Applying academic research in the synagogue

COLLABORATION: Rabbis, Academics In New Partnership. In a first, Clal and UPenn Judaic studies research center team up to disseminate ideas from cutting-edge scholarship (Robert Goldblum, The Jewish Week).

The ivory tower and the synagogue near you could hardly be more different.

In one, solitary postdoctoral fellows pore over ancient texts in search of often arcane, though potentially transformative, knowledge; for instance, the “emotional, embodied experience of prayer” in the Qumran community, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.

In the other, a community of worshippers gathers (with less and less frequency these days), and while prayer is surely on the agenda, the more mundane pressures of modern life impinge: bar/bat mitzvah schedules, the building-fund campaign, how to integrate intermarried congregants; all of it can compromise the spiritual and meaning-making project of synagogue life.

In a potentially bold stroke, Rabbis Irwin Kula and Brad Hirschfield of Clal – the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, think they have a way to unite academia and the wider Jewish community. The goal: to bring the ideas uncovered by those postdoc fellows to Jews in the pews, and those beyond the synagogue. And in that way to “reimagine Judaism on the ground,” according to Rabbi Kula.

In what is believed to be a first-of-its-kind program, Clal is teaming up with the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania to train a cohort of multi-denominational rabbis to be “translators,” as Rabbi Kula calls them.

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Two scholars at the Katz Center, Eva Mroczek and Rachel Werczberger, spoke about their research into “experiments in community building and prayer practice,” as Rabbi Hirschfield put it, one ancient and the other contemporary. Mroczek focused on the nature of prayer in the Qumran community, and Werczberger on the idea of “Jewish authenticity” as it applied to several Renewal/New Age-type communities in Israel that flourished in the early 2000s but eventually collapsed.

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