Tony Jones reports the difficult news that our friend Dieter Zander, with whom so many of us spent time at the January 2006 gathering, has suffered a stroke and remains under sedation.

Updates about Dieter’s situation are available here.

Dieter is a true emergent-religion pioneer. In the mid-1980s, he founded the first-ever GenX Church, New Song, in West Covina, California. In the mid-1990s, Willow Creek’s Bill Hybels invited him to launch Axis, Willow’s church-within-a-church for GenXers. Since 2000 he has lived in the Bay Area, where he and Mark Scandrette cofounded Re-Imagine; he now is the Pastor of Arts and Spiritual Formation at BayMarin Community Church, working with David Cobia, who also was with us in January 2006.

Our prayers for a speedy and complete healing, healing of body and healing of spirit, are with Dieter and his family.

Writing in The Forward, my old schoolmate Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove rightly notes that

[W]hile Judaism may be a religion of deed and not creed, a generation that does not invest its energy into the question of Jewish belief is a generation that will find itself without the life-sustaining aquifers necessary to keep it vital.

He points out that without theology, kashrut, circumcision, and Israel are, respectively, a diet, a medical technique, and another problematic Middle Eastern country.

And without theology, the synagogue is just another old boys’ or old girls’ club, or perhaps just another preschool.

Larry Hoffman has started the conversation (PDF download). Anyone want to join him and Elliot?

(Thanks to Jewschool’s LastTrumpet for the heads-up.)

This post by Ron Wolfson

When I was a kid in Nebraska, Thanksgiving was all about turkey and football. In contradistinction to the Jewish meals of my youth, the Thanksgiving celebration was curiously absent of any ritual whatsoever, except the annual fight over which of us brothers got to eat the enormous pupik (gizzard)! In school, we learned some great patriotic American songs and a little ditty about going to Grandma’s house, but we never sang them at the Thanksgiving table.

One day in the 1980’s, my friend Dr. Larry Neinstein, director of student health services at USC, said to me: “You know, Thanksgiving could really use a ceremony like the Passover Seder. It’s the one time of the year most Americans sit down to a meal together.” Larry knew that I had written a guidebook for conducting a Seder. I said: “Let’s write a Thanksgiving Haggadah.” We began work on it…but life intervened and we didn’t get very far.

Shortly after 9/11, Larry called again. “Now is the time for elevating Thanksgiving” and we began again. I mentioned the project to my friend and S3K Board member, the brilliant Lee Meyerhoff Hendler [an S3K board member --ed.]. It turns out that Lee’s mother, Lyn, was a true patriot, and the idea captivated her. Larry and I handed off the idea and our preliminary work to Lee - and she was off and running. After a number of years field-testing, Lee has created a magnificent interactive family celebration for Thanksgiving called “Freedom’s Feast.”

The downloadable booklet is available free online here. It is a wonderful compendium of texts, songs, and stories that illuminate the values of American democracy.

Our family has introduced Freedom’s Feast into our annual Thanksgiving celebration with great success. At first, some people were wary…and one of my cousins had a fit when I said we had to turn off the football game for ten minutes. It was the singing of the great patriotic songs that captured everyone. And, when people had the opportunity to say something about what America means to them, well…I wish I had taped my immigrant relative who spoke so movingly about how America saved his life.

This Thanksgiving “seder” can work in congregations and other community groups – and there are short, shorter and shortest versions of the script for family and friends, plus an interfaith ceremony. A huge yasher koach to Lee for creating a wonderful way to enhance our Thanksgiving celebrations!

As Rabbi Sid Schwarz, author of the just-released Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World, writes in this JTA op-ed:

[I]f the Jewish community made social action a signature part of what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century — not in lieu of Jewish learning and practice, but as a complementary part of it — we have a good chance to capture a new generation of Jews with a legacy that traces back to our biblical ancestors.

In the absence of time-stopping pre-cogs who walk through walls and recover from any injury, this is a good start.

This post was written by Ron Wolfson

It looks like our Christian friends have discovered Shabbes.

In the New York Times article (10/22/06) titled “Prepare Thee for Some Serious Marketing,” we learn that one of the granddaddy megachurches - Willow Creek Community Church in Barrington, Illinois - has introduced “The Table,” a new program for members featuring a meal, conversation and prayer. Willow Creek brought in Randy Frazee, a well-known author and leader in the church growth movement (see his The Connecting Church), to create a new way to do small groups. In his book, Frazee emphasizes the importance of relationships that lead to a genuine sense of belonging as opposed to the sometimes superficial social circles that are the result of forced groups. With “The Table,” the church is targeting members who live in the same neighborhoods and bringing them together for an informal meal and conversation, hoping to strengthen connectedness and loyalty to the brand of Willow Creek. More than 6,000 people recently attended several hundred weekend “Tables” in the neighborhoods surrounding the church.

There’s a new movie coming out called Deja Vu and this story feels like deja vu all over again. Some 25 years ago when I first began to research “family education” approaches in other religions, I visited with the key leadership of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City to learn about their very successful “Family Home Evening” model.

“Oh,” Brother John told me, “it’s really quite simple. Every Monday night, we ask families to gather together for a meal, seated at a table rather than in front of the television, and we encourage the parents and children to talk with one another about spiritual matters beyond ‘what did you do in school today.’ There is usually some Bible study, some singing, and lots of interaction. Some families even do the dinner by candle light!”

Add some wine - and it sounds like Shabbat to me!

Synagogue 3000 has identified a similar phenomenon among what we call Jewish Emergent spiritual communities - groups that emphasize the notion of hospitality as a fundamental building block for community organizing. Rabbi Dov Gartenberg of Panim Hadashot in Seattle has hosted many “table” meetings over Shabbat and holiday celebrations in homes throughout the area… Some of our S2K/S3K congregations have introduced similar attempts to transcend the borders of the synagogue parking lot.

In my recent book, The Spirituality of Welcoming: How to Transform Your Congregation into a Sacred Community (Jewish Lights Publishing), I emphasize the importance of creating a synagogue of relationships that goes far deeper than the typical program-centered menu of activities offered by most congregations. “The Table” and the experiments of Jewish Emergent are examples of what I call radical hospitality, a critical component of sacred community.

Finally, lest you think this idea is only for young professionals, my wife Susie and I - along with four other baby-boomer couples whose adult children have flown the coop - enjoy Shabbat dinner once a month with our “Empty Nester Shabbat Group.” It’s a potluck “table” which begins at 7:30 p.m. and often lasts late into the evening, filled with great food, ritual, heated political conversation, good jokes, and always begins and ends with blessings. There is only one rule: no children allowed. No synagogue created this group; we did it ourselves to meet a sharply perceived need; Shabbes just didn’t feel right when sitting alone at home.

Clearly, it’s harder to do this than to bring people into the synagogue building. But, just as the Hillel Foundation learned to transform itself by branching out beyond its buildings to reach college students, synagogues that reach out and extend their brand into the neighborhoods and dining rooms of their members may very well find this to be an important step in transforming frequent-flyer congregations into communities of meaning.

Beliefnet.com reports on a new article in the American Sociological Review which finds that “Americans’ social contacts are shrinking and ‘more focused on the very strong bonds of the nuclear family.’” From the news story:

Possible causes of the shrinking circle of close contacts include an increase in work hours and the influence of Internet communication….

…Americans increasingly are confiding in fewer people while the number of people who say they have no one with whom to discuss important matters more than doubled to nearly 25 percent in 2004, up from 10 percent of those surveyed in 1985.

In such an environment, it is vital that churches and synagogues do not just prioritize hospitality and welcoming, but indeed make it core to their congregational identity.

Our colleagues Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer have published “Whatever Happened to the Jewish People” in the June issue of Commentary.

In response to a conversation initiated by Jewschool.com’s Mobius, Steven has responded with a Top 7 list of what he calls “reasons for the decline of peoplehood, most of them (no surprise), sociologically rooted, and few of them blaming anybody in particular. In no special order [NB: the comments in parentheses are his]:

1. American society"s support for innovation and diversity (a good thing, I think, in its own right, but a challenge to peoplehood nonetheless).
2. The focus on the pursuit of individual meaning in religious life and Judaism (same comment).
3. The ascendance of sample-and-assemble identities (same comment).
4. Greater fluidity of identities and the decline of institutional and partisan loyalties of all sorts (actually, this trend I"m not so happy about).
5. Decline in Israel"s ability to inspire (also not such a good thing).
6. Distance from American Jews" pre-American ethnic origins (inevitable).
7. Declining inter-personal connections among Jews as spouses, friends, neighbors, and co-workers (possibly the biggest factor and not at all a good thing).

Jconnect is an initiative aimed at “building Jewish community for post-college young adults in Seattle.” It “offer[s] regular weekly classes for Jewish young adults to enrich their minds and bodies. These courses are planned based on the interests of our participants and designed to be engaging, convenient and affordable.”

Here is the official listing for Dov and Dwight’s emerging conversation in Seattle, entitled “Seeking Common Ground”:

A Conversation with a Rabbi and a Pastor On Religious Identity and Belief in a Pluralistic World

Taught by Rabbi Dov Gartenberg and Pastor Dwight Friesen

Tue May 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 from 7:30 pm to 9 pm at Hillel

$25 per person for 5 sessions - SIGN UP NOW!

Our first Jconnect Seattle class specifically reaching out to Jewish and Christian young adult participants, this new course will offer a unique opportunity for interfaith discussion on religious identity and faith in a world of diverse choices and religious contentiousness. Does my religious identity or lack thereof help or deter my relationship with others in a diverse society? Does a sense of religious choseness make sense in our times? What is religious conversion in pluralistic world? What does it mean to affirm your faith tradition in a world of multiple ‘truths"? This course will use dialogue, text, and film to spur discussion as we attempt to answer some of these emerging questions about the future of religious life. Do you have a Christian or Jewish friend who might be interested in this class? Email them a link to this description.

Rabbi Dov Gartenberg is the founder and rabbi of Panim Hadashot-New Faces of Judaism, a pluralistic education and outreach organization which has received national attention for its innovative approaches. Dov is a Conservative Rabbi with a strong background in comparative religions.

Pastor Dwight Friesen is a local Christian theologian and leader of the emergent Christianity movement.

Last night I attended the Los Angeles premier of The Tribe, “an unorthodox, unauthorized history of the Jewish people and the Barbie doll …in about 15 minutes”:

What can the most successful doll on the planet show us about being Jewish today? Narrated by Peter Coyote, the film mixes old school narration with a new school visual style. The Tribe weaves together archival footage, graphics, animation, Barbie dioramas, and slam poetry to take audiences on an electric ride through the complex history of both the Barbie doll and the Jewish people- from Biblical times to present day. By tracing Barbie"s history, the film sheds light on what it means to be an American Jew in the 21st Century.

The Tribe, conceived and directed by Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain, was supported by many of the foundations currently supporting Jewish Emergent, including the Andrea & Charles Bronfman Slingshot Fund, Natan, the Righteous Persons Foundation (via REBOOT), and many others. Consultants on the film included S3K Jewsh Emergent Working Group members Andy Bachman and Amichai Lau-Lavie.

The film probably had its desired effect on me, leaving me with more questions than answers. Very wisely, the film doesn’t ever give a fixed definition of “tribe,” nor does it weigh in on the infamous “Who is a Jew?” debate.

The Barbie motif is an excellent vehicle for talking about assimilation, especially since a Jewish woman designed the doll based on a very blonde postwar German doll called “Lilli.” But while the film addresses assmilation very well, there was a clear European-American emphasis and it left me wondering about Jews who don’t look like Barbie or Ken, and in fact may resemble other Others (I’m thinking of Mizrachi Jews, Sephardi Jews, etc.).

But that’s the point, right? — to get me thinking, and to get Jews talking. And it that it succeeds very well.

It was a provocative film — definitely a conversation-starter, as one of my friends put it. In fact, the producers have created a Tribe “kit” containing a “Guide from the Perplexed” and “Conversation Cards” to trigger an “unorthodox discussion.” Although the “institutional screening” price probably puts the film out of reach for many Jewish Emergent groups, there appears to be a loophole for those showing the film in a private home: for that, the DVD discussion kit costs only $40.

I’ll probably get in trouble with Tribe’s producers for saying this, but in fact, this loophole is a great excuse both for smaller groups and “establishment synagogues” looking for a creative way to engage 20- and 30-something Jews in their communities. Throw what IKAR calls a “house party,” an effective way to move beyond the walls of the synagogue to have a serious Jewish conversation. (And if the experiment works, go ahead - buy the full institutional package and get the entire congregation involved….)

And yes, you can join the conversation on the Tribe website. But they’re not selling membership: you’ll have to figure out on your own how to be an MOT….

The Jewish social justice blogosphere has become richer with the creation of jspot.org, “featuring Jewish perspectives on contemporary issues of social and economic justice” and sponsored by the Jewish FundS for Justice:

Our focus is on domestic issues only; no foreign policy, no Middle East, no Israel. We hope to direct some attention to the problems faced by those living in the United States without access to quality health care, housing, education, childcare, or a clean environment; those who work for low-wages, in unstable jobs, or are unemployed; those who struggle against discrimination and bigotry; those who are victims of violence and abuse. We hope to celebrate and scrutinize the efforts to address these problems; to offer varied perspectives and new ideas.

JFSJ is a thought-leader on social justice issues for Jewish Emergent congregations, and this blog certainly will help to further the conversations that are taking place around the country.