Spotlight on CLAL Archive
Welcome to Spotlight on CLAL. Here you will find stories about what is happening at CLAL and about the work that CLAL is doing across North America. Sometimes we will focus on a program, or a special event, or upon a CLAL faculty member's work and interests. Bookmark this page if you want to get to know us better.
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CLAL Interns Program Breaks New Ground
By Judy Epstein, Director of Public Affairs
This
fall, CLAL expanded its highly successful internship program of rabbis from all
denominations to include doctoral students from such diverse fields as anthropology,
musicology and history. With a group of 18
students who study with CLAL faculty each week, the program challenges participants to
debate fundamental shifts in Jewish identity, family and community life. Rabbinic students are pushed beyond issues of
pluralism -- the traditional concerns of this program -- to engage in vital contemporary
debates in sociology, cultural anthropology, political science and the arts, making them
better able to address the concerns of congregants and other community members. At the
same time, the doctoral students are exposed, as they would be in no other setting, to the
ideas and inspiration of those who have chosen lives as religious leaders.
“Building
the Jewish future starts with creating passionate, open-minded leadership,” said
Rabbi Daniel Brenner, co-director, with Dr. David Kraemer, of the program. “Rabbis
are trained by their institutions to be generalists, and academics are trained to be
specialists. By bringing these two groups
together, the academics can push the rabbis to be more careful in how they define their
role as religious leaders, as well as their own formation of Jewish identity. The rabbis can push the academics to ask how their
work is connected to the ethical and spiritual currents of the Jewish world.”
The
highly competitive one-year program is directed at rabbinic students in their last two
years of training and at graduate students in the humanities and social sciences. The goals of the program are to build a
network of people with different backgrounds who can learn and interact with each other,
and to train young leaders to think on two levels --
how to be leaders within their communities and how to participate
effectively in the wider world.
“It’s
important to work with rabbis while they are still in the process of shaping their vision
of the Jewish future,” said Rabbi Brenner. “This
program challenges them to remain open-minded to the diversity of thoughts and practices
in the broad range of Jewish experience. And
for the academics, it invariably challenges their notions of what it means to be
Jewish.”
The
program, which began about ten years ago, has built up a strong network of alumni around
the country. Through its development,
it has trained numerous leaders to become advocates of pluralism and skilled communicators
of Jewish history, wisdom and identity in a contemporary context.
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