Rabbi Melissa Weintraub co-founded Resetting the Desk to rework political discord into inventive options. Pictures by Carolyn Fong
Rising up amid the cornfields and soybeans of Illinois in a small city known as Bloomington Regular, Rabbi Melissa Weintraub knew from a younger age she was something however regular. Her household was certainly one of solely about 100 Jewish households on the town, she says, and her mother saved the one kosher kitchen in the neighborhood. Rabbi Weintraub’s mom would drive three hours to a kosher butcher in Chicago, stocking their freezer with sufficient meat to final till their subsequent kosher meat run. Her father, then again, ate decidedly unkosher cheeseburgers over paper plates, she remembers with amusing, in order to not sully the household’s dishes as he broke the Jewish prohibition in opposition to mixing milk and meat.
So not solely was Rabbi Weintraub “conscious of cultural and ideological rifts within the U.S. at a younger age,” she says, her childhood was additionally marked by bridging and translating a number of cultures — typically at her personal dinner desk.
Is it any shock then that, a long time later, Rabbi Weintraub is a co-founder and govt director of Resetting the Desk, a groundbreaking group that goals, amongst different issues, to bridge the partisan divide.
The roots of Resetting the Desk lie in Rabbi Weintraub’s first group, Encounter, which was based within the thick of the Israeli-Palestinian battle. “It was 4 years into the second intifada (or Palestinian rebellion) and it had turn out to be unlawful for Israelis to enter Palestinian areas of the West Financial institution and virtually unattainable for Palestinians to enter Israel through allow,” she remembers. However as an American citizen, Rabbi Weintraub had freedom of motion and her typical week seemed like spiritual research in Jerusalem at some point, a birthday celebration within the Palestinian metropolis of Ramallah one other, and an NGO assembly in Bethlehem, which additionally lies in a Palestinian space off-limits to Jewish Israelis.
Bouncing between worlds with colleagues, buddies and acquaintances on either side, “felt like … dwelling within the twilight zone,” says Rabbi Weintraub, who provides “folks had been obsessive about one another however had nearly no contact with one another’s precise humanity and lived experiences. I used to be changing into more and more satisfied that every of those worlds wanted one another’s views to amass the inventive and collective intelligence to rework the battle and the distrust that fuels it.”
Via having a “dialog throughout disagreement” Weintraub hopes to shift “rigidity into receptivity.”
Realizing her life had turn out to be a bridge and she or he wanted to assist “carry 1000's of individuals throughout it,” Rabbi Weintraub, one other rabbi and a gaggle of Palestinian activists based Encounter.
“The purpose was actually recognition on a deep degree,” she says, including that the concept wasn’t to gloss over the battle or emphasize similarities between the folks however, reasonably, to facilitate Israelis and Palestinians “confronting the toughest and most painful issues via one another’s eyes.”
In 2014, a decade after she co-founded Encounter, she determined to carry the identical philosophy to that different more and more fevered battle — the American political divide.
Resetting the Desk grew out of the understanding that doing transformational work with Jewish Israelis and Palestinians additionally necessitated peacebuilding work inside each communities; a bit of that meant “overhauling the polarized argument inside the broader American Jewish group.” Rabbi Weintraub additionally realized that the American public “was one spoke within the wheel” — one of many many third events concerned within the battle.
Simply as she didn’t search to color over variations between Israelis and Palestinians, Resetting the Desk works “to rework political disagreement into the supply of strengthened relationships, inventive downside fixing and collective insights,” she says.
Resetting the Desk has all kinds of choices, from facilitation coaching to communication talent workshops to story slams to academic supplies; interventions vary from 90 minutes to eight months. If there’s an overarching theme to all of those modalities, it’s that Resetting the Desk’s facilitators assist folks learn to observe the warmth reasonably than keep away from hot-button points. For instance, in workshops, they typically have individuals excavate private tales, particularly “formative life experiences which have formed folks’s political make-up,” says Rabbi Weintraub. Then facilitators train folks to pay attention for what appears to matter probably the most to the speaker and “ask into” delicate materials — particularly what they don’t agree with. Via having a “dialog throughout disagreement” Rabbi Weintraub hopes to shift “rigidity into receptivity.”
The final word purpose, based on Rabbi Weintraub — who says she grew to become a lady of material as a result of she needed to be “a therapist, an instructional and an activist suddenly” — is to construct “a extra cohesive society, a shared society, during which we don’t erase our disagreements however make them generative, during which we see our counterparts as our companions in sustaining our democracy.”
This story seems within the December . .