Inclusion: Reimagining Our Personal Responses to Communal Disruption

Inclusion: Reimagining Our Personal Responses to Communal Disruption
By Rabbi Benay Lappe

It was such a joy to join the FJMC International Convention earlier this month. I have been
reflecting on what an energizing, thoughtful, courageous group of leaders you are. For those of you who couldn’t be there in person, I hope you’ll take a moment to watch the 17-minute video or the Convention presentation and join the conversation from wherever you are.

We talked about what I call CRASH—those moments when the Master Story we’ve been handed no longer works. And, let’s be honest, we’re living in a time of one massive CRASH after another. Antisemitism is rising. The Jewish community is deeply divided on how to respond. Families are hurting. And many of our institutions are struggling to stay relevant. At times, every day feels raw and untenable, but this isn’t the first time we’ve been here.

Our tradition knows a lot about what happens when we CRASH because it was built on it. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Rabbis looked around at the ruins and asked: Now what? And—partly because they, the marginalized folks of their time, had already been building an alternative from the margins for years—in that moment, they did something revolutionary. They didn’t try to fix the broken system. They trusted their svara—that deep moral intuition each of us carries—to guide them forward to create a future that, though it might have been unrecognizable to their peers, became the Judaism that created us.

And that’s our task now: Look toward the margins. Those folks have been working on a post-CRASH world for a long time and have figured out a lot. Re-center your project on them, and let them invite you into it.

As you in the FJMC continue your incredible work—especially your efforts around inclusion—I want to leave you with this reminder: Inclusion shouldn’t be about “welcoming” people into what is. It’s about re-centering the folks on the margins, who—yes!–will benefit from what you’ve created, and what you can teach them—to create what will be the FJMC of the future.

You don’t become the community of the future by tweaking the past. You do it by being brave enough to write a radically new chapter—together—with everyone at the table. So thank you, truly, for welcoming me in, for leaning into discomfort, and for being willing to do the sacred, messy, hopeful work of living through a CRASH to a more liberatory Jewish future for all of us.

With gratitude and admiration,
Rabbi Benay Lappe

Looking for more from Rabbi Benay Lappe? Check out her work at SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva at svara.org. Interested in learning more about bringing in a SVARA speaker to your community? Contact Elli Krandel at .