The ultimate impact of the leader depends most significantly on the particular story that he or she relates or embodies… Leaders tell stories about themselves and their groups, about where they are coming from and where they are headed, about what is to be feared, struggled against, and dreamed about… The most basic story has to do with issues of identity. And so it is the leader who succeeds in conveying a new version of a given group’s story, who is likely to be effective.

—Howard Gardner, Leading Minds

This year, Passover arrives at a time of great hope and frightening dreams, of pessimism and renewed optimism, of darkness and vision — on the surface, assimilation and decline; beneath the surface, renaissance and renewal. For a moment, a brief moment perhaps, the American Jewish community has the power to define itself, to tell a new story.

My teacher, the late Dr. Michael Osband, taught in the  name of Rav Soloveitchik that two different kinds of storytelling take place as part of Jewish holidays — zachor and sipur.  While the memory of other holidays is transmitted through the zachor (remembering) process, Passover requires the more active process of sipur — active, personal, storytelling.

Through the sipur process, we tell a story that actually happened to us. For the Rav, the seder is literally a time warp. We are slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt. We are fellow revolutionaries with Rabbi Akiva in B’nei Brak, waiting for the final battle between good and evil; we are present at countless sedarim with generations of great rabbinic figures; we are reading the four questions and new unimaginable, horrible questions with Mordechai Anielewicz in the Warsaw Ghetto, and we are celebrating in Jerusalem, in Israel reborn with Ben-Gurion in 1949. We embody all these stories because we are actually present — right now — in all of them simultaneously.

Sipur, the process of active storytelling, is itself an act of leadership, transformation, and liberation. Particularly in a time when the very structure of our Jewish community life appears to be changing, when the old stories don’t appear to be working anymore, when we shift from an old worldview to an uncertain future, the leader as storyteller becomes critical to the process of connecting with the past and creating a vision of a transcendent future. The leader, then, uses the turmoil of the sea and the wilderness to create a vision of a new future and a renewed community.

When we create our own seder, we become the architect of our own redemption. As we lead our seder and tell the story to our children, we are also defining ourselves rather than letting our oppressors or our oppression define us; we are liberating ourselves, and ensuring our future.

How will this year’s seder be different from all others? Who will sit at our seder? What questions will they ask and what stories will we tell? As we gather our families and friends around the table, many of us will be sitting with children raised in interfaith households and young adults who have returned from Taglit-Birthright Israel trips to Israel. Those children and grandchildren may be asking surprisingly spiritual questions. (A recent study found that the next generation of Jews is actually more spiritual than the last and that the children of intermarriage are the most spiritual of all.) And Birthright, like the seder itself, is a sipur experience — a personal journey during which individuals begin to experience Jewish history by traveling the land and meeting their peers. So our Birthright returnees may well ask questions about their history and what ties them to the Jewish people.

What story will we tell them at our seder in 5770, when they ask: What is this service, this story, to you?

• In a time that lacks vision and prophecy and that yearns for meaning, our stories carry an ancient faith in an ancient God
  so that our children and grandchildren will have spiritual options to fill their lives with light and joy.
• In a time of greed and selfishness, our
  stories are part of an old — a very old — tradition of caring for strangers, the poor and oppressed, the widows and orphans, the elderly and handicapped.
• In a time of forgetfulness, our stories are part of a living chain of learning and literature, allowing us to be inheritors of an ancient and hauntingly beautiful culture.
• In a time of anomie and loneliness, we carry the secret of community building
  that provides our children with a sense of caring and belonging.
• In a time of rootlessness and alienation, our stories are connected to a religious civilization with a 3,500-year-old history and an infinite future and the ultimate
  responsibility for the betterment of human­kind in the name of the God whose story is at the heart of our existence.

Our capacity to tell this new story will test our strength as leaders and storytellers, mothers and fathers, grandparents and teachers. Much, though, depends on how we elicit and respond to questions — to the stories of our children and grandchildren.

Passover is about storytelling (“Haggadah,” of course, means “the telling”) and order is the meaning of the word “seder.” The tension between the freedom to create one’s own Passover script and the set form of the seder — the 15 steps, from kadesh through nirtzah — makes Pesach something like a jazz performance.

1.       The Jews have no single Haggadah, and thank God for that. The lack of a centralized text, and Passover’s dining-room setting, means that Pesach is, in many respects, a homemade chag.

2.       While some sedarim emanate directly from, say, the rabbis of Maxwell House, some people dare to create a story specifically for the people around their table.

3.       For me, a great seder is highly interactive; it’s a chance for our own family or Jewish community to perform together the story of Jewish liberation.

4.       The big question: How to get a table full of Jews to engage proficiently with the Haggadah? One would need all the children — the wise, wicked, simple, and the question-free children — along with their parents, to listen carefully and respond with ample intelligence and feeling. A place at the table can be earned with one’s ears, brain, mouth, and vocal chords. Technology can help.

5.       Someday soon, sedarim will be conducted from iPhones. No more Manischewitz
Haggadot.

6.       Here’s a Passover tweet of the future: “Manischewitz = the wine of affliction.”

7.       Yes, iPhones. For those of you for whom the term “People of the Book” isn’t just a bitter 21st-century joke — for whom Jewish culture remains the ne plus ultra of bookishness — hear me out. Many serious readers own and use iPhones. Their lives are seriously bound up with email and texting, and they understand that using social media (that is, the sort of communally written content one gets on YouTube, FaceBook, and Twitter) is not merely a rebarbative habit of the computer-drugged young. These people will one day put their smartphones to a real Jewish use.

8.       Imagine a table of family and friends, heads bent over illuminated little screens. Emails and tweets and digital pictures of Hillel sandwiches shooting across the table and to the outside world, and then back again around the table. Imagine how empowering this will be to the young and shy — wicked and wise children writing wicked and wise things with a few expert taps. Imagine having the ability to fact check any and all points raised at the seder table.

9.       The iPhone Passover can be chaotic, with any number of pishers virtually heckling the seder. With a premium on responding quickly in the world of social media, one writes back with comments. You like. You share. If you fear and hate interruption, this innovation isn’t for you.

10.       But the truth is, even at a good, nondigital seder, there is a lot of disruption. It might be useful to have those blurted-out questions and comments put into writing. It might force the blurters to be more thoughtful, to formulate better blurts.

11.       If your seder is one where all the guests are intent on strictly following the order — the words and paragraphs and pages — of the Haggadah, or following the halakhot on iPhones, this seder is not for you.

12.       If the print-based Haggadah is a game of follow-the-leader, the iPhone seder is choose-your-own adventure volume.

13.       A caveat: If your guests aren’t curious or courteous or interested in the Pesach story in the first place, the iPhone will probably make things worse, because the iPhone can easily lead the uninterested to check their email, stocks, and sports scores.

14.       Is it feasible? There are millions of iPhone users right now, and you can download a Haggadah app from a company called Hada Porat for $2.99 and the Union Haggadah goes for $.99. Neither of these apps is ideal, but they are a start. My wife looked at both and said, “They’re cheat sheets.” Perhaps they are, but I prefer to think of them as lead sheets. Love that Passover jazz.

15.       The truth is, the iPhone is a tool — as is a Haggadah. It’s only as useful, or as dangerous, as the people touching it.

Since the major Jewish immigration wave to America in the 1880s, Jewish educators and communal leaders have argued over the proper ways to socialize the next Jewish generations into American society. The integration story is fraught with the tension of multiple and competing values: shifts from outsider to insider and back again and from material scarcity to abundance, the ongoing dialectics between universalism and particularism and between faith and peoplehood, content and relevance, survival and transformation. These have been the main characters in an ongoing story whose tensions can be managed, periodically even embraced, but not resolved.

This is the case I make to my Jewish education graduate students each fall, in a course called the Sociology of Jewish Education. I explain to an initially unnerved classroom that there are no guarantees for Jewish continuity, only experiments. Together, we explore how, by relinquishing belief that we can control the future, we become bold and powerful in the present, especially if we use knowledge of the past. For example, we investigate the evolution of the American bar/bat mitzvah — how it became tied to those infamous “minimum relgious school requirements” over which parents and administrators engage in power struggles daily, who determines what a “real” bar/bat mitzvah entails, and how such copyrights become established. And through stories and narrative we uncover the fluid nature of the field — how it changes and how all the stakeholders in the field of Jewish education — educators, students, parents, institutional leaders, and philanthropists — are responsible to author or reinterpret our story.

Most of us have inherited an overarching and often unconscious master narrative, which I refer to as the “Humpty Dumpty Narrative.” With uncanny precision, Humpty’s tragic tale echoes contemporary American Jewish communal anxieties about qualitative and quantitative survival:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
There was a putatively whole, “authentic” place where Jews once lived and belonged —namely, Europe (the master narrative is thoroughly Ashkenazic).
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
Leaving Europe for America and shifting homebase to new shores (and not Israel), may even represent the “sin” of Jewish modernity.1
But all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not put Humpty together again.
American culture and ideology have driven an unnatural and unholy wedge down the middle of a once-integrated Jewish life, leaving Jews and “Jewishness” bifurcated between ethnic and religious dimensions, hyphenated, truncated, and episodic.2 In short, American Jewish identities are broken in pieces. And now, all the Jewish educators and all the Jewish professionals cannot seem to put Jewish life back together again in America.

Was there ever a high, holy place — a “wall” from which we fell? And are American Jews expecting just the right educational antidotes and formulae that will (ideally, once and for all) heal and fix the wounds from our “fall”?

Though besieged with news about the woes of contemporary Jewish life, today’s students are rejecting Humpty’s story of loss. They are experimenting with a new way of interrogating the narrative of change and loss and, under the surface, the politics of authenticity surrounding Jewish identity formation — a key to Jewish education. In class, we’re learning to ask: How can we as Jewish educators navigate multiple and competing definitions of authenticity? How do we relate and respond to the boundary pushing?” In other words, how do we make explicit and transparent some of the stories Jews tell about themselves to each other about the authentic and authoritative, and ultimately generative, versions of Jewish identity formation?

Here’s one way we’re experimenting: Students identify one artifact of contested authenticity — something that pushes Jewish boundaries in a controversial, threatening, or problematic way — and then analyze and examine their own personal and professional strategies about how it might be addressed.

I suggest to the student that examples of such artifacts³ could include: photos of Halloween books featured in a religious school or Jewish day school, a “Miriam’s breast pump” as a Jewish ritual object, the canine ritual of “bark mitzvah,” an article in New Voices magazine that extols the virtues of intermarried clergy, the text of a blessing offered to all the non-Jewish spouses in a congregation during High Holiday services by the senior rabbi, or a YouTube excerpt of Rabbi Funnye Capers leading his African-American congregation in Shabbat services in Chicago. Along with a tangible version of the chosen artifact, the students should bring to class responses to these questions:

• What are the advertent and/or inadvertent purposes (religious, physical, sociological) of the artifact?
• What boundaries does it push? How, for whom, and why?
• What questions, feelings, and dilemmas does this artifact raise personally for the educator?
• How do the concepts of scholars Stuart Charmé⁴ and Shaul Kelner⁵ influence your understanding of the artifact? Where do you draw the boundaries, and how might you communicate this stance to a group of congregants, learners, campers, or colleagues?

After examining the artifacts, we invite a Jewish historian and a feminist theologian to offer critical responses to the students’ treatments of the artifacts. The discussion — among students, respondents, and other faculty guests — is charged and stimulating. One of our respondents probed the difference between “inauthentic” and “kitsch,” and all present became the main characters in an ongoing dramatic story. Indeed, reflecting on the session the next day, one student reported feeling “both frustrated and appreciative of the lack of definitive answers.” Rather than resolve, each generation’s leaders must accept their authorial power and write new culture responsibly — that is connected to our rich and varied past.

Another student imagines bringing this method of inquiry to the classroom, where
seventh-graders “would identify things that are marginal or on the boundaries, and [I’d] invite my own colleagues to be the respondents.” While it can be deeply unsettling to learn that boundaries are not fixed, it should be equally empowering to realize that they can be navigated and negotiated. Herein lies part of the authority of today’s liberal Jewish educator: to determine what it really means to push the limits. With the example of Jew-Bu’s, the authenticity question becomes, “Is there some kind of acceptable syncretism, the blending of two religions, two systems of thinking?”

Liberal Jews want their boundaries to be porous, but not too porous. An orienting metaphor of porosity emerged that day, which, not surprisingly, also applies well to the social-scientific study of Jewish identity formation as a whole: the metaphor of a living cell, with a semipermeable membrane. A cell has a way to let things in from the outside and to let things out from the inside, without being inundated or losing its integrity. Words, metaphors, and narratives all shape our understanding of the past and the present, and our vision for the future. Write on.

1 In 1900, Jacob David Wilowsky, rabbi of Slutsk, Russia, told an audience in New York that any Jew who came to the United States was a sinner. In his view, Judaism had no chance to survival on American soil. “It was not only home that the Jews left behind in Europe,” he said. “It was their Torah [biblical text and learning], their Talmud [rabbinic texts and learning], their yeshivot [Jewish academies of learning] — in a word, their Yiddishkeit, their entire Jewish way of life.”

2 See Jonathan Woocher’s full argument about all eight types of brokenness is his (1995) “Toward a ‘Unified Field Theory’ of Jewish Continuity” in A Congregation of Learners: Transforming the Synagogue into a Learning Community; Isa Aron, Sara Lee, and Seymour Rossel, eds. (UAHC Press, New York)

3 One can find the list of the artifacts that students selected and analyzed at www.shma.com.

4 Charmé, Stuart. “Varieties of Authenticity in Contemporary Jewish Identity.” Jewish Social Studies. Pp. 133-155.

5 Kelner, Shaul. “Birthright and Creating of Ritual.” pp. 1-3. And, Kelner, Shaul. (2001) “Authentic Sights and Authentic Narratives on Taglit.” Paper presented at the 33rd annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies in Washington, D.C. on December 16, 2001.

It has been almost five years since my father last spoke to me. He is no doubt hurt and disappointed by what I’ve written about my childhood spent in a small Trotskyist organization known as “the party.” “It is an attack on the working class,” he would probably say. He is still a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party, after all, living in Brooklyn — just a subway ride away from me — and participating in that never-ending procession of meetings, conferences, and sales of the Militant newspaper, whose masthead reads: “A socialist newsweekly published in the interests of working people.”

Notwithstanding my father’s charm and wit and generosity in picking up the check at dinner, his disappearance from my life has not been such a great loss. I’m happily married and residing in Manhattan in a beautiful apartment that I own, despite having been taught as a child to loathe private property. No, the real loss occurred when my father abandoned my mother and me when I was nine months old. “Mahmoud went off to fight for a world socialist revolution,” she would often say by way of explanation. And because this world socialist revolution was imminent, indeed was about to occur at any moment, my mother sacrificed almost everything for the party — of which she also was a member — including lots of her time, some of her money, and all of her passion. Most importantly, she maintained a chronic and debilitating worship of my father, which prevented her from ever being able to move on and find someone else. I was doomed, therefore, to a life of fatherlessness. I was also doomed to a home in which my father’s absence was as great as his presence.

One summer afternoon when I was four years old, my mother took me to a performance of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” I was so affected by what I saw that for many weeks afterward I would greet my mother upon her return home from her unhappy job as a secretary and demand that we go at once to my bedroom so we could reenact the story. Reclining with exhaustion on my bed, my mother would gamely take on every role in the drama, including the cow, the harp, the giant, and, of course, the widow, which is to say, herself. I was only Jack, pulsating with a spectrum of emotions, each one of them in the extreme, as I scampered around the bedroom enduring poverty, banishment, terror, and that final glorious moment when I would descend the beanstalk just steps ahead of the giant and scream for my mother to hand me the axe, which she did without a second to lose, managing to be both giant and mother at once, crying out “Fee, fi, fo, fum!” and “Hurry, Jack! Hurry!” And in my mind, I would swing that imaginary axe and down would come the beanstalk with the giant landing dead in the grass and the harp and goose in my mother’s arms, meaning that my mother and I would now live happily ever after. That is, until the next day, when I would accost her once more at the front door of our apartment and lead her by the hand into my bedroom.

While the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk” was obviously a version of the socialist revolution that we dreamed about — eliminating the wealthy oppressor — it was more an indication of my own private desire to triumph over my father and rid him from our home once and for all. Alas, that never quite happened. But when I was sixteen, my mother resigned from the Socialist Workers Party and began to shape a new life for herself. And in my adult years, I would occasionally meet my father for dinner as we tried to get to know one another. But then I started to write and publish pieces about my childhood, and my father stopped speaking to me altogether.

His presence remains, though. Even now, when I read the newspaper, I will find myself wondering as a matter of reflex what his opinion would be. This is how I am able to keep my father close at hand, as my mother did when I was young. And then, with great difficulty, I do what I can to think independently, which, I suppose, is one of the lessons of that timeless tale of the boy who swung the axe.

A year ago, I found myself in inner-city Baltimore, shoveling manure into a garbage bag in a gas station parking lot. The gas station attendants were none too pleased when my farmer’s trailer, with live cattle in the back, pulled in and, accidentally, deposited a pile of dung that had slid out under the door. Not okay to put it in their garbage cans, they said. We had to take it with us.

Welcome to my world. I never thought this would be part of my Jewish journey. How, you may ask, did I find myself shoveling manure in a gas station parking lot?  I am the founder of KOL Foods, which makes available and promotes sustainable food systems. Specifically, I provide kosher beef, lamb, and now poultry. Less than ten USDA certified slaughterhouses remain in the United States that kill their animals according to the laws of kashrut. I work with one of those slaughterhouses in downtown Baltimore, which has been family owned and operated since the 1800s.

Sustainable agriculture is a way of producing food in which animals are treated humanely and the environment, farm, and factory are healthy for workers and consumers. Before industrialization, animals were raised in organic pastures, and the meat, which was expensive, was considered a treat.

Today, the focus at industrial animal farms is on gaining short-term profit — with minimal concern for the environment, workers, animals, or the consumer’s health. Such farm production raises several environmental issues, including the pollution of U.S. waterways. Public health issues, listed below, are staggering:

• Waste matter causes food-borne illness (like E. coli), and, in the United States alone, sickens 76 million people and kills 5,000 people every year.
• Cattle and lamb are ruminants; their native diet is grass. When they eat grain, it makes their internal organs acidic, which makes their E.coli much more toxic for humans.
• A 1998 Consumer Reports study revealed that 71 percent of store-bought chicken was contaminated with salmonella. The recent outbreak of salmonella in peanuts has been traced to factory meat farms whose manure was spread on fields and then seeped into waterways.
• While studies have warned that eating conventional red meat lowers one’s life expectancy, many doctors recommend eating grass-fed meat (without antibiotics or growth hormones) that is rich in heart-healthy Omega-3 fatty acids and cancer-fighting CLAs.

In addition to the health issues are animal and worker welfare concerns. For example, animals are crammed together in confined areas without access to sunlight and fresh air; their feet don’t even touch the ground. Workers experience dangerous conditions, including exposure to dust and gases, as well as workplace injuries.

Factory farms produce lots of really cheap meat. While the low cost can be advantageous to consumers, it does not reveal the actual costs to our society, our environment, or our Jewish values.

The standing definition of kosher meat is that it comes from a kosher animal that is slaughtered according to the laws of kashrut and passes a kosher inspection. How the farm or factory that supplies the meat treats its workers and animals are all nonfactors. So when the nonkosher meat industry adopted industrial practices, the kosher meat industry followed suit.

To be designated “organic” means that animals eat organic feed and do not receive hormones or antibiotics; it says nothing about how the animals or factory workers are treated. In fact, these “industrial organic” systems have many of the same issues as conventional plants. A more important distinction is between meat that is industrially produced and meat that has been produced sustainably from family farms that do not use feedlots.

At KOL Foods, I hope to put ethics — the moral code of how animals are raised for slaughter — and kashrut back on the same plate. We should eat in a way that honors the Earth and the life that was taken in order for us to eat. We can all help do this by pressuring the kosher meat industry to raise its standards; eat consciously — that is, bless the food and reflect on how it came to the table; eat sparingly — eating meat will feel more special if it’s eaten only on holidays and Shabbat; don’t swallow your ethics — consume only sustainable, non-industrial meat.

The claims have merit; rap greases a teenager’s pores with slimy booty and bling-bling and it is an outlet for guys’ suppressed machismo — a shooting range for their testosterone. But curiosity, intellect, and abstraction are also part of the rap experience. While teaching Hebrew school, I use Bible raps — which create modern midrash that serve as edifying bridges to the text — in my lesson plans. What started as something in my classroom has turned into “the Bible Raps Teacher’s Toolkit,” which is used by students and educators in more than 100 classrooms. In fact, there are eight year-round “Bible Raps Classes.”

Clever kids with attention deficit disorder have forever hastily crammed acronyms and other semantic time capsules with information to be unearthed minutes later and emptied into the bottom of an exam’s first page. Rap can serve this purpose: a crude container for the essential information and an agreed upon acronym between teacher and student to unceremoniously empty and discard come test time. But what else can be attached to the skeleton of an educational tool? What if this skeleton comes out of the closet, tatted up, wearing sagging jeans and a confoundingly tied blue bandana beneath a baseball cap with lowered brim?

Let us unpack hip hop’s baggage. Rap, in a classroom setting, uses the charm of nursery rhymes. The bridge that nursery rhymes laid out between generations is expanded in rap. More words flow without causing semantic traffic jams. Nursery rhyme roads become hip hop highways. Rap bends, embellishes, and exaggerates stories. And that fits with Torah stories, in which concubines, giants who talk smack, murders, sibling rivalry, lightning, and locusts are commonplace.

We create Bible raps as a way for students to engage the text. A rap verse demands attention. Every rap a rapper raps is his or her declaration of what rap is and who the rapper is within the culture of hip hop. Therefore, in rap, the lyrics count; they’re asserted, forcefully as one’s own. This creates a more vital relationship with the text. When students rap their own Bible rap, they have to mean it. (see dozens of their videos at biblerapsnation.com)

Imagine you’ve just written a rap explaining to Jacob/Israel, how you struggle (“Yisrael”) with your Judaism. You put the ear-muff headphones on and instantaneously all noise is a beat. Your body thinks before your brain, and your head begins bobbing to what has now become a “funky-ass” beat. You are the only one in the room hearing the beat; outside the earphones, people watch as you begin to harangue the silence. Success is measured by how convincingly you assert your identity in the words that you rap. Keep it real. It’s not easy, and the bumps of the beat feel just as rocky as the bumps of self-consciousness. Each word you use to focus on Yisrael flexes the stomach muscles. It’s an exercise of will, of agency, of self-assertion, of being shot like an arrow toward a vision of your Judaism.

In this process we take an adolescent’s attitude and, rather than condemn it in order to keep class in order, we grow it into a song, a story. This allows unchained, roaming, bounding footmarks to be stamped indelibly into the beat, to run free in the classroom, and then be tracked and heard forever. Each time students return to the rap outside of the class, whether it be their own Bible rap or one of ours, all the lessons that are associated with that song return, as if they were whistling while studying their Hebrew school notes.

The Jewish narrative, as any other, has an evolving story line, composed of the interplay between history and memory. Twenty-first-century digital mapping technology affords a unique opportunity to enhance our understanding of this narrative by making thousands of Jewish heritage sites not just visible, but “visitible.”

Diarna, “Our Homes” in Judeo-Arabic, is a project that harnesses technology, particularly Google Earth, to provide virtual access to the sites of our endangered Jewish heritage across the Middle East and North Africa. In the case of writer Lamaan Herdoon, who left Iraq in the 1970s, and dreamt of returning to Baghdad,  Diarna enables the realization (if only virtually) of a dream long deferred:

I wish that I could fly like a bird with my daughters and show them the home where I grew up, my school, Frank Iny, the college I attended, Baghdad University, Abu Nawas Street, the Tigris River, and our synagogue….

For thousands of years, Jews lived in communities from the edge of the Sahara in Southern Morocco to the Iranian-Afghani border. In the past few decades, and vividly illustrated recently with the flight of many members of Yemen’s dwindling Jewish community, most of these ancient communities have ceased to exist in essence or in fact. But while community members have left, their former structures and sites remain behind. Digitally mapping these places provides insight into the lives and stories of past and current inhabitants, as well as a tangible mechanism for preserving and exploring memories and history.

Documenting sites in this manner also creates an image of one’s heritage not wholly available through text, photos, or stories alone. For Lauren, Diarna enlivens her mother’s roots in a country she couldn’t imagine visiting now, the Islamic Republic in Iran. “I have studied Farsi; I have attempted Persian cooking; and I wear my great-grandmother’s jewelry to try to connect with my identity. But when will it be safe for me to visit the neighborhood where my grandparents met? Now I have a virtual passport to experience the sweep of 2,700 years of Jewish life in Iran.”

Until recently, there existed very limited geographic documentation, in either scholarly or popular works, on the physical parameters of Mizrahi communities. However, today, Google Earth makes available a freely downloadable program that supplies interactive satellite imagery of the entire globe to an audience in excess of 500 million users.

On our Web site, we weave and synthesize satellite imagery (complete with terrain, zoomable perspectives, tiltable views, and 360-degree rotation), archival and contemporary photos and videos, audio- and video-oral histories, panoramas, and even three-dimensional models, to create compelling entry points to these once vibrant, yet largely forgotten communities. Anyone with an Internet connection can travel across the region as if on eagles’ wings, unaffected by the political and interreligious strife on the ground, which often thwarts physically preserving, and even (in too many cases) simply visiting these sites.

Over time, these sites are physically disappearing. And they are at risk of being forever lost both to history and memory as the last generation with personal memories passes on. This reality, as well as the dearth of information on, and accessibility to, Mizrahi heritage sites has left us (in a sense) as orphans, disconnected from an essential aspect of our identity. The story of who we are, individually and as a people, is rooted in the Middle East’s soil. One of our researchers, Adam, whose mother’s family is from the rural village of Nabeul, Tunisia, yearned to discover what Jewish life in Nabeul had been like, only to find that “hardly anyone in my family could give me a good sense of that and, even if they did, the line between myth and history was blurred. It was not until I realized that I could see the places where my family had lived for centuries that this almost mythical place became real.”

Diarna marks a beginning toward preserving and reconstructing a more comprehensive, interactive, and “living” exploration of the heartland of Jewish heritage. In the process, we are, moreover, creating a prototype for digital preservation that can be replicated for Jewish sites in Europe (where thousands of sites are similarly endangered), as well as the cultural heritage sites of other ethnic groups and civilizations around the world. Contrary to the age-old reality, memory may no longer be a place where only those who have been before can go; now, we can all return home.

I am bringing in a promotion used on UCSD college campuses for Israel. It was a condom that said, “Israel: It’s still safe to come.”

What boundaries does it push?

1. At least two boundaries are pushed. First, it pushes the boundaries of how we want to define Israel. This condom defines Israel as a place where people can have sex. It defines Israel as a place where sex is the reason to go and the top priority. It does not speak about the history or religious significance of Israel. It also frames Israel as a security problem, and does so jokingly
2. It pushes boundaries of how educators relate to college students. The condom defines college students as only being interested in sex and unable to think critically or have a desire to go to Israel because it is an important location in Jewish history and religion.

How does it push my boundaries?

I know that we need to make Judaism seem fun and interesting, but I am concerned we are going too far. Are we promoting Israel as a place where teens can get drunk, party, and have sex? I am concerned that this type of promotion encourages this type of thinking, suggesting to students to think about a trip to Israel in the same way they regard a spring break trip to Mexico.

Professional challenges this artifact raises for me:

1. What are the images/messages of Israel we want to promote?
2. How do we promote Israel to teens and college students in a dynamic way that does not degrade Israel?
3. Can this type of promotion be part of a larger promotion? What would have to be in the other parts of the promotion to balance out this message?

Authenticity Artifact

Cafepress.com offers “custom & funny t-shirts plus unique gifts” for a wide audience.  In fact, you simply have to search for the term “Jewish,” and you will receive more than 13 thousand Jewish designs on almost 4 hundred thousand products.  You can purchase the designs on everything from shirts, to hats, to thong underwear.  A limited selection of designs include:

• A reindeer with antlers that form a menorah
• A picture of a Hassidic boy with the words “Born to Kvetch”
• The words “Jewish Slut”
• The words “Never Forget” above a Star of David
• A picture of a bowling ball with the words “I don’t roll on Shabbos”
• The word Yod-Hay-Vav-Hay

What boundaries does it push?

While this website does allow Jewish people to express their complex Jewish identity by embracing and owning both popular and controversial Jewish symbols, the site has much larger implications for Jewish authenticity, and pushes multiple boundaries by:

1. Allowing for Jewish identification without a basis in history, traditions, or institutions.
2. Displaying irreverence toward Jewish tradition.

How does it push boundaries?

As a Jewish young adult, I find many of the images on Cafepress.com humorous and entertaining.  However, as an informed member of the Jewish folk, I find equally as many images (especially the ones mentioned in this document) offensive, because they poke fun at critical Jewish concepts and issues, many that are central to my own Jewish identity. This website also raises several questions for me:

• Who purchases these items, what designs are most popular, and why do people purchase them?
• How can I reconcile my folk desire to find humor in my life with my personal boundaries of appropriateness and Jewish knowledge?
• How can we as the Jewish elite convey to the Jewish folk that many of these graphics are inappropriate, offensive, or wrong?

How does it push my boundaries as a Jewish education professional?

As a Jewish educator, I worry that the younger generations of Jews will use items such as those found on Cafepress.com as the only means of forming their Jewish identity.  They will “purchase” their Jewish identity, without any foundation or understanding of what it means to be Jewish.  In the future, if my constituents wear products from websites like Cafepress.com, I will do my best to provide a historical, traditional, or cultural context to ground their stated Jewish identity.

Authenticity Artifact:

This artifact is IMRU: Judaism for the Whole World, a facebook group with real members and real meetings in Los Angeles.  Their stated hope is “to promote a culture of sharing Judaism in our synagogues and explain the value of a proselytizing ethic within the life of the religious Jew” and “to develop the tools and techniques to assist Jews as they begin telling others about life in covenant.”  Visit their facebook group at: http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=imru%3A+judaism&init=quick#/group.php?gid=34087498652&ref=search&sid=7903068.801013611..1

What boundaries does it push?

IMRU pushes at least two boundaries.

1. the boundary between Judaism and Christianity: The organization couches their language of covenant and mission in a way that sounds like a Christian missionary organization.
2. the boundary around proselytism and how people talk about Judaism.  Though Judaism does have a history of proselytism that dates back to long before it was forbidden by the Emperor Hadrian in 131CE, proselytism has not been a part of Judaism since that time.

I think that this group pushes the boundaries for most Jews, both religious and secular, across the denominational spectrum.  IMRU proposes a radical change in the way Jews conduct themselves in relation to their Judaism and in relation to non-Jews.

How does it push my boundaries?

IMRU makes me uncomfortable.  I grew up in a community where proselytism was a fact of life in Scouts and public school.  I remember how awful it felt in high school to be given a Book of Mormon by a friend when my dog died.  I remember the degrading words from elementary and middle school friends: “You’re such a nice person, I’m so sorry you’re going to hell.”  I would never want to share my “life in the covenant” the way my Christian friends did with me.

Professional challenges this artifact raises for me:

1. Does proselytism have a role in contemporary Judaism?
2. What is the difference between “welcoming converts” and proselytism?  Is that difference significant for Jewish professionals?
3. In this artifact, IMRU makes a descriptive claim that renewed proselytism would bring back an ancient tradition in Judaism that would bring more historical continuity to the present day.  Do we, as professionals, value this kind of historical continuity?

Authenticity Inquiry: Dabru Emet

This statement of Dabru Emet (“Speak the Truth”) was published in the New York Times in September 2000 by four trans-movement Jewish scholars as a response to the growing post-Holocaust openness of the Christian and Catholic communities. The document intends to establish eight common principles Jews and Christians can agree on, including “Jewish and Christians worship the same God,” and “Jews and Christians accept the moral principles of Torah.” (The entire text can be accessed here: http://www.jcrelations.net/en/?item=1014).

The text has the potential to push many boundaries. For one thing, the document minimizes the differences between Jews and Christians; if one were to read it without much prior knowledge, one might think that there are not any major theological divisions between the two religions. Dabru Emet also pushes the question of self-representation: if the document is meant to be an authentic way to present ourselves to the Christian community, how authentic is it, as Jews, to portray ourselves as similar to Christians, instead of as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it, striving for “the dignity of difference?”

Personally, Dabru Emet makes me question the authenticity of interfaith dialogue. On one level, I see a practical need for it; on another, how much of our distinctive Jews selves are we willing (and able) to give up in order to engage with members of other faiths? Professionally, I wonder if this is a useful teaching tool. I first encountered it as a (graduate) student, but was able to navigate the complexities inherent within the document’s ideas. I am concerned that if we paint, to our students, Judaism as being very similar to Christianity, erasing all signs and beliefs of difference, they might ask, “Why bother being Jewish?”

Authenticity Artifact:

This artifact is an example of using traditional Torah cantillation to chant verses from the Torah in a vernacular language (in this case English) as opposed to the language of Hebrew in which the Torah is written.

For an example of this, click the following link: http://odeo.com/episodes/25434476-Experiencing-Torah-V’Yei-Rah-Genesis-Chapter-18-1-4

* this link plays a recording of the 4 verses first in Hebrew and then in English *

What boundaries does it push?

Hebrew is Judaism’s lashon hakodesh – the holy language.  It is the language of the Torah and the language of the Jewish people.  When we choose to read Torah publically using the ancient art of cantillation, we best honor that ancient art and the holy language in which the Torah is written by rendering in it Hebrew.  The melody is designed to help explain the text and it’s use can elevates the moment into a holy moment.  To use the cantillation marks to only render the text in a vernacular language then misses the point of reading Torah in the first place.  Just as the Talmud teaches us that Rabbi Yohanan prohibited reading the Torah without a melody, using the melody without the words of the Torah seems to fail to recognize that the words being chanted are from sacred text, they are not ordinary and should not be rendered as such.

How does it push my boundaries?

My objection to this practice is not that I am against translation of the words Torah for those who are not conversant in Hebrew.  I have often chanted Torah and then with the scroll still open, offered a translation of those words into English, the given vernacular language of the community in which I worship.  Chanting was given so that we can make these ancient words, those in the original language in which the Torah was written, come alive for the community.  For those who understand Hebrew, the meaning and nuances are rendered with cantillation.  For those who are still learning Hebrew and do not understand the exact meaning and nuance, the sweetness of the melodic chant will open them up to the possibilities.

Professional challenges this artifact raises for me:

When we choose to read Torah using the cantillation marks and melodies, it is essential that we regard the sacredness of the text and the responsibility of carrying a tradition that is over 2000 years old.  When we read the text in the vernacular, even if it is with the cantillation marks and melodies, we suggest that Hebrew is not a necessary part of our tradition.  As Jewish educators, we owe it to our students to expose and familiarize them with the foundations within our rich tradition.     Then, in a safe space, we can help them use this foundation to question, interpret and commit for themselves.

Authenticity Artifact:

“I am a radical Conservative neo-Hasidic Theravada (ther-uh-vah-duh) practitioner of Vipassana (Vi-pash-na.). I spent last Passover celebrating a “Zen Seder” that opened with a modified Haggada narrative comparing Israel’s exodus from Egypt to Buddha’s liberation from suffering.” If you haven’t guessed it by now, my artifact is a quotation from a Jew-bu, someone who chooses to combine Jewish and Buddhist practice and belief.

What boundaries does it push?

For me, there are primarily two main boundaries being pushed: the prohibition of avodah zarah (idol worshiping) and the different approaches to the role of the individual and the community regarding concepts of prayer and community in each religion.

How does it push my boundaries?

I am not sure if I find Jew-bu’s to be authentic, but it makes me feel an uncomfortable when I hear about a “Zen Seder” because I believe it detracts from the meaning of Passover and risks compromising the unique significance and values embedded within specifically Jewish history. And I wonder: why are people becoming Jew-bu’s? What do they feel is missing from Judaism that is fulfilled by Buddhism? Do liberal Jews believe Jew-bu’s are authentic?

Professional challenges this artifact raises for me:

As a Jewish professional, I find this artifact is dangerous because it takes people away from living Jewishly.  I really enjoy Jewish meditation and I think that it can be a powerful component in our spirituality.  Therefore, if mediation is a reason that most Jews become Jew-bu’s, then I believe we should expose people to that aspect of Judaism.  It is important to expose oneself to information about all different religions and what other people believe and how they practice.  At the same time, it is also important for Jews to be devoted to wrestle with one’s Jewish practice.

Authenticity Artifact:
My artifact is the genre of Jewish Tattoos such as the Magen David, chamsa, Shalom, and chai, etc.

What boundaries does it push?
Tattoos of any sort push our traditional Jewish belief that our bodies are on loan from God and returned to Him upon our deaths.  This prohibition is defined in the Biblical source Leviticus 19:28, which states “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead nor incise any marks on yourself: I am the Lord.” This boundary is pushed further and maintained by the malicious tattooing of numbers on Jews’ forearms during the Holocaust.

How does it push my boundaries?
Jewish tattoos do not push my boundaries.  I’ve embraced the thought that Jewish tattoos are vehicles for Jewish identity formation and self expression.  Like many others, I have one too.  In fact, it’s their widespread appeal in liberal Jewish settings today that inspired my inquiry into whether the halacha (Jewish Law) mentioned above holds value in liberal, contemporary Judaism and to what extent.  Tattooed Jews are staking a claim on their Judaism, sending a message to others that they are Jewish and proud. I wanted to know how others receive them.

Professional challenges this artifact raises for me:
Jewish communal professionals, clergy, and educators are symbolic exemplars for the community.  Therefore, I wonder about the message tattoos send and what’s appropriate. Is a chamsa on one’s ankle kitsch and cute, while a magen david on one’s bicep distasteful?
Do Jewish tattoos send the message that it is acceptable for Jews to be like everyone else in secular society when we’ve traditionally set ourselves apart?

Authenticity Artifact:
I bring the following artifact: tattoos with Jewish themes/symbols

What boundaries does it push?

As I understand it, tattoos are prohibited in Judaism based on two traditional and one modern idea.  First, tattooing is a pagan ritual and thus prohibited. Second, tattoos have traditionally understood to be a form of self-mutilation.  One should not alter their body as they are ultimately on loan from God.  Finally, Jews were tattooed against their will in the Holocaust.

Those who choose to get a tattoo with a Jewish symbol use a traditionally prohibited act to express a particular Jewish value or celebrate one’s Jewish identity in a non-normative manner.  This challenges the notion that those who get tattoos do so on a moments notice and without consideration for the consequences.

How does it push my boundaries?

On this issue, I find myself to be among the boundary pushers.  It is possible to offer counter arguments to those listed above.  First, we are no longer concerned with pagan ritual and there are countless aspects of the secular culture that influence Jewish practice and identity today.  Second, one might understand a tattoo to be a form of self-beautification rather then mutilation.  Consider a cancer survivor who places a tattoo of the word ‘chai’ over a surgery scar.  She does this to remember the strength that allowed her to reach recovery rather then the time of uncertainty and panic she felt when the surgery first took place.  Finally, a Jewish tattoo today can be an outward expression of Jewish pride; one that emphasizes the freedom that Jews who were part of the Holocaust did not have.

Professional challenges this artifact raises for me:

1. Is it the responsibility of the rabbi or other religious leadership to discourage tattoos based on Jewish values and teaching?  Is it possible to acknowledge both sides of the argument?
2. What assumptions might people draw upon finding out that a Jewish leader has tattoos?  Might such assumptions be different depending on what point in the relationship this information is obtained?
3. If someone is going to get a tattoo, what Jewish values and teachings might we use to caution them in their decision?
4. Are memorial tattoos in a different category then other tattoos (i.e. a tattoo someone gets in memory of someone they have lost)?

Authenticity Artifact:

I am bringing in kosher yoga, as presented to me on the HUC Spirituality retreat, as a way to blend Jewish tradition with the practice of yoga.

What boundaries does it push?

1. At least two boundaries are pushed. First, can yoga be integrated into Jewish tradition?  Even more important, can Judaism be authentically expressed through yoga?
2. It pushes boundaries when it is used to replace a traditional tefillah service because yoga and tefillah seem to serve different purposes.

How does it push my boundaries?

I know that we would like to be creative in our tefillah practice.  However, when I do yoga, I feel connected to myself and like I have achieved something personally.  While I may feel that way after prayer, Jewish prayer is traditionally experienced within a communal setting and reaching out to God.  I worry that Jewish yoga could conflate the self and God, which is problematic for authentic Jewish prayer.

Professional challenges this artifact raises for me:

1. The generation of Jews that are “seekers” who would find this appealing may see this as an acceptable form of prayer.  How can I help redirect them and use this practice in a way that can help them pray without being their prayer?

Authenticity Artifact:

The “Kabbalah Red String” is the name for a bracelet used to protect against the evil eye. Although the red string – which costs $26 on line – has a history in Judaism as a superstitious practice to protect against the evil eye, it has recently risen to prominence in large part due to the Kabbalah Center, in Los Angeles.

What boundaries does it push?

1. Amulets are superstitious magic, which the Bible clearly condemns (Deut. 18:10; Zechariah 10:2), and of which the Mishnah & Talmud disapprove—albeit apparently because of the desecration of God’s name when it’s a written amulet. In other words, the red bracelet is outside of the lines I understand as bounding Judaism.
2. When worn by non-Jews it becomes a cool, cultural artifact of Jews. It is literally an artifact, divorced from its context. Furthermore, for some people, the red string has become symbolic of the excess and even cult-like aspects of the Kabbalah Center. The Kabbalah Center’s attempt to trademark the red string sends the message that the bracelet is not longer a traditional Jewish folk or mystic artifact but a brand of the Kabbalah Center.

How does it push my boundaries?
If the red bracelet reflects a practice of Kabbalah in a Jewish framework, if it reflects ‘existential claims about one’s deepest values and sense of self,’ then the red bracelet in that context may have authenticity, a traditional Jewish folk practice reflecting an intellectual and spiritual Jewish life. On the other hand, amulets are on the borderline for authentic Jewish items for me: authentic in terms of Jewish culture—peoplehood—but not in terms of religion.

Professional challenges this artifact raises for me:
I think those are easily understood and communicated boundaries. Firstly, amulets—and other superstitious folk practices, such as chamsas—may be culturally Jewish but not religiously so. This may be an opportunity to talk about truly religious “amulets:” mezuzot and tefillin, which are meant to focus one’s heart, mind and conscience on God but are not intended as protective talismans. Secondly, such cultural practices are therefore Jewish only when done by Jews. When performed by non-Jews, they take the quality of voyeurism, museumification, fascination with a foreign ethnicity. Essentially, they are religious or cultural tourism, and void of the context of culture, lose their meaning.