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Dear CBI Community:

We are writing to share significant news: Our Executive Director Emily Kieval submitted her resignation to the CBI Board, effective October 31.  Please see her announcement to the community below.

First and foremost, we want to express our immense gratitude to Emily for all she has given to CBI over these last 5 years.  She has made an extraordinary and lasting impact on our community and we look forward to the opportunity to honor and celebrate her.  We are so grateful! 

At the same time, we also know this is a lot to process, especially coming on the heels of other recent changes that have happened and are still happening.  So yes, this is a big time for CBI! And we certainly have what it takes to not only rise to the challenge, but to create opportunity from it - because that is what we do.  In this instance, we want to share a few broad strokes regarding our next steps. 

We will:
-- create a search committee, which will start by reviewing the executive director job description in the context of the organizational structure as a whole; 
-- work closely with Emily, starting now and for the next 3 months, to create as smooth a transition as possible;
-- communicate with staff, ensuring stability during this time, and integrating their feedback into the review and hiring process; and
-- communicate with the community (you!), both keeping you informed and creating opportunities for your feedback 

For now, as this work gets underway, we want to focus on our gratitude for Emily and our confidence in the future of CBI.  We look forward to shaping our path forward together, grounded in the strength and commitment of our amazing community.   

We are here for your questions or thoughts.  Please feel free to reach out to Barbara Black at barbarablack413@gmail.com or Pamela Schwartz at pschwartz77@gmail.com. We will be in touch by the end of the month with additional updates.  But again, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Wishing you all a good and restful end of summer.

B'shalom,
Barbara Black and Pamela Schwartz, Co-Presidents
on behalf of the CBI Board of Directors

Message from Emily:

Dear CBI Community,

As I mark my fifth anniversary as your Executive Director, I am filled with pride and gratitude for the incredible journey we've shared. It is in this spirit of reflection that I write to you to share that I will be transitioning out of my position at CBI after the High Holy Days.

Reflecting on the past five years, we have navigated numerous challenges, including the abrupt transition to remote and then hybrid programming during the pandemic and reopening during a period of significant community growth. We also have faced unexpected leadership transitions, which we have navigated with resilience and adaptability. We have purchased and renovated the water building, developed a campus vision statement, and moved into the initial stages of a capital campaign that will transform the campus for generations to come. We have worked tirelessly to refine our internal and external systems, address budget challenges, expand our fundraising capacity, engage new demographics, and further build and define our "big tent" in the post-October 7 world. 

I hold deep care for each staff member, board member, and our entire CBI community. I have confidence in the dedicated staff and volunteers who have been the backbone of our organization's stability and progress. Your continued commitment will ensure a smooth transition and maintain the stability of our beloved community during this time and for years to come.

As I look forward to a period of rest and time with my family, I am optimistic about the future of CBI. My hope is that my departure will create space for fresh ideas and innovation, helping CBI embrace the opportunities ahead.

Thank you for the honor of serving this vibrant and dynamic community. I am immensely grateful for the experiences and growth we've shared.

With heartfelt appreciation,
Emily

Dear friends, 

This is the first of what I hope will be many notes that I send to our CBI community over the next several months. While I worry about committing to writing weekly, I do hope to write regularly. In these notes I intend to share updates, resources, and a few of my own thoughts and teachings here and there.  

I want to acknowledge that we’re once again dwelling in a place of uncertainty with the recent news that we are no longer in rabbinic contract negotiations. So I’m sharing with you what we are sharing with one another here on staff: let’s take a breath and trust in one another. We will find our path forward, and continue to craft our communal path together. And from the leadership side, we will share updates as soon as we have them.  

This coming week the CBI staff will be engaging in several days of retreats. This will be time to clarify our goals and visions, and begin planning for the upcoming months in areas such as high holy days, educational programming, and the full calendar year ahead. And lest any of us think that we are all in planning mode, the Gan Keshet summer program and spectacular vibrancy (in the form of both people and plants!) on Abundance Farm are a reminder that there is always an aspect of campus that is in the heart of its season.  

I also want to share personally that I have long-awaited plans that require me to be out of town for the next four Shabbatot. Shabbat services are in great hands between Rabbi Jacob, Aram Rubenstein-Gilles, the ritual committee, and several community leaders and teachers. With some exception, I will be in the office in the weeks between, so if you were hoping to connect with me please feel free to contact the CBI office or reach out over email to schedule time together. 
 

Finally, a bit of Torah:  

This week’s parasha, Balak, details the story of Moabite King Balak who hired the sorceror Bilaam to curse the Israelites passing through his territory. Thanks to the intervention of an angel and a talking donkey, when Bilaam arrives and looks out over the Israelite camp, the only words he can utter are those of blessing. The most well-known words of his blessing are “Mah tovu ohalecha Ya’akov mishkenotecha Yisrael” “How good are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, Israel,” which have made their way into our liturgy.  

For years, I have been struck by one simple fact about this story: the Israelites have no idea this is even happening. Uniquely, this seems to be the only story in the Torah that happens to and about the Israelites without any of them being aware of it (at least at the time).  

There is profound learning in this for all of us: What does it mean to be worthy of blessing at all moments, even when we don’t believe we are being watched? How can we conduct ourselves in such a way that we aren’t only acting as our best selves when we know it will be noticed? And from the other side, how can we open ourselves to feel overwhelmed by awe and goodness, even if our preconceived agendas are trying to convince us otherwise?  

Wishing all of you a Shabbat filled with unexpected blessing. 

Shabbat Shalom, 
Ariella 

Dear CBI Community,

You are warmly invited to join the CBI Rabbinic Search Committee in welcoming the prospective candidates for the role of Rabbi for Spiritual and Ritual Life: Rabbi Yosef Berman and Rabbi Ruhi Sophia Motzkin Rubenstein on April 19-20 and May 3-4, respectively. 

While we are still firming up the complete schedules for each weekend, you can prepare for the following: On Friday night, the candidates will each help lead Kabbalat Shabbat during Shiru Shabbat, give a short d’var Torah, and lead Maariv. On Saturday, the candidates will leyn 8-9 lines of Torah, give a 5-10 minute d’var torah, and lead Musaf. They will also join the community for Kiddush and an open Q&A after services. Each candidate will also host an open learning session, and we will share more details about date, times, and topics of discussion closer to their visit dates. 

Please read on to learn more about the candidates. We encourage you to also read each Rabbis’ letter to the CBI community, hyperlinked below their bio.

The Search Committee, which was deliberately formed to reflect the diversity of the CBI community, has unanimously agreed on these two candidates being the best potential fits for the role out of the entire applicant pool. The upcoming weekends are not only opportunities for the community to get to know the candidates, but for the Rabbis to get to know CBI. We hope you will join us to warmly welcome both Rabbi Ruhi and Rabbi Yosef to Northampton. 

Best,

Meredith Lewis & Naomi Barnesky, Rabbinic Search Committee co-chairs
Veronica Darmon, Leah King Kaufman, Maxine Stein, Noah T. Winer, committee members

Rabbi Yosef Berman: Friday, April 19-Saturday, April 20

Rabbi Yosef Berman (he/they) grew up in Houston, Albany, and Kansas City and received his Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University in Connecticut. A Wexner graduate fellow, Rabbi Yosef was ordained in 2010 by the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, an unaffiliated and pluralistic seminary in Boston. Following ordination, they served for five years as the Rabbi of Temple B’nai Israel in Revere, MA. In 2018 Rabbi Yosef co-founded the New Synagogue Project, a spiritually vibrant, justice-focused, and radically inclusive congregation in Washington, DC. Before co-founding NSP, they co-founded Ruach Guild, a skill development and support group for activists who provide spiritual care to social justice movements and organizations. He has also worked as a farmer, chaplain, community organizer, and advocate for justice and equality for Palestinians and Israelis. He is passionate about joyful Jewish observance, gardening, ultimate frisbee, and the power of community to create both personal and societal transformation. Rabbi Berman and his partner have two daughters.
Read Rabbi Yosef’s resume and letter to the CBI community. 

Rabbi Ruhi Sophia Motzkin Rubenstein: Friday, May 3-Saturday, May 4

Ruhi Sophia Motzkin Rubenstein (she/her) has served as the rabbi of Temple Beth Israel: Center for Jewish Life in Eugene, Oregon, since her ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 2015.  While completing her rabbinic studies, she served for two years as a Cooperberg-Rittmaster Rabbinical Intern at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, New York’s LGBTQ synagogue. Prior to rabbinic ordination, Rabbi Rubenstein worked as a Jewish environmental educator with the Teva Learning Alliance and spent a year in Jerusalem through the New Israel Fund-Shatil Social Justice Fellowship. For several years, she wrote a monthly op-ed for her local newspaper, bringing a Torah lens to current events, and she is a frequent speaker on antisemitism, aspects of Judaism, and social and environmental justice in the wider local community. Rabbi Rubenstein and her husband have three daughters.
Read Rabbi Ruhi’s resume and letter to the CBI community. 

Dear CBI Community,

Thank you to 200+ of you who have already taken the Rabbinic Needs Assessment survey that was sent out in August. We’re already noticing a few trends: Ritual, spiritual life, and pastoral care are the biggest areas that you, our community, have prioritized so far. 

This needs assessment is only the first step to understanding the role we are looking to fill with a new spiritual or ritual leader. The search will ultimately encompass community input, staffing and leadership considerations, and budgetary realities. 

We want to be clear: It’s incumbent on us to keep all options in mind throughout this time of transition. We are looking at a variety of models that can best meet the needs of our growing community, and it's likely that the structure of our leadership will look different than in the past. We recognize that change is both exciting and challenging.

The Search Committee will be holding listening sessions to hear from the community, including through targeted focus groups. In-person listening sessions are drop-in, you do not need to RSVP. Zoom listening sessions are by registration only. 

General listening session: Tuesday, October 10, 7:00-8:00 pm in the CBI Library 

General listening session: Thursday, October 12, 12:00-1:00 pm in the CBI Library

General Zoom listening session: Friday, October 13, 12:00-1:00 pm over Zoom. Register here for the Zoom link

Please keep an eye out for an email with dates for more of these opportunities, both in-person and over Zoom. For those that can’t attend, please feel free to send feedback here. 

Moadim l’simchah,

Naomi Barnesky and Meredith Lewis, Search Committee Co-Chairs
Veronica Darmon, Leah Kaufman, Maxine Stein, Noah T. Winer, Search Committee

Dear CBI Community,

We so appreciate your patience, grace, and dedication throughout this time of transition at CBI. When Rabbi Justin David first announced his departure, it’s likely that many questions—some of them logistical, some of them emotional—came to your mind. 

What does this mean for our growing community? Who should we hire? When will they begin? Will they be the right fit? 

As the Rabbinic Search Committee Co-Chairs, we are looking at these questions and emerging ones  with openness and optimism. As a community, we have been presented with an incredible opportunity to take stock, reflect, and move forward as we seek a new staff member who can take on much of Rabbi David’s role. We are also looking for someone to work alongside and complement the skills of our current clergy and interim rabbis, Rabbi Jacob Fine and Rabbi Ariella Rosen, and the whole CBI staff. With that in mind, we want to know what responsibilities you would prioritize in a candidate. 

Please take this short survey to help get us started.

Over the next several months, the Search Committee will hold various listening sessions to hear from the community, including through targeted focus groups. Please be on the lookout for these sessions as they start to populate the calendar after Yom Kippur.

At this time, we are also looking for approximately six individuals to join our Search Committee. It is of the utmost importance that this committee hold space for and listen to the diverse needs, views, and voices of the congregation at large. Therefore, this committee should be made up of individuals who hold diverse identities and viewpoints as much as possible. 

It is equally important that this committee be efficient. Therefore, we are looking for committee members who are committed to weekly work across a variety of tasks. If you are interested, please review the job description and express any interest by August 25.

Meredith Lewis and Naomi Barnesky, 
Rabbinic Search Committee Co-chairs.

Dear CBI Members and Friends,

We are writing today to provide you with an update on our financial status at CBI. Those of you who attended the annual meeting a few weeks ago are aware that we are currently in a challenging financial environment. At our last Board meeting, we passed a budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year that we believe is a responsible and balanced budget based upon the realities of our current revenue and expenses. It required some difficult decisions.

Over the last few years, our expenses have outpaced our revenue and we have been able to maintain our level of programming by using up cash reserves and one-time funding from grants and covid relief funds. We can no longer count on these funds and need to budget based on our ongoing annual revenue streams. The budget for fiscal year 2024 requires some cuts in hours to administrative staff. It also means we cannot fund an interim rabbi for this year. As noted in our previous letter, our current talented senior staff members, Rabbis Jacob Fine and Ariella Rosen have generously agreed to step in and fill our rabbinical needs for the coming year. We are committed to hiring a rabbi for the following year, but it will require a substantial increase in annual revenue going forward. 

Our kehila (community) has grown tremendously over the last few years—in membership, physical footprint, educational programming for adults, preschoolers, students, and teens, and farm initiatives. We’ve hired additional staff and met other increased expenses to support this growth, increasing our budget by 50% in four years. During this time, we have not raised dues, nor have we restricted our programs to members only. Revenue from dues and other donations have not kept pace with what is needed to support our programming. Now is the moment to shift our focus away from program growth and instead stabilize our yesod (foundation), in order to assure long-term financial health and community stability.  

To do this we will need the help of all of our members and friends to join in supporting our beloved community. As a first step, we encourage members to take a close look at the budget information below this letter, as well as your dues explanation letter coming out soon, for a better understanding of our finances and how we’re hoping to grow CBI in the years to come. We realize that we have a very diverse membership with different levels of financial capacity. Over the next year, we will be asking all of you, our members and friends, to look deeply at what our thriving CBI community means to you and to try to stretch your contributions in the best way that you are able. If you still owe dues for 2022-2023, click here to make your annual contribution now.

Barbara Black and Stan Schapiro, Co-Presidents
Emily Kieval, Executive Director

Here is some information about our financial structure:

CBI is a not-for-profit institution that now has an annual budget of about $1.8 million. It is home to a USCJ-affiliated synagogue, a licensed preschool program and Abundance Farm. Our budget supports all aspects of our extensive list of programs, including full- and part-time professional staff, maintenance of our campus buildings and grounds and all the administrative work that keeps us going. This year, without an interim rabbi, 83% of our budget will go towards personnel salaries and benefits. 

Here’s a breakdown of our expenses by program.  (FY 2024 Budget): 

And here is where the money comes from (FY 2024 Budget):

Notice that tuition and fees cover only a portion of program costs. For example, ALMA religious school tuition pays for about half of the direct costs of running that program.

Our member dues cover about 30% of the total costs in our current budget. Some members pay standard dues, some pay more, and some pay less. Some join our Sustainers Program and  commit to contributing at least $500 or more each year beyond their regular dues. The rest of our income comes from annual fundraising, program fees and grants. Finally, we are fortunate to have some modest endowment funds that are used to support various programs and the operating budget. 

Going forward, we are committed to transparency about our budget and financial health. The Board voted to form two committees: the Revenue Review Committee to look at all aspects of our funding, including dues structure, donations, and annual giving; and the Expense Committee to look at how to track and manage program, staff and maintenance expenses. Both committees will make recommendations to the Board and the CBI leadership team over the next few months. We will communicate their findings and recommendations, to you, our community, regularly throughout the year. 

Please feel free to join our next open forum, “What’s Cool at Shul” to be scheduled soon. In addition feel free to contact any of us. 

Dear Friends,

Many of us came together last month on Shavuot for a memorable evening of learning “Torah from the ground up.” Together we identified that each of us has Torah and wisdom to offer, and our community is not complete without all our gifts. With the gifts and strengths of our clergy, professional staff, and lay leaders in mind, our Board of Directors has decided to move forward without the addition of an external Interim Rabbi to our staff.  

Instead, Rabbi Jacob Fine and Rabbi Ariella Rosen will be our Interim Rabbis for the upcoming 12 months as we begin the search for the permanent Rabbi who will fill the role that had been held by Rabbi Justin David. We are so honored and privileged that they are taking on this responsibility.  

Given CBI’s tremendous recent growth, which includes increased expenses, not hiring an additional rabbi allows us to maintain a balanced and responsible budget for this year and prepare for CBI’s next phase of rabbinic leadership (we will be sending out a communication with a full discussion of our finances shortly). The search committee for our permanent Rabbi will be led by Meredith Lewis and Naomi Barnesky -- stay tuned for more information about that process and how you can share your voice.  

During Rabbi David's recent sabbatical, we experienced first-hand the incredible talent in both our professional staff and volunteers that support our community. Rabbi Jacob has been a part of CBI for 11 years, and has been working most recently as the Senior Director of Jewish Life and Abundance Farm. Rabbi Ariella has been with CBI for the past year, as our Director of Youth and Family Education and Engagement. She has prior experience as a pulpit rabbi, and many of you experienced her leadership on the bimah this past Yom Kippur.
 
Both rabbis stepped into additional leadership roles together with many dedicated lay leaders to provide our community with pastoral and lifecycle support, as well as services and ritual leadership. For the coming year, they will be working together with our Executive Director, Emily Kieval, to assure that all pastoral, ritual, lifecycle, and educational needs of the broader CBI community will be met. As a community that so deeply understands the value of Torah from the ground up, we have many staff members shifting their portfolios, and volunteers already stepping up to offer their time and support in the many tasks that enable our community to thrive.
 
We are already so thankful to those who are lending their time and efforts and appreciate that we will be able to call on even more of you in the year to come. Keep an eye out for more ways to help, including search committee, High Holy Days, and other areas looking for volunteer support. In the meantime, if you need Rabbinic support, you can email interim@cbinorthampton.org or call 413-584-3593 x 210 to leave a voicemail (voicemails at this extension are now checked regularly, even when the office is closed).
 
This is an exciting time at CBI, and this interim year is an opportunity to recommit to the work of building our holy community together. We thank you for sharing yourselves with all of us, and for being the community we can call on to do this work together.
 
Barbara Black and Stan Schapiro, CBI Co-Presidents 
Joel Feldman and Ellen Gertzog, Rabbinic Transition Committee Co-Chairs 
Emily Kieval, Executive Director 

Dear Friends, 

In February, we shared that Rabbi Justin David will be moving on from CBI and starting a new journey as the Dean of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College. At that time, we also shared that the CBI leadership team is here and working to support the community throughout the upcoming time of transition after Justin departs on June 30. In the meantime, Rabbi David shortened his sabbatical and has since returned to CBI to wrap up his tenure with care. 

Since February, we on the staff and board have established a transition committee, led by Joel Feldman and Ellen Gertzog. Joel and Ellen have already been working incredibly hard to lay out a plan for our community going forward. They enlisted community members Naomi Barnesky, Caryn Brause, Larry Hott, and Leah King Kaufman, and together, the six of them are working with our leadership to plan for the next steps, both short-term and long-term. 

The transition committee’s work includes creating ways for community input and keeping the community informed each step of the way, and you’ll hear much more from them in the weeks and months to come. 

We continue to be here to talk if you need anything at all. 

Emily Kieval, Executive Director

Rabbi Jacob Fine, Senior Director of Jewish Life and Abundance Farm

Rabbi Ariella Rosen, Director of Youth and Family Engagement and Education

Meredith Lewis and Stan Schapiro, Co-Presidents

Joel Feldman and Ellen Gertzog, Co-Chairs, Rabbinic Transition Committee