Exodus to Empowerment (Guest Author: Dana Talmi)

Dana Talmi profiles Avraham Nega Admasu for
PresenTense Magazine’s recent “Heroes” issue

Name: Avraham Nega Admasu
Home: Rishon L’Tzion, Israel
Profession: Material engineer, father, community leader
He’s a hero because: He’s empowering Ethiopian youth

Who is Avraham Nega Admasu?

A 38-year-old father of three, material engineer, and community leader, Avraham Nega Admasu empowers Ethiopian youth in Israel to connect to their culture and to integrate into the broader Israeli community.

Admasu is part of a garin—a Hebrew word that means “seed,” a collaborative community working together for the betterment of society, under the umbrella of the Friends by Nature.

The nonprofit organization works to empower and educate the Ethiopian community in Israel. Committed to planting the seeds for a successful and vibrant Ethiopian community in the town of Rishon Letzion, the garin is one of 10 such communities dedicated to strengthening the Ethiopian community from within.

Ethiopian Beginnings

Admasu’s path as a community leader is informed by his life story. He grew up among 11 siblings in Kabazit, a small village in northern Ethiopia.

During his childhood, he tended livestock with his father and helped the women bring water from the nearby well. In 1984, his family sold their livestock and bribed the necessary local officials, enabling 52 family members to leave the country secretly and make the 12-day trip to the Sudanese border by foot.

— Don’t stop reading now. Continue on to Israel. —

Sending Money to Israel? What’s Your Return? (Guest Author: Chaim Landau)

Chaim Landau reflects on the history of Diaspora giving to Israel and where we stand now. This piece was originally published in PresenTense Magazine’s philanthropy issue.

Sending Money to Israel? What’s Your Return

Well before the founding of the State of Israel, Jews in the Diaspora have been sending money to support a variety of causes in the land of Israel. The simple model, however, of Diaspora Jews as donor and Israeli Jews as recipients, has become outdated.

The Old Paradigm of Giving

It is no longer axiomatic for many young Diaspora Jews that they need to send money to a successful country whose fate seems to have little impact on their own lives.

Money invested in Israel, whether by the individual or the Jewish community as a whole, must benefit both donor and recipient, and needs to be seen as part of a holistic two-way relationship. Such philanthropy, instead of being divorced from Jewish life in the Diaspora, needs to enhance and contribute to it.

Source: Tzedaka.org

The money that Diaspora Jews sent to Israel throughout the years was indispensible in absorbing millions of immigrants, building up the State’s infrastructure, and maintaining an army capable of defending Israel.

What these donors received in return was pride in Israel’s very existence: its military victories, developing infrastructure, and its vigorous and thriving society. They could feel themselves a part of the Jewish people, and active partners in building up the Jewish state even if they did not reside there themselves.

Jewish Poverty in the Diaspora

Yet Israel’s current condition is not the same as in its early years when it was undeveloped and unstable, and American Jewry has its own pressing needs. Jewish education in the Diaspora is still a luxury for many.

— Keep reading for best practice models in engaging donors —

Caring About the Environment, Jewishly (Blog Action Day 2009)

How do we live as Jews, caring consciously and spiritually about the environment? I’ve done a lot of thinking about this matter, but the best speech that I ever heard on it was a presentation given at the 2009 ROI Summit.

The presenters have kindly agreed to share their speech with you on caring about the environment and living a Jewish life.

This post is an entry for Blog Action Day 2009.  (Check out the blog, and find them on Twitter at @blogactionday and with the hashtag #BAD09.)

The Speech

Presenters:  Karin Fleisch, Vivian Lehrer, and Anthony Rogers-Wright.

Karin Fleisch:

“Environmentalism just makes sense. We all live on this planet and need its resources to thrive and survive. As Jews, environmentalism is rooted in our history, our religion, and our values.

Climate change, over-consumption, mass species extinction — these are happening now. And it’s not just about the Earth anymore. It’s about preventing massive…human…suffering.

Vivian Lehrer:

But it’s going to be alright – probably – IF we adapt, as we are so good at doing. We already have all the solutions we need to make significant change.

We need to stop thinking of Jewish environmentalism as a separate category and focus on creating a healthier world for all – because, in the process, we’re going to strengthen Jewish communities and identity.

The Jewish imperative for environmentalism isn’t marginal – it’s our most core, mainstream and familiar values and traditions.

Shabbat– is an ecological treasure! A day to rest from shopping, manufacturing, driving!

Kashrut (keeping Kosher)- the idea that what we eat matters, that it’s upon us to minimize suffering of animals! We need to update this to take responsibility for the full impacts of what we eat, the stuff we buy, and what we put into landfills. We vote with our dollars and with our forks for the full story of our food and our stuff.

Brachot (the blessings over our food)– invite mindfulness of where our food comes from. To bless food we have to figure out whether it grew from the ground or a tree; from there it’s a short step to thinking of how it was raised, whether the people involved in getting it to us were paid a fair wage, whether its story helped or hurt our environment.

— Keep reading for a list of Jewish environmental organizations —

Yehuda Kurtzer Wins Bronfman Brandeis Contest: Read His Full Proposal Here

Photo by Diego Lemas

UPDATE: Huge congratulations are in order for Yehuda Kurtzer, who has been chosen as the winner of the Bronfman Brandeis contest. His biography and proposal are below.

This is the 10th entry in the Bronfman Big Idea Series.

About the Author

Yehuda Kurtzer is a doctoral student in Jewish Studies at Harvard University, where he is writing his dissertation on the Jews of the Mediterranean Diaspora and their relationship to the rise of rabbinic piety. As part of this project, Yehuda focuses on transformations in Jewish identity in the changing ancient world.

An alumnus of the Wexner Graduate Fellowships and Bronfman Youth Fellowships, Yehuda has served as a teaching fellow at Harvard and for the past two years as an Instructor in History at Hebrew College in Newton, MA. Yehuda has worked as a Research Fellow for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum helping to bridge the worlds of Jewish Studies and Holocaust Studies, and as a consultant on rabbinic texts for Facing History and Ourselves.

He has lectured and taught widely in adult education settings, including The Curriculum Initiative, the Brandeis Initiative on Bridging Scholarship and Pedagogy, and NYU’s Center for Online Judaic Studies. Yehuda also helped co-found and continued to help lead Brookline’s Washington Square Minyan. He lives in Brookline, MA with his wife Stephanie Ives and their son Noah.

[Further links in body of text below.]

“The Sacred Task of Rebuilding Jewish Memory” by Yehuda Kurtzer

Jews Have Six Senses: Quoting Jonathan Safran Foer

“Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing…memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger.

The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks – when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep while stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain – that the Jew is able to know why it hurts.

When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?”

~ Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (p. 198.)

Introduction

The next great step for the Jewish future will be the reclamation of the Jewish past. I believe that the most successful, interesting and engaging programs currently invigorating the Jewish world are seizing upon this idea, and implementing the gifts of the Jewish past in surprisingly progressive and fresh ways.

I feel part of this process through my various communal initiatives and both eager and equipped to study and articulate its roots and its implications. The innovation I propose to advance at Brandeis is not a limited program but a powerful programmatic and public policy statement on what authentic Jewish memory means, from where it derives, and how the Jewish community can reinforce its values both in theory and in practice.

Keep reading to learn more.

Bronfman Big Idea Series: “Life-Centered Judaism: Bringing Life Unto the Nations”

How can the Jewish value of life imbue our spiritual and communal practices? How can we organize our communities and our thinking around our love for live? How can Lifeism and Life-Centered Judaism inform our views of Jewish law, practice, religion, consciousness, peoplehood, and tikkun olam? David Bar-Cohn’s proposal tells us more.

This is the 8th entry in the Bronfman Big Idea Series.

About the Author

Originally from Los Angeles, David Bar-Cohn now lives in Israel with his wife and four children. He holds an M.A. in Clinical Psychology and runs a private psychotherapy practice.

He is the author of a soon to be published book on Jewish prayer, conducts a Jerusalem-based discussion group on Judaism and science, and recently studied for Smicha (rabbinic ordination) in the area of Kashrut.

Please visit his website at the Torah Technology Institute to learn more.

The Premise of the Proposal

This entry proposes to advance the value of “life” as the driving force behind Judaism and explores its implications for Jewish unity, Jewish education and scholarship, as well as our role as “light unto the nations,” as encapsulated within a new philosophy of “Lifeism.”

This proposal puts forward two related ideas:

1. Life-Centered Judaism as a construct for understanding Jewishness
2. Lifeism as a general philosophy

Both systems of Life-Centered Judaism and Lifeism are based on a single ethic of “Life” to which all other values are secondary. The definition of “life” in this context includes both the state of being alive itself as well as vitality (physical, emotional, intellectual, economic, interpersonal, and so on).

That is to say, in a life-based system of ethics, “good” is defined by the protection, prolongation, and proliferation of human life, as well as by the increase in vitality and sense of aliveness within the individual and society. “Bad” is associated with the erosion or eradication of life, the diminishment of vitality.

The proposal for Life-Centered Judaism makes the case that Judaism is inherently based on the life-principle, whereby our task as Jews is to articulate and apply this principle. Lifeism comprises a new philosophy based on the same principle that can be applied to a wide range of social and political contexts.

Practical applications of Life-Centered Judaism/Lifeism fall into the following categories:

1. Scholarship and education
2. Models for evaluating religious & social structures
3. Social and political policymaking
4. Paradigms for dialogue and diplomacy
5. General consciousness raising

Keep reading to learn more about Lifeism and Life-Centered Judaism.

Bronfman Big Idea Series: “Translating Judaism for the Post-Digital Age: Creative Zionism and a Renewed Jewish People”

What can we as modern Jews learn from the social networks created in the Diaspora? What does being part of the collective Jewish system add to an individual’s life? What is the Jewish role in the Information Revolution? How can Jewish social entrepreneurs create a value-added system for being Jewish in the modern world?

This is my 7th entry in the Bronfman Big Ideas Series.

About the Author

Ariel Beery is the editor and publisher of PresenTense, co-founder and director of the PresenTense Institute for Creative Zionism, director of strategy and design for MavenHaven, co-editor of BlogsofZion. He was a co-founder of the Creative Zionist Circle together with Aharon Horwitz in 2003. Ariel lectures and writes on topics pertaining to the Jewish People, its future, and Creative Zionism.

Ariel is a full time graduate student at NYU’s Wagner School doing two master’s degree–one in nonprofit management and the other in Judaic Studies. Ariel is a graduate of Columbia University, where he majored in economics and political science, served as President of the School of General Studies Student Body, and was co-founder and co-coordinator of a lecture series on Minorities in the Middle East at Columbia.

You can learn more about Ariel and read his writings here.

Photo by Lisa Kereszi

Translating Judaism for the Post-Digital Age:
Creative Zionism and a Renewed Jewish People by Ariel Beery

Introduction: Technology & the Search for Meaning

The advent and spread of information technology has irrevocably transformed the means of communication, and therefore the form communities will take until the next great leap in technological abilities.

The capabilities we as humans now have to develop relationships with others and to plan and execute collective actions have been exponentially impacted by the spread of the internet.

These capabilities will only be expanded in the coming years, as mobile broadband becomes just as accessible as AM radio, as data storage puts near infinite bits on a keychain, and as battery life becomes measured in days and not hours.

What has not changed, however—what has even increased in recent years—is the human need for meaning and the search for others who share a common conception of meaning and values. Hence the rise of the evangelical movement, hence the increased focus in business on social return on investment and social entrepreneurship, and hence the valuation of social networks such as Facebook for sums in the billions of dollars.

Bronfman Big Idea Series: “Renewing the Jewish Pioneering Spirit by Volunteer Work in the Negev”

Photo by Yaniv Ben-Arie, Western Negev a Week After the Rain

How can we re-awaken the Jewish pioneering spirit with strengthening Israel and helping to make the Jewish future more secure? Dr. Jason Goodfriend’s proposal for the Bronfman Big Idea contest presents the possibilities.

This is the 6th entry in the Bronfman Big Idea Series.

About the Author

Jason H. Goodfriend is a senior forecast analyst for a major corporation. He holds a PhD in Systems Engineering (decision sciences) from the University of Virginia. He has held a variety of posts in industry, government, and academia, and he is the author of the textbook A Gateway to Higher Mathematics .

Dr. Goodfriend has volunteered within the Jewish community on numerous occasions. He has always been deeply concerned for the Jewish people and for Israel ever since his parents played Yiddish and Israeli folk songs to him when he was a young child.

The Executive Summary

The goals of the proposal for “Renewing the Jewish Pioneering Spirit by Volunteer Work in the Negev” are the following:

• Establishing a large-scale volunteering program for Jewish young adults and teens to help the Jewish National Fund, the Daroma Association, and other organizations working to develop the Negev region of Israel
• Creating programming for and trips to biblical sites in the Negev and other parts of Israel as part of the volunteer experience
• Designing a marketing and outreach program to the Diaspora to promote the Negev volunteer experience and to make the Jewish community worldwide aware of the efforts being made to develop the Negev
• Creating programming that focuses on the central importance of the desert and the pioneering spirit in Judaism

The Proposal by Jason Goodfriend

Introduction

The Desert as a Place of Spiritual Rebirth for the Jewish People–
The desert has played a central role in the history of the Jewish people. The patriarchs and matriarchs sojourned in the Negev. The Israelites received the Torah in the desert, and then wandered there for 40 years as they fused into a people. Moses and Elijah, as well as countless others, fled to the desert to “find” themselves.

The narrative history of the Jewish people is infused with stories of the desert as a place for finding ourselves and developing our connection with G-D. There is something about the desert that fosters a spiritual reawakening.

Bronfman Big Idea Series: “Covenant with the Future”

Photo by NASA via PingNews

What is the future of the Jewish people and Jewish identity as we advance into the 21st century? What unites us as a people? What changes will we need to make socially, psychologically, and religiously to adapt to the challenges that this century will bring? Tsvi Bisk has some answers.

This is the fifth post in the Bronfman Big Idea Series.

About the Author

Tsvi Bisk is the director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking and the author of a new book, The Optimistic Jew: A Positive Vision for the Jewish People in the 21st Century, as well as Futurizing the Jews: Alternative Futures for Meaningful Existence in the 21st Century.

Tsvi is also this week’s featured guest on Ha’aretz’s Rosner’s Domain, where he answers questions about Jewish identity and continuity. After reading his proposal here, head over and check it out.

Covenant with the Future by Tsvi Bisk

Rationale

Two polls have justifiably alarmed the Jewish people.

• In Israel, about 50% of young people polled identified themselves as primarily Israeli rather than Jewish
• In the United States, close to 50% of Jews under the age of 35 indicated that they would not view the destruction of Israel as a personal tragedy

These two indicators taken together cast doubt on the very future of the Jewish people. This being the case the formulation of concepts and practical programs dealing with how Jewish life might look in the future must be our top priority.

The project I envision– Covenant with the Future– will attempt to do just that. That Jews need a covenant with their future if we wish to survive and flourish. We must “futurize” Jewish civilization and in order to do that we must “futurize” Jewish thinking.

The working assumptions of this proposal are that:

• The Jewish past and Jewish tradition are no longer identifying elements of Jewish identity and might even be divisive for ever-growing numbers of young Jews in Israel and other communities around the world
• Two objective trends are serving to exacerbate Jewish identity: globalization and ever increasing rates of change (where real time change constantly erodes the unifying force of tradition)
• Only visions of a common Jewish future can be a unifying force– visions that contain practical projects (modern mitzvot) that enable young Jews from every part of the Jewish identity spectrum to work together on projects that have universal human consequences, but are yet unframed within a Jewish value system. This would be our Covenant with the Future