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Rabbi Emily Cohen: Find Your Tribe. Tell Your Story. Make it Yours.
103 Plays2 years ago
What does progress and change look like in contemporary Judaism? What do Hamilton and Passover share in common? Where’s the best 3-dollar-slice in Brooklyn? Emily Cohen is a Reconstructionist Rabbi serving the West End Synagogue in NYC, and a keen choral musician. She is a founding member of Tirdof: New York Jewish Clergy for Justice.
CONTENT WARNING: indirect discussion of anti-semitism, white privilege and supremacy, COVID, discussion of discrimination against patrilineal Jews, non-Ashkenazi Jews, and queer jews.
Rabbi Emily talks about Reconstructionist Judaism, writing the Hamilton Haggadah and getting it in front of Lin Manuel Miranda, the importance of Passover and storytelling, her writings on HeyAlma and the work of raising rabble to bring more marginalized voices to the center. She talks about the challenges of marriage in patrilineal Judaism and what a future for a more united Jewish people could look like.
And Gritty. It Gritty.
Check out Emily’s website: https://rabbiemilycohen.com
Subscribe to Emily’s Substack: https://morethanfourquestions.substack.com/
Follow Emily on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ThatRabbiCohen
Follow Emily on IG: www.instagram.com/em.cohen
Check out Emily’s article about marriage and patrilineal Judaism: https://www.heyalma.com/why-my-rabbi-had-to-leave-the-conservative-movement-to-officiate-my-wedding/
Check out Emily’s Podcast, Jew Too?: Tales of the Mixed Multitude: https://www.jewtoopodcast.com
Check us out on Instagram and TikTok: www.instagram.com/uncommongoodpod Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: youtube.com/@uncommongoodpod
we chat to ordinary people doing uncommon good in service of our common humanity.
We are creating community that builds relationships across difference by inviting dialogue about the squishy and vulnerable bits of life.
thanks for joining us on the journey of (un)common good!
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Transcript
Keeping Traditions Alive
00:00:00
Speaker
There's something to this. There is something to this spirituality and this tradition and like this just like passing down of connection. We have a through line that goes back thousands of years and that is astonishing and I would hate to see that go away.
00:00:19
Speaker
And I also don't want us to be doing Judaism or any religion in the same way as our grandparents or great-great-grandparents or the way we go back. It should be ours. They say every rabbi, every preacher has one sermon and mine is, we need you and you need this. Be part of a tribe and make it yours.
Introduction to 'Uncommon Good'
00:00:44
Speaker
It's Uncommon Good, the podcast where we chat to ordinary people doing uncommon good in service of our common humanity. My name is Paulie Rees.
00:00:54
Speaker
Fam, I am delighted beyond measure to bring you today my pal, Rabbi Emily Cohen. She's the spiritual leader of the West End Synagogue in New York City. She's ordained in Reconstructionist Judaism, and she's the host of the podcast, Jew Too, Tales of the Mixed Multitude.
Tackling Tough Topics with Rabbi Emily
00:01:15
Speaker
Quick content warning off the top. We have an indirect discussion of antisemitism, of white privilege and white supremacy, dealing with COVID as a faith leader, a discussion of discrimination against patrilineal Jews, non-Oshkinazi Jews, and queer Jews. So as always, if these things are not right for you to listen to, feel free to switch this one off, and we will catch you in the next one.
Innovations in Jewish Storytelling
00:01:40
Speaker
Emily goes on to talk about reconstruction of Judaism, writing the Hamilton Haggadah, and getting it in front of Lin-Manuel Miranda, the importance of Passover and storytelling, the theological politics of marriage and patrilineal Judaism, and the work of raising rabble to bring more marginalized voices to the center. It was such a treat and a privilege to catch up with Emily, hear about the work,
00:02:09
Speaker
and where she sees a contemporary Judaism going. Please enjoy my chat to Rabbi Emily.
Music and Cultural Connections
00:02:21
Speaker
The last time we collaborated meaningfully was a mutual love of choral music. Singing one of the rarest performed I think is still fair to say. Masterworks in the Thomas, Talos, Spem, and Allium
00:02:39
Speaker
It was awesome. So, so Spevan Allium is a 40-part piece. So most choral pieces are like, you know, you might have soprano, alto, tenor, bass, maybe within those parts they split and you have like an eight-part piece. Occasionally you even have splits within the splits and you could have like up to 16 parts, but 40 is insane. You know, 40 is having these different quartets like spread around the space all singing.
00:03:07
Speaker
And so they interacted with one another. I was the soprano for the final group that entered. So it began with like the first group and then it went all the way around to like the eighth or ninth or something. And so one of the craziest parts about where we performed, which was in the rotunda, is that there was such a delay with the reverb
00:03:30
Speaker
that you couldn't trust your ears. You had to look at the conductor and know from where the beats were falling, where you had to come in, because if you just listened to the people, you would not come in at the right time.
00:03:46
Speaker
most of the time with choral singing, the decay isn't that long. But it was a crazy exercise in trust among other things, just trusting the conductor's hands and not trusting one's ears, which for a lot of singers is not intuitive. We're used to listening and
00:04:07
Speaker
figuring out where to come in. But it was so fun. And that experience, I don't think I've ever had anything quite like it, especially because it was also, I don't know if you remember this, Polly, it was freezing. Like we were all wearing coats, you know, like as we were singing. So, you know, people in the audience had blankets and so it was just like this very sensory experience that was unlike anything else I think I've ever done.
00:04:31
Speaker
Yes, I forgot about that, but I remember having purchased special fingerless mittens just to be able to use for that performance.
00:04:44
Speaker
And then I'm in this choir now in New York called Corocos, which I like to joke that it's the kind of thing that in any other city would be professional, but because in New York there's a billion and a half people that have lovely musical talents, it's completely amateur. There are professional-ish folks in it, but it's an amateur group. We don't pay, we aren't paid, et cetera.
00:05:06
Speaker
But it's been so much fun, and in 2019, we went to Serbia, which is a long story, like how we ended up going there as opposed to anywhere else. But it was an amazing trip, just in the sense that it was a part of the world that most of us had never spent significant time in.
00:05:27
Speaker
We got to be not only in Belgrade, but also in these little towns. We were participating in this international choral festival in Negotin, which is a tiny little town in Serbia, but two moments there. One was that we sang
00:05:45
Speaker
Again, organically, in the crypt of this church, there was this piece that we got to sing that was by one of the most well-known Serbian composers. There was a little subgroup of us that were on a tour on a day off.
00:06:04
Speaker
Started singing this thing and the you know, the locals and the tourists were just like kind of amazed by this group of people Hopefully our Serbian sounded okay And then the other moment on that trip was we what we sang in an art gallery also in like a relatively small Town and it was packed
00:06:22
Speaker
The love that the locals had for choral music was insane. We sing in a church in New York and we're lucky to get 100 people. And in Serbia, they packed every space that we performed in. It was just so much respect and love for choral music. And so those are some of the top ones. I mean, I'm sure there's others. I've been very, very lucky, but those are a few.
The Hamilton Haggadah Phenomenon
00:06:48
Speaker
A note tells me here that we both are fans of, at least a little bit, the Lin-Manuel Miranda verse. Yeah, I saw Freestyle Love Supreme when it came back to Broadway. I think it was one of the, either, I forget if it was just before COVID or if it was one of the first shows I saw after COVID. It was like, the last few years have gotten so fuzzy. I wanna say I saw it before COVID though.
00:07:16
Speaker
with a friend of mine, because it was one of those things where I had the opportunity to get last minute tickets for not very much money, and I just remember getting two of them and being like, ah, who's going to come for me? But Chris Jackson was there, which was amazing. They had kind of like rotating guest folks, and he happened to be in that evening.
00:07:38
Speaker
It was just super fun. But yeah, it's interesting. I've never seen Hamilton on Broadway. I saw it in San Francisco when it was on tour. I enter the lottery kind of regularly, but maybe this is just being way too naive. But with a number of Broadway shows that I know are not going anywhere, I just sort of enter the lottery perpetually because I'm just like, I don't want to spend $300 on two tickets. But, you know, since I live here, I'll just eventually win is the hope, I guess.
00:08:08
Speaker
Being on the topic of Lin-Manuel Miranda, I would love to ask you about the Hamilton adaptation that you co-wrote. Oh, this is so sweet. This is also going back. Yeah, so this was, gosh, we started this in like, I don't even know, I want to say like 2015.
00:08:34
Speaker
maybe 2014, 2016, somewhere in that range of years. I feel like a lot of my stuff has been a combo of organic
00:08:51
Speaker
like geekiness and luck. So this certainly fell into that category. My friend Jake and I, Rabbi Jake Bess Adler, he's in Jersey now at a synagogue there. He and I used to carpool a lot to rabbinical school. We lived in Mount Airy and rabbinical school was out in like Jake in town, Elkins Park area. So it was like a 15 minute drive.
00:09:15
Speaker
I had an old Jetta that couldn't connect to an MP3 player, so I had CDs. I had CDs that I'd made of the Hamilton soundtrack from the MP3s or whatever. We would listen to that. I think I introduced Jake to Hamilton and then somehow
00:09:37
Speaker
He found out about someone who had written on Twitter or Facebook or something like a joke about doing a Hamilton Agata, and then we actually took it seriously. Passover was coming up, and we thought it'd be really fun to just parody some songs. I think the first one we did was the 10 dual commandments or something, but we made it
00:10:03
Speaker
I don't know. We did something with the 10 plagues for that, and then we just kept playing with it and recording it all on garage bands with... I don't think I even had a USB mic at that point, and so it was just plugging in headphones and dubbing over ourselves. But we put the lyrics on a Google Doc and then
00:10:29
Speaker
It was just for us, like it was literally just like for us for fun. But then we put it on Facebook because we were like, hey, we wrote these things, friends, like look at this. And then I just remember getting a text from somebody being like, you might want to put your name on that Google Doc.
00:10:43
Speaker
and we logged on and there were like 30, 40 people on it that we didn't know. And so then we were like, yeah. And so we started trying to formalize it a little bit more. But the fun thing that happened was that the next year we wanted to complete a hagata. And so we actually got an independent study credit to take this parody thing and form it into a fully fledged hagata, which we then
00:11:08
Speaker
ask people to donate to HIAS if they were going to download it. So HIAS is an organization that works with refugees and immigrants, and we thought it fit with the theme of the Hamilton story that like, and also with Passover of course, and the idea of coming away from narrowness, from Mitsuraim from Egypt into expansiveness that we know.
00:11:29
Speaker
Connect it with highest and so yes, it was really fun. It was like and and the recordings are Incredibly embarrassing I cannot rap and I tried and then I put it on the internet So like that's out there, but I don't recommend looking at it So yeah, but it was it was such a such a fun little 15 minutes of fame blip, you know that that we got to go through and
00:11:54
Speaker
I feel like the phrase construction, I cannot X, but I tried, is the start of every idea that could become something that changes the world. Maybe. Tell me more about that. What have you tried and then been like, I can't do this, but I'm doing it anyway and it's going to change the world?
Secular Jewish Identity
00:12:16
Speaker
Well, Rap. So, big shout out to Freestyle Love Supreme Academy, now FLS+. At the time of taping here, we're in mid-January, where that company is slowly reemerging from lockdowns and thinking about in-person live music experiences again. And now,
00:12:46
Speaker
But yeah, so I took their coursework, it's like that Dunning-Kruger thing. I know just enough about the history of this genre, this beautiful art form, to know how poorly I do it.
00:13:03
Speaker
Number one, I'll say the same thing about Christian sacred texts and exegesis the same way, like no just enough to know how badly I do it. I'll say the same thing about speaking Spanish.
00:13:19
Speaker
And generally speaking, I'll say the same thing about long-form comedy improv. If ever they reform in a meaningful way, I'll never be on a Friday night team at Operate Citizens Brigade, but you know, I play. That's awesome.
00:13:43
Speaker
Yeah, do you know if either Bill Sherman or Lynn ever found out about the parody, if they ever heard it?
00:13:51
Speaker
I think he did find out. Lynn did find out about it, and the reason that happened is because this woman who was one of the assistant stage managers found it, who happened to be Jewish, and she wrote an email to Jake and me, which we completely flipped out over, because it was somebody who worked on the crew of Hamilton. She asked, would it be okay if I showed this to Lynn and the cast, and we're like, uh-huh, that would be okay.
00:14:21
Speaker
So I have no idea how much, if any, he actually saw or heard, but some people on Hamilton knew that this existed. And then the fun little follow-up to that is that the next year, I had a podcast that's been on hiatus for two plus years now, which I still have hopes to bring back at some point, but I have not for a while. But anyway, it was about the experiences of Jews in interviewed families and with multiple influences in there.
00:14:50
Speaker
in their families and homes in some way. And we were doing a Hanukkah episode. And so I was trying to get sound bites from different communities about their holiday celebrations, like how they combined multiple holidays or celebrated in different ways. And so I reached out to this same assistant stage manager and I just said to her, hey, like, I remember you mentioning at some point that there was a Hanukkah party with the cast and crew of Hamilton. Like, do you...
00:15:20
Speaker
have anything from that and she did she had this this video of them doing the Hanukkah blessings and was willing to like send me a sound bite from it So I have like on some episode of this podcast a little sound bite of them Like I think David digs and some of the other folks on Hamilton doing the Hanukkah blessings, which was so fun Beautiful that podcast is due to do tales of the mixed multitude for
00:15:44
Speaker
I had a bit of a listen. It was delightful. Are there any stories in addition to the Hamilton blessing that stand out from your podcasting days?
00:16:00
Speaker
I don't think there's like, there's not a specific story that's coming to mind, but I would say that like my overall experience of the podcast was really an experience of unintentionally helping a lot of people to feel less alone.
00:16:17
Speaker
Um, which is one of my kind of life goals, I guess, as a human, as a rabbi, is like to help people feel connected. And so I would get these like emails periodically from folks who would be like, you know, I listened to these episodes and like, you know, I come from a family that, you know, is like,
00:16:35
Speaker
Jewish and has Catholic people in it or whatever, and just feeling okay and seen for who they were, or at least, if not fully seen, understood a little bit better.
00:16:51
Speaker
In the Jewish world, this is getting a little bit niche, I guess, for a more general audience, but just to name that there's a lot of growth that's happening in the Jewish world right now around inclusivity, as I know there is in much of the rest of the world, and thank goodness.
00:17:09
Speaker
But the Jewish world, for understandable reasons, tends to be skeptical of difference because difference often comes with, and now we're going to kill you or kick you out of the place where you've been living for a couple of generations or whatever it may be. So it's an understandable fear of outsiders, and it is an extremely damaging one that I think we are, as an overall Jewish community, working to
00:17:36
Speaker
fix. But what that means in practice is that people who are pick your adjective, people who are queer, people of color, anything but Ashkenazi presenting, people who are disabled in some respect, people who come from families where there's multiple religious influences, people who've converted
00:18:05
Speaker
and I could keep going and going, are all often less welcome in mainstream Jewish spaces than they should be in the United States. And that is something that my podcast was an attempt to look at and that I know a lot of amazing works being done around.
00:18:24
Speaker
But it's really easy for these folks who have a total claim to the Jewish community to feel like it's not worth claiming that because why would you want to deal with all these people who are just being skeptical and sometimes overtly mean or hostile to you. And I believe really
00:18:42
Speaker
strongly that the Jewish world is stronger for all of the different elements that are a part of it. And I want to create a Jewish world and a world in general where people can bring their full selves. And the podcast, I guess, was just a little attempt to do that. And it was really lovely to see that that was in some way successful, even if it was more of a starfish effect than a systemic effect. But I would love to be able to do more of that work.
00:19:13
Speaker
Well, some of the work of this podcast in particular is to lean into, as you say, some of these niche ideas and to open them. And for lack of a better word that I haven't found yet, to translate them to a culturally uninitiated audience.
00:19:35
Speaker
So if it's all right with you, I would love to lean in a little bit more. I know you from some of your writings on Hey Alma and in your Twitter and in your Facebook. You're a great follow, by the way. Thank you. Yeah, no, my pleasure. And the one conversation
00:20:00
Speaker
that I remember us having in person, because that was so long ago, and at the time you were a student in the reconstructionist movement. Do I still have that correct? Correct. For the uninitiated, the culturally uninitiated, can you tell me a little bit more about what that means? To be a reconstructionist? Sure.
00:20:24
Speaker
Absolutely. So the Reconstructionist movement, fun fact, when you are in rabbinical school, you have to take a class called Reconstructionist Judaism 101 or something to that effect. And the final for that
00:20:39
Speaker
class is an elevator pitch on what reconstructionism is because it can be so complicated to explain in just a few words. That class I took nine, 10 years ago, so I don't remember my pitch, but I can say a few basic things which are things like
00:20:59
Speaker
The Reconstructionist movement is probably among the newest movements of mainstream American Judaism. It is distinctly American in that it was founded here by a rabbi named Mordecai Kaplan, who was especially active in the first part of the 20th century, going into like mid-20th century. And there were a few ways that Kaplan was different from your average rabbi.
00:21:25
Speaker
One thing that set him apart in a major way was that he did not believe in Jews as a chosen people. So if you look at Jewish liturgy, traditional liturgy, you'll see a lot of Jews being chosen from amongst all of the peoples of the world or being separated in some way. And Kaplan said, no, like that's not
00:21:46
Speaker
We are not a chosen people. We opt into Judaism, or that's more of a modern take that we opt into Judaism together. But that he said something along the lines of the Jewish religion doesn't exist, or sorry, the Jewish religion exists for the Jews. Jews do not exist for the religion. So the idea that it's people-centered.
00:22:12
Speaker
He also, more than any other leader, talked about the notion of Judaism not only as a religion, but as a civilization, and as a civilization that evolves over the course of, at this point, millennia. The idea being that for sure it's a faith,
00:22:30
Speaker
But it's also something that is a part of your culture, your overall sense of how you are in the world. So what Kaplan said is that Jews live in two civilizations. They live in the Jewish civilization where tonight Shabbat will begin. It's Friday, so this evening we'll go into Shabbat.
00:22:47
Speaker
And we also live in the secular world where it's Friday and like it's the end of the work week in theory, unless you're a rabbi or whatever, and then you have to keep working. And so we're always holding both. We're always having to figure out how to hold our secular identities with our Jewish identities. And part of that is, again, with this notion of an evolving religious civilization, the idea that
00:23:12
Speaker
Jewish tradition gets a vote, but not a veto in how we operate today. So me, female rabbi, female rabbi who comes from an interfaith upbringing or Jewish upbringing in an interfaith household.
00:23:28
Speaker
I would not have been deemed anything near appropriate to be a rabbi a thousand years ago or even a few hundred years ago. But we are in a time now where we have evolved such that we understand that
00:23:43
Speaker
it doesn't make sense to bar rabbis or bar women or non-binary folks or other people that would have been barred from the rabbinate hundreds of years ago from the rabbinate today. And so that's just one example. There's a billion of them, but always trying to think about what does tradition teach us and then how do we actually make our decisions today in consultation with both tradition and modern sensibilities.
00:24:10
Speaker
Philly, I should just say, is also kind of the unofficial headquarters. I mean, it's the official headquarters of the movement and that's where the movement is based, but also there are probably more Reconstructionist synagogues per capita in Philly than anywhere else, and there's probably more Reconstructionist Jews per capita in Philly than anywhere else because of that. So if you were to be in
00:24:30
Speaker
many other major cities in the United States, there might be at most one reconstructionist shul, and most of the Jews you'd meet would not be reconstructionist or know what reconstructionism is, but sort of like how, you know, in Philadelphia, people know what Quakers are. Like, I think in Philly, people who know about Judaism generally have some experience with reconstructionist Jews, which is kind of cool. I would love to sort of pivot us just a little bit. We'll come back. Gritty or the Philadelphia Fanatics?
00:24:59
Speaker
I don't understand how that's a question. I'm sorry. It's obviously gritty. It's gritty. It's gritty. And then our crazy celebrations, which require the city to keep a supply of telephone and street lamp grease. Grease.
00:25:27
Speaker
Is this a really good stress release valve, or is this potentially problematic?
00:25:40
Speaker
I think not to get on my high horse, but I think it's mostly just an intense reflection of the complete difference with which rowdy white men and rowdy not white men are treated. I'm not a football fan, I should say, so that's another thing.
00:26:08
Speaker
I'm all for people enjoying themselves, but the way that people got away with that and the amount of damage associated, and then I see the way that others in the city are treated for much more minor incidents, I grease those poles and hopefully nobody gets hurt.
00:26:35
Speaker
Let's just say that you'll never see me attempting to mount the awning of the Marquis of the Four Seasons Hotel. Yeah. Nope. No, thanks. Or the Ritz Carlton or whichever it was. I forget which it was. Yeah. Yeah. No, they brought out the pole grease for the Phillies in the World Series this past summer as well. They did? Yeah. So apparently it's an equal opportunity offender sort of situation post. Wow.
00:27:06
Speaker
Wow, indeed. Wow, indeed. Thanks for the little trip down Philly memory lane there. What is the most delicious thing you've eaten at Ready Terminal? Do you remember?
Pop Culture and Jewish Tradition
00:27:22
Speaker
I don't know. I haven't been there for years. When I moved to New York, I had this thought that I would get to Philly at least twice a year because I was like, it's an hour and a half on the train. It's so easy. Then I got busy and then a pandemic happened. I think I've been to Philly all of like twice in the last-
00:27:41
Speaker
four years, which is insane. So it's been a while since I've been to Reading, but I just remember, I think it's like, as with many food markets, like Chelsea Market in New York is the same and things like that, it's less about like what did I actually sample and more about just like walking around and like seeing all the stuff and smelling all this stuff. Like it's like a full sensory experience. And so I don't remember what I eat half the time when I go to places, because it's just like,
00:28:09
Speaker
I've smelled so much already that I'm just excited to carry all of that with me and then whatever I actually sample. Yeah, you've got the smell of the fish and the
00:28:22
Speaker
the dim sum and the barbecue and the markets, not just the ready to eateries, but all of the producers, the butchers and the ultery mongers, et cetera, yeah. So I want to loop back to something, again, for those of us uninitiated, could you tell us what the term you used Haggadah means?
00:28:50
Speaker
Oh, sure. Yeah. A hagata literally means the telling, and it is the book that accompanies a Passover satyr, which means order, but it's a special meal that you do for Passover. There are lots of different kinds of hagadot, which is the plural of hagata, everything from very straightforward traditional ones to
00:29:12
Speaker
themed ones like the Hamilton Agata to ones for kids, ones for families. I have probably at least a dozen hagadot that I've collected over the years and they're all different and they're all delightful.
00:29:25
Speaker
Yeah, I'm trying to imagine like the craziest ones to where like a devoted liturgical theologian could have adapted one like what like Rick and Morty or Star Wars. There's definitely Star Wars. There's definitely like
00:29:47
Speaker
What else have I seen? Yeah, there's a Mrs. Maisel one. There's like, I mean, for basically any pop culture phenomenon, you're gonna have some kind of, if not a full hagata supplement. Okay. All right. Yeah. I love that. I love both the notion of fandom, but also the amount of
00:30:18
Speaker
I would imagine the amount of liturgical knowledge a person would need in order to do that well. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. Passover is one of the few things that even very secular Jews often take part in in some way, like they're invited to a Seder or even if they don't belong to a synagogue or do anything else on a regular basis, they'll host a Seder with their family.
00:30:43
Speaker
it's it's like often a long meal and so the Haggadah can be like a really lovely way in for people who are not as like into the traditional rituals because it's like it's fun to have the different illustrations to have like the to-dos along the way and to have like a little explanation so um you know I think a Haggadah is
00:31:05
Speaker
not just a guidebook, but really an essential way of drawing folks in. And in some ways, it feels like a very reconstructionist thing to have these hybrid hagadot, with a pop culture thing, because they're saying, here's something that you like that's in your day-to-day life, and here's something that's part of your Jewish engagement, and we're going to make them go mush more or less.
Navigating Cultural Diversity
00:31:28
Speaker
Yeah, I would like to lean into something you, a term you mentioned there in passing. At least in my experience of working in spiritual leadership and in Christian traditions, you don't
00:31:49
Speaker
It is less socially acceptable to Christian clergy and probably to folks who would identify more as secular to think of the term of a secular Christian. I think mostly because a lot of the people who would claim probably more to be, if anything, I would say would
00:32:16
Speaker
would lean closer to the term of ex-Christian. A lot of times because of
00:32:24
Speaker
traumatic formative experiences with the culture, with issues of community building and lack of attention to, as you've identified with reconstructionism, to social justice issues, to inclusivity. Is this not a term I think that is
00:32:49
Speaker
socially, perhaps even theologically acceptable in a broadly, in a broad Christian sense because of how exclusive, I would say Christianity tends to see itself. Can you say a little bit more about what you see as the culture of secular, of the secular sort of like Judaism space?
00:33:18
Speaker
Sure. I think what you're saying makes sense to me that it's harder to be a secular Christian. Correct me if I'm not articulating this in the way that you think is accurate, but my understanding is that Christianity really is based around a belief structure. There's a lot of wiggle room within that belief structure to be sure, but there is a theology that is centered in Christian understanding of the world. If you are not
00:33:45
Speaker
somebody who partakes in that theology, it's going to be harder for you to feel a sense of connectivity to the Christian tradition. And again, I'm saying this as an outsider. So like, you know, if I'm being off base at all, please, please correct me in that.
00:34:01
Speaker
No, I think that that's right. A central tenet of my experience of Christianity, of my experience of studying it in going to a Christian seminary is that the creeds and having right belief
00:34:20
Speaker
as many beliefs as an individual sect of Christianity might say are necessary or not, regardless of how many things you have to believe correctly in order to be Christian. But that's still important. Right.
00:34:41
Speaker
So I think you're on there, but please. Yeah. Thank you. I'm glad I didn't mess that up. So I think one of the ways that that is really different from Judaism is that for sure there are beliefs in Jewish practice. There are Jewish theologies that most Jews probably hold some
00:35:03
Speaker
belief in, and Judaism, as I mentioned before, is more than just a faith. It is a culture. If you go to myancestory.com, it says that I'm
00:35:20
Speaker
50% or whatever Ashkenazi Jewish, which Judaism is not a genetic thing. You cannot say you're Jewish because of your genetics, but you can say that you have Jewish heritage due to genetics in a way that like on my mom's side, we're pretty sure that her mother
00:35:38
Speaker
came from a Sephardic Jewish background, but we have no means of proving that because those particular genes are mixed enough with the rest of the Iberian gene pool that you can't piece them apart from one another. But there is a sense of culture and identity that
00:35:58
Speaker
goes beyond faith itself. So there are Jewish atheists, and that is in many, many Jewish spaces completely normal. There are Jews who don't really partake in synagogue life in any meaningful way, who might not have coming of age rituals like a bimitzvah, but who are still part of this Jewish heritage. And the other thing is
00:36:25
Speaker
I think especially given the current upsurge in anti-Semitic rhetoric, it's important to name that when you are deemed Jewish, you can't take that off even if you want to. I know people that were not raised religiously Jewish at all.
00:36:42
Speaker
but they are still considered to be Jewish due to having Jewish parentage and being a part of that community. So it's in some ways an identity that you can choose to set aside, but it is also an identity that others who don't like Jews might force upon you, even if you would rather not have it as part of who you are.
00:37:08
Speaker
Jewish identity is really confusing and I think that's why secular Judaism is really important because you shouldn't have to be part of a religion if you don't want to be part of that religion. Heaven forbid, to all of our listeners across traditions of belief and spirituality, as we would say in Christian traditions, that will preach.
00:37:40
Speaker
I want to lean into that idea a little bit more about, I don't know that even the language of religious freedom is the right thing to say, but the capacity for choice and to find whatever system of belief, faith, no faith, spirituality,
00:38:11
Speaker
that we have. I think I sense this among traditions of faith happening now. Maybe this is just a Christian perspective, and this is a little bit too totalizing for me to say, but it certainly feels like in many faith traditions that I've observed recently,
00:38:38
Speaker
There has been a pressure to stake a claim and regardless of whatever it is, to lean it, to find one's tribe.
00:38:51
Speaker
as it were, and maybe it's not even religion, but it's some other sort of guiding principle of belief that society, culture, is pushing us to stake identity in a meaningful, perhaps even dividing way. Am I potentially onto something or am I grasping at straws here?
Building Community through Social Media
00:39:22
Speaker
I think you're totally on to something and it's a big deal. I'm really into the work by Casper Terre Kyle and I think Angie Thurston, they were up at Harvard Div, I believe, and they did all this work on
00:39:42
Speaker
Circles of community and so like I've heard this spoken about is like three big circles You have like your most intimate people like the folks that you live with the folks that like you could call at 3 a.m You know, like if something was going wrong Like your most inner people you have your outer circle Which are like the people that are sort of in your circuit like the person that you might not necessarily know their name or much more than their name But you see them around
00:40:06
Speaker
Um, and then you have this middle circle, which are like the people who once upon a time would have been the folks at your church or in your bowling league or, you know, whatever else, you know, at the PTA that you went to. And that's the circle that shrinking because of social media, people are getting more and more.
00:40:25
Speaker
acquaintance level connections. And due to the pandemic, like most of us kind of settled into like, okay, who are our call at 3am people? But that middle circle is kind of crucial and we're missing it. And so, you know, we're seeing even with secular organizations, like I was reading this yesterday,
00:40:44
Speaker
I forget whose Instagram this was, but somebody was writing about how SoulCycle now is starting to have these sessions that are about light stretching and conversation about deep topics, which is the kind of thing that you would do with a circle of community and people are missing that.
00:41:10
Speaker
I don't necessarily believe in having a singular tribe that it's like, okay, I am Jewish, that is my tribe. Although there is this kind of joking reference of Jews as MOT, like members of the tribe. But I do believe that we do need community and especially we're both millennials-ish. I think that our generation
00:41:32
Speaker
has done a really bad job of finding those communities because we were thrown into social media as soon as we were adults. That changed a lot of the way that we interacted with one another as young adults. Whether it is a synagogue or a church or
00:41:50
Speaker
acquire. I think one of the reasons that music matters so much is because it does create that shared community around a shared interest that is deeply spiritual. You can say you're not a spiritual person if you sing, but you are because there's something about that. I do think that we really need to be working
00:42:11
Speaker
more in a lot of my work, you know, the way that I see New York City is like there are more unaffiliated Jews here than there are probably anywhere else in the United States. And I want them to show up and affiliate, not for the sake of like making my shul a mega shul. That is not a goal. But in the sense of like, you know, I think that there's something to this. There is something to this spirituality and this tradition and like this just like passing down
00:42:41
Speaker
of connection. We have a through line that goes back thousands of years, and that is astonishing. And I would hate to see that go away. And I also don't want us to be doing Judaism or any religion in the same way as our grandparents or great, great grandparents or the way we go back. It should be ours. But I think that what my, I guess they say every rabbi, every preacher has one sermon and mine is like, we need you and you need this.
00:43:10
Speaker
And the this can change but like Yes, be part of a tribe and and make it yours is my little mini sermon Thank you That that clip will immediately go to take talk because again to to bring it on back again that will preach and
00:43:36
Speaker
How's TikTok, by the way, for you? Maybe this is taking us a direction we're claiming to go, but I am curious. I'm curious about social media. I know that when you sent me even info about podcasts, you were like, we're going to put things on YouTube and on TikTok and on whatever else. I'm curious in your own ministry such as it is, in your own work around all of this, how do you see social media fitting in to helping people connect?
00:44:03
Speaker
I'm still in the information gathering phase. That phase, you know what it's like because you've produced a podcast that ran across three, four years. That early phase, you're just trying to get into the cycle of consistently producing content.
00:44:22
Speaker
and holding yourself accountable to producing enough content to where you can find your drive and you can figure out who needs to hear what you're producing and finding your voice at the same time. The strategic work of this podcast and the media company that's producing uncommon media on all socials, whatever,
00:44:48
Speaker
is to build, as you say, that sort of third circle of friends that might be somewhat culturally affiliated, but at least
00:45:00
Speaker
in a way to have to go back to what we built culturally in the 90s of being able to tolerate each other's differences and to not react with physical, psychological, or intellectual violence as the instinct is to sort of build that space and to draw in a lot of different voices and to find the common humanity and dignity underneath.
00:45:24
Speaker
So to the extent that you have to find ways of engaging people who think differently, I think social media, at least for now, is accomplishing the goal.
00:45:40
Speaker
My most favorite hate tweet was my first video that I released on YouTube and it wasn't about my guest who told a wonderfully hilarious anecdote about having a childhood crush on the Back to the Future Leah Thompson.
00:46:04
Speaker
Um, and because I was wearing a strong red lip and I'm, I'm a male body person, they were like, um, uh, what was it like, why is he wearing red lipstick? And I responded, um, intentionally misinterpreting that person's quote. Oh, because that's just my favorite shade. Um, so I don't, I don't know. Like I, I, what, what I hope social media will do is, um, allow, allow us to at least
00:46:35
Speaker
And if for some reason it becomes more, whether either socially or politically legislated, that it will at least give us the framework to
00:46:52
Speaker
to start building a little bit more accessible community. I think that the thing that we were always told that Facebook could have been or was designed to be, but ultimately we now understand had nothing to do with Facebook, right? Yeah. So I guess I'm trying to co-op social media for my own purposes, same as everyone else.
00:47:22
Speaker
That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah, but I mean, who knows? At uncommon good puddle on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and all the other things.
00:47:38
Speaker
But it's a very good question, right? Because the question that I think we're kind of revolving around is how we form community, how we form the self inside, and what systems of belief we use to do that. Yeah.
00:48:01
Speaker
And now we're not just talking about those systems, but we're specifically talking about the delivery mechanism since it's so specifically mandated. Like we have three minutes on TikTok. We have like in an Instagram reel, you have at most 90 seconds. In a YouTube short, you have 60 seconds. So.
00:48:25
Speaker
How do you break down the important nugget of a reading, say in, well, a text that's common to the two of our traditions, Deuterocanonical Law, in the course of 90 seconds?
00:48:46
Speaker
Right. Right. It's a huge question. Yeah. And I've gotten into trouble on Twitter at times for writing a thread that people don't read. So it's like they'll read the one tweet and they won't see the thread that gets into the nuance. And I should stop doing that, but I guess I
00:49:10
Speaker
I feel like I just have enough of like, I'm kind of an idealist wrapped in a pessimist, wrapped in an optimist, wrapped in a pessimist. But if you peel back all the layers, there's like this little idealist at the center that still believes that like, you know, people are ultimately good and like, you know, can can learn, grow and connect with one another. And maybe that'll change one day and maybe it won't. But I think that my approach to Twitter
00:49:34
Speaker
is even in like the Elon Musk's age where I'm just like, I don't know what's going on with this. I don't know if Twitter is going to like disappear, but it's like I have had so many positive connections on that site, like people that
00:49:50
Speaker
that had never had a Jewish interaction before or that lived in a place without Jews except for them and they were having to figure out how to navigate Jewish life remotely from lots of other Jews. People who had never experienced a female
00:50:09
Speaker
a female rabbi before, or a queer rabbi, or somebody that comes from an interfaith background. There's been so much good there that I would hate to say, oh, it's just a force for evil that takes us away from the real world.
00:50:25
Speaker
I don't think that's what it is. I think that there are limits. Part of my Shabbat practice is to be off social media, so I'm not Shomer Shabbos Shabbat observant to the degree that some Jews are. I will still use electricity. I will still take the train around. I'll still spend money on some things, but I try to be more intentional, and part of my Shabbat practice is saying that
00:50:48
Speaker
I will check text and I will check email because that's about like connection, but I won't do social media for those like 25 hours each week. Yeah. But I do think that there's a lot of good that can come out of it too, and I hope it doesn't get swallowed up.
00:51:05
Speaker
What one would hope When it does feel like things are getting swallowed up when it does feel like things are like real real like heavy pressure and like you just need to like get a dosage of
00:51:22
Speaker
the good in social media. Are there any follows that you'd love to shout out? Do you watch cute cat videos? Do you watch recipes? Do you have an ASMR channel you love?
00:51:40
Speaker
ASMR I feel conflicted about because some of it I love and some of it drives me crazy. So I do not have an ASMR channel that I follow particularly. But yes, definitely cute cats, definitely lots of cooking. I mean, I don't even know what particular follows, but I just really, I love cooking videos.
00:52:01
Speaker
love my cat videos, love my actual cat who's here somewhere. And my partner's also amazing with this because when he can tell, he'll sometimes look over at me and be like, what are you doing? And I'll be like, I'm tweeting. And I'll be like, are you sure this is a good idea right now? And he'll pull something up on his computer or phone or whatever and help me to reset, which is great.
00:52:25
Speaker
Yeah. I want to lean into your partner and your marriage a little bit because you wrote a very public and a very nuanced and insightful article on Alma talking about some of the challenges of your marriage.
00:52:49
Speaker
And not specifically like the interpersonal stuff, but the challenge of just figuring out how to be ideologically wed. And this had a little bit to do with some of the different sects of Judaism and this line that you've described about being culturally Jewish, but also
00:53:16
Speaker
not necessarily having all of the proper boxes ticked in such a way. Someone who wants to know all of the details about it can go and read it, but
00:53:32
Speaker
That to me feels like something that is a hell of a lot to carry. And I wonder if you can spend a moment or two just reflecting with us on it.
00:53:50
Speaker
Sure. The article is really about institutional politics with different Jewish movements. I am what is called a patrilineal Jew.
00:54:05
Speaker
What that means is that my dad's Jewish my mom's not yeah in some Jewish movements that means that I am just as Jewish as anybody else and in others it means that I'm not Jewish at all because Judaism has for the last 1800 years ish used mostly something called matrilineal descent, which means that it doesn't matter what the father is what matters is the
00:54:31
Speaker
the birth canal out of which you come into the world. I could go into so many details on all of the ways that I find that problematic in movements that claim to be egalitarian because of biological reductionism and other complexities there.
00:54:49
Speaker
All of that to say that in the conservative movement and the orthodox movements, I'm not considered Jewish, even though I am an ordained rabbi in the Reconstructionist movement and was raised Jewish in the reform movement, which also says patrilineal descent goes.
00:55:05
Speaker
Where this got complicated is that my rabbi, the person I considered to be a rabbi, Barry Citrin, is an 80-year-old man, a wonderful, wonderful human being who was like half the reason I went to rabbinical school, and he was ordained conservative. And so I am a big supporter of Jews and interfaith marriages. I was raised by an interfaith partnership. My sister's partner is not Jewish.
00:55:34
Speaker
I feel great about interfaith families, I fell for a Jew, which was surprising, and a man, which was not unsurprising, but I identify as pan like it could have been anybody. It could have gone any number of ways. Yeah, it could have gone any number of ways, and I happened to fall for
00:55:51
Speaker
a Jewish man who was born in Jerusalem, raised mostly in the States, and so identifies as Israeli American, but doesn't speak fluent Hebrew and did not spend most of his childhood in Israel. But anyway, he's as Jewish as they come as far as the check boxes.
00:56:08
Speaker
And so I was really just upset because my rabbi would not be able to officiate my wedding to a Jew, not because of my partner, but because of me, because I would not be considered Jewish. And I am so grateful that he actually chose to leave
00:56:28
Speaker
the movement, both to do my wedding and also to do his daughters, because his daughter was marrying somebody who doesn't claim any faith tradition, but was not Jewish. And so he had these two weddings come up within a few months of each other. And I got to have him with us, which was, I mean, pretty incredible. Because when I emailed him to ask, I just expected he'd say no.
00:56:51
Speaker
But as far as Adami and me, it's interesting. Adami's my husband, my partner. We could have a whole conversation about the word husband and how I feel weird about it, but setting that aside. You can lean in if you want. We have time.
00:57:06
Speaker
Well, I'll just say I feel weird about just all the baggage that comes with the words husband and wife. We have what I would like to consider a true partnership. He's making dinner tonight because I'll be leading services after this call.
00:57:28
Speaker
put away the dishes from earlier. We are to the degree that it's possible really in an equal partnership.
Adapting Religious Services for Modern Times
00:57:37
Speaker
And so it's not like he's the breadwinner and I'm sitting at home. I mean, I am sitting at home, but that's because I'm working from home this morning. But it's not like we have that traditional setup of husband and wife.
00:57:49
Speaker
It also feels weird for me as a queer person to use the word husband because I don't like the assumptions that that might cause people to make about me. That's a little sidebar, but all that to say that he grew up in, I would say, kind of an orthodox adjacent
00:58:10
Speaker
religious space, but at home he was almost completely secular. So he went to a Jewish day school and he went to an Orthodox synagogue, but at home they kind of did whatever. And so we've had really interesting discussions about what is religious life? What do we want for our own shared home?
00:58:29
Speaker
because he's not super spiritual. But when I use kind of alternative prayer language, it's something that jars him. And so we're learning a lot from each other, because he's learning about these American movements of Judaism that weren't a part of his upbringing
00:58:45
Speaker
And I'm getting more of an understanding of the visceral reactions that some folks raised in more traditional settings have to alternative religious practice. And so it's, I think, really good for both of us. And so far, we've managed very well. We have had some pretty spirited debates around certain topics over the years, and we're still kind of
00:59:14
Speaker
when it comes to things like circumcision, he's very pro, I am not. So there's stuff like that that if we have children, we'll have to consider. But I think that I'm learning a lot from him and he's learning a lot from me. And so there's a beauty in that.
00:59:34
Speaker
You mentioned working from home. Do you feel like your community West End, do you feel like it's mostly back to the pre-lockdown normal? Do they feel like they're back?
00:59:50
Speaker
So, you know, it's interesting. I joined West End in July 2020. So the first year and a half that I was there were completely on Zoom. I think maybe not completely, but like 90 percent. And then we ended up putting in an elevator for much of the last year.
01:00:06
Speaker
which has meant that I haven't had consistent access. In fact, it's only really in the last month that I've had regular access to my office, which is a godsend. It's so nice to have a place to put my books and have quiet meetings and all of that. So I'm still not going in every day. I'm probably in two or three days a week, so I'm still kind of hybrid in that sense. But our services are now mostly back in person, which is really beautiful.
01:00:31
Speaker
West End has a lot of seniors and we want to be as accessible as possible so we actually are still requiring masking during services and then we have people if they want to unmask afterwards for like refreshments and things and so people are having to make their own decisions about what they're comfortable doing and we still have an online presence like a pretty significant one.
01:00:56
Speaker
you know, half our services at this point are hybrid. So I actually have a laptop on the Bima, on the altar. And I'm like looking at Zoom and I'm, you know, I'm like reading things out from the chat. We're unmuting people to share readings and stuff like that. And then the other half at this point, we're doing more as live stream. So it's like, people can still be on Zoom with one another and see the service, but they're not. I don't have the laptop on the Bima and it's a little bit more
01:01:20
Speaker
Singular focus although I'll usually say something to the zoom people once or twice and really like remind them to interact with each other And then we're still keeping at as of now one service a month. That's completely on zoom And that's partly because we have now remote members who joined during the pandemic who live in you know
01:01:41
Speaker
Colorado, Ohio, Maryland. And so since they're not able to ever, unless they make a special trip, come in person, we want to make sure that there's at least one service a month where everybody's on equal footing and where we're all in our Zoom boxes instead of the people in the room being all together and the Zoom people feeling like they're disconnected. Yeah. It's a weird new world to be doing spiritual leadership.
01:02:12
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited to see what comes next. Who knows, right? It's so, you know, we're in such an interesting flex point, you know, and I really don't know what the future holds for religious engagement and religious community, but I think it could be amazing or it could end up, you know, continuing to fall to pieces a little bit and, you know, with people continuing to disaffiliate and things like that.
01:02:39
Speaker
Yeah. We're at the end of our time. I am so grateful for our conversation. We'll pause to, oh no, we'll have to have you back to talk about so many other things.
01:02:55
Speaker
But I'm so grateful for the time that you've you spent chatting to us today. We have just one final question to ask you a little bit about impact. Same question we ask everybody who's been on the show. And that is, what do you want the world to look like when you're done with it?
01:03:14
Speaker
That is a beautiful question. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for having me. It's been just lovely and different from a lot of the other podcasts I've done, which is special to have some different topics come up. Cheers to that. Yeah. What do I want in the world to be like when I'm done with it? Gosh, I mean, one day I won't be here.
01:03:38
Speaker
I hope that I won't ever be done trying to make the world better and that at some point I will die and the world would be better than it was when I was alive. What I really hope for is that, like I said, we can reach a point where people are connected with one another.
01:03:56
Speaker
more than they are now. I've been seeing this meme go around recently about this debate about, as an adult, should you invite your friends to help you move? And people being like, no, you're an adult, just hire movers. And other people being like, no, invite people, be in community. And that's absolutely what I dream of, is a time where it's not just about our little tiny nuclear families
01:04:25
Speaker
trying to do it all, but it's like, it does take a village. It takes everybody working together to try to make this world a little bit more inclusive, a little bit more connected. I think if we can all see, we have this concept of B'Tsel and Elohim being made in the divine image, if we can all see that in one another,
01:04:48
Speaker
that's what I want the world to reflect as well, that we see that divine image in everybody that we encounter, that we bring our kindest selves, because we don't know who's going through what, and just lean in from a place of care instead of a place of suspicion, which is really hard to do in 2023, in big city life or wherever else you are, it's easy to be suspicious and understandable. But I hope that by the time I leave the world,
01:05:15
Speaker
It'll be a world that is a little bit more focused on kindness and connection rather than getting ahead Also capitalism is bad And one title final time on both accounts that will preach Emily it's so good to chat to you and to get to catch up a bit. Thanks for being with us today. Thank you so much. I
01:05:43
Speaker
My thanks to Rabbi Emily Cohen. You can follow her on Twitter at thatrabbicowen on Instagram at em.cohen. You can check out her website, RabbiEmilyCohen.com, read her Hey Alma articles, subscribe to her substack,
01:06:04
Speaker
Check out the podcast, Jew Two Tales of the Mixed Multitude, all at the links in the episode description. Thank you so much for tuning in to Uncommon Good with Paulie Rees. This program is produced in southwest Philadelphia on the unceded land of the Leni Lenape tribe and the Black Bottom community. Our associate producers are Willa Jaffe and Kia Watkins.
01:06:25
Speaker
If you enjoyed listening to the show, please support us by leaving us a five-star review and a comment and subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help people find us. Uncommon Good is also available on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram at UncommonGoodPod. Follow us there for closed caption video content and more goodies.
01:06:44
Speaker
We love questions and feedback. You can send us a DM on social media or an email at uncommongoodpod at gmail.com. Thank you so, so much for listening. Until next time, wishing you every uncommon good to do your uncommon good, to be the uncommon good.