By Erica Levi Zelinger
At the start of the semester, rabbinical students and faculty at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College crossed the street to Curtis Arboretum, where they met with a representative and spent time doing community service. For Amanda Beckenstein Mbuvi, Ph.D., it was a lesson in how RRC forms rabbis. The arboretum, she says, isn’t just “the backdrop” students see when they sit outside. It is “part of what it means to be in this place.”
Mbuvi became director of RRC’s Center for Jewish Ethics in 2025, succeeding Rabbi Mira Wasserman, Ph.D. Established in 1994, the Center is where “study and action meet,” training future rabbis as ethical guides and developing resources for Jewish communities. One year in, Mbuvi shared her priorities and hopes for the Center.
Learning to Build Community Where You Are
The arboretum activity, part of RRC’s Fall 2026 Immersive, reflects a central goal of Mbuvi’s work: helping students cultivate inclusive, just communities rooted in place.
The idea grows out of the 1299 Reckoning Project, RRC’s examination of the neighborhoods it has called home, from its founding on Broad Street in North Philadelphia to its 1982 move to Wyncote, and the relationships it did — and didn’t — build with its neighbors. Mbuvi sees a lesson that applies well beyond RRC.
“One of the clear lessons of that move is to pay attention to where we are and not just sort of have a bubble somewhere else,” she says. “All the spaces we’re in, where we live or that we move through during our commutes, all of those spaces matter.”
Being a good neighbor, she says, means building local relationships and staying aware of the issues affecting the surrounding community. And because most RRC students don’t live near campus, she hopes the experience becomes “a model for cultivating a sense of place wherever they are as they move out into new communities.”
Tzvi Silver, who did research on the 1299 project, has since organized others to continue the arboretum work throughout the year.
“My involvement with the Friends of the Curtis Arboretum began with RRC programming designed to connect us with the neighborhood, something that was not a priority at the old location on Broad Street” says Silver. “Personally, I find it satisfying to do invasive plant and litter removal between classes. I find cleaning up to be a straightforward way of engaging with the world around me. It imparts mutual benefit.”
For Mbuvi, that kind of initiative is “my ideal”: “not just to invite people to participate in organized activities, but to support and inspire people in doing their own work, seeing the next steps.” It reflects a broader approach to the Center’s work: engaging students as partners who can help shape where the work goes next.
Turning Recommendations into Culture
Putting the 1299 Reckoning Project’s recommendations into practice is another priority — but Mbuvi doesn’t want to reduce that to a checklist. “One of the key things is not just thinking about this in terms of discrete actions,” she says, but about “broader cultural shifts and dynamics and practices” that change how RRC is grounded in its community.
That also means resisting the impulse to simply add another program. With students already balancing classes, internships and other commitments, Mbuvi tries to work within existing structures: “doing things differently instead of just doing more.”
Rethinking Who Leads
Another focus is a series of events with the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association on disability, ableism and the rabbinate. Expectations of leaders reflect a community’s ideals, Mbuvi says, and without examining them, other efforts risk producing “more expectations for rabbis to be all things to all people.”
The series aims to connect rabbis with disabilities to one another and to resources while lifting up “new leadership structures and new practices and new ways of being a rabbi that communities may not have been familiar with.” Broadening what communities can imagine, Mbuvi believes, could connect them with gifted rabbis already in the field and those coming through RRC.
She is also developing anti-bias resources for congregations and search committees, helping them distinguish among “preferences, traditions and requirements” so they can consider rabbis whose backgrounds they might not have anticipated.
Looking Ahead
In three to five years, Mbuvi hopes the Center will be a resource hub for students, community members and the wider public, connecting people with RRC’s faculty expertise, its civilizational approach and innovative practices.
“People can talk a lot about change,” she says, “and people don’t necessarily know what to do instead.” Her answer is to offer concrete resources and models that help people imagine and put into practice new ways of building communities.
Ultimately, Mbuvi sees the Center’s work as preparing rabbis not simply to respond to the communities they inherit, but to help imagine what those communities might become. Rabbis, she says, should be able to “envision, embody and bring forth new possibilities for the world,” and work alongside others to make those possibilities “accessible and compelling.”
