Dear Kadima members,

We’re writing to let you know about an important change in the new Jewish year. Rabbi David Basior has decided to transition from his role as Kadima’s Rabbi to Rabbi Emeritus after the High Holidays. We are deeply grateful for his 11 years of service to our community. You can hear directly from him in his letter to our community below.

Rabbi David will continue to co-lead this year’s High Holidays along with Beit Avodah, our ritual and liturgy committee. He will remain a cherished member of our community in his new role as Rabbi Emeritus. Rabbi David will still officiate all planned b’mitzvahs in the upcoming year, and has agreed to contract with Kadima to provide some life cycle support for our community in this interim period.

While the shift is earlier than we had initially expected, it also gives us as a community an opportunity to expand member participation across our organization. Starting in the fall, we will convene an exploration committee to begin the work of charting Kadima’s rabbinic future. Beit Avodah will plan services and consider how our community provides pastoral care during this rabbinic transition.

Sarah Edelstein has agreed to take on staff responsibilities for programming, and the board is excited to deepen its collaboration with our various task forces. Ultimately, this period of rabbinic transition will serve as a reaffirmation of Kadima’s democratic, member-led ethic.

On the topic of democratic renewal, the Kadima Board appointed three new members, Katie Harris, M. Quinn Schultz, and Britt Nave, to the board. This came after members overwhelmingly supported this action in the opinion poll that was sent out. We are excited and thankful for the new board members stepping up to provide their energy, expertise, and leadership.

The board is also tremendously grateful to Hila Keller and Chelsea Alvarez, who recently rotated off the board, for their dedicated service to Kadima. Their leadership and skills were invaluable to keeping our organization afloat as we navigated the choppy waters of the last few years.

Thank you to all the members who have helped in our efforts to ensure long-term financial stability for Kadima. Your attendance in community meetings, participation in the task forces, answers to our surveys, generous donations, email responses, and phone calls have all helped us chart a better course. Your robust participation in the new progressive, income-based membership model would enable us to hire an executive director to grow our organizational capacity and stability.

We are looking forward to continuing to partner with all our community members and ensure everyone is more included in communal decision making.

We are profoundly grateful to Rabbi David for his years of spiritual, ethical, and strategic guidance and his ability to build and nurture our collaborative community. We will savor our time with him during the next few months as we prepare for his pastoral transition to a different role in our community. We send him and his family our best wishes and profound gratitude.

We are confident in the resilience of our community and look forward to building and growing together during this transitional period. If you have not already, please consider joining a task force, and please take a moment to re-register for membership via our new system if you have not done so yet. We look forward to seeing you at High Holiday services!

Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
Kadima Board
Britt, Guy, Katie, Marion, Michael and Quinn

PS: If you wish to reach out to Rabbi David to share a note of gratitude, please write to him at [email protected]. He will be back in the office at the end of July.

Dear Community,

I have loved working at Kadima. Not so long ago someone thanked me for my leadership here, and my response was “It is my pleasure!” The thanker looked at me skeptically, knowing it has been a rocky go of late, and said ”Is it, really?” And, with a smile, I replied: “Yes. It is my pleasure to serve Kadima as its rabbi.”

It has not been a linear eleven years. There have been some very high highs, and also some deeply low lows, with so much in the gray, lovely, complicated in-between. But overall, my time at Kadima has been both largely and profoundly positive for me. My hope is that when you weigh all the ups and downs, you can say something similar about your time in this community. It truly is remarkable.

I am writing to announce that my time as Kadima’s rabbi will come to an end earlier than expected. My last day will be September 25, 2026, just after Yom Kippur 5787.

I had every intention to stay at Kadima through June 2027 to support the community through a rabbinic transition and have time to say goodbye slowly. While the work this spring to stabilize Kadima financially has been tremendous – creative, dedicated, slow, and intentional – it has also been understandably uncertain for the staff and the whole community. While the organization's stabilization work continued this Spring, I sought out other possibilities to create stability for myself and my family. In the midst of it all, I accepted a full-time, year-long residency in hospital chaplaincy at Seattle’s VA Hospital that begins this fall.

The Board and I have worked out arrangements for me to remain Kadima’s Rabbi until just after Yom Kippur, serving for the High Holidays this fall before departing and becoming Kadima’s Rabbi Emeritus. And, as previously agreed, I will still officiate all eight of our currently scheduled youth b’mitzvah services through June 2027 – and I am excited to do so!

I firmly believe Kadima’s future is well held in this community’s hands. Together with the Board, the Financial Task Force has provided a road map to find stability for Kadima, and now our community must grasp and secure it. I believe that a financially stable Kadima can be a Kadima that rebounds far stronger than before, with the possibility of future rabbinic and executive leadership that suits the community’s needs, supports a continued strong youth education program, and amplifies our powerful and important Jewish voice for justice, solidarity, and peace. It will be up to each one of us to ensure this future. I hope you have already experienced the creativity and energy of our newly created task forces and will consider joining one – Member Engagement, Financial, Programming, and Values – or join the Board itself, to be a part of what’s to come.

I hope these next few months can help set the community up for a stable next chapter. Let us celebrate what we have accomplished together, acknowledge where there is still much room for growth, repair what is broken, and enable our collective to move onto what is next with gratitude, humility, and possibility. I hope to see you all at least once before my tenure ends. As you see above, I am staying in Seattle, my family and I will remain members of Kadima, and we look forward to continued support of Kadima's ongoing success.

To moving forward,
R’ David

Thank you from all of us at Kadima for your continued support. If you have questions about R’David’s transition or anything else, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected].

We ask that out of respect for R’David’s much deserved vacation that you please refrain from calling him or texting him directly about his transition at this time.

If you would like to reach out to him to share thanks or ask questions, please email him directly at [email protected] and he will respond to you as he is able, upon his return.

Thank you for your care and understanding!

In gratitude & solidarity,
Kadima Staff & Board

“In the beginning...Jewish radicals created Kadima." (Kadima 1:1)
The year was 1978, and the world was increasing in neo-nazism and authoritarianism, and Jews said "Let there be liberation." And there was liberation.

Beginning as the Jewish Liberation Alliance, Kadima held its first event on July 9th, 1978 as a rally in solidarity with the community of Skokie, IL who was (almost) marched on by nazi party members. About the march on its 40th anniversary, Jewish Currents wrote: "Archival documentation tells a more complex story of massive counter-demonstrations, black and Jewish solidarity, Holocaust survivors who vowed to confront the Nazis in the streets, and a grassroots battle between a small collective of proud, leftist Jews and the conservative institutional leadership of the Jewish community."

Kadima is very proud of our legacy and strives to continue this fight. Each July 9th, we are offered the opportunity to mark an everyday practice of furthering our collective legacy towards liberation.

May our founders be blessed. May those who have sustained Kadima and created in its image be blessed. May those who are being raised in Kadima be blessed. May those carrying on Kadima be blessed. May those innovating and evolving Kadima be blessed. May those we've lost along the way be remembered as a blessing and may peace be upon them. And may we continue to pursue justice in health, connection, solidarity, and joy.

In love & solidarity, Shabbat Shalom,
Kadima Staff & Board

Learn more about Kadima’s history:

• “Kadima is Founded in 1978” - HistoryLink
  
  
• “Counter-march and demonstration in Seattle through Pioneer Square in response to Nazi march in Skokie, Illinois, July 9, 1978” - UW Libraries
  
  
• “The Skokie March That Wasn’t” - Jewish Currents
  
  

Thank you to the University of Washington Libraries for the use of these historic images.

This week we meet one of the Torah's most troubling figures. Pinchas, the grandson of Aaron the High Priest, sees the Israelite leader Zimri publicly bringing Cozbi, a Midianite noblewoman, into the camp during a moment of communal and spiritual crisis. Pinchas takes a spear and kills them both. The event seems to cause a plague to end, and God grants Pinchas a brit shalom – a covenant of peace.

For generations, commentators have struggled with this story. Is Pinchas held up as a model of religious courage, or is the Torah preserving a moment that should leave us profoundly uneasy? The rabbis seem to recognize the danger. The Talmud teaches that while kana'im pog'in bo – "zealots may strike him" – if someone comes to ask a rabbinic court whether they should act as Pinchas did, the answer is no (Sanhedrin 82a). Jewish tradition remembers Pinchas, but it refuses to make him a precedent.

That restraint feels especially important this week.

This shabbat marks the 250th anniversary of the United States’ independence from England. I find myself less interested in celebrating than in honest recognition.

The American Jewish story has never been simple. This country became home for millions of Jews who escaped poverty, antisemitism, and violence. At the same time, America closed its doors to countless others through restrictive immigration laws, leaving many with nowhere to flee. The choices facing Jews in the early twentieth century were often impossibly constrained: to stay where they were and struggle or die, to seek refuge in a United States with tightening quotas, or to become part of the Zionist enterprise. There were no clean options, only history bearing down on vulnerable people.

Nor is the broader American story simple. This nation tried to hold out extraordinary promises while repeatedly denying them through slavery, the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples, exclusion, incarceration, and systems of terrible inequity that endure today. Remembering 250 years means resisting both triumphalism and cynicism. It means telling the truth about the gifts people have found here and the harms that have made those gifts unevenly available.

Perhaps that is why I find myself drawn less to Pinchas than to the daughters of Zelophechad at the end of the parasha.

Machlah, Noa, Choglah, Milcah, and Tirtzah also confront injustice. But instead of picking up a spear, they bring their claim before the community and ask the Israelites – and G-d – to become more equitable – to live closer to their highest values. Adonai responds with a remarkable affirmation: ken b'not Tzelofchad dovrot – "The daughters of Zelophechad speak rightly."

And today ushers in the Three Weeks, beginning with the 17th of Tammuz. The rabbis teach that the Second Temple fell because of sinat chinam – baseless hatred (Yoma 9b). Whether or not that explains the destruction historically, it names a spiritual danger that never goes away. Communities unravel when certainty eclipses humility, when zeal overtakes wisdom, and when we forget that justice is meant to enlarge our humanity rather than diminish it.

May these Three Weeks deepen our capacity to remember honestly, argue courageously, and keep choosing the path of the daughters of Zelophechad: expanding justice not through certainty or force, but through moral imagination that leads to communal change.

Shabbat shalom,
R’ David

P.S. Speaking of three weeks, I will be away from the office for the next three weeks, stepping away from email and congregational responsibilities. I look forward to reconnecting when I return as we begin the ascent toward the New Year together. I wish you all a meaningful, safe, and rejuvenating stretch of summer in the meantime