WJC IN ISRAEL

Two Schapiro families stand in front of the Western Wall. A day later, we’d all return to the Western Wall to see just how incredible King Herod’s Temple project must have been as we toured the Western Wall tunnels.

Celebrating a very special birthday, WJC’s ECC director Ann Pardes climbs up Masada with Dale Klein. Even Sammy Spider braves the rain to climb. As for the rest of us, we couldn’t hack the weather and took the tram.

by the arrival of a Birthright group, we were thrilled to get our tour started.

This past Hanukkah, a group of WJC members, along with Rabbi Arnowitz and his family, spent ten days in Israel. This trip was not only a spiritual and moving experience but a bonding experience for all who attended. Led by our fearless tour guide Geoff Winston (Rabbi Arnowitz’s Camp Ramah counselor thirtyplus years ago) and teen leader Shlomit Frenkel of Keshet Educational Journeys, we ate, learned, hiked, and had tons of fun.

(Top, from left to right) As the kids in the group participate in an Escape Room, Major (res.) Yaakov Selavan shows us Syria from a bunker in Tel Saki and recounts heroic stories from the Six Day War. Harry and Pam Lebow enter the bunker. We greet Israeli soldiers with some American treats and goodies. We participated in an archaeological dig at the Beit Guvrin National Park. Ian Sitkowski and Elia and Jeremy Toeman are happily digging in the dirt to see what they can discover. Amazingly, our dig site is called Westchester because a group from Solomon Schechter Westchester (now The Leffell School) was the first to dig there a few years ago. (Bottom, from left to right) What is more fun (and scary) than rappelling off cliffs in the Golan?!?! Our group visits Save a Child’s Heart, an Israeli humanitarian organization that provides cardiac healthcare to children worldwide. We visit with patients undergoing treatment and share toys and gifts we brought from home.

WJC gratefully acknowledges the generous support and foresight of Joan and Stuart Schapiro in helping WJC members travel to Israel.

Rabbi Ethan Tucker is this year’s WJC Scholar-in-Residence. President and Rosh Yeshiva at Hadar, an organization that empowers Jews to create and sustain vibrant, practicing, egalitarian communities of Torah, Avodah, and Hesed, Ethan was ordained by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and earned a doctorate in Talmud and Rabbinics from the Jewish Theological Seminary and a B.A. from Harvard College. For this issue of Voices, we asked WJC’s Assistant Rabbi Cornelia Dalton to talk with Rabbi Tucker about his work, and what emerged was a fascinating Rabbi-to-Rabbi conversation, which we have excerpted and edited below.

Rabbi Dalton: Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up doing the work that you’re doing.

Rabbi Tucker: My childhood was split between New York and New Haven, as I grew up in two very involved and committed and observant Jewish homes, straddling different denominational spaces. I didn’t think I was going to be a rabbi, but my father [Rabbi Gordon Tucker] is a rabbi, and that was hard to escape at the end of the day. I ran the egalitarian minyan at Harvard and eventually decided that the world did not necessarily need me as another lawyer. So I decided to go into rabbinic work and devote myself to trying to strengthen and build and catalyze the Jewish community that I dreamed of, which synthesized a lot of the things that I grew up with and took from different spaces. My work at Hadar, which I’ve been doing since 2007, has really been focused on creating a culture of gender equality in all aspects of citizenship and leadership in the Jewish community, and to do that alongside a serious commitment to learning and observance, and to see those as reinforcement of one another.

What does egalitarianism mean to you? What’s important to you about it? What felt compelling to you about it as a path of exploration, either socially, morally or halachically?

It was really in college that I first kind of confronted a dissonance between what it meant that my female colleagues were going to be my total equals in all aspects of intellectual and social life, but that there would be some kind of disability or marginalization in shul and the synagogue. I was open to explanations or justifications for that, but it just never sat well. I started to see it as a problem that needed fixing, halachically. Like, how do we get around it, in a kind of Apollo 13 way: how do we make out of Scotch tape, and all the loose parts, something that can function as a landing apparatus? And over time, it emerged that the commitment to egalitarianism was bound up with a commitment to more people doing more mitzvot. I began to feel like a commitment to gender equality in a committed religious environment is a commitment to stringency, to taking on more, to expanding the circles of responsibility and obligation.

One of the things you’re coming to WJC to teach about is community. And one of the conversations we’re having internally is how we can make sure we’re meeting the needs of all of our constituents, thinking about all kinds of diversity: economic diversity, interfaith diversity, young families, single folks, people with special needs, etc. When you’re thinking about more people doing more mitzvot, those expanding circles, whose voices are you thinking about, and who are you most afraid of leaving behind?

I start from a 30,000 foot view: what does vibrant community that will leave echoes through the ages look like? What kind of commitment does it require to be self-sustaining, and who are the people we have to gather in order to make that strong? The people I actually worry about leaving behind are the people primed to be major contributors, assets, pillars of this effort. I worry we’ll get something wrong and compromise getting our most passionate and committed people involved. But my hope, in the end, is to supercharge people’s motivation to get them to come together to build something extraordinary.

So what does that end up meaning on the ground? What is Hadar? What do you do there as an organization to achieve that vision?

The story of Hadar is about a range of different projects. The prehistory was a minyan called Kehilat Hadar that was designed to be a holistic davening experience, and then we moved to a professional-led organization that could bring a broader holistic vision to bear. We started a summer program in 2007 for 18 undergraduate-adjacent young adults, basically modeling a different kind of egalitarian yeshiva just for an experience of immersive study. That grew and we started offering public lectures and expanding to other cities, we have Devash magazine, our weekly parashah magazine for children and families, and we are trying to build to an ultimate dream that goes cradle to grave, radiating out Torah to the entire Jewish community.

Tell me more about the magazine, which I certainly use. We actually feel like we have a massive curriculum to teach. We got a grant from a foundation to help execute our dream vision of the kid reading it to themselves on the couch or the family around the Friday night dinner table. We want to give kids a feeling of ownership over the Torah and being protagonists in its story. The next goal with it is a book, a compilation you can get when your child is five and it can carry you for the next seven years.

So much of your work has straddled the halachic world and organizational work. What has it taught you about managing conflict, and people being on opposing sides of an issue? There might not be 39 different possible conclusions in any given passage in the Torah, but there’s usually at least three. And when you see that over and over again, I think it does train you to think a certain way, and help you go beyond talking points. I worry that our culture has hurt people’s ability to understand what motivates someone else. I think we should be able to appreciate that someone has a different position, motivated by something else, and then be able to put language around what would be lost if we followed their way. But when it’s all about winning and losing, power and vindication, then there’s no learning, there’s no wisdom. It’s not just about being for or against something but being able to say this is right, and it’s also complicated.

Finally, what’s your favorite thing about Jewish community?

I really love the experience and rhythm of davening and the cycle of the year, having a liturgical and communal frame that sort of tells me what today is, reverberating in a way that goes far beyond my personal narrative.

That’s my favorite thing, too, belonging to something that is much greater than myself. Thank you for taking the time. We’re so looking forward to having you with us in the spring. I can’t wait to continue the conversation.

Connection, Community, Conversation: An Exploration of Community and Belonging

It’s ironic—through media and technology we are more “connected” than ever before, yet many of us still want more. Join Rabbi Ethan Tucker of Hadar for a weekend filled with discussion and learning devoted to community, connection, and how we can find a deeper sense of belonging and meaning, both as individuals and as a congregation. To learn more and reserve your spot, please visit wjcenter.org/sir.

Friday, April 28, 2023

6:00pm: Rhythm & Ruach

7:00pm: Dinner

8:00pm: Lecture & Conversation: Where I Belong: Finding My Place in Meaningful Community

In his opening discussion, Rabbi Tucker shares his ideas about the foundations of Jewish gathering and how these may impact our relationships with each other and our community.

Saturday, April 29, 2023

9:15am: Morning Service/Sermon: Sacred Community

Rabbi Tucker delivers the weekly sermon on Parshat Acharei MotKedoshim, a Torah portion dedicated to the elements that make a sacred community.

12:15pm: Kiddush Lunch

1:00pm: Discussion: Building Bridges or Walls? Judaism has a rich history of bringing people together in vibrant communities. Using ancient Jewish texts, Rabbi Tucker offers insight into the dynamics of community building and belonging that can serve as guideposts today.

7:15pm: Champagne & Conversation Reception (Ambassador Circle Only)

8:30pm: Dessert Reception, Lecture, and Discussion: Torah: God’s Love Letter to Us

Judaism, and Jewish living, can be famously difficult to access and understand, it can look like a disconnected set of laws and practices without a coherent explanation.

Rabbi Tucker will help us see the forest through the trees, so to speak, by building on the often ignored, imaginative stories of the rabbis to see the Torah as God’s outreach to connect to us.

Sunday, April 30, 2023

10:00am: Bagel & Lox Brunch

10:30am: Closing Lecture and Conversation: Tik Tok, Netflix, and Torah: Helping our children  their Jewish Identity

Using Jewish values to instill meaning in our children and grandchildren’s lives, Rabbi Tucker highlights the importance of Jewish learning as a family and provides tools that make Jewish living more accessible.

Sunday, June 11, 2023 at 6:00pm