An American Jewish Story

An Interview with Elan Babchuck ’96

Rabbi Elan Babchuck’s life is a quintessential American Jewish story, and he himself is a champion and student of the American Jewish story. His tale is no more linear than that of American Jewry, both having both been shaped by history, unexpected twists, and a revolutionary embrace of where we stand now—and where we might be headed —as a people. Elan embraces a far more sanguine, promising assessment of American Jewish life than many pundits seem to suggest. As a rabbi, Executive Vice President of Clal, founder of the Glean Network, a lifelong entrepreneur and, quite simply, a pioneering thinker, he proffers a new vision of opportunity rather than loss, imagination rather than gatekeeping, unparalleled growth rather than decline. This is where tradition meets innovation and where Elan’s view of Judaism as “a wisdom technology for human flourishing” might just be the future.

Elan tells the story of how he came to be a rabbi.

“When my father passed away, it was eight years since I had finished Schechter. He had been sick for five years, but there had always been the hope that he might get better. I was at a crossroads in life. I had just decided to heed his wise counsel to sell my painting company that I had been running for a few years. I was 21, I was about to finish college and I couldn’t imagine how to move forward, both from my grief and because I hadn’t yet figured out what my purpose was. I had no idea where my next steps would take me.”

Elan continues, “We sat shiva and, right from the start, Schechter classmates I hadn’t talked to in eight years showed up. People from throughout the community came to visit, others picked up the phone, and countless teachers came to pray with us and share stories about my dad. I remember feeling so enveloped by this loving community. They made me feel like the center of a world, but part of a much bigger one, too. That experience brought back so many memories of Schechter because it’s what these people did throughout my nine years there. That’s when I looked around the room and had the first inkling that maybe being a community builder like this is exactly what I wanted to do. I will always be grateful because this should have been the lowest point of my life, but I felt completely uplifted by the Schechter community and the stories they told about my dad such as the little kindnesses he did for them that he never told anyone about. I will never forget it.”

Talking to Elan today means understanding how he sees the interplay between the past, the present and the future. After four years as a pulpit rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in Providence, Rhode Island, he segued into his current work at Clal, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, where he works to reimagine Jewish life. “There’s a phrase I’ve been playing with a little bit: ‘I’m nostalgic for the future.’ Nostalgia is about yearning for a homecoming. It’s a homesickness, usually about something in our memory,” Elan says. While this concept may seem contradictory at first, Elan’s description of “future nostalgia” actually represents an alluring glimpse into his work at Clal, a Jewish think tank focused on training emerging leaders in pluralism and innovation, and where “making Jewish a public good” is their North Star. Elan speaks in bold, impassioned tones about expanding our moral horizons, and creating “[a] new home that we can build in the future,” while cautioning that it might not resemble the past. “And that’s OK,” he is quick to reassure.

Clal was launched in 1974 following a tumultuous fissure among many of the greatest rabbis, thought leaders and philanthropists in American Jewish life who diverged in their assessments of troubling trends. The lightning pace of building synagogues in the suburbs, launching day schools and creating Jewish institutions had, perversely, led to denominations becoming “more siloed, less trustful of one another and less collaborative,” Elan explains. Clal’s founding members ascribed to the thesis that there have been three eras in Jewish life. “The first was Biblical Judaism which was temple-based and led by priests, from whom my maternal lineage descends. Next came the rabbinic era that began with the writing of the Mishnah 1,700 years ago and has lasted all the way through the 1970s. This third, emerging era is signified by a call for reimagining Jewish life, thought, and practice in the face of shifting Jewish consciousness and a need for greater dialogue across internal borders.”

Elan unpacks this last sweeping period and the seismic changes it brought. “All the things we do now were established during those 1,700 years because everything we did prior to that is gone. We don’t sacrifice goats at a temple, and priests don’t run the services anymore, for example. We have completely redesigned how to shape the lives and character of children. We built incredible institutions, conceived profound Jewish thoughts and adopted life-changing practices. These are the bells and whistles that we know of as Jewish life today, but just as significant shifts in the first century forced Jewish leaders to reimagine Jewish life, we are called to do so today in the 21st century.”

Elan considers Clal’s trailblazing philosophy as relevant now as when it was founded. “We are just as much in that tectonic shift in the landscape of American Judaism. This is a similar moment of unease, discomfort and anxiety, but just as much a moment of opportunity. Every generation of American Jews sees itself as the ‘last generation,’” he observes. While Elan is not shuttering himself off from statistics and acknowledges that “[t]here is more than a handful of reasons to worry about the global rise in antisemitism or that we’re cannibalizing ourselves or assimilating too much,” he pushes back against complete pessimism. “We need to stay at the cutting edge of our own thinking around pluralism, innovation in Jewish life, and shifts in American Jewish sociology.”

The role of the rabbi vis-à-vis the Jewish community has also evolved alongside the many sea changes in Jewish life. Elan offers the story of his mother’s lineage. “I come from four generations of chief Sephardic rabbis in Tiberias who were also Kohanim of Jewish priesthood lineage. My grandfather’s role as rabbi was to know everybody in the community, to go door to door, to collect and distribute funds, to put the chicken in the pot as it were, and to make sure that everybody’s needs were met. It wasn't only about being the religious leader. It was about building a community and infrastructure from the ground up, then serving to make connections across those communal bounds.”

This storied rabbinical lineage technically ended with Elan’s grandmother who was the youngest of 10 daughters, yet Elan believes it lived on in an alternate form. “My grandmother became a social worker and basically did exactly what her father did as a rabbi, but in different ways.” He marvels that in just one generation because of the total coincidence of 10 daughters, “the world of rabbis both changed radically and remained exactly the same.” He finds a parallel today. “There are rabbis coming out of rabbinical school who are going to do work that is completely different from when I was ordained 10 years ago, and that’s because the world is changing. While the tools we use might be different, the need for curious, courageous, compassionate leadership in any given community, in any given era, is constant.”

Only a week apart in the spring 2012, Elan was ordained as a rabbi and earned his MBA. He and his wife, Lizzie, also welcomed their first child Micah, named after Elan’s father Michael, who was later followed by daughters Nessa and Ayla. While his two courses of study—rabbinics and business— were worlds apart, Elan describes them as being “ in dialogue” for as long as he can recall. He allows, of course, that the notion of applying innovation techniques to Jewish life can feel threatening to traditionalists, while innovators, for their part, see tradition as holding back progress. “The truth,” says Elan, “is that innovation and tradition are actually two sides of the same coin. To quote my beloved teacher Rabbi Irwin Kula: ‘Every innovation in Jewish life is just a tradition that hasn’t made it yet, and every tradition is an innovation that made it.’ Think of the most ‘traditional’ Jewish experience you can—be it Yom Kippur, Passover, challah on Shabbat—every one of those was at one point in time an innovative, new idea. It just turns out that they stuck around for long enough to be embraced as ‘traditions.’”

Part of Elan’s work is to flip the calculus that American Jewish life is crumbling or that innovation will ultimately yield a form of Judaism that is foreign. “There are going to be many ‘Judaisms’ that evolve over time, just as there have been over the last couple hundred years. We used to call them ‘denominations,’ but the boundaries across denominations have grown remarkably porous. Younger Jews often eschew labels while crafting their Jewish lives more proactively.” In fact, Elan celebrates the fact that the American Jewish population lives out “[m]illions of Judaisms. The frontiers of Jewish life are no longer confined to the coasts or the big cities. They’re in the heart chambers of the eight million American Jewish souls who are trying to figure out how their Jewishness can honor where it came from and fuel the journey to wherever it is they feel called to go. What an exciting time to be Jewish!”

The rate of intermarriage among American Jews represents a prime example of Elan’s optimistic perspective on the data from demographic studies. “Every 10 years, we do a population study that prompts this reactive notion that American Jewish life is so ‘watered down’ that we cannot even recognize it anymore. I completely understand this fear, but when are we going to take ‘yes’ for an answer?” he asks. “The narrative of scarcity and erosion in Jewish life has become such a constant drumbeat that we start to believe it. We are the first generation in which large numbers of nonJewish people are falling in love with Jewish partners and, despite a significant rise in antisemitism, are saying, ‘Yeah, I’m going to throw in my hat with the Jews.’ That’s an incredible gift, if we can bring ourselves to experience it that way.”

Moreover, the ways in which Jews define themselves have expanded beyond the categories of the past. These same demographic studies generally provide checkboxes that represent just a handful of options for people who are being asked to quantify their Jewish identity and practices. “You can look at the rising number of people who identify as ‘None,’ namely ‘Jews of No Religion,’ and you can say we’re disappearing. We had a good run of a few thousand years, but this is it. The problem instead is that those very same Jews who checked off ‘None’ will say, ‘You haven’t given me a box that reflects what I love most about Judaism, and what keeps me up worried at night, and what kind of world I want to leave behind for my children someday, or what turns me off about Judaism. As long as you give me these tiny boxes to check, I’m going to tell you: none of the above.’

“Let’s fast forward to American Jewish life in 2022,” continues Elan. “We’re seeing significant growth in participation in our institutions, an uptick in enrollment in many of our schools, and some 700 startup Jewish communities being founded all around the country. You’ve got all these people willing to take risks, experiment, try new things, and build new worlds. They can appreciate the traditions that we’ve always done in Jewish life such as Passover, B Mitzvahs, and so on. But they also recognize that ‘always’ is actually just ‘once’ with a longer track record. So why not try something once and see if it sticks?”

The notion of Jewish wisdom as a technology may seem like odd semantics at first, but extrapolating the riches of Jewish knowledge and applying it in unexpected ways drives the work at Clal. The organization’s work around “making Jewish a public good” has indeed played out with extraordinary results. “We are at our best when we seed ideas into the consciousness of American Jewish life or the sociology of American religion writ large, and then take a step back and let those seeds germinate and blossom however they will,” shares Elan.

Elan provides a powerful example. “I was approached by a U.S. Army general who heard about my work with Columbia Business School where I teach entrepreneurship to faith leaders. He told me that the Army was in the process of retraining 2,000 military chaplains to battle a self-harm epidemic both on base and among veterans. He believed that these chaplains were uniquely positioned to identify mental health challenges and create innovative strategies to meet people where they are.”

For two and a half hours that day, Elan led a session, then received an invitation to come back the next month, and then again the next. “This is part of a broader initiative called the Spiritual Wellness and Readiness Initiative. They just reported on new data, which shows that by retraining and repositioning the chaplains to be more of a central force on base and to really meet people where they’re at, existentially, ideologically, spiritually, emotionally, that they’re witnessing a sharp reduction in self-harm, which means that it’s really working. Chaplains can’t be sitting in the chapel on Sunday waiting for people to show up. They need to adjust their mentality and go to the people to serve them where they are.”

Elan considers the greatest privilege of his career to be a session he taught at Fort Drum in Syracuse last spring. “I had about a half hour left in the session and folks were responding positively, so I took a risk. I gave them an option: ‘I can teach you a theory about building concentric circles in communities or I can teach you a piece of Talmud that’s changed my life. Every single one of them said, ‘I want Talmud!’

“I was standing in front of a room of about 100 folks, who were almost exclusively Christian clergy, and I taught my favorite story, a conversation between Rav Hiyya and Rav Hanina about how to make sure that Torah lasts forever. Rav Hanina says, ‘I’m going to go out and teach it in my charismatic way, and people are going to be so moved by my brilliant teaching that they’ll remember every word of Torah in perpetuity.’ Rav Hiyya says, ‘I’m going to take my time with this process, and put people at the heart of it. I’ll go out to a community of orphans. I’ll feed them, I’ll treat them like human beings and I’ll teach each of them one book of Torah and then I’ll leave, so that they have the opportunity to teach each other, and become a community in and of themselves.’ For me, that was what it meant to make Jewish a public good. All those soldiers and chaplains went back to their bases. And maybe by now they’ve forgotten the name Rav Hiyya, but they will never forget the importance of meeting people where they’re at and of elevating the dignity of every single person around them.”

“I come from a military family myself. My mother served proudly in the IDF,” notes Elan. “There are few things that I would rather do with my time than to play a small part of a big effort in which our thinking at Clal can serve a much broader audience in such a pressing, impactful way. I learned that piece of text 12 years ago and I thought ‘Gosh, this is so beautiful. Maybe I’ll use it for community organizing or for adult education someday.’ But if you had said, ‘Actually, you’re going to teach it to 100 mostly Christian chaplains who are then going to use it to inspire their work to prevent suicide on base,’ you got me. I did not have that on my BINGO card.”

Elan’s sense of nostalgia is intertwined with the hopefulness and confidence he feels for the future.

“I’ve been in the startup world for 20 years and so much of it is, ‘Build the company, build the company, build the company.’ But at Schechter, from where I sat as a student and during my time on the board, it was never about that. The question was not how do we build a bigger school. It was always how we build up the bigness of the students we graduate into the world, so they can bring their Jewishness to bear in the most profound ways imaginable?

“What I learned at Schechter has shaped who I am, how I parent, how I love, how I lead, how I serve. Every single bit of wisdom, even the stuff I’ve long since forgotten, is somewhere deep inside my kishkes and continues to emanate through the work that I do. I believe so much in Judaism as a technology for flourishing and in the Jewish wisdom that we teach at Schechter. As long as there are places like Schechter in the world, shaping minds, building character, instilling Yiddishkeit in thoughtful, innovative ways, I won’t lose a wink of sleep worrying about the Jewish future. We’ll be just fine.”