When Amichai Lau-Lavie realized he was gay, he knew he had to make a choice: hide his identity to abide by his Orthodox upbringing, or be true to himself. It wasn’t an easy call for a man whose ancestors had been rabbis for generations—including his uncle and cousin, who both served as the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel.
Ultimately, Lau-Lavie decided to split the difference. As an out gay man, he became an Jewish leader, drag performer and rabbi, founding Lab/Shul—a “God-optional” experimental community for Jewish gathering—in New York City. Now, he’s also the star of a documentary about his controversial career, Sabbath Queen, which is currently touring the American film festival circuit.
If anyone is “not that kind of rabbi,” it’s Amichai Lau-Lavie—and he joins Ralph Benmergui this week on Not That Kind of Rabbi, a show about spirituality and personal journeys.
Transcript
Transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors
Ralph Benmergui: Hi, everybody. I’m Ralph Benmergui. Welcome to Not That Kind of Rabbi. To be clear, as always, I’m not a rabbi, but if I was, I wouldn’t be that kind of rabbi. Having just had a run-in with a conventional synagogue trying to do unconventional things, it’s not fun sometimes to be a rabbi. For those who think it’s all roses, I can tell you from my friends who are rabbis: it’s political, it moves around, it has its edges. So, an interesting experience for some. There are different kinds of rabbis and different kinds of Jews, and different kinds of ways of getting to your Judaism. One of them that has evolved over the last little while, out of New York where a lot of Jewish innovation is going on, frankly, is what’s called Lab Shul. And at Lab Shul, all kinds of interesting projects are going on, and all kinds of ways of accessing spiritual as opposed to religious avenues have arisen. The man who is the co-founder and spiritual leader of Lab Shul is Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie. His uncle was the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv. His cousin David was the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel. He was in the IDF; he was a paratrooper and then he was a combat medic. He’s a social activist, an LGBTQ activist, and called Sabbath Queen. There are many things to talk about, but I’m just happy that I get this opportunity now. Rabbi, welcome to Not That Kind of Rabbi. How are you?
Amichai Lau-Lavie: I’m honoured to be Not That Kind of Rabbi with you. Thank you for the honour of this invitation, Ralph, and it’s a pleasure to meet you.
Ralph Benmergui: Now, if anybody could fit this title, you could. So we’re just going to do it that way. I want to kind of start with an origin story because you don’t come from the innovative, outer edge of Judaism; you come from the core Orthodox piece of Judaism in your upbringing. Am I right on that?
Amichai Lau-Lavie: Well, I would challenge that. I think the innovative, the fringe, and the centre keep taking turns. I was born in Israel to a very Zionist and modern Orthodox family, which included innovators like my uncle, who was the former Chief Rabbi. My uncle went his own way and brought very musty Judaism to the Israeli popular speak. My grandfather, of blessed memory, his father, who was a rabbi in Poland, was an innovator of women’s rights and girls’ education in the 1920s, and even an early Zionist, although he may have changed his mind later. So, on the one hand, yes, I come from a very pedigreed dynasty of orthodox mainstream leaders. And yet, the bend towards change, I think, is in our lineage as well.
Ralph Benmergui: I hear that. And, yeah, there’s a lot of wisdom in that, I think, about what it is. Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day. This will be taped and sent out later. But yesterday was that day. And one of the things that strikes me is this idea that God died at Auschwitz. Could you talk to me a little bit about what I should take from that, really?
Amichai Lau-Lavie: We’re going there? I thought this was like a casual conversation about Sabbath Queen and the state of world Jewry in 2025, while our hearts are broken and beating with what’s happening in Israel and in Gaza, and I’m here in New York under the new Trump administration. You just lost Trudeau. Whoa. The world. Okay. But yes, talking about suffering and the existence of the divine is something I’m actually very interested in. I’ll say as a sidebar that I am three years into a three and a half-year journey called Below the Bible Belt, where I took upon myself to read the entire Hebrew Bible, cover to cover. It takes three and a half years if you do it daily. One chapter a day. It’s a project called 929, which is the number of chapters in the Bible. My older brother began that project in Israel, and I took it on as a 50-plus bucket list. I’m like, I gotta read the whole Bible. So we’re three years in. I’ve been posting every day on Instagram, etc., and we are in the middle of the Book of Job. So am I asking questions about, wow, the world and suffering, and if there is a God, what the hell is going on? Not just in Auschwitz, but in so many cases where cruelty and the lack of compassion and horrendous storms ravage everything we believe is good in our own lives. You want a couple of minutes of a response?
Ralph Benmergui: Yeah.
Amichai Lau-Lavie: Okay. Well, this is a little story. My father, may he rest in peace, was a Holocaust survivor. His name was Naftali. He was born in Poland. The Chief Rabbi of Israel, my uncle, Israel, who was still alive in his 80s, was saved by my father. They were a very known couple of Holocaust survivor brothers who made it through terrible camps. And my father saved his younger brother, and they both made it to the land of Israel and continued the rabbinic lineage. And I’m the queer version. But never mind.
Back when my father was quite old about 15 years ago and frail, quite depressed, as strong men tend to do when they no longer can work and be at it, I asked him, do you have any unfinished business? And without hesitating, he pointed up and he said, yes, I have a few questions to, you know, who about, you know what. My father chose to remain Orthodox after the Shoah. He sat with me for about 10 hours over the course of a few weeks and I interviewed him on his questions about faith and God and why he stayed religious, although he was kind of lukewarm about it. And it came to the question of where was God in the most awful moments. My father was in Auschwitz and in Buchenwald. And he framed this conversation as four questions. The forecasters, his four questions, basically one question. I don’t know if I can say, you know, F words on this esteemed Canadian channel, but like, basically, what the—and where are you? And my father spoke to God as Avinu Sheba Shamayim Tate, Our Father in Heaven, where the hell were you? From the point of view of people he knew who asked that question in the camps, it was very cathartic for him as a Holocaust survivor. He’s written his book, he’s talked about it, he’s taken us and lots of people back to Poland to learn to remember. But that was cathartic for him spiritually.
And it led me down a rabbit hole of books about theodicy and theology. And what did all the good philosophers and rabbis and thinkers say about this question? It turns out there was a lot. No kidding. And I’ll briefly say there was one fat volume. There is a great book called Wrestling with God that includes some of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. It came out, I think, in the late 20th century of Jewish responses to the Holocaust theology. It’s 99% men and only one woman. A theologian by the name of Melissa Raphael from the UK, an esteemed teacher, who says the following. Like many of those other theologian men, yes, God died in Auschwitz. A certain kind of the God that we relied on, the God of if it’s going to be. If you will do good, it will be good. The conditional God of the Bible, an old sense of reward and punishment, that Father God died. But Raphael interviewed many survivors and asked them, did you experience God or the holy in the camps? And they said, yes, when another human being saw me. When a human to human, face to face, Panim al Panim, Experience of the Sacred. And I was a human and not just a number.
And so from that, she says, yes, God, the male God, the old, died in Auschwitz. But a different kind of the divine arose, and that is the Shekhinah, the divine feminine who sees us eye to eye. She’s not a superwoman. She doesn’t save us. Sorry, Gal Gadot, but it’s the sense of “I am with you in sorrow.” I am holding your hand. I’m face to face with you. We get to be face to face with each other at times of sorrow. And that’s the response to “Where was God?” Yes. So, anyway, long story short, you asked a big question. My father was both amused and perturbed by this answer, but it led me on an entire journey of writing this out. Even at this time, while my family in Israel is suffering, my Palestinian friends are suffering. Here in the United States, people who I love and care for are in great threat. Around the world, there’s so much hurting in different ways. The notion that the divine exists in the way we show up for each other, in the compassionate, face to face, gaze to gaze, both, and despite difficulties, that’s as divine as it gets.
Ralph Benmergui: So, chesed. We’re talking compassion, kindness. Chesed.
Amichai Lau-Lavie: It’s a beautiful word that is so hard to translate.
Ralph Benmergui: Yeah. And instead of the old God of reward, punishment, transaction, petition, all of those aspects, we’re into a different phase.
Amichai Lau-Lavie: And just for a second, if you think about it theologically and sociologically, yes, World War II and the Holocaust were such a turmoil of change for the Jewish people and for the world on so many levels. One of the things that emerged strongly is feminism, practically, and the feminine divine. We may have said Shekhinah 50 years ago, 100 years ago, it was very vague. There’s a notion that the divine is not just masculine, not just Avinu Shebashamayim, Father in Heaven, it is something else. The change in gender roles and participation and the body politics, the identity politics, for better and worse, me sitting here as an openly gay rabbi, so many women in leadership positions, that also changes our theology. And chesed, that sense of love as opposed to the fear or the awe of that old godliness, is part of the shift we’re in. I think you and I share a teacher in Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi of sainted memory, who really understood this paradigm shift.
Ralph Benmergui: Very much so, and was willing to turn many things that we had taken for granted on their heads, one being the idea of a God up there. As a God that’s distant and dual, a non-dualistic idea of God changes the whole game. And he was very much into that. When you talk about God optional at Lab Shul, some people I’ve spoken to about it say, “God optional, they’re just trying to bend to take anybody in who have them.” And I said, well, maybe it’s not quite that simple. Maybe it’s not just the bending of the tree towards whoever might get low-hanging fruit. Maybe it’s about a different way of thinking of that word, or not thinking of that word, using different words to describe that divine interaction. Am I close to what you’re trying to get to with God optional there?
Amichai Lau-Lavie: That’s a beautiful reading. I will say the following: Lab Shul is a very inclusive and diverse community. People come who’ve been damaged by religion, who are seeking religion, who grew up in a more austere Judaism or very diluted Judaism, or very often are not Jewish and are there because they love somebody who’s there, et cetera, and other seekers. The word God is so imbued with layers, some of them positive, many negative. It is the white supremacy God. It is the masculine old-guard God. It is associated with things that are not the sense of majesty, sacredness, and being that many of us know and the subtleness of this mystery that we love so much. So God optional was a wink. Not so much bending the trees, but saying, yeah, listen, I don’t know what you believe in: love, life, higher self, Avinu Bashamayim, mother in heaven, the voice of sacred within, optional metaphor. We played with God fluid. We played with BYOG, you know, bring your own God. Those are all good. We actually, it’s interesting, we are, we’re discussing God optional. It’s been about 15 years since we started using it, and it’s atheist, agnostic, and believer-friendly. Because our liturgy is always a translation, a poetic translation of the Hebrew into an English that is gender-neutral and really open. One change that I did learn from our teacher Reb Zalman is that instead of the Hebrew word melech, when we ascribe any majesty to the divine, we say ruach, which is a masculine sense of saying king. God is king. Now, sure, we get the mythic majesty here, but for many of us, no, I don’t want to imagine God as a male king on a throne. There is too much in there, from monarchic to colonial to masculine to patriarchal to power paradigms. So Reb Zalman already introduced the notion of Ruach HaOlam, not the king of the world, but the spirit of the world, the breath of the world, the eternal ‘sh’ that we all share. Ruach is non-gender, and it’s non-hierarchy. It’s breath. So we use ruach. We love it. I can’t even imagine using melech anymore. But it’s constantly a question. There are people who are used to it. They love it. They see the metaphor within it, beyond the words. So I think we need to be playful with our liturgy, and we need to be careful about the balance between old and new. But find the sweet spot.
Ralph Benmergui: Yeah. And when I think about ruach, breath, spirit, wind, I also think about right now, I’m really struggling, and maybe you can help me with this. I mean, there’s two things I want to talk about: Rabbi Cooper’s idea of God as a verb, but the other part is I’m seeing the climate crisis as a spiritual crisis, that it is an issue of sacredness or the lack therein and of the idea of dominion as opposed to stewardship. You’re in a high urban setting in New York, and I often feel I’ve lost any sense of cosmos when I walk through urban settings. I’m walking on pavement. I can’t see stars. I can’t. I don’t have the sense of context to a cosmology that has 500 million galaxies in it. It’s just me. I’m the big thing in the movie that I’m in. So I’m wondering, how do we reconnect ourselves? Because sometimes I talk to Jewish thinkers who say, well, you don’t want to go to pantheism. You don’t want to go to the worship of nature, but I think we’ve lost something. And I’m just trying to figure out, have you struggled with this idea with eco-kosher, with Eco Eco Green? You know, how do we do from dominion to stewardship without just fudging the words?
Amichai Lau-Lavie: You know, I thought this was going to be a casual chat, Ralph. You’re going for the you.
Ralph Benmergui: Don’t call. You don’t write. Nothing.
Amichai Lau-Lavie: You know, this is an answer that isn’t snarky, nor is it comprehensive. But one of my rediscoveries of a phenomenal tool to help us ground ourselves in the ecosystem and commit to more holistic, organic ways of living is reclaiming Shabbat, and especially the Friday night experience around the table, the Sabbath Queen’s feast, and the simple things that we take for granted. I am reclaiming them as tools for resilience and resistance, starting with gathering around a Shabbat table. And unplugging, like when you walk into the opera. Or like, yeah, unplug. You’re turning off your phone now. It’s considered sacrilegious and an abuse of human rights, certainly among my teenage children. But, yeah, that’s what we’re doing now. We’re unplugging. We’re here now. Lighting of candles. Fire. Ancient, ancient fire. Really giving attention to this holy act of lighting a candle and whatever blessings go with it. And the same with Kavanaugh, with intentionality around raising a cup of blessing for what is worth a blessing, and breaking bread with the intention of feeding each other and nourishing through the rituals of Friday night that many of us know. Whether it’s blessing our children, giving charity, sharing words of wisdom, or singing together. Right. Singing together around a table. At Lab/Shul, we call these soul fuel stations. I’m sort of coming back to the simplicity of the Friday night table as a soul fuel station. The rituals we have, if we reimagine them, retranslate them, and adapt them to whoever is around the table, then they become fuel for the rest of the week. They become moments of great learning about what matters most. That includes our connection to the cosmos, to each other, to our neighbors, and to the earth. Right. All the blessings are around this sense of what grounds us: fruit of the tree, the bread from the earth, the hands that feed us. There’s a love and justice component to these rituals of Friday night. There’s a sidebar here that we can save for your next question about Sabbath, the film that sort of coincided in some way, that one feeds the other with the understanding of how vital this toolkit is.
Ralph Benmergui: I think that, certainly at our home, that’s the idea, the Sabbath project, as it were, for us. I do find a struggle to connect people back to community in a highly individualized society that we live in, where the private good, I always say, you know, 40 houses, 40 lawnmowers. Do we really need 40 lawnmowers, or could we have 40 but collectively own and use them for years on end, once every two weeks? I do worry about it because the biggest movement in North America is spiritual but not religious. Right. When I think of spirit, I think of Buber. I think of I and It and I and Thou. What is the relationship I am in with myself, with you, with this universe that we’re in? How do I strengthen those bonds? I sometimes wonder. Religion, to me, often seems to have been a fitness program, you know, like a godly jungle gym of some kind that we’re supposed to go to. But it’s Shabbat when it’s not optional. When you’re there every Friday, in one permutation or another, it’s a subversive act. You are reclaiming the ability to relate and have relationships with other people and not sit around the table talking about Netflix but bless each other, give gratitudes, share meals, make it, potluck it, and let people invest in the whole idea. I would love to see it as a revolutionary act around the world, regardless of faith or so-called religious background. So when I think of Sabbath Queen, when I think that we turn to a door in a Kabbalat service and the Queen is supposed to enter, you took that on also as a gay man, to represent yourself at times as the Queen. What made you go there?
Amichai Lau-Lavie: Briefly, I’ll say my journey from a young man in Israel, questioning a lot of my identities, coming out as gay in a religious family meant I had to ask which narrative do I follow? My heart, that allows and demands of me to come out and be who I am, and love who I love versus the Torah, the laws, and the family expectations. In the Orthodox world I grew up in, basically, you’re either going to stay in the closet and get over it or just don’t even think about it. That was basically the option. That made me question Jewish law and the Torah, who wrote this, and what is this? I realized that there are many different strands of Judaism that find ways to challenge tradition when it needs to evolve along with us from feminist, humanistic, altruistic, etc., lenses. By some point in my mid-20s and late 20s, I discovered all these different Jewish houses of study and art projects, and more pluralistic and inclusive ways to engage with Jewish life. That brought me to the United States in my late 20s, in the late 90s, to work at a great congregation on the Upper West Side, Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, which was and is an important leader in Jewish life. Rabbi Roly Matalon and Marcelo Bronstein, who at the time were in the lead role, Roly still is, invited me to be an artist in residence. Now I know what a chutzpah it was. I was a stinker at 28 years old, and I came to do Jewish theatre and adult education at BJ. It was a very generous invitation, and through it, I discovered different forms of theatre, most important among them storytelling, a device I created where we combined Torah and storytelling and transformed the Torah service to be Judaism’s once again prime time interactive theatre, where we take the old book and talk back to it. It’s a longer story. But out of that, I was asked to do a Purim night, and on Purim, one drinks, and I had one vodka too many, and Hadassah Gross emerged intact with a Hungarian accent, as the widow of initially one rabbi, eventually six rabbis, a Holocaust survivor, a kabbalist, teacher of secrets to the elite, and matchmaker. Very pious, very modest, very over the top. I needed a couple vodka tonics for her to show up regularly, which was one of the reasons I thought it might be good to stop. But she gave me the permission, as a drag queen who taught Jewish texts and conducted Jewish rituals, to really blur the lines. Whether it was in synagogues or clubs or museums, or whatever events, it was a drag queen, which is the Western Court jester, neither male nor female, funny, crass, whatever. It’s that kind of liminal. But this was a Rebbetzin who did Jewish stuff, and so people weren’t sure. Like, when we’re lighting candles with Hadassah, is that like a drag show or is this an actual Hanukkah ritual? It’s kind of both. In between, something was able to be opened which was spiritual, through humour, respect, and irreverence. It gave me the permission to be very publicly out as gay, and very public, out as Jewish and, dare I say, spiritual, maybe even religious, and do it through the wig and with the makeup. After about a decade of Hadassah’s raging success all over the world, it made sense to me to put her away for a moment and figure out my own voice. As a rabbi, I no longer needed that makeup. She decided to go down into the Dead Sea and record a video on Purim a decade ago, saying, I’m going down into the Dead Sea to save the Shekhinah, the divine feminine, from the clutches of patriarchy. It might take a very long time, but only I can do it. So be well, Zeitgeist. I’ll be back. Don’t wait up. She’s still in the Dead Sea, floating, light emerging.
Ralph Benmergui: She’s floating.
Amichai Lau-Lavie: She’s floating. And she… well, who knows?
Ralph Benmergui: We have something.
Amichai Lau-Lavie: She has gravity, superpowers. The point was, it was a theatrical device that was very shamanic. It both gave me and many others a way to contend with shadows and trauma, and that’s what spiritual teaching and performance can do. She gave me, Amichai, the way to say, I actually don’t need to be the widow or the rabbis. I want to be the rabbi. The film Sabbath Queen, which is 21 years in the making by my dear friend Sandy Dubowski, who’s an esteemed director, took this project on. That’s a whole other story, partially because of the Hadassah Gross drag. He was fascinated by that, that is, in the early 2000s. But then my journey kept evolving and he kept documenting it. And at some point, they decided to call the film Sabbath Queen because that is also one of the rituals that I conduct with Lab Shul monthly for.
Ralph Benmergui: The people who come to Lab Shul, people who come to Friday night. What’s the yearning that you discern more often than not in why they’re there?
Amichai Lau-Lavie: Well, it changes. I think, on the very, very baseline, whether we’re Jewish, Jewish-adjacent, however we roll, there is a yearning, a thirst for the kind of Jewish sensibility and music and words and sentiments that really fuel our sense of identity and connect us to each other. This is an old, old civilization. We have wise, wise ways. Some of them have been lost, some diluted, some, like you said, in the religious sense, very formalized. But it’s juicy stuff. To sing, to dance, to weep, to laugh, to figure out what prayer means. Being in conversation with yourself, with the soul, with the world, however you roll, what the divine is. To use some of this poetry we inherited, which is our liturgy, but adapt it and talk about things that matter, right? That’s what happens at a Friday night. It’s body and brain, it’s soul and sustenance, it’s nourishment. We eat together. It’s really important.
Ralph Benmergui: Yeah. Yeah.
Amichai Lau-Lavie: And I would say, for sure, in the last year and a half of this horrific war, with so much suffering and so much confusion and anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, people are torn between their different loyalties and priorities. People come to be together, to look around and say, huh, I’m with other people who believe in both and who want Israel to survive, who want Palestinians to thrive, who want this war to be over and our moral imagination to expand. To look left and right and sit with and sing with other people who share the same radical hope that we can move from binary to non-binary politically. We can embrace diversity without being just progressive responders, but actually authentic holders of a humanistic vision that is grounded in our Jewish DNA. People need, I need this sense of reminder that we’re in this together and that there are many others who think otherwise. Whoever is listening religiously, politically, poetically might be very different from how I roll. But at the end of the day, we are about being face-to-face with each other. That is the divinity. Obviously, we’re self-selective. You know, people are self-selective at Lab Shul. And I don’t think we are getting the full spectrum of the human expression of the Jewish voices. People prefer to be in bubbles. I get it. But we say everybody-friendly, and we mean it.
Ralph Benmergui: It is said that the language of the divine is silence. I know the ecstatic end of what you’re talking about—the movement, the dance, the music, the sharing. What place does silence have in an evolved spiritual reality?
Amichai Lau-Lavie: How long do you want the silence between us to last? Because honestly, we would both be out of business. Although, as the Psalms say, to the divine, silence is the utmost praise. My personal practice begins each morning with my own version of a morning meditation and my prayer props. I inherited beautiful morning liturgy like “Modeh Ani.” You know, I’m grateful, et cetera. And it’s in the silence where I really sit. In my personal and public life, the role of sitting in sacred silence matters much. One of Lab Shul’s loveliest partnerships is with the local New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. We have ongoing Zen Shabbats where we bring in Shabbat with some of the Shabbat liturgy props and a few guided meditations with the two senseis who are part of our community. When Sabbath Queen does come to Canada, these two beautiful senseis, Koshin and Shoto, are also a big part of the Sabbath Queen film. They’re dear friends and leaders in our community and leaders of the Zen community. So we sit in silence a lot.
Ralph Benmergui: Good, wonderful. One last thing. Is there a desire to scale up or out Lab Shul so that it becomes more of a movement globally? Or is it like, no, no, we don’t want to end up in the marketing business. We want to just do what we do. Where are you at with what Lab Shul has become and what it should become next?
Amichai Lau-Lavie: Lovely question. Thank you. Lab Shul is simultaneously a local New York City community with people who show up. And so that matters. It’s a local hub. We need those. At the same time, there are a few technologies that we’ve developed that we feel and know are exciting for people way beyond us. I would say the central one, now that we have our eyes on, is something we’re calling “Becoming,” which is about how to reimagine rites of passage and coming of age at every life stage. We’ve been doing very creative B mitzvahs for teenagers for close to 20 years now, completely revamping what happens at these coming-of-age ceremonies for teenagers and their families. Then we’ve adapted the sense of rite of passage for people who are 65-plus and for people in midlife, like 40 or 50. It’s not exactly an adult B mitzvah. It’s a way of taking time out of one’s life at key pivotal moments, transitions, and asking a few questions like where am I from? What matters to me? What do I want to leave behind? With a small group of people, you create a type of ritual in which you come of age, as an elder, in midlife, as a teen, as a tween. We’re building that now. We’re in a few pilots on that and we feel very strongly this is something that is a simple enough toolkit that can be adapted by other communities and individuals. We’re living longer. Climate crisis and political idiots pending, but we are living longer. Seems like we have more time and bandwidth and more need for spiritual pit stops throughout our lives to help us gain momentum and clarity and prepare for the next phase.
Ralph Benmergui: Yeah, Reb Zalman talks about the seasons, right? The spring, the summer, the autumn.
Amichai Lau-Lavie: Absolutely.
Ralph Benmergui: And the winter. And there are passages through those seasons that are important to demarcate, to make life conscious. The idea of a sort of journey where you can say, you know, who do I love? What do I regret? What do I want to be remembered for? These are important milestones. I’m always amazed if I go to someone’s “something zero” birthday party—50, 60, 70, 40, whatever it is—when people just stand around, eat some appetizers, and talk and leave. I think, no, why didn’t we honor this person? Why didn’t we talk about them? Why didn’t we tell a story about them? You know, why didn’t we share what we love for this person?
Amichai Lau-Lavie: So, you know, I just heard from this Afghani Jewish woman because we’ve been doing a lot of work about rites of passage and what exists and what we can do with Zalman’s very important teaching on wise aging, et cetera. This Afghani Jewish woman told me that, if I think I got it right, when people turn 40 in their culture, everybody gathers and the person turning 40 has been asked three questions. They have to publicly respond during the party to these three questions. Everybody gets the same three questions. I don’t know the three questions, but I can find out. What a wonderful ritual. Something like that. So we’re thinking a lot about that. It is grounded in Lab Shul’s core curriculum.
Ralph Benmergui: Nice.
Amichai Lau-Lavie: Like the storytelling method of translating tradition into now. I feel like this is something that meets people at their humanity. It meets people in their Jewishness. It is something we’re excited to share with more people and communities, and that’s going to emerge in the next year or so.
Ralph Benmergui: Rabbi, it’s an absolute pleasure to spend some time with you. I hope more people check out Lab Shul. And I love the idea of becoming a toolkit to be able to do these things with. In the renewal movement, there’s a lot of, how do we do something with this? We’re not a denomination, but how do we innovate in a way that helps to be inclusive of all and redefine? You know, it’s like that idea of the Jewish version of sin is not a bad act. It’s bad aim. Right. So maybe a little more eye on the prize of why we’re here.
Amichai Lau-Lavie: Absolutely.
Show Notes
Credits
- Host: Ralph Benmergui
- Producer: Michael Fraiman
- Music: Yevhen Onoychenko
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