SHMA.COM
meanings of a Torah portion requires engaging in discourse with others. Such an approach
benefits not only individual learners but also
learning communities, whose level of discourse is heightened when participants prepare in advance.
Given our limited resources, we must be
careful to not duplicate one another’s efforts.
The hallmark of this next decade should be
collaboration. Our dual goal must be to estab-
lish unique learning environments and to blaze
varied pathways in support of idiosyncratic
Jewish journeys. We must ensure that those
who are “doing-it-themselves” have access to
supportive Jewish communities that can bring
them in as stakeholders in the endeavor of cre-
ating a thriving, inspirational, and authentic
Jewish future.
A Jew-It-Yourself Mini-Manifesto
DANIEL SIERADSKI
Daniel Sieradski is an
interdisciplinary artist and
documentarian investigating
post-normative forms of Jewish
cultural expression. A digital
strategist for Jewish nonprofits
and former publisher of the
pioneering blog Jewschool,
Sieradski is now working on
“31 Days, 31 Ideas,” a project
that offers 31 innovative
ideas to transform the Jewish
future. Read it at
http://31days.tumblr.com.
In an age when many American Jews are in- creasingly unaffiliated, disaffiliated, post-de- nominational, post-institutional, and “fluid”
in their identities, a vanguard of Millennial and
Generation-X Jews are reinvigorating Jewish life
for a new era. They are emboldened by a culture
of “Do-It-Yourself lifestylism” — mainstreamed
by the environmental sustainability movement.
They are informed by the user-generated, par-
ticipation-driven, decentralized and open source
ethics of the Internet. They are empowered by
their own imagination, inquisitiveness, and ap-
preciation for the Jewish tradition. And they are
making, as CNN recently noted, “one of the
world’s oldest known monotheistic faiths and
its culture work for them and others in a time
when, more than ever, affiliation is a choice.”
Through creative interpretation and experi-
mentation, the “Jew-It-Yourself” generation has
introduced a reframing of social, cultural, reli-
gious, and political views through a series of
inter- and extra-institutional initiatives that are
slowly transforming the Jewish world, making it
accessible and relevant for new generations. In
the process, these Jews have inspired an inter-
national Jewish social innovation movement
bred on values of inclusiveness, egalitarianism,
non-hierarchicalism, decentralization, sustain-
ability, and individual empowerment that are
now being infused into the logic models of the
next generation of Jewish organizations.
The act of re-imagining and forging one’s
own path has, of course, been a hallmark of the
Jewish tradition since our people’s inception —
the archetypal moment being Abraham’s de-
struction of his father’s idols (see Sh’ma’s year-
long series ‘Avraham’s Father’s Idols’). Of
Abraham’s iconoclasm, Rebbe Nachman teaches
in Likutei Moharan that to truly serve God, one
must tune out all the other voices in the world
and heed only the divine voice calling from
within; one “must be impervious” and believe
himself to be “the only person in the world.”
Though it sounds selfish, self-indulgent, or
narcissistic to some, this radical subjectivity is
nevertheless a core tenet of our faith. Rav Kook
wrote in HaOrot that “all our endeavors in
Torah and scientific studies are only to clarify
whatever comprehensible words it is possible
to distill from the divine voice that always re-
verberates in our inner ear.”
Yet being on one’s own trip does not mean
forsaking community. Indeed, listening to the
voice within, Abraham opened wide his tent.
Those who cleaved to him were themselves vi-
sionaries and seekers in exile. They saw in
Abraham a model to emulate in their own quests
for authentic self-realization. Reb Simcha Bunim
of Przysucha taught that a bona fide tzaddik is a
person who is truly himself — one resonant with
his inner voice — and who awakens in others a
desire to be, not like him, but also truly them-
selves. For Abraham, the ideal “conscious com-
munity” was therefore one in which individuals
supported each other in becoming one’s true
self. So, too, for the “Do-It-Yourself” Jew.
