Search for Meaning with Rabbi Yoshi - Search for Meaning with Zack Bodner

Search for Meaning with Zack Bodner

01/18/23 • 40 min

In the latest edition of his Search for Meaning podcast, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback hosts Zack Bodner, CEO of the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center and author of "Why Do Jewish? A Manifesto for 21st Century Jewish Peoplehood."

The founder of the Z3 Project, which fosters renewed conversation on world Jewry and Israel relations, Bodner has spent his career serving the Jewish community. Before taking over OFJCC, he spent 14 years as the Pacific Northwest Regional Director of AIPAC. During his time heading the OFJCC, he oversaw the launch of the Taube Center for Jewish Peoplehood, and helped create the Center for Social Impact, which is committed to tikkun olam initiatives that address poverty, disaster relief, racial justice, and more.

His new book discusses what it means to live a meaningful, relevant, and joyful Jewish life. Bodner touches on the role of Jewish education in general, and Jewish preschools in particular, including Wise's Aaron Milken Center. Bodner also touches on the evolution of interfaith marriages and Judaism's relevance to our increasingly multifaceted sense of personal identity.

What, though, does it mean to "do" Jewish, instead of just "being" Jewish?

"In my mind, how you live and what you do is way more important," Bodner says. "I start the book off with this quote from David BenGurion: 'Words without deeds are nothing,' because it really is, in my mind, about the doing."

There is a lot of tikkun olam in Bodner's conception of "doing" Jewish.

In the midst of an existential crisis while working as a legislative assistant in Sacramento shortly after graduate school, Bodner came to a realization: The meaning of life was to be God's partner in creation. He touches on the kabbalist tradition of divine light: "Our purpose in life, our meaning, is to be God's partners in creation, because when God created the universe, it was imperfect, it was incomplete, so we exist to finish the work, and we do that by fixing the brokenness, by making the pain go away, by helping bring other people joy, and enjoying it ourselves. That was the notion that hit me, all at once."

What, though, does it mean to "do" Jewish, instead of just "being" Jewish?

There is a lot of tikkun olam in Bodner's conception of "doing" Jewish.

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Search for Meaning with Veronica Zweiback

WARNING: This episode of Search for Meaning with Rabbi Yoshi contains some explicit language.

In the latest edition of his Search for Meaning podcast, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback hosts singer-songwriter Veronica Zweiback, who talks about her journey in music, as well as her journey of self-discovery in terms of gender identity.

Rabbi Yoshi's niece comes from a musical family. Not only are her uncle a talented guitarist, but father plays the guitar, bass, and drums. Her mother Kimberly Marshall is a world-renowned organist and a professor of music at Arizona State, so fittingly, Veronica played piano (along with the violin, cello, classical guitar) growing up.

She first began songwriting as an 8-year-old, and still remembers looking down at her handwriting as she wrote her artist name. At the time, she thought, it was just what young songwriters did—write out one's band name in cool fonts—but there may have been something deeper behind her choice.

"I had this alter-ego name, and this is so prescient and cute thinking back now," she says. "It was so telling. It was my name backwards, which was 'Noraa,' because my name at birth was Aaron ... There's always this cycle as an artist, especially for songwriters. There's this pressure to have an alter ego or a moniker, so you're often just playing with identity through your songwriting, the different parts of yourself."

At 16, Veronica's friends began calling her Ronnie, inspired by the song "ronnie ronaldo!" written by Greta Kline, whose own stage name—Frankie Cosmos—became the name of her band. Veronica and her band soon began to go by Soft Ronnie when playing shows.

"I was a little fangirl, and she was our favorite artist, and all my friends would geek out about Frankie Cosmos, her band," Veronica said. "She would start singing 'Ronnie,' and we would all go crazy, because that was my nickname. Also, the person it was about was shortening Aaron to Ronnie in the same way that I was at that time."

A music project that defies naming conventions or a traditional genre, Veronica describes Soft Ronnie as sad-guitar-rock/indie-alt/DIY/anti-folk. For the uninitiated, DIY means that Soft Ronnie not only records, but produces, releases, and promotes music. Artists like Jeffrey Lewis (a comic book artist and singer-songwriter) and Daniel Johnston got their start in much the same manner. It was in fact the DIY scene that helped Veronica overcome early insecurities when it came to music.

After some shop talk about music, Rabbi Yoshi and Veronica delve into how the search for gender identity maps onto her experience with and expression through music.

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Search for Meaning with Matan Koch

In the latest edition of his Search for Meaning podcast, Stephen Wise Temple Senior Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback hosts Matan Koch, the Senior Vice president for Strategic Change at RespectAbility, a nonprofit organization fighting stigmas and advancing opportunities so people with disabilities can fully participate in all aspects of community. Born 11 weeks premature with cerebral palsy and confined to a wheelchair for his entire life, Koch graduated from Yale and took his law degree from Harvard Law School, and has been a lifelong advocate for those with disabilities. He joins Rabbi Yoshi as we celebrate Jewish Disability Awareness, Acceptance, and Inclusion Month (JDAIM).

Observed each February, JDAIM is a unified effort among Jewish organizations worldwide to raise awareness and foster inclusion of people with disabilities and those who love them. JDAIM was founded in 2009 by the Jewish Special Education International Consortium to raise awareness and encourage inclusion for people with disabilities and special needs. Appointed by President Obama to the National Council on Disability (where he served from 2011 to 2014), Koch is a longtime national leader in disability advocacy.

"As the child of a congregational rabbi, who was also a URJ camp faculty member, and himself a former NFTY national officer, I was born into sort of the entire apparatus of the Reform movement at a time when people like me were not a part of that apparatus," Koch says. "In many ways, I benefitted from that. While institutional Judaism wouldn't think about practical strategies for people like me until the turn of this century, it meant that the approach was much more, 'How are we going to include Matan?' and much less, 'What's our strategy for the inclusion of Jews with disabilities?'"

From his childhood summers spent at URJ camps Eisner and Kutz, he saw demonstrations of demonstrated a type of inclusion that would plant the seeds for his future advocacy, and fell in love with song leading.

He began his disability policy career lobbying for a major disability organization in Washington while an undergraduate at Yale (where he was the president of the university's student disabilities community) and was appointed to the city of New Haven disability commission at the age of 18 while a college junior.

After graduating from Harvard Law, he served as counsel for Proctor & Gamble. Working with both the product marketing teams at P&G and its disabilities inclusion network, he developed the perspectives on consumer power and talent maximizing jobs for people with disabilities at the heart of the business case for universal inclusion that he teaches today.

Considered one of the nation’s leading Jewish inclusion experts, he has developed training and materials for many Jewish organizations, including Hillel International, the Union for Reform Judaism, and Combined Jewish Philanthropies. The son of a rabbi and a Jewish educator, he has been speaking on Jewish inclusion since early childhood and has been formally and informally retained by Jewish organizations for the last 20 years.

"This to me is the zinger: So what is the traditional instruction that, you know, resulted in the building of the Mishkan and the building also, later, of the Temple? It is, 'Build Me a space that I may dwell among you,' right? That, that we're building a space for God," says Matan. "And yet, if each of us, with our varying levels of ability, is a reflection of God, then God reflects the totality of all of that, which means that to build a space—to truly build a space for God to dwell among us—it has to be a fully inclusive space, because any person, any attribute, any type, that is excluded from the space that we build, is a facet of God that we are excluding from that."