In this episode, Roy talks with Rabbi Noa Kushner. She founded The Kitchen in San Francisco, a congregation that’s been studied by Jewish communities around the world for both meeting modern needs and fully engaging with traditional Jewish texts and ways.

Rabbi Kushner walks us through her journey, the inner life of a rabbi, what the role of a rabbi actually is, how to start by living a religious life, how prayer is supposed to work, how she built a congregation.

We learned that a community builds in some of the same ways a startup does. Rabbi Kushner built The Kitchen while figuring out what people wanted, and people kept showing up and showing her what she was creating.

And… she explains how everyone can learn about the Kitchen’s ways in her new book, Pretend You Believe: How to Enter Religion.

This Is Not Advice is Roy Bahat's attempt to understand every aspect of a job directly from the people who do it exceptionally – so that everyone who listens can take those lessons into whatever it is they do. Roy is a startup investor focused on the future of work at Bloomberg Beta and an MBA professor.

Chapters:

00:00:00 - Preview

00:03:40 - Becoming a rabbi in the first place

00:10:36 - Getting ideas

00:17:29 - Making the work (crafting the practice)

00:43:32 - Progressing your career

00:52:04 - Selling the work (building the institution)

01:07:27 - Communicating about yourself and the work

01:19:52 - Understanding and improving the system

01:27:22 - Final words: advice for someone considering the rabbinate

Read Rabbi Kushner’s book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803567/pretend-you-believe-by-noa-kushner/

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Read our community-edited reference guide on how to work: https://www.thisisnotadvice.work/

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