If I’m a Jewish trendsetter, it’s at least partly by accident and, because “There is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9), the trend that I am setting is a rabbinic “Back to the Future.” I am North America’s only pulpit rabbi simultaneously maintaining a full-time public oath of office. I serve full-time in the […]
Who is wise? I believe it is the one that learns from his children. As I read about megatrends in Judaism and religious life, I understand what I read through the lens of my two adult children. Here’s my Jewish background so as to explain what may seem to be my approach. I am a […]
Imeinu Jewish Birth Workers Collective is a network of birth professionals and other service providers who are committed to offering physical, emotional, informational and spiritual care to the laboring mother, her baby and her family to encourage the most positive pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum experience. We are honored to offer resources for childbirth as a […]
Mine is a congregation that doesn’t read books such as Jewish Megatrends (though it occurs to me that I should send them the chapter on which we’ve been asked to write this essay), so its members don’t quite get how at least two of the three factors Rabbi Schwarz described (the two that aren’t about […]
My work with Jewish Initiative for Animals (JIFA) engages institutions and individuals of all stripes to turn the Jewish value of concern for animal welfare into action—a mission that aligns with and transcends the four propositions that Sid Schwarz outlines in Jewish Megatrends. Chochma /Wisdom There are ways in which the traditional Jewish framework for […]
IfNotNow was founded in the summer of 2014, during the war in Gaza. The movement’s founders were all Jewish millennials, some with roots in the institutional Jewish world, having grown up going to Jewish day school or summer camps, and others had little to no connection to the organized Jewish community. The founders of this […]
When the American Synagogue came into being, the institutional structure had to respond to, and contend with, the societal challenges of the time: social circles being segregated by race, class, and religion; the push and pull of assimilation vs. maintaining a strong – but foreign – identity; and the concentration of resources and communication around […]
The “forced continuity” of the Jewish community of the 80s and 90s, as mentioned in Jewish Megatrends, gave birth to frustrated Jews who felt that it was an all-or-nothing reality– do and believe what the religion required, or abstain from it. Meanwhile, these same individuals were told that they could change the world. The Boomer […]
The quote from Talmud at the beginning of Jewish Megatrends is very beautiful: “Fortunate is the generation in which the elders listen to the youth” (Rosh Hashana 25b). We should be so lucky. I agree with Rabbi Sid’s assessment that Jews are seekers of wisdom (dorshei chochmah), seekers of social justice (dorshei tzedek), seekers of community (dorshei kehilla), and […]
In his thesis, Rabbi Sid Schwarz offers that the downturn in Jewish communal affiliation does not “suggest that Jews are no longer seeking each other out. It simply means that Jews are turning their backs on larger, mainstream organizations that are experienced as top-down institutions in an era when Jews want to do it themselves.” […]