Jewish Counterculture Oral History Project

MONA and MICHAEL FISHBANE

Interviewed by Jayne K. Guberman

May 12, 2017 and October 18th, 2017

A Project of the Jewish Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania Mona and Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane, 5/12/17 + 10/18/17

Jayne Guberman (JG): My name is Jayne Guberman. Today is Friday, May 12, 2017, and I'm here with Mona and Michael Fishbane, known to his friends as “Buzzy,” at the home of their son in Highland Park, New Jersey. We're going to record an interview for the Jewish Counterculture Oral History Project. Mona and Buzzy, do I have your permission to record this interview?

Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane (BF): Absolutely.

Mona Fishbane (MF): Yes.

JG: Great. So, as you know, today we're going to explore your experiences, especially in the late sixties and early seventies, and particularly your involvement in Havurat Shalom, and then the impact that the havurah has had on your own lives, and beyond, on the larger Jewish community. I'd like to start by talking with each of you about your personal background, and your families as you were growing up, and to flesh out who you were at the point that you got involved with the havurah. So, Buzzy, we're going to begin with you. You were born in 1943 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tell me about your family when you were growing up, your parents and your immediate family.

BF: So I grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. Both of my parents were part of first generation immigrant families. From my mother's side, it was from the Ukraine, and from my father's side, it was from Poland. The families lived in the Greater Boston area, and they came in various waves and settled in. They had both come from traditional backgrounds, and as they settled in America, they were sort of observant Conservative Jews. I think my grandfather continued a very traditional lifestyle, but he was part of Kehilath Israel in Brookline, which in those days was very right-wing Conservative. My father grew up in Lynn. In those days, there was a Talmud Torah and Orthodox schools at the same time, but he also became a traditional Conservative Jew. I grew up in a traditional Conservative Jewish family, as was common in the 1950s, which means that it was traditionally observant, and there was no mechitzah — there was no separation between men and women — but otherwise it was traditional. It was characterized by rabbis who had had Orthodox backgrounds, and it was also characterized by the shamesh, the sexton, both at Kehilath Israel, which I often went to, and Temple Emeth in South Brookline, where the sextons were actually people who had smicha from Slabodka. So, Conservative Judaism in those days (00:03:00) was very, very traditional, except for the phenomenon of the seating. Other than that, it was a very observant community.

JG: Which synagogue did your family belong to?

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BF: We were part of Kehilath Israel. When we moved to South Brookline, we belonged to Temple Emeth, which was a Conservative synagogue.

JG: What did your father and mother do? What did your dad do for a living?

BF: My mother was a homemaker. My father was involved in business and merchandise. He worked for my grandfather for a period of time. He also then became involved in stocks and other aspects, so he was a businessman in that sense, a frustrated academic. Because of the thirties and the war, and when he came back — my father was wounded in the Second World War — people had to work in a different way, so he never really completed the kind of education that he probably would have done.

JG: Did you have siblings?

BF: Yes. I have two brothers and a sister, all younger than myself.

JG: So you said your dad was severely wounded on D-Day.

BF: That's right. In a certain sense, war and Jewish persecution were part of my childhood experiences. My grandfather escaped from the Russian Army when he came to America, and all of his stories to me when I was a young child were of the persecution or the murder of the Jews, the Cossacks bayoneting children when he was growing up before. He eventually escaped through trade routes to Vienna, then to Antwerp, and then to the United States, but those narratives were very much part of my childhood history. From my father's side, the war was a constant preoccupation. My father was part of the Normandy Invasion. He was severely wounded on June 6, on D-Day, and came back as physically very much impaired because of the war. They didn't clear the beaches quickly, and by the time he got to the medical hospitals in Virginia, he had no use of his arms or legs. That's what they called in those days a "basket case" — they were just carried in baskets. He eventually forced himself to learn how to walk and so on, and he became the First Commander of the American Jewish War Veterans in Boston. So my father was — what we would now call P.T.S.D, but the Second World War was part of our mental history for that period of time. (00:06:00)

JG: So you were born while he was away?

BF: Right. Well, I don't remember him until he came back, and I was about two and a half or three at that time. The narratives of the war were constantly part of it. That was also part of the American Jewish experience. It's interesting that in the first public broadcast my father gave at the American Jewish War Veterans, which was a public radio

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broadcast, he spoke on behalf of what they called in those days "Negroes." So it was — American Jews are trying to be integrated. He felt important to speak on behalf of the integration of the Negroes. That was part of that American Jewish culture. It had a certain identity, but it was also precarious in a certain sense.

JG: Are we talking in the forties or —?

BF: We're talking about the mid-forties, late-forties by that point. But this was American Jewish life even into the early fifties. It was a kind of identity and hidden identity, simultaneously concerned with being American and Jewish as well. Boston was a unique case.

JG: How so?

BF: People — there was no outward display of being Jewish. No one would wear a kippah in public, even the traditional people in the old part of Brookline. People were very much aware that they were Jewish. Many had come from Roxbury, Blue Hill Avenue, where there was a very mixed community. People kept their Americanism and their Judaism — they were intentioned, but it was kind of a cautious balance very frequently. That was very much part of the mental climate. You could be very strongly Jewish at home, but when you went outside in the street, you should remember that you were Jewish and you were accepted in America, but you had to be careful about how you appeared.

JG: You were five when the State of Israel was founded, right?

BF: Right.

JG: What kind of relationship, if any, did your family have with Israel and Zionism?

BF: Well, when I was a kid, what I remember right at the time of Israel was that one moment in the afternoon Hebrew schools. The principal said we had to stop using "Ashkinazus,” the Ashkenazi pronunciation, and we had to start using Sephardi. Of course, it was as difficult for all of us as it was for the teachers. [laughs] But this was, in a certain sense, (00:09:00) to mark Israel.

JG: When are you talking about?

BF: This is '48 —

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JG: Forty-eight? So you were already involved in Hebrew school at that point?

BF: Yeah. So I remember that, and then this continued into the early fifties as well. It was a very conscious issue. There was something called Israel. We didn't really know what Israel was. It's a faraway country, and there wasn't much television. It was there and it had a mystique about it, but no one quite knew. And that mystique actually lasted until the early sixties when I went there as an undergraduate. It was just like, it was a place where people came, and they worked the land and they rolled up their sleeves, [laughs] but it didn't have — Israel as a State was not very much part of the conversation in the synagogue life as I was growing up. It was there, but all that we really ever did to celebrate Israel is we all had to buy these stamps to build the forest. So kids would buy stamps, and every Sunday they would fill out these trees to buy for Keren Kayemet. That was very common for bar mitzvah presents in those days, that people would buy trees. People would sing Israeli songs, but it had no political concreteness because the political scene, or the relationship between Israel and the Second World War and the Holocaust, was not yet explicit. That waited until after the Six Day War, until it became a strong ideological component in American Jewish life, and that's the way it was for me even when I was in high school already. When I went to Brookline High School, there was what we called the Hebrew Teachers College. It was the Hebrew Teacher's High School and on then to the College, and everybody carried what we called in those days a "double load." I would go to public high school and then at two o'clock in the afternoon, I would go to my grandfather's house, and he would sort of test me on various Hebrew things before I would be allowed to have my meal with him. Then from five or six to nine every night, we would go to Hebrew College. The reason I'm mentioning that in this context is that Zionism expressed itself in terms of being able to speak Modern Hebrew. So at the Hebrew College, everything was in Hebrew, even through high school in those days. It also expressed itself in the fact that a number of my teachers — for example, Moses Steiner, who (00:12:00) — I didn't understand in those days, but he grew up in Poland, and he was a disciple of Jabotinsky. So we never knew that Jabotinsky was right, left, or others. I gradually was able to piece that together after the Six Day War. But people — it was very much rabbis or secular Jews from Europe who taught in the Hebrew College, and many of them had Zionist backgrounds, either secular Zionism like Steiner or the religious Zionism of some of those who came from Hungary, Poland, some of the rabbis who were my teachers. It was part of a much larger identity, which had not yet — even then, it was not political. It was expressed through cultural Zionism. Cultural Zionism was the phenomenon of the Hebrew College and Hebrew High School, which meant we were reading the early authors, beginning with Bialik, but then all the contemporary authors. The first time I think that Zionism as an ideological issue came to consciousness, probably in my second year in high school, and we read a short story by Chaim Hazaz. I don't know if that name is still known to people, but he was from a Sephardi narrative. He

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had written this narrative about Jewish cultural memory, a short story. It was more or less, the Jews were persecuted, now we're in the land — that's Jewish history. It was one of those kind of — those were pivotal moments, reading those narratives. They brought us into what we would call a Zionist consciousness, or cultural Zionism, and it was clear that there was a major shift from Europe. The notion of shlilat hagolah, which was common in Israel — the negation of the exile — was not a big ideology in America, but I heard that quite frequently from those teachers I had, some who learned Hebrew in the Tachkemoni Schools in Poland, and others. But it was cultural Zionism, and political Zionism — or physical Zionism, I would say; it wasn't even political — when I first went to Israel in 1962, and we saw the land, we saw people, we saw the physicality of it, and it was more of the physical nature of the survival of the Jewish people, rather than being a political ideology.

JG: What did Israel mean to your family? For instance, to your grandfather, who had reared you on these stories of persecution and escape and the precariousness of Jewish life in Europe?

BF: To be honest, for my grandfather, Israel was the Jewish people. It's the people of Israel. It's Am Yisrael. My grandfather wasn't political in that sense, so I never even really heard aspects of that. He was a (00:15:00) Jew who came, fled persecution, had a minimal education because of his narrative, and was a proud Jew, but Israel meant the Jewish people. It wasn't a state or a political entity.

JG: Was that true for your parents as well?

BF: It was expressed in America — the way it would be expressed in those days is through synagogues. People didn't appear in the streets for an Israeli Independence Day. That would be too out there in the social realm. But there were celebrations. People would always stand up and sing Hatikva. There would be an Israeli flag next to the American flag in the synagogue. So that was part of consciousness and identity, but it had a muted political aspect. So if my parents were involved in that, it was the way most Conservative Jews in those days were involved. That is to say, they celebrated those days as the synagogue would celebrate it.

JG: You started to tell us a little bit about your Jewish education. What was that like? Would you describe your education as a child, and then as you got to be a teenager?

BF: Right. Well, there are various aspects. In those days the Conservative afternoon schools were every afternoon for two-and-a-half hours, at least Temple Emeth was, and then Sunday for four hours.

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JG: When did you start going to Hebrew school?

BF: It was certainly by the fifth, sixth grade, in terms of every day. So that was part of my consciousness, both in terms of grade school, high school, afternoon and early evening were Jewish texts and Hebrew. I can't speak too much about that aspect of grammar school. It was just what most kids do; try to get through the day, when you're nine and ten years old. What struck me very much when I first went to the Hebrew High School, when I was going to Brookline High School, was the range. One of my teachers was David Weinstein, who was writing at that time Hebrew Through Pictures. So we were part of that first generation — they had Spanish Through Pictures and German Through Pictures — that whole notion of the first experience of speaking Hebrew in public and being part of that. So he would be part of one end of that spectrum. Another of my high school teachers was Rav Goldman, who studied in the Chevron Yeshiva. He was very much involved in giving us trick questions (00:18:00) on the Shulchan Aruch. I had others — Rav Gold, who had smicha from Poland, and then there would be Dr. Steiner. So, there was a range of people from American backgrounds all the way through. That was very much also part — all the people who came from Roxbury in those days. Even people like Isador Twersky and others. It was a kind of a secular humanistic ambiance. The head of the Hebrew school was a person who was kind of a Viennese Jewish poet. The thing that made the biggest impression, and it actually carried through to my whole life, was when most people sort of grow up and have a tension between Orthodox or traditional learning, and secular or cultural or Hebrew learning. It was never a conflict for me in that sense. The methodology of different people representing different styles of Jewish living — because they were simply teachers. They weren't observing me in my home. My home was a Conservative Jewish life. But the range of teachers and of what they represented in terms of background allowed me to have multiple models of people who had very traditional backgrounds whose lifestyle I did not share as a child in those days, and then people who were quite secular, people who had an academic orientation, or people like Rav Goldman. I saw things that I wouldn't have known before. He was getting his PhD at Harvard at that time, and he was learning Iranian because he wanted to study the Talmud, and yet he was from the most traditional years of the Chevron Yeshiva. So I saw types of integration that later, when I went to Israel, didn't create — the kind of conflicts that I had were of my own intellectual formation, but culturally I saw a very broad range that deepened me from the time I was in high school, right to this day, where multiple voices, multiple approaches, can co-exist and cohere simultaneously.

JG: How would you describe your Jewish identity as a high school student? Who were you when you were in high school?

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BF: Even within that Conservative environment, I was quite observant. In high school, I put on tefillin every morning, which sort of meant that I would get up at five in the morning. I would put on tefillin, then walk and leave at seven-thirty to take the bus. None of my peers did anything of that nature. (00:21:00) So it was a matter of private religion, because I don't think that many of the other kids who were going to Brookline High School, or certainly others, were involved in that level. So that was an intense formation of my identity. What stands out for me, I remember a narrative. In high school, I think in my second year in high school, we were part of what they called the Concert Choir. We went to Buffalo, New York, and we were going to sing Palestrina and Brahms and all that, and then a whole series of Christian stuff. Then we got on the bus, and I remember going to the back of the bus and putting on my tefillin. It was the first time I had done anything like that in public. Then I remember a couple of the boys that were part of that whole thing, they sort of said, one said, "You're different than us." Then a couple of them grudgingly said, "We admire you," — because, you know, that notion of having a public identity or private identity, or being committed to something, for me it wasn't done for ideological reasons. That's just who I was.

JG: What prompted you to start putting on tefillin?

BF: I was observant in those days. My father didn't put on tefillin every morning, but I did.

JG: Did your grandfather?

BF: Yeah. But that was my inner formation of myself, so I had an inner Jewish language, which has constantly evolved and changed or went through gaps and divisions, but that was fundamental to who I was from the earliest of days.

JG: Were there moments in those years, experiences that particularly moved or touched you spiritually? I recall reading something about your attendance at a lecture by Heschel, for instance.

BF: I'll give you two examples. One relates to Heschel. The other relates to the Holocaust. When I was in high school, in what now was the center of Boston was an area called Scollay Square. That was where the sailors came, and so on and so forth. But they had many old book stores, and I used to take the trolley — that's what you called the streetcar in Boston in those days — to Scollay Square, and I used to go to some of these old book stores and wander around. This was, of course, in the mid-fifties, so the Holocaust was not spoken about. I came across this book called Burned in the Ovens Till Dead. It was a memoir. I had (00:24:00) no idea what was going on, and I came back to

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speak to my father. My father, as I said, had P.T.S.D., and he really, he would have these depressions every day from the war, but he had a very strong — didn't want me to talk about it. He was very, very upset. It was gradually — it began —

JG: About the Holocaust?

BF: Yes, because this was a big secret, what had happened, and I discovered this on my own through this accidental encounter in this book store in the early fifties, mid-fifties. Gradually I would go back and found the war. But that was a fundamental shaping event, the murder of the Jews of Europe. That affected my identity very deeply. I'll tell you a little bit later about when I went to Israel for the first time, right after the Eichmann Trials. So that was — but again, these were private issues, because people didn't speak about that in public. The event with Heschel was fundamental for me in a different respect. So I mostly grew up in a kind of Russian Jewish environment, and people were moderately educated and, except for the Hebrew College, many people had never gone to a European university of any sort. So I never saw that notion of people who came from a traditional background but also had a secular cultural studies, or were different than a certain kind of traditional observant Jew. In those days, I still wanted to be a rabbi. Everybody wanted me to be a Conservative rabbi. There was one Motzei Shabbat, a Saturday evening, and Heschel was going to speak at a synagogue in Mattapan. I think it was the synagogue of Jack Riemer in those days. I saw a phenomenon that to this day, it was dramatic and visual. He was writing — at that point I think he was writing God in Search of Man, and he was developing his theory of Jews involvement in time as opposed to space. So then he was standing up there, with an accent and a beard, and yet you knew he was European, but not European in the way we thought European Jews were in terms of Eastern European Jews. He started — he had a stack of notecards on the side. So, I'm sitting there mesmerized — I was twelve years old — (00:27:00) and he started to talk about the Sabbath and time. And I remember, he began by talking about Kant. Well, I had no idea who — Kant-Shmant? I didn't know who Kant was, and Hegel-Shmeygel, right? I didn't know what any of those terms were, but somehow, coming from him, they had a dignity. Then he started talking about the Sabbath and time. He was very performative. So he started talking like this. He started talking about [gestures as if picking up cards] time, and he was taking the cards like this. It was like this event, where the cards on this side went down, and this side of the cards went up, all as he was talking about time, right? I remember that as a visual, visceral experience, and then just being deeply overwhelmed. So right after that time, I read for the first time The Earth is the Lord's, which was originally given in Yiddish at YIVO when he came over, and it was considered a hesped, or a eulogy, for Eastern European Jews. When he recited that in Yiddish, he stood up and gave a Rabbonim Kaddish, a Rabbi's Kaddish. Then it was translated, and then I subsequently read some of his other works, as best I understood it

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as a high school person. Since Heschel wrote in this rhetorical style rather than in an intellectual style, you could follow it even as a kid.

JG: Were these sparking sort of spiritual and intellectual questions for you? Did you have anyone to talk to about this?

BF: No, I didn't have people to talk to. My formation was always a private language, and a private language in relationship to the sources or the authors of the sources, or a private language, let's say, with these kinds of books. So it was in a certain sense inchoate, and it didn't have a structure. So if there was an intellectual crisis or something like that, there was no person that I could speak to about those kinds of questions, so I had to work through them as best I could. It was less a spark in both cases as being aware of another dimension. So the Holocaust was the first awareness that the bland American Jewish life of Dwight Eisenhower had darkness. The world had darkness. America in the 1950s was this silly American Judaism of everybody sat together in the synagogue in a very upright, polite way. (00:30:00) It was bland, and I didn't know what was not bland, because that's all we ever saw. The notion of evil and darkness first hit me in the sixties in a different way. My father was personified. This was not simply personified, it was historicized. That was an extremely powerful awareness. With people like Heschel, it was the awareness that there was a language of personal spiritual quest that was independent of the language of what the commandments meant. So I wouldn't have seen that otherwise if I hadn't seen him. It opened a window, which then I had to then kind of learn how to deal with.

JG: It sounds like it was both tremendously exciting and stimulating, and also lonely.

BF: It was lonely, and without context. So it was as deep as my own emotional and intellectual life could take it, which sometimes was better or worse. But it was lonely in the sense that there was no one there. Now people talk about a conversation partner.

JG: None of your teachers at Hebrew College, rabbis —

BF: There was one rabbi, Rav Lewin, who was severely tortured in the Holocaust. We knew that, and we knew not to say anything. He eventually became one of the chief librarians at Hebrew University. The only thing I remember of him from those days is that there was a chapter from the Book of Ruth that he would never [laughs] teach, because it has — sexually risque, right? But beyond that, you couldn't approach him, and people didn't talk about theological issues in those days. There was no vocabulary. In other words, this vocabulary of a public discourse, of religion, spirituality, that's all post- '67 and part of what became the Havurah Movement and so on. But there wasn't the

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vocabulary. Even today, there's very little of a public discourse. It still has more of a political side of identity. But in those days, it didn't exist at all.

JG: After finishing high school, you set out for Brandeis? You went to Brandeis as an undergrad.

BF: As an undergrad I was at Boston University, and then I went to Brandeis.

JG: Boston University first?

BF: Yeah.

JG: Ah, I didn't know that. (00:33:00) How did you land at Boston University?

BF: I landed there because that was the only place I could afford. It was a question of finances.

JG: Were you there for all of your undergraduate career?

BF: Right. Then I went to Brandeis for graduate school.

JG: I see. So you were at B.U. from '61 — what was that?

BF: It was '60-'64.

JG: Sixty to sixty-four. How did you find B.U.?

BF: I was by myself. [laughs] I studied philosophy and philosophy of religion. The afternoons, I worked in Hebrew schools, because I had to pay for my college education. The financial situation in my family was very poor, so I had to pay for my college education. That was really a determinant. That was also a fundamental determinant feature of who I was, and then the Hebrew College would be from five or six to nine every night. So I didn't get home until ten.

JG: You were still studying at Hebrew College?

BF: Yeah, we had two loads. So, we had a full load of B.A., and then a full load from five to nine every night, and then from nine to two on Sundays. Then in the middle of the day, for two or three hours, I taught in local Hebrew schools. So that also increased both the loneliness and the privacy of it. I had to support myself. I actually supported myself from

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the very beginning — that issue of having to provide for myself physically, my food as well as my college education, but also for myself spiritually. That inwardness was who I was from the beginning. When I first went to Brandeis as a graduate student and I got these huge fellowships, it was like a different universe for me. For the first time, I was able to have a different identity.

JG: So, you went to Israel —

BF: So Israel, I went in '62-'63, when I was still in college.

JG: This was your junior year.

BF: That was my junior year. When I was there, that was — so that was the first concrete encounter with cultural Zionism, and physical Zionism, political Zionism. It was a very, very austere country. (00:36:00) It was a country that was absolutely dominated by the Holocaust. This was right after the Eichmann Trial. That was '62, and every day the broadcast would go on of searching for people, if they knew names. That's how the day began.

JG: Names of —?

BF: Names of who could find whom. They would announce various names: "People are looking for so-and-so." That's how the day began.

JG: Did you mean family members?

BF: Family members — people who were looking for other people, people who were looking for other people. That was the opening announcement on Kol Israel was to announce the names. There were huge lists in the newspaper. There were big central places in Jerusalem where you could go and look for names, because people were trying to — families were trying to reconnect. It was very common in '62 when I was there that people would have nervous breakdowns in the street and start running and screaming. I remember seeing it happen a number of times that people would start screaming about the Holocaust or yelling things from the war. People would have frequent nervous breakdowns in the middle of the street. That was very, very common. So that was part of the mood of Israel in '62 realistically, but it became more public after the Eichmann Trial.

JG: When did the trial take place?

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BF: It was in '62. But, in other words, this sort of brought all this to the surface. It was a very traumatic year in terms of that. Everybody that you would turn out to would be some sort of survivor, and the Sephardim were invisible, more or less by design or their own whatever. But the Ashkenazi community was a traumatized community. I can remember the first time I was invited to Sde Eliyahu, which is a religious kibbutz, and conversations would go something like this. They would take out an album, and they would — this was a very typical conversation. They would show — they would take out an album of family members. They'd say, “Tistakel, Michael,” Take a look, Michael. They would say, "Atah ro-eh zeh, zeh, zeh, v’ zeh?" They'd go through, and "chus l'kulam," they were all extinguished. And they turned the page, "chus l'kulam," and then the second sentence that would follow was, "Az lama lo tavoh itanu?” Why don’t you come here? That was the Zionist argument. We've all been murdered, and now you join us and come. That argument I heard numerous times, that (00:39:00) if that makes an impression upon you, you have to give your life and share your life.

JG: And did that tug on your heart and your soul?

BF: It did. It did. The only reason I know that I came back was become of the family poverty and my own felt understanding of what my parents needed from me. I would have stayed. When I went there that year, all the people in the dormitory, in the Chaim Greenberg Institute, were from Buenos Aires in Argentina, and they were running away from the persecution of the Dominicans. So their conversation was also anti-Semitism. So that whole ambiance were people who were making aliyah. I could have made aliyah in a flash. It was my own perception that I was needed back in America.

JG: For personal reasons.

BF: For personal reasons. Whether how I processed that — but that is really the only reason I came back.

JG: How common was it for young undergraduate American students to spend a year studying in Israel?

BF: It wasn't common.

JG: What had drawn you there?

BF: There was a program at the Hebrew College. Four or five people were given fellowships and put up at the Chaim Greenberg Institute. Partially the subvention was through the American Zionist Organization. Other than that, it may not have happened.

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But there were very few people who went. People didn't get on planes and go to Israel. There was no such thing called a "gap year." People didn't even really go to yeshivot. So that wasn't a phenomenon, even in 1962. Everything changed after '67, but '62, very few people went. Very few streets were paved. Jerusalem was like a tiny village. They still had the Mandelbaum Gate. Actually there were two or three of my friends, who wandered off at night into no-man's-land and they never came back. It was a dangerous area. What now we call Derech Hevron, Hebron Street, was already at the borderline. At night time, you couldn't see. They didn't have streetlights, and you could wander off. We had several of our friends who never came back. But the city itself was like a tiny little village. You could walk across Jerusalem in fifteen minutes, from the end of Baka where we lived, which was in the southern section, to the Mandelbaum Gate in no time. So it was a totally different (00:42:00) world.

JG: What was the world you encountered there intellectually, through your classes?

BF: That was a transformative year at the Hebrew University. The same way I had never seen Jewish intellectuals who were also traditional at the Hebrew College, I'd never seen true European intellectuals. So I took an introduction to Zohar with Gershom Scholem, and I studied Jewish philosophy with Shlomo Pines. These were all the great people. All my teachers were extraordinary scholars in the European or Prussian university mode. The Hebrew University was — the joke was, in those days, it was the last Prussian university.

JG: What does that mean?

BF: It was extremely austere. The separation between Wissenschaft, or academic study, and religious study, was an absolute split. The notion that study and identity were directly related was not even a phenomenon. Then there were these phenomena that I saw. I'll tell you two episodes that I had with Ernst Simon, who was a disciple of Buber and close with Gershom Scholem — the things that I would never have seen as an American. One was, there was a person giving a course on the French Enlightenment and the German Enlightenment, and in the middle of the course, they were playing the music of Buxtehude, and all of this kind of material. All of a sudden, the person who was giving the course, who was a secular Israeli — he wrote the Divine Name on the board. Simon came in, and they didn't know what to do. They didn't know whether they should take the blackboard — they couldn't break the blackboard — and they didn't know if they should take the blackboard and hide it in the machsan and kind of not use it again. But I saw things that, as an American — here you had a person talk about Jewish history, and then he would do something that only a secular Israeli who knew nothing about the tradition [laughs] would do, and then you had a traditional Jew come in, and he was flabbergasted

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because he'd never seen that kind of a halachic problem. There was an episode I had with Simon that was very transformative to me personally, because Simon was very close to Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig, and I actually have in my library now his copy of The Star of Redemption in German, when he studied it with Rosenzweig, (00:45:00) with his notes in the margin of both Jewish and German literary references. So you can actually see what their mental world was. But the episode that I wanted to describe was again this kind of juxtaposition between tradition and intellectual studies. So it was one Saturday afternoon, and I was at Simon's home, and we were having this very intense discussion about liberalism and intellectualism and the spiritual quest, all in the spirit of Rosenzweig. That was one side of who he was. Then, on the other side, he looked at his watch and it was time for the afternoon Mincha prayer, and he jumped up and it was like he entered into a different time-culture zone, and he was a totally transformed person for the next ten minutes. I saw something of this juxtaposition of worlds that was integrated in one person. It wasn't as if they bled into each other. They were just two simultaneous, coherent mental universes. You can read about Rosenzweig, but if you saw a Rosenzweig disciple, not the way — it's sort of watered down in America now. But if you saw what that German model of discipleship was, that to be an intellectual in the world with all of that, that was full, but the Jewish identity, it wasn't as if you were constantly re- translating a Jewish identity in terms of the Jewish. That had its own intensity, had its own logic, but it was part of the same personality. I had teachers in those days there that were quite extraordinary, and then at the Greenberg Institute — because of the nature of education in the Hebrew University, a lot of important people didn't teach there — so my Hebrew teachers in 1962 for Hebrew were Yehuda Amichai, Aaron Applefeld, and a number of other people who didn't have academic positions, and they were teaching me literature and Hebrew poetry. So you can understand for an American boy who had never seen any of this cultural range, I was transformed. The books I read, reading scholarship in Hebrew, speaking this kind of Hebrew. They used to laugh at me. They said I spoke "lashon Shabbat." It wasn't kind of street Hebrew. It was this kind of special Hebrew that (00:48:00) in Europe you would speak in Shabbos lashon, a very special thing, right? So it was a totally transformative year in many respects.

JG: So you came back, finished at B.U.

BF: Yeah, then I went to Brandeis.

JG: Was that a self-evident next step for you?

BF: No, it wasn't self-evident at all. Again, in part it was financial. [laughs] It was bizarre. I couldn't decide exactly what I wanted to do. I had multiple interests. Part of my interests were Near Eastern Studies.

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JG: Had you abandoned the idea of the rabbinate?

BF: Oh, yeah. I had abandoned that. It just didn't have spiritual coherence for me. As I mentioned, I studied philosophy and the philosophy of religion, and I studied lots of Buddhism and Vedanta, in terms of comparative religion.

JG: As an undergrad.

BF: Yeah, and I was very much — that kind of opened up the range of religious questions and the way I understood my observance, or some of my observance lapsed in various ways at that period of time. But I couldn't quite decide what I was going to do for graduate school. The other two options — my Jewish studies at Brandeis, which was in the beginning a default position, became the most important thing in my life. In the beginning, I was going to study Assyriology. I was accepted at Harvard to study Assyriology, but I didn't get enough money to live on. Then I was accepted to study comparative religion with Eliade at the University of Chicago, which I eventually came to teach at. What he liked about it is that I was going to write a Golden Bough of the Ancient Near East. That was going to be my doctoral dissertation, but again, I didn't have enough money to live on. Brandies gave me what in those days was called an NDA, Title 4, which gave me both deferment during the Vietnam War, but also gave me two or three thousand dollars a year. When I started, I really started doing philosophy and comparative and Near Eastern languages. It was only in the encounters with the teachers that I had that I saw that the interest in the ancient Near East and ancient Near Eastern languages was primary, but I didn't quite realize at that point that that would be the first stage of a much larger way to come back to the Jewish sources in a new way. At that point, it was trying to find (00:51:00) a foundation before the Biblical and Jewish sources. The quest was trying to find a foundation, and the foundation was to go behind that material. Within a couple of years, I began to see that as the seeding ground of how I wanted to develop later in Biblical Studies and Jewish Studies and so on. But part of that inner transformation that we were talking about, to Eastern religion and other comparative religion, was because I became very dissatisfied with the explanatory or the understanding of mitzvot or theology. I was tired of constantly translating religious language into metaphors that were not as real as they should be to be an observant person. I was trying to find other symbolic worlds, other forms of symbolic language. So the interest in comparative religion was to find another spiritual language that was not a part of the world that I was kind of separating off from as I was exploring. The Near- Eastern material was to find a foundation language of the grounding of Western or Jewish culture and civilization, but that it had not yet been — it was prior to that transformation. It was much later that these syntheses and this growth became — but that was part of the

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realization that my Jewish language, for a couple of years, wasn't doing the right kind of spiritual work for me. I remained a religious person, but the question was to find —

JG: When you say a religious person, what do you mean by that? I assume observant —

BF: Well, for me in those days and maybe still now, observance is a physical expression and actualization of the interior life. It's not that it starts from the outside and goes inward, but both generationally and also who I am, the inner formation had to come first, or the action can't come secondly, or that language could become dead or became formal or became hollow. I remember seeing a number of times where the metaphors were not living metaphors. I was just trying to make them meaningful. (00:54:00)

JG: Can you give an example when you say they were not living metaphors?

BF: Well, if you're trying to find a language about God, or you're trying to find an understanding about evil, or you're trying to find an understanding about why am I observing X and Y, so there's a whole phenomenon religiously, ta'ameh hamitzvot, explaining the commands, justifying language. It's a kind of personal apologia, or cultural apologia. You keep searching around to try to find something to shore up the observance of that language, but you only have ten fingers, so sometimes there are more holes in the dyke, right? So then you want to find a language that's different, fresh, and compelling. I had to leave that because Jewish language, Jewish imagery, is who I am, but I still found the space within other religious vocabularies that allowed me to re-think it in a way that wasn't — it allowed a free ritual space for the mind. So that is what religiosity meant and still means to me. It doesn't mean that the commandments are not what one is addressed by, but then and still now, the interior becomes the exterior. They become ways of actualizing an inner state of the spirit of mind. Things of that nature.

JG: Were you involved in Jewish life at Brandeis — Hillel for instance? Al Axelrad had just come, I think, pretty much by the time you'd just —

BF: Right. Not really, not really. Axelrad sat in on some of the courses on Uggeridic and Bible and things like that, and I knew him from that. I saw him as — Brandeis was the storm center for the anti-war movement. Al expressed very liberal, Reform Jewish political ethical values, and gave a voice to that for many students at Brandeis. I would say that at that period, my Jewish identity was mostly absorbed in my studies. I was trying to reconnect and find a new language, and that political side was (00:57:00) just quite modern, and the Jewish —

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JG: Was what?

BF: It was moderate, and the Jewish side, too — I didn't find the Jews that interesting. When we come to talk about the havurah, those became interesting people, because they didn't deny the range of experiences, and they were trying to do a different level of integration. In those days, people were one-dimensional people in many cases, and my whole life was not to be one-dimensional.

JG: As you were just mentioning, these were years of, I guess, turmoil in society, certainly among American youth, and certainly at Brandeis. Were you involved with or influenced in any way by what was going on in the larger society — the anti-Vietnam activities, especially in light of your father's experiences?

BF: Well, the Vietnam War was a great horror, and being in the university, in a place like Brandeis, which was a liberal environment, it wasn't just that it was unjust as a political phenomenon. Napalm was in the newspaper every day, or on the video with Cronkite. So, what the war — the way the war expressed itself, was a horror. The closest link — I think this is still before the havurah — but the closest link between those experiences and my father's experience was in 1967, when they closed the Straits of Suez before the Six Day War. I had decided that I wanted to go to Israel to fight. There were a number of volunteers who were talking that way, and the Holocaust was in everybody's minds, because the language of the closing of the gates of Suez in those days was we can’t allow — the language of "Never Again" was not just a phrase. It was a reality for the American Jewish community at that time. That's really what the closing of the Gates of Suez meant. So, the war all of the sudden became — the looming shadow of the Holocaust was there. So, the episode that I would describe at this moment was (01:00:00) we were supposed to meet at the Israeli Consulate, which was in Kenmore Square at that time, with our passports, and we were going to be on the next transport out for all of the Americans who wanted to fight, or to serve. In those days, you actually could have fought. It wasn't simply that you were on the supply chain, but you could actually fight. There was word going out that they did want people to go out and fight. But, because of family issues, I went to my father to ask permission if I could go. Now you have to understand, my father was this P.T.S.D. Normandy survivor who didn't talk about those issues, and as I would make this case, he and my mother were silent. Then, finally, I said, "We can't allow another Holocaust." That was my big piece de resistance argument. Then for the first time, my father broke out in a scream and tears, and he said, "One person who's been wounded in the family is enough." And I just stood there, dumbfounded, and then he said, "But you can go."

JG: To fight?

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BF: Yeah. So, I went to the consulate, and just as we were about to be taken by bus to the airport in Boston, they closed the runway in Israel. They didn't allow any more planes to come in. So, in a sense, I didn't go, and I was on the last possible transport. So, that was one aspect of this mentality, but right after that I had another experience where these were not verbal experiences. And I'm not a prejudiced person, but I had another — that summer, I went to Princeton to study Arabic.

JG: The summer of '67.

BF: Yeah. I was studying Arabic at Princeton, and the teachers were from Jordan, etcetera. I had an experience right after that. The teachers liked me. I had a teacher called Musseh — Moshe, right? — Musseh. And he said to me in a language which, like, again, these things are tattooed into you, he said to me in his (01:03:00) Jordanian accent in English, "I like you, Michael. I like you very much. But if I ever saw you in Jerusalem, I would stab you." And he meant both; he meant both. You have to understand that the range of what it meant to have Jewish identity in those days, between the Holocaust, Israel, being an American, being an Israeli. At that point, religious language was suspended. The notion of what it meant to fight for Israel, or who the neighbors were, for me became very real in this bizarre — in that little episode. But these become formative moments that become ritual memories, right?

JG: One last thing I want to touch on, before we let Mona have a turn here, and that is Mona. So, to switch gears entirely, you met Mona, I believe, during these years at Brandeis, as well.

BF: I met Mona in the late sixties. We had one encounter which got deferred for a period of time. Actually, I met her through her sister, who had been in Israel with me in '62, and then she came to Brandeis. Then, on the second meeting with Mona at Brandeis, we fell in love, and developed our love and our lifelong conversation.

JG: What year was that?

BF: Sixty-seven.

JG: Sixty-seven.

BF: Right, and then of course Mona had known Al Axelrad from Wellesley, and his interest in the havurah, which I'll be able to share at a later point. But, that became — I would end this part by saying that that formation of companionship was probably the first

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time that I began to develop a more public language, and not simply being a private, isolated person. So, I'll go on record to say that Mona had given me a public language. [laughs]

TRANSITION TO MONA

JG: So, Mona. Let's turn to you and begin by talking about your family and background and bring you also to the point where (01:06:00) you got involved with Havurat Shalom. So, you were born in 1947 —

MF: Right.

JG: — in Chicago.

MF: Right.

JG: Tell us about your family when you were growing up.

MF: So, I'm technically the baby of the family. My twin brother was seven minutes older than me, and my sister is four and a half years older than us. My parents were Herman and Janet Dekoven. My father was a labor lawyer, an attorney in Chicago, and my mother was a social worker and then stopped working to be a stay at home mom, and then later became a teacher, a special-ed teacher. Then my parents, when they got married, they went to Washington DC. They were part of the FDR Administration, part of the New Deal. They were very gung-ho and socially conscious people. My father worked for the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, DC, and then they came back to Chicago where there was family. My sister was born in Washington. Then they came back to Chicago where there was family, and my father worked for the National Labor Relations Board in the Chicago Office for a while, and then he started in private practice. He represented management in labor-management disputes, but I think my father taught me how to be a couples therapist, because under his aegis, when he was negotiating and he was representing management, there was never a strike by labor, because he always helped management understand that it was in their interest to keep their workers happy. So, there was a strong — we were a middle class, upper middle-class family, but there was a strong commitment to social justice from the get-go, including in his work.

JG: Where did you actually live?

MF: I was born in Chicago, and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment for the first three years of my life. It was complicated, right? So, they put my sister to sleep in their bed.

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My brother and I went to sleep in the cribs in their room, and then when it was time for them to go to bed, my parents, they put my sister on a couch in the living room. But we managed. It was not easy. There wasn't much available in those days. It was during the war.

JG: This was in the immediate aftermath of the war.

MF: Right, but it was a tough time, even though my father was a lawyer. So, my parents moved to Highland Park, a very nice suburb north of Chicago, when I was three. We grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, which is actually where we live now. [laughs] That's another story.

JG: So, tell me about the area and what it was like demographically and especially with the Jewish community.

MF: Sure. So, my parents came to Highland Park because of the synagogue that was really sort of brand new, that they helped found. It existed, but when we moved, it was just getting started — North Suburban Synagogue Beth El. They wanted to be — they wanted to leave the city. They wanted the suburban life, and they were also, I think, leaving behind the Orthodox backgrounds they both came from and wanted a more (01:09:00) Conservative life. So, they were very active members of Beth El. Beth El was my home. When we came back to Highland Park, we initially went to Beth El. Now we go to Chabad.

JG: You mean you and Buzzy.

MF: Buzzy and I, in 1990, when we came back, which we'll get to later.

JG: Yeah.

MF: I said kaddish for both of my parents in the sanctuary which my father helped build — you know, the small sanctuary. So, it was very sweet. It was a very special place growing up.

JG: So you moved there in 1950.

MF: Nineteen-fifty.

JG: What was the area like?

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MF: The area was an affluent suburb. There were a lot of Jews — not as many as there are now, for sure, but certainly the synagogue drew a lot of Jews. It was a suburb that was friendly to Jews, as opposed to a some other places where Jews weren't allowed to move at all, up to a certain point.

JG: So, there were restrictive covenants elsewhere?

MF: Yes. There were places like Kenilworth that you did not move to if you were Jewish. You weren't allowed to, actually. And there were country clubs that were "No Dogs, No Jews." That didn't affect me directly. I didn't sense any anti-Semitism, but I came to understand that that was how the world was.

JG: How would you describe the Jewish environment in your home?

MF: The Jewish environment in my home was pervasive. It was joyful, traditional Conservative. We observed Shabbat and we observed Kashrut. Every Friday night, my mother made just the most amazing food, you know? I would come home from school and have just a little piece of fried chicken or whatever chicken she was making. It was a joyful time. My father loved to sing. He was a bit of a cantor as well as a lawyer, and we sang around our table all the time. My parents entertained a lot. My mother loved to cook, and she had that timing right, which I sort of learned from her. So our house was full of people. The holidays were very important. The synagogue was really our main home, and it was also my main center, socially and intellectually.

JG: When you say you kept kosher, that was in the house, out of the house?

MF: Both.

JG: You kept kosher. How did you observe Shabbat?

MF: Well, we went to synagogue, basically. As I got older, not only did I go to services, but in the afternoon I went to the rabbi's house in high school, and I studied Talmud with the rabbi and a bunch of high school boys. [laughs] I was the only girl, and it was wonderful. It was a lovely experience.

JG: Were there aspects of Jewish culture that were particularly important to your family?

MF: I think it was mostly the traditional holidays and Shabbat that were particularly important to us.

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JG: Was there Jewish literature in your home?

MF: Yes.

JG: Newspapers?

MF: Newspapers I don't know.

JG: Music?

MF: Music for sure. My father loved chazzanut. I mean, there was a lot of chazanut in our home, and he would sing Pinchick and Koussevitzky. Then I went to Camp Ramah, and that was really important for me.

JG: Yes, so let's talk about your education.

MF: Sure.

JG: So, did you go to public schools?

MF: I went to public schools. There was no day school in those days. I went to public school in Highland Park, and I had a great education (01:12:00) there. Then I went to synagogue. I think it was, we went twice a week for afternoon school, and Sundays, in addition to whatever I did on Saturday. I did that all the way through Hebrew high school and one year of Hebrew college, all at Beth El.

JG: Was that connected with Spertus as you got older?

MF: Only after I left. Spertus came in — the Spertus-Beth El connection happened later. Well, no, that's not true actually. It was through Spertus, but they had a connection where it could be taught at Beth El. I actually skipped the last year of Hebrew high school. I didn't want to bother with the exams, I just wanted to learn. So, I skipped ahead with some of my buddies and I did the Hebrew college year.

JG: Can you describe, sort of give us a sense of what Jewish education was like, or what was it like for you as a girl in these years?

MF: You know, first of all I want to say I was raised in a feminist household. I didn't have to undo a lot of the stuff that women of my generation had to undo, or unlearn. My parents would sit at the Friday night table often, and my mother would quote Ashley

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Montagu on the superiority of women, and my father would clap in the background, you know, say, "Yes!" My parents’ message to my sister and me was, get your PhD before you have your first child. So the assumption was, whatever our dream was, we would achieve it professionally, and then we would have children. It was never a question.

JG: And that you should have a dream.

MF: And we should dream, yes. Both my parents believed I could do anything. They were very, very supportive academically, in any way. My mother thought I could be an opera singer, which was clearly not true. [laughs] Or a ballet dancer, which also wasn't true. But they gave me confidence, tremendous confidence, and my sister too. It was a very intellectual home. My mother was a real intellectual, even though she had sort of no place to put it except our conversations around the table.

JG: Yeah.

MF: My mother, by the way, also led bible study groups in our suburb, and in the synagogue, quite a bit.

JG: For the synagogue. What kind of Jewish education had she had?

MF: My mother's story is interesting. She was raised in Poland, in a very hasidic, frum home. Her grandfather was the best friend of the Gerrer Rebbe. I should say, he was the best friend of the son of the Sfas Emes, the Gerrer Rebbe. So, it's very, very likely that my great-grandfather learned at the Sfas Emes's table, which is quite something in our circles. [laughs] This man, this grandfather of hers, Isaac Mendel, was extremely important to her. Her parents were — it's a complicated story, and I won't go into the long, complex story, but basically, her parents were coming back and forth to America to try to make a start, and they left my mother and — it was actually a second marriage. It was complicated. But they left my mother with her grandparents, and her sister with the other grandparents, of the second husband. I could tell you the short story about it if you want. It's actually an interesting Jewish story.

JG: Sure.

MF: Basically, my mother's mother Sarah was (01:15:00) betrothed as a baby to Rubie, a baby boy, by their fathers when they were born. Then the kids met when they were thirteen, and they liked each other, and at eighteen they loved each other, and they were ready to get married, but at that point Rubie had become non-religious. He was a revolutionary. This was in Poland, in shtetls in Poland. So her father called the match off

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and married my grandmother off to a man she didn't love, a very, very religious man, who was cold, according to her. My mother was the fruit of that marriage. Very soon into that marriage — my grandmother was either pregnant with my mother or had just given birth — she divorced this man she was forced to marry, which was very gutsy of her in that context. [laughs] And she married Rubie, the man she loved. So I only found out this story when I was twenty years old, just because some relatives were going to show up on our doorstep, and my mother had to explain who they were. Basically, I knew Grandma Sarah and Grandpa Rubie as my grandparents, and I had no clue about this. It was a big secret in my family. But my mother — so Rubie and Sarah were off trying to make a start in America, and my mother was raised in her grandfather's home. It was a very joyful childhood for her. She was much loved, and she had no anti-Semitic stories at all. She didn't experience anti-Semitism. It was sort of amazing. She came with her sister. Her parents came back from America and brought the girls to America, and she said goodbye to her grandfather and the other people who raised her. I'm named after Manya, which was my grandmother's sister who actually raised — who did the physical care of my mother, in the grandfather's home. Manya later died in Auschwitz, as did my mother's biological father. But my mother never saw these people again. At twelve years old she left for America. This was 1926. I'm very grateful that they did take her. They started in Chicago and they started all over again.

JG: My goodness that's quite a story.

MF: Yeah. So, her home was very religious, but like my father, she was eager to incorporate modern ideas into her Jewish practice and integrate a more modern lifestyle.

JG: So what did that mean in terms of your family — integrating modern ideas?

MF: The sky was the limit. We could go to college wherever we wanted to. My sister went to Wellesley College. I went to Wellesley College. It wasn't exactly a haven of Jewish life, or Jewish whatever, although I became president of Hillel there, which is how I got connected to Al Axelrad down the road, and how we ultimately got involved with Havurat Shalom, actually. So, the world was — I wouldn't say our oyster, but the world was certainly available to us. There was never a conflict, just like there was never a conflict between being a woman and accomplishing. There was never a conflict between being Jewish and being intellectual or being accomplished in the secular world. It was seamless. I was very blessed that way, really. I was well-loved, and also had this — it wasn't a rich lifestyle, I mean, you know, struggling financially in the beginning, but it was rich in terms of possibilities.

JG: So, what were you interested in (01:18:00) as a teenager in high school?

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MF: I just loved learning. I loved math. I loved French. I hated science, which I'll get to later, because I am now very passionate about neuroscience [laughs], but I just — I loved social sciences. I just loved learning. Literature, I loved French. I took four years of Latin and three years of Greek. No, three years of French and one year of Greek. I mean, it was just — I was hungry to learn. It was very exciting. I went to a very good high school, and really had good learning experiences, and then I had this whole thing going on in Hebrew high school as well.

JG: What was the thing that was going on in Hebrew high school?

MF: We were learning. It was very intense. It wasn't quite as intense as Buzzy's, but that was a different story. It was very serious. I also was chosen to compete in the Chidon Hatanach, the National Bible Contest — International Bible Context — and I actually came in second in Chicago and second in the Midwest, and then I went to New York. The first time I ever flew was when I went with my father to the competition in New York. That's when I came in second-to-last. [laughs]

JG: How old were you?

MF: [laughs] Sixteen out of seventeen kids. I think I was sixteen years old, and I studied really hard for that. It was intense, but it was fun. I loved it.

JG: It was fun.

MF: Yeah.

JG: Were you involved in youth groups?

MF: You know, I was. This is part of the Camp Ramah offshoot. I went to Camp Ramah as a kid, from, I think, '61 to '63.

JG: Sixty-one to sixty-three. So, you were —

MF: Something like that. Or, '60 to '62, in those ranges. I was about twelve to fourteen or something like that, and I loved Camp Ramah.

JG: Was that —

MF: In Wisconsin.

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JG: Lots of kids went, or —?

MF: Yeah. A lot of kids from our synagogue went, and it was wonderful. I loved it. It was a great experience. I made lots of friends. Then, in the winter, it was a little snobby, but instead of going to USY we had LTF. LTF was Leaders Training Fellowship. That was for the elite. Now when I grew up, being elite wasn't a dirty word. [laughs] In our culture right now, it sort of is. But no, we were like — I don't know if it's the smart kids, or the kids who were really devoted to study, serious study, and weren't just doing the social thing. It was very social, that was where my friends were, but we learned. We had these meetings periodically in the city, and I would meet up with my friends from the city. It was a very positive experience.

JG: When you say you had LTF, is that in your synagogue?

MF: It was in the synagogue, and then we would go to Chicago for periodic meetings as well.

JG: The synagogue has become — it's a major synagogue, a very big synagogue.

MF: Yes, and it was —

JG: Was it on it's way to that?

MF: It was pretty significant then. I don't know how many families versus now, but unlike now, I'd say more people were observant. It was a closer-knit community. I mean, there are plenty of observant people now. We were probably on the more observant side. I mean, I'm sure there were many people who (01:21:00) didn't keep kosher or Shabbat, but it was a very vibrant place. I just had a cohort that was very significant for me.

JG: Tell us some more about Camp Ramah, which was very significant for a number of people who ended up being involved in the early havurot. So, you went as a young teenager ––

MF: As a kid, yeah.

JG: What do you remember about your early experiences of Ramah?

MF: Well, I remember Shabbat by the lake. I mean, it was so —it was schmaltzy, and it was full of soul. There were people coming from New York, from the seminary, to teach

26 Mona and Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane, 5/12/17 + 10/18/17

us. We also had a lot of fun. The classes were very, very important. I remember studying — I can't remember who my teacher was, but I remember studying. I learned “Hashofet kol ha-aretz lo yaaseh mishpat,” and it wasn't, “Hashofet kol Haaretz lo yaaseh mishpat?” The Ruler of the Universe won't do justice? This is Abraham, right? But it was, no, the Ruler of the Universe will not do justice! In other words, arguing with God, being lenient and compassionate. I just thought that was mind blowing. It was so out of the box of piety. It was really this kind of dialogue we had. It was that kind of learning. We had great classes. It was much more — Camp Ramah's not like that now. We had to speak Hebrew. We couldn't eat without speaking Hebrew. So, it was an immersion.

JG: Could you go to Ramah without having strong Hebrew to start with?

MF: I guess you technically maybe could, but you'd be kind of behind. I don't know how they did that. Everyone had to speak Hebrew, so probably not too much of that.

JG: Did you actually speak to your friends in Hebrew?

MF: At camp? Yeah. Well, I don't know. In the bunk, in the privacy of our bunk. But, if you wanted to eat anything, you had to talk in Hebrew. In all activities you talked in Hebrew, and in swimming you talked in Hebrew. I mean, yeah, it was pretty intense.

JG: So, your Hebrew was —

MF: Oh, and also there was Tisha B'av. I mean, Tisha B'av was like a big fire, and very dramatic, and we're sitting, you know —

JG: What do you mean it was a big fire? Describe what happened.

MF: It was just, they had something on the lake that they burned, something symbolic, I don't know. It was very ritualistic, because there were no other holidays during the summer, right? So, that was the Jewish holiday. And it really — we sat on the floor. It was very intense, the whole thing.

JG: What was Shabbos like at Ramah?

MF: It was lovely. We wore white. We were clean. We went to services. I don't think in those days girls could get an aliyah or read Torah.

JG: When are we talking about?

27 Mona and Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane, 5/12/17 + 10/18/17

MF: Sixty to sixty-three-ish. Something like that.

JG: So, early sixties.

MF: Yeah. So, I don't think — well, can I go back to my bat mitzvah, actually? [laughs]

JG: Please.

MF: Rabbi Lipis was our rabbi. We were very close with him. I have a twin brother, and we were going to have our bar and bat mitzvah, and normally in those days the girls had their bat mitzvah on Friday night, and they read haftarah Friday night. I mean, they were futzing around with the tradition, (01:24:00) trying to make something work, right? But they hadn't clearly gone the full way yet. My parents wanted my brother and me to have our bar and bat mitzvah together on Saturday morning, so I was the first bat mitzvah on Saturday morning at Beth El. The rabbi was very happy to do it. I didn't get to read Torah, but I did read haftarah, on Saturday morning when it's supposed to be read. My father taught us trope, both haftorah and Torah trope. So, I learned Torah trope, even though I didn't read it. It was a very powerful experience, a very beautiful experience, for my brother and I to share.

JG: What did it mean to you?

MF: It really meant — I don't know that I thought so much about the obligation of the commandments so much, which I did anyway, but it was more — and there wasn't any issue of putting on a tallis and tefillin back then. But it was more like, learning the skills was really important. It was a real right of passage. It was much more important than the party. The party was, like, not a big deal. My parents put on a party, and I didn't care about that. But it was a big deal to learn, and later on I tutored kids for their bar and bat mitzvah. Even before I was allowed to read Torah myself, I was tutoring kids for their bar mitzvahs, for the Torah trope.

JG: Why did you learn the Torah trope at that point since you weren't going to be allowed to read?

MF: I was just there, I don't know, and I wanted to learn. I was curious and —

JG: Did you have any feelings about not being able to read the Torah?

MF: I don't think it even — I don't remember if I did or didn't. You know, I was living in la-la land on some level. [laughs] Maybe I did. I don't remember feeling grousy about it

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or unhappy about it. I did what I did, but I learned it anyway. Later on I had feelings about it, but I don't think at the time I thought about that.

JG: At Ramah — which you were going to Ramah right at this period, right?

MF: Uh huh.

JG: Were girls — what were girls’ public roles in —?

MF: You know, I don't remember, but I'm sure we didn't lead services, and I'm sure we didn't read Torah. I don't think so. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

JG: You probably would remember, because —

MF: Yeah, because we were going according to the Halachah of the Conservative Movement, and if I was bat mitzvah, I don't think we did. I'm pretty sure we didn't. I know I did something, but I don't remember what. Probably maybe read haftarah or something.

JG: Yeah, okay. I know that you went on to other aspects of Ramah, and I want to get to that in a second, but I'm curious whether Ramah, these early years as a camper at Ramah, had an impact on your sense of yourself Jewishly that in any way sort of differed from or amplified your experience in your (01:27:00) home congregation and your home life, which was very full and rich also.

MF: I would say it amplified it. For starters, when my sister came back from Ramah, she helped us become a little more observant in our family.

JG: In what ways?

MF: I think, I'm not sure exactly what, but I think her level of Kashrut maybe got stronger, but I know that my sister coming back from Ramah had an impact. Ramah was such an immersive experience, but it was very much in keeping because I was at a strong synagogue and had such a strong identity. It was very much in keeping with our home life. I don't think it was in conflict. I think it just augmented it — being surrounded, being there all the time. The learning, certainly. I missed camp when I would come home. Oh my goodness, I would go into withdrawal, you know? [laughs]

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JG: So many people talk about the barrenness of mainstream American Judaism, and of synagogue life. And your family was actually involved in sort of building one of these large synagogues.

MF: Right.

JG: Many people talk about Ramah as a totally stark contrast.

MF: Like an antidote or something.

JG: Like an antidote to that. What was your experience?

MF: I don't feel that way because I feel like our synagogue life and our home life and Ramah were all interwoven. It was a very rich life. It was a very meaningful life. So, I didn't feel alienated. I mean, when I go to a Conservative synagogue now, I can certainly feel that sense of — I think it's changed. I think it's more diluted, at least from when I was a kid. There are a lot more people who belong, so the numbers are a lot bigger. Actually, now they aren't, but they were. They're bigger, but a lot of people don't bother with observance. So for me it was just all of a piece, actually. Ramah was just more intense.

JG: Then you went on to do other aspects of Ramah — Ramah Seminary in Israel. When was that?

MF: Right. So, Ramah Seminary was very important to me. That was in '64, so I was a junior in high school.

JG: Tell us what Ramah Seminary in Israel was.

MF: Right. It was — we were very proud of the fact that we were not “touristim,” we were “studentim.” [laughs] We told everybody that, and we studied. Again, I don't think Ramah Seminary does this now at all in the same way, but we learned every day for at least three or four hours a day, in addition to the touring. The touring was very much key to our bible studies. We'd go to archeological sites and link it to the texts. So the Ramah Seminar was expansive in the sense — well, first of all, we also went to Paris. We didn't go to Eastern Europe or anything like that, but we did do some other stuff. We were with kids from all over the country. That was very enlightening and enlarging for me in some ways. (01:30:00) But it was wonderful, and I remember, because of the Hebrew I had because of Beth El and at Camp Ramah, I was fluent by the time I got to Israel. I remember having a conversation with my cousin. It was probably just before I was leaving, so I had already had that immersive, however long we were in —

30 Mona and Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane, 5/12/17 + 10/18/17

JG: Leaving where?

MF: Israel for the summer, at that time. Then my Hebrew was much better, and my accent was pretty good. I remember having — my cousin was sort of a philosopher-type person. He was a few years older than me. He was an Israeli living in Tel Aviv. The night before I left, I was staying in his parents’ house, and we were up late talking on the beach, you know, in very soulful conversation about philosophy, in Hebrew, and he was, like, blown away that my Hebrew was as good as it was. I was able to hold my own in that conversation, which was amazing. I went on, later — when I did my internship in psychology, I did it in Israel, in Hebrew. I later came another year and taught a course in Hebrew. So, I mean, it was all from that foundation.

JG: That's remarkable.

MF: Yeah.

JG: How typical is that?

MF: Probably not. [laughs] I think my husband's stories and my stories of Conservative Jewish life are not typical of Conservative Judaism, but at that period, for some segment of the population, it was, and it was very meaningful.

JG: How many people would participate in these Ramah Seminaries?

MF: I'm not that good at numbers. Maybe there were eighty of us? Maybe a hundred? It's somewhere between fifty and a hundred.

JG: In what way was it enlightening?

MF: Just to be with people from Canada and California and New York and we all shared a certain experience, a certain vision. Certainly, going to Israel was enlightening to me. It was like, there's a bigger world than Highland Park, Illinois. [laughs] That was huge!

JG: So, Israel was — and what year were you going there?

MF: Sixty-four.

JG: This was '64. So, Israel was still young.

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MF: Right. Optimistic, before the Six Day War.

JG: Sixteen years old, right?

MF: Right.

JG: What was your family's relationship to Israel as you had been growing up?

MF: It was very strongly Zionistic. My mother used to — she was, I think it was called Poale Zion, and she was head of it or something in Chicago, and they brought in Golda Meir. [laughs] Golda Meyerson, I think her name was back then, from Milwaukee?

JG: Did you go?

MF: I did not, but she certainly did. My parents were very strong Zionists, very much so. My sister later made aliyah. She actually went for her junior year, which is where she met my husband, who ultimately, she brought us together. So, it was all very beshert. [laughs] Then she met an Israeli and married him and stayed in Israel. It was very hard on my mother, despite her Zionism. You know, Zionism is one thing, but losing [mimics quotation marks] your daughter — and it wasn't like in Orthodox circles now, where it's very common that children move to Israel, and their parents often follow them. It's not (01:33:00) a trauma, and also one can fly pretty easily. But back then, you didn't fly. It was a huge expense to go by boat.

JG: By boat?

MF: Yeah. So, it was hard. It was very hard for my mother, for that to happen. But Israel was always part of our world, our life.

JG: Can you just sort of sum up how you think Ramah, including your Ramah in Israel experience, contributed to shaping your Jewish identity?

MF: A part of it was joy. I remember Zalman —he wasn't Shalomi — Zalman Schachter came one year.

JG: To —

MF: To Ramah in Wisconsin and blew me away. We later met and got to know him in the havurah, of course, but he — we were sitting on the grass. We were sort of bourgeoise, maybe boring Conservative kids, and we're sitting on the grass, and he talks

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about the grass grassing. And I was like, [laughs] "Wow! We're tripping here!" You know? I didn't have that language then. It was really amazing. He was probably one of the most spiritual people who came, but people came from the seminary who were very inspiring. I had wonderful teachers. So, it was inspiring spiritually, it was inspiring socially. I learned a lot. I learned a lot of Hebrew, I learned a lot of texts. Then Israel just intensified things.

JG: So, how would you describe yourself as you were getting ready to set out for college, in 1965?

MF: Oh, well. I had a solid foundation. I had no clue what I was going to. I didn't know what I was going to be doing, Jewishly. I went to Wellesley, which is not exactly a hotbed of Jewish anything.

JG: Yeah. And how did you decide on Wellesley?

MF: My sister went there, and I visited her and I loved it. She went there for two years, and then she ended up at the Hebrew University, after her junior year. But, I went there, and I just — the campus is gorgeous, the classes are amazing. It just felt like home.

JG: What did you think you'd be interested in studying?

MF: Psychology is what I wanted. I wanted to be a psychologist, which is what I am, from the time I was in seventh grade. [laughs] My father, I was doing a paper on hypnosis and my father had a doctor friend who did hypnosis, and I got to watch it. And I was like, wow, I want to work with the mind. I didn't know what that meant then, and I wanted to study psychology and then go to psychology graduate school, but at Wellesley psychology was all rats.

JG: All rats?

MF: All rats, and studies. So, I'd study whatever classes were about human beings, and then I left the rats alone, because I was, like, "Ick!” I don't want to do rats." The irony is while I don't do research or anything, I gobble it up in terms of reading it — in terms of the neuroscience stuff now. (01:36:00)

JG: Even then? I mean —

MF: Not then, no. So, I did what I had to do, but I didn't — so, I didn't major in psychology. I majored in philosophy, which fit me just perfectly.

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JG: So, your college years. You started in '65?

MF: Yeah.

JG: Sixty-five. So this was — you know, the counterculture was flourishing.

MF: Right.

JG: And the Civil Rights Movement was in full bloom there, and activism against the Vietnam War was beginning to really roil in mainstream society.

MF: Yes.

JG: Were you caught up in these movements? Did you see yourself as part of the counterculture?

MF: I did, and mostly through the havurah, actually. The havurah gave us a Jewish voice for the counterculture, which I know we'll get to later. We went in '68, and I think Buzzy was with me, and I think the havurah was just starting maybe. We went to a March on Washington, and we were going to lift the Pentagon three inches off the ground — which, of course, we did, you know. We got tear gassed and whatever. I think we stayed at a Hillel or something. I don't remember. So, I think I found my anti-war voice more strongly once I was in the havurah. I was certainly against the war, that wasn't even a question. But I wasn't political in the sense of going out and doing a lot of stuff. I did some marches and whatever, but it wasn't my main focus.

JG: What was Jewish life like at Wellesley?

MF: [laughs] Very thin. I had a roommate across the hall from me. She ultimately went to Israel and became very frum and had many children. But, we were co-presidents of — first I was a member, and Al Axelrad then became the rabbi. His main job was at Brandeis, and then he also had a part time job at Wellesley Hillel. So, every Tuesday at four, he would come and we would meet, and then I would go to Brandeis sometimes for things. But, obviously there wasn't a serious Jewish component. I agreed to become president of Wellesley Hillel because it meant I got to meet with Al for an hour before the meeting started every week, and I thought he was so amazing. He was really a very important person in my life. So, that's kind of how I got into that.

JG: Were there many Jews at Wellesley?

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MF: Not a lot. It was a very WASP-y place.

JG: Did that concern you before you got there? I know you said you had been there, but —

MF: It didn't. I don't know. I just felt, I'm ready for the wide world. I had my Jewish self- solid. Going to a place that was very Jewish, I don't think it ever was discussed. I mean, obviously I was supposed to marry a Jew. That wasn't even a question. But how you got there from there, I don't know. I think my parents were very enamored with Wellesley. It was kind of fancy shmancy, and it truly was a great education. I got a wonderful education there.

JG: You just said that Al was a very important person in your life.

MF: Right. (01:39:00)

JG: Tell us a little bit about Al Axelrad — who had just begun, in that same period —

MF: He was probably in his thirties at the time! I don't know. I thought he was all grown up or something like that. Al was just a lovely soul, a beautiful person. He had a way of integrating Jewish values with political values. He was really great at dialogue. I mean, I was a college freshman or sophomore, and I was like most of us then, lost and confused and studying existential philosophy, and what's the point of it all, right? And Al was a kind of an anchor. He was very, very solid for me, a real good dialogue partner in many ways. I don't know that he opened me up Jewishly necessarily, because I already had that, but I just felt really grounded with him.

JG: Another thing that I would say that sort of typifies Al was the way he attempted to sort of integrate Jewish life in his political activism.

MF: Right.

JG: They were an expression of his Jewishness.

MF: Right.

JG: Did that resonate for you? Did it have an influence on you?

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MF: Yes, it did. I think Wellesley was not the place for huge political activism in those days. Now it's become very politically active — and certainly as the Vietnam War went on. It was a little bifurcated, that I had this kind of Jewish piece and that I had my scholarship. I mean, I was a very serious student. I spent a lot of time studying. So I don't know, I balanced both. I think my Jewish life was more quiet back then. There was a period between leaving home and havurah. It was a little bit of a limbo, Jewishly, for me, and Al really helped me find a solid place again, even though I wasn't in a Jewish community per se.

JG: Did you feel drawn to what was going on Jewishly at Brandeis?

MF: I did. I went there some, and I went occasionally to Harvard Hillel. If we wanted to date, you know, if we were heterosexual, we had to go off campus basically. [laughs] So, I certainly did some of that, and some of that was Jewish things.

JG: Yeah. Did you also encounter Ben Zion Gold, Rabbi Gold?

MF: I knew him, I met him, but he wasn't a major person for me. I know he was for my sister.

JG: So, the Six Day War happened during your undergraduate years, the end of your sophomore year.

MF: Right.

JG: What was its impact on you?

MF: Terrifying. It was — the whole thing was just sort of surreal. Being at Wellesley, I didn't exactly have a context, or cohort of people, to process it with so much, though we did with what we could. (01:42:00) It was frightening. My sister — she wasn't there. I think at that point she might have been studying in the States. Right, she was at Brandeis, and her husband was studying at Harvard. I think they were not there. I can't remember for sure, but it was scary. It was very frightening, and it felt existential. And then there was the joy, also. [laughs]

JG: Exactly. So, you met Buzzy also, during these years.

MF: Yeah, right.

JG: Tell us about that.

36 Mona and Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane, 5/12/17 + 10/18/17

MF: So, my sister was trying to find me a nice Jewish boy, and she fixed me up with Buzzy. I think this actually was in '67. I think it was the winter of '67. We had a blind date. He came to Wellesley, and in those days at Wellesley, you were called down to the lobby by the bell person, the person who was on bell duty —

JG: Of the dorm.

MF: Of the dorm, and your whole floor would hear it. You know, "Mona Dekoven, you have a — ", and if it was a woman or a relative it was a “visitor,” and if it was an eligible male it was a “caller.” So, "Mona Fishbane — Mona Dekoven, you have a caller at the front desk." [laughs] So, of course I was all dressed and ready to go, and I met him. I'd never seen him before. It was a completely blind date.

JG: How did they know each other?

MF: They knew each other from Israel, from '62. They were both out there. She was there for her junior year, and he was there for his junior year. Then they knew each other at Brandeis, because they were both graduate students at Brandeis at the same time. So, we went out. We went to Cambridge, and we saw Dr. Zhivago, the movie. It was a snowy Dr. Zhivago, right, and then we came out from the movie, and it's a snowy Boston. It was like a blizzard, actually. This was maybe a Thursday night, and I had hours that I had to be back. It's called parietal hours. So, in those days in Wellesley, the dorm mother was in loco parentis. She was the [gestures quotation marks] “mother,” and there were [gestures quotation marks] “rules,” which to younger people would sound crazy, but that's how it was. The rules were that we had to be back on a weeknight by eleven, or else we were grounded the next weekend. We couldn't go out. I, of course, had plans for the next weekend, and so on the way home, number one, it was a very bad snowstorm. Now Buzzy, mind you, grew up in Boston, [laughs] so he knew the area pretty well — maybe not Wellesley so well. So, he's driving me back on the Pike, on the Turnpike, and as he's talking and the snow's coming down, I asked him about his work, and as he's driving he's turning to me and he's talking about mythopoeic thought and subsurface culture, and I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought this guy was really strange, and I didn't know what he was doing and what he was talking about. Then, the piece de resistance is that he missed the Turnpike exit, and got me back late, and I was grounded. So, that was that blind date. Check that one off, right? Then the next day he calls me and asks if I want to go out with him again, (01:45:00) and I said, "Well, tell me what's going on." Boston After Dark was the paper that said all the cultural stuff going on. He told me a few things, and I said, "Sorry, I'm busy." [laughs] I wanted nothing to do with him. It was not nice at

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all. So, we had — that was the end of our relationship, okay? So, a year later, also in the winter — this was now the winter of '68 — I was visiting my sister at Brandeis and we had just had lunch at the Student Union, which was in the Castle at Brandeis, which was an actual castle — is an actual castle. We were coming out of lunch, and we bumped into Buzzy, who was going into lunch. Buzzy and I hadn't seen each other for a year, so we were, like, eyeing each other in a kind of uncomfortable way, but Sidra and Buzzy were friends, and Sidra was asking him how he was doing, and he told her with me sort of standing next to her that his father was dying of cancer, and he was talking about it. I looked into his eyes and I sort of fell into his eyes. I was so taken by how he was talking about this most painful topic. He and I were kind of eyeing each other from the corner of our eyes, because we had this weird kind of prior connection, or disconnection. So, he went in and said goodbye and had his lunch, and I said to Sidra, "I kind of like him. I'd like to talk to him some more." So she said, "Go in! Ask him if he can have some coffee!" So I did, and I sat down. I asked him if I could join him for coffee, and he said, "Sure." We started talking, and that was it. We fell in love. We fell in love in a castle, and that's a true story. He missed all his classes that day, which he had never done. We sat and talked for four hours. That was it. It was the eyes.

JG: It was the eyes.

MF: Yeah.

JG: Okay, so I think that pretty much takes us to where we're getting connected to Havurat Shalom.

BUZZY AND MONA TOGETHER

JG: So, let's turn now to how you became involved with Havurat Shalom, and let’s begin with how and when you first heard about and became aware of the very idea of creating a small Jewish intentional community. Buzzy, why don't you start.

BF: So, my first major recollection was around 1967. It was around December. I was in New York, going to a Society of Biblical Literature meeting that was being held at Columbia and Union Seminary, and Art Green and Burt Jacobson, who were then students at the seminary and also students of Heschel, said they wanted to have a meeting that evening with a couple of other people who also became peripherally involved with the havurah, and people who were among the most spiritual people in those days at the seminary, and they bemoaned the fact that the seminary was a place where the study that was being done wasn't personal or wasn't spiritually engaging, and that their religious life had become (01:48:00) fairly routine and dormant, and not spiritually growthful. There

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was also the political component, that the seminary was not, Jews in general were not involved in terms of Jewish values in the anti-war, or any form of the liberation movements, including Civil Rights. Heschel had not yet become fully involved in this. He became involved in it peripherally. He wasn't the leader in that, but he was a facilitator. In any case, the students — we had a meeting.

JG: Who was involved?

BF: In that meeting? Well Art was there. I know Burt Jacobson. There were one or two others — if some of the names come back to me. They never became fully involved. David Goodblatt (01:49:02) was at the seminary at the time doing Talmud. He since went — he was involved for a couple of years, and then he went to Haifa in Talmud, and then he more or less — he was the son of a Conservative rabbi, but he more or less moved out of observant Jewish life. But this was an attempt to kind of rethink things from the spiritual side. Burt Jacobson was involved in the side of Jewish education. It was multifaceted. We had this meeting that was really trying to talk about that. Hillel Levine may have been involved that night or he came to a much later meeting, and we decided that we would try to have a meeting that May in Boston. This would be the May of '68, after they had graduated, and whether there was anything realistic to be done. In the meantime, people would kind of write up position papers or think about it.

JG: How did you know Burt?

BF: I had met him through various kinds of friends at that point. We hadn't developed our friendship, but people had introduced me, and we were kind of fellow travelers in a certain sense. Then we had that meeting in May, which was an evening meeting, which seemed to have things become a little bit more intense. Also, prior to that, a number of the people who were interested in that, and I believe this was before that main meeting, wanted to get together with Nahum Glatzer, who had been involved in the Free Jewish House of Learning of Rosensweig, (01:51:00) the Frei Yiddishe Lehrhaus, because of his experience in Jewish renaissance and renewal — in Germany, we'd call it renaissance — and also, Alexander Altmann, who was involved with Art. This actually might have been into that next fall, because it was part of that larger planning group. Because Altmann, when he was in Berlin before the — in the late thirties — was involved in setting up the Rambam Lehrhaus. So, he was involved in a more Orthodox form of Jewish resistance, renaissance, renewal. Ultimately they were both supportive, and we had to do it on our own, with an American idiom. This sort of was encouraging, but we didn't quite know how to do that. Then there were subsequent meetings. I myself wasn't fully convinced as this was moving forward. I had a number of very interesting conversations with Mona that had partly been stimulated by Axelrad, who would have been her Hillel rabbi at

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Wellesley, about the intriguing nature of this. I was still a little bit hesitant about that in terms of what that meant for my Jewish observance, or what it meant for my scholarship — how to integrate all of that. Mona sort of said, "Why don't you give it a kind of try? Maybe this might be interesting." So, some of that meeting may have actually moved into the early fall, but there was a series of various conversations that people also began to have. Joe Lukinsky, who was a Conservative rabbi — he taught education at the seminary — he was involved in a number of these follow-up meetings. Part of the thing that was exciting at that point was to try to develop a community. It wasn't just education. It wasn't just a new spiritual language. It wasn't just politics. It was the question of, to form an intentional community in which — that could break out of the mold of what we consider to be meaningless, bourgeois Conservative Judaism, with everything that would unfold from that. So, you had a lot of risk, but it was very much involved, maybe partly out of the hasidic background of a number of the people, the notion of having a kind of kehillah kedoshah, a kind of a holy community, and to gather together in an intentional way. We didn't yet know what the form of study would be, the songs, the type of prayer life, but it was (01:54:00) felt that this was a community that had to rise to a challenge, because for a lot of us, even who had grown up with a traditional Jewish background, parts of our Jewish life was dead. In other words, non-observance was not really an option. Orthodox observance at that time wasn't an option. Conservative Judaism wasn't any more a living reality, and yet there were no communities for doing that. So, when we moved to the next phase to discuss part of that, there's — a lot of these issues grew through communal practice. A lot of these people had strengths, but as the community grew, there was a synergistic series of different, very extraordinary people, who, with push and pull, actually made all those dimensions happen. But they happened at the communal level, and not with any strong or dominating personality. So, maybe Mona has other kinds of memories about that.

MF: I have a similar but somewhat slightly different memory. The first I ever heard about the havurah was through Al Axelrad. Buzzy and I were already dating. I remember walking around the Wellesley campus, and he said —

JG: You and Al.

MF: Mm-hm, because I was president of Wellesley Hillel, and we were having our little pre-meeting meeting, and I remember Al said to me, "There's this thing we’re thinking about starting. Do you think you and Buzzy might be interested?" And I said, "I don't think so, but I'll talk to Buzzy." So, I raised it with you. I don't remember any of these other meetings. Maybe they happened and I didn't know, or maybe they happened afterwards, but he said, "Yeah, let's try it!" And then we had a meeting at Brandeis.

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BF: That's the meeting. We were talking about that meeting at Brandeis. That was with Glatzer and with Altmann and so on and so forth. There may have been some other people. I don't remember who else. There may have included George Savran, there may have been Michael Strassfeld. There were a number of people that we met in one of the rooms, and that was part of the — everything was a matter of hope and anticipation, but the concreteness wasn't clear. All we knew was that all of us had been deeply influenced by Glatzer, who had been all of our teachers at Brandeis, and Glatzer was both a disciple of Buber and Rosenzweig, and all of us had been deeply influenced, like we were first generation disciples, and Art was a disciple of Heschel. So, that became part of that conversation, because Heschel himself, in the mid-thirties, after Buber left, was more or less an acting director of the Frei Yiddishe Lehrhaus in Berlin as well.

MF: Well, it's not as if we were looking to create something on our own. (01:57:00) It was a bit happenstance. I'm a big believer in serendipity, you know? That things come your way, and if you're open to them, then wonderful things can happen.

BF: It happened because the time was right, and the people were right.

MF: And we were open to it.

BF: And the bonding of persons wouldn't have happened if there wasn't the bonding, but also significant differences in personality.

JG: Right. Are you talking about even at the pre-havurah — just even in this planning process, before the havurah officially was known?

BF: We all wanted something new to happen because we wanted to save our Jewish souls.

MF: But we weren't — I don't think Buzzy and I were in a place of, like, we really need something. What's it going to be? We were minding our own business. We were in love. He was busy with graduate school. I was busy doing my work at Wellesley. I think Art at the seminary — people who were at the seminary, at JTS, were very unhappy with what was going on there. They deliberately wanted to create this. We were just in love and having a great time —

BF: Well, I was coming to Brandeis as a graduate student, so the center of gravity was shifting. Hillel was coming to Boston to study —

JG: Levine.

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BF: Hillel Levine. So, there was a shift of gravity that was happening that way, so that's why the meetings first became in Cambridge, and then we spent that first year there. It wasn't clear even that it was going to necessarily happen, but that conversation became exciting for all of us as an opportunity to share time together. Then it became a religious community.

JG: Early on in this planning process, the idea of creating this community as an alternative seminary became a thing.

BF: It was a thing, and it became a bit more. The reason was —

JG: The reason which —?

BF: Well, in creating a community, since a number of people had come from a seminary, which was not training the next generation, one of the iterations possible was to create a new alternative. They felt that JTS wasn't doing it. Certainly YU [Yeshiva University] was not in the ascendency at that point. There wasn't a Reconstructionist seminary.

JG: Although the seminary was opening — the Reconstructionist —

BF: Yeah, but they were — they, in effect, at the spiritual level, at the small group havurah level of the (02:00:00) revival of liturgy, which was also happening in the Catholic circles, they took their cue from us. Because a lot of those people were responding to us at a certain point. So, the notion of a seminary was to provide a new type of Jewish leadership. Also, it was the stimulus to try to create the curriculum and form of study and spirituality for the next generation, which they at the seminary didn't have.

JG: The next generation of rabbis.

BF: Of rabbis. That was one of the motivations. How much the notion of military deferment played a role, it was involved but it wasn't central. A number of key people, like Stef Krieger, others who came from the University of Chicago — we would have these ritual walking to the Cambridge City Hall for the burning of the draft cards. But that was part not so much of a political stance so much as it was part of the larger Jewish counterculture finding its ethical voice, for peace, for justice, and to do that in Jewish terms. The reason I say it was a bete noire to have a seminary and an anti-war movement was because we then became very much involved in, how do you accept another person, and what were the moral criteria to accept another person to the seminary, and were they

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in fact serious about their Jewish life, or were they just looking for a deferment? So, we got involved in many serious political, emotional discussions to make sure that while that was a key value, it wasn't going to disturb but rather enhance the structure of the community, and when people appeared that they were just looking for a deferment, or their moral or spiritual issue for coming to the seminary was not what we particularly wanted, we would have these night meetings that would go through the night for several days. This notion of judging another person's moral life and spiritual life — this was the sixties, so everybody took these issues of integrity very, very seriously.

MF: I want to just add, because I think you're now going ahead to when we already existed. I think the impetus was, it was an alternative to the synagogue, to the Conservative synagogue, which was considered —

BF: — big and anonymous.

MF: Yeah, and boring. It was an alternative to JTS, which, at the time, many people came from JTS and were very disillusioned. And it happened at the time of the Vietnam War. (02:03:00) It was all three things, but the main Jewish spiritual focus was the seminary and the community. We were very — I think in the first year there was a very strong push, and we'll talk about kind of how we accepted people and whatever. It wasn't just their moral thing. I think down the road, what happened was, Art in particular became uncomfortable and people became uncomfortable and the faculty, with judging, because when you're running a seminary or a degree granting institution, you have to judge your students.

JG: Yeah.

MF: And we were very much anti-judgment. [laughs] So, that's partly where that piece fell off. But I think it was primarily a sense that we were going to save the soul of liberal American Judaism. [laughs]

BF: That's the truth.

MF: We were not exactly modest in our goals. We were not modest in our goals. We were going to — well, and another thing I just want to add, because this happened really from the beginning, we had this notion that the havurah would grow in a cellular fashion, that we would be the first havurah, and then it would grow in synagogues, it would grow in communities, it would grow in all kinds of places, and it would be like a huge expansion of havurot. And, to our astonishment, that's actually what happened. I mean, it wasn't like a lot of little Havurat Shaloms were out there, but every synagogue now has a

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havurah or havurot, right? The notion that there needs to be — and that's the other piece — there needs to be more intimacy in our Jewish practice, was a key motivator.

BF: I think the fact that the synagogues were large and anonymous, the rabbis were preaching and talking down, so it was a top-down institution, that the teacher could learn from the student, was something that was important, and that was also a key factor in the Lehrhaus. So, there was probably very little of the existing institutions that we wanted to continue, but there was no liberal inter-space between non-observance — or Reform, very problematic observance — and centrist or right-wing Orthodoxy, which, as I say, was even less at the ascendency. Its own rise came subsequent. So, we were trying to find a holy space.

JG: Is that what you mean, what you were referring to, when you said a few minutes ago that Conservative Judaism is no longer living?

BF: Well, from our experience, we were all products of it in the most intense way. We were the most educated of that next generation, and yet that was not anything we could pass on to our children or had any sort of vibrancy, that synagogue life — liturgically, ideologically, theologically — had no vitality or intellectual heft.

MF: And the kahal was like an audience, and that's still a problem (02:06:00) with Conservative synagogues, that the clergy are performing, that the kahal were kind of recipients. That was something that was very troubling to our —

BF: And we were the best of that generation, and it was no longer serving a spiritual purpose for us.

JG: Right. So you, for instance, said in the prospectus that was written — do you recall that there was a prospectus?

MF: [laughs]

BF: [laughs] Right, right, right, right.

JG: So, there was a prospectus, and among the things that are in that prospectus is the expression of a fear that young Jews will simply abandon Judaism.

BF: Well, that was, the best — to put it in that historical context — the best Jews were becoming politically involved and alienated from Judaism in the anti-war movement. Their moral and spiritual energies were against the war. People like Jim Sleeper, who

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came from that background and then went back to that background. The fact that the spiritual life was empty. So, there was nothing drawing that next generation into any kind of renewed spiritual possibilities. And then there was a huge amount of intermarriage. There was just, everything was happening in the sixties where the best people were also becoming interested in Eastern religions. It wasn't even a "Jew-Bu" at that time. They were just people who were involved in Buddhism. People were meditating. So, the whole culture was losing its best people to Eastern religions where you could have a religious consciousness without a practice — a Jewish religious practice. The moral and the ethical emphasis wasn't coming out of Jewish sources, but they had it, becoming involved in the principles of justice and righteousness for Civil Rights, in the anti-war movement, and then for feminism. The larger notion of what it means to be a person was something that was emerging, and Judaism wasn't responding. That's part of what we were trying to become — new persons, the New Jew.

MF: When we were starting the havurah, feminism wasn't on the horizon yet, and whenever you're ready, we can tell that story, because that was an important part of the story. But not yet.

JG: Yes, we'll get to that. So, here we are. It's the spring of '68. (02:09:00) In fact, as I understand it, there was a decision to move forward with creating this havurah as an alternative seminary.

MF: Right.

JG: Partly to deal with issues of the draft, but largely because of all the issues that you've been —

BF: The internal Jewish issues.

JG: The internal Jewish issues, right. There was the process that went ahead to have this new alternative seminary chartered, so that people actually could get draft deferments, and this would actually be a seminary. Do you remember over the course of this spring- summer planning period any significant areas of disagreement or tension that emerged over the directions, or formats, that this new intensive community would take?

BF: It's hard to reconstruct a lot of that, but part of this was whether it would be directed by individuals or by group consensus. Art was certainly a major, strong personality, but he didn't want to be a rebbe or the major strong personality. The notion of consensus was very strong, but too much consensus — nothing gets done. Yet, all the people had strong personalities. So, the issue was how would decisions be made? What would be the

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educational structure? Everybody had something to say, but in fact there were only a half a dozen of the people who really were technically competent. So, that was a tension of, how do we learn from each other? How do you establish a curriculum? How do you actualize Jewish sources pedagogically in which a teacher leads but other people have what to say even if they're not textually competent at that point?

JG: Right. Havurat Shalom opened its doors, so to speak, in early fall, I think it was September —

MF: Sixty-eight, in Cambridge.

JG: Had there been a process of recruitment of people to be part of this havurah for that very first year? I'm not clear, Buzzy, as you've been speaking, whether you're talking about things that happened once —

BF: It was internal. I don't remember — I can't remember how the public announcement happened. I do know that that inner circle developed through friendship networks. So, there were a number (02:12:00) of people who gained their MA’s at Brandeis. There were some undergraduates, like Danny Matt, who were connected with people. There were people who knew other people through the Ramah movement. So, I would — or when Zalman Schachter, it was through Art’s connections. I think part of that first intentionality was, you know someone who would really be part of our group and be compatible.

JG: Do you know what, if anything, the process was by which people — by which decisions were made about whether to ultimately invite a particular individual or person?

MF: I want to differentiate. There's the teachers and there's the students. In that first year, the hierarchy was very clear, and I think even into the second year, until we gave up on the seminary part. Buzzy was one of the teachers. Art was one of the teachers. There were several others, and then there were students.

JG: I mean, were you invited, essentially invited, recruited, etcetera, as a teacher?

BF: I was a member, and that's what we were going to do. But —

MF: Yeah, but you were part of the teachers.

BF: Yeah, I was a teacher. People —

46 Mona and Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane, 5/12/17 + 10/18/17

MF: I mean, nobody got paid. It wasn't —

BF: So, the issue was, who knew enough sufficiently that we could legitimately pass on the Jewish tradition and make rabbis?

JG: So, who were among the teachers, for instance, in that very first year?

BF: Well, Art and myself. I think Zalman was teaching something. Maybe Burt Jacobson was doing something about education. I think in those days, there were some people like Steve Mitchell, who was a translator and a poet. He was working on a translation of the Book of Job, so he gave a workshop on that, on spiritual writing. There were different people from different areas, but the core was to make the place seminary-worthy, or worthy of a rabbinical degree as a continuation of the Jewish community. We took that very, very seriously — the teachers did, and the notion that people would have to — if they were going to get a rabbinical degree — would have to come to that level of competence.

JG: How many people were involved essentially as students in that first year?

BF: It might have been ten, a dozen. That was part of that intense group, Joey — and Gail — Reimer. David Roskies was still a student, in his first marriage. He was very much involved in some liturgical planning for the first Yom Hashoah that we had, when he wrote that liturgy on Night. So, there were a lot of people who had (02:15:00) different kinds of dimensions. Everybody contributed in very powerful ways, but different people in different ways. I would say in terms of that intensity, maybe not more than a dozen. Michael Brooks was also involved in that.

MF: He was a student.

BF: He was a student, yeah.

JG: So that first year, when the doors opened, this was basically being conceived of as an all-male community.

BF: A community. A community. It didn't — there wasn't an issue of feminism because that really wasn't in anybody's head, even in the liberal circles. It hadn't really — Betty Friedan, it didn't really — it wasn't a halachic issue. It was only emerging. It was really a series of people who wanted to share in the study. The feeling was at the beginning, those who would feel that the energy pulled them would stay, and if it didn't work, they would kind of leave. Mona was centrally involved —

47 Mona and Michael (Buzzy) Fishbane, 5/12/17 + 10/18/17

MF: Wait, let's back up a second. All the students and all the teachers in the beginning were male. Let's just start there. Kathy Green came along with Art. I came along with Buzzy. A couple of other people came along for the ride. But —

JG: You mean a couple of other women.

MF: Women came along for the ride. There were no women students at the beginning. It wasn't even a discussion. I didn't sit there feeling, why can't I be included? I was just part of the group.

BF: That wasn't part of our language.

MF: The second year — the third year, actually, 1970, I actually was a full-time student, and entered that responsibility. If you want, I can tell you the story of how women became equal halachically. I could tell, you now, because it sort of fits, if you want.

JG: Sure.

MF: So, it was our first-year retreat, so it was probably — I think it was the first year — Sukkot retreat? We were out at the retreat center.

JG: So, it was right at the beginning.

MF: I believe so. It could have been the second year, but I'm pretty sure it was the first year. I may be wrong about this. We were on retreat, and for Shacharit some of us were up early. There were ten of us, nine men and me. [shrugs] And no one was thinking, oh, we don't have a minyan or anything like that. One of our members —

BF: Epi Epstein.

MF: Epi Epstein was saying kaddish.

BF: And he grew up Orthodox.

MF: And someone said, "Epi, you can't say kaddish. There isn't a minyan." And I counted, and I said, "Why? There's ten people here?" And I wasn't being provocative. Remember, I grew up in a feminist household. I mean, granted that feminism hadn't hit Judaism yet in my world or anybody else's world, but I just — here we were, and we were equal people. I was a player. I hadn't applied and gotten [does air quotations]

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“admitted” or whatever, (02:18:00), but I was very much a part of the community. People were like, "Oh." Then someone said, "Epi gets to decide whether he can say kaddish with nine men and a woman," and Epi said, "Fine."

JG: Was it immediate?

BF: Yeah.

MF: I think so. And then —

BF: In many other cases, we cited the halachic sources, for other things, but in this case we needed to make a decision. It didn't come ideologically. It just came because there were ten people.

MF: Pretty much from that day forward, we were egalitarian. That was that. [laughs]

BF: But it wasn't ideological. It wasn't for feminism.

MF: That's not true.

BF: If you think back on it, a lot of the —

MF: That's not true, Buzzy.

BF: A lot of the men who were very strong, open to huge things, feminism wasn't in the air. You just looked past those issues.

MF: Well, that is —

BF: It became part of the consciousness maybe one or two years into the — like '68, '69. Part of the larger culture of the first wave of feminism hit us, and then we all of a sudden had a language. But liberal men like ourselves looked past it, and Mona didn't even notice it. People didn't see it until an issue came up, and then, because of the culture of that time, we said, "How could it not be that way?”

MF: But there was no pushback. Like, I remember when I came back to Highland Park, there was this whole issue, and it's still, in our current synagogue, it's still not fully egalitarian. It's mostly egalitarian. That was in 1990, right? So, from 1968 to 1990, the Conservative Movement struggled; the Seminary, JTS, struggled; the synagogues struggled. A lot of people had push backs in a lot of synagogues, where men would walk

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off in a huff and leave the synagogue if women were called to the Torah or counted in a minyan. There are still synagogues out there like that. This was not like that. We were blind and then we saw, and then that was the end of it. We were inclusive.

JG: How did this feel to you?

MF: It felt great. I mean, it felt like, duh, where were we before, you know? And I didn't feel anybody feeling bad about it, or negative toward me or toward that process. It was part of our eyes opening, the whole feminism process.

BF: I remember once right after that, we had, as we often had, a big halachic meeting on the big feminist issue of kol isha, of whether women's voices —

MF: We did?

BF: Yes, I remember. I won't get into the halachic aspect of the discussion, but I will say something that always was so powerful in those days, even when women were involved and women were leading the davening. The issue was that everybody was emotionally (02:21:00) mature. The issue of feeling comfortable in a mixed setting was part of a kind of emotional and spiritual maturity that we had. Now obviously there was a readiness at the halachic level to let that happen, but the kinds of residual issues that make some people uncomfortable — sexually, emotionally, physically — the havurah in those days, the people were very spiritually balanced, and the conversations were respectful. That carried over. The other aspect of the early liturgy is what we used to call "hazan's choice." We were trying to re-develop a sense of living liturgy, and the person who was the hazan, or the leader, would make certain kinds of decisions for that week, and people would be respectful. In different ways women became involved, that became part of that emergence of people feeling comfortable with their friends. You can't separate the fact that people were very comfortable with the spiritual and emotional life of their friends. So, if they were leading something, it wasn't like there was male or female. It's that you respect them as a person. That was a deep underlying issue, and the Halachah sort of followed within that notion. You can't say which led which at that point, but the fact that everybody respected each other was a transformative aspect of who we were.

JG: And, as you're saying, it sounds like it was pervasive, in that respect, that it pervaded everything that you did.

BF: Yeah.

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JG: So, let me give you a little roadmap of how I want to proceed, so we can get through a number of different topics. That is, I want to now — we're launched. It's fall of '68. I want to look at some of the key pillars of havurah life, starting with community, then, tefilah, then liturgy — including all the feminist stuff — and then learning and social action.

MF: Well, now, you've got to add food. We had communal meals.

JG: Food is part of community, so that's where we're going right now.

MF: [laughs] Okay.

BF: Okay.

JG: Okay, (02:24:00) so, this has been a wonderful overview of sort of the vision of what community was about, and the deeply held feelings and respect that people had for each other. What role did the house play in the creation of community? It started that very first year in the house in Franklin Street in Cambridge. By the next fall, the havurah had purchased a house, in Somerville next door. So, what was the impact of these houses, and of this move to a permanent home?

BF: Well, I'll say something about the house in Somerville because that became the permanent house. I think a community had to have sacred space. The sign on the havurah in Somerville was, "Kehilah Kedoshah Havurat Shalom." Kuf Kuf Havurat Shalom.

JG: Can you translate that?

BF: Yeah. Holy community, Kehilah Kedoshah. I think that was requested by Zalman. But that was the sign. The notion, when you came in — even in Cambridge — when you came into the building, it was a different space. We all felt that. Physically, we all sat on throw pillows. It had a different kind of quiet, and it was pervaded by friendship. That was part of what produced the holiness. It wasn't the sacred descending, it was the inner love of friendship that was rising into holiness. The other thing in that first building — well, in all the buildings, because there was a prayer space, there was a place for meals, and then there were various rooms which people rented out — there was a respect for private space. In other words, there was a communal space that we shared with a holy language, with texts, with love — friendship love, it's hard to say what was love and what was friendship, but it was a love-friendship. And then, if people went into private rooms, it was privacy. So, that balance between the public and the private, that also played itself out in the community itself. Everybody was encouraged to talk, but if you chose to keep

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silent, it was understood no one would invade your privacy. You didn't have to talk. People loved to talk. People tried to shut everybody up, because they talked (02:27:00) so much, because it was the sixties. But at the same time, if you didn't talk, you had a right not to talk. So, the building in a sense was expressive of the values of personhood.

JG: Can you describe a little bit the decor of the place, the aesthetic of the place, and how that was sort of emblematic of or an expression of the values of the community?

MF: Sure. Before I do any explaining, I just want to add that I think the pregnant pause — to add onto your silence thing — was a very big deal. There was a lot of pausing before we spoke for a lot of people. A lot of intentionality, taking a breath, not rushing into things. In terms of the building, the first year it was split half and half: half was Art and Kathy's place, half was the rest of our place. It was a nice place, but it was temporary lodging. It was fine. The havurah in Somerville was really home. The wood was rich, is rich, and it's an old home, with old features of home. At one point we had to paint the place. You probably have heard this story before, about how each of us got — it was yellow, it was bright yellow — and each of us got, somebody drew up a template of the whole outside of the place, and we each got a little section that we were responsible for, myself included. I'm up on a ladder painting. [laughs]

JG: How did the yellow get decided? Was that —?

MF: I don't know. I don't know if it was already yellow and we just decided —

BF: It was like everything. We needed a mortgage. Art Green and I were the only people making a salary, so we went down to the bank in the South Shore, because we were the only people responsible. I don't even know if we're legally still responsible. [laughs]

MF: We got off the mortgage.

BF: Yeah, but the two of us, I mean, things just sort of happened that way. It has to be done. Who can make it happen? [laughs]

MF: Well, so there was —

BF: Although there was the nudge list. After that, they brought the nudge list. Things that happened. There was a monthly nudge who was in charge of making all these space cadets do things together. [laughs]

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MF: Well, that comes to the community piece, because I think the whole question about how we organize ourselves is a whole other thing, which is interesting. But in terms of the outside decor, it was — I don't know how we chose yellow. It was probably a consensus.

BF: It was probably the cheapest paint around. [laughs]

MF: We had to do it, and we all were there, painting this house. It was very do-it- yourself. Then of course the Jewish Catalogue came out in these years, and it was joyous. I mean, it was our bodies, our souls. You know, our intellect was engaged, our stomachs were engaged, our hearts were engaged, our souls were engaged. It was a very all- encompassing kind of feeling, in terms of our commitment.

JG: There was a principle that people had to live, or were supposed to live, within walking distance.

MF: Right.

JG: Was that observed pretty much?

BF: Yes.

MF: Pretty much. There were some people who came out —

BF: People who came, members (02:30:00) had to be near each other.

JG: Because?

BF: When it became a phenomenon, people drove from everywhere. [laughs]

MF: I think part of it was that we didn't want to drive on Shabbat. But part of it was we wanted to actually be a community that had shared meals together. So, Friday night we were not at the havurah. We were on our own in our homes, but we were inviting each other over all the time.

BF: Those were very powerful.

MF: I actually have a very fond memory of — it was a private memory of us, but it's part of the havurah and havurah people were there — of, as we're videotaping, my son has made his challahs for the Shabbat, so we can smell it. [laughs]

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JG: Today.

MF: Today, but it won't show up on videotape. So back then, we made challahs too, and the way we kneaded the challah is, we would have friends over and we would toss the dough from one person to another, [laughs] and then let it rise on our radiators.

BF: The other thing was, we were all so poor, and the old Cambridge houses, we benefited from the heat coming up from the grating. So, we used to put the challah on top of a chair that was on top of the open grating. [laughs]

MF: So, there was a real sense of the community. The other thing is, can I talk about the communal meals?

JG: Please.

MF: So, every — I think it was Tuesday night?

BF: Wednesday.

MF: Wednesday nights. So, it was — we would have communal meals, and we took this obligation very seriously, as seriously as anything else — studying or davening together. Different people would take different roles in cooking. I was the pie lady. [laughs] At that point there were almost all men and me, and they would go, "Oooh, oh, this is such great pie!" I just kvelled. It was just wonderful. It was a great feeling. So, it was a real sense that eating and shared life was a very important part of this. The other thing that's related to the community piece is that we had very serious discussions within the first year about whether anybody could have a job outside of Havurat Shalom. Now, Buzzy had a job teaching at Brandeis. Art had a job teaching at Brandeis already? Or, he had a job somewhere.

BF: It was the nature of commitment. The nature of commitment.

MF: I think a couple of other people did, too, but, I mean, we even considered moving out to the country as a commune. I mean, we were sort of a little bit hippy-ish, a little bit commune-ish, in the middle of all this, and there were serious questions of whether we all could — if people really had the right to private lives and professions alongside this. That didn't last all that long, but it was definitely strong in the first year or two.

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JG: In terms of the cooking, the shared cooking, first of all, meals took place in the havurah.

MF: Yes.

JG: Did people share the cooking? Did one person, or did everybody sort of —?

MF: No, I think everybody sort of chipped in. I think probably we had rotations. I don't remember exactly, but there was a strong sense of —

BF: There were different people in charge of organizing. Keeping the house clean, making sure the meals took place. Things like that. Then there would be the monthly nudge, because (02:33:00) everybody always put it off till the last minute.

MF: Well, that's an important piece, because no one wanted — and Art especially — didn't want to be the boss. I mean, Art had a certain status there, but he didn't want to be a rebbe, nor did he certainly want to be the president or whatever that means, the C.E.O. Nobody wanted that. We were very egalitarian. But we realized pretty quickly, probably from the get-go, that somebody had to organize. So, we basically had a rotation. It was either once a month — or, I think it was once every three months — someone would take that role. At one point, I took that role. You were the organizer nudge person who would just remind people of their jobs. It actually worked, I think, pretty well.

BF: There weren't computers. [laughs] Contact people, send them a note, buttonhole them. Being a nudge is a little bit more labor intensive than today.

MF: And probably that included clean up and cooking, and it probably included rotations for davening.

BF: You should also understand, in terms of the decor of the room —

JG: Which room?

BF: The prayer room. The meals were at a long, long table, but the prayer room had big pillows. It had a wicker — it was kind of a big wicker box that served as the ark. That's all we could afford. There were all different kinds of macramé to do things. Then there was Krishna Cat. Krishna was also — there was a cat. There was a cat.

JG: An actual cat.

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BF: Yeah, called Krishna Cat. Krishna Cat was very important. Krishna Cat was part of the decor.

MF: Lot of books. Lot of seforim.

BF: Yeah. A lot of seforim, but it was in the hippie style of the 1960s.

JG: Very low key.

BF: It was low key. That's the way we all dressed. That's the way the style was.

JG: Do you recall where the pillows had come from?

BF: We either made them or we stuffed them or we got them from second hand stores. [laughs]

MF: I would imagine there was a lot of, like, people put out their furniture on the street. I'm sure a lot of it came from there. [laughs]

BF: Yeah, then maybe people would put some kind of a case on, or some kind of thing.

JG: What was the attitude towards Kashrut and the observance of Kashrut at these communal meals?

MF: We were vegetarian. In terms of people cooking in their own home or whatever, I don't think we worried about that.

BF: I think there was a notion of what that level of trust was. Since everybody was pretty much vegetarian —

MF: There was no treif. There was no meat, I believe, and what people did in their own homes —

BF: Everything that would be done for the community or in the building, I would say that pretty much (02:36:00) everybody kept a halachic standard. There had to be some kind of common understanding of trust. No one was the mashgiach, as some sort of a supervisor, but it was clear that everybody had to be comfortable. It became easier since almost everybody was vegetarian in those days. [laughs]

JG: Were they already, or is this something that Everett sort of —

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BF: No, it wasn't simply Everett.

MF: I think most people were vegetarian.

BF: Most people were vegetarian. We had one anti-vegetarian thing at one — it was typical for the 1960s. So, what happened was, we were at Packard Manse, which was something of a Christian retreat house, for one of our retreats, and one person, Michael Brooks, wanted to learn about shechitah, so, ritual slaughter — in case he would ever need —

MF: No, no. I think he felt that ethically, if he was ever going to eat meat, he had to be able to do shechitah.

BF: All right. So, Zalman, as a Chabad rabbi, they all knew how to do shechitah. So, I think this lasted just into the very beginning of the slaughtering, where Michael had to look at the lungs or something and he passed out. [laughs] That was the end of the halachic instruction. It was just typical. I mean, people wanted to have all of these skills, but we were so different from that. [laughs]

MF: Another memory I have of Michael Brooks is a very aesthetic memory of being in his home, and of holding a kiddush cup and filling it to the very top. It's the first time I'd ever seen that, because usually we leave space so it wouldn't spill. He would fill it to the top and just a little bit over, and it never spilled. Buzzy's taken that up. He does that now. It's a hasidic custom I think, isn't it?

BF: [nods]

JG: So, there was a real spiritual aspect to food.

MF: Oh yeah. Definitely.

JG: Can you describe that a little?

MF: The communal meals were holy events. We ate with intention. I'm sure we did some kind of meditation before.

BF: We would do a niggun, or study niggunim or wordless melodies particularly.

MF: Niggunim, yeah.

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BF: That was really part of the holy thing. I mean, you just didn't eat. Where the eating and the breathing and the singing and the talking, it was all one fluid —

MF: It was all sacred.

BF: Yeah. That was all part of it.

JG: And this was true, you're saying, even of the Wednesday evenings.

MF: Oh, definitely.

BF: That was particularly then. That was a holy — because we didn't have a communal meal Friday night. (02:39:00)

MF: We did some shaleshudes, didn't we?

BF: Yeah, occasionally. But Shabbos was, you'd have two or three couples over, and it would have that same quality, but everybody was present on Wednesday night. Then right after that, there would be like a mussar. There'd be cheshbon hanefesh. Everybody would kind of have to describe if they were upset with someone that week, and you had to publicly apologize. Or, what issues were going around. In other words, the continuity of that was to make sure that the community remained a community, and that if you had a grudge or something was bothering you, that was the time that people would say that. Those post-meal meditation confessional things, or clearing the air, was very important, because it was like a family. That could go on for hours if there was an issue. But, that was taken very seriously, to share that sacred space.

JG: Yeah. I want to come back to that in one minute, but you just mentioned — one of you just mentioned — your Shabbos meals, Erev Shabbat, in people’s homes. Havurat Shalom became known as a Shabbat-inviting community because of this. Were there some people who were inviters and some people who were more invitees typically?

MF: I'd imagine that that's true. I don't remember it very much. I remember in the beginning we were a very self-selected group, so we weren't, like, bringing in all these people from outside, although we welcomed people coming to daven with us. But we were a very sort of insular group of the teachers and the students, and our partners, and maybe some friends.

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BF: There were a couple of guys who didn't couple with anybody else, so they didn't do that. They might have been more involved in creating the communal meals. But insofar as anybody had an apartment in that general area, everybody invited. I would say, that said, there were also havurot within the havurah.

MF: There were sub —

BF: There were sub-friendship groups, obviously.

JG: Did Shabbat dinner in people's homes take on special characteristics that you recall?

MF: Well, like that thing on Shabbat, Michael's wine, there was the same sacred space, same intentionality, the deepening of personal friendship in our homes. It was the same feeling. I mean, we were very intentional and somewhat self-conscious about creating sacred space.

BF: I think the other thing was —

MF: Both in our home and in the havurah.

BF: As opposed to what you would see in a more traditional home, the teaching was invariably (02:42:00) a hasidic text. So, the discussion was always —

JG: At any meal.

BF: At any meal, at a communal meal or a personal meal, if there was a dvar torah, it was always on some hasidic or spiritual text. So, that affected the nature of the discussion. Secular speech sort of wasn't allowed. [laughs] We had very clear notions, but in those occasions, there was no secular speech.

JG: Did you have a model in your head, the two of you as a young couple, of what kind of an atmosphere you wanted to create when you invited people to your home for Shabbat dinner, and how you would have gone about creating that? How did people create that environment?

BF: It was personality by personality.

MF: No, she's asking how we created —

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BF: But, I think we just, we were welcoming and singing in our own style. Each home was characteristic of the love of that couple.

MF: I think for me, and this has been true my whole adult life — it started then — preparing for Shabbat would start on Tuesday. [laughs] We'd invite people ahead of time. I'd think about it. I'd shop. I'd start cooking. Then it got more structured, as I got older. I just couldn't stand up in one fell swoop on a Friday afternoon and cook. But, it became a real intentional and exciting part of our planning, of our week. Then having people come in, and we would gather around, and we would come to the table, and I imagine we davened Kabbalat Shabbat together and lit candles. Then bringing out the courses, the ritual prayer.

JG: Yeah. Let's go back to the group meetings, because as you told us, there was a structure to how this worked, and also an ideal of openness in the community, where people wanted to be able to share and be open with each other. And yet, this was a little fraught for some people. Many people have talked about how challenging they found that piece. There was for many people a tension between what one member called "the conflict between individuality and commonality."

BF: It played itself out in different people. I tended to be among the more private people. There was a general unstated imperative that you couldn't keep a secret, and you had to be open in a certain way. But not everybody felt comfortable (02:45:00) sharing private, subjective feelings. So, the issue of sharing, you have to distinguish between being involved — and, of course, in the sixties, sharing means you tell every dark secret you have, or else you're not being honest. That just didn't work for a lot of people. We're talking about degrees here. Everybody shared the notion of communal bonding, the issue of honesty, trying to say what you meant if you had a conflict. But, to say that this comes from my relationship with my parents, or my childhood, or this and that, that for a number of people was going a little bit too far. Not everybody did that, but some — if people would go around, usually everybody had a chance to speak on a certain subject, and some people felt very uncomfortable if they said they just wanted to pass on evaluating something or speaking. So, that was a natural outgrowth. I think everybody had that spectrum, but it wasn't the same spectrum for everybody.

MF: I don't recall us all sharing individually all our personal kishkes. What I do remember is that there was a big — a lot of sharing around deliberations on community matters.

JG: What kinds of issues were community matters?

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MF: Well, for example, after the first year when we were thinking about accepting a new student — this is when we were still a seminary, so it was just a year, I don't know. Oh my God, we were so precious. We took ourselves so seriously, so we would stay up all night fasting before we would interview a new candidate, because we had to be spiritually ready to be present and get in the right intentionality. So, that's what I mean by precious. I think there was certainly a sense of — I don't know what we did if there was tension, when it was in the community, whether we had to have public conversations about it. I don't think so. But, there was certainly — everything had to be processed. Every rule, every, you know, deliberation —

BF: Process was the thing.

MF: It was this odd tension between hierarchical, because it was a seminary with teachers and students who were then — which is why that part didn't hold. And the egalitarian — not only egalitarian, but everybody had to be included in the deliberations.

BF: Inclusiveness.

JG: That was the thing.

BF: Yeah. People wanted to--people had different degrees of privacy.

MF: We could have private lives. I don't think everyone was expected to share.

BF: You had to learn how to go with that. So, there were these meta-principles, and one of the meta-principles (02:48:00) is respect. So, unless there was something that was outrageous, the larger notion of respect was the chief effort.

JG: Despite the fact that there were partners who were involved — girlfriends and in some cases wives — still in the first year or two, it was a largely male community with some women who were involved. There were significant male friendships that evolved for many people. Is that true for you, Buzzy?

BF: Yes. Art was a good friend, and that's a friendship that's lasted over fifty years. In those early years, my friendship with Steve Mitchell was very important. He was a poet and a translator.

JG: Friendships within the havurah for you, were they different qualitatively from the kinds of relationships you had previously?

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BF: Yeah. I think it's a real — the difference between havurah friendships and academic friendships and other friendships was — certainly the difference between friends in the academic world, you didn't always invite people to your home. Friendship in the havurah was also different from other friendships in which a guiding assumption was that you don't simply have an alliance or alignment on a certain thing, but since you're sharing a larger spiritual vision, there was a notion of a core, even if the personal dimensions or the amount of private sharing varied. In normal friendships, it might be the excited energy tying two people together, but it's not a shared social, spiritual vision. So, that created a different ambiance among people you became closer with, or the people — even the people who'd be on the margin of the havurah — the fact that we were part of the havurah together created that inner spatial spiritual bonding, and that is something very — that was a covenantal issue. This was different from other types of friendship. It was a friendship in which you shared holy sacred moments. We didn't have any other (02:51:00) religious community, so friendship community, prayer community, eating community. It was more than a commune. It was people who were beginning to share a spiritual destiny together.

JG: So, in addition to this notion of community that you were all trying to both create and live out in a very intentional way, the creation of a spiritual community, which you've sort of alluded to many times already, was a paramount value. How would you describe the place of tefilah within Havurat Shalom, and how did it relate to this notion of community?

BF: Do you want me to start?

MF: Okay.

BF: So, let me give a couple of different vignettes that I think will set the tone. Tefilah was central, but tefilah was difficult, and it was difficult for all of us who came from a traditional background but now wanted to create a new intentionality. It relates back to issues I had mentioned before, that we were trying to create a new spiritual language, a new spiritual tone. We didn't know how to do it. There was no model. Then I mentioned a couple of things that stand out in my mind. We can follow up on a couple of those. So, that first meeting of that first summer, Epi Epstein and I were in charge of the very first ritual event, which was supposed to be Tisha B'Av.

JG: Are you talking about '69 or '68?

BF: I don't remember the exact year, but it was the first time we were going to do something in a shared moment at a ritual level. We had been, we were charged with

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leading it, and I remember we had spent two or three days sanding the floor, and we were all talking, talking, filled with all kinds of dust. We were bonding over this, and we didn't know what to do. What was clear to us is that a lot of practices that we had grown up with, that were traditional practices, had to be scaled back to create space and silence. I think that the very first time we tried to do that was not very successful, because silence by itself doesn't work unless there's a spiritual undertone to silence. [laughs] It took a while to get to the spiritual undertone to silence. But, the reason I'm beginning this way (02:54:00) is because it had to work in a spiritually focused way. What you said had to be meaningful. So, at the very beginning on Friday nights, on Shabbos, Kabbalat Shabbat or Shabbat, there was a lot of wordless niggunim. That wasn't simply because the niggunim were traditionally without words. It was because melody and words — melodies without words — were a form of spiritual expression that didn't have to use language that in some cases might have been problematic. That was a very central feature. Whoever was leading the service, there could be spontaneous moments in which the regular siddur would be stopped, and there would be silence and then niggunim, and people would fold into that silence. I must say, before I give another example, it continuously astonishes me that within about a year of starting from almost silent to silent melody, to gradually introduce some mizmor, which were a lot easier of course — Birchot HaShachar — were a lot easier than other aspects, and then the regular form of tefilah, it filled in very fast in a traditional way, because people began to realize that the tradition had great power, greater power than the individuals that could just invent things, but also, it was riding on the spiritual crest of shared spiritual qualities. Now, the issue of silence and other aspects also included some form of what I would now call midrashic liturgy. Many people did this. I often was a shaliach tzibur, but there was one occasion that was particularly memorable. It was on the day of the Yom Kippur War. It was on Yom Kippur, and we had just heard about that the day before. We, of course, didn't know all the news, because we couldn't turn on the news. We had no idea what was going on. Although I had (02:57:00) done what I'm going to describe before, and other people had done this, this stands out in my mind as a very pivotal spiritual moment. What people would do, and what I was doing then, either during the normal chanting, or at some point even with the reader’s repetition of the Chazarat Hashatz, for the tefilah, the shaliach of the Shemona Esrei, a person would stop at a particular word and do a riff in English that would be a spiritual midrash on that phrase. So, I remember occasions on that Yom Kippur — part of the issue was fear for the Jewish people. Prayer, the issue of what kapparah was, the whole notion of being Klal Yisroel, being in a state of not-knowing, which is also part of that, the tension of life and death, what you're inscribed for ultimately, and sealed for. So, when you would do this riff, which we had done in other kinds of settings, it was even more powerful. What it would mean is, you would go from maybe a niggun to doing something with words, then you would stop. Or, some people who weren't fluent in

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Hebrew would sometimes daven in English. But, you always had the right to stop and do a spiritual riff on a particular word. So, the words had to be meaningful.

MF: Could I add something to this? Because I think it's really important. I think there were two things about the silence, the niggun, and the English. I think that the niggun and the silence were to create a readiness, a spiritual readiness for prayer. When we sat down, we didn't just jump into the tefilah, even when we were doing a more full version of the tefilah. We had to prepare ourselves. That was a very strong value, spiritually. The other is, it's like now when I'm doing a workshop, right? I'm a psychologist. I do lectures, and I say, “I'm going to do an exercise.” I say, "Okay, get yourself into that nice pose ready to do some mindfulness," and then we do whatever the exercise is. Everybody sits up in their chair. They know exactly what I'm talking about. That's what we did.

JG: What did you do?

MF: We would sit on our cushions. We would close our eyes. We would go into a sort of meditative state. I don't think that many people were doing Buddhist meditation at that point, maybe a few, but it was more, we would breathe. We would just have quiet.

BF: Quiet melodies.

MF: There would be quite a long period of quiet, and then the leader would start a niggun very slowly. So, there was that piece of just getting ready. We really nurtured the spiritual through this. The other thing is, we all — many of us, not all of us — (03:00:00) and certainly not later on in the havurah — but many of us came from pretty traditional Conservative backgrounds, and there was a sense, as I said, that it was sort of meaningless. It was rote. You just said the prayers. You didn't know what you were saying, you didn't care what you were saying. So, this issue of introducing English was really interesting, because we weren't — or, at least those of us who were in the central group — weren’t from the Reform Movement, where everything — a lot was in English. That was really jarring, right? Like, lashon hakodesh is Hebrew. But, almost to jar us out of our complacency, we would — and, I think Art did this a fair amount — we would say stuff in English, and it would be, it wouldn't just be reading from the translation, but we would have our own creative version of insight, including just saying the person's own translation into English of what the Hebrew was. That would be very jarring also, and that would be also very spiritually awakening. The whole point was to wake us up spiritually. I think all these were part of that.

BF: Yeah. I must say, when you think about the tone, somehow there's a genius about it. I've never — I've been around a lot of spirituality — I never saw again what was never

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prepared for but always happened. It would start quietly. It would build up. It would know somehow, through some kind of holy grace, how many times you had to repeat it, how you would back down, how long you would wait with sounds, and it was almost perfect every time. Part of that had to have been because everyone was somehow in tune with each other. It was so remarkable because it was never planned.

MF: I think we were also a little fussy about who davened, and who lead davening.

BF: Yeah, but it was always spiritually right, that issue of how loud, how soft, how many times, when you interrupt. It was tefilah. It was prayer.

JG: Many people have talked about the neo-hasidic aspects of tefilah, particularly at Havurat Shalom. What would you say about that, and how did mystical or hasidic, or neo-hasidic elements kind of come into it — both generally but, you know, specifically.

BF: Because there was — a lot of people were interested in a lot of hasidic masters, particularly, in those days, Rebbe Nachman. The desire to sing Yiddish melodies. I won't mention the particular person, but one person (03:03:00) was sort of considered to be the master of all of these melodies. We thought that this person was channeling something they had from their family background. It turned out that that person had memorized records. [laughs]

MF: Well, a lot of us did.

BF: A lot of us did, but the important thing was, this was sort of in the beginning of a lot of the Lubavitch records coming out. But, there was an intentional appropriation of what wasn't ours. Eastern Europe wasn't ours. The melodies — there was an intentional appropriation, and then it became ours through the havurah. In other words, it became what was characteristic. It was one of the first forms of true American Judaism. We were creating an authentic form of American spirituality, in some ways on the fly, but in relationship with the traditional sources. But then, even with the niggunim, the whole reason that it became so powerful is that it was being channeled back into a very distinctive American spirituality. That's what gave part of it its unique tone, because none of us grew up with that as a kind of family inheritance.

MF: But there's another piece of this, which is the study piece and how it plays into it. Many of us — [to BF] I don't know, did you study with Art? Did you take some of his classes? I studied with Art. I was a full-time student at the havurah for a year, and one of my teachers was Art. We studied hasidic masters, and the hasidic masters we studied

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would then sync really powerfully with the davening of the niggunim from the davening of that period of the master.

JG: And you would learn the niggunim how?

MF: We would learn — we would sing the niggunim. Sometimes we would, I think we would sometimes sing the niggunim before we studied.

BF: Somebody would have taught it. I don't know who, but somebody would have taught it.

MF: Then on Wednesday night dinner together, at services Saturday morning, we would — there would be this infusion of the neo-hasidic. And the "neo" piece was that we weren't in the narrower mind view of the hasidic masters back then, right? In several ways. We were enlightened —

BF: Conscious appropriation.

MF: We were secular in our own way, open to secular experience. Halachic practice varied among people, but the point is, the wisdom that we were learning in the classroom was of a piece with the davening. They went together, and I think there were niggunim in all contexts as well.

JG: Buzzy, you keep referring to it as "cultural appropriation." Yet, for many people, was there not a sense of their own family roots in this, however —?

BF: There was a gap. There was a gap. There wasn't anyone who had this from their family of origin. In other (03:06:00) words —

MF: Zalman.

BF: Okay, Zalman. But there was no person who had grown up in a hasidic setting who had this as a living experience. In many cases it came — Shlomo was involved, but Shlomo was contemporaneous with what we were doing.

JG: Carlebach.

BF: Shlomo Carlebach. The House of Love and Prayer, Shlomo Carlebach. But in many case these were the appropriation, through Belzer, Modzitz, other kinds of records that were first being produced at that time, and we were learning it and appropriating it. So, it

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was authentic in the sense that we wanted to channel it and make it our own. It was not authentic in the sense that we had heard our fathers or grandfathers singing these melodies.

JG: Would you say appropriation and reclamation?

BF: Yes. I'm using “appropriation” sort of in a traditional, hermeneutic sense of appropriating a culture, ingesting it, interpreting it, transforming it into a new spiritual voice. I think it does bear saying. People talk about neo-Hasidism and I understand that term, but really what we were doing was, we were creating a new form of American Jewish spirituality. It made deep use of that. That's what I really mean by appropriation, in that technical sense.

MF: Also there was a sense of excitement that in our own tradition were these hidden gems. I know when I studied Hasidut with Art, or I learned with Buzzy, I mean, it was so exciting, and it was so different from the sort of somewhat rote or deadened or sanitized version that we had gotten in Hebrew school, and that we didn't get in other contexts. I feel like there was a real sense of excitement, not from our parents or grandparents necessarily, but more that it was there waiting to be reclaimed, I guess.

BF: But then it had to be reclaimed through spiritual translation. That was part of our American Judaism, and our Western knowledge was part of that translation process. It wasn't just what it was for Nachman. It was Nachman as Nachman became an American Jewish spiritual counterculture type, right?

MF: With liberal values and feminism.

BF: Right. So, that's part of what that new wave was, that new wave of Jewish spirituality.

JG: Yeah. So, this tension between the traditional and innovation, traditional and experimentation, I think also extended (03:09:00) to non-Jewish sources, as included —

BF: You mean in the havurah itself.

JG: In the havurah.

BF: Where it was appropriate. So, we did —

MF: What are you referring to? Are you referring to —

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JG: I'm referring to use of secular music, poetry, etcetera.

BF: It was incorporated. If someone had a poem, you could incorporate it into the liturgy as one of those things that emerged from the silence. Or singing it or doing that. That was — everything that was taken in had to find the right balance and tone within the tradition. It wasn't like these were biological spots that stood out. If it didn't fit in organically, someone — it was the hazan's choice — may have introduced it, but it didn't last. It had to stay there. I think that was a very traditional way. It even happened among hasidim, who would borrow non-Jewish melodies. I remember it was very, very powerful to me at one point. I didn't bring it into the havurah, but I brought it into times when I studied with my sons on Shabbat afternoon. There was one very particular Benedictine chant I had learned at a Benedictine monastery, and it fit absolutely perfectly for the Ashrei. I would do this only on Shabbat afternoon. But, there was a way that if the melody was right, it could be brought into a Jewish context. With the hasidim, maalin b’kodesh, you raise it into a holy place. The same thing would be for poems. In other words, the Jewish liturgy was the matrix, and where other things could be melded in. The other thing I would simply say is that they were not permanently melded in. They became moments of a person who is the leader, who felt they wanted to introduce that at that moment. It wouldn't become part of the liturgy.

MF: I want to just add — and this is ongoing — recently I came across a “Lecha Dodi” to “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, which is all over the internet now. It's just gorgeous. Then we also — the Shaker hymn, "Lord Prepare Me to be a Sanctuary" — we now do it to “Pitchu Li Shaarei Tzedek.” These melodies are amazing (03:12:00) and, on the one hand, it jars you from whatever the usual tune is that you're using, and on the other hand, it opens you to a deeper spirituality. It's very powerful.

JG: It wakes you up, in a sense.

MF: It wakes you up. I think that started for us with Havurat Shalom. I don't think either of us had any experience with it before. It was exciting.

BF: It wasn't part of our spiritual heritage from the family.

JG: Can you recall any instances of that kind of experimentation of songs from the Civil Rights era, other Jewish — I mean, the American folk tradition — that became somehow melded with Jewish song?

MF: During Havurat Shalom?

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BF: Yeah, it was [inaudible, see addendum] (03:12:40) right? That was — isn't that a Quaker melody?

MF: I don't think so.

BF: [sings, see addendum]

MF: No, I don't think so. I think that's one of the hasidic melodies. I don't actually remember that. I'm sure there are some —

BF: I think it's Quaker.

MF: But I don't remember.

JG: Which one are you thinking of, that you think might be Quaker?

BF: [sings, see addendum]

MF: [joins singing] I don't think so. I think it's a hasidic melody.

BF: I don't think so.

MF: Anyway, there were a lot of melodies.

BF: It was internalized. If those things worked, they became part of our shared tradition. Otherwise they would just become individual moments that someone was introducing. The criterion was whether it served the community, not whether it just was something that was interesting for one person one week in their life or something.

JG: Are there any instances you can think of at the moment that sort of did become part of the havurah liturgy, the havurah way, along these lines — that did have lasting value to the community?

BF: You mean in terms of davening style?

JG: Specific songs, melodies, prayers.

BF: It depends who you ask. People —

MF: Wasn't it “Kotzker” —?

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BF: Yeah, that's the one I was thinking about, because David Roskies wanted to — because there was a famous melody in Kotzk they used to sing in Yiddish and things like that. Some people wanted that to be the havurah theme song, but [laughs] it was —

MF: It's more the tradition for me. It's more that it opened up. Like, we both went to the Western Priory at one point. The Brothers there were very special people and friends, and they had a singing tradition, and we had songs from there. So, we would play those songs, and then we would play “Pirchei” at home, right. In other words, there was a sense that there was — and we weren't necessarily (03:15:00) into meditating in the Buddhist sense; we didn't get into that then — but there was a sense of the richness of traditions and they didn't have to shut each other down. It was a sense that they could borrow and learn and grow.

BF: But that was the sixties, so —

MF: Yeah, but today, too. That stayed with us.

BF: Everything — but that was part of our world in the sixties. You could hear everything, and that was informing you, but being Jewish was the center point. Everything was possible and being Jewish was at the center. How that happened depends on the individuals.

JG: Can you describe the role of Torah reading and Torah discussion as it evolved in those early years at Havurat Shalom?

BF: Well, at the very beginning we didn't have a Sefer Torah. So —

MF: We had it by the second year.

BF: Yeah, but the first year we didn't.

JG: So what did you do?

BF: So we took out a text, and we had aliyot around the text. Then people either had been assigned or spontaneously would give a d’var torah at different moments of that reading.

JG: In the midst of the reading?

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BF: Well, no, at the appropriate stations. After an aliyah, something like that. It was done from a book. No one would interrupt the reading. That was not halachically proper. But, between aliyot, then there would be a time for either people who had prepared something, or after. When we finally got a Sefer Torah, then it became much more traditional event. That was a center point in the service because that wicker basket was in the center of the room. [laughs] So, again, that was one of those features where it became more traditional, but in the havurah style. Or, the way the Torah would be — how do you even describe the way the Torah would be passed around? When it came out, it wasn't like one person carried it around. It went from hand to hand. So, it was the transmission of tradition. It was very spiritual. Everything was very physically — the boundary between the physical and the spiritual was impermeable. Or, it was permeable, I should say. It was permeable. So, that was a feature. I remember it would go around — I remember it going around like a baby. It was a Sefer Torah, and it went around like a baby. I mean, I haven't thought about this in maybe thirty, forty years, but it was, that's what it was. (03:18:00)

JG: Women would also?

BF: Of course. There was no — everybody was together.

JG: Would women actually leyn?

BF: Of course.

JG: Yeah?

MF: I think so.

JG: Did women know how to leyn?

MF: Some did, some didn't.

BF: I mean, they learned, whatever. You got yourself to a place where you could do it. When you did, you did it.

MF: But I think in our years it was mostly men leading the service and leyning.

BF: Yeah. It took a while, but we also had some extraordinary models. I mean, that first year was Zalman.

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MF: We also were there only for the very first years. We left in '71 so I could go to graduate school in Western Massachusetts. So we were there from ‘68 to ‘71.

BF: The most intense part was the most intense first three or four years. But, Zalman was extraordinary.

JG: How so? How was he extraordinary and a model?

MF: He was only with us for one year, by the way.

BF: In which way?

JG: In this regard, talking about him as an extraordinary figure.

BF: Zalman had a God-given genius for awakening the soul of anything. [laughs]

MF: Including grass. [laughs]

BF: Anything. Anything.

MF: As I told you at Camp Ramah.

BF: He could take any melody that you had heard, and you thought it was just a humdrum thing, and introduce it into a prayer spontaneously, and the prayer would be transformed. Or he could do it in the opposite way. In other words, he had a way of taking liturgical moments and making them holy moments. There was nothing — it wasn't secular. He just had this genius, particularly in prayer and in melody, to know the right rhythm, what melody from any place, God knows whether it was hasidic or not, that would fit the words. I remember [laughs], I remember the first time I saw it happen. At first I thought I was going to jump out the window, and then I realized what he was doing. We took over — one of the first places we davened was the Tremont Street shul, which is in Cambridge. In those days, it was just dilapidated, and they wanted us to help — eventually it became a central point for Shavuot and Simchat Torah —

MF: — they wanted us to help make a minyan.

BF: But there was once they called us, and I think it was the first time that Zalman had come to town. All of a sudden, he sort of looks around, and you could see that he saw that everybody had this glazed look in their eye. This is the first time I saw him do this. He started to do “Ashrei” or something to "She'll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain When

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She Comes." And, (03:21:00) like, it electrified everybody. It was something like that. I remember it was "She'll Be Coming ‘Round The Mountain."

MF: Just started laughing.

BF: But, like, all of a sudden, it got people into the right place. [laughs] Like he just, he just — he was from another dimension.

MF: Well, he did in that context something similar to what I was describing earlier about the niggun and the silence and the English. It's about jolting you out of your complacency spiritually and opening you up to something new.

BF: But he could do it on the fly with a spiritual intuition that was something that comes along so rarely in the world.

MF: His input was very important. He was only with us for the first year, but it was a very important year. He would periodically visit, or something.

JG: In terms of the way people approached the idea of offering a d’var torah, can you say anything about how that happened in the havurah?

BF: I think in the beginning, for a number of people, they were imitating Art — very poorly. [laughs]

JG: [laughs] What does that mean?

BF: Well, Art knew how to do it. He knew how to give over a d’var torah in an American spiritual idiom. He had the knowledge and he had the wisdom and he knew how to do it. Then a lot of people wanted to be hasidic wannabes, and they didn't have hasidic texts, they didn't have the spiritual wisdom, this and that, [laughs] but they wanted to be a wannabe. They wanted to do it. The model would be that kind of adaptation of a drasha, or a sermon, but it would be done in an American spiritual idiom. But Art could pull it off, and most of the people couldn't, or they would have to do something that was a variation. So, the d’var torah varied, but that was certainly the most traditional type. Otherwise, people would kind of give their own — usually it descended into a sort of psychological, personal reading of some phrase. [laughs]

JG: So, a lot of the critique of the d’vrei torah in the havurah in that period is that they were overly subjective, in that they —

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BF: Well, that was a quality —

MF: Wait, I'm curious what other people have said. Overly subjective and not based in traditional texts, or what?

JG: Overly subjective at the expense of (03:24:00) the text.

MF: [nods] Mm-hm. I think that's fair.

BF: Well, later on we can talk about study, but that was my shocking experience at the beginning, and it took me awhile to realize what was positive and what I wanted to hold on to from that. I was already on the faculty at Brandeis when I was still a graduate student, so I was already teaching advanced level courses even in the early days of the havurah. Before I had gotten my doctorate, I was on the faculty. I remember one of the first courses I was giving was on some certain psalms.

JG: At the havurah?

BF: At the havurah. Stuff that I may have already done at Brandeis, but in an academic way. Then I remember, so, this was — names will go unnamed — I was teaching the text, and you always try to find the right balance between the technicalities of the text and its content, or even its spiritual wisdom. Then, one or two guys lay down on the floor while I was teaching and started to groove. [places hand on forehead and rocks back and forth, laughs] And then they started to talk, and I said, "Did you hear one word that I said about the text?" [laughs] And they did and they didn't, but they wanted to emote. That was the most extreme example.

JG: So, they were emoting to each other about the text?

BF: They were listening to me teach, and they thought I was doing a groovy job, in a different way than I thought I was. [laughs] They were getting high on my teaching, and then they felt like they needed to say something about what they were going off on. I remember at first I was totally shocked. Then I realized that Brandeis was the other end of the negative balance, too. It was dry academic philological study, and this was, in some cases, empty spiritualized subjective responses. I began to realize how — I had to myself, because I was teaching in both places — trying to figure out a pedagogy. That actually became very important to me, to try to be (03:27:00) appropriately spiritual and also philological in both kinds of ways, to kind of figure that out. But that was a very extreme case, where the difference between really mastering a text and sort of breathing it [laughs] and I say it now with humor, in its own way it was very beautiful. But the

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contrast was so high, and the very fact that they got down on the floor like they were holy rollers or something [laughs] at that moment was very powerful.

SESSION 2: OCTOBER 18, 2017 (03:27:38)

JG: Today is Wednesday, October 18th, 2017, and I'm here with Buzzy and Mona Fishbane in their new home in Teaneck, New Jersey. We're going to pick up our interview for the Jewish Counterculture Oral History Project that we began last May and did a first session for. When we concluded that session, we were discussing the evolution of spiritual and liturgical practices in the first couple of years of Havurat Shalom, 1968- 1971, before you left so that Mona could continue her studies. So, I'd like to pick up our discussion today by delving into the issue of Gender Studies, gender issues and Jewish feminism, which we just began touching on last spring. Let's begin with women's roles within tefilah in the first few years of the havurah. Again, some of these questions are directed to one of you in particular, and otherwise either one of you can feel free to sort of jump in and augment what each other is saying.

When the havurah first began, what is your memory of whether women had any public roles at that point in public worship?

BF: My recollection was that those women who wanted to serve as prayer leaders — so, it was considered hazan's choice, so the prayer leader's choice — who could decide how much Hebrew, how much chanting, how much intersecting English that was done in chant, and how the Torah service would go, or the discussion. I have a fairly distinct recollection that Janet Wolfe, who at that time was Barry Holtz's wife, did participate as a hazanit. I don't think anybody called them a hazan. It was just sort of like the leader at that time. There were no restrictions at that point with respect to that because that was simply, everybody was participatory. As I recall, there was never an issue that came up for that, or for women who would (03:30:00) give a d’var torah, a kind of a sermon or a teaching, either on Wednesday night communal meals, or Friday night or Saturday. That was totally open. It was only in a particular issue that had particular halachic significance that Mona can talk about, that we actually had to make a kind of communal decision, because there was a little pushback or hesitation.

MF: So, I think what you were referring to was the issue of, are women counted in our minyan?

BF: Well, the particular event that took place on the retreat.

MF: Right. We've discussed that already.

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JG: We've discussed it a little, yeah.

MF: So, I mean, until that moment — this was 1968 — I think we were a bit clueless. I don't think we were thinking in terms of gender as much as we were the anti-war movement, the anti-establishment in terms of Judaism, in terms of, you know, we were very full of exuberance about our new vision of what Judaism could be. What I did notice is that no women applied and were accepted to the Havurat Shalom community seminary. There were women who came along with their men. There were quite a few of them, and many of them visited. Kathy Green was, of course, there, zichronah livracha. We just lost Kathy. So, she was there as a stable presence.

JG: And they actually lived in part of the havurah.

BF: Yes.

MF: Right, so they lived in the Cambridge house. They had half the house. Half the house was theirs, half the house was the havurah. So, Kathy was a stable presence there, and Kathy was both a mother figure to some of the younger people and a spiritual person. I don't think she led services or taught herself. I could be wrong. But her kitchen was a major draw. [laughs]

JG: Shabbos dinner at the Green's, among other things, right?

MF: Yeah.

BF: In some ways, the whole issue of that first wave of feminism, of the feminist mystique. We generally had this feeling that we were at the crest of openness and egalitarian sharing, and it never crossed our minds until questions came up about how we would handle halachic questions. We considered ourselves really at the forefront of that kind of openness, and I think a lot of people would have shared that at that time. Somehow, as Mona said, we were clueless. It just wasn't an issue that was on the table, because we didn't make — all of the partners of the men, (03:33:00) the women were going to graduate school, or in education, or involved in all kinds of things. They were equally involved in the anti-war movement or any other kind of social issues that we were doing. So, we were sort of part of that larger American and Cambridge ambiance of gender openness, and it came as a little bit of a shock when we had to kind of consider the halachic issue when those issues arose.

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MF: It wasn't just the halachic issue. Again, I think we were a little blind to the fact that it was basically a men's group, and there were a few women sprinkled in.

JG: Art Green described it as a pre-feminist moment.

MF: I think so. I mean, we weren't anti-feminist. We weren't like, holding down the traditional bastions. I think we were just not aware. I, in 1970 — so we were already in Somerville — I spent the year '70-'71 studying full time at the havurah. I think I was the only woman who did at that point. I mean, Kathy came when she chose to to classes, but in terms of making a commitment, I did that. I didn't apply or anything, I was just there, and I didn't feel like I was breaking any rules. I didn't feel like I was pushing myself in. I just felt very comfortable with all these guys, and we were all buddies. There was also a sort of interesting way of referring — you know, to try to sort of make it safe sexually, in terms of sexual harassment, not that that was ever on our minds — but everyone was called "uncle" in the house in Cambridge. In Somerville, but I think in Cambridge especially. So, I was Uncle Mona, he was Uncle Buzzy, so-and-so was uncle this one. It was a way of kind of taking away the gender tensions.

BF: Well, the emotional bond always had a slight erotic tinge, because there was a lot of touching. There was a lot of hugging, singing together, and people shared very deeply across lines, and very spontaneously that language, that everybody was called uncle, created a kind of family atmosphere, and it kind of toned down what could have been — there never was even the hint of any kind of impropriety among all the people who were together in such continuous ways for years and years. But this was an interesting, spontaneous way, that we were sort of all referred to with the same sort of sobriquet, as it were.

JG: Am I correct that "Uncle House" was a term? Uncle House —

BF: I don't remembe —

MF: I think so. I think there was probably somebody — maybe Joel Rosenberg because he was living there — I think that may have been referring to the second house, the house in Somerville. (03:36:00)

JG: Dorton?

MF: Not Dorton. Dorton was people who lived away from Somerville.

JG: You mean the other havurah house.

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MF: So, there were two houses. One in Cambridge, and then in '69 in Somerville. Then there were people living in the house. A lot of people lived outside the house. So, when we were married in '69, we had an apartment of our own, but we always had people over and vice versa. Then there was a group of people who lived Dorton. Dorton is the Yiddish for "over there." So, they lived a little bit of a distance away from the Somerville house.

BF: That was the first — they were alien. Dorton also were — there were several people who became baalei teshuva, and in that process of their transformation, they opted for a much more traditional lifestyle. It became a little bit of a tension because they wanted to impose that, and many of the other people had grown up in traditional homes and were struggling for a new way. Their new way was to go back to an old way, and then it became a general decision that sociologically they would live there, and eventually, that "there-ness," they moved to Brooklyn or something like that. Then they were no longer part of it. So, all the Yiddish connotations of dorton were in play.

JG: Mona, to go back to our focus on tefilah and women's roles in tefilah, what's your recollection of your own experience, as a woman, of prayer.

MF: So, first of all, I don't remember women leading prayer. When you said that Janet did, it rang a bell. Many of the people, certainly faculty — aside from Buzzy, everybody thinks he's a rabbi but he's not — but many of them were rabbis, or had been at JTS. So there was a lot of rabbinic knowledge in the room, in the men. I don't think most of the women had that solid background. I mean, we had whatever we had. I had a very solid background, but not at the level of going to JTS and doing graduate work in Jewish studies. So, it just felt natural to me that I would defer to other people. I didn't feel like, oh, I want to do this. I think if I had wanted to, it would have been fine. I don't recall that I ever led services. Maybe I read Torah, I don't know.

BF: No, I don't think so.

MF: And maybe Janet led some meditation?

BF: I think women filled that in through teachings, or on the communal meals. It's sort of like we didn't think — even in that respect, we had very obsessive communal discussions and meals, and those were never issues. It's sort of like they got resolved spontaneously. They were never matters of friction or deliberation.

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MF: (03:39:00) I don't think they were resolved spontaneously. I think they were never addressed.

BF: Yeah, but —

MF: I think Art's statement, it's pre-feminist —

BF: But people sort of fell into whatever pattern they wanted, and it wasn't that people were pushing for anything else.

MF: For example, I was into making pies, and for our communal meals I would make the pies. And all these men loved my pies, and I really got high on that idea, right? I mean, it's not a very feminist perspective, but it didn't even occur to me, and I'm a feminist. I was raised as a feminist. I went to Wellesley College. But maybe because I was raised in a feminist home from the get-go, and because I went to Wellesley, I wasn't constantly fighting against male chauvinism whatever. I didn't come to Havurat Shalom with a burden of anger or resentment or limitations, so I didn't feel like my pies were a lesser contribution. I also was very serious in the studying. I was there for a year, and I remember David Roskies was my hevruta, and we studied very seriously. I felt taken seriously. I felt like a full member of the community. At one point I was a, whatever we called it —

BF: A nudge. The person —

MF: Monthly or every three months, we sort of rotated the person who was [does air quotations] “in charge.”

BF: Well, we had the people in charge, but of course the people in charge were just as spacey as the people who were not in charge.

MF: Was nudge the term you heard?

BF: Yeah. The nudge was the monthly nudge who would make sure that —

MF: They'd do what they're supposed to do. [laughs]

BF: And we had to have a term like nudge so that no one would feel resentful. [laughs]

MF: The very first time that the issue of women and halachah, or women and stance religiously came up was that time and the issue of women saying kaddish. That was —

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and it was, like, a shocking moment, for me and for everybody else it seems like. It was like we just bumped up against something that we hadn't even seen before.

JG: Why was it shocking?

MF: Well, first of all, again, I was raised in a feminist home. My father used to spout Ashley Montagu on the superiority of women, and my mother was totally on board with that. She loved it. My sister and I got a lot out of that. My brother, who passed away this past November, I think it was not so easy for him. [laughs] But for my sister and me, my parents basically said that we should get our PhDs before we get our first child. So, expectations were very high, and it wasn't like, you must do this. It was like the sky's the limit.

BF: But the shock issue was, feminism wasn't an issue at JTS, and it wasn't a reason why the people who went to JTS wanted to create the havurah. It was done for spiritual reasons, but the feminism wasn't even an issue with what they were struggling with there. The fact was, when Epi was there with his first wife, they both came from a more traditional home than any of us had come from, in Toronto. So, when the issue came up of saying kaddish, (03:42:00) it was a real halachic question that we had to face by a person who had to confront that — then confronting it through his lens, whether he was going to then move with the ethos. What was interesting about a whole variety of questions is that — and Art actually wrote about this as well, in the piece that Hillel contributed to, talking about the same event — whatever kind of semi-halachic kinds of questions came up that dealt with how we would run services or do things, we actually took out the Talmudic sources, and people sat down at the communal meals, and we sometimes deliberated for several weeks. Then we would come to a decision based on halachic sources. When this moment happened, we had —

JG: Just recount for one second what the moment was.

BF: That moment was that Epi Epstein —

MF: We were on a retreat.

BF: We were on a retreat and he had to say kaddish, and he looked around and he said, "There are only nine people. There's only nine men and Mona." And Mona said, "But I'm a person."

MF: No, what happened was, it happened a little bit differently. We were outside. Only some of us got up early enough to be at this minyan. Not a lot of people did. I was one of

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them, and Epi said, "There isn't a minyan here," and I counted noses and there were ten of us. I was not being provocative. I was just like, well, there are ten of us. I didn't even think to think that way.

JG: Your experience, it sounds like, to that point in the havurah, women were —

MF: Yeah, women were full citizens.

BF: Well we —

MF: Let me just finish. So, that was the moment. It was like, “Oh.” Everyone, I think, stopped at that moment and thought, or maybe, or whatever —

BF: Epi had to make a halachic decision —

MF: No, we said, we said — somebody said — Epi should make the choice for this moment, and then we're going to have to consider the whole issue. So, Epi made the decision, and it was okay with him.

BF: And then we never had a halachic discussion. It was clear to everybody that this is the way we have to go.

MF: I think we finally decided, I mean when you say halachic, we didn't take out the Talmud —

BF: No, but Art also referred to this. He said it was obvious at that point, and we didn't have to go back and confirm this, or in any way, with any traditional sources of permissibility, or whether in fact it wasn't permitted. We decided that's what we needed to do, because once that decision was made, it became the clear issue that — it was an identity forming moment, actually.

MF: So it was actually, that's why I said (03:45:00) it was such a startling moment. It was like, we were blind and then it was clear. There was no struggle, like, factions pulling in this way or that way. Epi did have the choice, because he was saying kaddish, and I didn't experience him as that observant, or as more observant than the rest of us. Maybe he had a more observant background. But we all just hadn't confronted it, and then we did, and then it was a done deal. I don't recall it being a huge struggle.

JG: And he made that decision basically on the spot. Is that right?

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BF: Yeah.

MF: Yeah.

BF: Well, at that point none of us had lost a family member to make that decision.

MF: We were all pretty young.

BF: Well, to discuss a minyan issue.

JG: Did it, however, prompt you all to recognize that you had crossed a new threshold, in terms of halachic issues and goals?

BF: As I recall, we did it for ourselves. What eventually happened several years down the road is that some of the other seminaries — JTS and Reconstruction — the larger notion of — we became competitors for certain students, and it influenced the social changes that were going on elsewhere. But we didn't do it as a sociological movement, changing it sociologically. We did it for ourselves, but it became a much larger issue. Then, of course, that affected the New York Havurah, and then the Fabrangen in Washington, and gradually that produced a kind of mass that made some of the other places feel that this was an issue on the agenda that had to be discussed if they were going to get certain kinds of students.

MF: Well, also, the larger world changed.

JG: So, I wanted to ask you, Mona, to what extent you were thinking about feminist issues in general. This was the late sixties we're talking about, and just turning to seventies. So were you involved at all? What were you aware of at that point? What were you thinking about?

MF: Well, I can tell you that my Master's thesis on my way to my doctoral dissertation was on couples who were at the cusp of liberation. So, I studied traditional couples and [does air quotes] “liberational” couples.

JG: This was in the late sixties?

MF: No, this was later. This was in '73. I was just starting to be aware. Now, again, I have many, many friends, certainly at Wellesley, certainly in other contexts through my life, who really had struggled with being kept down. Being told (03:48:00) by their parents or whatever — in graduate school, I experienced this too — they were told they

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should be a nurse or a teacher, and you have to dumb down to get a guy. We never were told that at Wellesley. I mean, that's one of the reasons I loved being there. It's like, just soar. It was the same message I got from my house growing up. But a lot of women had to struggle against that message. I didn't, so for me, I just felt entitled, I guess, to be a full person wherever I went, including Havurat Shalom. That minyan moment was the one time where we had to bump up against that. Certainly throughout my time at the havurah, I never felt like a second class citizen. I mean, I didn't have as much learning as some of the people did, some of the men especially, but I felt like I was entitled to learn, to contribute to the conversation, to be a leader when it was appropriate.

JG: So, this incident with Epi's decision took place before the founding of Ezrat Nashim.

BF: Yeah.

MF: I don't know what year that was.

JG: Seventy-one –– seventy-two.

BF: Oh yeah.

MF: Oh, definitely. It was '68, or '69 probably.

BF: Oh yeah.

JG: Sixty-eight –– sixty-nine. Were you involved with, associated with, any of the people who did get involved in the very beginnings of Ezrat Nashim?

MF: No.

BF: I may be wrong, and Art might be able to correct this, but there was a magazine that was being formulated in Cambridge. Was Nashim part of it? There were a couple of people who were part of the Yiddish Workmen's Circle group. They were more socially active. They had come from traditional homes, and they became Liberationists, Marxists, things like that. It wasn't — maybe it was Lilith. It was Lilith. That was being edited in Cambridge, in discussions at the havurah. At the same time, we were — our parallel publication was Response Magazine. Then we did the New Jew. Mintz edited that, and the Response Magazine was coming out quarterly. A lot of people wrote articles in that. There was a Gottlieb, Aviva. They would come, and then there were discussions (03:51:00:00) about types of feminist readings, or more aggressive feminist perspectives that were coming through that. But it never was a large issue. Also, people gave

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expression to some of those things in places like Boston After Dark. There were a lot of these funny underground publications that were going around in these circles where people would express themselves, and this was just one mode of feminism, the Lilith side. It was way before the extreme feminist movement that also was connected with Lilith and moon issues and stuff that developed in the early years of the Reconstructionist Seminary. I think Tikva Frymer-Kensky was part of — there was a whole other issue that was playing off larger issues of women with a y, and witch with a y.

MF: That was a little later, though. That wasn't during our period.

BF: That was a much larger issue, and that hadn't yet surfaced, that radical feminism. This Lilith magazine was a kind of early expression. I remember having conversations in the havurah on some of those topics.

JG: So, in this early period — were you going to say something?

MF: No, I was just going to say, I don't think we addressed it. I just don't. Even after that moment, the minyan moment. I just don't think we addressed it. I think we were, again, relatively clueless. We were focusing on the Vietnam War. We were focusing on rejuvenating American Judaism and text study and our chevrashaft.

JG: You did mention something that was a significant factor for many women, which is that many women came from relatively impoverished backgrounds Jewishly, in comparison to the men who were involved.

MF: I wouldn't say impoverished. I think a lot of the women — well, I can't say how many — but some of the women were raised Conservative like I was. I got a very good education. I went through Hebrew high school and a year of Hebrew college and Camp Ramah and I was fluent in Hebrew.

BF: It just wasn't advanced rabbinic knowledge.

MF: People hadn't gone to graduate school in Jewish studies — women — or JTS or anything like that. I was in the mode Jewishly, in terms of text study, of soaking it in. I just felt it was such a privilege to learn with Buzzy or Art of whatever.

JG: In terms of tefilah, though, would you say that you recall any significant sort of first times that women did something in the minyan, besides being counted in a minyan?

MF: I don't remember. Do you?

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BF: No. No.

MF: We were there in the very early years. I know things changed a lot in the seventies. (03:54:00)

JG: So, women read Torah? They did everything that men —

MF: I'm assuming so.

BF: I don't — in the early years we didn't have a Sefer Torah, so the prayer service was that people would read or chant from the book, and then there would be discussions. But even after we got a Sefer Torah, I think men did that, but that's just the way — it fell out. I mean, I don't think it was —

JG: Women have told me that part of that was because they didn't know how to do it. They had to learn.

BF: Probably.

MF: Well, I knew how to read Torah, and I don't know that I ever led services, but —

BF: I don't think you ever did that.

MF: I don't think I ever did. I don't know.

JG: All right, well, let's move on.

MF: I guess we went back to clueless pretty quickly after. [laughs]

JG: Yeah, and as you were saying, many of the developments in Jewish Feminism began in the seventies, and sort of built —

BF: That snowball of women being empowered for study took place —

MF: And challenging certain norms, and the intensity of it all.

BF: That took off in the early seventies.

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JG: Yeah, and then B'not Esh was formed in '81, and the more sort of experimentation with liturgy. For instance, do you recall, were Imahot part of —?

MF: No.

BF: No.

JG: This was all before that. So, all of those kinds of changes were a little bit off. Not a lot, but several years.

BF: It never even came up.

MF: Pre-feminist.

JG: Okay. So, in addition to the creation of a spiritual community, an intrinsic part of the havurah's concept of community was the role of study and learning, and of course both of you were very involved. You, Buzzy, were a faculty member when you came in. Can you describe what the vision was for the havurah in terms of the role of teaching and learning, and its place within the community, and in Jewish life?

BF: So, let me — I could preface it with a couple of broad generalizations, and then I'll give you a very interesting event that took place that actually was transformative for me, because I was simultaneously teaching at Brandies, and doing traditional German-style Wissenschaft Jewish studies. So, the conceptual background can't be separated from the fact that one of our teachers was Nahum Glatzer at Brandeis, for Art and myself. Glatzer was a student of Rosenzweig and Buber, (03:57:00) but he also taught in the Frankfurt Lehrhaus. One of the features of the Frankfurt Lehrhaus was that everybody can contribute to study on the basis of their life experience. So, Rosenzweig's notion was that people would move not from the center to the periphery, but from the periphery to the center, and that the hierarchy of teacher-student was broken down by the fact that there would be an initiator of a discourse, but as long as people stayed with the subject matter, they could bring their life experience. For the Jews in Germany at that time, that brought them closer to the ideal of beginning to learn. So, there was this notion of creating a new type of Talmud Torah, of study, and a new type of Beit Midrash, where learning, the term learning, continued, but the style of learning was not simply a person who would give the main shiur, the haput shiur in German, and then everyone would go off and come back, but it would be interactive. Life experience was a core value in terms of what a text meant. So, in one of the early meetings, in fact, we were steeped in that from Glatzer. Glatzer had written some articles in the Leo Baeck Yearbook on the opening curriculum, the style. We moved from his own particular style. Professor Altman — in effect there

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was a Lehrhaus in Berlin at that point, although it was a very different style of study. When we first met at JTS in '67, when we were in early discussions that summer and continuously —

MF: You don't mean JTS. You mean Brandeis.

BF: We met, I remember an initial meeting at JTS when I was at a Society of Biblical Literature meeting.

MF: Oh, okay.

JG: Society of —

BF: Biblical Literature meeting. I was asked. It was at Union Seminary, and I met some of the people for the first time when they were discussing that. That continued to this notion of how we could have a notion where everybody could contribute, and that there would not be top-down learning. That was almost the sociological way also that we were addressing the question that was affecting the synagogues of the Conservative Movement, where a rabbi would be three feet higher and talking down, and there would be an audience. When those synagogues developed havurot as sub-groups, it was precisely to have (04:00:00) this horizontal, interactive learning. So, this was a very important principle for all of us, because of the style of the sixties, life experience was often subjective, psychological, highly personalized, and often not on topic, but what the topic stimulated as a form of subjective association. That sometimes had to be controlled, because people would say, "This reminds me of thinking of this," or "I'm having this feeling." Discussions would become overly personalized, and it moved away from the text. So, let me shift to an interesting experience that I had simultaneously while I was teaching at Brandeis. This may have been '69, probably the first year I was teaching at Brandeis. So, I was very much imitating the style of my teachers, of classical Wissenschaft, and I hadn't gotten my PhD, so I really wanted to kind of do their German style right. I had a very interesting crisis, which became a crisis by correlation. So, that year, in '69, I gave a course at Brandeis on the Book of Genesis. It turns out that half of that class eventually went to the Jewish Theological Seminary. It was a very interesting group of people. As the style was in those days, we were going to do the ancient Near Eastern background. Well, a month into the course, I had talked endlessly about Enuma Elis and the Babylonian creation story and Biblical criticism, and never got to a word of the text. Simultaneously, I remember giving a course. This particular course that struck me was on Psalm Nineteen, where the heavens declare the glory of God, ha-shamayim m'sapprim kavod el, etcetera etcetera. I had a very particular take on that which

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eventually became a chapter in my book, On Text and Texture, but it dealt with the issues of language, creation, revelation, and redemption, and the notion of voice, etcetera.

JG: This was —

BF: And I was doing this at the havurah.

MF: And not at Brandeis.

BF: This is not at Brandeis. As I was doing this — so, this is the whole other side. So, one course was overly objective — objective knowledge, objective experience, (04:03:00) critical historical positive method in the classic Nineteenth century German style. I was doing this course, and as I was beginning to teach this course —

MF: This course was —

BF: At the havurah, on Psalm Nineteen, two people got up from the table and lay down on the floor, and were grooving. They were in a state of, like, an ecstatic moment of the 1960s, right? Like, they were tripping out on what Fishbane was saying —

MF: M'sapprim kavod El, right? [laughs]

BF: And I could just see them. Like, what I was saying, I had just got them off on some other trip, and they were just [waves hands in the air]. And I couldn't bring them back to the table. Clearly, they were responding to the text, but we couldn't have a discussion at the table. This was going on just at the moment where I was realizing the crisis at Brandeis, and I realized that something is wrong in both places. What was wrong in both places was, one, everything was a prolegomenon — the introduction to study and you never got to study a word of the text, or you're always doing meta, and you never did the text because you didn't want to insert yourself into the text. The other, in that first year, was so subjectified that there was nothing but the person inside the text. There was no longer a text. It affected me very deeply as an antinomy, as a contrast, and I was in a process of trying to resolve that tension. I couldn't deny either, because they were both real to me, and eventually I made a kind of decision that I was only going to teach one way in both places. The one way was, we would study about the text, and one of the ways to get at the personal would be that I would use certain kinds of personal metaphors as I'm teaching the content, to try to use that as a human facilitation into the text. In the havurah I sometimes had to go the other way around. It was like, how you create the correlation between the personal feelings about the text and that the text is still an anchor for tradition. Otherwise, it's an individual floating off. I think many different classes

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worked with that tension quite (04:06:00) differently, but because of the respect for personhood over against textuality — say, at Brandeis in those days — we had to try and find, or I had to find, a balance between objectivity and subjectivity. I know that people like Art and others all had to work with that in different ways, to try to find that right balance, because we were committed to the fact that the human experience was a type of commentary if the text was going to be an ongoing living document and not just a kind of private annotation. This was part of our living — so, there was a notion of living commentary, and the fact that other people could contribute, even if they didn't have the knowledge, and there wasn't going to be deferring to one person who had a doctorate and one person who didn't. Everybody had to try and resolve that in different ways, of how the personal and the textual worked out, but we were firmly committed to the notion that life experience is a life commentary, and we were committed to the problematic that if we were going to remain in the Jewish tradition, it had to be anchored over against traditional source learning. So, how that tension worked out, I'm sure it was totally different than it could ever have been in the 1920s in Germany, and it was unique to this moment in Cambridge. I'm sure all sorts of other kinds of havurot have worked with these kinds of issues in their own way, but I felt, as a teacher, this clash quite deeply. It made me realize that depending on the material, I had to find this way. I must say in retrospect, after all of these years, some people do say that the texts have religious experiences that can be personal experiences, and the text remains. So, everybody had to find their own personal style that they were comfortable with in doing that, but that became an ideal for the havurah. The pedagogy of teaching could not be separate from the style of conversation between persons.

JG: Did you, on the faculty, actually discuss this issue and talk about how to resolve it, each of you finding your own way?

BF: I don't remember it as a formal thing. I know that (04:09:00) Art had some issues in one way. Roskies, I think Steve Mitchell was doing something else at that time.

JG: Zalman was there that first year.

BF: Zalman. Everybody had a different way of approaching the issue, depending on how they were trying to resolve their Jewish life personal issue. I think the issues may have come up at some communal meals or sort of group discussions, of how can you retain respect for the personal and everybody's psychological response and still realize that the text has certain kinds of limits and boundaries. Probably the typical way we would have answered that is, everybody has to figure out how to do it. I just emphasize that, just to repeat, because I hadn't thought of it precisely in these terms. Respect for the other in conversation had to be translated also into the pedagogical style. We had to find a way to

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acknowledge other voices but know that it was being stimulated by one primary voice, which is the text.

MF: Can I add a little perspective on this? I'm really interested in what you're saying. I've never heard you reflect on this. I don't think you've reflected in quite this way, which is what's nice about this narrative, you know? This opportunity. I think there was, without our necessarily saying it, a commitment to a kind of intimacy. There was a kind of intimacy that was being created. We were a reaction against the coldness and the hierarchical nature of JTS at the time. We were against the coldness and hierarchical structure of the synagogue, the Conservative synagogue, and I don't think we used this term, but I think if we were about anything, it was about textual intimacy, spiritual intimacy, and interpersonal intimacy. Without becoming sexualized, in respect to that other conversation, which is so interesting. I think that on the one hand, you had this Wissenschaft, this sort of German idea of objective text, in which case the teacher is teaching down to the student like the rabbi is talking down to the kahal. It's the old frontal teaching method, which has been debunked now, but we are filling people up with the knowledge that comes from prior generations or the text, as represented by the teacher. I think what you were doing, and I think you've written about this in other ways, is you were creating an intimate connection with the students and with fellow teachers and fellow haverim, (04:12:00) around the text. You and I have talked about traditio and traditium, that there is a transmission of the tradition, and the teacher or the spiritual leader has a certain role to play in that transmission, partly by embodying a way of life, a way of living, a way of teaching, a way of davening, or whatever. I think that that's what you were feeling your way into as a teacher, that there was a sense of connection, of an intimate connection, with students. So it was much less hierarchical. Yet there was a tension — and I think you felt it then — between respecting the texts, knowing some of the secondary literature, knowing where the text fits in the ancient Near East or in Medieval studies or whatever, versus just grooving on the text. That was a tension in the havurah, as I recall.

BF: I felt it more strongly. Don't forget, when Art was teaching hasidic material, you could move much more rapidly to the spiritual take on it.

MF: The subjective.

BF: I, at that point, was much more committed, in a certain way, to that objective ideal, and I was struggling. So I was still a little bit of an anomaly in that respect.

MF: Although Art —

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BF: Art hadn't made his commitment yet to come back. He had to come back to graduate school and he was struggling with that issue, but also the text that he was dealing with moved naturally to that level.

MF: Art — I was in Art's classes, and Art, without addressing it explicitly as I recall —

JG: Can you say what classes? What kinds of classes?

MF: We studied —

BF: Nachman?

MF: Nachman of Bratslav. I don't remember how he quite did it, but there was a flow between study of the text and Art being the teacher and our absorbing and processing it ourselves in hevruta or whatever. But there was always a coming back to the text, and there was a deferring to Art's expertise. I imagine that was going on in your class too, and it was a very subtle kind of thing. At some point, I think certainly after the second year, maybe even — I think for the two years we were a seminary, and then basically Art initiated giving up on it, because part of being a seminary meant that the teachers had to judge the students and give them credentials. Art in particular was very uncomfortable with that because there was this sense sociologically of, we're all fellow travelers. I was going to say we're all brothers, which is interesting. [laughs] We're all uncles, you know, together, with some people obviously having more expertise, like Art and Buzzy and other people, but there was a tension between what's the hierarchy versus this sense of fellowship, and that was explicit in the havurah.

JG: How did you experience that as a teacher and as (04:15:00) a learner? Did you take classes also, in the havurah?

BF: No, no.

JG: You didn't.

BF: No. It was just a matter of time. It wasn't a matter of — I would participate in group study, or if there was a drash on Shabbat. I think everybody was trying to grow but trying to find their own pressure point of how to do that.

JG: So, as you were developing your own approach, what do you think you were trying to convey to the students in your class about the point of the text, the goal of text study and how to approach a text?

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BF: It's very hard to retrieve that kind of archeology of memory, in a sense. I was beginning to become aware at that point of what later became a major and multi-formed trajectory of my work, which was the power of the voice of the interpreter. It's both an opening, a transformation, but it's also a respect and continuation. We were all very much concerned, whether through the mode of study or my emphasis on issues of hermeneutics or interpretation, that the culture historically, from the earliest moments, trying to live in that tension of open-endedness and respect for its own canonical authority, this traditium, which is the fund of tradition, and traditio is the transformation, but they're dialectically related. The traditio builds on the traditum and it's constantly — so we were aware in some ways of trying to understand how we could be traditional and new at the same time. Traditional and new meant that you had to build on the material, but in an interpretive way. So, it was in some ways our own take (04:18:00) on what the general feeling of the Reform Movement in the nineteenth century, which was that there's an openness to interpretation which had historical cultural implication. How to work out that balance — particularly in the 1960s — of tradition and change was our particular problematic. Because of the sociology of American Jewry or the problem of post-Auschwitz and everything. Or the way the tradition froze because of fears of assimilation or decimation, a lot of fluidity became frozen, and that was called the normative tradition. But the normative tradition often had multiple voices simultaneously. So, we were trying — in ways knowingly and unknowingly — trying to retrieve that. I was beginning to appreciate that. That was one side. The other side that was continuous with my work initially with the Ancient Near Eastern Bible and other kinds of issues, which has also remained a long-term legacy for me, and I think we were all concerned about that, is that there is no essential Judaism — essential in the sense that there is something that was essentially independent of the impact of other cultures. So, certainly part of the prod of my study of the ancient material was really to show the deep impact of Mesopotamia on biblical civilization and its transformation into a biblical idiom. But you had to see those transformations to see the changes, and of course that was also in the Greco-Roman period. It affected every single thing. So, it was not only tradition and change, but it was also the fact that Jewish civilization was always struggling to maintain a certain selfhood of identity and deeply immersed in other cultures, and itself going through processes of thematic and cultural transformations of even some of its key terminology. So, that was a concern of mine already from the beginning. I think many of us began to realize that, and that became a kind of concern. Certainly it was a concern of myself. I'm not sure I could have or would have put it in these words then, (04:21:00) but I know it was — I felt it more as being a provocateur against the establishment then. I don't feel myself to be a provocateur anymore in that sense, but that was a different cultural moment.

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JG: Buzzy, can you recall any instances, as you sort of got a grip on your own mode of teaching and learning in this context, of any instances where you felt your students were getting to that place where they were grappling in the ways that you were envisioning, as opposed to what happened in the moving, moving early instance?

BF: I can't remember a key moment. I realized that for it to take place organically, all that I could do is model the way I was doing it. In a way I was providing what the teacher's doing. In other words, it became clear to me as well that the modality of the teaching of the text was often as important as the content, and the side associations that were emerging where one could then think about a personal or metaphorical aside, or what you would associate to, was also widening the students' lens. Getting it, I don't know. I mean, now there are a lot of people who “get it” but in lots of different ways. I was more concerned with my notion of integrity, in that the students could see that, witness that, but then they had to do it on their own. So, one of the things that I used to do even at Brandeis, that I continued to do much later in Chicago, is to foster that. It's sort of worked out in some of the publications that I try to do for the community, like the haftorot commentary, or the Song of Songs commentary. It was — I would give out these worksheets from my text classes, and then give a number of articles which would all be contradictory to each other. The class discussion (04:24:00) was to make people aware how their voice or their choice of a different reading changed the meaning of the text, so that they had to be aware of certain kinds of critical takes on the material to understand the ethics of interpretation, that wherever they were coming down, they like other people who are also doing that. So, that became a pedagogical concern of mine, even in the more technical way. I think that was also a way of trying to give a certain kind of restrained license to each person's voice.

JG: Restrained license and perhaps responsibility?

BF: Yeah. There's a license, but within the restraint of responsibility. Right.

MF: Was that at Brandeis or at the havurah?

BF: At Brandeis. At Brandeis for sure.

JG: Mona, you've mentioned several times that you spent a whole year as a full-time student. Were many people doing it by the time that you did that? Were there still full- time students there, as there was that divide early on between part-time and full-time students?

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MF: I mean, there was that discussion over whether people could have a job. There was a group that wanted to go off and become a commune somewhere in the country and have no other outside anyway. That got voted down, [laughs] but there was some tension between that. Buzzy and Art were, I think, the only two people who had full time jobs. Other people taught Hebrew school or whatever. I think it was me and a bunch of guys who had applied to the havurah for the purpose of being there. So there were a bunch of us whose full-time commitment was being there.

JG: Where were you in your own studies, and what was your motivation for spending this year doing a year of full time study?

MF: So, I think this was actually '69-'70, not '70-'71, because '70-'71 I was starting to work in my field. I was between college and graduate school. The havurah was my home. I just figured it was an amazing opportunity to just delve in and be part of this group more intensively.

JG: So what was your experience as a student? How would you describe —

MF: My experience was, I was sitting at a banquet table with amazing people, mostly Buzzy and Art, and learning with amazing people too, because many of the students went on to become leaders in the Jewish community. I mean, in that initial crop, these were like hand-picked, amazing people who also self-selected. So, I loved being with really bright, creative, sensitive, spiritual people. For me, the havurah was that. I think of everywhere (04:27:00) we've been since, we haven't replicated anything like that, because it was such — people came from all over, many from New York, to Somerville, to be part of this. So, to me it was a delight. It was a delight in terms of learning. It was a delight spiritually. It was a delight personally. There was a lot of growth, a lot of personal interaction, a lot of intimate interaction. Some of us were newly married couples, and we would share that process together. Socially it was very fulfilling, and very intense also.

BF: It was also a time that the metaphor of self-exploration was it. So, for Mona it was also a transition period from Wellesley to graduate school or doing an internship at Mass General Hospital or things like that. But that notion that there was a hiatus and you had to find yourself, this was part of that finding one's self, but in a very thick way. It was self- exploration. What was involved here that was unique at this moment in American Jewish life — it wasn't taking the place of any other venue of liberal or traditional Jewish life — is that you were finding yourself through the tradition in a new way. That had never happened in American Jewish life — self-exploration through self-discovery through the traditional sources. And now, of course, sources that had not been part of the seminary mainstream. Hasidism and Kabbalah were not part of the traditional mainstream, whether

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through Yeshiva University or the Jewish Theological Seminary. So, that's part of what made this culturally quite unique, and a kind of first. So, it was individual self- exploration that was taking place in a very special cluster of a community that believed that they wanted to recreate the notion of community which was fundamental to Judaism, not a sociological community but a certain type of intentional community. That self- exploration, which was the larger cultural metaphor, was done not through Buddhist or Indian sources but through Jewish sources — which is not to say that there was an impermeable gap. A lot of people were very much current with what was going on in the East. That was kind of our — the cat was called Krishna Cat, right — the famous cat? (04:30:00) That was just part of the Cambridge ambiance, but it was self-exploration, that Jewish sources had something to say to one's inner personal growth. I don't think that it ever happened as an American Jewish moment before that.

MF: We were also very inward.

JG: So, how did it affect you, this year of study, the study component in particular? You had a strong background, as you said, for someone who's coming out of a Hebrew school, Hebrew high school kind of environment.

MF: There were several factors. One was that I hadn't studied Hasidut. We were neo- hasidic, which was the sort of frame that I think Art gave us.

BF: And not had yet become observant. [laughs]

MF: Overtly focusing on spirituality and a neo-hasidic perspective — I mean, Art opened me up to all these sources that I did not know, which were not part of my suburban bourgeois Conservative background. Even though I had a lot of knowledge, I didn't have anything about Hasidut, so that was huge, and I think it was all in the service of our inner spiritual development. We were very inner focused. We were a little bit focused on the outside world in terms of the Vietnam War. There was this burning of the draft card or whatever, supporting people, war resistors. We hadn't yet gotten to feminism. We certainly hadn't gotten to racism. So, all of the sort of social activism stuff was not very present in the havurah, except anti-war feelings. I think Israel and Zionism took a back seat also.

BF: It affected you in the sense that it gave another language besides a psychological language —

MF: No, I'll get there. I'm just saying that the external societal stuff was not the focus. The focus was us internally, and that's both a strength and a problem of the havurah in its

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early days. I think things evolved later, and other havurot went in other directions, and certainly Havurat Shalom itself went in other directions. For me at the time, I've always been a sort of more introspective person who values both psychological and spiritual growth. In my current life certainly, that's the thread I see throughout. This was a huge opportunity for me, to develop in that way, and to connect. There was a lot of psychological wisdom in the Nachman stories or in the hasidic experience. So, there was that, and then there was this intense — and, for me, one of a kind — social connection, that intimate connection of people singing together, davening together, eating together, studying together, (04:33:00) sharing their inner journeys together. That was extremely intense. We were newly married. We were starting our life together, and we were starting it in this amazingly intense and intimate community.

JG: Did your interest in psychology, and what was arising for you when you were learning in your classes and in the havurah in general, do you see intersections between how they interacted on you and the directions for your career, the directions you took in your own personal work?

MF: So, I think I knew I wanted to work with the mind from seventh grade. [laughs] I didn't know what that meant, and then it became clear I wanted to be a psychologist. Psychology at Wellesley was all about rats, and it was not my cup of tea. I wanted to study humans. Ironically, now that I've gotten more into neuroscience, a lot of it comes from rat research, and I'm fascinated by it now. I love watching the little rats run around and do their thing. But at the time, I thought that's not what I want to be doing. I wanted to study humans. So I studied philosophy, and took whatever psychology courses were about people. I think the integrating of the psychological and the spiritual is something that began for me in the havurah and has developed ever since. For example, for the last twenty years, I've been participating with Conservative rabbis on a retreat. It's called the Rabbinic Training Institute. JTS hosts it every year. We've been to Baltimore, we've been to various places on retreat. It's in January. It's five days in January. For twenty years I've been a psychologist on that retreat. I lead an evening personal growth group, and then one-on-one consultations, and then I also take classes. So, actually for me — I hadn't thought about that — that's the closest I get to going back to the havurah, is that I sit with male and female colleagues, learning with great teachers. In the morning they bring in wonderful teachers. Buzzy was one of the teachers at one point, my son Eitan was at one point. Aviva Zornberg. I mean, we've had great morning teachers. I love those conversations. Again, it's a wrap-around experience. We're eating together, we're singing together, we're studying together, we're exploring together. The topics I have each year are different, like forgiveness, or honor your father and mother, or parenting. Whatever the issue is, whatever the title is, there's a colon, and the subtitle is, "personal and spiritual challenges," or "psychological and spiritual challenges." So, I'm integrating the

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two, looking at the Jewish tradition and interfacing it with personal exploration for the rabbis. (04:36:00) I never really made that connection before, but I think for me that started in the havurah, before I went to graduate school. I had that passion for psychological exploration, but it was coming out through the texts. So, that thing that for you was a bit of a challenge, of the people who are grooving in all kinds of different directions, my groove was psychological, and I found a lot of wisdom and a lot of resonance. The dialogue between the text and personal growth for me, I think, probably goes back to that period.

JG: When the havurah was first founded, this was obviously a period of tremendous activism on the part of American youth. We've talked about anti-war activism, social activism, etcetera. I know that this was part of what was going on at the havurah. I'm curious what your view is on the role of political and social activism sort of over the course of the time that you were involved, and what you know of what happened in the following several years. Did it have a primary place? Where was it in the scheme of things that were important, and that the havurah focused on?

MF: I can share my perspective. I think we were in a bit of a bubble. Like we were pre- feminist, I think we were pre-a lot of things, other than the Vietnam War. I mean, there were people who were challenging, for example, the federation about some of its commitments. Some people were involved with Soviet Jewry certainly, early on. But I think we were, again, very inward-focused, focused on our chevraschaft, our personal and group cohesion and learning and growth. I think that the more outward-looking — aside from the Vietnam War — happened after we left. I'm not saying that that's a good thing. It just was what it was, at least that's my experience of it. It was more that we were challenging the status quo of stale Judaism, stale seminary, to create something vibrant.

BF: I think Soviet Jewry was a serious issue, but in iterations after we had been living in the havurah, till '71, after we had moved out to the country a little bit. But then Mona and I, we went. We were among the first who went to Eastern Europe. I taught in Moscow and in Leningrad and in Minsk.

MF: That was in '74.

BF: Yeah, so I'm saying it was a little bit after. (04:39:00) We became aware of the plight of Jews. I think part of the stimulus of this awareness of a much larger context was after '67 and the threat to the State of Israel and the closing of the Straits of Tehran, and the fear of another Holocaust, and the awareness again of the fragility of Jewish life and destiny. That was a major shift in consciousness. It might have even had a big impact on the growth of the havurah, of an authentic American Jewry that wasn't simply European

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Jewry. We didn't see ourselves necessarily as a continuation of European Jewry, but the moment did come for an American Jewry, and it was different from an Israeli Jewry. In the early seventies, the awareness — beginning in the late sixties, after the result of the Jews of Silence, some of us did get involved in the samizdat literature or the underground teaching, as we did. I remember coming back, I was very much involved with writing letters to Congressman — he later became president at Boston College, who lobbied very much on behalf of Soviet Jewry. We actually got several people released. We got involved in loggerheads with the Israeli government and others, this Breira movement. We were more concerned that people had the choice to leave than that they had to leave to come to Israel. The Israeli State Department —

JG: You mean the Soviet Union.

BF: Yeah, to come to Israel to fill in the West Bank and make facts on the ground. I got into some very difficult pressure moments for that. We began to have this much larger consciousness of responsibility. It was a political activism of a very —

MF: But that was a whole other period.

BF: Yeah, this was the mid-seventies. It grew out of that. We were thinking still quite locally in the sixties. The impact of the Six Day War, but then the issue of affecting the federation, the issue of affecting the curriculum in the other seminaries. But, it was kind of local. It didn't have this — only (04:42:00) as we became conscious that there was a possibility of an American Judaism that was different, that had not yet been defined. And it's still in the process of being formed. It takes a good generation or two. That's what's happening. That's part of the tension of what's going on. That's where our energy was beginning to be focused.

MF: The notion of the niggun I think I first came across in the havurah. I don't think we talked about —

BF: That wasn't part of American Jewish experience of people —

MF: Not if you were Conservative. Probably not if you were Orthodox, either —

JG: Or Reform.

MF: Or Reform.

BF: That you could have an intimate experience through melody.

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MF: And that was a really important part.

BF: Yeah. It was also, it was important both because melos, or melody, is a binding factor, but it also bypassed theological discourse. There was simply a way —

MF: It was experiential.

BF: To create, experience, a spiritual encounter when the theological language had not yet been formulated, or we didn't need to discuss our criticism or how we stood in relation to this or that issue. It became another form of avodah, of spiritual service.

MF: I grew up very — very wordy. [laughs] Very rational, you know? A philosophy major, a daughter of a philosophy major, etcetera. The niggun, it just stops you short in your tracks. It's another reality that we — I — definitely encountered in the havurah. Shlomo Carlebach was a very important influence.

BF: Through Zalman.

MF: Well, through Zalman. I think that the niggun — we could be in a niggun for a long time before we ever said anything prayer-wise.

JG: So-called "wordless niggunim."

MF: Right.

BF: Right.

MF: That was a huge gift, and our communal meals, and shalashudes. There were a lot of opportunities to sing, and that was really, really important.

BF: That was a major factor —

MF: And it continues to be to our day. Our children now, one of our sons is part of a minyan here in Teaneck — Koleinu Minyan — which is —

JG: Aleinu?

MF: Koleinu.

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JG: Koleinu.

MF: At the Conservative synagogue. So, here's what happened. To go back to our little self-centered view, we thought that Havurat Shalom would be the beginning of an organic cellular development of havurot, and that ultimately, havurot would be everywhere. It turns out that that was true. I mean, how often do your young (04:45:00) childish illusions actually turn out to be accurate? People now talk about our havurah, and the havurah is a social group, or a davening group, or whatever. I take great pleasure, actually, that Havurat Shalom did in fact start a process of breaking down the barriers of coldness, of mass — of rabbi over here [gestures above] and kahal over here [gestures below] into a more intimate context, whether it's social, or intimate, or study. I think for me that was —

BF: It created intentional communities, rather than sociological communities.

MF: Right.

JG: Both of you have used that term, "sociological communities."

MF: But wait, I want to go back for one second. In this Koleinu Minyan — it's a minyan, but it's sort of like the havurah — it's twice a month.

JG: Is it associated with a synagogue?

MF: With the Conservative synagogue here in Teaneck, Beth Shalom. It's an offshoot of Hadar. People who were at Hadar in the Upper West Side had children and wanted to move to the 'burbs, and so they're here. I love the whole synagogue. I go every week anyway, but this Koleinu Minyan is so intense. Ironically, a lot of the people there are from JTS, [laughs] that had gotten smichah at JTS or had taught there, because JTS itself has been transformed. But our son actually teaches hasidut at JTS now, so actually it comes full circle. But the niggun is such a key part of that experience. And always new niggunim, and niggunim are always coming around, so it's not just the same old stale things that you've been singing for twenty years.

JG: Where do new niggunim come from?

MF: A lot came from Shlomo.

BF: I think they're accessed from the tradition.

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MF: From hasidic sources, all sorts of different hasidic people. I don't know — traditional, old ones. Sometimes people are making them up as they go along. Some of them come from non-Jewish sources. I think over Simchat Torah in the Koleinu Minyan, or maybe it was in the regular sanctuary in Beth Shalom, there was one of the peace songs that someone was singing. Of course, everyone in the kahal picks it up, and we're singing to that, right? There's a Quaker song, "Lord Prepare Me to be a Sanctuary," and we have applied that to “Pitchu Li Shaarei Tzedek.” We sing that together.

BF: But that's how those things happened, from the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

MF: It's just, there's a joy of taking known or new niggunim and finding a way to introduce them into the liturgy that just makes the liturgy so much more powerful and spiritual, and the singing together, the communal. At Beth Shalom, at this Koleinu Minyan, niggunim are online, and people prepare them ahead of time. We had a workshop actually, ahead of the High Holidays.

JG: What do you mean they're online? You can listen to them online?

MF: There's (04:48:00) a so-called CD. The recordings are available through the website. Then we had a get-together before the holidays where the people prepared the niggunim together, so when it's time to sing together, it's like a high. That was so Havurat Shalom, and I love it. I love that that has survived and thrived, actually.

BF: Yeah, we —

MF: Both the havurah and the niggun piece I think have both really —

BF: The vision of splitting off into multiple, different intentional groups that would come together —

MF: Intimate intentional groups.

BF: Yes. That was just another way that we would talk about the fact that we would give birth to something. It happened against our own will in settings that we never could have dreamed about.

MF: It wasn't against your own will. You don't mean —

JG: It wasn't against your own will.

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MF: You don't mean against. You mean we didn't will it, it just happened. It happened.

BF: Yeah, well, it wasn't part of our will.

JG: It wasn't —

BF: It wasn't anything that we were actively working towards. We were working toward our own particular community.

MF: Yeah, it wasn't like we went out and seeded all these havurot all over the place. We just did our thing and then it caught on in other havurot, in New York, in Washington, and —

JG: Elsewhere.

MF: And I think somehow it became part of the zeitgeist, and then people were writing about it. Then synagogues started experimenting with including havurot, because I think the synagogues knew they were in trouble in terms of not having these intimate, close connections. So, I feel like it did make a difference. I think it has blossomed at that level.

BG: But that's —

JG: Did you want to say something?

BF: No, no.

JG: Okay. This is actually a wonderful segue into the final section, on reflections of the impact of the havurah on your own lives spiritually, and on the larger Jewish community in America and beyond, to the extent that you think that's so. So, just to recap for a minute, you were both actively part of Havurat Shalom from '68-'71, at which point you left for you to go to do your graduate studies. Have you been involved in other havurot over the years? What's been your history of —

BF: It can't happen again. [laughs]

MF: Yeah, not like that.

BF: My feeling? It was a mythic moment.

MF: Mm-hm.

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BF: None of us — for all of us, it was the Garden of Eden, those who were there. Everything after is wandering, looking for another place, and it's just —

MF: You’ve got to leave the garden.

BF: It's a temporary oasis, and it has all — there weren't faults, the way we remember it, and even from the twenty-fifth anniversary — and we're going to be having almost the fiftieth —

MF: The fiftieth.

BF: — coming up in this May. Even there, when multiple generations (04:51:00) since us have come, we don't think they measure up to the founders.

MF: No, no, no. That's not fair.

BF: My feeling?

MF: That's your —

BF: We talked about it. I would say that the difference was, I don't know. I'm not saying elitist in a way, but there was a certain kind of emotional, psychological, textual strength that a lot of the people of that particular three or four years had that we didn't find in the other groups. They were needier psychologically, they wanted this or that. There was a certain kind of emotional — it wasn't sobriety — but it was a thick, a different thickness. Everybody was different, and it was precisely because they were unique. Everybody was a unique personality in those days. Those friendships are the friendships of a lifetime. There are a lot of things we passed through to other friendships, but it has a mythic quality. The few of us who can still get together, we remember something that was extremely special, and it's not like what happened in any other synagogue group that we, or I, have ever been part of. So, I would say it's a touchstone, at least for me speaking personally. I've never been able to replicate it, nor — look, part of it is also, we were in our twenties. We were open in a different way.

JG: And you were unburdened by other obligations.

BF: And we were unburdened. So, we were open in a way that spiritual group intimacy, it was a spiritual community of real friendships that had real conversations. There was no chatter in the havurah. Everybody from that group went off in a very interesting

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trajectory. There's hardly a person from those opening two or three years who has not lived an interesting life, in the Jewish world or personally, even if they moved in a different direction. I don't really have connections with these other kinds of groups. For me, it was foundational as a teacher, it was foundational as a scholar, it was foundational and irretrievable as a community. Any kind of a small hevruta or family, their havurah is the measure of that. (04:54:00) If the family is studying or learning together, the havurah is a measure, I think for me and for many of the other people. It's a kind of legacy that at this point of my life is an irretrievable legacy. It's a legacy that was so foundational because that moment in the sixties was not something that many people remember or could even tap into. It was what it was like to be a creative living moral person in the sixties. Everything was so possible. In other words, there was hope and despair that were simultaneous in all respects, both Jewishly and culturally. Peace and war were joined. The notion of your spiritual mentality. Our notions of body, what we think about body, were coming — men and women were coming to an awareness of their bodies in ways — it's a different thing, forty or fifty years later, but those were just happening then. There was a cultural moment. So, it's not just nostalgia. It was — anything that I am cut its teeth at that moment, at least for me. I also would want to say that talking about it in this way, I feel that I can speak openly in a way that if I was saying this, even to a lot of friends that didn't have that, I would be filtering. I would be self-monitoring, and I would be choosing how I formulated it. There was a kind of flow of that historical time that I feel deeply internally. There was a new melding of what it meant to be a Jewish person, and we were all going through that and growing with each other. Those of us who are of our age who come together for that, we shared something of a collective birth.

MF: So, I just want to say, because I think you asked an interesting question of how it has affected us in our ongoing lives. We have actually (04:57:00) helped found several — I don't know if I would call them havurot, but — minyanim, in the more connected sort of way. So, from my graduate years at UMass Amherst, we went back to Israel for my internship, and Buzzy had a scholarship there; came back pregnant, had our first son. We then co-founded the Newton Minyan, the Newton Egalitarian Minyan.

JG: The Newton Center Minyan.

MF: The Newton Center Minyan, in Newton Center, Massachusetts, which started out in people’s homes, and then —

BF: Which is now part of the Hebrew College Minyan, but that was the home minyan.

MF: No, the Newton Center Minyan meets in the Hebrew College. It's not the Hebrew College Minyan.

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BF: Yeah — yeah, yeah.

MF: So, it grew. We met in the Baptist church in their activity room, and then we went up the hill to the Hebrew College. It's now like two hundred families, I think. I mean, it's gotten very big.

BF: It was originally like four or five couples. [laughs]

MF: But again, it was that spirit of we can create something intimate. People we eat with, people we sing with, people we relate to, people we study with. So, that was a bit of the havurah.

JG: And when was the Newton Center Minyan founded?

MF: So, that would have been —

BF: About '74-'75. '75, maybe.

MF: In the late seventies, I would say.

JG: When you came back.

BF: Yeah.

MF: We came back in '75, and eventually it grew.

BF: About '76.

MF: And it grew from an occasional, once-a-month minyan to weekly. I remember there was a question of, could we do Simchat Torah? [laughs] Because for Simchat Torah, you need at least two Torahs, and you need a commitment.

BF: Right.

MF: Somehow Simchat Torah meant we were a real community, and I was really lobbying for that. I think I had the havurah behind my back, you know? The wind behind my sails or whatever. And we did, and it really transformed into a — I don't think it was every week, but I think it was twice a month or something after that. So, it became a real community, and it is a real community now. When we moved to the Chicago area, we

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joined a Conservative synagogue. It was a big — you know, the thing that we all rejected — and I had grown up in that synagogue, so it was some ways very familiar to me. It was a lovely synagogue, but we were itching to have something more intimate. So, we helped found another minyan.

JG: Within the synagogue?

MF: Within the synagogue. We worked with the powers that be. It was quite a process. And it was not egalitarian. We had to go through that process. For me it was, like, outrageous to step back in 1990 from egalitarian in 1968. They were on their way, but, you know, whatever. It was a more old-fashioned kind of context. But that was a lovely experience. None of it was the havurah. I mean, Havurat Shalom was a moment in history with amazing people. It did give us a sense that you could create something really intimate. I think the closest I have now is this Koleinu Minyan that I mentioned, because it just feels very (05:00:00) similar —

JG: Not a brand-new experience for you, in terms of the sense of being part of —

MF: Right, and Buzzy and I had diverged. Well, I shouldn't say we totally diverged. What happened was, there we were again in a Conservative synagogue.

JG: In —

MF: In Chicago. In the Chicago area. Buzzy was unhappy in the large Conservative synagogue. The Chabad rabbi in Highland Park, Illinois, Rabbi Schanowitz, was starting something in his house, a little Friday night shtiebel. Buzzy started going with one of our sons, and really liked it, and liked the intimacy of it. Again, there's that hasidic shtiebel — not-performative kind of thing, the genuine spiritual thing — that blossomed into an actual kahal. They built a building, and then they expanded the building. For the last bunch of years — I mean, so we came in '90. We were there twenty-seven years. For the last at least fifteen, twenty years, that Chabad, the Central Avenue Synagogue became a major factor in Buzzy's life and in mine. So, for a while I was going to Beth El, to our little minyan once a month. It was a longer walk, and he'd go to Chabad, and we wouldn't see each other on Shabbos. It was really frustrating. Eventually I just gave up and I went to Chabad, which is interesting for me because I'm this feminist. [laughs] And here I am, like, I can't read Torah, I can't have an aliyah, I can't lead services, all of which I was doing in the Conservative shul. But I also kind of liked the intimate davening experience. I liked the people, and I really liked being with Buzzy. I liked the rabbi very much, and his wife was wonderful. So, that became our community. It was a very ambivalent kind of process for me. What I'm saying is, Buzzy became more and more halachically

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observant and committed, and for him — I think, for you — that spiritual focus was expressed more and more through a halachic perspective, which some of our friends from the havurah days haven't been able to understand. Like, how do you go —

BF: I would like to address a thing like that, that I think —

JG: Please.

BF: That I think very much bears on the havurah and one of the reasons why I became more halachically strict in my behavior.

MF: Can I just say one thing? I should add that from thirteen, Buzzy was putting on tefillin and davening three times a day.

BF: I was always observant.

MF: And they kept kosher and they had Shabbos, so except for the egalitarian, you know, do we sit together or not, and the open-minded thinking, Buzzy was always halachic.

BF: I was always observant. Everybody goes through changes and breaks and things like that, but there is an aspect of the havurah that was powerful but negative for me when I became a father. So, I do want to mention this, because it was transformative for me, and part of the reason why I have a very different commitment and understanding of halachah than I did when I was younger. (05:03:00) It's an offshoot of lying on the floor and grooving, which, believe me, I understand that, and I understand hasidic melody and contemplative intimacy. It's part of who I am as well. There developed a notion, and even in Buber's I and Thou there's a critique of this, but I didn't make the connection at that point. The issue is that religious worship does not have value unless there was an emotional or psychological high, and the goal was to get to an emotional or psychological high.

MF Slash spiritual.

BF: Even if you were in community, that was the touchstone. The touchstone was at an emotional level, and at an interior level, so there was always a self-awareness of whether that was a good davening because of whether it resonated at a certain kind of semi- charismatic or emotional level. That affected — it was probably really part of the original hasidic experience. Within the hasidic experience, the halachic notion of z’man, and you do things at a very particular time, was in great tension in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, because people say, Well, you have to prepare, and you can't start doing

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something until you're spiritually ready. Tensions between the Hasidim and the Misnagdim, one of the issues was over z’manim, because you had to be ready. It wasn't just the z’man, but it was also the hachana, the preparation. I don't know when it became clear to me. It certainly became clear to me with my sons. One day I realized you can't transmit emotional highs, and that the tradition would not continue if that was the issue, of transmitting emotional high. You have to transmit a more stable form of tradition that can bear the emotional content. It wasn't that the content was superimposed upon the emotional high, but that the emotional rhythm had to enter into what had carried the Jewish people together for twenty-five hundred years. (05:06:00) So, it's passing on the tradition. The tension was, can you do that and enter into it in an intimate way. But I was shocked when I realized that what was important to me in the havurah, among other things, were these emotional moments, and that wasn't a valid stand-alone notion of the transmission of tradition.

JG: How old were your sons when you were realizing —

BF: Younger. They were younger, and I was trying to help them become — they always studied with me during the weekend at the Shabbat table, so we had very intimate study life, both of them, but it was that notion. I'm still working with that tension, but as a father, when you say what are you passing on, you have to make a distinction whether you're simply passing on the emotional tone, or you're passing on the tradition that has to be done with a certain emotional tone, but that that's the carrier. I think a number of the people of those old days remained with that first level, became still an ideal. Others made their peace with that balance in different ways. There was a period of time that I was probably the most traditional of the people —

MF: Or the only —

BF: Of that first generation.

MF: And I think people looked at you like, what's wrong with you? Because he'd only eat in a kosher restaurant, or whatever.

BF: But others have gradually gone through their own changes, and probably realizing this at different cognitive levels. It wasn't a reactivity. It was an awareness that what was important in the havurah was to recapture the emotional tone. That was a very important event in the sixties, to recapture the deep spiritual content of Judaism that had been shunted off. But then, that wasn't the Halachah L'Maaseh. You couldn't do it on its own. It had to be put into halachic kelim, utensils, carriers, things like that.

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MF: Actually, I think — I want to correct myself on my narrative, because you actually started going to Shaarei Tefillah in Newton Center years before we moved, so this process of becoming more halachically oriented, I think it was also a sense that, for you, being commanded and living in the context of the halachah was itself spiritual deepening, as opposed to just the way we had done it more in the havurah. So, there was a real spiritual shift, I think, for Buzzy.

BF: I tried to give (05:09:00) that forms of expression in the theology book I did, Sacred Attunement, and that that was an attempt to kind of work that out in theological language. But that book retains the quality of a very personal voice. I'm glad that there are a lot of people for whom that personal voice could become a shared voice, but it was written as a personal voice to see what I could say with integrity about where I was going. So, now I'm working on a different one, but it reflects where I am in my mid-seventies, at a different point with a different sense of legacy, and a different sense of integrity, that's different.

MF: I think for both of us there's, on the one hand, the sense of a lost Garden of Eden, [does air quotes] "The Havurah Years," right? And for us the havurah is those years. I don't look down on anyone who came afterward. It's just a totally different experience. So there's that view, and longing for those good old days, and also the days of our youth and our innocence and all that stuff. God knows the world was a more optimistic place, even though we had the Vietnam War. But also, the other model of it is — and I think that's true for both of us in different ways — the ongoing growth of which the havurah was a part, an integral part, but that we've continued to grow, each in our own ways, deepening our spirituality or our wisdom or whatever we're trying to do. And tradition, we'll have passed it onto our children and our grandchildren. So I feel like there is a sense of sort of progress from the havurah days? Not that we've surpassed it and not that we're putting it behind us or disowning it, but it's certainly not where we are now, even though it informs us.

BF: But we can live within true communities in Teaneck. We're accepted in two communities simultaneously, with friends in both communities. Not many people do that in this kind of a community. And our sons reflect those two poles, right? Elisha is more traditional, but he has strong egalitarian commitments, and Eitan reflects more that neo- hasidic style. So, that notion that everybody will have to find their own balance, but that balance has to include becoming part of a larger synagogue community, that's also new.

JG: Do you mean a synagogue community, or just a community?

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BF: A community, but also I think a synagogue community. It's clear — yeah. (05:12:00) See, what we didn't do in the havurah, living holy communities do. That is to say, they do things for the sick and the dying.

MF: Well, we weren't there yet.

BF: [holds hand up] That's what I'm saying. Our community didn't — our havurah didn't have a chesed group. It didn't bring meals to the needy. It didn't take care of the sick. It didn't provide tzedakah.

JG: Outside of your own immediate —

BF: Exactly. So, that's what a larger community can do. That is also — that was a different time, a different place, but as you develop a family, you begin to see that those institutional components are so important.

MF: I also think that we raised our sons surrounded by community, whether it was the Brandeis community or other friends or the havurah or whatever spiritual community we were part of. Our sons were raised in community. People were always coming over to our house. There were study sessions. There were meals. We were very social. Without preaching anything, they just grew up with a lot of spiritual connections —

BF: Diversity.

MF: And diversity.

BF: They also grew up hearing different — there were always different people at our table who had the whole spectrum. So, they never were splitting of who is legitimate, who isn't legitimate. They never had that.

MF: And there was a sense that they were held by — I mean, I have pictures of their brisses. The whole faculty from Brandeis was there, and our havurah friends were there, and the Schechter community was there as we got older. I see in both of our sons’ lives that same — I wouldn't say commitment to community. It’s just how they live. They live in community. Their Shabbos table is a welcoming place, and to me, that's very gratifying, that that's something we've actually passed on. I think for me, since both of us were a little bit lonely growing up — though I had a synagogue community I liked a lot, and you did to some extent — I think the havruah was formative for us in that regard, of shaping us.

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JG: Over the years, have you had any involvement in the national havurah activities as they got going in the late seventies and throughout the years? There's still a very thriving Havurah Summer Institute.

BF: We went to one or two of those summer things.

MF: Early on we went.

BF: There was a couple. It wasn't the thing. [smiles]

MF: It wasn't the havurah.

BF: It wasn't it. It was like there were all these wannabes, and it just didn't ring true. Even times that we've gone on (05:15:00) kind of these much larger retreats of different generations, you know, twenty generations of havurah people, so it's like a havurah retreat in miniature, it just doesn't work.

MF: I think that we —

BF: The tone, the language, what it meant to be autonomous or proud of a community. We were just different for ourselves. No, we were never really part of it.

MF: We went twice to Limmud conferences, which was very interesting. We went to Limmud UK, which is the mothership of Limmud. We were both invited to speak, we both spoke, so people kind of knew us from that.

BF: Teach, teach.

MF: We taught, right. We each taught, I think, four classes, and then we went to other people’s classes. Limmud is amazing, because it's like Jews from all over the place, and especially the international Limmud, which is amazing. There were, I don't know, two or three thousand Jews from all over the world at this Limmud UK. Six hundred came for Shabbos. I mean, it was just amazing.

JG: When are you talking about?

MF: This was —

BF: About three or four years ago.

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MF: I think a little longer, like five years ago.

BF: It took place in Warwick, England that year.

MF: Yeah. It was just amazing, and it felt to me — it wasn't the havurah — but it felt to me that same sense of excitement and energy and friendship.

BF: The young generation in England that had decided that they weren't going to make aliyah, and they were going to make their home in Europe again. There are a lot of people who are coming to that, who had decided that they wanted their Jewish life to be European or English, and not that the real life that they had to do — so they were actually coming together with energy to find male or female partners that they could have a life in Europe. That was also a part of the intense energy of the younger people, and then there were of course the people older, our age.

MF: Then we went to Limmud New York a couple years ago, which was another sort of experience like that. I taught at Nefesh International, which is Orthodox, Jewish mental health workers. There's something about being in that spiritual, psychological chevrashaft that feels very natural to me, that I love. So, it's not like we're only out of Eden. There's a bit of Eden we took with us.

JG: Yeah. Buzzy, you've been obviously one of the most dynamic and prolific forces in Jewish life and scholarship over the past fifty years, can you — literally because we just have a few minutes — in a snapshot, sort of tell us where your — you described where you were sort of at the time of Havurat Shalom, when you were involved with Havurat Shalom. Where have your interests taken you, and how would you say your experiences at Havurat Shalom sort of continued to have an impact, if they did, on the (05:18:00) evolution of your thinking and your approach?

BF: Well, I couldn't begin to answer that, in light of our conversation now. [laughs] I would say, part of my interests, of course, have been the history of interpretation and hermeneutics, but the fact that Judaism is a theological culture and that its theology is driven by interpretation, and that each interpretation is a voice, and that voice comes out of the ground of real life experience together with the text. So, if there's anything that I could summarize in a snapshot from the havurah to what has given my life a certain trajectory, it's plurivocity, multiple voices, and that the voices are all grounded in living life theology and in connection with the text. Trying to foster — make people who read understand that reality, so they can transfer it back into their life. There is a kind of theological ethics to reading, that you make a decision of how you're going to read a text and how you're going to apply it, and then to try to become aware of the multiple voices

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that have constituted Jewish life at all times. To break down what appears in the books as texts as multiple voices, all rooted in different standpoints, all struggling to carry things forward. The other thing that's related to that — and I think it's just as important — we were often criticized in those days that we were selective, and that we chose certain types and aspects of Judaism. The fact is — and I fully became aware of this as I became a commentator myself and tried to understand what the great commentators were doing — to be a great teacher and to be a commentator means you have to make a decision among multiple interpretations — which ones do you want to channel, and choose, and bring down. So, all of the commentators, even those who are considered classics, have chosen because of values what they have siphoned and privileged, even if they're giving them a multiple voice, even in their own commentary. They're choosing, because they're trying to shape their community (05:21:00) at that time. So, there's a multivocality overall, but multivocality also means that people are choosing. If there is an honest link to the integrity of the past, you have to shape and choose that as part of the living theological content that you're doing. It's a little bit different from the dynamics of halachah, but insofar as we are saying that the impact of the havurah as a spiritual, mental configuration is that choice, decision, and selectivity is unavoidable, and it's a historical fact. It's just a question of what you're choosing and whether that will be productive, and good for the present, and good for the future. So, that's what I've risked my life on. [laughs]

JG: Thank you.

MF: Can I add a piece?

JG: You may.

MF: I think that I've watched Buzzy be a teacher and a mentor and a student for many years, kind of this multi-generation journey from being Nahum Glatzer and Nahum Sarna's grandson and son, so to speak, from mentorship, to being a mentor to your students. I think that — and I've never thought this before, but as we've been talking about it now — I think the havurah gave you some perspective on teaching as a full-body experience, teaching as a multi-modal experience. Not just a cognitive experience, but an emotional experience, psychological, spiritual. When I think of how you're devoted to your students, you're devoted to them as people, as growing people — spiritually, psychologically, through the text, through their work with you, but it's not some disembodied intellectual exercise. Your students are often very devoted to you. You're very devoted to them. You care about their personal and spiritual well-being. It feels to me like that's a model that was partly something you got from your own teachers, but a lot of it was forged, I think, in the context of the havurah. Does that make sense?

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BF: Absolutely. Absolutely. That's part of the great gratitude I have for the havurah.

JG: And Mona, you went on to become a clinical psychologist.

MF: Right.

JG: You've recently, until recently, been the director of the Couples Therapy Training Program at the Chicago Center for Family Health, is that right?

MF: Right.

JG: So as your career, in your own thinking, has evolved, would you say that your experiences — emotional, intellectual, spiritual — in the intensive community of Havurat Shalom, influenced your views of relationships? Of the way you work with people as a therapist?

MF: I would say yes. I mean, (05:24:00) I'm very interested — as I indicated in terms of my work with the Rabbinic Training Institute — in integrating the spiritual and the psychological, and in particular Jewish values, with psychological values. I think a lot of what I try to do in my clinical work is help, whether it's couples or inter-generational work, I do a lot of intergenerational work too, with adults and their parents. I do a lot of healing work, so to speak, with adults and their parents and their siblings. The Jewish texts on Kevod Av v' Em are actually very important to me in that regard. So again, from the havurah, that moment when we were bringing the psychological and the spiritual and the intellectual together really, I think, gave me some insights into that. I've written — I wrote two articles on intergenerational work, and one specifically around Kibud Av V'Em, looking at the psychological, intergenerational issues and the Jewish values and the Talmudic texts around Kibud Av V'Em. I think in general, I view my office as a sacred space — [laughs] a space where blame and shame aren't invited, where people can be safe to explore and risk. I view my work again, as multi-modal. It's full presence. It's not just an intellectual exercise. I think that thinking about values without preaching to people is really important, especially in the world we live in now, where the "Me Generation" and self-focus has gotten so out of control. I think it tears at the fabric of family and marital life, or intimate life. So, a lot of my work is about helping people become more generous and more thoughtful, reaching for their best self and living according to their higher values, which is not something that people typically bring into the therapy room when they're at odds. When a couple is at odds with each other, they're focusing on how I'm being hurt and you're the perpetrator. So, I think, for me, the spiritual and the psychological very much go together. Again, I'm not preaching Jewish

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stuff to my clients, but I think it informs who I am in the work, and I think the havurah was part of that process for me.

BF: It was foundational. It was a matrix. It was a birthmother.

JG: Are there ways for either of you in which your views on Jewish life, would you say, diverge from what you thought during your havurah period?

MF: Well, certainly for you, the sense of halachah and commandedness and limits has grown.

BF: Um —

MF: And for me, too. I mean, we live an [does air quotes] “Orthodox lifestyle,” in the sense that we observe Shabbat and Kashrut and all of the observances, even as we think freely, and I daven in an egalitarian as well as an Orthodox context.

BF: It's hard to say even in retrospect whether the personal or the communal was over- dominant. (05:27:00) I think for every one of us, it was constantly shifting — foreground, background. Some people probably remember me as much more focused on the personal and not as open to sharing. For me, it was a stretch I moved into, so it helped me with that. But that notion of that boundary between self-exploration and communal exploration, and how the two can be in tandem or in tension. Of course, that gets played out in the family with children. That was worked out or experienced by us — when I say foundational — we were being molded in a fundamental way at that time. That's I think part of why this moment for a lot of us of that generation was so powerful. The inner, and then the collective, were in a kind of dynamic — not correlation, not even a synthesis, because it was always changing. So, how all of these values — it's very hard to filter out one thing or another — but we were reborn, for all of us. We had a new sense of what identity was and social identity, and I think for all of us, that has remained a kind of inner principle or an inner matrix, against which other things try to either map themselves onto it or diverge. It was fluid in state — it's very hard to pin it, in a sense. But maybe people in their adolescence, or Erickson was talking about college being a type of a moratorium and a suspension, this was something of that for very self-conscious, intelligent, spiritually oriented people. It was a time in time and out of time, and it was a new moment of creative formation that happened after adolescence, after college. We all felt that we became new in a different way. How to (05:30:00) pluck the seed of every flower that grew in our lives is not always possible, but that was — we never saw it as a family, but it was a family. It really was a family.

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MF: I saw it as a family.

BF: Yeah. So —

JG: Mona, any final thoughts there?

MF: Sorry?

JG: Any other thoughts on that?

MF: On how we diverged?

JG: Yeah.

MF: Well, I think certainly we've come to think a lot more about the larger context of the culture we live in and the world we live in.

JG: What about the whole issue of gender and egalitarianism? Since you came from a very egalitarian place, you lived in a very egalitarian place, and then sort of moved kind of fluidly in and out, depending upon the context.

MF: Right. [laughs] It's a little — it's kind of remarkable. I still do.

JG: Yeah.

MF: I go to an Orthodox shul and I'm behind the mechitzah. I think I'm most at home in an egalitarian context. That's why I love the minyan where I'm at now. It's most consonant for me. But I'm not — number one, I'm not that judgmental about practices, other people’s practices, and number two, I have this philosophy: take the best and leave the rest. It's served me very well in a lot of relationships and contexts. So, going to Chabad all these years back in Highland Park, it was a beautiful service, lovely people, lovely davening, and it made me very sad that I couldn't have an aliyah or read Torah or lead services, but I didn't dwell on it. I didn't, like, refuse to go, because I wanted to be with Buzzy and I also liked a lot that was there. So, I do kind of find what works best and still keep my identity.

JG: So, this is my final question. If there's anything else you'd like to add, you're certainly free to and welcome to. Just in a sort of summative sense, what do you see as the main contributions of the havurah to American Jewish life over the past half century? We're about to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Havurat Shalom. What role do

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you see, if any, for the havurah as we get fully into the twenty-first century now, sort of the challenges that the American Jewish —

MF: "The havurah" meaning Havurat Shalom in particular?

JG: No, no, no.

MF: Havurah period.

JG: Havurah at large, yeah.

MF: You know, I think that havurah now is such a broad term. I was with someone the other day, and they said, "Our havurah, da da da..." and I (05:33:00) was tempted to say — and this was, I think, in an Orthodox context — I was tempted to say, [raises hand] "We're the founding members of Havurat Shalom!" [laughs] I don't have to go into the whole story, but it's interesting to me because the term wasn't used. I think it was used originally in, what, the Essene community or some early community way back when. But, that was self-consciously chosen by probably Art or whoever, and again, it's very rare that you create something de novo that then becomes a reality out there and that has blossomed. I actually am very pleased about that because I think Havurat Shalom, and then the subsequent havurot, tapped into something very profound in American Judaism that was missing. Number one, we needed more intimacy, like a shteibel. Number two, we needed to rescue or come back to a more experiential, emotional, and niggun-based exploratory approach, as opposed to the sort of — basically, for many people, it was a dead experience going to synagogue, I think in many different ways, and most people have no awareness at all that this is connected to Havurat Shalom. The whole Havurah Movement is an attempt to create more intimacy, more relevance, more depth. Some of them are study sessions, some of them are davening, some of them are eating, some of them are socializing, raising the kids together. To me it's all good. In other words, the whole notion that the Havurah Movement and other independent minyanim have tapped into the need for intimacy and spiritual exploration that was really missing at that particular historical period — and I think frankly, still is. I think the Conservative Movement is in trouble, partly because of that. I take great pleasure in that, actually. I think it's not only enriched our lives, but I think it has made a real difference in the larger American community, without people necessary saying, Oh yeah, that goes back to Havurat Shalom. I don't really care about the attribution piece, but I do think that it made a difference. It has made a difference. I think from an ongoing perspective, the havurah idea is very important, that people feel sustained and nourished Jewishly at all these different levels. Again, I want to emphasize that it wasn't just — we were multi-modal. It was intellectual, it was spiritual, it was davening, it was study, it was eating, it was

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supporting each other experientially, emotionally. That multiple level, I think, is also a major piece of this.

BF: When I look to the future, I have mixed feelings. The mixed feelings are that the intensification of the Havurah Movement, particularly as you get out of the East Coast and you go to other places, becomes the privatization, and in some ways (05:36:00) the Protestantization of Judaism. It thins down to a voluntaristic community that establishes its own rules, its own sense of Judaism. The positive aspect of that, of course, is that it saves Judaism for lots of people, for whom it would not have any resonance or any language. But precisely because we're facing a huge crisis of assimilation and the deterioration of Jewish life, and the strengthening of more fundamental aspects of the community, and a great splitting, I worry whether the intensification of the multiplication without the awareness of a shared heritage that becomes a point of reference — rather than the community's process being the point of reference, but a meta-point of reference, which is the historical continuity of Jewish religious life. I don't know. I mean, we're at a very, very — we're at a great crossroads in terms of assimilation, the thinning out of knowledge, people needing to form these communities because otherwise they would have nothing to give them a sense of Jewish identity and continuity. But, the danger is that they become a series of satellites without a center. They may, because we're talking about down the road several generations away. In other words, a danger is that everybody has a right to decide, irrespective of their knowledge or their type of commitment to the tradition — so, it increases the voluntaristic aspect, which I fully understand why and the wherefore and the need, and perhaps other communities have totally reduced the voluntaristic aspect, and it's a social obligation, or a religious obligation in various ways. But how that moment which was born in the havurah as an American moment of Judaism in which people can make their own decisions and weren't always waiting for the decision that had been made five generations earlier and worrying whether you have sufficient authority to make the change, that aspect of America is going to affect (05:39:00) the possibility of Jewish life, or the thinning, or the continuity. I can't be a futurist. As a sociologist, that's not my forte or my interest, but it's a worry that I have. The havurah will save what it saves, and the hope is that the second generation of those communities will feel the need to be a little bit more traditional, to pass on the legacy. Then maybe it will be shored up for a while. But the long-term life of these things on this planet is — I don't — it's a hard view, for me, anyway.

MF: I think that our position, and particularly Buzzy's, of integrating commandedness and halachah rooted in tradition with open mindedness, innovation, change, and creativity, is very special and fairly unique. People are often on one side of that divide or the other. They're either more traditional and innovation is maybe threatening, or they're innovative and tradition is not accessible or they don't care. So, we occupy a very small

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slice of the pie that sort of works for us, but it's a very delicate balance, and the Jewish community gets more and more split —

BF: I would say —

MF: Between the more observant and the less observant.

BF: I would say, at the end of the day those young communities have the legacy of the havurah to give them a future. For people like ourselves, the legacy of the havurah has helped us live out the rest of our lives with integrity.

MF: And what we've passed on to the next generations in our lives.

BF: Yeah. So, we're at different points in that spectrum, of the future of life or the end of life, and how the havurah has made an impact is very different.

MF: And actually, some of the reunions with our cohort, the original cohort, aging together and reflecting on aging together — whether it's raising kids or divorce or widowhood whatever it is, health issues — it's been very powerful to share that, because we have a shared history and a shared commitment to wisdom, and now facing aging and other challenging issues. So that's been very powerful, those meetings, those reunion meetings.

BF: I think there was one moment where we were talking about Kathy Green, who passed away.

JG: You just lost her.

MF: We just lost her, yeah.

BF: And —

MF: So many people were at the funeral. (05:42:00)

BF: Well, everybody was there. People came in. The moment I want to describe was as the casket was being taken out, Art wanted — and he felt that Kathy wanted — that we would sing the Kotzk melody, which was our theme song.

MF: So many people were at the funeral. (05:42:00)

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BF: Well, everybody was there. People came in. The moment I want to describe was as the casket was being taken out, Art wanted — and he felt that Kathy wanted — that we would sing the Kotzk melody, which was our theme song in the 1960s. Art sort of looked at me at that point, and he says, "I hope everybody will do this. This was who we were." And everybody sang the Kotzk melody —

MF: In Yiddish.

BF: In Yiddish. We passed out the sheets. In a certain sense, that is the havurah going into the sunset. Some moment. There was that uniqueness of what was involved, of what the content of what that Kotzk melody was. That Kotzk is there bimkom ha'mikdash. Kotzk was a sacred sanctuary, and people would make a pilgrimage to Kotzk. That's what the havurah was. It was bimkom ha'mikdash. For us, it was the replacement of a holy sanctuary. It became a holy community. So that moment is the moment that we're living the last part of our lives as part of.

JG: That's an amazing place to end.

MF: Thank you.

JG: This conversation has been a real privilege, to talk to you both. I'm very, very grateful to you, personally and on behalf of this project. So thank you.

BF: Thank you very much.

MF: Thank you for your wonderful questions and a great dialogue. It stimulated a lot of memories.

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Addendum

Pg. 69: We just did some sleuthing: the niggun Buzzy thought was a Quaker tune was in fact a Bratzlaver chassidic niggun: Oz V'Hadar Lvusha Here is a youtube link to chassidim singing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjXrO0KlEbw

Pg. 69: The words that I mentioned were: Oz ve-hadar levushah (words from Eshet Hayil, from Proverbs 31: 25) and the melody is hasidic. (A Bratzlav niggun — sung with a faster up-beat tempo than we did, hence I thought it might be a Quaker melody.)

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