House Blog

The following is d’var tikkun (words of justice) was given my Mimi Micner, Spirituality Chair, at our annual Membership Meeting on Sunday, March 10, 2013:

Each year, we gather as a community in this moment to do several things. We gather to celebrate — to celebrate the community that we’ve built together and the work that we’ve been able to do as that community. We gather to decide — to make decisions based on our values that furthers our growth and work as a community. We also gather to notice, and that’s what I want to spend a few minutes talking about — to notice in a larger sense where we are as a community, with its many opportunities and challenges, and where we want to be going together.

So when we look at ourselves in this particular moment in time, what do we notice?

This week’s Torah portion, Vayakhel-Pekudei, has been helpful to me in answering this question. This week, we read the story of the building of the Mishkan, the Jewish people’s portable sanctuary in the wilderness that they built en route to the land of Canaan from Egypt, and G-d says something very interesting about Betzalel, the head contractor of the Mishkan. G-d says:

Va’yimale oto ruach Elohim bechochma u’v’tevuna, u’vedea, u’vechol melachah.
Divine inspiration filled him with wisdom and with understanding and with knowledge and with every craft. (Ex. 35:31)

This verse lifts up three specific qualities that Betzalel became endowed with that were necessary for him to successfully build a dwelling place for G-d: wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. But what strikes me is that these qualities don’t immediately seem all that distinct from each other: what’s so different about wisdom, understanding, and knowledge that they’re made into distinct characteristics, and if they are distinct, what about their difference is meaningful? AND, perhaps, is there meaning in the the order of the words as they’re written?

I’m going to go ahead and write down each of these qualities because I want to be pretty specific here:

Chochma – wisdom
Tevuna – understanding
Dea – with knowledge

Midrash Tanchuma, which is a 9th century commentary, has an interesting take on what the differences among these characteristics might be. It talks about how these three characteristics appear in Proverbs. Here, we see the following:

With wisdom God founded the earth
With understanding God lastingly established the heavens
With divine knowledge depths were split
And the skies distilled dew

So here are the subtle differences that I think are being thought about here:

Wisdom is related to getting started on a task.

Understanding is about sustaining, about the cultivation of the ability to sustain what has been built.

And knowledge is then about distinguishing, helping us make distinctions between situations, so that we can apply our understanding.

The differences here seem meaningful to me, as is their order in this verse of Torah, to help me understand what I’m noticing about this community.

This community was born based on specific wisdom. It was born on the hypothesis that a Jewish community rooted in values of social justice and driven by its participants would be exciting and generative for young Jews. I think that all of us in this room and the work that we have been able to do can attest to this hypothesis being true and alive.

But that’s not where we’re at anymore. Certainly we still hold the wisdom that gave birth to our community, but I think at this moment in time we’re living in the next two stages, that of understanding and knowledge, of sustaining what we have built and of figuring out how to move forward strategically.

So at this stage we have to start asking ourselves new kinds of questions: What does it look like for us to have the tools we need to sustain what we have built and what we are building, which is growing in number of members/participants, in programming, spiritual richness, and political clout? And what does it look like for us to create a culture of distinguishing or discernment, where we’re intentional about what we take on programmatically, spiritually, and politically. The membership meeting is our time to check in on our own Moishe Kavod House Mishkan-building project. Guided by the model of Betzalel, let’s push ourselves to be “filled with wisdom, with understanding, and with knowledge.”

This is an exciting week! The 2013 Moishe Kavod House Annual Membership Meeting is this coming Sunday, March 10, 2013. Join the community at 3:30p.m. to share food and song, and to make important decisions about our community! We will make three decisions on our community’s direction on the membership dues structure, with our food justice commitments, and with our new social justice strategy! The following summarizes the items that have been prepared for discussion at the Membership Meeting, with full documents linked:

Membership Dues Structure
Over the past three months we held a series of community conversations to inform how we establish a new dues structure that will reflect our values, inspired by models for equitable community investment found in Jewish texts and by the work of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek. We propose that each individual is asked to contribute a symbolic “half shekel” of $36 as the base payment for membership. Each member is strongly encouraged to make an additional contribution of an amount that is right for them, whether it be $5 or $500. This self-assessment is completely confidential. Stake your claim in our community by taking this survey. If you want to be a member, we want you at the Membership Meeting!

Institutional Purchasing Campaign
The Community Food Advisory Board [CoFAB], our major working group of the Farm to Shul Team, is leading our Moishe Kavod House community in a campaign to create an institutional food system that reflects our commitment to social justice and community building.  Over the course of a year and a half, the CoFAB has been working to bring this food system to life in our community, and we will be exploring the ways the community at large has been and will continue to be engaged with this process.  Since the 2012 Community Retreat, when it was first presented to everybody, members of the CoFAB have edited and updated our Community Food Ketubah which outlines the values and commitments we are taking as a community. Together, we will hear about and give our feedback to the team, pushing this campaign to make sure it is true to our community’s goals and capacity as a whole.

Social Justice Strategy Team
Also at the 2012 Community Retreat, we, the membership approved the creation of the Social Justice Chair position and elected Rabbi Margie Klein in September 2012. Since then, Margie organized the Social Justice Strategy Team which has been working this year to solidify our long-term social justice goals and to explore how we can better streamline and coordinate. Our refined Political Power Action Template is the result of a series of community conversations over the past three years about community priorities, values, and capacity. In the spirit of creativity and a commitment to action, the team has worked hard to develop this model – we are proposing to try it out for the coming year, and at the end, to checking in as a whole community about how it has felt, what it has achieved, and how we feel about the choices it has required us to make about where to channel our energy. Please be in touch with SJ Chair Margie Klein with ideas and suggestions about how we can more effectively (and enthusiastically!) integrate this trial plan into our teams and house’s work more generally.
 
Yours faithfully,
Julie (President@kavodhouse.com)
Sam (membership@kavodhouse.com)

Board Update from the President:

The board continues to feel privileged to be supporting our community through the development of better strategic planning and infrastructure. This will be discussed further at the upcoming membership meeting on March 10, 2013. Major highlights include:

• Work exploring how we can combine our commitment to grassroots energy with a stronger focus around intentional planning toward furthering our mission and vision;
• Work around better supporting our housemates in order to support our work in a more sustainable manner;
• Work helping us move towards a more sustainable long term funding model (shoutout to the Torah of Money team!).

We’re excited to be in conversation with the community about these important issues as we move into the spring. I encourage you to be in touch whenever you’d like!

- Julie (President@kavodhouse.com)

Finance Update:

The money that Moishe Kavod takes in goes to sustain the many important things that we do. Our expenses fall into two major categories:

1) On-going expenses at Moishe Kavod, like house costs (rent subsidy to our resident organizers, utility costs, etc.) and food for meetings, events, and to supplement our Shabbat potlucks.

2) One-time expenses. For example, our money helps pay for the annual community retreat and pay membership dues for the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization.

Some finance-related items that are being discussed in our community include:

• With leadership from the Development Team, we are exploring ways to be more independently locally sustainable as an organization;
• Our Community Food Advisory Board (CoFAB) is leading a community effort exploring how to make our food spending reflect our social justice values;
• A group of board members is creating a protocol which can be used to determine how we work with our social justice partner organizations to support one another financially;
• The Finance and Communication Chairs of the board are working to make our spending more transparent. As we work to do this, please send suggestions to finance@kavodhouse.com.

Finance reminders

Our members and resident organizers provide the labor of purchasing food for our many programs. If you need to be reimbursed remember to submit a receipt to your team’s housemate liaison as soon as possible. Any time you submit a receipt, please remember to fill out the CoFAB food  survey (http://www.kavodhouse.com/resources/tools-for-teams-event-policies/cofab-institutional-purchasing-campaign/) and remember that someone should take a picture of the event or meeting. You can expect to be reimbursed about two weeks after you submit a receipt and submit photographs.