Online Jewish Salon Hopes Conversation Has The Power To Heal
When Jews gather around their Passover seder tables on April 22, most will read in the hagaddah prayerbook a simple tale of four children who are tasked with learning of the Jewish exodus from slavery in ancient Egypt: The wise child, the wicked child, the simple child, and the child who does not know how to ask.
For Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, cofounder — along with Jewish educator Sandra Lilienthal, of the online Jewish learning platform Wisdom Without Walls — the image of the four children is a model for an innovative way to connect Jews from diverse backgrounds and religious and political perspectives.
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In Wisdom Without Walls, which launched in February, he said, “we have created an online table where all of those kids are welcome.”
An ambitious project
Wisdom Without Walls is an ambitious project at a delicate time, when synagogue membership is low, and the aftermath of the Oct. 7 terror attack and ensuing Israel-Hamas war have left many American Jews feeling culturally and religiously disconnected.
“Oct. 7 was the control-alt-delete of Jewish life,” said Salkin, a prolific author and speaker who retired as rabbi of Temple Israel in West Palm Beach, just months before launching Wisdom Without Walls. “We wanted to help American Jews and others process that.”
To succeed, the organization will have to accomplish a task that can feel difficult if not impossible in a divided society — bring together people with varying viewpoints for productive, meaningful conversations.
An online ‘salon’
Wisdom Without Walls is premised on the power of conversation to foster growth and connection. The organization has a $90,000 budget for its first year, funds that come primarily from membership fees but also from private donations and, Salkin and Lilienthal hope, forthcoming grants from foundations.
Participants can attend a single session for $25, or they can purchase an annual membership, which includes access to the first year’s 24 to 30 sessions and their recordings, for $240. There are 20 annual members registered so far, along with some small congregations and regional Jewish federations exploring an institutional membership concept.
The “salon” model refers to a type of gathering popular in France and Italy in the 16th to 18th centuries, characterized by an open exchange of ideas on topics of literature, art and politics. Participants do not need previous Jewish education, nor do they even need to identify as Jewish, Salkin and Lilienthal said.
To underscore the open dialogue that defines the salon model, 90-minute “conversations,” not classes, are led by “conversation leaders,” not teachers.
The roster of conversation leaders is a veritable who’s who from diverse sectors of American and Israeli Jewish communities, many of whom are frequent guests at established Jewish educational institutions like the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center or the Hadar Institute in New York, where talks are often offered online or in hybrid format, for a similar price point to Wisdom Without Walls.
Those institutions have “incredible programs,” said Lilienthal, but in contrast to the interactive salon model, “you’re not talking, you’re listening.”
“Judaism has always promoted conversation,” she said, “we wanted to replicate thousands of years of history of conversation in our own time.”
There are a few red lines Salkin and Lilienthal have established — if those are crossed, they can remove participants from the session.
“We cannot accept the idea that there should not be an Israel,” Salkin said, “and we cannot accept any racist positions that believe Palestinians and Arabs are not made in the image of God.”
Top-tier speakers
The inaugural conversation was led in February by Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University and author of “American Judaism: A History,” published in 2019.
Sarna spoke to an audience of 50 people who engaged with spoken comments and typed chat in a conversation about whether there’s reason for optimism for American Jews at this fraught moment.
“All I can say is that most people stayed to the end,” said Sarna, adding that he was impressed at the salon’s “long format, which is different from the 30-minute [online] programs that experts claim is all listeners will absorb.”
Upcoming speakers have a broad set of topics on their minds. Some are directly connected to Oct. 7 and its aftermath. In February, Rabbi Shlomo Brody, author of “Ethics of Our Fighters: A Jewish View on War and Morality,” explored the timely issue of morality in armed conflict.
Other topics range from racial justice to spirituality to love. These include Rabbi Isaiah Rothstein, a scholar and leader at Jewish Federations of North America, who will speak from his identity as a multi-racial Jew on “American Love in the Aftermath of Slavery.”
Also on the roster are Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, whose daily digital project “Below The Bible Belt” examines all 929 chapters of the Hebrew Bible through an LGBTQ lens, and Rabbi Sharon Brous, who will speak on “a revitalized American Jewish spirituality.”
The gift of the web
Though some might suffer from Zoom fatigue, the ability to connect across geography and ideological bubbles is “a great thing,” said Salkin.
As Jewish worship and learning went online during COVID, he added, “we turned a curse into a blessing.”
“It’s a revolutionary moment,” said Rabbi Ed Feinstein, who leads the synagogue Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California and serves as Lecturer at the Ziegler Rabbinical School of the American Jewish University.
Even three years after most people became literate in Zoom and other virtual platforms, the medium is a “gift to American culture,” says Feinstein, who is advising Sallkin and Lilienthal on Wisdom Without Walls.
“In the Jewish faith, education was always a lifelong process,” he said, “I think America is beginning to catch up with this idea.”
Holly Lebowitz Rossi is a freelance writer based in Arlington, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School and a veteran religion reporter, she is also coauthor of The Yoga Effect: A Proven Program for Depression and Anxiety.