#416: SPOTLIGHT: Irwin Kula
#416: Irwin Kula
February 4, 2025
A Backbeat of Community
Question for Irwin:
Do you recall a moment or period in your work/career where your feeling of “mis-alignment” was growing simply too large and causing you anxiety or bad sleep… what practical change or action did you take?
Irwin's Response:
My most recent misalignment moment began early 2024. As a “thought leader” in the American Jewish and religious landscape, my identity has been defined by being at the "cutting edge" of the mainstream. I discern the partial truths in polarities/extremes and help leadership - those with political, financial and cultural influence - integrate these partial truths to keep them from metastasizing. In January 2024, I felt a painful unbridgeable gap between what I saw and understood happening in Gaza - a logic of endless violence that compels the destruction of another population - and what I could say in the very spaces I have served for decades. This misalignment between my conscience and what I could say without being marginalized, attacked, and losing support of investors has been sad, unnerving, and extremely hurtful. I have been challenged intellectually, psychologically, and ethically and have had some long term relationships damaged. For the first time in 45 years I don’t “belong”. To say this has disturbed sleep is an understatement.
What practical change and actions have I taken? I am living in the gap - seriously sitting with the cognitive and emotional dissonance. I am speaking with my most important investors as truthfully and as intentionally as possible. I am loosening some attachments - beliefs, world views, ideas, desires, fantasies, understanding of success - critical to my identity. I am owning the loss. I am living more frugally. I am developing new relationships, new insights and hopefully new ways forward. I am learning about courage. And I go to sleep and wake up trembling under the weight of being a seventh generation rabbi trying to meet this moment.
I suspect Irwin would love all direct responses from you. I find it incredibly encouraging when I hear from any of you after I share my thoughts. It is powerful for me. I assume many others have a similar experience. So here is Irwin's email… pip
Joe's thought…
Irwin, thank you for your courage. Your words took me to a deep, deep place where I saw you nourishing a community, hungry for safety and a sense of belonging. Your vulnerability in owning loss, fills me with hope. Hope in the belief that in the vastness of the space between is and isn't there is a growing light that your spirit nurtures.
- Joe