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A Reconstructionist Perspective

By Rabbi Brian Field

Over the past month I’ve been sharing some of my latest thinking on the topic of Jewish identity. Last week, I took a detour and explored the Passover story in terms of what insights it provides for understanding who is a Jew and who gets to participate in Jewish ritual life. Today, in the middle of Passover, as our ancient narrative takes our people out of Egyptian slavery and towards the crossing of the sea, I’m introducing some perspectives that have deeply influenced me.

I trained to be a rabbi at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia. Much of my thinking and my values are inspired by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan who founded Reconstructionism in the first half of the twentieth century.

I want to share two of Kaplan’s ideas that guide me in my work.

One of the most important things that Kaplan wrote was “Judaism is an exemplary way to be a human being.”

This statement tells me that Judaism is at root about how to be human. Judaism is a language, a spiritual technology, for addressing and enhancing humans, and the human condition.

Therefore, any human being who sees in Judaism a way to being a more realized and fully developed human being can avail him or herself of this technology.

In another expression of his deep originality, Kaplan defines God as “the power that makes for human salvation.” This approach has inspired many Jews to conceive of God as a process more than a thing, as a dynamic experience more than static form.

(As a personal note, I need to add that my own beliefs about God include this among other perspectives. I’m not introducing Kaplan’s theology to start talking about God, but rather as an illustration of his approach to reconstructing core Jewish beliefs.)

My immediate question is this: Can we do a “reconstruction” of Jewish identity parallel to what Kaplan did with theology? Can Jewish identity be more accurately understood as a process, as a movement, as a slope rather than as a fixed thing or a point? What would that look like? Next week I’ll explore that question.

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By Rabbi Brian Field

The moon is waxing. When it becomes full this Monday night, it will be time for Jews and our loved ones to gather for Passover and tell the story of the Exodus, of how the Jewish people came to be.

In fact, it was a mixture of Jewish and other influences that made this most Jewish of stories possible. And it was a mixture of Jews and others who actually took part in the Exodus itself. I’ll expand on that idea later on….

For now, I’d like to point out something unique about the Passover celebration: many of the Passover symbols represent a thing and its opposite at the same time. Some examples: Matzah is both the bread of affliction and the symbol of redemption (the afikoman that is hidden, found and shared at the end of the meal). Charoset, the fruit-nut mixture is both deliciously sweet and the symbol of slavery. The green vegetable – the symbol of spring – is dipped into saltwater which is both the evocation of the tears of suffering and the sea that is our pathway to freedom. The egg is a symbol of the cycle of life, evoking both the mourners’ first meal as well as the hope of new beginnings. There is one passage in the Haggadah (the book we use to help us tell the story of the Exodus) that reads: “Now we are slaves, next year may we be free.” There is another passage that reads: “We used to be slaves, now we are free.”

Passover is a story of many layers where participants are encouraged to see ourselves in a “both-and” way: both slave and free, suffering and celebrating, mournful and hopeful, dissatisfied and grateful.

This complexity can also be seen in how Passover engages Jewish identity. Take the example of Moses, the hero of the story. As an infant, he is adopted by an Egyptian princess and given an Egyptian name – Moses (compare with the names of Pharaohs such as Ramses or Tut-moses). Moses is raised in privilege and power in Pharaoh’s palace as an Egyptian prince and it is not clear that he has any idea of his Israelite identity.

When Moses flees to the wilderness, he lives with a Midianite family, headed by a Midianite priest, and marries one of his daughters, Tzipporah. My own sense is that it is from his father-in-law that Moses learns about a God of freedom.

So the central character of the foundational Jewish story is born to an Israelite family, separated as an infant from that family, raised as an Egyptian prince and spends his adult life as part of a Midianite family.

It is only after years in the desert as a shepherd that Moses experiences the burning bush in which he connects this God of freedom with the God of the ancestors of the Israelite slaves. His mission: to bring that God of freedom to the slaves, and in the process, make a personal reconnection with them. Interestingly, even before he reconnects to his Israelite kin, it is not Moses, but his Midianite wife who performs the Jewish covenantal act of circumcising their son Gershom (Exodus 4:24-26).

When Moses returns to Egypt to speak to Pharaoh, he is able to do so in part because he carries an Egyptian name and is familiar with the ways of the Egyptian ruling class. At the same time, Moses is able to do so in part because his Israelite brother Aaron is willing to stand with him. And Moses has a clear message to communicate about God’s promise of freedom because of his years in the desert with the Midianite family and his father-in-law, the Midianite priest.

So back to Passover as a both-and celebration: On the one hand, Passover is the Jewish story par excellence. It is a celebration of the beginnings of Jewish spiritual peoplehood. On the other hand, it is clear that Moses’ Jewish identity and his understanding of the meaning and purpose of that identity, while having a biological basis, is in fact constructed primarily from connections and experiences that are outside of the Israelite people.

One of the goals of the Passover celebration, the Haggadah tells us, is that each one of us is to see ourselves as if we, personally, had come out of Egyptian slavery. In other words, following the model of Moses, we are called to bring new experiences, new connections and new learnings into our self-understanding about our Jewish identities. And according to a later part of the Exodus story, we see that it wasn’t just Jews who came out of Egyptian oppression, but a mixed multitude of peoples as well (Exodus 12:38).

This is what I meant by the idea of a mixture of Jewish and other influence making the Exodus possible. And there being a mixture of Jews and others who actually took part in the Exodus itself.

Passover has always been at one and the same time a deeply Jewish and a deeply universal story. This is a holiday when Jews dig deep into our own stories about who we are. It is also a time when we share the experience of the Exodus with all who are yearning to discover and recover a vision of freedom. And in both ways, we get to open our arms and hearts wide to become more than we were.

I wish you and your loved ones the sweetest, most engaging and transformative of Passovers.

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A traditional, radical Jewish metaphor

By Rabbi Brian Field

A traditional Jewish symbol of what I’m thinking of here as the “shore” of Jewish identity can be seen in the tzitzit, the specially knotted fringes at the four corners of the tallit, the prayer shawl. According to the Torah (Numbers 15:37-41), it is by looking at the tzitzit on one’s tallit that one is reminded to perform mitzvot, the sacred acts that express one’s Jewishness. In other words, the tallit has always been a powerful symbol and expression of Jewish identity.

One of my teachers, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, has helped me to see the tallit in the following way:

The tzitzit are located, interestingly, not in the center of the tallit, but at its very edge, the place where the cloth ends and space begins, just like the point on the shore. What’s also interesting is how the tzitzit are tied. The first third of each tzitzit is knotted in a very precise way that is filled with Jewish spiritual symbolism. The bottom two thirds are left untied, freely dangling, flowing in the air.

So we have in the tzitzit a religious symbol that evokes the “seashore” nature of so many of our identities – the knotted section being the ways in which one is Jewishly identified and the free-flowing section being the ways in which one claims other identities. Put another way, when you reach the clearly set boundaries of Jewish community (the edge of the tallit) you don’t stop. You figure out how to tie the knots as they reach beyond the boundaries, or, in other words, you create Jewish ways of being outside of traditional Jewish norms. But you don’t tie it all. Because Jewish doesn’t define all of who you are.

So in the tallit we have a symbolic garment that expresses having an unambiguous Jewish identity: one is literally wrapped in the symbol of the Jewish covenant with God. And attached to the four corners of the tallit, there are tzitzit dangling out into space, into the “sea.” Some of it we tie and frame Jewishly. And some it we don’t.

Who would have imagined that one of the most traditional symbols of unambiguous Jewish identity (the tallit) is also a powerful expression of outreach and inclusion?

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A Second Metaphor

By Rabbi Brian Field

Here’s a second metaphor for thinking about the contours and the frontiers of Jewish identity: the seashore.

Think of a point at the seashore. Is that point a part of the land or a part of the sea? Of course the answer is “both.”

When the tide is out, the point on the shore is more obviously connected to the land. When the tide is in, the point on the shore is more visibly part of the sea. It’s the same point, but how one sees it, the status one gives it, is dependent not on where that point is, but what the tide is doing at that moment.

And for so many people with whom I work, and people I know generally, that describes their Judaism. Sometimes it is their Jewish connections that are more figural, and other times, it’s other aspects of their identity that are “obvious” or more shaping at a given moment.

I frequently ask the people with whom I work to name the tides in their lives so we can better relate to their unique and personal point on the shore. Another way I might ask this question, and I pose it to you here, is this:

“What moves in and out through our identities?”

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Useful Metaphors

By Rabbi Brian Field

In my work I’m frequently translating concepts that are brand new to people into terms that are more familiar to them. I rely on metaphors in that interesting process. Here are two metaphors that guide my evolving ideas about Jewish identity and help me think afresh about the people I’m helping.

1st metaphor – the mountain:

I grew up on the North Shore of Vancouver, BC, which marks the beginning of a section of gorgeous coastal mountains. My family lived at an elevation of about 900 feet above sea level. Technically we lived on Mt. Hollyburn, though I couldn’t see its peak from our house. I could see other mountain peaks from our house. And I certainly knew that when we left the house we walked either up or down! Clearly, we lived on the side of a mountain. But it never occurred to us to think of ourselves as mountain-dwellers. From our perspective the actual mountain began somewhere higher up the mountain than where our house sat.

As a kid, I constantly puzzled over the question “where does the mountain actually begin?” Did it begin when the land’s slope went up more steeply? Did it begin where the houses stopped? Did it begin at the shore, right where the land started to rise out of the water? Or did it begin below the water, at the seabed?

Given this cluster of images, which I sometimes still ponder as a grown-up, I’m inclined to hear the Jewish identity question in a similar way. Not so much as “are you or aren’t you Jewish?” but as “where on the slope of selfhood does Jewish identity begin!?” A logical follow-up question is this: Where does Jewish identity end? Is there a limit to how much an identity can include and contain?

What do you think?

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By Rabbi Brian Field

• An adult child of an interfaith marriage plans to marry someone with a nominal Christian background. In our meeting, the couple tells me that they deeply want some way of Jewishly invoking the sacred dimension of their marriage covenant
• An interfaith couple is pregnant with their first child and they want a naming ceremony for their baby. They haven’t figured out what their family’s spiritual orientation will be. They want to think this through with someone like me who plays on the Jewish team, and who also understands that they have stakes, loyalties and resources in more than one world.
• A man who was raised with a Jewish identity but no real connection to Judaism is marrying a Catholic woman. The woman contacts me requesting that I officiate at their wedding because she believes that having a rabbi at this key life event will help her future partner regain some kind of positive or nourishing connection to his Jewishness.

These are some people who have come to speak with me recently at Judaism Your Way.

As a rabbi, how should I respond to them? How should the Jewish community respond?

From a conventional perspective of Jewish identity, it would be inappropriate to offer a Jewish ceremony to these people. Their individual and/or collective identities are not exclusively Jewish. And by some definitions, they aren’t Jewish at all.

As I see it, the issue of Jewish identity is the intersection of two phenomena. The first is the matter of status - how a person is perceived by others, including rabbis. Status is about getting an affirmation of identity by a community or group. The driving question here is whether other people recognize someone as a Jew.

The second is the matter of personal identity: how a person perceives him or herself. Here the operative question is “do I feel Jewish?” Or, in the case of a child, the question is about the way in which the parents identify the child.

I recently attended the annual convention of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association (RRA). We discussed the rapidly evolving landscape of Jewish identity, and the fact that a growing number of people with a wide range of Jewish connections and identities are requesting some form of recognition from the Jewish people in general and rabbis in particular.

I was asked to speak at this conference about my perspectives on this trend through my work at Judaism Your Way. I’ll be continuing to blog about the ideas that I shared with my colleagues. I’d love you to read along and let me know what you think.

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By Rabbi Brian Field

The RRA Connection: the monthly newsletter of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, January 2010

I always thought that I would be a congregational rabbi. Yet during my eight years in two pulpits following graduation, a part of me seemed to be holding back. I began to notice, however, that I became most rabbinically alive and creative when working with people who felt marginalized from the Jewish world and/or had an ambivalent relationship with Judaism and Jewishness.

In 2002 I left congregational work and became a hospital chaplain. I also began officiating at weddings of unaffiliated (including interfaith) couples. I was extending my rabbinic reach. But I had no idea what was next.

In the spring of 2004 I learned of a position with a new outreach organization in Denver, Colorado. Founded and funded by an interfaith couple who had been unable to find a local rabbi to marry them, they had approached the local Federation as well as the JCC, offering to fund the position of a rabbi who would work with interfaith couples. When both organizations declined, this couple formed an outreach organization themselves.

By July I was hired as rabbi, along with an executive director and administrator. Our analysis: Most Jews were not engaged or affiliated Jewishly because in one way or the other, they were hearing some kind of “no” from the Jewish world. Our mission: to find creative Jewish ways of saying “yes” to as many Jews and their loved ones as possible. We named our organization Judaism Your Way, and moved into a storefront office.

Judaism Your Way is a non-membership, pluralistic outreach organization with a mailing list of over 1600 households. Our programs are playful, a bit unusual, and accessible to non-Hebrew readers and non-Jews. We offer holiday gatherings, classes, life cycle services, and a bnai mitzvah program. We meet people with affirmation, encouragement and resources. When appropriate, we refer participants to area synagogues.

Judaism Your Way was first met with suspicion in some quarters of the Denver Jewish community. However, after six years, JYW now collaborates with many other organizations and congregations. I am very much a part of the rabbinic community and have excellent relationships with most of the local rabbis

I feel blessed. Our organization is growing. I have two great co-workers. I’ve found work that suits my creative, pastoral temperament as well as my radical, post-modern vision of what’s possible for Jews and the non-Jews in our lives. I am more connected to more people than I ever was as a congregational rabbi. The people I serve are not the people who decide my employment status. I rarely hear, “We’ve never done it that way before.” And, I’m happy to report that I’m no longer holding back.

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By Rabbi Brian Field

JYW Newsletter, Spring 2010

There’s a witticism that boils down every (well almost every) Jewish holiday down to three sentences: “They tried to kill us. We won/survived. Let’s eat.”

One reason we smile at this reductionist take on Judaism is because we recognize the centrality of eating in Jewish celebration. Many Jewish holidays have a feast associated with them and even those that don’t are associated with particular foods.

This is more than tradition. From the very beginning of time, the Jewish people has believed that eating matters. Really matters — to history, to society, to the earth, to God. Whereas in Greek mythology, history begins when a human being, Prometheus, steals fire from the gods, according to the Torah, history begins when human beings violate a divine command regarding what to eat.

Eating matters so much that we have a wide-ranging set of practices and conversations around what’s fit to eat — called kashrut or keeping kosher. Like all vital Jewish practices, the meaning of keeping kosher continues to evolve. In the last generation we’ve witnessed the development of eco-kashrut — integrating Jewish principles of sustainability, justice, health and compassion with Jewish eating traditions — as well as the introduction of hechsher tzedek (kosher justice) — a standard for determining what is kosher by including among its criteria how the food producer treats its workers.

Under the leadership of a new national organization called Hazon, meaning “vision,” these and other concerns (evidenced in books such as Michael Pollen’s The Ominvore’s Dilemma) are coalescing into what’s being called The New Jewish Food Movement — in which Jewish farmers, rabbis, chefs, teachers, students and families are exploring how one can eat in a way that is both deeply Jewish, healthy and sustainable.

Locally, the Jewish food movement is taking root (pun intended) in the form of CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture). CSAs are where individuals pre-purchase a share of a farmer’s produce for an entire season. The CSA guarantees the farmer a secure market and gives members access to local, organic produce at competitive prices, while helping to preserve farmland and build community. A Boulder-based Jewish CSA called Tuv Ha’aretz (The Good of the Land) is now in its second year. In Denver, there are two Jewish CSAs currently forming.

Imagine the possibilities these CSAs bring to the Jewish community! Examples include holiday celebrations, Jewish education, addressing issues of hunger and malnutrition with Jewish community resources, and integrating Jewish food consciousness more deeply and easily into our lives.

Judaism Your Way will be bringing aspects of Jewish food consciousness into our programs starting with our 8th night Passover Seder.