Shaping Societal Narratives: Insightful Discourse with Rabbi Brad Levenberg

Lighting the path for our conversation today is Rabbi Brad Levenberg, the esteemed senior Rabbi at Temple Sinai in Atlanta, Georgia. His insight into fostering a fair society and the importance of creating positive Jewish memories draws a nuanced picture of progressive spiritual leadership. With Temple Sinai housing the most extensive collection of Jewish literature in Georgia, we explore the transformative power of knowledge and the potency of banned books in shaping societal narratives.

Our discourse navigates the impressive efforts of the Atlanta Black Jewish Coalition in bridging the divide between Black and Jewish communities. We reflect on the evolution of the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. Rabbi Levenberg's personal journey and his small, yet significant victories for humanity act as a guiding light, inspiring us to leverage our resources for societal progress. This intriguing discussion delves into the intersection of spirituality and culture, providing a fresh perspective on our collective journey towards an equitable future.

Note the website for the Atlanta Jewish Committee is ajc.org

(This episode was recorded in August 2023.)

Transcript

Rev Lynne: 0:22

Welcome to Spiritual Gumbeaux. And for our episode today, I'd like to welcome Rabbi Brad Levenberg. He is the senior Rabbi at Temple Sinai here in Atlanta, Georgia. This is our first time meeting and I must admit that I am elated. Why? Number one, to meet a fellow Antiochian and a fellow Ohioan. For some reason I just feel connected, and that is because of the two institutions, the State of Ohio as well as the school of which we both are connected to.

Rev Lynne: 1:02

For our listeners, Antioch is one of the oldest liberal art institutions in America. It was founded in 1852 by Horace Mann, who was an abolitionist and reformer. And, in case you may be wondering, well, who graduated from that school? Well, Coretta Scott King is probably one of the most notable graduates of Antioch, as well as former congressperson Eleanor Holmes Norton and, for those who may not know, Judge Leon Higginbotham, who was very influential in Brown versus the Board of Education, as well as his time on the judicial court. Well, Rabbi, tell me, would you be willing to share a little bit? Share a little bit about yourself and your work.

Rabbi Brad: 1:53

Absolutely, Reverend. I am so elated and delighted to be able to sit across from you, most certainly, and overjoyed that what I do has brought us into relationship. I've been at Temple Sinai now for, oh goodness, I'm starting my 18th year at this institution and for the most part, I do what many clergy members do, a lot of counseling, a lot of life cycle events, working with people of all ages, and most certainly, I guess an overarching philosophy of my rabbinate would be that I look forward to helping people make positive Jewish memories. Sometimes that's through education, sometimes programming, sometimes it's through recognizing the brokenness of the world in which we live and finding a way that they can be God's hands for good in this world.

Rev Lynne: 2:49

Wow, powerful. Well, Spiritual Gumbeaux is a podcast in which we speak with spiritual leaders. We're not really looking for religious leaders. We're looking for spiritual leaders across the spectrum, some in religious institutions, some in nonprofits and hopefully, some in corporate America, who make their decisions based off of their spiritual inclinations and how their spiritual life guides them in their decision making but, more importantly, in their being in the world. And so when we first connected, I said, oh my goodness, this is a great connection right here. One of the things I wanted to ask you, as a spiritual leader, what would be your opinion or what do you think about our spiritual direction in a post civil rights America?

Rabbi Brad: 3:43

Wow, starting with a huge question, and would that? I thought that there was just one direction, but we are far from monolithic as a greater city or state or country or people. We seem to all have a lot of different directions that we're running. It feels less like we're all on the same track, going in the same direction, and more like we're all at the amusement park playing bumper cars. Often our journeys lead us to interact with each other and intersect with each other, and I think that's often when it's the best.

Rabbi Brad: 4:24

I find that I am most inspired by people who recognize that we are far from a post-civil rights era, that, in fact, while the civil rights struggle could be cast and classified as one particular era of American history in which there were certain legislative goals that were intended, I think that the reality is that we were talking about a society that was significantly more equitable and just. Unfortunately, we're far cry from that. So when I find people who like to pat themselves on the back and talk about exclusively the days of yesterday and that's not immediately followed by a recognition that the struggle is still very much real and is very much going on for everybody, I find that there's some room to grow. So I love it when people talk about the days of yesterday, when they use that as an impetus for why we're still doing what we're doing today and, in fact, when they acknowledge the debt that we have to the generations before.

Rev Lynne: 5:40

Thank you. Thank you. Recently, well, upon arrival here, we were trying to determine what area would be best to sit down for the podcast and, as we were being escorted in, I was told that you house the largest repository of Jewish literature in the state //that's true.

Rev Lynne: 6:04

And I thought, wow, this is really great because this was not a part of well indirectly, but now it's directly a part of our dialogue, I'm hoping. Recently, about six months ago, I received an email from Antioch about becoming a part of this initiative called the Right to Learn, which is about activism in the area of banned books, which I have become extremely passionate about, and at Incarnation we are starting to collect banned books because there is a threat that they may not be published anymore. We don't know where this is going to go. Recently, at a clergy event, the question was asked how was this time for Christians after Easter? For me, what happened after Easter?

Rev Lynne: 6:58

And one of the things I had discussed was really diving into this notion of banned books. And there was a gentleman at the table who was about 86 years old and he was also a priest, and he looked up from the table and he said to me and everyone in the room he said I was a young boy when Hitler did not receive the chancellorship and the German people came out and burned all the books. And he said I saw this on television, I was a small child. And he said I want to say to everyone in this room. That what she's talking about is very important because it can be the beginning to the end. When I walked in here and saw all these wonderful books that are being saved are you keeping banned books or are you collecting banned books for the synagogue Jewish banned books?

Rabbi Brad: 8:06

I'm smiling because I'll certainly answer your question, but because I'm a clergy person, I of course have to speak for several minutes first and answer other questions that you didn't ask. So my thoughts are going in three different directions, and the third is a direct answer to your question. The first is that you recognize the space and lift it up to space in which we are presently sitting, which is the Cranes Learning Center at the heart of the synagogue campus. One of the things that you may not realize is that the space was renovated in 2019. And, in fact, the space used to be remarkably different. It looked like a traditional library with stacks in the middle of the room, and it wasn't really a space that was conducive to be able to sit and have conversations like we're having now. In fact, if you were to take a look to your left, you'd see all these sort of nooks, these bookshelves on the wall. Well, what I love is that each of those, prior to the inclusion of the bookshelves, those were computer nooks. In fact, what we said when we first designed this space in 2005 was that we needed a space that had desktop computers, because that was the way of the future. I was particularly overjoyed the day that we removed the computers and replaced them with bookshelves in this space.

Rabbi Brad: 9:38

The second space where my head was going was that I sit on the Film Evaluation Committee for the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. One of the films that we just screened is a film called the Books he Didn't Burn, and this was all about the books that were found in Adolf Hitler's private library. Now this is a film that hasn't yet found distribution. It was just made and is currently being shopped around at the festival circuits. My hope, of course, is that we're able to screen it in Atlanta at the festival in February, but in the event that we're not, I'll just share with you that the documentary was particularly telling because it did speak very much to the books that were burned in Germany and, of course, also highlighted these quotes that people had offered.

Rabbi Brad: 10:30

Where they burn books, they will soon burn bodies, and this was highlighting the books that Hitler chose to prize, and a lot of these were texts that would illustrate who he ultimately became.

Rabbi Brad: 10:47

They really narrated his entire journey, from the time that he was a teenager through his suicide, and it was just fascinating to be able to compare and contrast what existed on his shelf, which inspired such hatred and devastation and what was burned, which were books that truly reflected beautiful stories of a multitude of people and philosophies that unfortunately, unfortunately did not get to see the light of day in Germany when they should have been lifted up for study. And now the direct answer to your question, with pride, Temple Sinai has a banned book club with, I guess, what one would just naturally assume, or what I would hope would be an assumption. Of course we have banned books in this library, of course we keep them on the shelves and of course we encourage people to read them. We don't draw a distinction between books that were banned for political agendas and books that should be read by everyone. We find that that is up to their reader to determine, and we will give people the breadth and depth that they so desire.

Rev Lynne: 12:09

Wow, this is very I guess one could say prophetic in many, many ways. Again, you just never know. There's no such thing as coincidence and how people come together. Because my sense is that here is another wonderful connection and a thought that just came to my head and one of the questions I was going to I am going to ask a little bit later about black and Jewish relationships here in the city of Atlanta. But what I am sensing right now because we do ban books as well that this just may be an opportunity for Temple Sinai and the Church of the Incarnation to maybe have a different kind of relationship around this notion of banned book club, and maybe this meeting and our time together is hopefully bigger than you and I, and maybe it just might be a part of a small sense of healing in our city.

Rabbi Brad: 13:20

I don't know,// I love everything that you just said, everything. Books should bring us together. Even if they're, they're bringing us together over argument and discourse, over dialogue. We should be able to read a text on our own and develop our own opinions, but then to find ourselves in relationship with someone else by hearing how they read the same text, what passages stood out to them, what themes did they find particularly evident, which characters were the most alarming. This is the way that we find as a gateway to stories of our own lives.

Rev Lynne: 14:04

Yes, yes, this is really really great //and it's timely, as well, I'm focusing on just this.

Rabbi Brad: 14:11

Past Friday night I delivered homily at our Sabbath services. In the Jewish community the Sabbath is Friday night through Saturday night and Friday night in this community the reform community is significantly better attended. It's sort of our main service each week, and the sermon that I delivered this past Friday night was recognizing that August 4th was a date in 1938 that Germany had passed a law. I'm not recalling the exact name of the law right now and I don't have the paper in front of me, but the corpus of the law is that Jews who didn't have Jewish sounding names had to include a prefix to their name Israel for men and Sarah for women. I used that to help highlight the fact that in Germany there were 1,989 laws that were passed from 1933 to 1939 against the Jewish community, some national and some more local. I paralleled that with the 651 laws that had been introduced in America that are anti-LGBTQIA plus, and perhaps it was not the most sincere of equivocations or connections, but I saw a parallel in the story of the Jewish people from 85 years ago to a story that's going on right now. We never start with concentration camps. There's always these baby steps that happen first and we have to be vigilant.

Rabbi Brad: 16:01

One of the pieces in the sermon that I highlighted was the divisive concepts law in the state of Georgia that was signed by Governor Kemp. It's this law that bans the teaching of nine different divisive concepts, oddly enough related exclusively to race, but which is being applied to a teacher in Cobb County who was not invited back this year because of the end of last year, when this law was in effect. She taught a book to her fifth grade class called my Shadow is Purple. So if we're finding that books are divisive concepts and that books should shelter and hide us from the truths about who we are or perhaps we should hide from who we are by banning these books well, how problematic. And so when you bring up the banned books and I'm just thinking about these stories that are populating the news even as we speak-// yes, yes, thank you for that.

Rev Lynne: 17:07

Could you say a little bit more about your experience in Black and Jewish relation dialogue?

Rabbi Brad: 17:15

Sure, I came from Cincinnati which, as you and I were discussing earlier, is either the southern most northern city or the northern most southern city, and I like to think that for the purposes of this story, it was the northernmost southern city because I remember growing up and learning about Martin Luther King and learning about the civil rights struggle and, for some reason, the history. I recognized its importance but it didn't feel like it was part of my story. It felt like it was American history. When I came to Atlanta in 2006 and began to recognize the deep roots of the civil rights story in this city and in this community, that I was able to walk the streets with the exact same people that I studied when I was in elementary school in Cincinnati, well, it brought that story to life in a very different way than it did before. So I found myself incredibly inspired by the story of civil rights and the story of civil rights in Atlanta and in Alabama and in Mississippi.

Rabbi Brad: 18:31

It wasn't until I participated in a program called Leadership Atlanta in 2017. I guess it was 2016 to 17. We had a weekend that was exclusively devoted to race relations and that's where I got to interact with and understand, from a place of vulnerability, the narrative of how unfinished the civil rights story really is Now. Granted, I had been here for 11 years and I had a number of opportunities to interact with that story, a number of friends who we just never would talk about that aspect, we would talk about just brokenness in society and you know the hawks because you got to talk about the hawks. But it was that experience that really transformed me because it opened my ears and eyes to a zeitgeist that was present but that I didn't understand and I didn't appreciate. When hearing the experiences of people who were my friends, and then opening that door even more to hearing, with vulnerability, the experiences that others had had and, of course, seeing what was going on in the news in a whole different way, being much more analytic about how I was consuming the stories that I was reading, I found that I had a moral responsibility to be much more active in that space than I previously had, and so I immersed myself in the AJC's Atlanta Black Jewish Coalition.

Rabbi Brad: 20:23

This was really an ancestral organization. It's a legacy organization it's hard to say because it only dates back to the 1980s, but still it's a legacy organization founded by John Lewis and Sherry Frank, a Black, non-jewish man, white Jewish woman who thought that our communities needed to have points of intersection and we needed to build bridges of understanding, and so that's exactly what the Black Jewish Coalition was intending to do. But from 1982 through 2022, that story has ebbed and flowed and it's weaved in all sorts of ways that we couldn't possibly predict, from tensions between the communities to a heightened awareness of the fact that someone could be Black and Jewish. The story of somebody who went to one of the retreats and they said everyone who's Black pair up with someone who's Jewish, everyone who's Jewish pair up with someone Black, and someone who's Black and Jewish said am I just supposed to sit by myself? What is the infrastructure for me here?

Rabbi Brad: 21:32

That's where the organization began to morph a little bit and began to shift and, through my involvement, allowed me to find a channel for a lot of those, a lot of the desire that I had to right wrongs, and I was then all of a sudden put into relationship with people who not only had a similar desire, but had access to be able to do things that I never could do, and it helped me understand the power and the privilege and the resources that I bring to the conversation and how I could wield those to great effect, and great impact In, I guess, 2020,.

Rabbi Brad: 22:13

That's when the folks around the table invited me to be one of the co-chairs and the only thing that I insisted upon was that I, as the white Jewish co-chair, and that there was someone who was a Black, non-jewish co-chair as well, that we had a third co-chair of someone who was Black and Jewish. So the three of us collaborate. We meet every two weeks. We try our best to, under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee, to wield a lot of the resources available to us to address things like monuments and stone mountain and racial inequity and banned books, and the list goes on and on, but really it is just about addressing white supremacy in all of its forms, in every way that it manifests, and we do so in relationship with each other, which is, I think, the most powerful.

Rev Lynne: 23:17

Wow, thank you. When you say AJC, I'm assuming Atlanta Journal Constitution,// not exactly, so it's great Thank you for letting me offering that corrective.

Rabbi Brad: 23:27

It's one of those things that I've also learned about being in these relationships. Is the assumed knowledge, or just even what is so common parlance. For me, in this case, AJC is the American Jewish Committee.

Rev Lynne: 23:41

Thank you, Thank you. I know our listeners will say AJC, what's the newspaper got to do with this?

Rabbi Brad: 23:46

For everyone who's Googling ajc. com and looking up Black Jewish Coalition, you may find some odd stories that don't actually get you anywhere. Read those for sure, but if you want to get more involved, that would be going to the American Jewish Committees website.

Rev Lynne: 24:02

Thank you. Thank you. I know we have a limited amount of time, but there's so much that we could talk about, and we could go on and on, and we could probably have our own talk show. Who knows, we could indeed. But also, could you tell us a little bit about the Jewish Film Festival that's coming up and some of the things that we might be able to look forward to in the future?

Rabbi Brad: 24:23

So the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival happens to be this incredible gem in Atlanta. It started wow, actually it started 20 years ago and no gosh 24 years ago. And it started as a product of the American Jewish Committee in these offices off of Piedmont where a few people said, hey, let's watch a few Jewish movies together. And they took some VHS tapes and put them into the VCR and they watched it sitting around a table in a boardroom and they liked it so much that they said let's do it again next year. We'll call it our own little Jewish Festival, jewish Film Festival. And they did, and they invited their friends and it kept growing and growing until finally it became its own 501C3. And now the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival is the largest Jewish Film Festival in America. It's the largest Jewish Film Festival in the world, which I guess makes it the largest Jewish Film Festival in the galaxy.

Rev Lynne: 25:22

Okay.

Rabbi Brad: 25:23

At least as far as I know and the Film Festival is a curated festival. There's over 200 people who sit on a screening committee. Our task on the committee is to view submissions that come from all over the world and to determine really three things. Is the film on mission? So does it relate in some way to Judaism? Is it good, got to be an excellent film to be in the festival and would we recommend it? And for these films that we would ultimately recommend, there's about 70 films that are screened in the festival.

Rabbi Brad: 26:01

There's about 40,000 people who attend these films over the course of 10 days in February, and each of the films they each are incredibly compelling in all sorts of different ways, sometimes telling an aspect of the story of the Jewish people that may be unfamiliar to many, including people who grew up Jewish.

Rabbi Brad: 26:24

Sometimes it's stories of intersectionality. Sometimes it's stories that maybe highlight something that is an ill in society, where Jewish people and others with whom we can be in partnership can make a difference and an impact. Of course, one of the best parts of the Jewish Film Festival is that the audience is remarkably diverse, as is the Film Evaluation Committee. In fact, it's one of the most eclectic groups that I've ever seen in Atlanta participating in these festivals and the screenings. And most of the films have a talk back afterwards, so there will be someone connected to the film or a panel discussion afterwards highlighting some of the themes of the movie or perhaps how the story is felt locally. It usually leads to a lot of good conversation in a parking lot and hopefully a lot of good activity in the year ahead.

Rev Lynne: 27:22

Okay, I am looking forward to participating and being a part of that. And another point of connection my son, who is a film major, was one of the, I think, part of the panel for the big premiere of something last year and I was supposed to be his date but he got a younger date and so I was disinvited.

Rev Lynne: 27:49

I look forward to telling him so that I can say to him oh well, I don't need you so I'm looking forward to that, I would like to end our time together with a quote from Horace Mann. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity, which is the Antiochian quote.

Rabbi Brad: 28:15

Indeed.

Rev Lynne: 28:15

And I just wanna say that I see you are on that journey to win small victories for humanity and I thank you for that.

Rabbi Brad: 28:25

Thank you. What a wonderful conversation. Thank you so love this.

Rev Lynne: 28:28

All right