the vision of Empowered Judaism is no dream—it is a fledgling reality they can connect to and help build.

(We named everything at Hadar a team rather than a committee, something I learned from the educational organization Limmud in England. After all, no one likes committee meetings, but everyone wants to be part of the team!)

In recent years, the synagogue world has become obsessed with welcoming people into the worship space—and not just Kiddush, but the service itself.

the more Jews become empowered to define their own Jewish identity, the less likely it is that they will be satisfied by a broad label.

Independent minyanim are communities formed by Empowered Jews; Yeshivat Hadar is a community that models and teaches how to become an Empowered Jew.

what would it take to build the ideal learning community—one that fostered Empowered Jews in an environment where they didn’t need to compromise a core part of their identity? Fortunately,

prayer is not meant to be seen as a flat statement of belief. It is a literary creation with all the power, nuance, and complexity of literary creations. As Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky has written: “Prayer had better be poetry, not prose; it had better be mythic poetry at that, correlating the mortal human heart and the eternal divine spirit.”

We are calling it a yeshiva to reclaim the cultural valence of the term—an intellectual and spiritual center where Torah radiates forth into the broader community, and the community feeds back into the yeshiva.

a worship environment that is powerful, not just inclusive.