Filmmaker Jeremy Sarachan Features Dorshei Derekh

Facing the filmmaker - Reena, Jane, Betsy, Avruhm, Bobbi, George

Last summer an intriguing email landed in my in-box, from a filmmaker. Jeremy Sarachan, a Rochester-based professor, explained: “While on Sabbatical this fall, I hope to visit several synagogues throughout the United States to capture the spirituality and community associated with Reconstructionist Judaism.” He added that while he happily attends a Reform congregation, he identifies as a Reconstructionist, making this project a voyage of self-discovery.

We were pleased to be included in his travels. The Delaware Valley is rich ground for such a project, given the presence of RRC, numerous Reconstructionist communities, including Minyan Dorshei Derekh, and scores of RRC-ordained rabbis. Filming on shabbat was not an option, so we planned a Havdalah get-together on December 6^th. Jeremy first joined us at shabbat services, chatted with attendees over kiddush, and decided to not just film the Havdalah ritual, lead by Rabbi Malkah Binah Klein, but also to capture a discussion amongst us.

If you’ve seen one Reconstructionist community, you’ve seen one Reconstructionist community. There are many hallmarks of our movement; uniformity is not one of them. Jeremy was surprised at the amount of Hebrew in our service, as well as the level of literacy. The presence of a dozen+ rabbis in our midst contributes to that, and also helps attract Jewishly literate lay Jews.

Rabbi Tamara Cohen pointed out, at Havdalah, that while Reconstructionists make distinctions, we don’t privilege one distinction over another. We eliminate the traditional phrase marking the difference between Israel and all the other peoples. We note the difference between the sacred and the everyday, and appreciate both.

We reconvened in a circle, naturally, and responded to the prompts Jeremy provided. Reflects Rabbi George Stern, “Most exciting for me was the opportunity to listen both to Dorshei members with much more background about our minyan than I and to newer members who provided new insights. The conversation revived my enthusiasm about our wonderful minyan and its devoted and caring members.” We mentioned that our Chesed Committee has been very active, in response to our minyan aging in place and more people needing healing prayers and active support. Jeremy noted the high level of compassion echoing through our service.

Many expressed how impactful the Reconstructionist Prayerbook, Kol Haneshamah (many of its creators attend our minyan, as does the editor-in-chief, Rabbi David Teutsch) is on their prayer experience, providing so many different appellations for God, as well as its inspiring commentary and beautiful poetry.

Dick Goldberg, a newer member, was struck by “the depth and richness that exist within our minyan—depth of Jewish knowledge, of commitment to engaging with the world, of genuine compassion, and of inclusivity, as we genuinely believe that all are created in the image of God; and richness when it comes to the different Jewish paths that have brought us together, variety of life experience, and unique ways of being in the world.”

We are very proud of the role Mark Pinsky plays at RRC, where he serves as Treasurer of the Board. He and Jennifer were introduced to Dorshei Derekh by his colleague Adina Abramowitz z”l and have become pillars of our minyan. Mark’s takeaway: “We don’t usually sit around talking about Reconstructionism, so it was fascinating and uplifting to spend a few hours listening to a cross section of Dorshei Derekh. We discussed what makes it meaningful to us and what we appreciate about our community. It felt like an affirmation of the choices Dorshei has made over the decades.”

People treasure the variety of styles and approaches that change weekly. I observed how rarely a member assigned a task had not made it to shul. Maybe a half dozen times in the nearly forty years I have been attending? That’s barely once a decade! We are very committed to one another; people show up.

We are, of course, excited to see how many of our exchanges make the cut and appear in Jeremy’s film. Regardless, as Debbie Weinstein points out, “the film shoot provided us with the additional benefit of a wonderful opportunity for us to share amongst ourselves our appreciation for the Dorshei Derekh Minyan community.”

Thanks, Jeremy! We are excited about your film. Thanks for helping us see ourselves in a new light.

Yasher Koach to Rabbi Tamara Cohen, Covenant Grant Winner 2023

Congratulations to our own Rabbi Tamara Cohen, recipient of the Covenant Foundation Award. Here is her talk, presented on November 8, 2023:

Hineni, here I am, Tamara Rut bat Esther Rachel v’ Shachna Pinchas, Zichrono Livracha.  

Hineni, here I am, a Jewish feminist educator, nurtured by beloved mentors and community and passionately committed to transforming Jewish education by centering the experiences of Jewish women and girls, LGBTQ+ Jews and Jews of color.

My work is the weaving together of ancient and new, the grafting of tradition and innovation, the invitation to others to join me in sacred play and holy community building. I gather and create texts, ideas and rituals that have been rescued, excavated and revealed to us by Jewish feminist historians, theologians and scholars and I offer them to Jewish young people, their parents and educators, as keys, as pathways, as doors inviting our youth, especially those who feel on the margins, to come inside, to make themselves at home in Judaism, a richer, more multifaceted, more whole Judaism that with their presence and creativity, can and truly serve as a home for all of us in our diversity.

Jewish feminism starts by recognizing the vibrant Jewishness of women but it doesn’t end there. It challenges structural inequity, asks us to re-think our core assumptions, dares us to name what is sacred in ourselves and in every being we encounter with ancient and new language.

Jewish education grounded in feminism is a practice of hope. Born of necessity, loss, exclusion, oppression, revolution, it invites us all to hold complexity, to dream that more is possible, and to trust that we have and can create the tools we need, even for this intensely challenging moment.

We have practices of empathy and listening, midrash, ritual and Torah study. We know how to honor each other’s experiences and embrace each other’s questions, how to hold ourselves and others accountable, how to walk the path of teshuva, how to envision justice and enact compromise, how to cultivate the courage for the hard work of collaboration and connection across difference, how to praise and cry out to God using Her many names.

The Israelites in the desert are said to have been sustained by Miriam’s Well. Perhaps it was the same well that Hagar saw when God opened her eyes in her moment of despair. That ancient mythical well is what I want to help our youth see, drink from, and when needed, help us refill. It is a well of sustenance, healing and hope.

Jewish youth need us to walk with them into the pressing questions and challenges of our era as guides and as partners. They need us to be honest, brave, and moral cultivators of hope even as we take seriously the threats we face. They need us to see in them what they can’t always see in themselves or in one another.

Hineni, here I am. Filled with gratitude and ready to answer the ongoing call to teach, to lead, to widen the tent, to insist on a third way, to do justice, love goodness and walk humbly with God.

The Covenant Foundation's Covenant Award, honor three exemplary Jewish educators who are each meeting a complex moment in Jewish communal history with a powerful blend of courage, commitment, and compassion.

The 2023 Covenant Award recipients are: Rabbi Tamara R. Cohen, Chief Program Officer, Moving Traditions, Philadelphia, PA; Allison Cook, Founder and Co-Director, Pedagogy of Partnership, Powered by Hadar, Cambridge, MA; Nicole Nash, Head of School, Hannah Senesh Community Day School, Brooklyn, NY.

Happy 36th Anniversary, Dorshei Derekh!

Longtime member, Rabbi Robert Tabak, as a historian and lover of ritual, has kept track of our milestones. He encouraged us to celebrate 36 years and pulled together a committee to do so: Jane Century, Fredi Cooper, Rachel Falkove, Dick Goldberg, Malkah Binah Klein, and Bob. 

Rabbi Malkah Binah, our service leader, shared:

We agreed that our priorities are to build a strong and loving sense of community, to have a musical service with a strong spiritual focus and a lively Torah discussion, to be open, creative and flexible, and to reach out to and include new people.   (From minutes of planning meeting in 1986 for what would become Dorshei Derekh)

Rabbi Tamara Cohen, unable to be with us in person, shared a poem:

Mizmor l’dorshim

    A psalm for the seekers

    Seekers of the path 

    With tambourine and tallit 

    With dishes to wash and stories to tell

    We call on one another alternating gender or not, muting and unmuting on our zoom squares, visiting     the sick, learning how to welcome and how not to harm.

    We call one another to Torah - for birthdays and yartzeits, for gratitude and healing, for wonder and        honor, pebbles and milestones.

    We call on the Source of Life, on foremothers or six.

    Choosing not chosen, we arrive at thirty six, hai plus hai, two strands of life, original members and         newer ones, the ones that left and came back and the ones that stayed. 

    Lidrosh: to seek, also to interpret and reinterpret.

    Seekers of the path,  

    through quiet and talk,

    Prayer and song. 

Rabbi Fredi Cooper bestowed an original blessing upon us:

A Blessing for Dorshei Derekh on the Occasion of the 36^th Anniversary

               Shabbat Parashat Naso: June 3, 2023/ 14 Sivan 5783

And so, today, we have lifted up each head

We have been lifting up each one of us for thirty- six years

And in this lifting, we have been sure to count carefully, each one

This is the blessing that has marked the vitality of our minyan

We have been seekers together through these years

And in our seeking we see each other….taking on a bit of the almighty

Thirty- six is a number so rich in it’s meaning and it brings blessing to our kahal, our sacred community

It marks now, that the minyan has lasted a double portion in life

But even more thirty- six is equal to Lamed, Vav

We learn that the world must contain at least 36 righteous individuals

At Dorshei Derekh we embrace the righteousness in each one of us

We help the other to step in the right direction in life

We embrace and recognize that at any time, any moment, one of us who is present

Could be one of those thirty- six

And if it is so, we hope to learn from that righteous one

On the first day of creation, God created the light

It is said that, that light burned for exactly 36 hours

May we continue to be lifted together toward the best light

And may we continue to come together in celebration, in prayer, in righteousness and justice

And together, may we always seek what is best in life

And find it here

With full hearts we say, Amen

And Student Rabbi Maria Pulzetti shared a teaching from her 2019 Bat Mitzvah in abstentia:

In Ahavah Rabah we pray,

v’haeir eynenu btoratecha –

light up our eyes with Your Torah.

That phrase evokes Sinai,

when our people gathered at the mountain, early,

seeking a glimpse of the Divine.

In place of the unseeable, the face of God,

we received the light of Torah.

Each day we pray that its glow will fuel us anew

as we listen, learn, and teach,

keep, perform, and fulfill,

with love.

We push and stretch and birth;

lean out, and draw our edges together.

Maybe today, we pray, we will dare

to love our neighbor with the deep love that bathes us.

Maybe today we will confront the legacy of slavery;

we will stop standing idly by;

we will center the needs of the poor, the sick, the mourners;

we will illuminate the laws of Torah

with the love poured upon us,

and with light in our eyes

we will listen.

Stefan Presser z"l Social Justice Retropsective: 15 Years!

Last night we gathered on Zoom for Havadalah and to hear from four of our leading Tikkun Olam activists: Donald Joseph, David Mosenkis, Tamara Cohen, and Seth Lieberman.

Betsy Teutsch shared this history of the Stefan Presser Memorial Social Justice Shabbat programing.

Stefan’s presence in our minyan intensified along with his illness. He was a husband to Sandy and father of their three young kids [adults, and all present tonight!], in his late 40s, when diagnosed with a brain tumor. His prognosis was not great. He had been a member of Dorshei Derekh for several years, but once ill, he came to Dorshei Derekh most every shabbat, often sharing where he was on this distressing journey. When he had to stop working, and his world became smaller, the times he spent with us became increasingly precious. He radiated love, and we all beamed it back at him. Many of our members regularly went to visit with him as he became more frail.

He died on Shabbat Shuvah, the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in 2005. A few of us organized a program on his 2nd yahrzeit. His dear friend Professor Seth Kreimer spoke on legal issues issues of the day.

My memory is hazy on how we decided to repeat this annually, but I recall meeting up with David Mosenkis at High Point to kick around ideas. Stefan had been the Legal Director of the Pennsylvania ACLU and many Minyan teens interned for him. Inviting them to speak was a way for us all to process both the loss of Stefan, and nurture his legacy. We got to hear what work Ari Spicehandler Brochin, Josh Marcus, Frances Kreimer, and our son Zach Teutsch, were up to. They are all active in social justice work as adults.

By 2010 our planning group included Donald Joseph. In Stefan’s memory we  planned an annual program on a specific social justice topic in the late fall/early winter. While the GJC community was always invited, it has primarily been an internal Dorshei Derekh event.

Our formula was to choose an issue we wanted to learn more about, invite an expert activist to speak, and pair them with someone with substantial Jewish insight on the topic. Adding a lunch or, as we called it, lunchy kiddush, encouraged people to stick around. This was our approach for the ensuing decade, pulled off on a shoestring, funded by our minyan treasury.

In the ‘0s, Germantown Jewish Centre’s social justice portfolio resided in the Social Action Committee. This committee was tasked with the annual MLK program done in conjunction with local churches, through the Neighbourhood Interfaith Movement. They also planned the annual Granger Shabbat focusing on local social justice issues. Additionally, the committee focused on direct service, organizing volunteers for tutoring and Story Times at our neighborhood’s Henry and Houston Schools. GJC’s program for housing and feeding homeless families, the Philadelphia Interfaith Hospitality Network, began in 1996, a complex undertaking with its own team of in-house volunteers. It became a major focus of direct service GJC mitzvah activity.

What was missing at GJC was a way for members with a passion around a particular cause to organize and build support for shared activism. We have always had many members involved in a myriad of issues. In our minyan Stefan brought his ACLU background; Mike Masch z”l was our pipeline to city politics, as well as to Harrisburg and Pennsylvania state government policy and budget. It’s not every minyan that offers a misheberach when the State Budget passes!

Many of our Stefan Presser program topics were proposed by Dorshei Derekh members wanting a platform for causes in which they were  already immersed. Malkah Binah Klein became our committee chair, and brought some specific programs, including the one on Gun Violence and another on Returning Citizens. On some level, we used this Social Justice annual program as an incubator; quite a few of the topics grew into synagogue-wide concerns. 

In 2016 the GJC Social Action Committee was restructured as the Tikkun Olam Coordinating Team. One of those working to bring about this change is our own Abby Weinberg. The mission is now very different, supporting members to advocate and organize for the causes they care about, and running programs where congregants can get involved. Tikkun Olam means Repairing the World; clearly we have continued providing direct services to but have expanded to working for systemic changes.

And we will be hearing Donald Joseph’s update on the Pennsylvania School Funding Trial, the culmination of decades of work by the Public Interest Law Center.

David Mosenkis will be talking in a few minutes about the synagogue’s deepening commitment to POWER, a state-wide multi-faith multi-racial movement advocating for systemic change in a number of arenas.

We will be hearing from Seth Lieberman, the chair of the synagogue-wide Refugee Committee. 

We will be hearing from Tamara Cohen, on the minyan’s antiracism task force, along with hearing about the synagogue’s.

These are all topics that we featured at specific Social Justice shabbatot, and are now woven into our synagogue’s work.

Personal activism and community organizing have taken off exponentially since the beginning of our Presser Shabbatot in 2008. The language around this work has changed. We have moved from Social Action to Social Justice to Tikkun Olam. We are now more nuanced about justice: we speak of racial justice, environmental and climate justice, reproductive justice, education justice, disability justice, and gender justice. Kol Tzedek, the Reconstructionist Congregation in West Philly where many GJC Gen Xers are active, including Josh Marcus, named itself Kol Tzedek, A Voice for Justice - right there, front and center. There are many similar synagogues around the country that have sprung up with a primary focus on Tikkun Olam.

Obviously, the 4 years of the previous administration raised the pursuit of social justice to a crisis level. And 2 years of a pandemic have reset most everything.

The Jewish community has generated ever more justice-oriented organizations. Keeping track of all of them is challenging!

Tonight we are reflecting on how social justice/Tikkun Olam moved from the periphery of Dorshei Derekh - something some of our members were devoted to - to becoming a central focus of our community.  And how Dorshei’s Derekh commitment to these values connects to GJC, our larger home.

We cannot claim that our Stefan Presser Social Justice programs brought this about, but we immodestly perhaps, do think they have helped to galvanize Dorshei Derekh, and motivated many of us to get more involved in initiatives we learned about at these programs. Indeed, we are better together. Pursuing justice is more effective, and more satisfying, when it’s a shared effort.

    - Betsy Teutsch, January 29, 2022

Dorshei Derekh Core Values

Our minyan has been continuing evolving over these past 35 years.

Shkoy'ach - kudos - to Rabbi Tamara Cohen for composing a contemporary statement of what matters to us and who we are now:

Ñ Core Dorshei Derekh ValuesÐ

·         Lay leadership

·         Vibrant participatory services

·         Critical and creative engagement with Torah and liturgy

·         Theological diversity

·         Mutual aid/caring for one another

·         Feminist innovation

·         LGBTQ inclusion

·         Anti-racist learning and practice

·         Intergenerational community

·         Inclusion of those who have been historically marginalized in Jewish communities.