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Shefa's Rabbi Blog List
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Alban Weekly 6/4/2012 -- "Weighing the Giant Fly"
from SAVEKOACH.ORG
from SAVEKOACH.ORG & SHEFANETWORK.ORG
KOACH Fact Sheet
USCJ wants to put KOACH on "hiatus"
Background
-KOACH is a project of The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.
-Thousands of students have benefited from KOACH. Many of them have become important leaders in the Jewish community.
- KOACH has provided 20 years of support and enrichment for Conservative Judaism on campus, working with Hillels, communities and individuals.
-KOACH is a resource for all students, no matter where they are on their Jewish Journey.
-KOACH provides progressive religious role models as well as programming for the entire college Jewish community.
-Five years ago, KOACH had a budget of 750K; this year, 127K
-KOACH has provided: Campus Interns, Enrichment Grants, Taglit-Birthright Israel for participants with Asperger's Syndrome, International KOACH Kallah, Dynamic Web Resources and monthly Ezine, Weekly 2 Minute Torah podcasts, the KOACH Faculty Program, onsite education, counseling, consultation for Jewish college choices and individual campus concerns and more.
-With extremely limited resources in the past year KOACH has still managed to continue to transform conservative Jewish life on campuses across North America
-USCJ Strategic Plan of March 2011 identifies the KOACH program as mission critical: "It is recognized that a continuing presence on campus for Conservative Judaism is vital to maintain the bridge between our high school students and the young adult post-college generation.
Today
-On Friday, June 1, 2012, The Jewish Week posted the following: "Rabbi Steven Wernick, chief executive officer for the United Synagogue, told The Jewish Week on Thursday that while Koach remains "a valued program," it would be "on hiatus" unless and until philanthropic funds can be secured to continue its work at colleges around the country." http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/breaking_news/conservative_movement_likely_suspend_college_outreach
-From ejewishphilanthropy.com: Wernick: Koach Closing, It's "Non-strategic" http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/wernick-koach-closing-its-non-strategic/
What you can do
-Send an email to Rabbi Steven Wernick, Chief Executive Officer of the USCJ (wernick@uscj.org)
-Send an email to Richard Skolnik, International President of the USCJ (skolnik@uscj.org)
-Join the effort to save the program with your donation, no matter how small, via the KOACH home page (www.koach.org) or the Women's League for Conservative Judaism (www.wlcj.org)
-Sign the petition at savekoach.org for:
a) Immediate reversal of the decision to suspend or eliminate the KOACH program next year
b) A commitment to additional personnel dedicated to fundraising and development which will secure long term, sustainable funding for the KOACH program
Links
A Response to the NY Jewish Week story: "Conservative Movement Likely to Suspend College Outreach"
A point of clarification in response to a deeply inaccurate headline for the NY Jewish Week story (pasted below and available here). The Conservative Movement will never suspend College Outreach. I'm a proud product of the work led by Rabbi Elyse Winick and others to inspire young Conservative Jews, along with countless thousands of others. So, while the United Synagogue might have decided to stop its funding, the sacred work is a clear mandate of our Movement. We have Torah to share, and if not with our emerging leaders, with whom? It is time to figure out how to build a new home for College Students of the Masorti/Conservative Movement, not to ask for the continuation of what has always been de-prioritized and inadequate funding.
Conservative Movement Likely To Suspend College Outreach
The budget committee of the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism will recommend that funding be halted for Koach, the movement's national college outreach program, when the governing board meets June 10, as part of an effort to reduce the organization's deficit.
Rabbi Steven Wernick, chief executive officer for the United Synagogue, told The Jewish Week on Thursday that while Koach remains "a valued program," it would be "on hiatus" unless and until philanthropic funds can be secured to continue its work at colleges around the country.
He said painful decisions were necessary in seeking to balance the United Synagogue budget, and that while "the impact [of Koach] on those we reached was quite high, we had to look at the return on our investment," suggesting that the $225,000 program was seen as too costly in terms of the number of students who participated on 25 campuses.
The Koach program had been in jeopardy last year when Rabbi Wernick revealed plans to downsize it because of budgetary constraints. (A decade ago Koach had a budget of $750,000).
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In response, a number of college students took to Facebook and YouTube to express how important Koach was in their lives. More than 300 signed a Facebook petition calling on the United Synagogue to "save Conservative Jewish life on college campuses," and the Rabbinical Assembly, the group representing the movement's rabbis, spoke out in favor of the program.
There were indications that, partly as a result of the students' efforts, Koach would continue, though with limited resources.
Student leaders contacted on Thursday expressed surprise and disappointment with the budget committee's recommendation to end the program.
"I'd be interested to see what Rabbi Wernick's reasoning is," said Jodi Schwartz of Seattle, Washington, one of six students on Koach's steering committee. "When he came to our convention in Boston in February he seemed optimistic," which in turn sparked a sense of hope among students.
Ethan Goldberg of Boston, another member of the Koach steering committee, noted that the 145 college students who attended the Koach convention in Boston was double the attendance of the 2010 convention.
Ben Goldberg of Chicago, another member of the steering committee, said "it is clear to me that the Conservative movement has very specific space within Jewish college life to fill, and I would be deeply disappointed if the movement's institutions decided that they were no longer able to fill that gap."
The 22-year-old, about to graduate from Northwestern University, plans to spend next year at a Conservative yeshiva in Israel before enrolling at the rabbinical school of the Jewish Theological Seminary.
He said he has personally benefited from Koach over the last three years. "It confirmed for me that Jewish leadership is what I would like to dedicate my life to," Goldberg said, adding: "I think it is not logical to invest so heavily in youth programs in synagogues and in summer camps and then say as soon as a student turns 18 and goes to college that we no longer have anything for you. I don't see how that makes sense."
On Thursday Rabbi Wernick said that while his organization remains committed to serving college youth, it has over the last three years been "very aggressive in aligning budget, staff and governance with our vision and mission in a strategic way." Faced with an aging membership, a long-term decline in membership and attendant financial challenges, the United Synagogue has been focusing on shoring up existing congregations, seeking to integrate the educational system and engage the next generation of leadership.
The rabbi pointed to success in greatly increasing philanthropic giving while seeking efficiencies in governance, board size and staffing. With it all, though, he acknowledged that the organization is not out of the financial woods and that "non-strategic" programs had to be cut back or cut entirely. He said he held out hope that "philanthropic resources" could be found to bring back Koach after the program is closed in the near future.
Editor Gary Rosenblatt contributed to this report.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Forward.com: Conservative Rabbis Give Gay Marriage Advice
Forward.com: "Conservatives Give Gay Wedding Guidance"
Rabbis Adopt Two New Frameworks for Same-Sex Marriages
By Naomi Zeveloff
When Gerald Skolnik, the president of a group of 1,600 Conservative rabbis, was asked to officiate at a gay wedding last year, he didn't know where to start. "I was flying by the seat of my pants," he said. Should the wedding look like a heterosexual ceremony, or something else entirely?
Now he has guidelines to turn to. After years of deliberation, the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly has provided guidance to rabbis for performing same-sex marriages.
On May 31, the assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards approved templates, culminating a six-year-long process that began in 2006 when Conservative leaders first officially sanctioned gay relationships. Created by Rabbis Daniel Nevins, Avram Reisner and Elliot Dorff, the ritual guidelines detail two types of gay weddings, as well as gay divorce. "Both versions are egalitarian," said Nevins. "They differ mostly in style—one hews closely to the traditional wedding ceremony while the other departs from it."
The guidelines passed on a vote of 13 to 0 in the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, with one rabbi abstaining.
Neither template includes kiddushin, a step in the ceremony in which the groom presents his bride with a ring. It is regarded by most traditionally observant Jews as the essence of the ceremony that constitutes it as an act of marriage.
Instead, the templates detail a ring exchange that is based on Jewish partnership law, an established halachic concept, said Nevins.
"We acknowledge that these partnerships are distinct from those discussed in the Talmud as 'according to the laws of Moses and Israel,'" said Nevins, referring to the words used in kiddushin, "but we celebrate them with the same sense of holiness and joy as that expressed in heterosexual marriages."
The committee's templates are meant not as exclusive formulations that the rabbis would be required to use but as guidelines that Conservative rabbis can rely on. The three authors of the templates, who consulted with gay and lesbian rabbis, among others, in preparing their proposals, have stressed that that they understand individual rabbis retain significant autonomy in interpreting law. Rabbis, they said, will continue to explore and improvise in this still new area of Conservative Halacha.
In the traditional Jewish marriage ceremony that has been performed through the ages, the rabbi recites the first blessing over the wine and a second over certain prohibited sexual relationships. Next is the ring ceremony, followed by the reading of the ketubah, or the legal agreement. Finally, the rabbi recites another seven blessings, known in Hebrew as the sheva brachot. Then comes the breaking of a glass underfoot, followed by a hearty "mazel tov!" Conservative rabbis have used this model as a jumping-off point for gay unions.
For gay weddings, the forms are still evolving. With the assembly releasing its own marriage templates, four Conservative rabbis, some new to gay commitment ceremonies and others familiar with them, shared their rituals with the Forward:
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
Rabbi Menachem Creditor, who helms congregation Netivot Shalom in Berkeley, Calif., is a traditionalist when it comes to marital rites. "The important thing for me is that same-sex marriage is marriage," he said. "It is not something different."
In the 10 years that he has been conducting gay marriages, Creditor has changed virtually nothing in the conventional marriage ceremony, adjusting only gendered language where appropriate. "I see every traditional form as pregnant with meaning," he said.
Creditor's perspective is not uncommon among Conservative rabbis. For instance, across the country, Rabbi David Lerner of Temple Emunah outside Boston also hews closely to traditional rites. "I tried to keep the elements as similar as possible so if you walked into that ceremony you would say, 'I am at a Jewish wedding,'" he said.
But Creditor goes a step beyond most rabbis, maintaining language that might strike others as inapplicable to gay couples. Creditor keeps most of the text in the last of the seven blessings, which refers to the rejoicing of brides and grooms. He changes only the last line to refer to a groom and a groom — or a bride and a bride. The wording "is not an imposition on a gay couple that they should be straight," he said. "It is an admission that sexual orientation is not a reason to limit joy."
Rabbi Gerald Skolnik
In contrast to Creditor, Skolnik has used a service that hints at the traditional Jewish wedding but ultimately deviates from the ancient rites.
Skolnik, president of the Rabbinical Assembly, roots his ceremony in a foundational Jewish ritual: the blessing over the wine. But for the second blessing dealing with sexual prohibition, he substitutes a prayer from the sheva brachot, which blesses God "who creates man in your image." "It was an acknowledgment that whether gay or straight, you are a sacred human being," said Skolnik.
Skolnik created the ceremony last year for a gay male couple at Forest Hills Jewish Center, where he is a pulpit rabbi. By his own admission, Skolnik was hesitant in applying traditional Jewish marriage rites to a homosexual union. "My effort was to try and craft some kind of ceremony that would be spiritual and Jewish, but not a clone" of traditional marriage, he said.
The ceremony did not take place under a chuppah, nor do the grooms break glasses underfoot. Rather than use the traditional prayer over the ring exchange, Skolnik replaced it with language he found on a liturgical website called Ritualwell. Though a surrogate ketubah was present, the seven blessings were not.
Though Skolnik was reluctant to map traditional wedding rites onto a gay union, he had no qualms about marrying the couple in the eyes of the state. Since gay marriage is legal in New York State, Skolnik signed the couple's marriage license.
Rabbi Ayelet Cohen
"My starting point," said Ayelet Cohen, former rabbi at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, Manhattan's LGBTQ synagogue, "is that a contemporary Jewish wedding should be a wedding between two individuals." In other words, the basis for her ceremony is equality between the betrothed, gay or straight.
Cohen, who first drafted a ceremony for her lesbian sister, maintains the broad structure of Conservative rites, but alters the liturgical language to square with contemporary mores. The wedding takes place under a chuppah and includes the first blessing over the wine. For the second blessing, she thanks God for sanctifying human sexuality. "Blessed are You, our God, Source of Life, who frees us from fear and shame and opens us to the holiness of our bodies and their pleasures," she says.
In traditional weddings, a man gives a woman a ring. Like many Conservative rabbis, Cohen makes this portion of the service a reciprocal ring exchange. But she does not change the liturgy. "For people who are familiar with the traditional Jewish wedding, this is one of the pieces that feels most authentic."
Cohen reads the ketubah and then recites the seven blessings, changing the wording about a bride and a groom to refer to same-sex individuals. The fifth blessing, which describes a barren city now filled with children, troubles Cohen in its implication that a couple would be happy only if they procreate. Instead, Cohen changes the language to rejoice in the "uprooting of senseless hatred" from the earth.
"I think it is about the couple repairing the world through a commitment to perpetuating the next generation," she said. "I don't think it has to be about them actually raising their own children."
Rabbi Stuart Kelman
Rabbi Stuart Kelman, now retired from Congregation Netivot Shalom, formulated a ceremony that parallels, but does not replicate, a Jewish heterosexual wedding. "I wanted to develop something that is equal in function to the traditional ceremony," he said. "You can easily change the words so long as the words do the same thing as the original."
At the time he drafted his ceremony, Kelman said, gay marriage was such a new phenomenon that "I felt that it needed a name to distinguish it from a heterosexual union." But he points out that today the practice is commonplace.
Kelman's model is not a wedding but a Brit Reyut, or "covenant of love." His ceremony utilizes a new terminology. Instead of a chuppah, the couple marries beneath a sukkah. The ring ceremony is a chalifin, the Hebrew term for exchange. Kelman utilizes a shtar, or a deed, in place of a ketubah.
The service begins with the blessing over the wine. But in place of the prohibition on sexual activity, Kelman substitutes the shehecheyanu, a prayer for special occasions.
And both partners break glasses.
Contact Naomi Zeveloff at zeveloff@forward.com or on Twitter @NaomiZeveloff
Read more: http://forward.com/articles/157142/conservatives-give-gay-wedding-guidance/?p=all#ixzz1wUce1uvF
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Rabbi Julie Schonfeld in Ha'aretz: "Recognition of non-Orthodox rabbis is a partial - but hopeful - victory"
Recognition of non-Orthodox rabbis is a partial - but hopeful - victory
In stable democracies, struggles to overcome fundamental inequalities are, by definition, won by incremental victories.
| The decision by the Attorney General to recognize Masorti and Reform rabbis as community leaders and fund their salaries under certain limited circumstances could be an inflection point in the path towards a new relationship for Judaism and the Jewish state. |
It is a partial victory, still replete with inconsistencies that temper its impact – the rabbis can serve outlying communities but not in cities, they are paid from a different budget, they may not exercise leadership in matters characterized by decision-making in halakah. Nonetheless, this victory gives ample reason for hope. In stable democracies, struggles to overcome fundamental inequalities are, by definition, won by incremental victories.
The chasm has been narrowed between those whose religious views gave them total entitlement to conduct their religious lives as they chose, funded by the Israeli taxpayer to the tune of $450 million every year, and those who did not enjoy what Israel's Basic Law so eloquently calls "freedom of religion and conscience." Israel has brought freedom and sovereignty to the Jewish people in ways heretofore unknown, but in matters of faith and tradition, the Jew in Israel still awaits emancipation.
Equal funding is a central issue.
As noted above, the Orthodox establishment receives at least $450 million per year in taxpayer funds in comparison to approximately $60,000 for the Masorti and Reform movements. There aren't other organized Jewish religious movements or expressions in Israel seeking funding, because the imposition of a government-funded religious monopoly squashes the appetite to invent such things before they start.
We must not lose sight of the larger goal. Rabbi Miri Gold is the Jewish religious leader chosen by her community to inspire and strengthen them. What our hearts long for is an Israel where every Jew can find a community and select teachers who bring Torah and Jewish tradition in a way that inspires them. We imagine a time when the outstanding qualities of Israel's young – their courage, their dedication, their creativity, are both strengthened by a Judaism they desire and in which they are the inventors of religious vitality and innovation. We would like to imagine that historians in hundreds of years will look back on a golden age where Judaism in the Jewish state can flourish in ways previously unimagined.
The need to seek redress and equality, mostly through the courts, masks the true terms of the discussion which are about how Israel can avail herself of the power and beauty of Judaism. We are the inheritors of a religious tradition characterized by dialogue among multiple voices – the Talmud page itself is designed to share and to facilitate a conversation. We hope for the day when Israel will truly embody the Mishnah's principle of אלו ואלו דברי אלוהים חיים הן – that "[both] these and these" are the words of the living God – a clear statement dating back to our most basic rabbinic teachings, that Judaism recognizes multiple paths. Only equal funding for all streams of Judaism will achieve this goal.
Rabbi Julie Schonfeld is Executive Vice President of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international umbrella organization for Conservative rabbis.