TORONTO — Shaarei Shomayim Congregation’s Rabbi Chaim Strauchler hopes a new initiative to present short, gripping, TED-Talk-like lectures by North American rabbis will inspire the next generation of Jews to view world issues through a Jewish lens.
In October, the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) launched a series of rabbinical lectures, modelled after the TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) conference, a popular conference where the presentations are recorded and made available for free online.
“The idea is to create communication vehicles for great Torah messages and make use of modern technology, modern media and social media,” said Rabbi Strauchler, who chaired the 2014 RCA conference last summer and produced the online lecture series that is available on a YouTube channel called R3CA.
“I think very often, rabbis are not fully aware of their potential as public thought leaders and this effort is meant to, number 1, teach people and give them experiences of what they are going to find exciting and inspiring and it is also meant to help rabbis reconceive their roles, both to their own community and also to the wider community.”
Of the 10 lectures that are being released monthly, three are currently available on YouTube: Connecticut-based Rabbi Daniel Cohen’s lecture titled “Living a life of legacy: Discovering your Elijah moment; a lecture by Rabbi Mark Fishman, from Montreal’s Congregation Beth Tikvah, titled “Sex trafficking and the synagogue: Raising the engagement of our young adults;” and another by Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, from Congregation Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem in Montreal, called “Holocaust survivors’ secret to happiness.”
“Rabbi Steinmetz’ piece is about Holocaust survivors, and it is extremely inspiring because he is a child of Holocaust survivors, and you listen to it and get a sense that this person is really engaged in this issue, that he has something to teach me,” Rabbi Strauchler said.
The lecture about sex trafficking by Rabbi Fishman was inspired by a personal challenge he faced in his community about how to engage the children of his older members who were not attending shul regularly.
“What he found, was for that generation, what people really wanted to do, was not necessarily focus on the particular elements of Judaism, but on the universal, and he found that if you engage them, the desire to care for the problems of the world, that are not necessarily Jewish issues, they can relate to them as Jews together,” Rabbi Strauchler said.
“So he took a trip with members of his congregation to Thailand to focus on some of the issues of sex trafficking and they did it as a young community within a shul to address that issue.”
The goal of this project will be to gain 100,000 views for these 10 videos, each under 18 minutes in length, over the course of a year.
Rabbi Strauchler said another goal of the project is to widely share messages that “emerge from our Torah tradition that can help people live their lives in a better way,” and to inspire the rabbis themselves.
“I want rabbis to speak about whatever they are inspired by. To inspire others you have to inspire yourself. Every rabbi has their song that makes them sing and I want them to sing that song. I want something that is going to be passionate and inspiring.”
And he is relying on members of the rabbis’ congregations to help spread the messages to their social circles.
“With social technology right now, social media, you can just throw this onto your Facebook page, forward it to your contact list and say, ‘Hey, this is a great inspiring presentation that my rabbi did, you have to watch it,’” Rabbi Strauchler said.
“That type of interaction even further solidifies the learning experience, because you’re not just learning by yourself in front of your machine, you’re talking about it with a friend afterwards.”