Voices for Voices®

Finding Peace Amid Chaos: A Rabbi's Journey Through War and Community | Episode 239

• Founder of Voices for Voices®, Justin Alan Hayes • Season 4 • Episode 239

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Finding Peace Amid Chaos: A Rabbi's Journey Through War and Community | Episode 239

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Rabbi Michael Steven Ross takes us on a deeply personal journey through the challenging landscape faced by Jewish communities today. Since the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, anti-Semitism has become an inescapable part of daily Jewish life, with police officers now stationed at synagogues and schools. "What we are communicating to our children is you're not safe unless a police officer welcomes you into your house of worship," Rabbi Michael explains, revealing the hidden cost of this new normal.

Following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, Rabbi Ross found himself transformed as a spiritual leader. Where he once relied primarily on scholarly wisdom, he discovered the power of leading through "compassion informed by wisdom." This shift came with the development of a vital morning practice—alternating between meditation, nature immersion through cycling, and community prayer—that created the internal spaciousness needed to serve others effectively while processing his own reactions to traumatic events.

After visiting Israel during the conflict, Rabbi Michael returned carrying what he calls "two cups"—one overflowing with joy in connection to loved ones, the other overflowing with tears for all suffering. This profound metaphor captures the complex emotional reality many face during crisis. His four-part meditation practice, focusing on body, emotions, thoughts, and soul, offers practical wisdom for anyone navigating difficult circumstances.

The conversation takes an important turn to campus life, where Jewish students face heightened anti-Semitism and the painful dissolution of interfaith relationships built over years. Through it all, Rabbi Michael emphasizes community as our "Noah's Ark" during storms, and the power of daily gratitude practices to avoid being swept away by chaos. "We might need to be aware of the news stories unfolding," he reflects, "but we get to choose when we want to be engaged with that conversation." In this wisdom lies a template for resilience that transcends any particular faith tradition.

#PeaceAmidChaos #RabbisJourney #WarAndCommunity #FaithAndResilience #SpiritualGrowth #CommunitySupport #HopeInTroubledTimes #ReligiousLeadership #InspirationalStories #SocialImpact #CommunityBuilding #PerspectivesOnWar #FaithAndCourage #CommunityResilience #InspirationalLeadership

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Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

Welcome to this episode of the Voices for Voices TV show and podcast. I am your host, founder and executive director of Voices for Voices, Justin Alan Hayes. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for your love and support sticking with us. We couldn't do this without your support and you watching and listening and sharing, and we want to thank you and all the episodes sharing and we want to thank you and all the episodes, so thank you for that. We're very gracious to have this opportunity to come into your homes, into your car, subway, taxi, wherever you are. However you consume this video, watch it on Hudson Community Television or listen on I think we're up to maybe 16 or 17 different audio platforms. You can think of that as, like Spotify, quite the diversity of guests and topics and again, we're voices for voices, so we want to share the voices of humans is really at the high level as well, as we have this lofty goal wanting to help 3 billion people over the course of my lifetime and beyond and we can't do that. I can't do it alone, our organization can't do it alone our guests and their stories and experiences and how they're sharing that is an additional catalyst and so we thank our guests, obviously here today, but all of our previous guests and then into the future. We're going to be hitting at least episode 300 by the end of calendar year 2025 and that includes in studio episodes as well as out of studio episodes remotely. We we do some filming from time to time at different events. We we have some coming up towards the end of end of kind of early fall, so you'll obviously be included and able to watch and listen to those. So today we are going to be speaking with I call it part two, segment two with our in-studio guests, rabbi Michael, stephen Ross, and Rabbi Michael is a Reconstructionist rabbi.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

He lives in Beach Hudson, ohio. He is also an adjunct professor at Kent State University where he teaches the Hebrew Bible and modern Jewish thought. He is a jack-of-all-trades, he's so talented. He also is a Jewish meditation instructor who has developed a number of meditation groups and those are forming kind of as time goes on and new groups form and we invite you, if that is of interest to you, to reach out. Rabbi Michael would definitely be happy to include you and your friends, family and others as well. Rabbi Michael also directed a private learning center, hayom, which is dedicated to present tense Judaism for five years and he also directed synagogue schools in the state of Delaware, pennsylvania and North Carolina. Rabbi Michael is a member of the founding cohort of Rabbis Without Borders. He is also a published curriculum writer who also co-edited the recent Children's Prayer Book and I'm going to go to Kohanoa and the Voice of Children. It's excellent to, obviously, when voices connect and we're able to share. So that's awesome to just be a part of so many different outreach activities.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

And Rabbi Michael is married to Rabbi Rachel Brown and together Rachel and Michael are busy celebrating family life with their child Gabriel. Rachel and Michael are busy celebrating family life with their child Gabriel. He enjoys all the time he's able to spend with his son, especially when it comes to baseball, one of his favorite hobbies and pastimes. The Los Angeles Dodgers are very near and dear. And Rabbi Michael, his education is at the RRC, from the RRC, the American Jewish University. So I hope I covered as best as I could. So, rabbi Michael, thank you so much for joining us again on this episode. So in our first part we kind of talked about the early years and we're kind of capping that episode of current state, current times, current events, and so we want to pick up there and in your journey and how the current events are affecting you, the work you do, and then how, assuming the meditation and how some of that grounding is probably very helpful to you and to others.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

Thank you. You and to others, thank you. So I'm going to start this off by going back to the fall of 2018, when I first got to Northeast Ohio. That end of October was when we had the shooting at the Pittsburgh Synagogue. So where we're sitting right, that's like about a 90-minute drive from here in Hudson to Pittsburgh, and so a number of my students at Kent State Hillel were from that Pittsburgh community. It resonated so thunderously for not only my students but the folks here in town and that was really for us. This real marker of saying anti-Semitism is now part of our daily lives and we need to figure out ways to deal with it and how to navigate. So what was a crisis for the Jewish community also developed turned us into ways to develop connections to local churches and to build interfaith relationships, because they wanted to come and support us. So for the last seven years, we have alternated our Thanksgiving interfaith service from my synagogue into the two other churches here in Hudson where we have supported each other. That's been an amazing piece of fruit that has grown on that interfaith tree. To feel supported by our Christian neighbors while we're going through such trauma was really a huge blessing, and to then understand that the life of everyday Jews in Northeast Ohio since then has been marked by that sense of vulnerability.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

My son goes to a Jewish day school. Every day when I drop him off, he is greeted by a police officer. Every Saturday, when he goes to synagogue, he's greeted by a police officer. Every Saturday, when he goes to synagogue, he's greeted by a police officer. What we are communicating to him and to his peers is you're not safe unless a police officer welcomes you into your house of worship, your synagogue. That's an amazingly complicated thing to hold. As a parent, I don't know how many of our Christian churches need security at every Sunday service. Some, but not many. It's just a very different reality for us. Part of our budget has to go at the synagogue or at Hillel to making sure security is maintained. So that's like the beginning of this conversation is.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

Anti-semitism is now part of our everyday life and since the war in Gaza broke out between Israel and Hamas, it has become an amplified part of everyday life. So I want to talk about the war. Over the last 19 months, my work has changed because of the war and it's really a fascinating thing to focus on. Like what do I do now differently, because my students at Kent State need someone who will listen to them without question, wherever they are responding to the war, left, right or center. My members in Hudson need someone who will hear their anxiety, hold their pain. Allow for us to talk about that.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

So the first piece of this, I think, for the Jewish community was just navigating the experience of communal trauma. That event on October 7th was such a break, such a horrible tearing of a sense of security that for all of my life Israel had been a place where Jews go to feel safe no-transcript. So part of my response to October 7th is one to hold the trauma of my friends, my family, my community, my teachers, who are in Israel with great compassion and great tenderness. I took a trip to Israel a year ago, march. So in March of 24, 30 Jewish educators went on a trip to meet Israeli and Palestinian educators for two weeks and talked to them about how are they teaching their communities, how are they teaching their communities, how are they negotiating this trauma and how are they talking about creating a narrative of the experience. One thing we learned in this trip was that we don't heal from trauma, we move on from trauma. We learn to tell the story of the trauma and hopefully our narratives that we begin to tell after the trauma allow us to engage with life afterwards.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

So the piece I was holding was not just the pain of the Israelis I was meeting and feeling connected to and that sense of peoplehood really feeling vibrant and passionate, but also the pain of the Palestinian civilians, the mothers who were burying their young children, who were also going through great trauma as well. And so I felt like on that trip I was carrying both traumatic experiences side by side, certainly feeling more connected to the Israeli trauma but also shedding many tears on many days over the Palestinian trauma as well. And I came back from that trip with a very simple idea I felt a great joy of feeling connected to my Israeli friends and family and teachers and I also felt a great sadness of their stories, bearing witness to their pain. Allowing them to offer up their story and hear it without judgment, just as a sacred piece of what they needed to tell us, was very important but also very heavy to hold. That so I've said that since I've come back.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

I came back from Israel holding two cups. One is a cup of wine. In Psalm 23, we talk about kosi revaya. The cup overflows with joy, and so I feel a great sense of joy in my connection to my friends and family in Israel, and I hold a cup of tears and that cup of tears is also overflowing, and to walk through life with both of these cups is just a different experience, right that we're all a half step away from breaking down in tears at any moment and we're feeling very much connected to the power of Jewish community.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

So one thing I've been paying attention to, going back to that time last March, was my need as a leader to be more grounded and present with my community, that the the first couple weeks of the war was so unnerving and so shifting a focus on reality that I felt like I needed to have a daily practice of grounding myself before I got into work. And so I had a three-part rotation that every day I would go for an hour-long bike ride out by Gates Mills or I would have a half an hour of meditation and prayer or I would be in a communal prayer setting. And that rotation from bike riding to prayer and meditation, to being in community were the ways I could feel centered, buoyant, aware of who I was, because when I was on that bike in Gates Mills. Nature was beautiful and life was okay. The chaos was manageable. When I was in my meditation sits, I could notice how my body was that morning, I could notice my emotional realm and whether I was feeling connected to my emotional realm. I could notice the thought patterns that would arise in my mind and then I could invite my soul to be present with all of that. And so that four-part meditation that I developed during that time really has allowed me to feel a sense of centeredness and like I can be in the pain and I can still celebrate the beauty of a spring day.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

And so, for that first year of the war, I really felt like I was doing a lot of compassion work, a lot of work on noticing my own sense of compassion for my students and for my congregants, for the Israelis, for the Palestinians. And what I began to pay attention to was that I was leading from not a place of wisdom but a place of compassion, or, best said, a place of compassion informed by wisdom. And that was really new for me. As I mentioned last time, I like to think my way through things. I like to be the journalist or the scholar who can pull the books off the shelf and study them and tell people about the history or the context.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

I felt like when the war started, I didn't have any answers and I felt like my folks still needed me to give them a sense of connection. And so the thing that I connected us to was community. We could find community every Friday night, every Saturday, we could find a sense of togetherness because when we were in community, what I did pay attention to was when we were in community, we could share our own experience of the week. We could talk about the stresses, the anxieties, and we could hear other stresses. We could get out of our own head and realize that the group that was in our community, coming together to be with each other, was able to hold the pain, the anxiety, and that we could then go on and study some texts together, pray some stuff, do some meditation, whatever the piece was. We could do that because the community could be that survival, that Noah's Ark that could float through the storm. And so I think for me that the grounding of the daily practice and being in community a lot each week were the ways I could allow myself to move from more of a scholarly rabbinic voice to more of a chaplain voice to be able to teach from a chaplain's perspective. How is the pain landing with us this week? What's new about our anxieties, our stresses? And so from October 7, 23 until last fall, I felt like that was kind of our reality.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

And then, as the election hit and we began to see the results of the election and the chaos that has ensued whether you're on one side or the other of the chaos we are living in chaotic times both here in America and in Israel that the same techniques, the same skills that I've been working on during the war, would be the skills and techniques I could use to navigate this chaotic experience. We're now filming this. In May and a week from Thursday, I'll have my first meditation group at Temple Besh Shalom, and so every other Thursday night at 730 we'll sit and we'll learn basic grounding practices to navigate the chaos, and I'm hoping that will be a beautiful conversation where we can have a different conversation, not based on the politics of the story that hit the front page or our social media feeds, but more our own experience of noticing our breath, noticing our bodies and then allowing that information to be the conversation we have a way to talk about, because I do think we're in a very interesting choice.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

On a daily basis, we can choose to be swept away by the chaos and most of us do or we can start our day with some gratitude practices. I can take 10 minutes and say the morning prayers. I can take 10 minutes and have a morning meditation. I can hop on my bike and go for a morning ride, and that will change my day. Oh, if that's the way I start my day with gratitude and maybe do a little bit to bookend the end of the day, then the noise becomes a diet. How much noise do we want in our lives? How much chaos can we manage? We get to have some choice, some volition, some agency on how much can we tolerate? We might need to be aware of the new stories that are unfolding, but we get to choose when we want to be engaged with that conversation, and I do think allowing ourselves to re-inhabit that place of choice will allow us then to have a different response and a different reaction to the level of chaos that we're greeting on a daily basis.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

That is truly amazing because, as you were speaking, the first thing that came to mind, before you got to the three or four things grounding at the beginning of the day, was how do you take your thoughts, your feelings, your feelings and then others, and for me I'm just like, oh my gosh, that has to be so overwhelming. But you are able to find ways to limit that as much as possible, to be in that as calm as possible, before you kind of start the day. And I think for anybody that's gone through any type of trauma, current past, that that is helpful and what works for you may work for them, and what works for you may work for them and what works for others may not work for us. And I think just that explanation and knowing that, okay, here's a person at the human level and here's a way to get through the situation as best as possible, was that, that movement and into those three or four uh activities to start the day, was that immediate or how did you just land?

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

on, not just even just even just a specific, but just in general. Like I need to do something.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

I came up short at work. It was like the first month of the war and I was up too late reading the overnight news. And I was up too early responding to the overnight news. And I could see that many of my staff at Hillel were also frazzled by the rawness of the news, and I was not One of my staff.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

Folks offered up a teaching about the weekly Torah reading and instead of choosing compassion to hear his thoughts, I chose wisdom to judge his thought with an edge of criticism Not criticism on his teaching, but criticism on how we're entering a new kind of perspective. And that was just the wrong gesture. I needed to greet his exhaustion, his stress, his anxiety, with compassion. And so my supervisor mirrored that back to me later on and I realized that I wasn't going to use my job to process my stuff. I would have to process that stuff on my own and I'd have to find peers or other practices to process my stuff. I would have to process that stuff on my own and I'd have to find peers or other practices to process my stuff. And then I'd have to get clear with that before I walked in to be with my staff and my students. And that was the motivation, the impetus to really be in that rigorous daily practice, to say I need to do this, and then this will give me the opening, the spaciousness to do the work.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

Yeah, and that's just beautiful on so many levels and it can be applied to any trauma, any situation that is on our minds, and I can attest as well being up late looking at news, talking to individuals in time zones, right. So if we're having conversations, whether that's through text or WhatsApp or FaceTime, depending on Israel is ahead of us a few hours. Depending on Israel is ahead of us a few hours. And if we talk about your love of LA and Las Vegas, then there's three hours behind.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

Yeah, so it's just that in itself, it would be nice to have things so universal, where everybody's on at the same time, because I think that would that would be helpful and that's something that I'm I'm working through with some of the work that we're doing human trafficking, where there's a survivor of human trafficking who's on a different time zone and and so we're having conversations that's like, oh my gosh, it's three in the morning, like I need to get to bed, like I need to rejuvenate, so I can to your point, so I can be the best that I can for that that day the other thing I noticed over this past 19 months is that when I was able to be in these daily practices, my connection to god, my connection to my God, my connection to my prayer life, my connection to my meditation life was so much richer and so much more vibrant that even in the midst of the pain and the tears there was a profound sense of holiness and connection.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

And that was fascinating to be able to say all right, this spiritual work really can allow us to do both to say, to be grounded and to then feel this profound sense of connection.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

Awesome. Thank you for sharing everything, being so transparent and talking about tough subjects that are going on and, like you said, just even the budget of just modifying things. It's like, okay, well, this is just something we have to think about, we just have to do it. There's no, I mean, there is an option, but the safe option is security.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

Let me add a quick piece about anti-Semitism on college campuses.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

Oh, please do Because me add a quick piece about anti-Semitism on college campuses oh please do, Because that's a piece that's showing up in the newspapers and social media on a regular basis. It's a real thing. There is a profound, heightened experience by my students of anti-Semitism. Some of it is anti-Zionism, Some of it is just old-fashioned anti-Semitism. Some of it is anti-Zionism, some of it is just old-fashioned anti-Semitism. But there is a daily experience of anger, mistrust and hatred for many of my students, and then they have to figure out what to do with that.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

So part of this, I think, is we've lost, since the war has broken out some of our relationships, one of those interfaith relationships I spoke about, Some of our former relationships on campus with Black United Students or SALSA, the Latino group.

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

They have been diminished over the past year and it is hard and painful to see that the trust that we spent years building and collaborations that we were working on together have now been pushed to the side, and so it's a very unusual time on campus, which means that the students really need community. They really need a place where they can have a second home and feel relaxed and grounded. So we've been doing an intense amount of community building for this period and we're trying to figure out how to begin to talk about through a dialogue with each other, how to have dialogues to hear different Jewish experiences that are not the same but holding complexity, and how can we begin to finally say, okay, I don't have the same perspective on you politically, but I can hear your story, because I want to hear the motivation, the passion you have that I think will slowly be building over the next six to 12 months as we engage in campus life.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

Thank you for sharing that. I didn't know a good way to bring it up, so I'm glad you touched on that. We're in our last minute. Can you just share again how people can learn about you?

Rabbi Michael Steven Ross:

and learn to work and follow. So on Facebook I am Rabbi Michael Ross. I'm also on Instagram, rabbi MS Ross. I'm also on Instagram Rabbi MSR. And kenthillelorg is the way to connect to the Jewish Student Organization at Kent. Tbshudsonorg is the way to connect to Temple Besh Shalom here in Hudson.

Voices for Voices Founder, Justin Alan Hayes:

Thank you so much for joining us. And thank you, our viewers, our listeners, first show. I'll rebound with us from the beginning. I want to thank our guest, rabbi Michael Stephen Ross. Stick with us for two segments and, until next time, be a voice for you or somebody in need.

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