Good Friday morning!

Ed. note: In celebration of Sukkot, the next Your Daily Phil will arrive on Wednesday, Oct. 12. Chag sameach!

In today’s Your Daily Phil, we talk philanthropy and risk capital with author and entrepreneur Josh Foer, and feature op-eds by JFN’s Andrés Spokoiny on making connections during Sukkot, and by Theodore Feldsher on connecting with Sephardic heritage. Also in this newsletter: MacKenzie Scott, Aaron B. Lerner, Natan Sharansky, Lorry Lokey and Ilan Vitemberg. We’ll start with a visit to a Sukkot art installation at Manhattan’s JCC.

When Sukkot arrives on Sunday evening, the main event space at Manhattan’s Jewish Community Center will be on the roof, where two large sukkot stand side-by-side, ready to host all manner of gatherings.

But this year, the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, as the building is known, aims for visitors to also spend time in a smaller sukkah, on the seventh floor balcony, that measures just 9-by-12 feet, and will remain empty of furniture for most of the holiday. That sukkah, known as Imkha, is an art installation by Tobi Kahn, the prominent Jewish artist known for making ceremonial objects.

The sukkah is constructed of 13 white panels of smooth, painted wood, with rectangles jutting out from the walls at different depths. Rectangular holes peek out from between the rectangles, letting light in through the walls as well as through the sukkah’s roof.

Kahn chose white so that sunlight and the colors of the city and nature could reflect off of its walls. Similarly, he intends for the sukkah and the rectangles that make up its walls to serve as a space of reflection and imagination for its temporary dwellers.

“We think of ushpizin, we invite people to come in, and I want all your memories to be there,” Kahn told eJewishPhilanthropy, referring to the traditional Sukkot liturgy that invites biblical figures to dinner each night. “That’s why I wanted it to be white, so you could project your memories onto the wall… To me, Sukkot is very much about memory and bringing in people that aren’t there anymore.”

The project is funded by Zelda Stern, a local philanthropist who is on the board of Yeshivat Maharat, the Orthodox women’s seminary in Riverdale, and owns one of Kahn’s Omer counters, an object used to tally the 49-day period between Passover and Shavuot. The sukkah is a tribute to her late husband, Stanley Rosenzweig.

Since last November, the panels that now make up the sukkah’s walls have lined the walls of Makom, the JCC’s meditation studio, where they will return when the holiday ends.

“I’ve always wanted to do a sacred space that was a sukkah, but that was used all year round,” said Kahn. “It wasn’t going to be something that was up for eight days and in a basement for 11 and a half months… All those people that were working out in that room, their memories are there.”

Q&A

Josh Foer on what Jewish philanthropy lacks, his new production company and where he gets his ideas

Courtesy of Josh Foer

If you’ve paid any attention to the seemingly endless stream of efforts to reinvent Judaism in the last decade or so, odds are you’ve encountered a project of Josh Foer’s. Before Yom Kippur, eJewishPhilanthropy’s Ben Sales spoke via Zoom with Foer to talk about the Jewish nonprofit world, his creative process and goals, and how he pays for all of his ideas.

A series of projects: The 40-year-old author and entrepreneur is part of the team behind a litany of initiatives: Sefaria, the popular digital library of Jewish texts; Atlas Obscura, the online magazine cataloging unusual travel destinations; and Sukkah City, the 2010 art installation in New York City’s Union Square that reimagined what a sukkah could look like and represent. Recently, he embarked on two new projects alongside partners: The Lehrhaus, a bar-cum-Jewish study house in the Boston area, and Leviathan Productions, with the aim of producing TV shows and films telling Jewish stories. He’s also on the board of the Jim Joseph Foundation, which funds both Sefaria and the Lehrhaus.

Following his curiosity: “I like to learn, and I think that when there are gaps in the landscape that [are] like, ‘If only this thing existed, it would help me pursue my curiosity better,’ my inclination is to try and figure out if there’s a way to solve that problem… Sometimes it takes a long time. An idea needs to incubate and gestate and sometimes it’s not ripe yet, and that’s OK. A mistake can be pursuing something before it’s ready. So I’ve got ideas I know are kind of not quite there, but I know they might be there in a few years.”

More risk capital: “If I had to identify what I believe to be the single biggest source of stasis in our corner of the universe, it is the fact that there is so little meaningful risk capital [for nonprofit ventures] in the Jewish world… There are certainly places that will write small checks, $30,000 checks, $50,000 checks, but to start a real ambitious venture requires more capital than that — like an order of magnitude more capital. And there aren’t addresses to go to for that kind of real risk capital, whereas there is a whole system in the for-profit world.”

Read the full story here.

REBUILDING OUR COMMUNITIES

Building permanence among the temporary (Sukkot 5783)

iStock

“While generally not a fan of dystopian fiction, I recently fell for one such book: The Second Sleep by Robert Harris. A page-turner murder mystery, it takes place in 31st-century England, a time in which civilization has reverted to a new Middle Ages,” writes Andrés Spokoiny, president and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy. 

Skyscrapers: “The narrator in the story has only a vague knowledge of our civilization but knows that it was a mighty one, full of hard-to-fathom technological wonders… Interestingly, in this dystopian future, there’s virtually no trace of our gravity-defying skyscrapers. As the narrator explains, our modern style of construction, with iron and steel beams inserted in concrete casing, is deceptively fragile. The glass that covers modern buildings doesn’t decay, but it breaks and falls off. When that happens, the building is exposed to the elements, small cracks in the concrete allow moisture to penetrate, and the iron beams end up rusting, eventually bringing down the entire structure. In the novel, London is dotted with reddish-brownish stains where skyscrapers used to stand, like monuments to the futility of human hubris.”

Temporary huts: “It seems appropriate to talk about rotting buildings during Sukkot, the holiday in which we’re instructed to live in temporary, fragile huts, exposed to the whims of the changing weather of autumn. Our sukkot are deliberately perishable and have no pretense of permanence. But as I read The Second Sleep, I realized that even those buildings we believe will last forever will, over time, also crumble, just like our holiday huts.”

Communities: “We live in a time in which skyscrapers are easy to build. From my office in Manhattan, I saw the magnificent complex of Hudson Yards spring up from the ground in just a couple of years. Communities, in contrast, can’t be built overnight. The fact that they can last forever doesn’t mean that they are unbreakable. Yet, they can outlive even the tallest and strongest building, provided we take care of them.”

Making connections: “The notion of community, as Judaism understands it, is under fire today. The ideas of mutuality, reciprocity and radical hospitality are countercultural today. We live in a society in which the other is to be avoided, not sought, in which electronic devices shelter us from the challenge to build meaningful relationships with real people. In a time of intolerance and echo chambers, we struggle to define what we have in common with our fellow Jews and with our fellow human beings.”

Read the full piece here.

SEPHARDIC HERITAGE

Elul in Uzbekistan: Looking back at thousands of years to find inspiration for today

Courtesy

“Rising antisemitism, the assimilation crisis, the soaring cost of Jewish education and the associated costs of an observant lifestyle are just some of the challenges contemporary American Jewry faces. In spite of these numerous challenges, many Jewish programs have inspired significant numbers of young Jewish Americans to strengthen their relationship with their Jewish roots. One program in particular, the Sephardic American Mizrahi Initiative or ‘SAMi,’ stands out as it redefines and raises the bar on how organizations can assist young Jewish Americans from all walks of life establish and maintain a more authentic relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people through a Sephardic lens,” writes Theodore Feldsher, a participant on a recent SAMi trip, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

Off to Uzbekistan: “Traveling to Uzbekistan with SAMi provided the authentic connection to Judaism I was craving. We were provided with a taste of a more undisturbed and genuine sense of what Jewish life was like in Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries for generations prior. Our tour visited the synagogues and yeshivot where some of our greatest Sephardic rabbis studied and where countless Jews from lands near and far were welcomed with open arms.”

Full circle: “Traveling to the holy land of Bukhara provided me with a stronger connection to Judaism, comparable to no other experience in my life. I feel indebted to my lovely wife for convincing me to take part in SAMi’s life-changing program and pray to return to Uzbekistan someday soon. Uzbekistan and SAMi have forever altered my Jewish paradigm for the better and helped me realize that sometimes, experiencing Judaism’s most authentic and unadulterated traditions (which can be traced back all the way to the times of our Holy Temples) will help us better understand what it means to be an observant Jew in America today.”

Read the full piece here.

Worthy Reads

Divorce Dealings: Puck’s Teddy Schleifer looks at the possible changes — or lack thereof — in MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropic giving following her divorce from Dan Jewett. “The conceit of the philanthropic establishment is that there is virtue in patience, in the bureaucracy, in the R.F.P.s, in the site visits, and in the years of trial-and-error that precede giving-at-scale. MacKenzie, unique among philanthropists in her weight class, has been betting that’s all an excuse for inaction. Over the last year, MacKenzie had intentionally painted these efforts as a joint venture with her new husband. She referred to ‘Dan’ in her Medium posts as her partner; nonprofits thank both of them in paeans to their benefactors; there’s the joint Giving Pledge signatures, etc. And yet… most people don’t buy it. ‘Those in the philanthropic-industrial complex were being too cute by half by referring to “MacKenzie and Dan.” It was always just her, and it belittles her/makes her smaller by lumping her partner in with it,’ argued one philanthropic adviser over text. ‘Again, they’re kind of responsible for that themselves, but it was always just MacKenzie’s money and vision — does her a disservice by pretending otherwise.’” [Puck]

Pic of the Day

MENAHEM KAHANA/AFP via Getty Images

Orthodox Jewish men inspect hadas, or myrtle plants, one of four species to be used during the celebration of Sukkot on Thursday in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem.