Spotlight on CLAL ArchiveCLAL Quarterly ReportFall, 2001 Dear Friends, The tragic events
of September 11th have changed our lives forever. As Jews and as Americans, our sense of
vulnerability and violence has risen to a new level. Yet, as our nation attempts to
recover from this crisis, the need to connect and affirm life overwhelmingly surmounts the
desire to shut down and pull back. At this difficult
time, CLAL continues to play a vital role in helping to rebuild our nation's and our
people's spirit and growth. During the tragedy, CLAL faculty reached out to the New York
City community, serving as clergy and chaplains at various hospitals and triage sites and
speaking with groups to begin to address the horrific events. Faculty met with families,
conferred with fellow clergymen, and counseled people of many faiths to give comfort and
support. Many rabbis and community leaders from around the country contacted CLAL for
advice about what to say to local families, community members and congregants, both as
part of their New Year's remarks and privately. CLAL's President,
Rabbi Irwin Kula, and Vice President, Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, issued a statement following
the World Trade Center attack which was distributed to thousands of people nationwide.
Their remarks, excerpted below, were carried both in the leading Jewish press and in many
mainstream newspapers including the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun:
Please join us and
help send the message that intolerance, both inside and outside our community, must not be
allowed. The vision we create today is the one that will shape tomorrow. Barbara B. Friedman, Chairman NEW
DIRECTIONS
How might Jews and
the Jewish tradition contribute to the wider public debate on leadership, bioethics, or
corporate responsibility? How can Jews, or
members of any religious or ethnic community, embrace their particularity and still
contribute to the larger culture? How will
the trends affecting America -- globalization, the impact of technology and worldwide
instability -- change how Jews and others see themselves in coming years? For more than 25
years, CLAL has been on the cutting edge, linking the Jewish tradition with the societal
shifts of the American landscape. Convening interdisciplinary seminars, conferences and
consultations, and working with communities and institutions nationwide, CLAL generates
new ideas for broadening the debate about the American and Jewish future, influencing the
leaders who will meet the social, ethical and spiritual challenges of the next era of
Jewish and American life. In addition, CLAL sustains and develops networks from within and
beyond the organized Jewish world -- among rabbis of all denominations, interfaith
religious and community leaders, philanthropists, and opinion makers in the fields of
academia, religion, business, philanthropy and the arts. Through all of its work, CLAL
builds a Jewish life, ritual and practice that is spiritually vibrant and engaged with the
intellectual and ethical questions of the wider world. GENERATING
NEW PERSPECTIVES
CLAL
Explores the Future of Religion in America
On November 19,
CLAL's Jewish Public Forum convened the first of a series of seminars on the future of
religion in America. The program entitled What is Religion For? brought
together leaders from many academic disciplines, faith communities and professions to
consider the new and enduring questions about religion's role in contemporary life.
Participants considered the moral and ethical issues raised by September 11 and its
aftermath, to which religious and spiritual traditions could make some contribution. They
also explored the factors that both aid and hinder the development of fundamentalism and
extremism. This seminar is
part of a yearlong project exploring the nature of religion in a changing society. The
model of the open source software movement, in which programmers globally
contribute to and draw upon an evolving operating system, will frame much of the
years inquiry. When applied to religion, open source As we
confront challenges that include not only global terrorism but technological changes like
the mapping of the human genome, both Jewish wisdom and the wisdom of other religions
might serve as significant ethical or moral resources, said Dr. Shari Cohen,
Director of the Jewish Public Forum at CLAL. What is lost and what is gained when
particular communities offer their wisdom -- their intellectual property -- to the broader
public? Who really owns religious
traditions? Later this year
there will be two additional seminars, which will include rabbis and religious leaders
from multiple faiths, analysts from a variety of disciplines, and writers and artists. Several public events will also be held to bring
the insights generated to a wider audience. Cities
tentatively scheduled include New York, San Francisco, Miami, and Greensboro. The project is made possible by a grant from the
Toleo Foundation of Greensboro, North Carolina. Playing the Jewish
Futures: Scenarios on Religion, Ethnicity In times of crisis,
it is tempting to limit ones thinking to the comfortable and familiar. But it is
particularly important during these times to think more broadly about the larger issues
and to look for new kinds of questions, to avoid being engrossed solely in the short-term
and to take a longer view into the future. In this spirit,
CLAL's multi-year project on the Jewish future continues this year. The project focuses on
the question, How will people experience and express Jewishness in the year
2015? Over the course of the year, the
Jewish Public Forum will convene four seminars to explore the future of family and gender
relations, civic engagement, religion and spirituality, and communications and education. Each meeting is designed to shift the Jewish
debate, as well as to contribute to larger societal discussions about the future of
religion, community and identity in North America. Historians, rabbis, anthropologists,
scientists, journalists, business leaders and others will be brought into conversation
together in an unprecedented way. This years seminars will generate forty short
essays, which will be disseminated widely both within and beyond the organized Jewish
community. The project is funded through the generosity of the Eleanor M. and Herbert D.
Katz Family Foundation. Jewish
Guidebook on Palliative Care
CLAL has begun work
on a Jewish spiritual guidebook for palliative care for patients and their families. Funded by the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels
Foundation, it builds on CLAL's groundbreaking work in the Jewish healing movement. The guidebook will also address many of the
concerns of caregivers, chaplains and health care professionals as they work with
terminally ill patients. It is the first of
its kind to be developed and will be disseminated nationwide. CLAL faculty, in
collaboration with Joseph J. Fins, M.D., the Director of Medical Ethics at the Weill
Cornell Medical College, will link Jewish wisdom from traditional texts, stories and
personal experiences with professional medical perspectives. The guiding principle will be
to create a framework in which patients can evaluate decisions regarding their care.
Topics will include self-reflection, forgiveness, facing loss, finding hope,
reconciliation, coping with pain, making peace and encountering death. Ultimately,
our work will help doctors, patients and patients families to understand that the
choices that are made in medical care should be made in conjunction with the spiritual
needs of the patient, said Rabbi Daniel Brenner, senior teaching fellow and director
of the project. CLAL Roundtable
Series
CLAL has begun a
monthly roundtable series with key authors and thinkers, making the CLAL office a place
for high-powered intellectual dialogue for opinion makers, community leaders and
philanthropists. In September, Werner Hanak, curator of Vienna's Jewish Museum, spoke with
CLAL faculty and guests about whether the museum should have the responsibility for
educating people about the Holocaust, and what it means to be a young non-Jewish Austrian
in his position. In October, Boston Globe
journalist Larry Tye spoke about his new book, Homelands, which takes a fresh look at
Jewish life in the Diaspora. And in November, author David Shenk discussed his new book,
The Forgetting -- Alzheimer's: Portrait of an Epidemic. Reports in CLAL's online magazine,
eCLAL: A Journal of Religion, Public Life and Culture, make these discussions available to
a wide audience. Expanding
Jewish Philanthropy -- A Preview
The Nathan Cummings
Foundation has just awarded CLAL a grant to develop the Connections and
Commitments program, which will create a network of people concerned with expanding
their philanthropic roles and examing new understandings of Jewish giving. Drawing on Jewish texts and traditions, they will
construct a personal ethics of affluence, leading them to upgrade their participation and
commitment, both within and beyond existing Jewish communal frameworks. NEW
CHALLENGES, ANCIENT WISDOM
During an evening
of text study and reflection in New York City, CLAL's faculty created a program that
spanned the ethical, spiritual, social, and psychological dimensions of the current
crisis, challenging participants to consider questions they might not have encountered in
the press or in other conversations. Below is
a brief summary of the sessions.
Returning
to Life in a World of Moral Uncertainty
Rabbi Tsvi Blanchard Rabbi Blanchard
asked participants to consider excerpts from Shakespeare's King Lear and the
Mishnahs discussion of laws applying to mourners. Participants used the texts to
explore divergent understandings of moral chaos, and tension between memory and recovery
from tragedy, and to pose the question: What helps us to move on?
Visions
of Zion: Zionism and Diasporism in a Global Village
Photojournalist
Zion Ozeris photographs allowed Rabbi Brenner to start a conversation about home and
homeland. The images reflected the thriving communities Jews have built in Israel and
North America over the last fifty years, as well as the recent blossoming of Jewish life
in Germany and the old Eastern-bloc states. Yet recent events have provoked the question: Where
do we feel safe to live as Jews? Spirit,
Ethics or Science? Texts of September 11th
Dr. Cohen chose
texts illustrating two divergent responses to recent events -- a pacifist flyer asserting
Thou shalt not kill and a sociological survey. These texts served as a
starting point for asking: To what extent do social science, religion or other
ways of making sense of the world help us navigate the political and ethical challenges
posed by September 11th? Tracking
Dangerous Aliens Among Us
Libby Garland Ms. Garland gave
participants historical documents from an interwar-era controversy over issuing alien
identification cards. The texts provided an occasion to reflect on the parallels between
past and present debates about the relationship between national security and
aliens-- and citizens -- civil liberties, and to pose the question: What
kind of information should the government have about foreigners and citizens? The Real
Enemy and Why It Makes a Difference
Dr. Michael Gottsegen Dr. Gottsegen used
transcripts from the U.S. State Department and a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon to examine the rhetoric of the war against terror and our definitions of the
enemy. Discussion provoked the question: Whom do we trust in our coalitions? Post-Traumatic
Theology
Rabbi Steve Greenberg Rabbi Greenberg
traced Jewish theological understandings of God's reaction to the disasters that humans
cause for each other. Using a Talmudic parable, he prompted a discussion that asked: How
does witnessing destruction alter our understanding of God? Israeli
and American Responses to Terror: Can Israel be a Light Unto This Nation?
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg In the wake of the
politically motivated murder of Yitzchak Rabin, Rabbi Greenberg wrote extensively on the
topic of Jewish power. Using these writings, he discussed current responses to terror and
explored the ongoing question: How can Jews use power ethically? Drawing
Sharp Distinctions Without Losing Sight of the Whole
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield Rabbi Hirschfield
used recent e-mails offering humor at Arabs expense to explore the rhetoric of
us versus them. Drawing a parallel to the laws concerning the four species of
Sukkot, Rabbi Hirschfield asked: How can we draw sharp political distinctions yet
remain committed to the wider spiritual unity of all people? Making
War: Koranic and Biblical Regulations
Dr. David Kraemer Because we have
heard much about jihad but little about warfare in the Jewish tradition, Dr.
Kraemer chose texts from the Bible and the Koran that focused on the ethics of war.
Participants explored the similarities and differences, and reflected on the religious
rhetoric of the current engagement, asking: What exactly is a Holy War? Condemnation
Without Absolutes: Maimonides, Martyrology and Post-Modernity
Rabbi Irwin Kula Rabbi Kula used a
recent essay in The New York Times by philosopher Stanley Fish entitled Condemnation
Without Absolutes, the martyrology service of Yom Kippur, and Maimonides to focus on
the difficult question: Whom do we blame and why? The
Meaning of Religious Freedom
Dr. Robert Rabinowitz Americans often
discuss freedom in national terms. Dr. Rabinowitz discussed rabbinic interpretations of
freedom, as well as contemporary religious critic Diane Ecks book, A New Religious
America, exploring the question: What does religious freedom mean in a globalized
world? EXPANDING
JEWISH LEADERSHIP
CLAL
Internship Program
Beginning in
September, CLAL expanded its highly successful interns program of rabbis from all of the
denominations -- Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist -- to include
doctoral students from such diverse fields as anthropology, musicology and history. With a group of eighteen students who come weekly
to CLAL to study with faculty, the program challenges the participants to debate
fundamental shifts in Jewish identity, family and community life. Rabbinical students are pushed beyond issues of
pluralism -- the traditional concerns of this program -- to encounter vital contemporary
debates in sociology, cultural anthropology, political science and the arts, making them
better able to address the concerns of congregants and people who don't know where and how
to connect. The academics are exposed, as
they would be in no other setting, to the ideas and inspiration of those who have chosen
lives as religious leaders. Playing
the Jewish Futures: A CLAL Retreat in Aspen
In August, CLAL
held a retreat in Aspen with a national group of philanthropists and leading thinkers to
ask: How can we create meaningful lives and ethical communities in a time of great change? Drawing on Albert Einstein's famous quote that
problems cannot be solved from the same level of awareness that created them,
the program was set up to generate new insights and awareness. Led by
astrophysicist Dr. Saul Perlmutter, CLAL's Rabbis Irwin Kula and Brad Hirschfield, and Dr.
Shari Cohen, a political scientist, the retreat brought together the best of science and
religion, both of which are based on faith, optimism, and humility about human power. Sessions ranged from Dr. Perlmutter's lecture,
Heaven through a Scientist's Eyes, to text study and scenario planning on top
of Aspens mountains. Dr. Perlmutter,
whose cutting edge project, the Supernovae Cosmology Project, was named 1998
Breakthrough of the Year by Science magazine, is a member of CLALs Jewish
Public Forum network. His words convey the spirit of the Aspen event:
Rabbinic
Networks Reach Across Oceans
CLAL has begun a
several month project working with pluralist groups of rabbis in New York and Israel via
videoconferencing to create a seminar to be presented
at Limmud, an interdenominational conference in Britain, from December
23-27, 2001. The conference is expected to
attract close to 2,000 people. The joint
seminar will be about the multiple contemporary meanings of Shabbat. Leadership
and Community Development
Remaining deeply
involved with existing and emerging leadership in Jewish communities throughout North
America is central to CLAL's work. By
creating respectful, pluralist discussion and providing innovative approaches to building
community, CLAL continues to help nurture a new generation of leaders and philanthropists. CLAL has begun to
engage as a true partner in community development, working with top leadership in a
variety of cities to begin conversations with representatives from a range of Jewish and
professional perspectives. From Philadelphia
to Toronto to Greenwich to San Diego, CLAL is developing new programs geared to broadening
the lens for what it means to be Jewish. These
programs break down the boundaries between so-called insiders and outsiders in Jewish
life, so that Jewish institutions begin to widen their understanding of what counts as
Jewish involvement, and individual Jews begin to connect their civic and philanthropic
commitments to their Jewishness, said Rabbi Brad Hirschfield. One good example of
this is a new Unity and Diversity project for the New York Jewish community.
Recognizing that the diversity of the Jewish people makes maintaining a sense of shared
Jewish identity and community complex and difficult, the UJA-Federation of New York has
awarded CLAL a grant for the design and preparation of a unique curriculum and recruitment
strategy. Working in an unprecedented
partnership, CLAL and UJA-Federation of New York will plan the curriculum for use with
Jewishly diverse groups based in metropolitan New York. The groups, of about 20
participants each, will meet regularly throughout the year. This curriculum
will move beyond pluralist study sessions to provide participants with the perspective,
knowledge, skills and techniques for addressing potentially divisive communal problems in
more positive and constructive ways. Rabbis
of all denominations will be part of the planning process. Edah
Conference in Jerusalem
In October, Rabbi
Tsvi Blanchard was invited to speak at The Edah Conference in Jerusalem, modern
Orthodoxy's central conference. The event,
co-sponsored with K'Lavi Yakum and entitled To Be A Holy Nation: Modern Orthodox
Visions for the Future of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic Society, brought
together close to 700 American and Israeli lay leaders and community professionals. Guest speakers included the Honorable Daniel C.
Kurtzer, U.S. Ambassador to Israel; Ehud Olmert, Mayor of Jerusalem; Rabbi Shear-Yakuv
Cohen, Chief Rabbi of Haifa; and Rabbi Michael Melchoir, a member of the Israeli cabinet. Said Rabbi
Blanchard about the impact of the conference: The tradition teaches us about the
importance of interconnectedness and the infinite value of every life. There must be a profound respect for human life --
even for those with whom we disagree. Its
not just about me, its about us-- and us is very
wide. CLAL:
PRINT AND VIRTUAL
CLAL in
the Bookstores
CLALs new
book, The Book of Jewish Sacred Practices: CLAL's Guide to Everyday & Holiday
Rituals & Blessings, edited by Rabbi Irwin Kula and Vanessa L. Ochs, Ph.D.
(Jewish Lights, October 2001), offers a highly original collection of meditations and
reflections on the important moments of life -- from waking up to visiting the sick to
celebrating birthdays. Written by CLAL
faculty and culled from CLAL's recent Sacred Days calendars, it speaks to the sacredness
of daily living and was designed for both Jewish and wider audiences. To purchase it, go to your local bookstore or
click on the CLAL Web site link to Barnes&Noble.com. CLAL
Online
CLAL's online
weekly magazine, eCLAL: A Journal of Religion, Public Life and Culture, continues
to offer thought-provoking commentary on public policy, spirituality and society. It is the main feature on CLAL's cutting edge Web
site, www.clal.org, which has recently been redesigned with a new look. eCLAL and other resources on the Web site now
reach thousands of rabbinic, academic, political, communal and business leaders every
week. Commentaries,
monographs, full-length book reviews, and a broad range of roundtable discussions are
among the magazine's new offerings. Most
recently, eCLAL hosted a special feature issue entitled 9/11:
Dispatches from Ground Zero, providing personal reflections and commentary on
the crisis. This year, in addition to the CLAL faculty, participants from the Jewish
Public Forum network, the internship program, and other key thinkers will be asked to
share their insights on contemporary issues in the magazine. CLAL IN
THE NEWS
Gaining visibility
through the media is essential for organizations trying to reach a wider audience with
their issues, messages and insights. Through
the power of the press, CLAL can influence public opinion, generate new ideas, educate,
and connect with a broad array of thinkers, opinion makers, lay leaders and concerned
individuals. Working with the
press, CLAL has become a solid resource for reporters and is regularly asked to comment on
a variety of stories nationwide. CLAL faculty
have been interviewed on numerous topics including the impact of religion in the political
sphere, the legacy of memory, and the use of religion in a time of crisis. Articles have appeared in such places as The New
York Times, USA Today, the Boston Globe, and all of the leading Jewish newspapers. In
addition, CLAL faculty have written and published several op eds on both Jewish life and
contemporary culture in both the Jewish and mainstream media. The Book
of Jewish Sacred Practices:
|
Click on the link below to order it now! The Book of Jewish Sacred Practices: CLAL's Guide to Everyday and Holiday Rituals and Blessings, New! Irwin Kula (Editor),Vanessa L. Ochs (Editor) / Paperback / Jewish Lights Publishing |
Editor: Judy Epstein
Copyright c. 2001, CLAL - The National Jewish Center for Learning and
Leadership. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is
prohibited.