Meet an innoFaither is our series to introduce the inspiring optimists in the innoFaith world and what they’re working on and thinking about. We hope it helps you find and engage with each other across the network to advance faith-rooted social innovation and interfaith collaboration for social impact. Or just meet some cool people.
This feature was published in January 2021. Ian has since moved on from Nefesh, but you can still find him at the email at the bottom of the feature.
Meet Ian Schiffer, Community Weaver for the Nefesh spiritual community, a Dalai Lama Fellow, community organizer, connector, spiritual wrestler, and committed seeker of justice for all people.
What faith(s), if any, do you practice? Is your faith or practice bringing special inspiration or insight for you in this current moment?
I practice an open-hearted, relational Jewish tradition that is grounded in middot (traits/qualities) like chesed (loving kindness), and linked to building a world that is nurturing, where everyone's needs are met. I practice a faith that strives for prophetic wisdom and is embodied.
The leaders of the Movement for Black Lives have offered immense wisdom about spiritual fortitude to inform our organizing. My spiritual community Nefesh, which means breath of the soul, and our biweekly shabbats have been re-entry points into my body by connecting with ritual, song, and prayer and the values that are important to me regardless of what pandemics are co-occurring. Our practices have been a container to feel grief and be able to mourn as we pray for those who have died and remember the people we’ve known and those we never will. Traditional Jewish practices of sitting shiva and kaddish feel especially important right now. There is immense loss but also beautiful responses. New possibilities are created when people come together through mutual aid.
Additionally, resource mobilization has been a growing faith practice for me. I am choosing to be in communities that believe resources should flow like a river and trusting that when I remove blocks/dams that interrupt that cycle, more healing will be possible. Lastly, Israel's original meaning, a spiritual wrestling / relationship, is core to my faith practice.
Where do you live?
I live in Los Angeles, unceded indigenous land known as Tovaangar. It’s where I grew up, where my ancestors moved in the 30s and 40s. I appreciate movement ancestor Grace Lee Boggs, who spoke about the importance of place, that to do movement-building work, it’s important to stay in a place for a long time. The Yiddish phrase doikayt (hereness) means grounding in diaspora where I am. I feel deep affinity for the possibilities of Tovaangar and the movements that resist capitalism's racial inequities - we have a high incarceration rate and 70 thousand unhoused people, with significant racial disparities. I live in a collective house committed to transformation.
What's your favorite pastime?
I love connecting people and connecting resources to people and creating possibilities that wouldn’t otherwise exist. This might mean connecting with strangers, going for walks in my neighborhood, supporting friends, getting more connected to Jewish community, mobilizing resources in my community… and seeing the ripples.
What are you working on currently?
I feel really grateful that I get to spend days working as Community Weaver for Nefesh, a middot-driven, accessible, loving intergenerational Jewish community. My role is supporting our community to be connected to justice work and to know that work means fashioning connections to our own spiritual growth and development. I’m hoping to set up a mutual aid network within our community and externally and connect with campaigns for justice around L.A. We’ve hosted an anti-racist dialogue for white Jews and are working through how to confront racism, to undo it in our communities and our world. Confronting it is part of our practice of tikkun olam (repair the world) and teshuva (repair or return). That work also means bridging gaps between what our community currently looks like and doing internal transformation work so it can be a container that looks and feels more and more like the world (because Jews are a multi-racial, multi-ethnic people).
I also work for AFSCME Local 800 helping workers get fair contracts with Jewish organizations and ensuring the Jewish community lives up to its values. We call on Jewish non-profits to treat workers with dignity and care.
Additionally, in March, I’m teaching a course called Mensch Reimagined: Masculine People Building a Culture of Nurturance about how we can go beyond the label mensch (a person of integrity) to build a culture that is welcoming and that undoes patriarchy. This nurturance culture work has happened for many centuries predominantly by non-men and is known now as transformative justice, getting to the root and addressing why harm occurs and transforming it through a process of repair. Teshuvah mentioned above provides a beautiful portal/framework for this repair work as Jews. The four step iterative, often non-linear process can be such a gift for how to respond when harm occurs: reckoning, acknowledging and taking accountability for harm relationally and publicly, making reparations, and a guarantee of non-repeat of harm. I also love this article by Nora Samaran, "Own, Apologize, Repair."
Finally, L.A. is home to the largest community of urban Indigenous people in all of the U.S., but the Tongva people are not federally recognized and don’t have access to any land in this county, their ancestral homeland. Additionally, they are being priced out of where they live because of the housing crisis in L.A. As a result, there are movements for voluntary land taxes and “land back” to support the Tongva people. I’m following Jews on Ohlone Land and inspired by the Black Manifesto, hoping to mobilize Jewish and other faith communities to support these movements for reparations and rematriation.
What question are you thinking about these days?
Dr. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore talks about how abolition is not an absence but a presence. It’s about creating new worlds, new systems. So the question I'm sitting with is what institutions, communities, norms need to shed and unravel, and what can be possible when that happens? What presence can we be creating as faith-based communities, as sanctuaries, as new worlds offering wisdom to all people? I’m leaning into Arundhati Roy’s quote that “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
How can people find you?
ischiffer94@gmail.com
Ian is no longer with Nefesh, but you can find them here: