Zvika Krieger brings traditional texts, radical self-expression to Berkeley’s Chochmat HaLev synagogue
Growing up in Los Angeles, Zvika Krieger had a traditional Orthodox Jewish upbringing, but his journey into spiritual leadership is an unusual one that includes a Jewish day school education as well as the discovery of Burning Man as a place for Jewish prayer and connection. After a two-year stint at Meta, where he served as its first director of responsible innovation, he was chosen to serve as the spiritual leader for the progressive, Berkeley, Calif.-based Chochmat HaLev synagogue. Krieger sat down for an interview with eJewishPhilanthropy’s Esther Kustanowitz.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Esther Kustanowitz: You describe yourself as a “subversive ritualist and radical traditionalist,” held jobs in journalism, with the U.S. government and tech companies, and tackled issues ranging from Middle East politics to climate change and responsible innovation. What professional description best describes your work?
Zvika Krieger: Whenever a new opportunity comes my way, the first question I ask is, where can I make the most impact, help the world and advance the causes I care about? But the second question is, where can I learn the most? [In] the world that we’re living in, where challenges are so multimodal, you can’t just have a government solution, or just a private sector solution, or an NGO or civil society solution. You need to be able to see things from multiple different perspectives… A throughline in most of my career is innovation and challenging the status quo of stodgy traditional organizations that have brought me in to shake things up, to challenge conventional wisdom. Whether that’s the U.S. military or the U.S. State Department; the World Economic Forum; or an 80,000 person company like Meta, I’ve always been the intrapreneur or entrepreneur [who brings] a new perspective. My latest version of that is Judaism, the oldest institution of them all. While I was at Meta, I was also in rabbinical school.
EK: How are you intersecting with Jewish philanthropy?
ZK: Chochmat is funded primarily through dues and donors. We have a pretty healthy membership base, which has been steadily growing post-COVID. My goal is to make Chochmat self-sustaining… People in the institutional Jewish world hear about the work that I’m doing, [and say] “Jewish foundations will never fund this work. It’s too provocative, too out of the box.” But the numbers speak for themselves. We’ve tripled the number of people coming to Friday night services at Chochmat over the past year, 200-300 people praying, singing and dancing, some staying until midnight for “heartspace,” a progressive spin on this Hasidic tradition of a tisch, sitting around a table singing, chanting, eating and drinking, sharing Torah and having guest speakers on topics like Judaism and polyamory, or Judaism and psychedelics. That’s been funded by the San Francisco Federation. In conversations with foundations, I often say, “Don’t think about whether this resonates for you. But there’s lots of people, many of whom you’ve probably never met, whom this does resonate for.”
Read the full interview here.
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