Dear Friends,

We know it’s a busy time, but this won’t take long!  You can help JYW tremendously by taking less than 10 minutes to fill out our online survey about JYW’s impact on your Jewish engagement and attitudes, and your interest in a new program possibility. Your input will help JYW open more opportunities for Jews and their loved ones with programs you’ve asked for. The deadline for your response is Monday December 19th, so Please Click Here to Begin!

Gratefully,
Judaism Your Way

You’ll find copies of the High Holy Day Machzor Prayer Book and text of Rabbi Brian’s talks, along with resources from past holidays.

Download JYW’s page in Slingshot pdf

See article at the Boulder Jewish News

By Staff on ‍‍October 18, 2011 – 20 Tishre 5772

DENVER – Oct. 18, 2011 –Judaism Your Way (JYW), a Denver-based outreach organization, has been named one of the 50 most innovative Jewish nonprofits in North America by Slingshot ’11-‘12, a resource guide for Jewish innovation. JYW was selected because of its pioneering work in offering education, rabbinic services, and holiday celebrations for all Jews and their loved ones in a wholly inclusive and pluralistic manner. JYW’s goal is to be responsive to people “wherever they are on their Jewish journeys.”

The Slingshot guide is used by philanthropists, volunteers, not-for-profit executives, and program participants to identify trailblazing organizations grappling with concerns in Jewish life such as identity, community, and tradition.

Lolly Gold, JYW’s executive director said: “Our inclusion in Slingshot ’11-’12 is a tremendous honor and a strong validation of our approach to outreach. We believe that what’s needed is a Judaism that goes beyond welcoming, and opens a gateway for all Jews and their loved ones. They may be interfaith, LGBT, single, too young, too old, too free-spirited, too poor, or too something to fit into or feel welcomed by other Jewish institutions.”

Judaism Your Way offers low barrier, innovative opportunities for unaffiliated, disengaged or disaffected Jews and their loved ones of all identities looking for opportunities to explore and expand their experience of Judaism in personally relevant and meaningful ways.

If the Jewish people are going to grow, then inviting the richness offered by all Jews and those who love and support them can only make the soil more fertile,” said JYW’s Rabbi Brian Field. “JYW’s outreach not only seeks to gather people from multiple constituencies, but in fact successfully attracts them.”

JYW was chosen for inclusion in Slingshot ’11-’12 for the first time by a panel of 36 foundation professionals from across North America. Finalists are chosen based on their strength in four areas: innovation, impact, leadership, and organizational efficiency.

According to Will Schneider, executive director of Slingshot: “Slingshot highlights those organizations that work to ensure that Jewish life isn’t left behind as the world moves forward. We had more applications than ever this year, with a wider variety of missions. In order to be selected by our evaluators, innovations and their impact had to resonate more than ever.”

The Slingshot guide contains information about each organization’s origin, mission, strategy, impact and budget, as well as details about its unique character. The book, published annually, is available in hard copy and as a free download at www.judaismyourway.org and www.slingshotfund.org.

Inspired five years ago by Slingshot, a group of next-generation philanthropists launched the Slingshot Fund, a collective giving mechanism to support innovative Jewish life. In just five cycles, 55 members of the Slingshot Fund have contributed more than $1.8 million to innovative Jewish not-for-profits.

By Rabbi Brian Field

The day I realized the following truth was a day of both huge relief and enormous excitement for me: Our time is not the first time that the Jewish people has engaged in rethinking Jewish identity.

In Biblical times, Israelite identity was patrilineal (through the father) and did not exist independent of land rights and political status. Non-Israelites joined the community by marrying into an Israelite family. Following the loss of Jewish sovereignty under the Roman Empire and the dispersion of the Jewish people to minority status in small communities throughout the world, identity became matrilineal: one could claim Jewish identity by descent if one’s mother was Jewish. One could also choose to become Jewish by going through a process of religious conversion.

In the late 20th century, in response to changes in the Jewish community, the Reconstructionist and Reform movements adopted a position that became known as patrilineal descent. What this means is that if one parent is Jewish, and the parents identify the child as having an exclusively Jewish religious identity, than the child is considered to have the status of being Jewish.

The Jewish people continues to evolve. The patrilineal descent position did not account for same-sex families. Nor did it anticipate the revolution in third-party reproduction options, or a time when a majority of marriages involving Jews would be to a partner who is not Jewish. Or a time when western culture would support and celebrate people with multiple, complex identities, starting with the US’s bi-racial President.

Clearly, fresh thinking about Jewish identity is needed. And that’s what brought my rabbinic colleagues together in early March. We’re living in a fluid time that calls for creative and inspired responses. It’s just our luck that we are one of the oldest and most adaptive traditions in the world. Today Judaism is embracing people with a wider variety of backgrounds and paths than ever before. I see this trend as a source of new input and even survival blueprints if we figure out Jewish ways to engage and include.

What an exciting time to be a rabbi! I get to help to develop the vocabulary, the rituals and the evolving understandings that help people find Judaism their way.

By Rabbi Brian Field

In the conventional view, Jewish identity is a fixed thing. Either you are Jewish or you’re not. And rabbis are the professionals with the training and expertise to help determine whether someone is Jewish or not, and thus can be a member of a synagogue, be counted in a minyan, have a Jewish life cycle ceremony (baby naming, bar/t mitzvah, a wedding with a huppah), or be buried in a Jewish cemetery. If you’re not Jewish and you want to be, then you go through a process of conversion with guidance from a rabbi.

But that understanding ignores a growing contemporary reality, which is the the complex, rich, ambiguous and fluid identities of more and more people with Jewish connections. My evolving understanding of Jewish identity acknowledges that there is no one place where the mountain begins: a “both-and” understanding of Jewish identity that includes those who find themselves on the “shore” – that affirms the times one is more connected to the dry land, and also affirms the times when one is more connected to the sea.

Here’s a way of expressing that idea in Kaplan’s language:

Just as “God is the power in the universe that makes for human salvation,” Jewish identity is the desire and ability to identify and embrace one’s human-ness in Jewish terms.

And that means that the authority/responsibility of rabbis and Jewish communities is to help any human being who wishes to do so to embrace their human-ness Jewishly.

In practical terms, it’s less a matter of matching people up with pre-set categories, less a sense of “what is this person?” than helping people frame their sacred moments with Jewish vocabulary and grounding what they are reaching for in Jewish spirituality, to frame the questions and offer the Jewish vocabulary that can ground, grow and flex with the growing complexity of people’s Jewish journeys.

Going back to the metaphor of the tallit, my job as a rabbi is to help them tie their own tzitzit, to connect them to Judaism and Jewishness even though they may feel themselves to be, others may consider them, and they may objectively be “off the tallit,” outside of our inherited norms of who is a Jew.

What’s most interesting is that the Jewish people have wrestled with these issues before. Next week I’ll discuss some of what we can learn from our past eras of fluid Jewish identity.

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.