Spotlight on CLAL
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Religious Leadership In A Spiritual Marketplace: Interfaith Leaders Join CLAL to Explore
Religious Authority in America
By Judy Epstein, Director of Public Affairs
On June 10-12,
2002, CLAL will convene a unique symposium with religious leaders of diverse traditions. Entitled “Religious Leadership in a Spiritual Marketplace,”
it will focus on the challenges of religious leadership in contemporary American life. The program will concentrate on two central
questions: What are the implications of major societal shifts -- including the merging of
traditions, practices and boundaries -- for religious authority? How can a tradition both retain a sense of its own
integrity and still connect to other communities and to society-at-large?
Among those joining
CLAL’s esteemed faculty and rabbis from across the denominations will be Swami Atmarupananda of the Vivekananda Retreat;
The Reverend Katherine Henderson, V.P. of
Auburn Theological Seminary; Judith Lief,
Buddhist teacher and author of Making Friends with
Death: A Buddhist Guide to Encountering Mortality; Feisal Abdul Rauf, Imam of Masjid al-Farah; Tony Schwartz, V.P. of LGE Performance Systems;
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, author of Jewish Literacy: Words that Hurt, Words that Heal;
and Phyllis Tickle, contributing religion
editor, Publishers Weekly and author of God-Talk in America; as well as many other
spiritual leaders and key writers and thinkers about religion.
The program will look at the
impact of decentralizing and democratizing societal trends on the importance of religious
leadership. It is designed to encourage
participants both to reflect on the challenges and opportunities religious leaders face in
a changing world and to create a forum where they can engage in collective inquiry about
their own particular traditions and the role of religion in America.
“How each of
us brings our inherited wisdom to enhance the quality of life for all is a core issue
religious communities now face,” said Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, Vice President of CLAL. “People are selecting the rituals that feel
right to them. No longer is there an
unquestioned central religious authority. But
while this trend may be very challenging to religious leaders, it creates a great
opportunity -- when people freely choose to seek out a spiritual leader, it grants that
leader much greater authority.”
Sessions
for the symposium will include:
· Religious integrity
and pluralism: What do we mean by authenticity and integrity? How can we celebrate
uniqueness without undermining our sense of being part of the larger whole?
· Communities and
membership: How can we build coherent communities when boundaries are shifting? Do we need to come up with new notions of
coherence?
· Leaders and
followers: In the new spiritual marketplace, who gets to speak and for whom? What does it mean to be a religious leader in a
democratized, pluralist society?
· Ownership,
stewardship and the public sphere: In what sense do communities have ownership over their
traditions? What are the implications of
thinking about texts and rituals as intellectual property? Who holds the copyright?
On the evening of June 11, the
group will visit The Jewish Museum for a viewing of the provocative exhibit
“Mirroring Evil,” with discussion to follow.
“Who owns the legacy of the Holocaust? Who
has the right to invoke pivotal experiences – either horrific or heroic – in the
life of a particular community? Through
interfaith dialogue, these are some of the issues we hope to explore,” said Robert
Rabinowitz, Ph.D., a Senior Fellow and organizer of the symposium.
The two-day meeting will be structured
around a recreation of the beit midrash (house
of study and searching), with participants leading sessions using texts from their own
traditions.
“For years, CLAL has been focused on pluralism across the Jewish denominational divide and on how to learn from other communities as they go through similar journeys. Discovering how to bring the best of our inherited wisdom to American society in a way that will benefit both Jewish life and the wider culture is our next challenge,” said Rabbi Hirschfield. “At its core, Jewish tradition has always taught that being Jewish is a way of being human.”
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