We are a small, (mostly) queer, intergenerational group of secular jewish educators, activists, cultural workers and artists organizing a virtual gathering (with local pod options) in the summer of 2022 to be together, learn and plan.  

What do we mean by "secular"?  It's not an identity that fits all of us perfectly - but it is the term used for almost two centuries to name the jewish traditions that we are part of, and were the first to create and sustain specifically jewish movements for justice in our communities, from Tetuan to Czernowitz, Detroit to Tehran, Melbourne to Montevideo.

We use it to name a jewishness that says that we, individually and collectively, do not need to use the texts, approaches, forms, and practices canonized by the rabbinate as defining reference points for our jewish lives. A jewishness that is not compelled to respond to halakha, torah, and talmud as things to embrace, reclaim, re-imagine, or transform. A jewishness grounded in an understanding that we ourselves, in movements for justice, create fully jewish lives.

Or, described another way: The jewishness embraced by millions who understood the ways that shtetl theocracy aided and abetted the poverty and violence from which they fled. The jewishness that made Salonika, Baghdad, and Tehran centers of anticapitalist organizing before zionist collaboration with other nationalists impacted their jewish populations. The jewishness that understands its home expansively - as the Levant, as Yidishland, as the Maghreb - or with deep specificity - as this particular town, mountain valley, forest, wadi, stretch of coast - rejecting nationalist blood-and-soil narratives and the rabbinic notions of chosen-ness that can lie beneath them.

This jewishness does not set itself against ritual: it is the source of many, if not most, of the politicized ritual forms contemporary movements use, from justice-oriented seders and sukkahs to agitprop Purim plays to literary and theatrical bet dins condemning abuses of power. It does not reject relationships with the texts of the rabbinic canon: it simply declines to consider the Bavli or the Megila "more jewish" (or more jewishly meaningful) than the writings of Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Sami Shalom Chetrit, Ella Shohat, or Abraham Serfaty - and it insists that no canon defines authentic, grounded, or deeply-rooted jewish life. It has been lived by people who stand in every possible relationship to the traditional practices of their communities, from an absolute break, to deep transformation, to full continuity, and that none of those paths has priority; all are complete jewish ways of life.

What we're honoring our predecessors with, by continuing to call "secular," is one of the other jewish paths - one that does not carve out a separate sphere of the "religious" or "spiritual", and has a different vision of jewish authenticity.

We have seen a jewishness centered on rabbinic and/or priestly benchmarks of authenticity become dominant in almost all the spaces of the jewish left over our many years of justice movement work. Both NGOs and grassroots collectives now consider the authentically jewish aspects of their work to be the parts that use or refer to prayer, text from the tanakh or liturgy, and/or talmud study. This is compounded by mainstream jewish institutions making such parts of traditional jewish life the most easy to access (especially for people excluded by families and/or cut off from lineages by assimilation or violence). This is also part of the successful campaign by the christian right to assert the realm of religion and spirituality as the exclusive source of ethical guidance.  

Alongside this, we have seen many of the established secular or culturally jewish spaces and organizations redouble their support for the zionist colonial project, even as the zionist stranglehold on jewish life in many places weakens.

We aim to build something different; rooted in this world, and reaching from the many secular branches of jewish tradition; facilitating an exploration of organizing and projects that may coalesce as a network.

The gathering is scheduled for Friday July 15th, 2022 to Sunday July 17th, 2022 and will be held as a virtual gathering with some optional, regional in-person programming.

This form is a way for us to assess interest in the gathering and to expand our team of organizers for the event. Please complete it as soon as you’re able and let us know what you think -- all ideas and questions are welcome!  ** You can also email us at rootedinthisworld@riseup.net **