from TABLET by Sara Polsky March 25, 2015
Rabbi Noa Kushner opened a recent Shabbat evening service at San Francisco’s The Kitchen with a quote from Abraham Joshua Heschel: “It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society,” she read. “It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid.”
The service that followed was anything but dull: It was high-octane, all in Hebrew, and musical. The Kitchen, which Kushner founded in 2011 after working at Hillels at Sarah Lawrence College and Stanford University and as a congregational rabbi, describes itself as a “religious startup,” one of a number of independent Jewish congregations that do not slot themselves into traditional denominations, or even into the standard format of a synagogue. “What we’re looking at,” Kushner said in a recent interview, “is creating not an institution but what we affectionately call a solar system,” in which the city offers a variety of Jewish experiences that may not connect directly to attending services.
Here are some of the planets in that solar system: For Shavuot last year, The Kitchen held a scavenger hunt in which participants acted as Ruth and received text message directions from Gabe Smedresman, a Kitchen member, acting as Naomi (including instructions to study Torah for 15 minutes in a café). The Kitchen staff (three full-timers) is currently choosing hosts for a program of in-home Shabbat dinners. And just a couple of weeks ago, in mid-March, The Kitchen released an updated version of its Passover game, Next Year in Jerusalem. The game, which debuted in a pre-holiday rush last year, involves a deck of cards split between “ritual” cards, which are used in a precise order to guide participants through rituals of the Seder, and “action” cards, to be used at any time during the evening’s proceedings, which offer prompts to “reflect,” “act,” or “discuss.”
The new edition of the game was created in response to user feedback, just as startups improve their products based on user input. That similarity is intentional, said Yoav Schlesinger, the Kitchen’s executive director, not just because the organization is based in the startup-heavy Bay Area but “because we think it’s on point. It’s all about rolling things out quickly, getting customer feedback, meeting the needs of the market, making changes based on the feedback you get. It’s a conscious effort on our part.” The “product,” as Schlesinger put it, is Torah, the same product Judaism has offered all along. But The Kitchen, like a handful of kindred communities established in the past decade, is “trying to innovate around how we deliver that to people.”
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