Over the past few years, we have seen an important new phenomenon in Jewish life: the creation of dozens of independent minyanim, spiritual communities, alternative worship services, and emergent congregations. This rich array adds diverse opportunities for worship, learning, social justice work, community-building and spiritual expression. These new communities have welcomed friends and family members of all ages and backgrounds, from all walks of life, including Jews and non-Jews (and not-yet-Jews).

We know very little about the thousands of people associated with these new endeavors. Who are they? What are their concerns? How do they feel about the communities they’re creating, joining, and building? Why do they participate?

To answer these questions, the S3K Synagogue Studies Institute, in collaboration with Mechon Hadar, has launched a survey designed by the prominent sociologist Steven M. Cohen in partnership with Rabbi Elie Kaunfer and myself (Shawn Landres). Our goal is to find out more about the participants, members, partners, and “acquaintances” of these new spiritual communities. The results of this work will be a portrait of the interests, values, and concerns of a critical innovative turn in American Judaism.

If you are connected with such a community, we hope you will join with us in making this research endeavor a success by participating in the survey. Please click here (http://www.communitysurvey.info) to complete the survey. We think you"ll find the survey engaging and enjoyable to complete. It"s not too long – it should take no longer than 15 minutes. Your answers are confidential.

When completed, we’ll have a portrait of this vital segment of American Jews. If you have any questions, please write to us at Synagogue 3000.

In a JTA Op-Ed announcing the publication of a report written with Steven M. Cohen, Ari Kelman opines:

…what we are seeing is not the loss of Jewish practice in North America. We are seeing young people who want to build something new that follows a different vision of what an institution can be and that will cater in a different way to the needs of American Jews for meaningful Jewish engagement.

The report, “THE CONTINUITY OF DISCONTINUITY - How Young Jews Are Connecting, Creating, and Organizing Their Own Jewish Lives,” was commissioned by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies. It examines the anti-institutional bent of young Jews who are building new models for Jewish engagement that blur the lines between the secular and the sacred, as well as between Jewish culture and pop culture.

Congratulations to S3K Leadership Network member Sharon Brous and Synagogue Studies Advisory Board members Elliot Dorff, Arnold Eisen, and Richard Joel, four of this year’s Forward 50!

This post by Rabbi Andy Bachman

[Cross-posted to IDEAS: thoughts during a day in the life of Rabbi Andy Bachman]

So Chicago is aiming to be one of the first cities to produce a Green Synagogue. I like that. They have the space out there to do it in a way that we don"t here in Brooklyn but it puts on the table this broader issue, yet again, of how religious ideas and architectural ideas come together to make an ethical statement about energy-use, community building, and the pursuit of the holy all come together.

Apparently this is an increasingly strong investment choice for homeowners and it skews toward a younger generation and how they think about their property values, which is a very interesting sign. Wells Fargo"s recent survey indicates that 24% of its annually surveyed homeowners “dream green.”

Now to make the big leap. Inspiring Jews across the generations to care as much about their Houses of God as their Houses of the Family and Self. This transition, from the individuated to the communal, is one of the great challenges of our day.

Where our synagogue is located in Brooklyn is one of the most sought after sections of real estate in New York City. Housing values continue to rise, melding together architecture and beauty. As Alain de Botton argues in his new book, The Architecture of Happiness, “Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places–and on the conviction that it is architecture"s task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.”

Who we might ideally be is what the synagogue should be all about. So here we build not happiness, but goodness, which, if achieved, can make you happy.

Jewschool’s Yehudit Brachah considers the role of rabbis in emerging Jewish communities:

I assert and believe (and hope?) there are ways that the current generation of rabbis-in-training who are on board with and are in fact co-creating these independent communities can actually join with good holy souls to *gasp* bring these visions into the batei knesset of American Judaism (and further). The above qualities that are to describe these minyanim need not exclusively apply to unfunded minyanim that don"t own meeting space and lack a sisterhood.They are mistaken, those in the movements who, because they can"t hear the critique the minyanim are launching against the mainstream, are gleefully and ominously predicting the downfall of these independent minyanim once we grow a little older. But I challenge us: What are the next steps? What kind of shteiblach might we create — ones with all the qualities listed above, but in which we can mark life cycle events, raise kids, be cared for in our old age?

More to the stated topic of this post: What IS the role of the rabbi in the independent minyan movement? I truly hope that the rest of us who are creating these communities can think about ways that we rabbis-to-be and recently ordained rabbis can actually serve as resources for these communities. Because, just as one cannot learn quantum physics without a teacher, it is also extremely difficult to learn/create a spritual practice without teachers. I wouldn"t be the person I am today without important Jewish teachers who have changed my life (both with and without official titles). We are all teachers and learners.

It also happens to be true that some of us have spent 5+ years in school so that we can serve the rest of us as resources for building our Jewish lives. Please. Please! Use us as such. And help us all figure out a way that we rabbis don"t have to take a job in a large, impersonal, suburban temple in order to pay off our school loans.

Won"t you come to my small, spirited, lay-empowered, caring, justice-motivated, pluralistic store-front shteibl? Oh, and help me create it?

Sue Fishkoff covers the 2006 National Havurah Committee gathering and considers the impact of the next generation of the movement:

These younger Jews are bringing new sensibilities and priorities to havurah Judaism, while preserving the movement´s original egalitarian and counter-cultural nature. They want greater emphasis on music, social action, and traditional observance.

“There´s less fear of halachic practice,” notes [Rabbi Arthur] Green, adding that the founders of the havurah movement were fighting feminist and pluralist battles that today´s young Jews have moved beyond.

Panim Hadashot’s Rabbi Dov Gartenberg has posted some thoughts on the second gathering of our Working Group on Emergent Sacred Communities and its implications for Panim Hadashot and Kavana in Seattle:

Synagogue 3K set up the Emerging Sacred Communities group to explore the burgeoning of new and alternative communities and initiatives within the Jewish community. The participants were mostly Rabbis in their 20s and 30s who are starting new communities in cities around the country. Also participating were 3 Rabbis from Israel engaged in building new communities and approaches. The emerging communities represented at this gathering were diverse and hard to characterize. Some are attempting to create alternatives to conventional synagogues. Some are trying to transform older synagogues into something else. Some like myself were creating completely different models distinct from synagogues. Some of these communities organized themselves around social justice causes, while others were working on revitalizing and reformulating Jewish prayer. There were representatives from all the major denominations and many who identified themselves as post-denominational. Everyone agreed that the current Jewish communal structure is in crisis and that the modern synagogue and congregational rabbinate is in a struggle for legitimacy and relevance among many Jews.

[...]

I think Seattle needs both Kavanah and Panim Hadashot. Kavanah offers Seattle a serious experiment in building a more intentional community, a Jewish collective with a distinctive focus and ideal. Panim Hadashot offers a way to reclaim a Jewish home life and path to a more engaging Judaism that makes one appreciate the many choices that the Jewish community offers. Together we are part of a fascinating change taking place in American Jewry. Our gathering in New York was an ongoing attempt to make sense of the very creative spiritual ventures growing around the country. I is thrilling to be part of this creative ferment.

Maggid Sarah and I are having an interesting conversation over at Moshav HaAm…..

[UPDATE] A spin-off conversation with Mishkaneer Yoel Natan is developing here.

[A note from Synablog editor Shawn Landres: The following is an edited partial transcript of remarks made in May on April 30 2006 by S3K Leadership Network member Rabbi Sharon Brous at UCLA Hillel as part of Los Angeles's People of the Book Festival. It's taken S3K some time to get the transcript together but we think it's still worth thinking about.

At crisis times like this, when Israel and Lebanon are burning, many unaffiliated Jews feel a need for connection to one another and for ways to express their concern and support for the victims of suffering. At the same time they are wary of knee-jerk institutional reactions that, at best, do not honor the complexity and depth of their own commitments and, at worst, attempt to impose one emotional/political option to the exclusion of all others. Indeed, studies repeatedly have shown that many Jews find themselves on the margins of communal life precisely because of their ambivalence and confusion about the situation in the Middle East. Sharon's comments, though spoken this past spring, paradoxically are all the more important today, as both American Jews and the American Jewish community (not always the same thing) search for meaningful and productive ways, as she wrote recently, "to be unabashed in our support of the people and State of Israel, and at the same time, unapologetic in our sensitivity to the innocents on all sides of the conflict who have been caught up in the violence." Members of the S3K Leadership Network and leaders of other sacred communities currently are developing creative and effective responses that express both solidarity and sensitivity.]

[R'SAB 4/30/06] It seems to me that our community has made some real miscalculations in addressing the growing demographic of young people who are completely detached from institutional organized Jewish life. One of the most unfortunate strategies has been the framing of religious messages based on a perception of what the market looks like, rather than based on where the soul is, where the soul of our community should be. So our leadership is knocking itself out to turn Judaism into something incredibly appealing to young people, something sexy and smart and glossy and attractive. At the core of that approach is a great distrust of this demographic. It is to say that we really don’t believe that there are people searching for a true, deep, authentic, spiritual, and religious connection to Judaism, so a glossy brochure is the best we can do to bring them in – this, rather than speaking about the fire, the core of what Jewish life really is about. This of course only serves to further alienate.

[R'SAB 4/30/06] I have heard this from hundreds and hundreds of people in the twenties and thirties – and also from people outside that demographic. The simple reality is that many of our institutions are no longer presenting a compelling story for Jews. What we need is to articulate a way that our own Jewish connection, our spirituality, and our sense of religious connection are absolutely and intimately a part of the way that we engage in the world.

[R'SAB 4/30/06] Right now there is a great void on the world’s stage – we are missing a serious, progressive religious voice. Some Jews and Christians have demanded that the progressive religious communities really take a stand and have a voice on the global stage, but by and large, most of the progressive communities are silent.

[R'SAB 4/30/06] What we tried to do in creating IKAR was to establish a community that from the outset would be fully committed to the integration of the personal, spiritual, political and religious dimensions of our lives. We worked to express this connection as clearly and as authentically as possible, to show the real rootedness of social justice and human rights in the traditional Jewish texts. And in doing this, we found that we could create a community of purpose and meaning, one in which people would feel inspired to actually go out and work as Jews — not just because it"s a good thing to do but because they truly believe that their Jewish life mandates that they engage the world in this way.

[R'SAB 4/30/06] Many young people in are resonating to this message. We are realizing that if we say to people, “You have a short attention span, you don’t want anything real,” then they will respond that way. If we treat people as though they have depth, purpose, and a real need for an authentic religious message—then they will respond in that way.

[R'SAB 4/30/06] It seems to me that it is incumbent upon the Jewish community to rethink our whole agenda. So much of the way that we have been functioning for the past several decades has been about strengthening, supporting and sustaining institutions for their own sake, rather than really thinking about what is at the core of what it means to be a Jew and a human being in the world, and how we communicate that message in a way that people can hear and actually truly be transformed by it. That was the basis of our community, and that is why we call it IKAR, because the idea was to get back to the heart of what Judaism is actually all about – to sidestep the politics of the Jewish community that obfuscate the real fire of Torah in the first place.

[R'SAB 4/30/06] The core fundamental claim that our tradition makes is that every human being is created in image of God and therefore has innate dignity and worth in the world. What does it mean to operate as a Jew in the world when this is your core operating assumption? How do you create a Shabbat experience, how do you eat, how do you talk to each other through the lens of this core Jewish claim of human dignity? That is what we are working to do.

Rabbi Andy Bachman, “Building Community”

Rabbi Dov Gartenberg, “Beyond the Synagogue Walls”

Shawn Landres, “The Emerging Spiritual Paradigm”