which systemic racism limits those targeted by anti-blackness to little or no space at all in our society, economic space, physical space, emotional space, airtime in a conversation if you will.
Everything that from the physical to the more abstract yet still measurable space that we have in our life. And how it encourages those racialized as white higher in the racist hierarchy of power and value to take up too much space, so much space that it's actually oppressive to others.
And so the practice that emerges from that is dependent on your particular makeup of identities, your proximity to power within this racialized system that we have here in the U.S. For the person targeted by racism, your task, your practice may be to take up more space in meetings as Rabbi David stated, maybe your task is to speak first in a multiracial majority white setting as a person targeted by racism. Whereas a person who is racialized as white who is higher up within this hierarchy, perhaps your work to build anti-racist muscle is to seed space, to create space, more space for others.
And going back to what Rabbi David's saying about the hypothesis is that these small daily actions, it's not that if you can take your proper space in a multiracial setting, then we've achieved racial justice. No. What this is doing is that this is building anti-racist muscle like going to the gym, such that when you then go to do the work of systemic change, of advocacy, of community organizing, of direct service, then you'll actually be right-sized and you'll be a much more effective force of that change.
So in this way we've adapted the Musar practices and principles and to apply this to really building anti-racist muscle. And we are doing all of this within this particular framework called the Balance of Care, and we're adapting that from Sikh activist and visionary Valerie Kaur's Revolutionary Love Project where she talks about love for self, love for others and love for opponents. I could say more about that Balance of Care, but I want to pause and see Rabbi David, if you have anything you want to add to that or Bryan, if anything is percolating for you about what was shared.

Rabbi David Jaffe:
I'd like to share an example of something you had just said that was something that happened for me again around the same soul trait of anavah, of humility in a racialized environment. So working on this trait in all the ways I discussed, and this was right after George Floyd was murdered, and we're at the beginning of the marches and the protests that were happening, I'm on the board of directors of an organization near where I live in a majority black city and there was a big protest there in March. I went out it with them and got to the police station and the march was not supposed to go there. A bunch of the young people broke off and went to the police station. They were met there by a barricade that having a militarized police that were there and there was a standoff for a number of hours.
And I was there watching this, observing it, and this is in the city where I'm on the board of this community organization. And I'm looking around and I'm not seeing any of the clergy leaders or the leaders I know trying to manage these young people, teenagers, people in their young adult years, who are getting very, very agitated. And then there started to be, thank God, not too much violence, but there started to be a little bit going back and forth and eventually I left, but I went away thinking that was an abdication of leadership on the part of the leadership of this town. And I was going to come into my board the next day and say, "What's going on here? We have to really rally and give rebuke to people and all that."
I found out talking to my fellow board members who are people of color from that community, I'm not from that community, from the community that indeed there were many leaders among the young people who are there. I just didn't recognize them. I didn't know them because I'm not as intimately connected into that community as they are. And the fact that there wasn't more violence in it was actually fairly non-violent, successful, the whole thing, was because those leaders were there doing their thing.
And I realized in that moment that I was taking way too much space as a white guy from another place coming into place. I saw what I saw and I was going to impose it on us as an organization to do something. And I realized that was way overboard of my space and I could not tell what was happening there, and I needed to have way more on anavah and take way less space in this kind of situation to be there. And that became, and I really was able to have such a realization around it because of the Chesbon Hanefesh reflection practice that's built in to this practice and using the practice of being a stance of learning.
So I didn't get too hard on myself and I could say, "Oh well that's really clear." And that enabled me to go forward in a way as Yehudah saying, we're in the work, where I was able to then as a board member, support the people of color who are on the board, who are more closer to the community to do things they needed to do, as opposed to me being some clumsy-footed person kind of white person making a mess of the situation. That was a very clear example for where this working on this trait was really alive.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Before I go further, I wanted to ask if a community or an individual is interested in pursuing learning about doing this training or practice, where do they start? Is it your website? How does somebody learn to dismantle racism from the inside out?

Yehudah Webster:
Yes, thank you, Bryan. Certainly the website, there's an interest form, you could fill that out. It's a running waiting list. And so as an individual you could fill that out and stay tuned for upcoming communities of anti-racist practice that we will start. And if you are an institution or a community that you want to launch this for your community, same form on the website and we will be in touch with you to help get you set up. Really our process for scaling this approach and getting these practices into as many leaders as possible is to train others in how to orient their community members to these practices and to this wisdom, this spiritual Jewish wisdom. And so we can train your leaders in how to employ the DRIO approach and really help your community accomplish your racial equity goals.

Bryan Schwartzman:
All right, quick time out here. Did you know the Evolve podcast is produced by Reconstructing Judaism? You probably do if you listen to us. Reconstructing Judaism is solidifying its future with the Momentum campaign, and this campaign has less than $100,000 to go to reach its $10 million mark. By making a Momentum campaign gift, you can ensure affiliated Reconstructionist communities are places of resilience and connection, bolster digital platforms for learning and community like this, like this show, launch a new generation of Reconstructionist rabbis and work to create a world of justice and peace for all people. Please consider supporting this vibrant organization as well as our show. We'll leave a donate link in our show notes.
I think I wanted to get into your Evolve essay that the two of you co-wrote, which was really incisive and I think raised, addressed some key questions over the last couple years. And you write about how there was a surge in interest in many Jewish organizations in anti-racism work after George Floyd and how that took a big turn after October 7, 2023. And I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about what happened and why it happened and maybe then we can get into what do you think should happen in the future? How might we course correct? That's a big question, I know.

Rabbi David Jaffe:
I mean we saw in general in the country United States, you saw a big surge in interest of addressing racism and especially anti-black racism in this country after George Floyd's very public murder. And there was a moment where it really seemed like wow, things may shift here. Again, as a person who is racialized as white in this country, I've been involved in this work for many decades, and there's always been... Some people who are doing this, but to get it that broad was very exciting.
And you had Jewish communities were starting book groups, diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging committees. A lot of action was happening, and we came along, we wanted to bring a Jewish lens and so we created Dismantling Racism From Inside Out in the summer of '21, early in '21, summer of '20 actually, I started piling it and rolling it out there. And it was almost from the beginning a concerted effort, not from I would say specifically in the Jewish community, but more from conservative forces in the United States that were pushing back on this thing.
And even in the Jewish community in April of 2021, you had a publication that was really pushing back on some of the more equity based claims that we were trying to make, that there really needed to be an equity approach to how we're going to address racial injustice. Meaning that not everything would be fairly distributed for a moment. If you have wealth gaps as broad as in Boston, there was a study done by the Boston Globe that, I'm going to get the numbers not exactly right, but it's like the average white household had about $285,000 of wealth, and the average black had eight dollars, that's eight dollars.
So it's like you're talking about gaps like that union an approach that's going to actually try to level that playing field, and that means investing more in communities that have been underserved for a while. But there was a big pushback on that from some quarters. And then you had the pushback against DEI itself. And DEI is a very broad attempt to try to address these things. It's not perfect. And there are ways that a lot of DEI practitioners and models don't understand Jews and don't understand particularly white Ashkenazi Jewish experience as different than the white Christian experience in the United States.
And so that's a problem, and they need to be addressed. But that problem was exploited by forces that want to just get rid of DEI altogether to manipulate I think the Jewish community to come on board to be part of that pushback against DEI. Once October 7th happened and you had a real kind of, I'm trying to describe it, but very strong move to solidarity on the part of many communities of color with the Palestinians and many not having a real understanding of Jews and our relationship to Israel and that, that accelerated the sense of among some Jews, white Ashkenazi Jews particularly, we were just marching with them after George Floyd and now they're turning their back on us in our moment of need.
Now that whole formulation is actually errant because there's not an us and them necessarily. The Jewish community in United States is a multiracial community including black people, brown people, all kinds of people. So that us and them is very problematic already right there.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I mean we've been talking about the relationship between blacks and Jews for decades and it's been problematic that whole time.

Yehudah Webster:
Exactly.

Rabbi David Jaffe:
Exactly. And I know you've been talking about that a lot, but that's what we're dealing with right now, is that sense of us/them focusing on the particular and universal. And I really want to turn it over to Yehudah here to talk about how our approach goes right at this of the balance of care approach. So if you want to jump in there.

Yehudah Webster:
Sure, sure. This is the balance of care that I was really referencing before of how we marry the Musar with a particular anti-racist framework that we're using. And I'll just say that this is in response to a pretty insidious piece of the puzzle that we make visible for our participants and folks investing in the DRIO approach. And this is this hierarchical orientation to care, caring for those in proximity to us or within our families before caring for others.
And it is somewhat of a natural, we even get that in Maimonides, laws of gifts to the poor, to care for the poor in your city before you care for the poor in another city. Caring for those in proximity before others. And yet within a racialized context it becomes compromised and hijacked in service to reinforcing racist hierarchies of power and value as oftentimes the system that we're in forces and pushes and encourages us to address not just the needs but the desires of white folks before we address the needs of those targeted by anti-blackness.
Another way to think about this is that while black and brown people in this country hold a lot of the care of the society overall, little or no resources come back to black and brown communities. It reifies this racist hierarchy of power and value and that, literally it does that, but also on the subconscious level it does that. And so we see this as a very, very subtle yet insidious challenge that gets in our way of being most effective in our anti-racist work because when things get hard as they did after October 7th, we fall back on the habituations that live in our subconscious, and we prioritize the needs of those racialized as white over the needs of those targeted by anti-blackness if you you're with me.
So we recognize that we need a different approach to care. Our daily output of energy and resources can either reify racist hierarchies of power value or subvert them. Just how we live in, how we allocate our resources day to day, week to week, month to month. And so we use this framework again, building off of Valarie Kaur's Revolutionary Love Project. We call it a balance of care, care for self and the communal self. Care for fellows targeted by anti-blackness within this context of dismantling racism from the inside out. Care for opponents. And we've added a fourth domain, connection to Hashem, to the spirit, the spirit that exists outside of ourselves.
And when we say care, we use the care, the word care, not love, because we don't want folks to be confused. There's a lot of different associations with the word and term love, but we use care to really demonstrate that we're talking about acts of help and nurture. We actually like to use Bell Hook's definition that she uses in All About love, her book All About love. She's borrowing from M. Scott Peck, that action we take to nurture our own or another's mind, body or soul. And we're not talking about niceness per se, but we're really talking about what is that care going to look like? And sometimes that includes rebuke, sometimes that does include the Hebrew word tokhacha, with love and compassion.
And so as Rabbi David was pointing to before, this balance of care is very dynamic. It's not about equal outputs of energy and resources, but it's dynamic in that for time, for time we'll have to place more of our energy and resources on the domains that have not been resourced for it to come into balance with everything else. And so depending on who you are and your makeup of identities, your proximity to resources, you may need to spend more or less time in the domain of self-care. You may need to apply your practice more or less to the domain of care of fellows targeted by anti-blackness. You may have the capacity to extend your care to opponents, those who oppose your efforts of racial justice. Or you may need to be more resourced through your connection to Hashem, the spirit that exists outside of ourselves.
And we see that domain as very important as helping us be accountable to values greater than ourselves and each other. Because again, when things get hard and we feel like we're in a tight place, accountability to each other goes out the window. I'm like, "I don't know you." I only care about myself and my family, but if we're accountable to something greater than ourselves, hopefully that will help us stay committed to the values that we've stated are important to us.
So it's in this way that we then apply Musar to this balance of care framework, the principle that behaviors shift our attitudes more than our attitudes shift our behaviors. And Musar provides those concrete behaviors, those concrete practices through the various character traits, soul traits that we can work on of courage, patience. So we think about anti-racist courage, anti-racist forbearance if you will, anti-racist honor and respect, anti-racist anavah, humility. And so I think in this moment of both heightened antisemitism and a heightened anti-blackness, we can use this balance of care framework to say "Yes, you can both care for the Jewish community, the self and the communal self, while maintaining your care to undoing and dismantling racism through care for fellows, particularly those targeted by anti-blackness."

Bryan Schwartzman:
Yeah. I might be repeating a little bit what you just said, but I was really struck in the essay by the one sentence where you wrote, both the two of you wrote, "When societal challenges are overwhelming, humans often fall back on tribal instincts that prioritize the needs of those closest to them creating a hierarchy of care." And the challenges have felt overwhelming for some time now, and I aim to be for a nonpartisan show and host, but I'll say the first month of this Trump administration has felt really destabilizing to the point where individuals, and I think organizations too just don't know how to process what's going on in the world, let alone figure out where their attention should be.
So I guess in that context, is there a way for we in the broadest possible sense of we to focus on combating antisemitism and racism and so many other intolerances we're seeing, it's hard to just sort of take on the whole world. So maybe I'll stick with those two for now. And I don't have the answer, that's why I'm asking you two.

Rabbi David Jaffe:
Think we'll probably say too, our answer is yes. We must, and I think what's exciting about this framework that Yehudah just described is it gives us a pathway, and it gives us some tools to do it. And what Yehudah's describing, this is a very human problem. I mean, this is a human problem that goes back as long as there's been humans and we've been in tribes, particularly in the universal and where you focus. These are very, very old dynamics. And I think there's a way in here that says you don't have to give up prior care for yourself. Care for yourself is very important. And in a situation of rising antisemitism around the world in this country, we get to think about Jewish safety and that's important. And what do we need for Jewish safety? And here's where I think the chidush, the innovation is, and we get to do that not at the harm of fighting racism or you could put anything else in that thing.
But how do we do both of those? And yes, there may be more resources one place, but how do we keep doing it? Let me give a concrete example. This was alluded to in our article. You have a Jewish organization, housing organization, the Bayit, and then you have a non-Jewish housing associations like Housing Associated. And Jewish community has been providing some funding to that non-Jewish group doing affordable housing work. 10/7 hits, the non-Jewish group, puts out a statement of solidarity with Palestinians that kind of picks up on some antisemitic tropes. Not okay.
Now what happens at that point? If you have a balance of care approach, which these groups actually used and did well, you have the Jewish group being able to take the space self-care, say, "Hey, we're in a hard place right now. Your statement's very hurtful." They take the space to talk it out, but they don't do what a number of groups did do is then cut the funding. Because what happened in a number of situations is that Jewish funders said, "Oh, you said this thing I don't like, I feel hurt. We're now cutting off our funding." Yeah, I still care about affordable housing, but you know what? I don't care anymore because I feel so hurt. I'm contracting it in my tribal spot and I'm cutting you off out of that anger and I'm putting all my money now towards antisemitism.
The balance of care approach would be you take the space, you talk with how you're hurt here, get heard around it and say, "You know what? We got to shift a little bit of our funding right now to security and synagogues or something like that. But you know what? We care about affordable housing. We care about your community. We're keeping 90% of our funding going your direction." And that would be a balance of care approach.
And it takes practice to do this. It takes regulating ourselves. Bryan, you described like the overwhelm of this past month for a lot of people. So our practices have regulation practices, meditation, things like that. We have a very important practice called ratson, which means desire, yearning from the word ratsa, what do you want? And so we work with people on really grounding in themselves, what do you really want? What is moving you? What's your motivation? Incredibly important practice for when we're overwhelmed, there's so much coming at us. So this is why we're very excited about this approach and I think is very applicable to dealing with the challenges right now.

Bryan Schwartzman:
I don't know if this is an analogy for balance of care, but certainly as American Jews, many of us can sometimes forget or neglect that there is a whole big world and a whole big Jewish world beyond the United States and Israel. And Yehudah, I understand that you were just returned from a trip to Nigeria leading Jews of African descent. And I wondering if you could just tell us what was that about? What was your purpose? It sounds like a really exciting experience.

Yehudah Webster:
Yeah, thanks for that, Bryan. I think it really does connect to the work that we do here at Kirva as well. And this effort was called to Teshuva Across the Waters, or is called Teshuva Across the Waters, excuse me. And a slight to my description of my balance of care. As I said, it's dynamic and everyone's balance of care is different. For me, the communal self is both the Jewish community and the black community. I live at that intersection of both. Care for fellows, it also includes those targeted by anti blackness, but also the communal self is black folks, black Jews, all Jews.
And so this effort Teshuva Across the Waters was a way for me to really live out and to really invest in myself, the communal self and fellows across the waters. I am of Igbo heritage myself. My family has known that history orally, but I did a 23 and Me about seven years ago to confirm that. Didn't get an opportunity to go to Nigeria for the first time until last year. My sister was studying in Lagos. And so that opened up the pathway. And my parents, a few years back during the pandemic, they did a mitzvah of sending over a box of Sidurim to Nigeria. And that really forged the connection with a particular Igbo Jewish community synagogue in Nigeria.
And so when they went to visit my sister, they met some of the folks there. And when I went 10 months later, I was able to build off of their relationships that they had forged and made. And I traveled another domestic flight to the east of the country to what's known as Igbo land, to the state of Anambra, to the village, to the town of Ogidi. I was with the Igbo Jewish community synagogue of Ogidi. Spent five days there learning about Igbo customs, traditions and histories. I met the king of the Tribe of Gad who traces his lineage back before the common era.
And I was tasked as an ambassador by the elders of the community to come back and be an ambassador and to share and to help to foster more connections and relationships and baruch hashem, when I was able to come back and have the opportunity to do just that and really follow the energy of the community. And so with organizations, Black Jews Liberation Collective, which I've been a part of for many years, and Jewish Multiracial Network, we came together and we launched the Teshuva Across the Waters in July. We got 45 applicants of black Jews, African descent Jews, descent people who had potential or confirmed Igbo lineage. And many Igbo's were captured and enslaved and brought to the Caribbean and to the US particularly to Virginia. And so many folks in the U.S. And the Caribbean have Igbo roots. Though of course many do not know that because of the erasure of the transatlantic slave trade.
And so we took this journey just a few weeks ago, 25 of us to go and really retrace our steps through time to do Teshuvah, return to our ancestral land, to our ancestral people with the goal of returning to greater alignment with ourselves, to each other, and Hashem. Really an expression of the balance of care in many ways. And the goal now is to, we've grown our ambassadorship from myself and my co-conspirator Hannah Lancer, who's the president of Jewish Multiracial Network who's been to Nigeria many times herself, from just the two of us now 25.
And so we want to work on building out curricula to be taught from early childhood to adult level education so that this history and traditions and customs of Igbo people could take its rightful place and space in the canon of global Jewish history, customs, and traditions, and to continue to uplift other African traditions, Jewish traditions, customs, and histories as well. So it's a very exciting project. Thank you for creating the time for me to share about it and looking forward to doing some community report backs about the journey and the learnings that have come from this experience.

Bryan Schwartzman:
And you made this profound connection yourself just within the past year. What was it like for you to see others, other Americans really experience that? Was the perspective difference being a sort of guide on this experience?

Yehudah Webster:
It was incredible. It was so joyful to be there, to be able to share the experience with others. My parents came as well, because they weren't able to make the trip to the East, so that was just extraordinarily special to be in a community and really to recognize that we're all on a journey together to teshuvah. We're all doing this together and we need all of us. And I'm invested in, again, going back to the balance of care and ensuring that all corners of the Jewish world are lifted up and get equitable access to resources that many of us rely on here in the U.S., and that is not as accessible to other places around the world. So want that for my Igbo brothers, sister, siblings in Nigeria, and was grateful that we were able to get the resources to foster more connections of African descent people and Jews here in the U.S. and some folks in the Caribbean as well.

Bryan Schwartzman:
The work you're doing, especially with dismantling racism, is very much of the heart and individual and on a consciousness level. When I think of the work of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and of Dr. King, I think a lot about society, policy, laws. Is there a room for religious actors to do both? Does the place of religious leaders really have to choose between one or the other? I'm wondering how each of you sees that.

Rabbi David Jaffe:
Yeah, so the work of Dr. King and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, others in the fifties and sixties was deeply spiritual work. I mean, some groups were more spiritual than others, but certainly the work of direct action, which meant putting yourself in harm's way to try to raise tensions that would get larger attention around the country to something, there was deep spiritual preparation and inner preparation for that work. Dr. King describes that in his letter to Birmingham Jail as the different steps of nonviolent direct action. And purification is one of the steps, and that's a deeply religious, inner spiritual type of work.
So our work focuses more in that area of what's the inner work we need to do, as you would've described earlier, to really show up and build the anti-racist muscle or the muscle to be able to hold with courage in situations where you may be being attacked. All that. We focus there. We work very closely in partnership with the whole ecosystem of people who are trying to make social change in the Jewish community. And it's a very robust ecosystem right now. The Jewish Social Justice Roundtable, I think has 88 member organizations.
So the world looks very different than it did in the sixties, this kind of work. And so there's a lot more people involved in it and there's a lot more advanced work. So I would say it's not either/or, but people have specialties where they focus and then we work together and we really go deep into that inner preparation for the sake of being able to support this work of social change.

Yehudah Webster:
I guess I'll just add, agree with everything that David said, and I do bemoan somewhat of the bifurcation of all these methodologies and approaches, and I yearn for movement that really can hold all of these different approaches to change of advocacy, of community organizing, direct service and having that be grounded in a deep connection to the most high to Hashem, yud heh vav heh. And I think that that is something that is... Different spaces are tempting to do that, and I think that that is something that that I'm just yearning for in this moment, in this time. I think that that is what is really needed for us to overcome the overwhelm that you referenced earlier, Bryan, of this moment and of the foreseeable future.

Bryan Schwartzman:
Yehudah Webster, Rabbi David Jaffe, thank you so much for this conversation and for pointing a way forward.

Rabbi David Jaffe:
Good to be here.

Yehudah Webster:
Thanks so much for having us. Baruch Hashem.

Bryan Schwartzman:
So what did you think of today's episode? I'd love to hear from you. Evolve is about curating meaningful conversations and you're part of that. Send me your questions, comments, feedback, whatever you've got. You can reach me at BSchwartzman@Reconstructingjudaism.org. We'll be back soon with an all-new episode.
Evolve, Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song Ilufinu is by Rabbi Miriam Margols. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host Bryan Schwartzman, and I will see you next time.