“It is not upon you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
– Pirkei Avot 2:16
And elsewhere, in the Talmud, we are taught:
“Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh” – all Jews are responsible for one another. (Shevuot 39a)
I have been thinking lately that Kadima has always understood this teaching expansively: not only responsible for one another, but responsible to one another. Responsible for the kind of world our Judaism creates. Responsible for whether Jewish community narrows people’s humanity or helps them become more fully human.
When people ask why Kadima matters, I think part of the answer is this:
Because communities like this are not supposed to survive.
Not according to conventional wisdom, anyway.
A synagogue founded in living rooms by Jews who felt alienated from the mainstream Jewish establishment. Jews who wanted a spiritual home that opposed racism, nationalism, exclusion, and militarism. Jews who insisted that feminism mattered, that queer and trans Jews mattered, that non-Jewish loved ones mattered, that immigrants mattered, that Palestinians mattered, that disabled people mattered, that poor and working-class Jews mattered. Jews who believed governance should belong to community and not just institutions or wealthy donors.
Communities built around those values are often told they are too political, too idealistic, too messy, too marginal, too impractical to last.
And yet Kadima is still here.
Not only here—but alive.
Kadima’s very first public action, in 1978, was in solidarity with the Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois, facing down a neo-Nazi march. And what mattered was not only opposing antisemitism, but understanding antisemitism as bound up with all forms of hatred and authoritarianism. Kadima emerged from a vision of collective liberation before many people even used that phrase.
From the beginning, spirituality and justice were never separate departments here.
This community organized around anti-apartheid work and the Sanctuary Movement. It created cultural committees that reinvented Jewish life with music, theater, art, and experimentation. It helped found New Jewish Agenda. It built a religious school where young people could ask hard questions instead of memorizing easy answers. It wrote liturgy where God-language could hold feminism, humanism, grief, doubt, and liberation. It commissioned what is believed to be the first Torah scroll written by women. After 9/11, it helped create a Middle East Peace Camp because people believed that even amidst violence and fear, relationships and imagination still mattered.
And now, decades later, Kadima remains one of the only Jewish spiritual homes in this region where anti-Zionist Jews can fully exhale and be whole.
That matters.
It matters because there are people who walk into other Jewish spaces and instinctively begin editing themselves. Lowering their voice. Hiding part of their politics, their family, their gender, their body, their grief, their anger, their theology, their disability, their uncertainty.
And then they walk into Kadima and discover they do not have to amputate part of themselves to belong.
Again and again, people answered the question “Why Kadima?” with the same language:
“Because I can bring my whole self.”
“Because it feels like home.”
“Because my children are embraced.”
“Because wrestling with hard questions is how Kadima prays.”
I love that phrase:
Kadima prays by wrestling.
Not despite the struggle. Through it.
There are communities built around certainty. Around polish, prestige, or consensus. Kadima has never really been that kind of place. We are messy. We argue. We disappoint each other. We carry trauma and exhaustion and wildly different strategies for repair. We are, in very Jewish fashion, deeply concerned at all times.
And still—we keep showing up.
We keep singing.
We keep feeding each other.
We keep organizing.
We keep trying to align spiritual life with moral life, even when the world makes that alignment costly.
Especially now.
At a moment when many Jews feel spiritually homeless.
When institutions reward silence more than conscience.
When antisemitism is both dangerously real and cynically weaponized.
When trans people are under attack.
When immigrants are targeted.
When disabled and immunocompromised people are treated as disposable.
When so many people feel pressured to separate their Jewishness from their ethics, or their ethics from their spiritual life.
Kadima insists that we do not have to choose.
Here, pikuach nefesh means protecting vulnerable people by continuing to mask.
Here, accessibility is sacred.
Here, Palestinian solidarity and fighting antisemitism are understood as intertwined moral commitments.
Here, liberation is not a slogan but a spiritual practice.
Here, wrestling with impossible questions is itself a form of prayer.
And importantly: Kadima does not stand alone anymore.
What may once have seemed isolated or fringe is now part of a growing ecosystem of progressive Jewish life: Synagogues Rising, Tzedek Lab, Rabbis for Ceasefire, Diaspora Alliance, Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Liberation Fund, and so many others.
There is a growing hunger for Jewish spaces rooted not in fear or nationalism, but in dignity, solidarity, intellectual honesty, and collective liberation.
Kadima helped build that world.
And when you say “Kadima,” it means something.
It means a community willing to tell difficult truths.
A place where people are not asked to say prayers they do not believe.
A place where disagreement and questioning are part of sacred life rather than threats to it.
A place where ritual belongs not only to clergy, but to community.
A place where Jewish children can be raised without teaching them that moral compromise is the price of belonging.
For many people, Kadima is not one synagogue among many. It is the only Jewish home where they can fully arrive as themselves.
That matters enormously.
And yes, Kadima is imperfect. Beautifully, frustratingly imperfect.
It has survived not because it found easy answers, but because people kept choosing each other anyway.
People kept cooking meals.
Teaching children.
Leading songs.
Stacking chairs.
Writing liturgy.
Showing up to protests.
Holding grief.
Holding hope.
Holding one another accountable.
Beginning again.
That is sacred work.
And perhaps that is ultimately why Kadima matters:
because it proves that another kind of Jewish community is possible.
Not perfect.
Not polished.
But deeply alive.
A Judaism where people can bring their whole selves.
A Judaism rooted in courage rather than fear.
A Judaism expansive enough to hold contradiction, dissent, tenderness, and transformation.
A Judaism that understands our liberation to be bound up with one another’s.
There is a midrash that when the Israelites stood at Sinai, they stood “as one person with one heart.” Not because they all agreed. Not because they were all alike. But because they understood that covenant meant showing up together anyway.
Kadima has spent decades trying to live that covenant.
And so I think of another verse, from the prophet Isaiah:
“Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch out the coverings of your dwelling, do not hold back.” (Isaiah 54:2)
That is what Kadima has tried to do:
to widen the tent of Jewish life,
to make more room for conscience,
more room for questioning,
more room for justice,
more room for song,
more room for each other.
Kadima matters because there are people whose Judaism survived because this place existed.
And there are people not yet here — future seekers, future children, future exhausted and heartbroken Jews — who will someday go searching for a community where they do not have to betray themselves in order to belong.
Our responsibility is to make sure Kadima is still here when they come looking.
-
Rabbi David Basior
– Pirkei Avot 2:16
And elsewhere, in the Talmud, we are taught:
“Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh” – all Jews are responsible for one another. (Shevuot 39a)
I have been thinking lately that Kadima has always understood this teaching expansively: not only responsible for one another, but responsible to one another. Responsible for the kind of world our Judaism creates. Responsible for whether Jewish community narrows people’s humanity or helps them become more fully human.
When people ask why Kadima matters, I think part of the answer is this:
Because communities like this are not supposed to survive.
Not according to conventional wisdom, anyway.
A synagogue founded in living rooms by Jews who felt alienated from the mainstream Jewish establishment. Jews who wanted a spiritual home that opposed racism, nationalism, exclusion, and militarism. Jews who insisted that feminism mattered, that queer and trans Jews mattered, that non-Jewish loved ones mattered, that immigrants mattered, that Palestinians mattered, that disabled people mattered, that poor and working-class Jews mattered. Jews who believed governance should belong to community and not just institutions or wealthy donors.
Communities built around those values are often told they are too political, too idealistic, too messy, too marginal, too impractical to last.
And yet Kadima is still here.
Not only here—but alive.
Kadima’s very first public action, in 1978, was in solidarity with the Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois, facing down a neo-Nazi march. And what mattered was not only opposing antisemitism, but understanding antisemitism as bound up with all forms of hatred and authoritarianism. Kadima emerged from a vision of collective liberation before many people even used that phrase.
From the beginning, spirituality and justice were never separate departments here.
This community organized around anti-apartheid work and the Sanctuary Movement. It created cultural committees that reinvented Jewish life with music, theater, art, and experimentation. It helped found New Jewish Agenda. It built a religious school where young people could ask hard questions instead of memorizing easy answers. It wrote liturgy where God-language could hold feminism, humanism, grief, doubt, and liberation. It commissioned what is believed to be the first Torah scroll written by women. After 9/11, it helped create a Middle East Peace Camp because people believed that even amidst violence and fear, relationships and imagination still mattered.
And now, decades later, Kadima remains one of the only Jewish spiritual homes in this region where anti-Zionist Jews can fully exhale and be whole.
That matters.
It matters because there are people who walk into other Jewish spaces and instinctively begin editing themselves. Lowering their voice. Hiding part of their politics, their family, their gender, their body, their grief, their anger, their theology, their disability, their uncertainty.
And then they walk into Kadima and discover they do not have to amputate part of themselves to belong.
Again and again, people answered the question “Why Kadima?” with the same language:
“Because I can bring my whole self.”
“Because it feels like home.”
“Because my children are embraced.”
“Because wrestling with hard questions is how Kadima prays.”
I love that phrase:
Kadima prays by wrestling.
Not despite the struggle. Through it.
There are communities built around certainty. Around polish, prestige, or consensus. Kadima has never really been that kind of place. We are messy. We argue. We disappoint each other. We carry trauma and exhaustion and wildly different strategies for repair. We are, in very Jewish fashion, deeply concerned at all times.
And still—we keep showing up.
We keep singing.
We keep feeding each other.
We keep organizing.
We keep trying to align spiritual life with moral life, even when the world makes that alignment costly.
Especially now.
At a moment when many Jews feel spiritually homeless.
When institutions reward silence more than conscience.
When antisemitism is both dangerously real and cynically weaponized.
When trans people are under attack.
When immigrants are targeted.
When disabled and immunocompromised people are treated as disposable.
When so many people feel pressured to separate their Jewishness from their ethics, or their ethics from their spiritual life.
Kadima insists that we do not have to choose.
Here, pikuach nefesh means protecting vulnerable people by continuing to mask.
Here, accessibility is sacred.
Here, Palestinian solidarity and fighting antisemitism are understood as intertwined moral commitments.
Here, liberation is not a slogan but a spiritual practice.
Here, wrestling with impossible questions is itself a form of prayer.
And importantly: Kadima does not stand alone anymore.
What may once have seemed isolated or fringe is now part of a growing ecosystem of progressive Jewish life: Synagogues Rising, Tzedek Lab, Rabbis for Ceasefire, Diaspora Alliance, Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Liberation Fund, and so many others.
There is a growing hunger for Jewish spaces rooted not in fear or nationalism, but in dignity, solidarity, intellectual honesty, and collective liberation.
Kadima helped build that world.
And when you say “Kadima,” it means something.
It means a community willing to tell difficult truths.
A place where people are not asked to say prayers they do not believe.
A place where disagreement and questioning are part of sacred life rather than threats to it.
A place where ritual belongs not only to clergy, but to community.
A place where Jewish children can be raised without teaching them that moral compromise is the price of belonging.
For many people, Kadima is not one synagogue among many. It is the only Jewish home where they can fully arrive as themselves.
That matters enormously.
And yes, Kadima is imperfect. Beautifully, frustratingly imperfect.
It has survived not because it found easy answers, but because people kept choosing each other anyway.
People kept cooking meals.
Teaching children.
Leading songs.
Stacking chairs.
Writing liturgy.
Showing up to protests.
Holding grief.
Holding hope.
Holding one another accountable.
Beginning again.
That is sacred work.
And perhaps that is ultimately why Kadima matters:
because it proves that another kind of Jewish community is possible.
Not perfect.
Not polished.
But deeply alive.
A Judaism where people can bring their whole selves.
A Judaism rooted in courage rather than fear.
A Judaism expansive enough to hold contradiction, dissent, tenderness, and transformation.
A Judaism that understands our liberation to be bound up with one another’s.
There is a midrash that when the Israelites stood at Sinai, they stood “as one person with one heart.” Not because they all agreed. Not because they were all alike. But because they understood that covenant meant showing up together anyway.
Kadima has spent decades trying to live that covenant.
And so I think of another verse, from the prophet Isaiah:
“Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch out the coverings of your dwelling, do not hold back.” (Isaiah 54:2)
That is what Kadima has tried to do:
to widen the tent of Jewish life,
to make more room for conscience,
more room for questioning,
more room for justice,
more room for song,
more room for each other.
Kadima matters because there are people whose Judaism survived because this place existed.
And there are people not yet here — future seekers, future children, future exhausted and heartbroken Jews — who will someday go searching for a community where they do not have to betray themselves in order to belong.
Our responsibility is to make sure Kadima is still here when they come looking.
-
Rabbi David Basior
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