Transcript

Arielle Angel 00:00

Before we get started, a quick announcement. This episode is my last one as editor in chief of Jewish Currents. Starting at the end of this month, I’ll be stepping down from leadership at the magazine and will be taking up a new role as editor at large. As an On the Nose listener, you shouldn’t notice too much of a change. I’ll still host the show, which will now be called On the Nose with Arielle Angel. Other JC staff members will still guest-host from time to time, but most often, I’ll be bringing you new episodes once a week. The episode you’re about to hear is one where Rabbi Brant Rosen and I discuss leaving leadership in the left Jewish institutions we’ve built over the last decade.

AA 00:38

And before we start, just a brief reflection: I am very, very good at complaining. It’s just my way in the world. I do a bit of this on the podcast, talking about how hard this work is, yada, yada, yada. And there is some truth to that, but the deeper truth is that it has been an enormous privilege to do this work—to wake up every morning and devote my time and efforts to thinking through how we build a Jewish community oriented toward liberation for Palestinians and for everyone else. I am so grateful to my colleagues and to all of you, our readers and listeners, for making this work possible and for doing it with me. So, onward; the work continues. I’ll be here next week with a new episode of On the Nose.

AA 01:33

Hello, and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I’m Arielle Angel, editor in chief of Jewish Currents, and I’m your host for today. Even that little intro is a good segue into our conversation because I am only the editor in chief of Jewish Currents for another 10 days—April 30th, I’m transitioning out of my role to become editor at large. And I noticed a few months ago that Rabbi Brant Rosen of Tzedek, Chicago, was also transitioning out of leadership at that synagogue—an anti-Zionist synagogue in Chicago—after 10 years at Tzedek. And I thought that we would have a mutual exit interview of sorts to talk about what it means to have built anti-Zionist Jewish institutions over the last 10 years, and what it means to be exiting leadership now, in this moment. I wrote a piece last summer called “We Need New Jewish Institutions,” and the transition of leadership is also part of this process and something that I think a lot of Jewish institutions have not done, which is that the same generation or the same people stay in leadership basically forever. This is also a piece of the life cycle of an institution that I was hoping that we could document in this conversation. So, Brant, welcome to the show.

Brant Rosen 03:07

Thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to this mutual exit interview. I’ve been thinking a lot about it.

AA 03:13

By way of introduction, you are the founding rabbi of Congregation Tzedek Chicago and the co-founder of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council.

BR 03:22

That’s right.

AA 03:23

Well, so where do we start? I mean, Tzedek Chicago started in 2015, and then you were part of the founding group, and then it became a full-time pulpit rabbi position in 2019. So, we are really on a somewhat parallel track here. Jewish Currents’ revitalization was 2018, and both of us are stepping down this year. So, take me through: What were the conditions of starting Tzedek Chicago? And maybe you could, in the broadest sense, just to get us started, reflect on what the movement has been from then until now.

BR 04:03

Sure. As I was thinking today in anticipation of this conversation, it really occurred to me that 2014, 2015 was really—it was certainly an important turning point in my life, but I think it was also an important turning point in the American Jewish world.

AA 04:21

Yeah, completely agree.

BR 04:22

You know, Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza was Fall of 2014, and not coincidentally, that’s when I left my congregation because my speaking out and public involvement in Palestine solidarity movement just made things too difficult for me to remain in the congregation. I had been in a Jewish Reconstructionist congregation in Evanston for 16 years. And when you talked about leaders never leaving the institutions, I assumed I would retire from that congregation. It was a well-established congregation. It was a plum job, and I really thought that would be where I stayed. Because that’s just the conventional wisdom for rabbis: When you find a good job, you stay there. So, nothing was strategic about what happened. I ended up leaving rather unceremoniously and did not expect to ever work in a Jewish congregation again, although it was all I’d ever really done in my adult life. So, I started working for the American Friends Service Committee. I transitioned to working for the Quakers almost immediately. The circumstances of starting Tzedek Chicago really were also not particularly strategic. There was a group of us—some of whom were members of my congregation, a small number who left when I left—and just other progressive, and leftist, and radical Jews in the Chicago community who were feeling alienated by what was going on in the Jewish community around Israel/Palestine, and Gaza in particular.

AA 05:53

Yeah, I got drawn into this because of Gaza 2014. I mean, until then, I was basically a liberal Zionist, and that changed everything for me. I ended up finding IfNotNow just as it was getting off the ground, which was a perfect bridge for me because I still didn’t know how I related to Zionism. Like I was an ardent Zionist, but probably wouldn’t have self-applied that word.

BR 06:21

I can relate to that. I think there were many people for whom IfNotNow was really an important landing place in that moment. For me, 2008, 2009 was when I really broke with Zionism, and Jewish Voice for Peace was my landing place. I don’t know what I would have done without JVP, to be honest. It gave me an organizational and communal Jewish home. So, at any rate, to flash forward to 2014, a group of us just got together informally to do Jewish together. We had Shabbat dinners, we had done a Tisha B’Av service together earlier in the summer, and I remember very specifically we did a Palestinian solidarity seder on Pesach that I led. That, I think, planted the idea for some, in the core group of this group, to create something more substantial. I remember two members of that group, who had been congregants of mine in my former congregation, took me out to lunch sometime early 2015 and said: I think we have a congregation here, and we think you need to be a congregational rabbi, and we think you should be the rabbi of it. That was really what planted the seed, and once we made the decision, it happened very quickly. Over the summer of 2015, we had orientation sessions and focus groups, and we founded ourselves that fall and had our first High Holiday service in the fall of 2015.

AA 07:48

Were you right away identifying as anti-Zionists? I mean, this was 11 years ago. Even now, there’s probably a handful of anti-Zionist-identified synagogues. There’s a new network, Synagogues Rising, which we’ve talked about, but they’re not explicitly an anti-Zionist network. So, there’s still not so many. So, in 2015, this was pretty new. And it remains so.

BR 08:14

We crafted a statement of core values before we started recruiting members, and we founded the congregation on these values. In those values, we refer to ourselves as non-Zionist. Looking back, I’m trying to remember why we use that term. I would not have had any trouble referring to myself as an anti-Zionist at the time. I did, pretty openly. But our feeling was, as I recall, to come right out of the gate, calling ourselves anti-Zionist would be just a bridge too far, at that time. I don’t think the term anti-Zionist Jews or Judaism was really as much of a thing as it is now. To be an anti-Zionist Jew is a definite thing now, in ways that it was not in 2014. And so, I think there were many of us who, individually, would describe ourselves that way, but I think, for the purposes of our core values and our identity as a congregation, we used the rather squishy term non-Zionist. But actually, later—years later, in 2022—we actually changed that to anti-Zionist through our congregational process, because we decided it was really, really important to use that term.

AA 09:26

And that mirrors JVP’s process, right?

BR 09:29

I think it was 2019. Yeah, it was a few years earlier. That was around the time in which that term became more popularly used and a defining aspect of Jewish identity.

AA 09:41

Yeah, I mean, we relaunched, of course, in 2018. There was this profound sense that the community was constituting itself as an anti-Zionist community in that moment, which I think is what has led to the success of the magazine. Without that community self-identifying, we wouldn’t have been legible at all. And actually, there was this immediate outpouring of like: Yes, this is for us. We are identifying ourselves as the readership of this magazine. So, the timeline makes sense to me. But I have asked this question of myself many times: Why 2014? I mean, I was pretty old in 2014. I was nearly 30, and I remember 2008, 2011, but they didn’t break through. Obviously, 2014 was a much bloodier bombardment, and the political machinations were so direct on the Israeli side that it was undeniable to me. But of course, if you weren’t Jewish and you were interested in this issue, for a lot of people—and particularly, obviously, if you were Palestinian or in the Arab world—you didn’t need until 2014 to recognize that there was something going on here. But it speaks to the power of cultural context.

BR 11:05

Yeah. I mean, as I look back, I was struggling with my own Zionism for many, many years. You use the term ardent Zionist, and looking back, that’s probably what I was for much of my life. That’s the way I was raised, and I really started to increasingly question it around the time I became a rabbi, actually, which was in 1992. So, the timing was not perfect. But my approach to being a rabbi was always to keep things real. Let’s just say I’ve never wanted to be the rabbi who played the part of a rabbi on the bimah but was a different person in real life. What I was, was what I was. And so, my own struggles over the issue of Israel and Zionism were very public. I wrote about them very openly on my blog and talked about them in my congregation. There’s probably a lot that was quite naive about it, looking back, but it was the only way I knew how to be at the time.

AA 12:05

Well, I guess this is a good time to reflect a little bit on what has changed. I mean, we’ve already started talking about the way that the cultural context has totally transformed around us in the last eight to 10 years. What else has changed since the beginning of this institution-building for you until now? What has changed about the outside world that has affected your work?

BR 12:33

So in 2020, we went online, and what happened us was that our membership dramatically increased. It increased not only in Chicago but around the world. People from all kinds of time zones would join us. I have a stock phrase that I say on Friday night. I say: Whatever time zone you happen to be, we’re all entering Shabbat time right now, together. After 2020, when people started leaving their homes again and getting off Zoom, the congregation—we could not go back. We had members literally all over the world, and it made me realize that this movement is, for the first time, is really a global movement.

AA 13:16

Global and so under-resourced. Something that I relate to so much in what you’re talking about is the recognition that there’s so much scarcity right now that our small institutions have to stretch so completely. Even to the point of: What could be more essential to the question of Shabbat than timing? Friday night—what time havdalah is, what time candlelighting is. And yet, there is so much need.

BR 13:51

Yeah. There are times where I stop and I realize: Look at the growth of anti-Zionist ritual spaces, and the growth of Jewish Voice for Peace, and the growth of Jewish participation in the Palestine solidarity movement, and Passover seders at the college encampments. It’s all very significant, and at the same time, when you compare it to the Jewish establishment, it is so small and under-resourced, and such a drop in the bucket, still. So, that is very real. I think your article was a really important article for me. The article, “We need Jewish institutions,” because I think it was a really smart attempt to say: Okay, this is what we need. This is what is happening. But this is also some of the questions that we need to face, and this is the depth of that need. And if we’re going to be serious about this, this is what needs to happen.

AA 14:47

Yeah, I actually feel like 2018, 2019, and even a bit in the pandemic years feel, to me, like such a simpler time in doing this work. October 7th and everything that has come after has really shifted the positionality of anti-Zionist Jews, on some level. I think maybe for a synagogue, it’s less complicated because it’s the place where Jews are going to be together to do ritual. It’s not a place, necessarily, where they have to be constantly sorting out, “How do I feel about Palestinian resistance?” or whatever—like armed resistance or whatever. It’s not a place, necessarily, where you’re in confrontation all the time. Well, maybe it is. I don’t know. I don’t know how you feel about it.

BR 15:38

No, I think I agree with you. At the end of the day, we’re a synagogue. So, while we are an anti-Zionist synagogue, we still do the things that synagogues do. We have services, we have educational programs for adults and kids. We’re politically active, but at heart, we do what other congregations do. I can’t imagine what it must be like, in this moment, to be the editor of a journal like Jewish Currents, that has to respond constantly to everything that’s going on in the Jewish world. Especially since October 7th.

AA 16:08

Yeah, I think that the main change in the last eight years that I’ve been here is just that it used to feel a lot simpler to do this work. It used to be a little bit of like an anomaly—oh, anti-Zionist Jews, that’s great. Thanks for being here, you know? And now, I think that there’s a lot more ambivalence, just as the genocide has ground on. A lot of Jews are feeling more ambivalence about Zionism, but overall, the institutional landscape hasn’t changed very much, and if anything, they’ve doubled down. And so, I think there’s just like a real suspicion that has crept in, and I think having to then articulate a position, in light of all of that, has become difficult. Way more difficult. And that creates more internal fracture, that creates more anxiety. I sometimes feel a nostalgia for the early days, where also, the magazine, I think, had more of a sense of humor, and now it feels very difficult to find that again, or find appropriate moments for it in light of the horrors upon horrors, you know?

BR 17:22

Yeah, well, in that way, maybe it’s just a reflection of being Jewish in general. It’s harder and harder to find things to joke about. I will say that one of the things that I’ve been finding, particularly in the current moment—and here we’re talking about not just since October 7th but Trumpism, and the war on Iran, and the world in general—is one of the jobs of a rabbi is to help give messages of hope despite the dire nature of the times we live in. And I’ve always been pretty good at that, not in a Pollyannaish way, but really, I have an approach, and I’m finding it harder and harder to do it without it sounding really hollow—to offer platitudes that people can see right through. But I don’t want to just reflect back to people their own despair, at the same time. So, I think a lot of what we’re talking about is just a function of the time in which we’re living in, which is becoming just cascading heinousness, every single morning.

AA 18:28

Totally. I mean, hope is actually my worst card. I find it difficult to play that card, I guess. In fact, there was an event that we had, maybe a year and a half ago or something, where Peter Beinart and I were on a panel together, and somebody asked a question about hope, and then they handed me the mic, and Peter said: Don’t let her answer that one. And he took it from me, because I have such a hard time with that. I’m such a classic “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” kind of person, and that has actually, historically, put me at odds with some of the more activisty types in our readership, who often feel upset with me, as if I’m conceding to despair. But for me, it’s always been a way of being honest, and that being its own catalyst in some kind of way—that it seemed like without that honesty, we can’t move in an honest way, we can’t act in an honest way, and that pushing down that grief and that despair feels sometimes like a lie, or like repression, or something.

BR 19:38

I agree with that. I think we’re on the same page about that. I think it’s really important to be honest and to be clear about what it is that we’re facing and to name it. I think all of that is enormously important. In fact, this last High Holidays—which is my last High Holiday sermons at my congregation—and Rosh Hashanah in particular, I really talked about this, that: I won’t lie, that I’m feeling what you’re all feeling. And there’s the chant, “I believe that we will win,” and you know, I don’t think that’s a particularly helpful chant. I think there is a chance we won’t win. There are lots of times we don’t win, and I think we need to be honest about that. But I think hope is not related to faith and victory. It can’t be. And that’s something I’ve always talked about, too. I follow the line of Mariame Kaba and people like her, who say, “Hope is a discipline”—that hope is in the work, knowing that we may not succeed. And in this current moment, where we have a president who’s threatening nuclear war on social media every other day, and we have global climate change that’s just running amok, I think that kind of realism is all the more important, because if we’re going to have any kind of hope, then we have to be really, really clear about the nature of the moment that we’re in.

AA 20:58

Well, let me ask you this: Why are you leaving now?

BR 21:03

I’m leaving for some of the reasons that you articulated—I think it’s a healthy thing to make room for new leadership, and there are lots of great young anti-Zionist rabbis out there that I think deserve to have jobs, or at least a job. That’s one piece. I’m 63 years old, and I’m very aware that I’m entering into the last phase or phases of my own life, and there are things I want to do. I’m thinking seriously about: Well, how do I want to spend it? I’ve loved being a congregational rabbi, but I’ve been doing it since I’ve been in my twenties. I was 29 when I graduated in 1992, and I’m 63 now, and it’s really hard work. Especially—I never expected to be starting a congregation at that point in my life. So, I’m ready to do other things. I want to write, I want to teach, I want to be involved in community organizing—things I’ve been but just haven’t had the space and capacity to do as much as I’d like because I’ve been involved in the day-to-day running of a congregation. So, for all those reasons, it just felt like the right time.

AA 22:13

Do you have any feelings about stepping down in this moment that feels particularly fraught, uncertain, hard?

BR 22:23

No, that hasn’t occurred to me, because I know I’m stepping down at a point where our congregation is really strong. I feel really, really good knowing that this community will continue to meet this moment that we’re in, and that it’s not synonymous with me. I’m feeling remarkably good about the decision.

AA 22:42

Yeah, I’m trying to get there. I’m hoping to get there. I’m leaving, really, out of exhaustion, of just the effort that it took to run this, almost as a journalistic startup. There were three of us eight years ago; there’s 17 now, full-time staff, and everything about the project has changed, and everything has become more complicated. There’s a news desk, and a podcast, and an events program, and all of these kinds of things.

BR 23:17

Well, you asked me about how the landscape has changed since we began. As I think about it, there are still not many journals like Jewish Currents out there that are doing what you do. For many of us, you are our go-to.

AA 23:31

Yeah, that’s true if you’re talking about in the Jewish realm, but if you’re not talking about in the Jewish realm, I think one of the things that has changed, actually, is that a lot of other organizations that maybe would have covered some of this stuff once in a while are now really on our beats, because they are some of the most important beats in American foreign policy and in American domestic political life. So, whereas it used to be that we were like the only people reporting in a really dedicated way on the ADL, now you have tons of leftist magazines and news sources covering the ADL. You also have, I would say, people at the Forward who, in the past, wouldn’t have covered it quite the way that we would. And that’s still true, but they’re closer to us now than they were before we existed. I think there are things that we do that no one else does, but I think we are competing in a different way than we were. And again, I also just think it’s always been hard for us to attract top talent, especially if you can take that story now elsewhere. If suddenly, what seemed like a niche story is a huge story, then that means you could probably place it at Harper’s or at the New York Review of Books. Especially, also, as the bounds for what can be said in legacy media are stretching more than they ever have, as public opinion in the country shifts. And by the way, I think all of this is positive. It wasn’t good that we were the only people talking about the ADL, talking about AIPAC, doing that kind of reporting in the day-to-day, that kind of beat reporting. So, this is positive, but it is a shift.

BR 25:18

Yeah. I will say that I would have thought, 10 years down the line, that there would have been more anti-Zionist synagogues out there. I would have thought that I would be more involved in helping to seed more of these kinds of initiatives. But they are happening. They are happening on their own in a very organic way.

AA 25:39

Well, let me ask you this: Why do you think there’s such a gap in leadership in the Jewish world? Because I see that too, and on the one hand, it’s like easy to say: Well, we lost a generation of leadership because people couldn’t go into these completely morally bankrupt institutions, and so, they couldn’t be trained. I mean, you were already a congregational rabbi because you’re a generation older than us, but now, you have this whole crop of queer, anti-Zionist rabbis that have no pulpits to go to. So, where do they get trained up? But I think that’s

too easy. I’m not sure that it’s just the fact that people don’t have the traditional leadership training. I think it’s also a suspicion of—I wrote about this in my piece—a suspicion of institutions, a suspicion of professionalization, a suspicion of formality and organization that, I think, is related to what we’ve seen from our institutions and the decline of institutions in the United States—not just in the Jewish world.

BR 26:50

Yes, I agree with you. I think that many of the people in these groups are part of a culture that’s anti-institution. And for good reason. For very, very good reason. So, that’s been part of just the world that they live in. You know, before we became Tzedek Chicago, we were just a group of Jews that wanted to gather to do Jewish things together with other people who were values-aligned. We weren’t thinking institutionally, and I just think that’s the case. The Jewish establishment—the Jewish legacy organizations—have been working at leadership development for a very, very long time. They have it down to a science, and this new generation of anti-Zionist Jews that are coming up are just not part of that world. I don’t think any of us have thought enough about what leadership development looks like in this new ecosystem that we’re seeking to create.

AA 27:40

Do you have a sense of where you fall in these debates around hierarchy versus horizontalism? Or the question of these small minyans? Do they have to evolve into synagogues? Do you have a sense of that, or a take?

BR 27:58

Yes, I do. I think for a group that is small, and participatory, and horizontal, and that’s all they want to be, that suits their needs perfectly—that’s fine. They don’t have to grow into anything beyond that, if there is a consensus in the group that this is what they are, and what they need to be, and they’re meeting the needs of the people. But I’m the rabbi of a congregation that grew from that into something much more institutional. We, very consciously, made the decision that we wanted to be institutional, to grow institutionally, and grow more vertically and hierarchically. I think we have members for whom culturally it’s a difficult thing. We have many members who never belonged to a congregation for precisely the bad hierarchical models that they’ve been exposed to. And so, this is the first time they’ve been part of something, and as we’ve changed, and grown, and become more vertical in that way, I think there have been people who have had a hard time with it. But by and large, I think we need all of it. We need small grassroots groups, and we need mid-sized and large-sized institutions that aren’t afraid of what it takes to build real institutions if we’re going to have any real future.

AA 29:12

Yeah, I mean, one major shift for Currents in the last eight years is that we moved from more of a consensus model to more of a hierarchical model. Particularly after October 7th, because there just wasn’t a way to manufacture consensus where it didn’t exist on certain things. And it was slowing us down so much that we just couldn’t move. I mean, it was just impossible. And there was some resistance. There was a lot of working it out in endless meetings: Are we going to do this? Are we not? But I think that actually once we made that switch, there was a lot of relief. People started to feel way more relieved that, actually, certain things were just not part of their job.

BR 29:57

And things were getting done.

AA 29:58

And things were getting done. And as long as everything was on the table for everyone, and everyone had to be in every meeting, there was this impetus to be there to control the thing. But as soon as you were like, “Well, this part of the process is actually not part of your responsibility,” people were quite relieved. It actually shifted things somewhat quickly and allowed people to get back to their work. I also think about—there was another magazine that launched around the same time as ours that I won’t call out, but I thought it was a great magazine. I loved it. And there were allegations against one of the editors, assault allegations, which were not reflective of the culture of the place. This was one individual person. There were a whole host of great editors and people working there, but because they were not formalized—because they weren’t professionalized—that just ended the magazine. I think what’s great about having these systems and having a formal governance structure, and a board, and all these things is that no one person can tank the magazine. The magazine exists independently, and it’s insulated, on some level, from any one scandal.

BR 31:14

Yeah, that’s how it should be. It’s not easy. It’s a lot of work, but it’s sure preferable to having a tanking institution. This brings up something that I think about a lot, too, because I think the anti-Zionist Jewish movement, for lack of a better term, is still in its emergent phase, and I don’t know what the future looks like. The Jewish establishment and the Zionist movement is so hegemonic still, and like you say, it’s doubling down, it’s not giving up anytime soon. If anything, the backlash is fiercer than ever. And I wonder if this is a model—you hear often that if it’s like a Yohanan ben Zakkai model—that we’re always going to be this dissident movement within empire; we’ll carve out our own corner of empire to preserve the soul of Judaism. Is that all that we’re satisfied with? Do we want to seize something greater in terms of power, in terms of institutional power?

AA 32:13

Well, I think the answer has to be yes.

BR 32:15

The latter.

AA 32:16

The latter. I mean, it doesn’t mean we seize those institutions, but it does mean we supplant them.

BR 32:21

And you think that’s possible?

AA 32:22

Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what is or is impossible. I do know that—and I said this last week, at our live tapings on the podcast last week—I do know that the backlash in the U.S. on all sides to Zionism and the state of Israel is so intense that yes, some people will double down, but some people will not. Some people will choose their American-ness and their relationships with their neighbors. Look, it has been very easy to be an American Zionist. It hasn’t meant that you have to choose between all your relationships or whatever—that you feel shunned in all spaces. Certainly, in most places that you work, your coworkers aren’t like: Oh, that guy’s a Zionist. That hasn’t been the case in the past, but it is now, and I do think that actually, it’ll break in both directions. You’ll get people who are really, really committed, and Peter was talking last week about how a lot of those people will be Orthodox. But I think that you’re also going to see a lot of people who are just as willing, actually, to start re-examining things when it costs them something. Because Zionism has been a fantasy, always. In any case, if you’re holding a fantasy and it just brings a warm, fuzzy feeling into your life and no downside, then there’s no cost to holding that fantasy. But if it starts to be costly, some people will just let it go.

BR 33:46

I don’t know how anyone can consider it warm and fuzzy in this particular moment. The contortions it must take.

AA 33:54

I mean, yeah, but people do.

BR 33:56

They do, they do.

AA 33:57

But I’m glad we got on this tack because I was even going to ask you some pastoral advice. We got into this conversation last week because we got a letter from a listener, basically just about how much of Judaism is salvageable. I really do think that if we thought that we were in the ben Zakkai model, where we are always the minority, we’re just holding something down—if I really thought that some transformation wasn’t possible of Judaism as a whole, I don’t think I could do this. Because I don’t see the point in maintaining some dissenting opinion on what Judaism is if what Judaism is going to be, for as long as the Earth’s climate is still hospitable to human life, is this. Then like, why not give it up? Why hold on? I wrote about this in my goodbye letter, which is still behind a paywall but will be in subscribers’ hands very soon. Passover this year was really hard for me. I was like: I don’t know if I can keep doing this in this moment. And I feel like we may not win the whole thing or in all regards, but we have to win this.

BR 35:12

Yeah, I completely understand the question you’re asking. I get asked it all the time. All the time. What I love the most about Judaism and Jewish spiritual tradition is that it has always found a way to adapt. It always has. There’s an inherent creativity that’s baked into Judaism that it has pivoted, and changed, and adapted through incredibly, sometimes cataclysmic circumstances. It’s always found a way. And I’m not just saying that. I really do believe that. And look, if someone just can’t bear to go to a Passover Seder, I’m not going to try to convince them to do it, but I will try to help them understand how Passover does have ways in, even in this heinous moment, that can not just be comforting, but can allow them to use Judaism as a way to be in the world. I do believe that. That it’s not the same Judaism that we’ve assumed up until now, and we have to figure it out together. I think one thing for me—I guess one of my Jewish values and one I think that we cherish in our congregation, and I think I’ve inherited as a Reconstructionist Jew, is this notion of universalism. That being a Jew is not this tribal, us-against-the-world identity, and that, when it comes to Pesach, for instance, we’re not just reading about Jewish liberation, that the Israelites are not the Jewish people. The Israelites are any people who have lived under oppression. And likewise, Pharaoh can be any oppressor, even the Jewish people. So for me, one of the roads into using our tradition as a way of spiritually responding to the moment is universalizing these values. Doesn’t mean giving up on belonging to a people or belonging to a community, but it also means that we take very seriously that we are part of a human community and that Judaism is a way to refract our humanness.

AA 37:12

Yeah, I mean, I have been thinking about the transformation of Judaism from a strategic standpoint, as it relates to the Palestine movement, for a long time. I think I’m maybe more—I mean, I’ve had this conversation with Alissa Wise a lot—where I know that the transformation of Judaism is not Palestine solidarity work per se or directly, but I don’t think it’s wholly separate from it. I think that there is a way that the transformation of Judaism helps to decompose Zionism within Jewish spaces, and I think that we have an opportunity, in this moment, that’s like: This is the window, right now, to make a play for a completely new generation of people.

BR 38:01

I don’t know if this speaks to what you’re saying, but for instance, every Friday night we do a hashkivenu for the people of Gaza before we do the regular hashkivenu. Hashkivenu is the prayer, evening prayer, where you invoke God’s shelter: As the evening sky spreads, it’s God sheltering us. It’s something that I think we all look forward to doing. It’s something that’s really important to us as Jews, and it’s a part of this new kind of Judaism that’s rooted in Palestine solidarity. I would never do that hashkivenu at a rally or in a public setting. It is really for internal consumption only. There are a myriad of reasons why it would be terribly inappropriate to center Judaism, and Hebrew, and all of these things in a Palestine solidarity public event. But it does serve to point us toward a new kind of Judaism that I think you’re talking about, that incorporates Palestine solidarity as a kind of mitzvah, as a sacred part of the Judaism that we are seeking to create and to teach to our kids.

AA 39:07

I did want to ask you about the rabbinic vocation and what the future of that is. We’ve come off a conversation about leadership, but particularly rabbinic leadership—most of the rabbis I know are drowning. There’s a ton of burnout. It’s a very emotionally taxing and time-consuming role. I know you had some thoughts about that, and I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t get you on the record.

BR 39:35

Yeah, I think being any kind of clergy is always taxing, and overwhelming, and depleting, and I don’t know that the current moment is any more than it ever was. I will say, I was not prepared for this in rabbinical school. We were not taught self-care. We were not taught the importance of replenishing your own well in order to be able to draw from it for others. We weren’t taught about clinical things like compassion fatigue, and all of that is very real and is, in some ways, baked into this impossible job. And I don’t think it’s unique to being a rabbi, either. I talked to other clergy friends and colleagues about it, just the way that the job is defined—the amount of things that we are expected to be good at, the extent to which we have to be on call in this hyper-vigilant state.

AA 40:22

I relate to a lot of this.

BR 40:24

Yeah. Rabbi Arielle. I learned early on, and I had some astute congregants who also happened to be therapists who said: If you keep doing this the way you’re doing it, you’re going to burn yourself out. Maybe it is being felt more keenly in the current moment, just because of the level of despair that’s out there in the world, just in general. It probably is the case, but I didn’t start now.

AA 40:49

Yeah, self-care has always been hard for me. It’s hard for me to actually imagine what that looks like when you have a congregation that has these needs. Like if somebody dies, you may be in the middle of your self-care ritual, but you have to be there. Obviously, I’m in a very different line of work, but I’ve felt that urgency, just in terms of knowing that—again, I’m speaking to the scarcity of anti-Zionist institutions—knowing that if we didn’t say a certain thing, it might not be said at all.

BR 41:23

And things change so quickly.

AA 41:25

And things change so quickly. We always thought of ourselves as slower, like in a slower model to begin with, and yet, these last couple of years, everything felt so high stakes in particular, and it’s been hard to know how to speak, step away, or to know how to privilege myself within that. That’s really the reason that I’m not going to do this role anymore. So, I appreciate what you’re saying, and I also am like, I don’t know what self-care looks like as it relates to communal leadership. More for the rabbis than in my sense.

BR 42:01

I think it looks the same as it does for anybody. I really believe that if I was teaching self-care in rabbinical school, I would say that you need to figure out what fills you up, your thing alone. It can be related to Judaism, it can be related to anything, but what fills your well. And then, you need to take responsibility for finding the time to do it, and not see any shame in it, or feel any indulgence in it, but that you have to do it because if you deplete yourself, you’re not going to be good to yourself or anyone else out there. One of the poignant ironies of being a rabbi is that I think a lot of us become rabbis because we love Judaism so much. And then, we become rabbis, and we become professional Jews, and our own Judaism is taken away from us. We don’t have the time for personal practice like we did. We work every single Shabbat. We’re doing it for others. I haven’t been a normal Jew since I’ve literally been in my mid-twenties. So, part of what I’m excited about is figuring out how to be Jewish at 63, because I’m almost starting all over again. I mean, I’m not that person anymore, so I’m excited to discover what that might look like.

AA 43:11

I feel exactly the same, actually. Not as a Jew, but as a reader and a writer. As an intellectual, basically. I’ve been thinking in public for so long that I actually don’t know what it’s like to think in private, which is where a lot of the deeper work happens. I think that actually takes a toll over time, and even just with my own reading regimen—I mean, the last thing that I want to do when I get off of work is read anything. And sometimes, I’m getting off of work 10, 11 p.m., it’s like, I’m not going to read before bed. I’m watching television, you know? And so, actually, getting my intellectual life back is going to be a big piece of this.

BR 44:00

I can relate to that. Yeah.

AA 44:01

I guess my last question is: Do you think you’ll miss it?

BR 44:04

Yes. It’s a wild way to make a living for all the reasons that we’ve talked about, but I’ve loved it. I wouldn’t do it this long if I didn’t. And there’s a lot about it—I’ll be honest with you—there’s a lot about it I won’t miss. I’m looking forward to getting part of my life back, where I’m able to create some space to explore other ways to be in the world without the constant hypervigilance of the congregational rabbinate. I’ll still be hypervigilant because we all are, but that won’t have that extra layer, I suppose.

AA 44:41

Amen. Brant Rosen, thank you for your service.

BR 44:47

I just want to say, Arielle, thank you. Jewish Currents has been a godsend for so many people, and what you and others have been able to build it into has really filled such a void in the world and in the Jewish world specifically. So, I hope you’re taking some pride in what you’ve been able to create because it means a lot to a lot of us.

AA 45:07

Thank you. I appreciate it. I’m trying. I have so many competing feelings, like grief, and relief, and regret, and so many things, but I am trying to make some room for gratitude and pride.

BR 45:22

I hope so.

AA 45:23

This has been another episode of On the Nose. On the Nose is edited by Jesse Brenneman. Thank you to our guest, Rabbi Brant Rosen. If you like this episode, share it, like it, leave us a review. And as always, subscribe to Jewish Currents: JewishCurrents.org.