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After two years in Jerusalem,
Benj Kamm recently returned
to Boston and now serves as
the North American program
coordinator for Encounter, an
organization dedicated to
creating human connections
and breakthroughs in
understanding between Jews
and Palestinians as well as
between Jews and other Jews.
expansive prayer, but also to foster a space of
communal experimentation. Recognizing that
the minyan would vary dramatically in style
and content each Shabbat, we long resisted a
descriptive name, sticking to “the Fourth
Minyan.” (It’s since taken the name “Chavura.”)
I’ve learned that Jewish communities come
and go. The Fourth Minyan reflected the needs
of particular undergrads at a particular time. As
an undergrad, I was also a leader in Jews in the
Woods (JITW), another experiment in plural-
ist, peer-planned gathering — in this case, an
annual Shabbat retreat drawing students and
young adults from the East Coast. Two years
ago, our listserv quieted down; no one stepped
up to plan a retreat. Had the experiment in hor-
izontal, peer-driven experience failed? No!
Rather, if the project didn’t serve a need, why
invest in it? JITW had already hibernated once
before; we let it hibernate again. It has since re-
launched in its third iteration. The current in-
carnation is as different from ours as ours was
from what came before us. Allowing JITW to
pause made room for another group to own
and create its own Jewish experience.
Knowing What We Need
SHARON STRASSFELD
Sharon Strassfeld, one of the
authors of The Jewish Catalog,
is also author of Everything I
Know: Basic Life Rules From a
Jewish Mother (Scribner).
She is also an investor and
consultant in real estate for
the nonprofit sector.
The summer of 2008 was the 40th an- niversary of the founding of Havurat Shalom, the oldest havurah in America,
and more than 100 of its current and past members gathered at Isabella Freedman Jewish
Retreat Center in Falls Village, Conn., to celebrate and remember. Much was written about
Havurat Shalom at the time of its creation and
during the ten years thereafter, but the real document that characterized the havurah
movement during its early years was The Jewish
Catalog. I haven’t looked at the Catalog in perhaps 25 years. So when I was asked to write
this article, it was with more than a little curiosity that I returned to that first volume. What
struck me was both how dated it feels now and
how prescient we were then.
What was the core value that informed The
Jewish Catalog More than we like to believe, it
was a sturdy rebellion against the Judaism we
had grown up with in post-war America — large
synagogues staffed by pompous rabbis, cantors
singing music we considered inaccessible, and
an absence of real Jewish content in the homes
in which we’d been raised. The Jewish Catalog
held as its core values small-scale Judaism nourished in the home, supported by small, intimate
groups of fellow travelers outside of the home.
It valued ecology, experimentation, personal
ownership and empowerment, feminism, a
staunch “do-it-yourself” approach to Jewish life
and artifacts (I well remember our experiments
in boiling a stinking ram’s horn before drilling it
out to make a shofar), and a celebration of an
individual’s right to make determinations for his
or her own life. We got so many things right that
we have been able, in the intervening years, to
banish from thought the things we got wrong.
For example, because it was simply too early,
we failed to understand where the women’s
movement would take us. When The Jewish
Catalog was first published in 1973, it included
a chapter on feminism that was very tentative,
with a focus on all the wrong issues. How could
we have understood that less than four decades
later there would be women rabbis, or the
equivalent thereof, in every Jewish denomination in existence? The other thing we never
anticipated was the new breed of inconceivably
wealthy American Jewish philanthropists, who
