Some Notes About Synagogues in Challenging Times
If my own personal estimations are correct, I am among the minority of Ottawa Jews — especially in my age demographic and especially in the non-Orthodox community — who can be found at shul with my family on shabbat roughly once a month. What makes me go? What makes others stay away? And what makes me both value going while at the same time understanding and relating to why others don’t?
Ever since Steven M. Cohen and Arnold M. Eisen wrote about the Jewish “sovereign self,” social analysts of Jewish life, particularly in non-Orthodox communities, have understood that religious practice is experienced more and more as a choice rather than as a fixed obligation. For non-Orthodox Jews, Jewish practice is not automatic, even if certain rituals may give rise to strong sensory or “kishke” memories and associations.
On a given Saturday morning, when we’re not at shul, my family is typically either rushing one or more of my kids to an extra-curricular activity, seeing the adults tag-teaming to yoga class, or lounging at home, watching Saturday morning cartoons, reading or playing cards.
When we do get our act together to get dressed in our shul finery and drive ten minutes west, I am always glad we did. The kids develop a first-hand relationship with a community space that is not commercial. They pal around with their friends, enjoy the teen-led kids service, and form friendly connections with other shul members representing a variety of generations. And they develop a sense of communal identity and hone their Jewish literacy. This last shabbat, my daughter helped lead the very wordy “Ashrei” prayer, after my son was given the honour of opening the ark, a fascinated smile crossing his lips as he peered into the Torah-scroll-filled opening.
Sure, I have my bored and restless moments (a shabbat morning Conservative service isn’t exactly concise), and it sometimes feels like an effort to fit these semi-structured hours into our weekend. Still, we are a minority within a minority. Most Ottawa Jews rarely, if ever, come to shul on a given week. Most Ottawa Jews associate shul, if they do go at all, with High Holidays and perhaps Purim.
So what are shuls to do?
It seems to me that there are a few options. Shuls can focus on attracting members by emphasizing lifecycle events: in that case, a shul is there for you if and when you need it. Membership is therefore viewed as an insurance policy. Or a shul can also focus on trying to fill the pews on a regular basis, a strategy that will more likely lead to a committed membership base. Creating a connection between Jewish education and Jewish practice (in the form of a shul-based supplementary school) can help, but that is not without its costs and risks. So can a delicious and nutritious weekly kiddush. Warm, energetic clergy are key, as is a warm and welcoming atmosphere. While professional clergy are trained to be welcoming, I would think that many shul membership communities are less welcoming than they think they are. Finally, going to where others are — in the form of creating opportunities for “public space Judaism” may help bolster the particular brand, if not regular shul attendance.
But what if Jews simply don’t want to come? What if they prefer to spend their free weekend mornings with the kind of recreational activities that provide exercise or other direct artistic or skill-building enrichment? What if they just want to laze around the house, enjoying the unstructured family time of a private Saturday morning? What if they want to read or take a walk or watch Netflix or visit with friends or catch up on work?
All this raises the question of whether shuls should work to help create demand, or simply respond to waning and shifting preferences. In the case of religious institutions, the business of creating demand is risky business. It is a fine line between creating an attractive product that naturally draws people versus wielding the weapon of guilt and obligation.
Is there a point at which shuls should simply claim defeat, and allow natural membership to atrophy as the older generation fades away, perhaps amalgamate as the opportunity arises, or perhaps operate a skeleton operation — available for life cycle events and open on major holidays only?
Today, I leave you with more questions than answers. Maybe we can discuss this over egg and tuna salad with carrots and zucchini sticks on the side — at shul kiddush.
Yoga vs. Synagogue: A Fair Fight?
Jewish affiliation — particularly in the realms of synagogue attendance and other markers of organized religion — seems imperiled. The recent Pew Study of Jewish Americans has revealed a growing segment of Jews who consider themselves having “no religion.” Closer to home, a panel at Limmud Ottawa the other week was titled “Why Are Young People Turning Away from Shul?” And synagogues in various corners of North America — including two in Ottawa — are considering merging, as the loss of members to death and aging is outpacing the infusion of younger families.
Over at Open Zion in The Daily Beast, I recently argued for the value in raising one’s kids with a rich and textured Jewish practice, in light of the Pew Study. And surely our community will no doubt continue to grapple with how to engage the next generation.
But for now I’d like to throw out a challenge. As fewer Jews are identifying with the religious aspects of Judaism (at the same time as Orthodoxy is the fastest growing Jewish denomination), it is important to examine the kinds of ideas out there that are grabbing adherents, including many Jews. One such set of ideas, and related practices and rituals, is the popular trio of yoga, mindfulness and meditation. On almost any given hour of any day, my yoga studio — a couple of neighborhoods over from my synagogue — is populated with teachers and students who seem to be seeking physical, emotional and yes, spiritual, wellness.
Must a tradition like yoga, mindfulness and meditation exist to the exclusion of Jewish practice? Of course not. But given the inherent constraints of time, money and mental and physical focus, let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that cultivating a serious appreciation of each poses a natural challenge. In that case, let’s consider some of the guiding principles of the yoga craze — leaving aside the hyper-materialist aspects of brand-name yoga clothing as a status symbol — in light of what people may be looking for when they search deeply for a system of personal meaning. Can Judaism — in its most common manifestations — provide it?
Yoga itself is concerned with stretching the muscles and calming the mind.
A guiding principle of yoga is the concept of “prana,” or “life force.” Shakti refers to empowerment. Yogis are keenly aware of natural forces, regularly running through “sun salutations” while they speak of everyday “gratitude.” At the beginning of one class, our teacher urges us to “bow to the universal wisdom everywhere around us.” And at the end of most classes, we say “namaste,” roughly meaning “the spirit within me sees and respects the spirit within you.”
When cultivating the related practice of mindfulness — an appreciation for the present moment — one is taught patience, acceptance and to withhold judgment, especially about oneself and one’s thoughts. One is taught to proceed through the world emitting “loving kindness” to all those around you. This means that walls come down, differences of gender, religion, class and ethnicity are dissolved, and possibilities of interconnectedness open up.
By contrast, what we hear out of Jewish circles these days almost more than anything else, is the phrase “Jewish continuity” and a concomitant railing against intermarriage. This singular focus poses a challenge to this principle of cultivating interconnectedness. In other words, Judaism — with its touchstone concepts of covenant and Chosenness — tends to focus on particularist concerns. Principles surrounding yoga, mindfulness and meditation are inherently universalist. And this is to say nothing of the implications of Judaism cultivating a belief in a usually-male-referenced God who demands blessings and praise at every turn.
Among this pervasive search for meaning, are these increasingly popular universalist practices, ones that connect the body, mind and soul. As anxiety rates are ever increasing, people are searching for stillness. Occasionally I see these needs being met within the four walls of a synagogue. Surely, with its rich textual tradition, its generations of teachers and students, and its modern spectrum of denominational expression, a Jewish context can provide ways to enhance physical, social and emotional wellness. I challenge our Jewish leaders and educators, both lay and professional, to ask how well we are nourishing these fundamental needs within the framework of organized Jewish life.
Finding a movie to show at my daughter’s slumber party wasn’t easy…
Summer and its dog days typically mean a lot of mindless, blockbuster-style movies. As a parent, finding good quality films for kids can be a challenge in any season. Last spring, my daughter planned a slumber party to celebrate her 9th birthday. Finding a rental movie to show wasn’t easy. She’s past the age of being drawn to solid childhood standbys like The Rescuers, but obviously isn’t ready for Terms of Endearment. When she brought a title suggestion from a friend and I discovered that the first joke in the trailer involved the phrase “rape whistle,” I knew we were in a predicament.
This all leads to the general issue of the portrayal of girls and women in Hollywood movies. We all know about troublesome body image issues reinforced by celebrity photo shoots and bikini-clad beach scenes. But there is a much simpler test for sussing out how well women are portrayed on film. It is so basic, and the failure rate so high, that the results will likely surprise you.
Called The Bechdel Test and created by author, cartoonist, and social commentator Alison Bechdel, the test is deceptively simple. To pass, a film must fulfill three simple criteria. First, the film must have two female characters. Second, they must have names. Third, these characters must have at least one conversation with each other about something other than a man.
It’s amazing how many mainstream films fail the test. So many films have their plot and action centering on men, with women merely their romantic entanglements. Lord of the Rings. The Star Wars Trilogy. Avatar. The Social Network. Run Lola Run. Fail, all of them. See the discussion on the blog Film School Rejects. The Bechdel test website (http://bechdeltest.com/) provides an ongoing inventory.
It’s easy, with a steady diet of Hollywood entertainment, to get ground down. Girls subtly learn that their dreams and goals are less important than their ability to attract a man. And boys subtly learn that the primary purpose of girls is to support their dreams. I feel it’s important that both my son and daughter have an opportunity to contemplate the role of women in popular culture, and have a chance to rewrite society’s future, one letter at a time. So, amidst conversations about how much my theatre-active daughter longs to act in the movies one day, we frequently chat about The Bechdel Test at home.
In the end, for my daughter’s slumber party, we settled on the film Freaky Friday. A remake of the 1976 film starring Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris, the 2003 version, with Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis, is delightful. Fun for kids and interesting to adults, the film chronicles the switching of bodies between mom and teen for a day. Amidst all the predictable gags (mom in daughter’s body writing a math test, daughter in mom’s body thrust into a live television interview about mom’s self-help book), the film is ultimately about the way that the deployment of empathy can transform problematic family dynamics. The film is based on one of my favourite childhood books by the same name, written by Mary Rodgers.
At my daughter’s slumber party, there we were ten third-graders, one little brother, two parents and one grandmother, sprawled out on camping mattresses in the living room, munching popcorn and enjoying a film where women and girls are not merely accessories to the stories of men, but have conflicts, dreams and desires of their own.
Since that evening, a new show has appeared on Netflix. To say it passes The Bechdel Test with flying colours would be a grave understatement. Called Orange is the New Black, it chronicles the experiences of inmates in a minimum-security women’s prison. It is genre-defying, zany, touching, sad, and altogether human. Just like the portrayal of women on screen should be, but is too often not.
Of course, much of the content of Orange is the New Black is inappropriate for a 9 year old viewer. But I do have my daughter in mind when I watch it. A prison fate would be the last thing I’d ever wish any child, obviously. But television roles that are this textured, developed, intense and three-dimensional, and which hinge on a range of plot points, symbols and characters, not solely on men? Now those I’d wish for any budding actor — male or female — or any adult viewer, for that matter.
When Summer Camp Turns Tragic
Two Jewish summer camps were thrust into the news this summer for reasons of tragedy. First, lightning struck the Goldman Union Camp Institute, a Reform Jewish camp near Indianapolis. Three campers were injured, one critically. Then a counselor was killed, and four others were injured, by a falling tree at Camp Tawonga near Yosemite Park in California. When the lightning struck, there had been neither rain nor storm. When the murderous black oak had been examined, it appeared healthy.
When nature unleashes its fury on our vulnerable selves, we have good reason to want to run for cover and lock the door. It is especially unnerving when sudden and uncontrollable tragedy strikes at the sort of place which is engineered to be the kind of intentional community where shelter and mutual protection rules the day.
For many campers and counselors at Jewish camp, the camp to which they return year after year feels like home in a most specific way. While it’s far from one’s family house, it’s a place where social interaction and creativity reigns, where collective spirit and informal education are keys to personal growth, and where deep and textured connections are made to Hebrew, Israel and Judaism. Most of all, it’s a place where, when it’s working as it should, campers and counselors report feeling like they can truly be themselves. As Ethan Calof wrote in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin last year, recalling being tearful and frightened when he began his first year Camp Ramah, “When I decided to open my eyes, I saw everyone welcoming me into the ironclad Ramah community with open arms.” Soon, as he said, he “didn’t want to leave.”
This week’s tragedies remind us about the most precious commodity of all: the people involved in creating the sense of community that defines Jewish camp. I decided to take a peek at Camp Tawonga’s website to see how it describes its camping philosophy. I was struck by a couple of things.
The first is that “Tawonga counselors are kid specialists, with no secondary responsibilities outside their bunks, and are empowered to prioritize the quality of the group dynamic over any activity.” Parents send their kids to summer camp — an experience outside of the comfort zone of many kids as they first contemplate it — precisely for these reasons. Feeling part of something larger than oneself, operating within a group when the dynamics are at their best — represents the best kind of community.
Yet it’s not always easy to put campers front and center, particularly when much of camp demands various time-crunched feats of creativity by counselors expected to shine in their multi-tasking roles. As Seth Stevenson write in a short essay in Slate earlier this month (“Minor Gods,” July 3, 2006), “camp is for the counselors.” Hence as a parent, I find Tawonga’s self-described approach — assuming it actually works — to be touching.
The camp’s description of its philosophy closes with this: “you haven’t really seen it all until you’ve been to a Tawonga Torah service.”
Having spent my summer camping summers on Lake Winnipeg, I haven’t experienced a Torah service at Tawonga. But I can well imagine. Praying outside in Hebrew, striking the right harmonies, surrounded by campers and counselors who are experiencing Jewish life singly and together is the kind of platform from which inspired Jewish leadership is launched.
As we release our kids into the arms of summer camps, we are taking a leap of faith. We hope they aren’t homesick, we hope they don’t catch poison ivy, and we hope the food’s okay. When an extremely rare instance of tragedy strikes, there is not much we can do but hold the grieving families in our hearts and support each other in sustaining these summer havens. And when the precise form of tragedy is due to an act of nature, there are no policies to challenge, no issues to debate, no sides to be taken, no lawsuits to be launched, no personnel to be faulted. There are only our precious children grouped together in cabins, screaming their hearts out in evening programs, banging on the tables as they recite birkat hamazon (grace after meals), slicing through the lake with their canoe paddles, falling in and out of love, eking out meaningful lives against the backdrop of unpredictability, and becoming who they really are. 
Hebrew School Dilemmas
With the latest annual report of Jewish school funding having been released by the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, my eyes are drawn to the rapidly changing enrollment numbers. Among the supplementary schools, on average, and relative to program grades offered, Sunday-only programs (admittedly owing largely to Chabad’s dramatic rise) are able to attract and sustain enrollment better than are the more intensive programs, with the enrollment of the most intensive supplementary school falling steadily.
Much of these enrollment patterns no doubt have to do with changing preferences and circumstances among parents. With many families now boasting two-working parents, transportation to an after-school Hebrew program can be a challenge. (Though one program offers a taxi service to help address this need.) Add to this the competing pulls of sports, drama, music and art, the idea that a Bar or Bat Mitzvah can just as easily be celebrated via a trip to Israel rather than in one’s shul, and afternoon Hebrew school can be a tough sell. Many of these points are documented in Ottawa-based, Jackie Luffman’s wordpress blog OttawaShtetl.
Yet at the same time, Jewish day school enrollment — whose model is premised on the idea that weekends and afterschool hours are free for other activities, is also on the decline in Ottawa, particularly among non-Orthodox families.
Here, as a supplementary school parent, I will share some frustrations and dreams.
First, I struggle with wanting to keep synagogue attendance on Shabbat morning as a regular part of my family’s rhythm (not every week, necessarily, but not never, either). But it is a scheduling conundrum. With Hebrew school on Sunday mornings (as well as on some weekdays), most Saturday mornings my family members are looking to engage other parts of their minds and bodies. Committing to Hebrew school also means leaving less time for kids’ activities; keeping 9-2 every Saturday free of extra-curricular lessons altogether is therefore an added challenge. Shabbat morning shul attendance need not be an all-or-nothing proposition, of course, but that is not the case with extra-curriculars: one doesn’t generally attend one’s swim, dance or piano lessons only “sometimes.”
Even if extra-curricular scheduling isn’t the problem, my instinct tells me that many, if not most, supplementary school families who take their kids to Hebrew school on Sundays have little desire to center their Saturday mornings around shul.
A couple of years ago, I was on a committee tasked with developing a “shul school” at my synagogue, one that would have avoided the Sunday morning crunch in favour of in-shul experiential learning on Shabbat mornings. For an array of reasons, that project didn’t end up launching, but certainly the landscape is still ripe for this kind of experiential learning.
Relatedly, I look at other models with great interest. Consider the Jewish Journey Project, conceived of by Rabbi Joy Levitt, head of JCC-Manhattan. Billed for students in grades 3-7, it’s a model that accounts for varying interests and which builds in inherent flexibility. The website describes JJP applicants as coming “to understand that Jewish learning takes place in many settings, not just the traditional classroom. JJP is a living classroom, a network of museums, community centers, synagogues, theaters, art galleries, parks, gardens, and your family’s home.”
Now, one can assume that New York City possesses just a “tad” more Jewish resources than does Ottawa. But we should realize how rich our own resources are relative to how much they are being used by the average Jewish child here: everything from the exploring the Jewish archives, to visiting Hillel Lodge, to attending Jewish music concerts, to mounting Hebrew plays, to witnessing an array of life-cycle events, to engaging in Jewishly-infused eco-gardening, to attending synagogues themselves, many of which struggle to fill their sanctuaries with youth on a regular basis.
My second concern relates to Hebrew. I have yet to be convinced that any of our local supplementary schools are necessarily committed to imparting Hebrew as a dynamic, living language. I have seen first-hand the incredible effects of being exposed to French for just a couple of hours daily in our city’s French immersion kindergarten programs. Do any of our supplementary schools use Hebrew as a working language in the classroom?
Finally, I am concerned about the social splintering and wasting of resources that necessarily occurs due to there being five Jewish supplementary schools in Ottawa at the elementary level. With enrollment at some schools being as low as one or two students in a given grade, I urge our community to consider amalgamation. The kind of shared resources, economies of scale, and overall social capital that could be generated by merging two, three, or even all five supplementary schools could be tremendous.
Now I pass the baton to you, my fellow Jewish community members.
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What’s a Jewish Kid to Do?
Now that summer is approaching, I’m taking some time to reflect on the rest of the year, including most of the holiday celebrations that pilot the secular calendar. One of my biggest conundrums came this year at Easter. As a child, I recall Easter as a time where drugstore candy was even more plentiful than ever, oversized jellybeans came in pretty pastels, and Cadbury would issue their annual sweet and sticky Easter cream egg. Other than the chance to dip my finger into the societal sugar jar, Easter didn’t hold any emotional significance for me.
My kids have recently become acutely aware of being a non-Easter-celebrating family. This year, they pleaded tearfully for my husband and I to orchestrate an Easter egg hunt for them at home. By way of declining, our first thought was to take the kids out into the community. After a trip to the Experimental Farm for their holiday scavenger hunt, our kids were still aware that there was more to be had. “It’s not the same as having your parents hide the candy in your own house,” they lamented.
At these moments, my thoughts turn to Daniel Gordis’s excellent How to Be a Jewish Parent book. There he emphasizes that the key to instilling a healthy Jewish identity is to present Jewish life as a coherent whole. Purim is Purim, not a Jewish Halloween. Chanukah is Chanukah, not a Jewish Christmas. This approach makes sense to me on many levels. But when it comes to facing a tearful Jewish child on Easter morning, I am reminded that children don’t always experience life holistically. They frequently focus on the here and now.
A good enough solution came that afternoon with a chance encounter in the neighbourhood leading to an invitation for our kids to join a friend to hunt for chocolate at his home. Our kids have experienced the warmth that comes when they have an opportunity to invite a non-Jewish friend over for Shabbat dinner, so I was pleased they could accompany their friends to chase chocolate eggs.
Still, it seems that twice a year now — at Christmas and at Easter — I’m faced anew with the dilemma of Jewish parenting. It doesn’t help that some teachers at my kids’ public school have been incorporating holiday-specific activities in the classroom. One of my kids was given “extra playtime” the morning that the rest of the class wrote letters to Santa. On another occasion, my kid was included in the paper machier egg-making activity, but told to pick another type of egg to create other than an Easter egg (not a bad compromise, but still — why bring a religious holiday into the secular classroom?). My kid chose to make a dinosaur egg. The other Jewish classmate chose a snail.
On these occasions I admit I’m torn. Maybe it does help my goal of instilling Jewish identity when my kids are given one more reason to realize that being Jewish means being part of a separate and unique collective identity. A significant part of being Jewish means being part of a People who have traveled through history together. This is a chance to have that point driven home.
At the same time, I fear the type of Jewish identity that is centered primarily on what we, as Jews, “don’t” do. Negative identities can be powerful in instilling group cohesion. But they can also prove to be empty of content when the holder of that identity later seeks deeper spiritual, ethnic or political meaning.
All this leads me to wonder whether, as Canadian Jews, we should throw in the towel. The vast majority of us already celebrate Halloween. Most of us do something to mark Valentine’s Day. And, as a child of the 1980s, I have fond memories of sipping Shamrock Shakes when St. Patrick’s Day rolled around. In the U.S, Jews almost universally celebrate Thanksgiving.
Will the day come when, in addition to the rich calendar that is the Jewish holiday cycle, Canadian Jews will simply adopt the secular manifestations — chocolate eggs, the Easter bunny, Santa, ornaments and stockings — of our neighbours’ holidays? Perhaps. But, like jumping into a cold lake at the start of a Canadian summer, I won’t be the first to do it.
Conference of GLBT Jews to gather in Winnipeg
**a version of this essay appeared in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin**
Winnipeg’s Jewish community is getting ready to host the annual conference of GLBT Jews — from July 5-7 this summer. With a strong commitment to Jewish education and Jewish continuity, my hometown of Winnipeg is a model community for how to blend traditional and progressive values. Winnipeg has a high takeup of Jewish education, and boasts one of North America’s only Hebrew immersion summer camps. And at Winnipeg’s two Conservative shuls, for example, one can find a female cantor at one, and a policy of wedding same-sex couples at the other.
I spoke to Arthur Blankstein, one of the co-organizers of the GLBT conference. Being the same age as my father and having grown up in the same community — but with a different set of challenges, Arthur’s story struck a chord with me. “When I was a youngster, it was a very insular environment. It’s hard to be outside the mold here.” Blankstein continued, “If you were part of the LGBT community, the only way to escape it was to leave, or you became invisible in a city.”
After spending several years in Toronto — “being a little rotund, I didn’t fit into the meat market there,” as Blankstein described the gay club scene of the 1970s — he returned to Winnipeg. Upon his return, Blankstein sought to meld his gay identity with a commitment to the Jewish community. In 2004, he married his partner, Ken, in a civil ceremony. After Ken converted to Judaism, the couple married in a Jewish ceremony in 2011, marking Winnipeg’s first same-sex wedding at a Conservative synagogue. Their ketubah is now housed with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights.
The conference lineup contains an exciting array of high-profile speakers. One is Joy Ladin, a transgender memoirist and poet, and the only transgender faculty member at Yeshiva University’s Stern College, and whose story recently appeared in my column. Another is Jay Michaelson, founder of Nehirim and author, most recently, of God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality.
I recently spoke to Michaelson. Among other things, he hopes to encourage the organized Jewish community to get engaged with broader issues of social justice. He is struck by how much the Jewish community rallied against the genocide in Darfur, for example. But when it comes to the human rights issue of LGBT equality, he finds that the organized Jewish community is often silent. He attributes this partly to the “Orthodox veto” he sees as informally operating within Jewish institutional channels. Jewish organizations tend to think they must operate by consensus and unanimity rather than by the will of the majority.
Michaelson’s words resonated with me, as I thought about the significant Jewish showing on social media for the recent push to recognize same-sex marriage in the United States. Many Facebook users changed their profile picture in March to represent the red and pink equals sign that reflects the Marriage Equality movement. And many Jewish users adapted the symbol to reflect a Jewish twist, such as two parallel strips of matza. Yet institutional expressions of diversity and inclusion often lag behind.
Michaelson paints an alarming picture of some of the issues facing American GLBT individuals especially, including an array of discriminatory practices and a rise in GLBT youth homelessness. “In the U.S. you can be fired for being gay in a number of states, you can be fired for being transgender in almost every state,” Michaelson told me.
The story of the organizational framework of the Winnipeg conference is heartening, though. Funders include the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba, the Asper Foundation, CIJA, the Jewish Federation of Winnipeg, and the Gray Academy of Jewish Education, among others. And the presenting organizations represent an important link between GLBT groups and other Jewish institutions: Anachnu, Winnipeg’s Jewish GLBT group, is joined by the Rady JCC and two synagogues, one Reform and the other Conservative.
There are exciting lessons here to be learned for our own Jewish community in Ottawa. Just as Winnipeg’s Jewish community stands for much more than its famous cherry cheesecake and schmoo torte, Ottawa’s Jewish community could be greatly enriched by attempting to mount an event that stands for inclusion and diversity with a hitherto invisible subcommunity of our broader community in mind. Maybe some Ottawa delegates will return from my nostalgia-drenched hometown this summer with new energy and ideas towards this end.
Michaelson is convinced of the value of GLBT inclusion within a Jewish context.
GLBT Jews can bring a wealth of unique perspectives, including “one’s own experience of love and the body…solidarity with other groups that experience marginalization…[and] different ways of reading…the Bible.” Most fundamentally, though, “having a larger tent in our communities has benefits for everybody.” And Blankstein shared with me his guiding principle: “Don’t turn your back on your community, stay active in your community.”
There’s a New Rabbi in Town…and She’s a Bridge Builder
It’s always exciting when a new pulpit rabbi moves to Ottawa. And it’s especially notable when she is the first pulpit rabbi of her congregation, and, when it’s a “she.”
I spoke at length to Rabbi Elizabeth Bolton, Ottawa’s first female rabbi, who is taking the helm at Or HaNeshama (formerly the Ottawa Reconstructionist Havurah). OrH had previously relied on visits from rotating rabbinical students. Originally from Montreal, Bolton studied and served for two decades in the U.S., most recently at a Baltimore-based congregation.
Talking to Rabbi Liz (her preferred moniker) is an exercise in blurring the kinds of fixed boundaries that all too often keep Jewish denominations alienated from one another.
To describe the Reconstructionist approach, Rabbi Liz speaks of “process theology,” — the belief that “God’s hands are our hands,” referring to a phrase popularized by prominent Conservative Rabbi Harold Schulweis. Of course one cannot think of process theology without thinking of the teachings of Rabbi Brad Artson, another leading Conservative rabbi. As is well known, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, taught at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary for decades.
“The biggest misconception [of Reconstructionist Judaism] is that it is the same as secular humanism,” and “that it’s not God centered.” She prefers Rabbi Art Green’s description of Reconstructionist Judaism as “religious humanism.”
As a child at Talmud Torah and Young Israel in Montreal, Rabbi Liz was naturally drawn to davening. Serving as Vice President for religious affairs in BBYO as a teen, and relishing the chanting of kiddush at her family seders as a child, led her to work as a cantor, but not before training as an opera singer. (Her most memorable performance was for Princess Diana and Prince Charles at Expo 86 in Vancouver.)
But her pull to social justice and political activism — starting with work around the AIDS crisis in the 1980s — led her to see a career in the rabbinate as the best fit for her passions. Among the various streams of Judaism, Reconstructionist Judaism appealed to her for its “innate grasp” of the fact that people “are now affiliating through cultural activities,” and that “lifecycle moments are [often experienced as] portals rather than obligations to live a Jewish life religiously.”
But there was another crucial reason why Reconstructionist Judaism became her denomination of choice. At the time, the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College was the only rabbinical seminary to admit openly gay and lesbian students. As a lesbian rabbi, Rabbi Liz has been at the forefront of efforts towards greater GLBTQ inclusion. She speaks on campuses, visits congregations who are attempting to become more “welcoming,” and is “particularly proud of speaking at teacher training conferences — on interfaith panels and to queer student groups and conferences.”
Through organizations like Truah (formerly Rabbis for Human Rights-North America), Rabbi Liz is also active on social justice issues related to Israel. I asked how she plans to navigate the topic of Israel, a topic that can be polarizing. “With a lot of listening, a lot of patience, and struggling to hold onto hope,” adding, “I hope to engender some really good conversations and study, and try to shed more light than heat.”
A shabbat morning service with Rabbi Liz might include yoga, with the shacharit liturgy projected onto a screen. She also enjoys leading monthly music-based services she dubs Ruach, meaning spirit.
Rabbi Liz hopes to offer adult education courses on topics ranging from Yiddish language and music to gender and sexuality, to political and social justice. One of the topics she loves teaching the most is “Judaism 101,” as she puts it. “I also love teaching teenagers,” enabling her to engage in “Torah study that is juicy and in depth.” In addition to her Toronto-based young adult daughter, Bolton has a teenage son who will be attending high school here in Ottawa.
While speaking with Rabbi Liz — she has already been making the rounds to various shuls across the city to experience their shabbat services — it soon becomes clear that she is a natural bridge builder. “I’d like to think that my presence [in Ottawa] could inspire community growth,” adding that she hopes she can help the community “move away from saying ‘un’ and ‘non,’ as in the term ‘unaffiliated.’” Bolton adds that she had “the good fortune not to see myself on the margins even if certain aspects of my identity would put me there.” Still, she is sensitive to meeting others where they are, favoring the Biblical phrase “b’asher hu sham.”
Rabbi Liz sums up her rabbinical approach this way: “B’Tselem Elohim [the idea that all humans are created in the image of God] is my guiding principle, and ‘b’asher hu sham’ is my banner.
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