Jewish innovation

JFNAs Remarkable Pivot, and Me

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In the opening chapter of my book, Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews can Transform the American Synagogue (Jewish Lights, 2000), I share a vignette from a moment at the 1995 General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations (now called the Jewish Federations of North America or JFNA) that took place in Boston. The American Jewish songwriter, Debbie Friedman, who died all too young at the age of 59, was in front of a room of a couple of thousand delegates. She was teaching a song that has now found its way into hundreds of American synagogues—an alternative Hebrew/English version of the misheberach/prayer for healing. At the time, however, not many knew the song, certainly not the typical attendees of the GA. This was not a Reform Movement summer camp where thousands of Jewish kids learned to sing Debbie’s catchy songs.

This column first appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on November 15, 2019. 

The GA was a gathering place for the monied elite of American Jewry to network, plan and discuss the major issues of the day, from the security of the State of Israel, to the threat of assimilation to the funding of Jewish educational, cultural and social service agencies. They were not the singing or swaying type. Even if they were, it simply was not the culture of the GA. And yet, Debbie transformed the energy of the space in a way that only she could. The way she introduced the prayer touched people in a very deep way. That day, I witnessed hundreds of GA delegates rise to their feet, joining arms and swaying as they caught on to the melody of the prayer. I used the vignette to suggest that Jewish institutions, particularly American synagogues, were not sufficiently tapping into the desire of thousands of American Jews for a more spiritual expression of their Jewish identity.  

I thought of this moment this past week when I attended FedLab in Washington D.C. FedLab took the place of the GA, which is usually held every fall in a different city in North America (and periodically, in Israel). For over 20 years, from the mid-1980’s until the early 2000’s, I never missed a GA. It was, for a long time, the place to meet anybody who was anybody in American Jewish life and to hear the big issues of the day discussed by leading thinkers and activists from within and beyond the Jewish world. I was not the only one who stopped attending GAs some time ago. Somewhere along the way, the GA lost its sizzle to all but the Federation insiders, both lay and professional.

I continued to be a loyal contributor to my local Federation and, in my public roles, continued to argue that a gift to the Federation was the tax one paid for the privilege of being a member of the trans-national Jewish people. As I built a national Jewish organization (PANIM) that sought to integrate Jewish learning, Jewish values and social responsibility, I recognized that the network of agencies that sent students to our programs were all part of the Federation system. I could not have done my work without the system that was supported by Federation fundraising campaigns. And yet the kinds of organizations that I felt were most closely aligned with my understanding of Judaism were not part of the Federation system. My domestic politics were too progressive. My love for Israel found expression primarily in organizations with a deep commitment to Zionism and religious pluralism and human rights. And the kind of spiritual community I tried to build as a congregational rabbi was decidedly non-mainstream. Our synagogue became a home for spiritual seekers, religious skeptics and pursuers of justice.  

In my 2013 book, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future I argued that the key to a vibrant Jewish future was for the organized Jewish community to give more attention, more funding and more shelf space to new models of Jewish life and community that were being created by Jewish social entrepreneurs. I have brought this message to dozens of communities around North America and, for the past five years, the work has taken shape through an initiative that I lead called Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network. Our Network of innovators now numbers well over 300 all across North America, proving that this is hardly a fringe phenomenon. These organizations and communities are attracting Next Gen Jews in ways that most legacy Jewish organizations are not able to do. The challenge is: How do we build bridges between these new expressions of Jewish life and the better resourced institutions that make up the organized Jewish community?

All of which brings me back to FedLab. I was already in conversation with Beth Cousens, Associate Vice-President for Jewish Education and Engagement at JFNA about how to make more Federations aware of the Kenissa Network and she was incredibly helpful in that regard. But imagine my surprise when she described to me the plan for FedLab whose goals seemed so similar to what we had been working on with Kenissa for five years!

I’d be lying if I did not admit that I attended the conference with some skepticism. Organizations do not change their styles overnight. But I was quickly won over. Beth and her team of facilitators (to my eye, all women, and all quite extraordinary) created a crash course in network theory and the art of innovation. Most of the sessions took place in small groups which were carefully curated so that, even as the majority of attendees were Federation lay leaders and professionals, each room had a critical mass of innovators who embodied the kinds of new Jewish organizations that are popping up everywhere.  Every large session started and ended with a soulful Jewish song led by Naomi Less, the founder of Jewish Chicks Rock and now on the ritual team at LabShul in Manhattan. There were not many large plenaries but it was significant that at Monday’s lunch, attended by the approximately one thousand attendees, a short teaching and song was led by Isaiah Rothstein, a multi-racial, Orthodox, Jew of Color who is the Rabbi in Residence at Hazon.

My “Debbie Friedman” moment came in the final plenary when JFNAs new CEO, Eric Fingerhut, struck the perfect balance between assuring national Federation loyalists that their historic mission was still important but, simultaneously, announcing that we are entering a new era of North American Jewish life and that FedLab was a sign of things to come. Eric even came out from behind the podium and began singing a Hebrew prayer that asks God to bring us from darkness into the light. Eric did not exactly get the whole room standing, singing and swaying, but for the CEO of JFNA to reinforce the priorities and the gestalt of the previous two days was a strong message that the organized community must make room for a new way of engaging Jews.

Cultural change is slow. There will be resistance along the way. Institutions almost always default to stasis and there are a dozen ways that innovation gets thwarted, in ways both subtle and explicit. Every time Naomi Less started singing, I heard some person within earshot say something like, “Oh no; not again”.  But the pivot represented by FedLab is a huge signal that forms of Jewish identity that have too-long been on the margins of the organized Jewish community are now being invited to come into the center.

It is a shechiyanu moment and not just for “me”. There are tens of thousands of Jews who are eager to access Jewish life if only we lower the barriers of entry, generously share resources and expertise with innovators and suspend our judgmentalism of them and their eclectic approaches to culture, spirituality and religion. If we can do that, the Jewish world will be better for it and so will we.

Something’s Happening Here

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In 1967 Buffalo Springfield issued an anti-Vietnam War song called “For What It’s Worth” that began with, “There’s something happening here. What it is, ain’t exactly clear.” The lyric expresses what I was observing in the Jewish communal landscape over the last decade that inspired me to write Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future (2013). In the book I describe two opposite trendlines that were happening simultaneously—the decline of legacy Jewish organizations and the concurrent rise of an innovation sector of Jewish themed organizations that were experiencing growth, especially among millennials.

Note: This article appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on Dec. 13, 2016.

The analysis from the book suggested an opportunity that I was eager to pursue. In 2015, with the support of the William Davidson Foundation, we launched the New Paradigm Spiritual Communities Initiative (NPSCI) under the auspices of Clal: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. NPSCI’s mission is to identify, convene and build the capacity of emerging Jewish spiritual communities and organizations.

Because we were particularly interested in emerging groups that were attracting Next Gen Jews we looked at activity in five discreet sectors: social justice; spiritual practice; Jewish prayer groups (like independent minyanim); Jewish learning groups; and eco-sustainability/food-justice. Helping us in the effort are five co-sponsoring organizations: Hazon; the Institute for Jewish Spirituality; JOIN for Justice; Mechon Hadar; and UpStart.

We have just completed our first cycle of NPSCI. In March 2016 we gathered 55 creatives together, well distributed from the five sectors and coming from every part of the United States and Canada. While the innovators skewed heavily towards those in their 20’s and 30’s, the phenomenon is by no means restricted to that age group. The second stage of NPSCI is called Kenissa (Entrance-way): A Training for Leaders of Emergent Jewish Communities. That took place in December 2016. Each member of the initial Consultation was invited to bring a team of up to three people, professional or lay, from their communities.

What is exciting as we think about repeating this cycle for the next several years is that each person we find helps us discover one or two other Jews who are creating approaches to Jewish life and identity of extraordinary variety. NPSCI is creating a platform where these innovators can come together and gain strength from spending time with other creative individuals from around the country. Typically, most of these innovators are under-resourced, over-worked and sit at the margins of the organized Jewish community. Despite the fact that they are having success attracting the very Next Gen Jews that the organized Jewish community fails to attract, typical of start-ups, most struggle to become sustainable.

An invitation into the innovator’s network that is NPSCI is a little taste of heaven. If we did nothing more than identify these creative individuals and convene them, we could say “dayenu” but we do much more. We are essentially unleashing the creative wisdom of those in the network to teach and learn from one another. We are also offering a specific conceptual framework that inspires communities and organizations to imagine their work in more robust ways.

If the Jewish community is to turn the corner and be relevant to the next generation of American Jews, we need to better understand the phenomenon that NPSCI has begun to identify. To that end, we commissioned a study of the first cohort of NPSCI by Dr. Tobin Belzer, a sociologist affiliated with the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. Her findings build on previous work in the Jewish innovation space: Mechon Hadar’s Emergent Jewish Communities and their Participants (2007), and two studies by Jumpstart: The Innovation Ecosystem (2009) and The Jewish Innovation Economy (2011).

Studying the background, attitudes and behaviors of those attending the 2016 NPSCI Consultation, the study found that the vast majority were beneficiaries of strong Jewish backgrounds including a mix of afternoon religious school, day school, participation in Jewish youth groups and summer camps. Yet few identified themselves with the movements that presumably sponsored those experiences. The vast majority identified as “just Jewish” or “post-denominational” which raises question about their future affiliation patterns and the ongoing challenge to existing synagogue movements.

In terms of attitudes, our sample reflected the waning influence of the Holocaust on their identities and a rejection of a communal narrative centering on anti-semitism and “Jews at risk”. It confirmed what other recent studies have told us about attitudes towards Israel, with very few putting Israel at the center of their Jewish identity and a majority holding critical views about some of Israel’s policies. One fascinating paradox is that the vast majority saw their identities as global and universal instead of particular and Jewish and yet, virtually all expressed an affinity to the ethics and values of Judaism.

I have argued in my own articles and books that while some describe the next generation of American Jews as “post-tribal” a more accurate term would be “covenantal”. What I mean by that term is that even as younger Jews reject many of the parochial aspects of Jewish communal life, they resonate to values that are core to Jewish teaching—every person made in the image of God; the protection of the stranger and most vulnerable in our midst; a pursuit of peace and justice; a commitment to learning and the pursuit of truth. As such, programs and organizations that put such values at the center have the best chance of attracting this next generation of American Jews.

In fact, the Jewish innovators that NPSCI is identifying and convening are building exactly these types of communities and organizations. Asked to characterize the organizations that they are creating or leading, the terms most often used were: transformative, welcoming, non-judgmental, pluralistic, accessible, unconventional and risk-taking. By implication, few believed that the legacy organizations that make up the organized Jewish community reflected these values or principles.

As part of NPSCI’s commitment to support emerging Jewish communities in the innovation space, we are about to undertake a major mapping project of the phenomenon across North America. Identifying the people and organizations that are part of the upsurge of creative efforts to redefine Jewish life and Jewish identity is a necessary part of any effort to support the Jewish innovation sector. Those interested in being listed in our database and being invited to future gatherings sponsored by NPSCI can register their organizations or communities on the home page of our website: http://www.npsci.org/

Those interested in reading the Tobin Belzer’s full report, “Jewish Communal Transformation: A Look at What’s Happening and Who’s Making it Happen” can find it here: http://www.npsci.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/NPSCI-report-Nov-16-final.pdf.