I almost never read the emails I get from this popular queer yeshiva, but I opened one recently titled “Culture, Care, and Our Shared Definitions of SVARA.” It was a short post about the institution’s recent doubling of budget, staff, and participants; and the question of sustaining their culture — “the love, the magic, and the care that make SVARA what it is” — in the face of rapid but meticulously planned expansion. At the end, they solicited “blessings” for the beginning of their internal conversation about culture. While I’m not sure this is the blessing they were hoping for, I’ve got a few thoughts about their overall culture and change over the 5+ years I’ve been a member (and they’ve been advertising with my image) which, God willing, somebody will take to heart.
When I first started hanging out at SVARA, I had heard from a friend about their 5-day long annual retreat, Queer Talmud Camp, and eagerly applied and was accepted. At sunrise on my first morning, I crawled out of my tent by the still lake and walked past a handful of participants rocking back and forth in the morning mist, bound up in leather and quietly muttering the words of the shacharis liturgy. Later that day, in the hot afternoon, with my bare feet pressed to the cool floor of the bes medresh, I learned about the Talmud for the first time; suddenly a whole world opened up for me.
The first time I recited Talmud from memory that summer, the Rosh Yeshiva told me, like she tells everyone: “That’s yours. You own it.” As she reached out to hold my hand, I started crying; that was the very first moment I felt like I belonged, that I felt like a Jew in my heart and belly, three months before I completed my conversion. That week was sprinkled with other powerful moments; the SVARA staff became especially dear to me. They were approachable and intelligent, and over the years some became my friends. They held me in moments of sadness, danced with me on the dance floor, studied Talmud drunk with me in the middle of the night, and taught me patiently and passionately. SVARA became my spiritual home, a place where I felt I could learn and love as my whole self.
Like all of us, SVARA was hit hard by COVID; they canceled that year’s summer camp. They pivoted successfully to a distance learning model, and I watched them quickly become more popular as they streamlined their offerings. I started attending their online classes, glad that I could finally study in the SVARA bes medresh regularly. But after a semester or two, the atmosphere in the classes began to rub me the wrong way; I gained a reputation as someone who was always ready to introduce a wildly different or opposing perspective. I started to hear less original and interesting takes on the texts we were discussing, and more regurgitations of what is already known to be acceptable in that social group. I heard people repeat misinformed views they saw on some Jewish influencer’s Instagram story. Instead of meaningful discussions about Jewish law and life, the virtual study hall hummed with empty but meaningful-sounding buzzwords and platitudes (you know, like “innovate,” “grounded,” “embodied,” “magical,” or some of SVARA’s self-satisfied slogans, like “we are chazal.”). In class once I messaged a friend: “take a shot every time someone says ‘radical.’” “No thanks,” they said, “I’d rather not die.”
In early 2021, after a year-long process which began right before the outbreak of COVID in the US, SVARA posted a strategic plan to their website. “Through a process supported by the Jim Joseph Foundation and guided by TCC Group, SVARA’s first formal strategic plan has taken shape and paints a clear path toward realizing the just and liberatory Jewish future that we know is possible,” their website boasts. As I cruised through the immaculately-designed, corporate presentation, I realized that I had been watching SVARA go from a quirky, medium sized yeshiva attended by a few hundred weirdos, to a mainstream institution with a budget of more than $2M and around 20k participants.
I haven’t been involved in any of SVARA’s programming since my last conversation with their Associate Rosh Yeshiva. During this conversation, I confronted them (lovingly, I thought) about the grants and philanthropic gifts that make up most of SVARA’s funding. This conversation was prompted by Raphael Magarik’s excellent review of The American Jewish Philanthropic Complex: “[SVARA and similar] start-ups culturally mimic their counterparts in the business world,” he writes. “Hierarchically managed by charismatic founders, they emphasize ‘scalability’ and rapid growth; valorizing ‘disruption,’ they imagine progress as the replacement of older, bulky bureaucracies, like federations and synagogues, with leaner, more efficient and mission-driven competitors.” Ominously, he adds that “dues and fees for services are dwarfed by philanthropic donations, so that participants’ involvement is heavily subsidized. According to this financial logic, participants are not primarily members, or even consumers, but rather evidence of success — their experiences [and, I would add, identities] are the products sold to funders” (emphasis mine).
Indeed, as I watched SVARA grow bigger, I found myself no longer close with the staff I had spent so many hours learning with, but instead felt that I had become just another row in their CRM database; it seemed that the more I asked unpopular questions, the less interested SVARA became in retaining my patronage. Cohorts for which I had once been encouraged to apply or projects which I made clear I was interested in moved on without so much as an email to me. Staff members who used to tag me in Facebook posts seemed to have forgotten about me, being more interested in newer, high-profile members like Ezra Furman.
After all, I suppose, one can’t secure grants with an article like the one I’m writing now. Grants which pay for the comfortable six-figure salaries of the Rosh Yeshiva and the Executive Director, coming from the private Funds and Foundations that allow the wealthy to pay less taxes while the State consequently guts public service programs in order to subsidize those charitable contributions from donors. For almost a century, by taking advantage of 501(c)3 laws, the various factions of the American-Jewish communities’ wealthy elite have been using philanthropy to deliberately funnel money into specific day schools, summer camps, seminaries, Israel programs, and community centers; thereby ensuring that 21st century American Judaism — its values, priorities, and preoccupations — would look the way they wanted it to. The private fortunes of the super rich became those Funds and Foundations that power most of institutional Jewish life, including SVARA.
Being Jewish, or queer, unfortunately does not save us from being shitty; being a Jewish organization does not exempt it from its place in the nonprofit industrial complex and the continued survival of capitalism. Dylan Rodriguez defines the non-profit industrial complex as “a set of symbiotic relationships that link political and financial technologies of state and owning class control with surveillance over public political ideology, including and especially emergent progressive and leftist social movements.”
The specific pedagogy and method developed at SVARA, fueled by capitalism and the wishes of the American Jewish ultra-rich, informs the arrogance and entitlement that I see throughout normative queer Judaism; reflected by Benay’s once-moving words: “That’s yours. You own it.” SVARA has become a main driving force behind normative queer Judaism; by which I mean the general culture, assumed and enforced values and norms that is prevalent in most of the queer, progressive Jewish circles in North America. This culture is ruled by identity politics, hyper-individualism, a focus on personal meaning and self-actualization, “innovation economics”, and liberalism. Secular humanism, not Judaism, is their religion, and Jewishness, if identified with at all, is but a part of their spiritual practice. “To [them], American and Jewish values are indistinguishable” (emphasis mine), states one of many recent surveys of millennial North American Jews. In such tight-knit highly-curated social identity groups, surrounded by like-minded people and maintaining status quo by alienating those who ask the wrong questions, the progenitors and disseminators of normative queer Judaism are overwhelmingly only able to see Judaism through American eyes, instead of seeing the world through Jewish ones.
As stated in their strategic plan, SVARA’s institutional goal over the next two years (besides explosive growth) is to develop and disseminate their pedagogy and method and develop a “pipeline” (their word) to rapidly pump out SVARA-style leaders and educators. Those rabbis, according to the strategic plan, will go on to start their own communities informed by the same methods, furthering the symbolic and social capital of SVARA and its heroes, its funders, and the reach of their ideology within progressive Jewish spaces.
“The underlying belief being expressed is that individual SVARA-trained educators can create communal transformation by bringing SVARA methods and values with them into any Jewish or educational setting in which they teach and guide others,” explains a Jim Joseph Foundation case study on SVARA’s teaching cohort. “As [their] website explains, Talmud study creates internal transformation that will ultimately be expressed in communal revolution: ‘Talmud study [is] a spiritual practice for developing radically empathic, mature, evolved human beings who will create a more just, peaceful, and healthy world.’”
In the same way that the Revolution will not be funded by grants and carried out by nonprofits, it will also not be carried out because of SVARA’s secularized and universalized yeshiva learning. One should not attempt to draw universal lessons from the Talmud; as it is written, the Torah was offered to all the nations, but only the Jews accepted the yoke of heaven. I feel SVARA-niks are teaching/learning the Talmud in a void, approaching their own religion-history-culture like a Western-style academic approaches an object of study: from the outside, looking in. Or, they retroject their own feelings and identities to another time and place, asserting that “we are just like them / they were just like us.” But the Talmud will never be properly understood only through the lens of atheistic academia; it can be more fully understood and appreciated from within the world which it illustrates and shapes—and which shapes it.
SVARA claims that all that is necessary to learn is your alef-beys; but to truly study Talmud (oral Torah!) it cannot — and must not! — be divorced from the written Torah and the One who gave them both to us.
Instead of approaching the Talmud (and Jewishness in general) with humility and respect, and letting it turn their minds and hearts to the service of the Blessed Holy One, SVARA-niks aim to bend it to their own individual/collective wills and make the Law — and God — serve them. It is said: study is great only insofar as it leads to action; therefore, to only study Talmud is not enough, one must live it, including the law. “SVARA’s first assumption is that…Judaism needs major upgrading,” continues the Jim Joseph Foundation. But how can one seek to change the law when one does not recognize its authority in the first place?
SVARA’s stated goal — to use the Talmud to build up Jewish leaders who will be equipped to dismantle oppressive systems — will never be realized by them.
The answer I was given by the Associate Rosh Yeshiva when I met to discuss their funding is not an answer that comes from Jewish values, truly radical politics, or the Talmud. They claim that although of course “the system” is terrible, it is better for SVARA to exist even if by unfavorable means than for it to go under for lack of funds; the argument centers on their inherent worth as an organization rather than the revolutionary potential of Jews’ traditional lifeways. But, as Angela Davis says: “The purpose of work is to gain liberation, not to guarantee the organization’s longevity.”
What would Judaism look like if we actively stepped into our own systems, organized our communities by our rules instead of theirs? What would it look like if Rabbis earned no salary but had trades like the rest of us, or if we built mikvahs before synagogues, or if Torah schooling was communally funded? What could we accomplish if we divested from state and privately funded orgs, if we left behind the political neutrality of nonprofits? What can we become when we refuse to let ourselves — and our heritage — be the product being sold? When we imagine a more just future, what if instead of trying to “sell” Judaism, or finding ways to fit Judaism into modernity, we rebelled by building and sustaining our own ancient systems of justice, economy, and community?
What is truly revolutionary about Judaism, the Talmud, and particularly the Law, is that by accepting the supreme authority of God and the yoke of heaven, one frees oneself from human rules and rulership, from States, and from capitalism. This refusal to bow before human tyrants and assimilate into their society, the refusal of goyish rules for the Divine ones, the refusal to just fit in already is one of the most radical things Jews have always done, and hopefully will continue to do.