 There was a little boy sitting on my mama Hello, I'm Marcie Sklove. Welcome to Going Deeper. Today I'm sitting with Rabbi Ben Weiner, the spiritual leader of the JCA Jewish community of Amherst. Rabbi Ben Weiner is also very much known in the valley for being a beautiful musician. He is a homesteader sustaining with food on his farm. And he is a scholar in Irish and Yiddish literature. Also a prolific writer. I've been reading some of your things. He's also quite a mensch and a great sense of humor. And I'm very happy to have you with us today. Thank you. So I often start these with the question about your early life and how your early life informed all the work that you do now. Simply put, I think, I was raised in a relatively traditional Jewish household. And that formed a kind of a cultural and spiritual and even a social basis for my experience of life, such that no matter how far I wandered from it later on, and I did wander from it, it was something that it felt right to return to eventually and to situate myself as an adult in relationship to. So that all the different things that I ended up learning ended up, I think, relatively sensibly, if not entirely seamlessly, then being things I could bring back to my Jewish point of origin and then becoming a rabbi work with in a Jewish context. So sometimes a Jewish childhood is pretty much in the realm of kind of the prayer and all of that stuff. But where do you think your spiritual depth came from in that early life? I don't know who's going to watch this if we want to know what I should say, what I shouldn't say. But one of the problems that set me wandering at a certain point was perhaps a lack of what you might call spirituality in the context of my growing up. I certainly learned a great deal. I became very proficient in Jewish languages and texts and culture and familiarity with the modes of Jewish prayer. And in addition, I had rabbis when I was younger, who I still remember with great fondness as being important influences on me. But I can necessarily say that I would sit in my standard late 20th century big synagogue service and think I'm really in touch now with the source of all being. And so I think if nothing else, the upbringing kind of fomented a sense of spiritual crisis in that the things that were being proposed as reality, such as the existence of anthropomorphic deity and et cetera, while I was expected to believe them and intellectually did believe them, they seemed less and less tenable the older I got. That actually really brings true for my own experience. I can relate to that. There was a yearning of something not gotten from the religious experience. That's really interesting. So I know that you went to college and you studied Irish literature and Dublin had this whole life. And then why did you decide to become a rabbi? Well, I refer to my resume as kind of like the story of a dilettante on some level. There's a little bit of everything in it. And I think that speaks, I think, to both the wide ranging curiosity and a certain lack of focus and a certain diffuse sense of purpose through my 20s. I tried a number of different things, including the different types of study, academic study, including freelance writing and translating, including some teaching. And none of it kind of coalesced into a career picture. So first and foremost, I think it's, people are always surprised to me, say this, it was a career choice. Like what am I gonna do with my life? I get that, yeah. That's gonna be meaningful and important and draw upon the skill set that I have as scatters as it is. And lo and behold, the rabbinate seemed to offer that in terms of being an intellectual position with a lot of opportunity to read and write and teach. But then also, as opposed to academia being a pastoral position as well, in which the day-to-day relationships with other people wasn't about the academic subject as much as it was life experience. Yeah, yeah. And then also the music as well. Judaism is a very musical spiritual tradition. And so it seemed in the final analysis as a place that I could go to earn a reasonable livelihood as an adult and at the same time not sell my soul entirely and also draw upon all the different things that I care about. Yeah, so you have really taken music and made it even richer in the JCA context. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing there? Well, firstly, it's a very musical congregation. So it's not as if I invented music at the JCA. In fact, I think a lot of what I've been able to do is because of how musical a congregation it is. I mean, I often joke, it's a place where they start, if you're teaching them a new song, they start to sing it even before you're done teaching it to them. And once or twice I've actually written a song, started to teach it, they start to sing it right. I'm like, you don't know this song, I just made it up, but they still like to sing. So Jewish spirituality is based in prayer and prayer is a combination of words and music. And I think that in many types of Jewish spirituality, it's not as if the music is only important because it helps you to sing the words. I think there's actually a reciprocal relationship between the words and the music, such that each of them carries the burden of the spiritual expression. For many modern Jews, I think the music is actually even more significant as a spiritual avenue than the words because the words, given that they are shaped by a spiritual tradition that's so old, don't always immediately speak to someone in the present day. Whereas the music instantly, in many cases, can grab the emotions, can grab the spirit and take them on their journey. And it's also true for me. I grapple with the words sometimes in terms of what they mean to me, but the music, if it's good, which it usually is, is usually very immediately present to me. Isn't there also a component of just the vibrational aspects of the words in music that that creates a sort of a phenomenon in the body that touches a spiritual place? I think for people that don't necessarily understand the words, I think it's even easier in that regard because they're just sounds. When you understand the words, it's a challenge. Right. Because the words sometimes have to be worked with in order to really attach to them spiritually. But so my goal at the JCA has been to really enhance the music in part by bringing in musical instruments, which has always been something of a tension point in Jewish services, which have traditionally been acapella. Even in a congregation as relatively progressive as the JCA, it took some work. Is that because of not doing work during the Sabbath? There's been a variety of reasons why that's developed. That's one of the main ones, the notion that on the Sabbath, you're supposed to refrain from all types of work activity. And the concern actually is not so much the playing of the instrument as that the instrument might break and you didn't have to fix it. Wow. Or you might have to carry it to get to the synagogue. Right. So it's almost these kind of subsidiary concerns. Sure. In addition, there's been a kind of mournful character to Jewish spirituality for a long time because of the destruction of a temple 2,000 years ago. Right. And then the subsequent difficult experiences that Jews have had. Right. And there was always a notion that instruments is a little too celebratory. They did that in the temple, but the temple has been destroyed and now we have this kind of mournful cast to our culture. Yeah, interesting. And in addition, aesthetically, the acapella part is kind of nice. It ends up being voices blending with each other, just the simple, unadorned quality of human voices raised in singing together. So I'm thinking about that mournful quality because there's also in the Hasidic tradition a joyful quality of the music. And talk a little bit about the third Friday night Shabbat thing that goes on at the JCA. Well, so just the Hasidic point I think is interesting because absolutely in the Hasidic tradition, I don't know how much backstory we have time to give to that tradition, but it is very much an emphasis on joy, but it's pretty clearly the imperative of joy in difficult circumstances, which I think is what Hasidism is all about. Interesting. At least in essence. Rebbe Nachman who said, you must be joyful. It's a command. And when something's a command, it's not always easy to do. Sure. So I think that part of the Hasidic attitude of joy is precisely emerging out of something you might call a despair or a difficulty and trying to push through that into these transports of joy. So even then it's not as simple as it seems. The third Friday night, this is a plug I guess. Yes it is. The third Friday night of every month at the JCA is what we call Shabbat Naima, which means the Shabbat of pleasing melody. And I'd like to think that every service has pleasing melody. So this is just the branding, you know, logo essentially. But we have wonderful, I'm gonna call them amateur musicians just cause they don't get paid to be musicians, but they're greatly skilled musicians, but they're all members of the community. And we get together in a band with guitars and bass and percussion and accordion and singers. And we explore a certain legacy of Jewish communal song, sacred song. A combination of some of the melodies go back hundreds and hundreds of years. And again, occasionally one of them I wrote before, or they come from a kind of a contemporary milieu of synagogue music. And it's a traditional Jewish service. If you were to say, was this done? Yes it was, everything is done. But it's in this context of contemporary music without being like a rock show and without being overly cheesy. Like I think we managed to strike a really good. One time I was there and I loved the Leonard Cohen thing you did. And I know you thought that would be a real crowd pleaser. Yeah, we consider Leonard Cohen a Jewish liturgist and a psalmist essentially. So especially after he died, we did a special tribute with a couple of his melodies setting prayers to some of his melodies. The other thing that I relate to it is the Hindu kirtan tradition. Which again, it's doing the Sanskrit names of the divine. And there is this sort of vibrational aspect to repeating and repeating and music and all the rest of it. But to me, I think of it as Jewish kirtan. Well, in our kind of post-modern situation which every culture has the opportunity to partake of every other culture, at least to some extent. There are other religious musics that are definitely influencing the way we understand synagogue music today, including kirtan, including gospel. Sure, gospel would be the other word. Yeah, sure. It's not a coincidence, to some extent, with kirtan influence. Yeah, that makes sense. So, talk a little bit about farming and how you came to that and what it means to you and also how it relates to the spiritual aspect of your work. Sure. I like to joke that two things I was probably voted least likely to be when I was a child was a rabbi and a farmer. And now I've managed to become both of them. Wow, wow. I can find photos when I was a kid, really young kid, of we had a little vegetable garden at the house and I had like a little corn patch which I thought was kind of semi-mythological until I found a photo of it, my little corn patch. Very, very small corn patch. But I had no real relationship to gardening or farming for much of my life until about 10 to 12 years ago. And at first it was purely kind of an intellectual response to my concerns about the state of the planet. Both in terms of climate change, and other ecological catastrophes that we could list and resource depletion and things like that. And thinking well what's the, given the enormity of the problem, what's one thing I could do to sort of walk a little step here and so that I'll have a little vegetable garden. And my friend, I was in Philadelphia at the time in rabbinical school and my friend was living in a house with a lawn and she gave me a part of her lawn. And I began to garden with, I had one in particular mentor also in rabbinical school who was a second career person who had been back to the lander in a previous life. So she took me under her wing, kind of became my earth mother with regard to gardening and got me started. And I loved having a garden in addition to whatever it did for me spiritually in regard to the grave concerns I have about our fate as a species. I also just liked having fresh produce coming out of the ground and being responsible for it. I grew this, you know, I grew that. Like it's a, I come in with a basket of food that you grew yourself. It's an experience that wasn't so uncommon to the human experience for centuries till now but now it's got this, because of the trajectory by which we might come to it, it's got a different specialness. Those concerns didn't go away. And at the same time, a passion for the work increased and lo and behold, also a capacity for the work. Like actually being pretty decent at a lot of it. And so to the point that when I was looking around for a rabbinic job and I saw one opening here in Amherst before I even knew the community, I knew about this area as being an agricultural area. And I was like, oh, I want to live there. Even before I knew I wanted to work here. And so I came to the, to the valley and turns out the synagogue was a good fit, which was a relief. But then I also sublet a place for a year, which was a working homestead and took it over for the people that were going on sabbatical. And then we bought our own property out in Deerfield, which I've been developing as a small homestead farm for about six years. Yeah. And the spiritual component, I mean, it continues to be where I put my energy when I'm concerned about the world. Like I think just before I came here, I read a new report about species extinction, which kind of wipes me out when I read something like that. Just what am I gonna do about that? And I don't know what I'm gonna do about that. But at the very least, I'm gonna have this little piece of the earth that I'm responsible for. And the way that I farm it is such that I try my best to share it with every other creature that needs it. So that I love to bring out my own food and I also love when I see like a monarch butterfly, you know, fly past or when bees are foraging or when there's other animals that can come there and unless they're eating my food. Okay, really? I'm thinking the deer? Really? You're welcoming them. I'm trying to find the deer, you know, the deer. Except for the deer, I should say. And those worms. Yeah, but when it feels like a healthy piece of land, you know, both because it's feeding me and my family and also because it's not poisoning other creatures. Sure. That is probably the spiritual component is that's where I've gone with all this despair that I might be feeling. It's like, well, this is my responsibility. This is what feeds me and I do my best to take care of it. Yeah. On just a practical daily level too, I can imagine reading the newspaper and then, you know, the act of going outside and picking beans or weeding the garden. It's like, brings you to the present moment in a way that helps with the despair. That's right, that's right. It keeps me out of trouble, I like to say. Yeah, yeah. It's also, it's a lot of work. And so it's, it uses a lot of my energy, which, you know, might otherwise be spent worrying or something else less productive. You also once told me this wonderful story about your son and can you share that story about, do you remember? No. This story about him putting the dirt all over him and. I don't know if he'll like that I share this. Well, he's only four, so what do you mean? My son likes to say, he likes to look me in the eyes and say, dad, farming's not my thing. That's how he likes to stick the knife in a little bit. But then once, you know, he says it's not his thing and yet this is where he's growing up. This is what he takes for granted. Which wasn't what I got into it for, but now that I have a child, I feel like, well, that's a great value. So I, we went outside once and I was doing some work and he went over to hang out like in the shed or the greenhouse. And I come over and he's got these handfuls of dirt and he's just putting them on his head and rubbing them all over his face. He's just like, he's being one with the earth, you know. With this kind of look, this trance, like look in his face, this transportation. I think it's cause kids love to get dirty, maybe. I don't know what it was, but for whatever reason, you know, that's, I mean. It spoke to you. It spoke to me. It's like, okay, you say farming's not your thing, but you're rubbing yourself in the dirt here, so. Yeah. And it will be interesting to see how, you know, 20, 30 years from now, somebody asking him, how does your work, how was your work informed by your early life, you know. That's why I'm a stockbroker. That's who he's gonna start with. Oh dear, I hope not. Me too. Wow. Okay, so you started to touch a little bit about the despair and we are in an unusual period now. I mean, it's always been bad, but it seems like it's gotten a little worse in this Trump era. So has anything changed in your, you know, in your presentation at the JCA or how you speak about things or are people freaked out and how do you calm them? What's your, like, the social justice aspects related to politics and that stuff? A religious community, I think, has a complicated, multi-faceted role to play at all times and perhaps in particular in times of, you know, social, ecological, political destabilization. In rabbinical school, one of my professors helpfully phrased the question as being, there's a kind of a spectrum between the pastoral and the prophetic is what he said. In terms of the work of a congregational rabbi. The pastoral function is when your primary goal is that people come into your space and they feel safe, they feel loved, they feel heard, they feel connected. And the prophetic is in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets is when you get up there and you say this is what is right and this is what is wrong, you're either with me or you're against me. Yeah, wow. And what I was taught is that a rabbi has to be somewhat careful in how he or she or any additional pronouns stakes out the role with regard to that polarity. So the one thing I find helpful in the J.C.A. and so far as possible is to avoid taking stands in relationship to particular political individuals or political parties. Trying to step away from sort of naked partisanship and how I articulate. Because you never know it is Amherst. These are, you know, they are Jews, they are progressives. But you never know. Oh sure, they're some republicans. Yeah, what are the political allegiances of your community? And I think the congregational rabbi should err on the side of the pastoral because there are few places of refuge in this society and the synagogue should be one of them. So on the one hand it's to try my best to avoid naked partisanship and the identification of particular individuals as being the problem, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. So I think it's important to articulate the issues and to speak to the issues and to try my best to explain why should we care about issues such as this from this perspective out of a sense of Jewish values or religious commitment. And so that's what I try to do. You know, there's a very big kind of teaching in the 12 step tradition that says principles over personalities stick with principles. Don't get involved in the personalities. And this is sort of the same thing. Yeah, I would say I didn't know that that's helpful also. So what I do is try my best to articulate those positions. And if those positions and that articulation of them means you should vote one way versus the other, so be it. So I wouldn't, you know, there's certain issues of tax exam status where I have to avoid endorsing certain political situations from the demo. But if from an argument from values, from an argument from issues, you say like, well if you vote for this person, this is the policy they've said they're gonna institute. How does that square with what we've articulated as being the important value here? That's when I would be more comfortable making more an overt political statement. But the issue of pastoral and prophetic also comes back again to what is spirituality in these times? To what extent is spirituality providing a refuge from despair or some kind of a spiritual context in which you can feel something different? And then to what extent is it meant to motivate people to go out into the world and try to affect change? And the answer is yes, both, obviously, but they have to be in balance with each other. Because we're not just a political advocacy organization. And at the same time, I think Martin Luther King said that a house of worship that loses its mission for the betterment of society becomes a glorified social club. And so trying to find what is the appropriate balance in which both of those factors which are very much needed in our times are given their best expression. There's another sort of side effect or a consequence of these times that I've been seeing is just the intense collaboration going on with other faith communities. And we joked a couple of times that, wow, the Jews and the Muslims, they have a way of getting together now that's beautiful and supportive of each other. And I've been to some of those events and had some folks on the show. Do you, is there that kind of thing going on at the JCA that kind of reaching out and collaborating with? Yes, absolutely. There are two different types of interfaith networking that were involved with one on the clergy level. I meet with my counterparts in other houses of worship. And then also there's a lay leader group that also meets on a regular basis. I agree with you. I think if you want to talk about silver linings, it's really the sense of people need to connect with each other. Whether that is across boundaries, so to speak, or across lines of identity, or it's just people that, back when they thought everything was fine and good, which it wasn't during the Obama administration, they thought, okay, it's all fine and good, Obama's in the White House, I can just go back to watching TV or whatever. Now, the fact that it isn't okay has been brought to the fore and more striking relief, and so people feel the need to get up and collaborate with each other, which is something of a silver lining. I think so. I think there are some silver linings. Just how much people are also getting into activism individually and as groups, it's kind of inspiring to see, and I think it makes everybody feel a little more empowered, a little more able to be part of something good instead of something not good. There's a Yiddish expression to the effect that a shared sorrow is half a comfort, so I think that speaks to it a little bit. Sure. Well, good, we are getting toward the end of part one, and we will continue this in part two, so thank you, and we'll see you all in part two. Thank you.