"How do we keep a people as old as Moses innovating?" Insights for institutional religion from a gathering of spiritual innovators

Last month, I had the opportunity to attend a gathering of the Kenissa network, a group founded by Rabbi Sid Schwarz, that brings together leaders who are re-imagining Jewish life and fostering "communities of meaning." Kenissa supports and connects these leaders to help their efforts and emerging communities to thrive. The gathering was representative of a growing movement of faith-based innovators operating outside the bounds of traditional religious institutions and a model of three characteristics I believe our religious institutions must learn to adopt if they are to flourish in the current era and into the future.

Spacious

The Kenissa gathering was a testament to the spaciousness of God and faith that many of us believe in but don't always see represented in our religious institutions - a space infused with yet not constricted by the spirit of, in this case, the Jewish tradition.

From educators to spiritual coaches to entrepreneurs to artists, participants all brought their own unique gifts, but everyone I met shared a commitment in some form to the Jewish faith and culture. Such a commitment, in fact, that they had chosen the difficult path of developing new organizations, initiatives, and communities to respond to unmet needs, in many cases to create room for those who might otherwise not feel welcome or fulfilled in traditional Jewish spaces. For instance, Ariele Mortkowitz started Svivah, a community of Jewish women (notably inclusive of "anyone wishing to be part of a community of Jewish women"), which among other things birthed HerTorah, an initiative to bring more female voices into Torah scholarship.

Institutional religion can sometimes feel like an exercise in containing the divine, in creating a box in which to put it. Especially when under threat, the tendency can be to draw the lines of that box more emphatically. Intellectually, we all know it's a futile exercise - of course God cannot be contained - but we do it anyway. And for good reason. The hard boundaries of our faith give us some certainty in an uncertain world. They help us make sense of the world, our place in it, and how we show up.

But what if those boundaries worked with the uncertainty of a changing world rather than against it? In other words, rather than trying to offer us certainty in the chaos, what if religion helped us confidently navigate the chaos and infuse it with purpose and meaning? What would that look like? The Kenissa community provides a glimpse. It creates authentic space for the divine to move and work in and through everyone.

Creative

Whether a cause or consequence of the spaciousness, the pulse of the Kenissa community is one of creativity and experimentation. I found myself amidst a bunch of faithful people trying new things and, in so doing, refusing to be constrained by what is, striving however imperfectly for what could be.

In their own creations, some seek to bring that spirit of creativity to others. Rabbi Sarah Tasman founded the Tasman Center for Jewish Creativity on the idea that traditional institutions often focus on Jewish continuity, which comes from a mindset of crisis, but that it is Jewish creativity that has actually allowed the community to flourish for millennia. And will be what allows it to flourish into the future.

To be clear, creativity is messy, and the tensions and challenges of trying to birth new things was evident in the group. Many of the participants expressed struggles with leadership, funding, time, sustainability, and various barriers that put long-term success at risk. But the creative mindset pushes one to take risks and accept the possibility of failures along the way to realizing transformative impact, a mindset we would be smart to adopt in our institutions.

The rituals that our faith institutions uphold sustain us in our identity as people of faith. But in many cases, we've let ritual make us static. Because ritual roots us in the history, stories, traditions of our communities while also connecting us to the transcendent, it has the power to renew us and serve as a deep generative well of creativity. But we tend not to harness it in that way. In fact, we often squander it. As we step out of our spiritual ritual with the energy of the divine, we then step into organizational ritual that reinforces doing things a certain way because it's the way we've always done them. Everyone settles into their same formal and informal roles, and we repeat committees, meetings, activities, and approaches that may or may not bear fruit but that we do because it's what we know or because it was effective at one time.

What if we cultivated creativity as a value and a practice in our faith institutions? What if we used some of our resources to support experimentation? What if we tracked what bears fruit and what doesn't and learned and iterated accordingly?

Networked

Finally, the Kenissa gathering represented a new way of organizing that has become increasingly important for all organizations and institutions, including those of faith, to embrace. Kenissa convened a group of people with their own institutions and purposes in the world and created the space for them to think and work together on intersecting issues. Specifically, participants divided into four affinity tracks: New Spiritual Communities, Jewish Arts and Culture, Jewish Learning as Spiritual Practice, and Boomer Engagement. In the wake of the closing of a national umbrella organization for Jewish arts and culture, the Kenissa arts and culture group discussed the creation of a new alliance, which they intentionally distinguished from an organization. The era of big institutions is over. Not just because of growing distrust of institutions, but also because the rate of change today requires nimble and responsive action that is not exactly the hallmark of hierarchy.

Some of our faith institutions have more or less hierarchy than others, and all have some aspects of networked organizations. Certainly, many have taskforces to address discrete issues. But how many have the ability to rapidly surface teams to develop new solutions not just to internal issues but societal issues? And how many are actively teaming not just among themselves but with other faiths and with secular institutions and efforts as well? There are certainly examples of this, but this should not be something we do occasionally. It should be the way we organize and operate. Many of our institutions have an insularity problem that will increasingly correlate with irrelevance as change outruns us.

As a Catholic, I left the gathering thinking about the early Christian communities and whether the Kenissa spirit, though in a very different time and context and with a different application, had some similarity to the spirit of that emergent first century movement. But in the current time and context, our religious movements have been institutionalized for centuries and millennia. So I also wondered if we can really go the other direction. What happens when you decouple the wisdom and beliefs from the institutions that have sustained them? I don’t know the answer to that, but in the final session of the gathering, the Jewish Learning cohort expressed the question at the heart of their exploration as "How do we keep a people as old as Moses innovating?" As our institutions seek to chart a path forward in uncertain times, they would be smart to engage with that question and those asking it.

 Author: Danielle Goldstone

Photo courtesy of Kenissa