The 1973 Catalog ends its list of usage notes with six words that read like an instruction and function like a permission slip: “Be bold, and creative.” After three hundred pages of liturgy, ritual law, and Talmudic cross-references, that’s the closing note. Not “consult your rabbi first.” Not “proceed with caution.” Go be bold.

It would be easy to read that as the whole argument and stop there, and a certain kind of organizing writing would stop there, because rejecting expertise outright makes for a cleaner story than what the editors actually wrote. The line right before “be bold” is the one that matters more. For questions of halakhah, the editors say, consult a rabbi, or several, for full explanations and decisions. Then the complication: halakhah is a central input into your life, meant to inform, raise questions, offer solutions, provide inspiration. It is not meant to dictate behavior as a monolithic rule handed down from above.

That’s a specific, disciplined position, and it’s harder to hold than either alternative. The easy version of DIY religion throws out expertise entirely, treats every rabbi’s opinion as just another opinion, and ends up reinventing bad theology from scratch because nobody bothered to learn what the tradition had already worked out. The easy version of institutional religion treats the expert’s word as final, full stop, and tells you your own judgment doesn’t count until you’ve earned enough letters after your name. The editors picked neither. They said: get the input, take it seriously, and then the decision is still yours. Expertise informs. It doesn’t rule.

This is the exact fault line mutual aid organizing keeps tripping over, usually without naming it. There’s a version of DIY politics that treats any credentialed knowledge as inherently suspect, that would rather have an activist with good intentions run a legal clinic than consult an actual lawyer, on the theory that consulting the lawyer means capitulating to the system the lawyer trained inside of. That version gets people hurt. It also gets people killed, when the expertise being discarded happens to be medical. And there’s a version that never escapes the deference in the first place, that waits for the social worker or the nonprofit board or the city permit before doing the thing that obviously needed doing yesterday. The Catalog’s editors were navigating this exact tension fifty years before “lived experience versus expertise” became a phrase people fought about on the internet, and their answer wasn’t a slogan. It was a working method: gather the input, don’t let it become a cage.

The same instinct shows up in how the editors handled the fights they hadn’t resolved. In the second Catalog’s introduction, they admit to struggling with what they call the women’s issue and say plainly that it’s an ongoing, unresolvable struggle that gets more complicated with every factor added to it. Rather than paper over that with confident language, they invented awkward nonsexist forms, s/he and wo/rnan, knowing the forms were clumsy, knowing other people had already invented better versions they hadn’t found yet, and published anyway. That’s the same discipline as the halakhah passage. Don’t pretend to have resolved what you haven’t. Don’t let the absence of a perfect answer stop you from doing the imperfect, necessary work in front of you.

“Be bold, and creative” only means something because of everything that comes before it. Boldness without the input is just guessing. Deference without the boldness is just waiting for permission that was never going to arrive. The editors built a document that demanded both, and refused to let either cancel the other out. That refusal is the actual inheritance here, more than any specific ritual or resource list. Take the expertise seriously. Then act like the decision was always yours to make, because it was.