Falls Church’s Sarah Flores Shannon Leads Faith-Based Reproductive Freedom Efforts

Jewish by choice, Sarah Flores Shannon is set on finding and building community.

After converting to Reconstructionist Judaism in 2021, Flores Shannon began working at the National Council of Jewish Women, working to change the narrative around faith and reproductive freedom. She is also involved in The Hineni Circle, a 10-month immersive experience for Jewish young adults run by GatherDC.

Flores Shannon lives in Falls Church and attends services at Sixth & I in Washington, D.C.

Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I grew up in Falls Church, not far from where I currently live. I was actually raised Catholic, and I was very deeply involved with the Catholic community in northern Virginia, but I always felt this pull toward Judaism. I remember being in high school and going to a women’s Seder at my friend’s synagogue and feeling so profoundly moved in a way that I wasn’t feeling at my church. Coming to Judaism was something I officially began to explore in January 2020. Especially [as] someone who chose Judaism, I was able to create my own Jewish practice that was explicitly feminist and inclusive and was able to center the things that meant the most to me.

I started out at Adat Shalom [Reconstructionist Congregation] in Bethesda at the recommendation of a close family friend. There are so many reasons I was drawn to Judaism, but one of them was the ways in which I felt I can live out my social justice values and really connect those to Jewish values. I got very involved with National Council of Jewish Women and their northern Virginia action team. I had my synagogue outlet, and then had this advocacy space as well.

After I converted, in spring 2021, I moved to Dublin, Ireland, for grad school, which was amazing. By living around the corner from a small, progressive Jewish synagogue, I had this challenge and opportunity to figure out what my Jewish community is going to look like in a place where the Jewish community is so small. That was what led me to want to work at NCJW. At the same time, I got involved with Jewtina y Co., a group that helps bring together Latin Jews. As the daughter of a Cuban immigrant, [I was] able to find people that I connected with culturally, and to make that connection between my Cuban heritage and my Jewish practice.

What are your responsibilities with NCJW?
Over the past year and a half, I’ve been in this role where I lead the coalition Faithful Majority for Reproductive Freedom. We have over a dozen faith partners. [It’s] a mix of denominations and organizations that have a base of people of faith, and we’re trying to change and reclaim the narrative on reproductive freedom in this country. We try to measure culture change — there are so many people of faith who see their support for reproductive freedom as separate from their [religious] beliefs. We try to find new and innovative ways to make some inroads and help people of faith feel empowered to know that they’re the majority — the majority of people of faith support abortion access, which I don’t think a lot of people know.

What do you enjoy about working with different faith groups?
I think as someone who’s in an interfaith relationship and an interfaith family, I see so many connection points. There are a lot of similarities there with the work I do in the coalition, when we talk about the areas where we have shared values, but also where things are different. In Judaism, for example, there’s very clear information on abortion being permitted, but also sometimes required. There are some Christian traditions that don’t as explicitly have that theology, but they’re able to talk about [how] their other values support access to abortions and birth control. There’s such an opportunity when we come together in a way that isn’t transactional, and we’re actually building bridges among our different communities.

What Jewish values speak to you the most?
I think there’s this value of how we’re all responsible for one another, and that I think speaks so deeply to who I am. As someone who’s extroverted and sometimes gets annoyed at myself — “Why did I have to go off and talk to the stranger and try to help them out?” — I think the sense of community responsibility that we have just speaks so deeply to who I am as a person.

There’s this idea by Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionism, who talked about how the past gets a vote, but not a veto. I think that is a more contemporary Jewish value that I hold in the work that I do [in] movement building — we can look and take learnings from what we’ve done in the past, but that doesn’t mean that that’s going to cancel out what we’re trying to do in the future, just because it might be a little different.

What do you like about the DMV Jewish community?
I’m oftentimes overwhelmed by just how many amazing events there are around the city, whether it’s a Jewish happy hour or a learning session. I just think that’s really amazing for our community.