The (Bright) Future of Jewish Leadership

A year ago, we decided to do something unlike anything we had ever done before at SVARA. In celebration of our yeshiva’s 20th anniversary, we gathered a spectacular lineup of speakers for our first-ever conversation series, The Unrecognizable Jewish Future. These speakers had each brought their whole selves to shaping the past, present, and future of Judaism, and we were incredibly grateful that they had then agreed to join us here at SVARA to share what they had learned along the way. These folks were organizers, teachers, rabbis, and poets. They had spent their careers building desperately needed points of access into our boundlessly beautiful yet vehemently gatekept spiritual traditions. The youngest speaker had been born some 50 years after the oldest speaker, but there was a tangible sense of cohesion across the storylines that emerged. Throughout the conversation series, one message was clear: the future of Judaism would be unrecognizable, which was exactly what any future ought to be. These narratives reinforced the unforgettable introduction to our founder and Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Benay Lappe’s CRASH talk, bringing into focus the reality that the current moment had been brought about by events that, long ago, once felt like utter calamities. Because generations of queer and otherwise radical elders had moved through their own CRASH moments and gone Option 3, the rest of us now lived in a world with queer yeshivas, Black Trans Talmud scholars, a growing Torah of disability, and a deep radical sea of beautiful outsiders living authentically and unhurriedly in diaspora. These conversations evoked in me (and the hundreds of others in attendance) a sense that perhaps one day the world would be home to even more of these previously unimaginable futures.

In the spirit of looking toward the future, SVARA just wrapped up our second-annual conversation series this month, which brought together another brilliant cohort of speakers to share their insight on the future of Jewish leadership. This time around, the series was designed to speak to the ways Jewish spiritual leadership serves as a much-needed response to the onslaught of tumult and despair in the world around us. As we dreamed up our second pass at a conversation series, Team SVARA felt a responsibility to assemble speakers who could tell a more just and restorative story about how power is held and how leadership can be a connective, grounding force in the face of division and erasure. Hundreds of y’all registered and together we were all blessed by the wisdom of Rabbi Lisa Edwards, Ph.D, Rabbi Maggid Jhos Singer, Alexandra Corwin, Shira Kline, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife, and Laynie Soloman. The guiding questions were simple, but they felt urgent. What are leaders obligated to do, and not do? How do we build more pathways towards leadership? And what do we do once we get there? 

The Future of Jewish Leadership was moderated by longtime SVARA-nik and Faculty member Rabbi Becky Silverstein, whose calm and candor helped to build a well-supported container for a tremendous amount of inquiry and introspection. The series kicked off with “Reading Ourselves Into History,” featuring legends Rabbi Lisa Edwards, Ph.D and Rabbi Maggid Jhos Singer. For those who might not know Rabbi Lisa and Rabbi Maggid Jhos, they have each spent a lifetime tending to the nexus between activism and spiritual leadership. Both speakers opened with gratitude, for each other and for the opportunity to be part of the series. Rabbi Becky remarked on his own gratitude for the chance to bear witness to such profoundly accomplished queer elders in conversation with one another. Lisa thanked him, and offered, “Rabbi Laura Gellar used to remind me all the time to take note of the Torah of our lives. What a blessing to be learning the Torah of our lives with all of you.” Jhos was asked to start us off by sharing his favorite definition of leadership. “Leadership is stepping in when there’s a need for your expertise. It’s not a competition. It’s a huge, huge responsibility. If a leader takes a wrong step, it’s going to be magnified by every step of those who are following.” Becky then asked both Lisa and Jhos if they could recall a time when they first felt that they were becoming a Jewish leader. Jhos recalled: 

I was a longtime member of Sha’ar Zahav, which was a radical space not just because it was welcoming of many-gendered people, but because it had a longstanding rule that the rabbi would only lead services twice a month. The rest of it was layled. This allowed for a wide range of styles, and identities, and abilities to step on the bima and take the wheel. It was the first time that I was giving a drash. It was the first time I really understood that you can break someone’s heart open with the right words.

The experience of being trusted to be a leader before other Jewish spaces might have recognized him as a leader catalyzed something important for Jhos: a realization that, no matter your status or what honorifics you have (or don’t have), the tradition belongs to all of us.

It was Lisa’s turn to share. “Similarly to a lot of people, I had the sense of becoming a rabbi long before I was actually becoming a rabbi. Because maybe we’ve all always been becoming rabbis.” She recalled that, while pursuing her Ph.D and “hanging out mostly with lesbians and feminists,” she became a de-facto conduit for questions being asked by people who—for good reason—had nowhere else to ask them. Lisa remembered the significance of publications like The Jewish Catalog and Lilith Magazine in a world before the internet (a world I just barely remember), explaining, “those resources were amazing, but they usually just led to more questions.” Lisa shared that there were plenty of reasons why someone might not know where, or how, to ask a question:

In those days, if you had a Jewish question, you had to go to a library or ask a rabbi. But what if you didn’t have a rabbi because you didn’t go to synagogue? What if you didn’t go to synagogue because there wasn’t one where you lived, or because you thought you wouldn’t be welcomed there? What if you actually wouldn’t be welcomed there because of who you were? But I happened to know a rabbi, and I was starting to do my own dissertation research on Jewish texts, so I became sort of a go-to for all the people who weren’t able to ask the questions themselves.

During our second conversation, “Creating New Precedents,” we once again examined this idea of how and under what circumstances we find ourselves trusted to lead. We posed the question to speakers Alexandra Corwin, Shira Kline, and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who are all leading in their own Jewish communities and working diligently to inspire a new generation to nurture and trust their own power. Rabbi Danya dove in, offering that, in her mind, the current status quo for leadership was not particularly restorative. She shared:

Right now, leaders are often seen as people who can provide protection, direction, and order. That emphasis on protection, direction, and order is actually what has led us to this moment in time. Queer and feminist communities know that leadership is more than that. They know it’s intertwined in relationship. There isn’t one person making decisions for everyone. It’s a process taken on by the collective whole, one which is transparently and intentionally messy.

Shira Kline, co-founder of Lab/Shul, agreed with the notion that leadership needs to be more nuanced, and power must be rigorously examined if it’s ever going to be trusted. She shared:

I’ve been thinking a lot about “leadership” and “power” and whether or not those are interchangeable words. Power is about as easy to define as a dream. One that turns to dust the moment you wake up. In this moment, I feel like power is both as real as it gets and, at the same time, a total illusion. I used to think that leadership was an ability to see the future. Instead, I see leadership as feeling into the now instead.

Alexandra Corwin, Executive Director of Ammud: The Jews of Color Torah Academy, noted how extreme shifts in power and leadership show up in our own tradition and can be a source of hope:

I think power is often misunderstood. Many people think it’s immutable, that it’s held indefinitely, in a role or in a position. But in reality, power is something that can change very easily. An example from our own tradition is the Purim story. I think there’s a lot to be learned from booing Haman. In my life so far, I’ve seen so many examples of someone being at the height of their power and then, the next day, they’re not. That can be quite humbling for so many folks. And for folks who might not feel they have positional power, they hear that story and realize that they can be powerful in many ways. Because power shifts, and it turns, and it’s important to hold onto that.

In a moment as dark as this one, these reflections felt like a balm to imagine that somewhere, somehow, gears might already be in motion to bring about much needed change.

Our final conversation brought together Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife and Laynie Soloman in “Seeding What’s Next,” a space to reflect on Jewish leadership as it has been modeled and as it could be. Keshira recalled receiving the invitation to speak at this event: 

I looked over my shoulder and thought, “Who is this email for? Not me, right?” Somebody, somewhere felt like I belonged here, and that helped me believe that I belong here. And I think that, in all the directions, that is really needed. Throughout history, some people are given a seat at the table, and some are not. And part of creating more liberatory leadership and liberatory spaces is to create seats at the table for the unlikely suspects: the folks who haven’t been able to see themselves modeled as belonging at the table. The practice for me now is to not gate-keep our tradition from people. To stop trying to reshape and redirect people into what, to me, feels recognizable and acceptable. The challenge in my practice is to bring curiosity more than conviction about how things are supposed to be.

Laynie nodded in agreement, adding:

I also think we need a lot of different tables. And we need no tables at the same time! We need to understand that there isn’t one authentic table and then other auxiliary tables. We are trying to figure out, as best we can, what is needed and who can serve in what role. And to do so with chesed, with generosity for each other. No one individual has ultimate power. If I stood up one day and said, “X is now Y,” the only thing that would make that authoritative is if you all did it with me. So if power lies in what we’re all doing together, my responsibility becomes ensuring that we’re shaping the tradition together. That what you’re doing, and what I’m doing, and what we’re all doing together, is moving toward our ultimate goal, which is making this world inhabitable for G*d. That’s what we’re doing.

In a moment that is fraught with fear and disassociation, we have to continue reaching for each other. Spiritual traditions have always played a role in guiding society, its leaders, and its laws. In bringing together the leaders, educators, rabbis, and teachers who inspire us, we can keep painting a picture of what could be: a future where the most expansive iterations of Jewish tradition take shape, held and nurtured by those who are bringing their lived experience into conversation with the past as we move forward. At SVARA, we believe everyone who enters our bet midrash holds unique power. As we move through this moment, we are seeking to elevate the leaderful posture of our community and call upon those who can help guide us into a more expansive future. Because we know each and every one of us has a role in learning, leading, and shaping everything ahead of us.