It is Called “Covenantal Community”

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We should appreciate David Cygielman for introducing the broad eJP audience to the notion of communal “thickness” in his 11/13/17 post. As was noted in the response by Rabbi Michael Holzman, this is not a new concept. Well before the David Brooks’ column in the New York Times, sociologists have sought ways to measure the depth of connection between the people who make up any given social system. The idea of thickness was first introduced into the lexicon of the social sciences by Clifford Geertz in his classic study, The Interpretation of Cultures, which was published in 1973.

Note: This article appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on November 28, 2017.

In my view, it is essential that those who care about the future health of the American body politic focus their attention on the nature of community. This is no easy task because we use the word “community” so often and so freely, that the word loses much of its potential power and meaning. Yet there is a clear connection between the erosion of the civic fabric of American society, which has been documented by Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, 2000) and others, and the current climate of intolerance, bigotry and polarization that threatens the future of American democracy.

In his work, Putnam introduced the term “social capital”, to my mind, a far better descriptor for what others have called “thickness”. But to document the various ways in which social capital has been eroded in American society over the past 25 years is only the first step. Few argue with the diagnosis. The question is: What is the proper response?

I have argued that the Jewish community has a unique opportunity to respond to the loss of contexts of meaning for Americans by taking a closer look at how we go about the task of constructing our micro-communities (Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future, 2006). If one were to ask a random sample of Americans what institution provided a context of meaning for Jews, many would say: ”synagogues”. Would that only be true! If synagogues were structured in such a way that the people who came into its orbit truly felt a deep connection to the institution’s mission and to the other people who were part of that synagogue, we would not be facing the phenomenon of synagogues across the national and denominational landscape losing market share for the last two decades.

For the past twenty years I have had the privilege of working with dozens of synagogues and rabbis, trying to help them move from the prevalent synagogue-center paradigm to a new way of thinking about and structuring their communities. What we know about the synagogue-center paradigm that emerged in the post-World War II era of suburbanization is that it is primarily a transactional institution with relatively low expectations for membership (except for the payment of dues) and, consequently, low buy-in from members.  Nonetheless, for several generations, a large percentage of American Jews (studies suggest upwards of 80% in the course of lifetime), joined synagogues in their suburban neighborhoods to: a) acquire a basic Jewish education for their children, at least up until their Bar/Bat Mitzvah; b) to associate with other Jews; and c) to accommodate to a pattern of American life in suburbia where most middle-class people became members of religious congregations.

For a whole host of reasons that I have documented in Jewish Megatrends and elsewhere, that synagogue-center model of the American synagogue meets the needs of fewer and fewer American Jews. Jews, especially younger Jews, are voting with their feet and synagogues leaders across the country are in search for ways to make their institutions more attractive to Next Gen Jews.

What is so interesting to me is that the handful of people who have written about the future of the American synagogue, who have served as consultants for synagogue change efforts and who have led national efforts addressing the issue (e.g. Synagogue 3000; STAR; the Jewish Emergent Network, etc.) are in general agreement about what is wrong with the synagogue-center model and what a new paradigm might look like. However, there has been no agreement about what to call that new paradigm. In my own work (Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews can Transform the American Synagogue), I have used the term “synagogue-community” and “intentional spiritual community”. Others have used terms like “visionary synagogues” or “emergent synagogues”.

I sometimes say, partly in jest but not facetiously, that successful movements require at least two things: common nomenclature and a theme song. We can ditch the theme song for the present moment but I’d strongly recommend that those who care about the future of the American synagogue rally around the term “covenantal community”. I first introduced the term in a keynote address to the first national conference of the Jewish Intentional Communities Initiative co-sponsored by Hazon and the Pearlstone Center in November 2013. Dr. Bill Robinson, Dean of The William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, addressed the elements of covenantal community in an article in eJP in May 2017 entitled “Leadership Towards Covenantal Community”. And equipping rabbis with the vision and tools to transform their congregations into covenantal communities has been the centerpiece of the two-year fellowship program—the Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI)— that I have led since 2013. CLI is sponsored by Hazon.

What are the characteristics of covenantal community? A full answer requires far more space than this post allows but my working definition is: A group of people who intentionally enter into a mutual obligatory relationship in which they commit to: a) a common mission; and b) give of their time and psychic energy to support the viability of the group and the material and spiritual needs of the members of the group.

The key words are “mutual obligatory relationships”. This is no easy task in a society that so worships individualism and autonomy. Yet in my own experience, first as the founding rabbi of Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, MD, and then in consulting work with synagogues across the country, I have found that when you raise the bar of expectations, people are both willing and eager to make a much larger commitment than they ever dreamed possible. And then, in what become a virtuous cycle, people find that the community is able to feed their hunger for meaning and purpose in ways they never previously imagined possible.

A covenant is a contract of the heart. It is far more than an exchange of money for a range of goods and services. The starting point for the spiritual history of the Jewish people begins at Mt. Sinai when our ancestors entered into a brit, a covenant with God. That covenant involved many obligations for our people, obligations that we were not always prepared to live up to. But there is an implicit promise that if we live up to our part of the covenant, we are rewarded with a life of blessing. At a time when Jews, when all Americans, are so desperate to craft lives of sacred purpose, it is time for us to commit more time, resources and attention on how to build covenantal communities.

“Will You Still Need Me?” Thoughts on Aging and Purpose

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Some sermons take longer to percolate than others. This one has taken about 15 years. That was the first time that it struck me that the lyrics to the Beatle song, “When I’m 64” would be a great hook for a sermon. I decided to give the sermon in the year I turned 64. That will happen next week, so here goes.

Like many Boomers, the Beatles provided the soundtrack to my teen and young adult years. But the song “When I’m 64” seemed to be about my parents, not about me. Until recently that is. I learned that Paul McCartney wrote the song in late 1966 when his father, Jim, turned 64, one-year short of the mandatory retirement age in the UK. Here is the key stanza:

“When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now
Will you still be sending me a Valentine, birthday greetings, bottle of wine?
If I’d been out to quarter to three, would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?”

“Will you still need me?” Indeed.

Overcoming Denial
Just to be clear, I have no thoughts of retirement. Thank God, I feel like I am in my prime. I am in pretty good shape physically. And professionally I still have ideas and projects that people and foundations are willing to give me money to deliver. So, preparing this sermon has helped me confront the “denial” that afflicts so many of us who simply want to ignore the nasty little truth that aging happens, whether we are 75, 55 or 35. We all need to learn how to live more wisely because life is always shorter than we hope it will be.

Our Adat Shalom community has given a fair amount of attention to the theme of “Wise Aging” over the past decade. About seven years ago, Fran Zamore and Vickie Bremen led a couple of Saging Circles based on a book by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shlomi entitled From Aging to Saging. More recently a team of Adat Shalom volunteers, accompanied by Rabbi Fred, were trained by the Institute for Jewish Spirituality to lead year-long courses on Wise Aging. Course leaders have included Carol Hausman, Margie Arnold, Larry Goldsmith and Fran Zamore. All told, between 60-70 members of Adat Shalom have taken one of these courses and another one will be starting this November. I hope that this sermon might lead some of you to consider taking that course.

Admittedly, I still consider myself in the “learner” category on Wise Aging. But I am making progress. I recall an encounter I had early in my rabbinical career. The year was 1978. I was a rabbinical student, still single and not yet 30 years old. I was hired to serve a small congregation in Media, PA. A member came to see me about a difficult personal situation. I listened as attentively and as compassionately as I could. But after about 45 minutes the woman stood up and said to me: “I can’t expect you to understand any of this. You haven’t even lived yet.” Talk about being blamed for what you can’t control! This is when I started to learn that being a rabbi could get complicated. (But I do intend to keep at it until I get it right.)

What I want to share with you this evening falls into three categories: living more fully; living with loss; and living into legacy.

Living more Fully
The reason that I hope this sermon will resonate as much with the Millenials in the room as with the Boomers is because the most important lesson in Wise Aging is that we need to live life more fully. I don’t think it is ageist to say that young people waste more time than do older people. It is simply a matter of scarcity. We tend to squander what we have in great quantities; with youth comes the belief that one has all the time in the world to get stuff accomplished. As we age, we become humbled by the realization that the years slip by all too quickly, and that it can all end quite suddenly.

The first question posed to a human in the Bible is when God asks Adam: “Ayeka?” The translation: “Where are you?” is totally inadequate. God surely knows where Adam is. It needs to be translated in street slang: (dialect) “Where you at brother?” I can say that looking you straight in the eye. It is not a question about location; it is a question like: “what’s on your mind?” “what are you thinking about?” God is asking Adam: “What are you going to do with your life?” A heavy duty question.

There is no stage of life when you can’t ask yourself: “What is my life’s purpose?” But think how often the answers to the near-term version of that question do not add up to a fulfilled life. Where shall I go to college? What will I major in? What job will I take? Who will I marry? Where will I live? We answer each question at the appropriate time, weighing the options. But as often as not, one wakes up at age 40 or 50 or 60 and decides that they are not entirely happy with their life. Often it is because circumstances change. A job turns sour.  A spouse dies. A new opportunity presents itself. But sometimes it is because all the small decisions simply do not add up to a fulfilled life.

Nothing takes more courage than to get on the balcony, look at your life objectively and decide that you need to change course. There are numerous examples in our own Adat Shalom family of people who have changed jobs or made other significant changes in their life, some of them inspired by their work around Wise Aging. One participant told me that the course changed her life-long belief that her self-worth was determined by what she accomplished in her job. She retired earlier than she might otherwise have done and now enjoys more time engaged with art and music. Another Adat Shalom member was inspired by the course to move to Israel for a year to engage in serious Jewish learning, a life-long dream that, until she took the course, never seemed quite possible.

It turns out that asking oneself a serious question about life’s purpose is also a pre-requisite to living a more spiritual life. American society bombards us with messages that ties our self-worth to job status, income, wealth and material possessions. The Jewish tradition however suggests that our self-worth should be tied to other things called middot or soul traits. Acts of compassion, acts of generosity and acts of justice are what makes a life worthwhile. An attitude of gratitude; an attitude of joy; an attitude of humility is what makes for a happy life.

Living with Loss
With all that said, I don’t want to sugarcoat aging. If we had a choice, most of us would take a Peter Pan pill and stay young forever. But that is not an option.

With aging comes loss; loss of many kinds. For those who raised families, the first adjustment required is when children you raised move out of the house to live on their own, sometimes, far away. The relationship between the generations changes forever and it is often experienced by parents as a form of loss. There is also loss associated with retiring from a job. Not only is there a loss of income but, along with it, a loss of purposeful work, a routine, a network of colleagues and the status associated with a job. As aging takes a toll on one’s body there is a loss of stamina, strength and good health. For many, aging also takes a toll on our mental faculties. And finally comes the death of friends, relatives and life partners, reminding us that our own days are numbered as well.

Judaism has a clear teaching on how we should deal with loss. It comes from the laws governing mourning. The thrust of all of Judaism’s teachings is that we need to experience it deeply. We shovel earth on the coffin in the ground; what results is a spine chilling thud of finality. And we are instructed to make the deceased the topic of discussion at a shiva gathering, not sports, not the weather and not the movie we saw last weekend. A couple of thousand years after the rabbis established these customs, the helping professions realized the emotional benefits of embracing loss fully.

A story is told of a student of the Kotzker Rebbe. He was on his deathbed with family all around him. In a weak voice, he asks his wife to bring him some wine. Puzzled but acceding to his wish, she brings him wine upon which says the bracha and shouts “l’chaim”. The family is shocked.  The man replies: “I lived my life, doing my best to fulfill God’s will. I did it with a joyous heart. My death too is part of God’s plan. Why should I not celebrate it? L’chaim!”

The moral of the story extends to all other forms of loss. While we don’t welcome it, life happens. And with life comes loss. How do we accept it and not allow it to paralyze us? With an empty nest comes a stage of life that provides more time to travel and to volunteer for good causes. With retirement comes the opportunity to find an encore career, reinventing oneself in the process. And when friends start losing loved ones, everyone in the survivor’s orbit is given the opportunity to re-define “family” and “community”, extending ourselves to the survivor in ways that might not have occurred to us when that person was still partnered.

Yom Kippur provides good annual practice to prepare for loss. The one thing that is sure to exacerbate the pain of loss is when there has been conflict between people that has gone unaddressed. If one were to follow the Yom Kippur practice of asking forgiveness of those we have wronged and to be gracious in forgiving those who have wronged us, it would dramatically reduce the resentments and estrangement that often arise within families. All the symbols of Yom Kippur—wearing white, abstaining from food and drink, reciting Yizkor—engages us in an elaborate role play in which the theme is death. All to remind us that we should not postpone doing the things that are most important to us.

Living into Legacy
Several of the Adat Shalom members that I interviewed who took the Wise Aging course talked about how the experience encouraged them to give some attention to their own legacies. This is not a self-indulgent exercise.

Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher and author of I and Thou once wrote: “Every person born into the world represents something unique. If not, they would not have been born.” I recall using that quote when I drafted the first Baby Naming Ceremony that we used at Adat Shalom in our early years. Parents would read it as part of getting them to think about their dreams for their new daughter or son. But the premise of the quote is even more powerful as we enter our later years. How do we piece together the multiple layers of our life and what story does it tell?

Surprisingly, if we take the time to do the work, we come to a higher level of consciousness about what we accomplished, what we failed to accomplish and the kind of values that were manifested by the choices we made. I have sat with many mourners, preparing for a funeral, during which spouses and children struggled to articulate the deepest hopes and aspirations of their departed loved one. They will say to me: “My Mom, my Dad, never talked about that with me.” Isn’t it remarkable that people so rarely say the most important things to the people that they love the most? The Jewish custom of writing an ethical will to give to one’s children is designed to address this unfortunate phenomenon.

As I entered into my adult years and began a career as a rabbi, I was frustrated by the fact that I knew more about the inner lives of dozens of my congregants than I did about my parents. I wasn’t sure if it was my failure, or theirs’. But think about it. At what point is there an opening for a parent to say to a son or a daughter: “Johnny/Sally: Come sit here. Let me tell you my life story and what I am trying to accomplish with my life.” The reply would most likely be: “Dad, that is weird.” There never seems to be the right time. Yet, at my urging, I got what I sought from my parents. One of my most cherished possessions today are tapes that both my father and my mother made in which they tell the story of their lives, sharing details that never otherwise would have emerged.

One Adat Shalom member told me that soon after she finished the Wise Aging course she was travelling out west and she bought an attractive wood box holding blank note cards. The box had the word “gratitude” written on it. Now, each night, she fills out one card on which she writes something about the day just ended for which she is grateful. She intends to pass the box on to her children. Think about what a treasured possession that will be for her children and grandchildren who will very much want to know more about what made their mother/grandmother tick.

Paying attention to our legacy is answering the question that Martin Buber posed: “What was the purpose of my life and, after I die, what will I have left behind of value for my children, my descendants and for the community that mattered to me?”

Conclusion
In many ways, the question in the Paul McCartney lyric: “Will you still need me?” is asked by all of us, at every age. Is there any stage of life when we are not concerned about really being seen? About not being heard? About being needed? No. But as we age, what we most fear—not being needed—begins to move from perception to reality. The most effective response? live more fully; learn to live with loss; and live into your legacy.

A final story. In tractate Taanit of the Talmud we read the story of Honi, the circle drawer. One day he passed by an elderly man who was planting a carob tree. He said to the older man: “Kind sir, are you aware that it takes about 70 years for a carob tree to bear its fruit? Do you really think that you will be around to enjoy the fruit of your labors?”

The old man replied: “I am well aware of the nature of the carob tree my friend. But just as my parents planted carob trees for me to enjoy, so too am I planting trees for my children.”

Many people know this story only up to this point. And it has a nice ending. But the story does not end there. It moves into a pre-cursor to the Rip Van Winkle story. After the encounter with the older man, Honi has a meal which puts him into a deep sleep. The Talmud says that a rock enfolded him and covered him up for 70 years, the precise amount of time we have been told it takes a carob tree to give fruit. Honi wakes up and sees a man picking carobs from the tree. Honi, unaware of how long he slept, inquires: “Kind sir. Are you the one who planted this tree?”

“No” he replied. “That was my grandfather”. Our lives are given direction by the legacies that we inherit.

Postscript
I’d now ask everyone to stand up. Let me encourage you to close your eyes. Think about the people who have planted for you. Those who have made your lives rich and fulfilling. Those who have been role models for you. Those who have been your teachers. Those who helped you figure out what was important in life.

(Pause.) Open your eyes. You may sit down.

If the people you thought of are still alive, make a commitment to reach out to them in the next 24 hours to say “thank you”. If the people you thought of are deceased, make a commitment to share their name and what they did for you with a loved one or a close friend in the next 24 hours.

Finally, as a way to pay it forward and out of gratitude to those who planted for you, make a commitment to do some planting of your own in the year to come.

May each of us be able to live a mindful life, to age wisely and then to know that the next generation will enjoy the fruit of what you have planted.

Shana tova.

This was a sermon delivered on Kol Nidre, September 29, 2017, at Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, MD.

Jews and the “Faith” Question

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I recently had the opportunity to speak at the Chautauqua Institution (CI) about the “Crisis of Faith” in America. For those unfamiliar, CI was founded in 1874 by Methodist Bishop John Vincent as a summer camp for Sunday School teachers on the shores of Lake Chautauqua near Jamestown, NY. Today, CI functions like a summer camp for the NPR crowd, the days filled with internationally known speakers and the evenings replete with symphony, opera, ballet and theater.

This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on August 29, 2017.

Each of the ten weeks of the CI summer season is built around a theme and “Crisis of Faith” proved especially popular. The CI community has not yet outgrown its WASP roots although Jews are said to make up as much as 25% of the attendees today. A few years ago, the Everett Center was established, named after Jewish philanthropist Henry Everett, and it gave Jews their first permanent home on the grounds, joining the houses of virtually every Christian denomination in America.

The marquis draw of the week was journalist Bill Moyers. Best known for his PBS specials, Moyers is a man of prodigious intellect and a record of public service that dates back to his role in the Kennedy Administration where he was one of the architects (and then deputy director) of the Peace Corps. Unknown to me before I had a chance to spend some time with him, was that he got a Masters of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and has been a person of deep faith for all of his life, worshipping most Sundays at the historic Riverside Church on the upper West Side of Manhattan. Moyers framed each day’s presentation, interviewed the speakers after their lectures and then spoke himself on the final day of the week.

My antennae were already sensitized to the challenge that lay ahead when the speakers of the week were all asked to join a call with Bill Moyers about a month before the program was to take place. Moyers asked us if we intended to speak about our own “crisis of faith” or about the crisis being faced by the faith communities we represented. To a person, we all assumed we were being asked to take on the latter assignment although I sensed from Moyers some surprise, if not disappointment.

Because there are two main lectures each day at CI, I had the unenviable task of following Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom and author of over 30 books. Rabbi Sacks spoke about the simultaneous growth of secularism and religious extremism in the world and the consequences of losing the moderate middle ground. Quoting Jonathan Swift he observed: “We have just enough religion to hate one another but not enough religion to love one another.”

In my presentation, I spoke about my work with rabbis and American synagogues. I drew a correlation between the declining membership numbers in synagogues and the parallel decline taking place in most mainline Christian churches. I also highlighted the success of synagogues that were powerfully mission-driven, where the spiritual leaders make a clear connection between inner, personal transformation and the work of social transformation that we need to do in the world at large. I also spoke about what we are learning in the new national initiative that I am leading-Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network. I argued that even as the stewards of historic religious communities believe that the next generation is engaged in a wholesale abandonment of the institutions they have built, in fact, religious identity is being re-invented in exciting new ways.

But perhaps even more interesting to the 1,000+ people in the audience, was how differently I framed the “Crisis of Faith” for the Jewish community as compared to how Christians spoke about the same topic. Jews are quite adept at engaging in interfaith dialogue. Even though Jewish organizations and clergy have been deeply engaged in interfaith dialogue in American since the mid-20th century, the terminology for the conversations are usually Christian categories. As the minority sub-culture at the party, we play by the rules and definitions set by the majority culture.

Christians are accustomed to speaking about themselves as “faith communities”; Jews, not so much. Jews are less a “community of faith” than they are a “community of fate”. Jews are not united by a common understanding of God, a common lexicon of liturgy, or a common observance of ritual. Those matters of “faith” are hardly shared within one denomination or one synagogue no less across the full range of Jews in world. But as a “community of fate” Jews do feel a powerful sense of connection to a shared history and a common destiny. If Jewish behavior were to be defined by one core phrase, kol yisrael arevim zeh bazeh, “all of Israel is responsible, one for the other”, would be a far more accurate descriptor than “shma Yisrael…”. And while some rabbis might bemoan that fact, I would argue that the sense of mutual responsibility that Jews have acted upon, generation after generation is, in fact, the secret to Jewish survival.

Many a Christian colleague has remarked to me over the years how Jews don’t seem to attend worship services, they have the lowest “belief in God” quotient of any religious sub-group in America and they are not particularly observant of Jewish rituals at home. How is it, they ask, that Jews stand in greater solidarity with one another than do Christians?

In my experience, it is because for Jews, “belonging” has always been more compelling than “believing”. Even as we document the weakening ties to Jewish identity among Next Gen Jews, the “community of fate” factor is still powerfully at work. However, increasingly, that loyalty needs to be “earned” and that can only be accomplished to the extent our community continues to prove itself to be one of “sacred purpose”.

Networks Rising

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Sometimes you read a book to learn about something new. But at other times you read a book to find language for that which is already part of the way you function in the world. I had the latter experience reading the new book by Rabbi Hayim Herring, Leading Congregations and Nonprofits in a Connected World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).

Hayim has been the guru of social network theory in the Jewish world for some time, having published on it as early as 2001 in his article “Network Judaism: A Fresh Look at the Organization of the American Jewish Community”.  But he has taken his analysis to the next level in two ways. First, now that reality has caught up with the theory, the book is filled with examples of congregations that have used elements of network theory to re-invent congregational life (for the better, to be sure). Second, he co-authored the book with a Lutheran minister, Rev. Terri Martinson Elton. It is confounding to me how often the Jewish community is ready to accept ideas and adopt programs that are not informed by a rigorous examination of what is happening in the non-Jewish space all around us. We are not the first nor the only faith/ethnic community that is challenged to preserve elements of our group identity in a complex, multi-cultural society. Given that the book focuses on network theory as it pertains to congregations, having examples from the Christian world is an important contribution.

This article first appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on April 26, 2017.

To the uninitiated, networks are to the contemporary information age what hierarchies were to corporate America or what bureaucracies were to the industrial age. Each is a form of governance that was particularly suited to the economic success of each system. Not surprisingly, because we are only in the infancy of the information age, many institutions, both private corporations and non-profits, are behind the curve in modifying their ways of functioning and, as a result, they are significantly less effective than they might be. Think of how many companies that have not changed with the times have gone belly-up (e.g. Eastman Kodak). The same can be said about American churches and synagogues. The vast majority are still functioning in hierarchical ways that might have worked well 50 years ago. But the precipitous decline in congregational membership for more than two decades speaks volumes of the price to be paid for using an outmoded operating system.

The Herring/Elton book describes such congregations as stuck in a 1.0 operating system. They perceptively note that many congregational leaders fool themselves into thinking that they are changing with the times when they build a website and begin to use social media. Using the technologies of the “connected world” without changing the essential governing systems that go along with it, moves these congregations up to a 2.0 operating system. But if a congregation hopes to engage the next generation requires moving to a 3.0 system. That involves changing from authoritarian models of leadership to more democratic models; valuing innovation at least as much as tradition; moving from exclusivist standards that keep people out to inclusive models that are more welcoming; and much more. Anyone with a passing knowledge of historic religious traditions can see why clergy and congregational lay leaders are slow to adopt 3.0 ways of functioning. The values challenge the way religion has done business for millennia!

No institution changes quickly or easily. Those in positions of authority have a lot invested in protecting the status quo. This is true in all institutions. In the realm of religion, resistance to change can be easily championed by those who would claim to be protecting core values/practices of the respective religion and/or who are representing “the will of God”. Indeed, these are the arguments that have been made to justify, in the name of religion, slavery; the second-class status of women; the widespread practice of child marriage in the developing world; and the shaming and sanctions against LGBT persons and practices.

But despite the perceived threats to religious standards, network thinking can actually lead to a healthy renewal of religious traditions and the engagement of many younger people who are so alienated from the way faith communities currently function. By definition a networked organization will prioritize people over programs. It will allow new ideas to bubble up from the grassroots and not only come from the top down. It will breed a spirit of innovation and trial and error. It will celebrate diversity by welcoming in people of different backgrounds and life choices instead of perpetuating congregations of people who look alike, think alike and act alike.

Many of the most forward thinking foundations in the Jewish world are using network thinking to inform their funding. Case in point the Schusterman Foundation which has created several extremely robust networks like the ROI community, REALITY and their Network Incubator. Several years ago the Foundation created an animated video about networks and the Jewish community which is about as effective an explanation of the concept as you will find anywhere.

The Herring/Elton book particularly resonated for me. The Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI) (www.cliforum.org) that I run is now starting to work with its third cohort of 20 rabbis across the denominational spectrum for a two-year fellowship. Most of the rabbis we work with were raised in synagogues that functioned in an older paradigm (1.0, or at best, 2.0). We need to equip rabbis with the ideas and models that will help them move their congregations into a newer paradigm. The core principals we teach are fully in synch with the 3.0 model that Herring/Elton describe in their book: How do you make a congregation mission-driven and program aligned? How do you empower laypeople so that they are motivated to be fully engaged co-owners of the congregation and not relegated to passive members who are only expected to pay dues? How do you turn Jewish practice into a joy-filled and life-giving experience so that Jews see that Judaism can actually make them happier and more fulfilled human beings because they are part of a covenantal, mutually obligated community?

Similarly, my newest project is actually called, Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network (www.kenissa.org). The Kenissa Network is identifying and convening emerging spiritual communities that are forging new paths for Jewish identification in the 21st century. Specifically, we are working in six sectors: social justice, spiritual practice, independent minyanim, Jewish learning groups, arts and culture and eco-sustainability. Each of the communities we are identifying have a unique Jewish take on their particular thematic focus. And while on the surface, the groups do not have a lot in common, we are building a network in which the leaders of these respective organizations can learn from one another. It will result in building the capacity of the entire innovation sector of American Jewish life.

Herring and Elton ask the following provocative question in their book: What if congregations and non-profit organizations flipped their understanding of themselves from being dispensers of information to platforms for collective learning? It is a question that leaders of Jewish organizations would do well to ask themselves.

Introducing the Kenissa Network: A 21st Century Pathway into Jewish Life

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Twice in the past year I have published articles in eJP to introduce the work of the New Paradigm Spiritual Communities Initiative. Last week we had our second annual National Consultation, welcoming another 50 “creatives” into this unique network and we used the opportunity to re-brand the project as Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network (http://www.kenissa.org/). It is important to explain the name change and to share how the Kenissa Network is evolving.

This article appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on March 17, 2017.

The idea for Kenissa was generated by the thesis of my book, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future. Succinctly put, I argued and brought evidence to bear that at the same time that legacy Jewish organizations are on the decline and, it seems, American Jewish life is deteriorating, there is a countervailing process on the Jewish landscape of emergent communities and organizations that represent the seeds of an American Jewish renaissance.

In 2015 we secured seed funding from the William Davidson Foundation (and since joined by other funders) to create a national initiative that is designed to find, convene and build capacity with the “creatives” who are driving the phenomenon I described in Jewish Megatrends. These creatives are building new organizations and communities across a range of sectors that don’t always interact with each other including: social justice; spiritual practice; independent minyanim; Jewish learning groups; eco-sustainability; and arts and culture.

Many of these organizations work under the radar screen of the organized Jewish community but they are actually more successful at attracting the Next Gen Jews than are legacy organizations. The founders of these organizations struggle to find the resources to properly finance their operations and many feel marginalized by the mainstream Jewish community because they tend to be culturally, religiously and politically edgy. But it would be a huge mistake to dismiss the phenomenon as a fad. These groups are very much a product of the internet DIY culture and the emerging social economic patterns of the 21st century. Over time, they will be ascendant even as legacy organizations are destined to age out and lose market share.

All of which helps to explain why we changed the name of the project. If you spend any time with millennials you learn that they hate to be put into boxes and labelled. To my mind, the diverse phenomenon that I described in Jewish Megatrends represented the emergence of a new paradigm for spiritual communities in America. But we learned from our Year 1 cohort that about a third of our participants did not see themselves as “spiritual communities” nor did they like the label. A label that did receive far more enthusiastic response was “communities of meaning” which we defined as “networks of individuals that are inspired by an idea or a practice that enriches their lives and/or significantly improve conditions in the world for others.”

Kenissa is a name that emerged from a small working group of participants. Even though a lot of (so-called) marketing gurus recommend against using Hebrew words to name an organization or project, the desire to anchor the work in lashon kodesh, “the holy language of our people”, was strong among the leaders we are pulling together. In addition, the word kenissa means “entrance-way”. It is the perfect word to describe the network of Jewish communities of meaning that we are building because, for so many, these organizations and communities open the door to many Jews who are not attracted by more mainstream Jewish organizations. Quite often, engaging with these Jewish communities of meaning represents the first exposure they are having to Jewish life as adults.

What’s next? We are growing the Kenissa Network quite intentionally and deliberately. First, for those who have already been invited into the Network, we are now launching a national network of communities of practice that will help leaders support each other in everything from fundraising to scaling as well as more cutting edge topics like “creating covenantal organizational cultures”. Network members will also have the opportunity to bring teams from their organizations to our National Cross-Training Gathering in December.

Second, we are helping to provide thought leadership to the Jewish community by sponsoring a weekly blog that addresses how these emerging communities of meaning are attracting people to their projects. For leaders of synagogues and Jewish organizations that are struggling to hold on to existing constituencies or are failing to attract new constituencies, the Kenissa Network blog provides important insights into the thematic portals that are motivating Next Gen Jews. (http://www.kenissa.org/)

Third, we are about launch a national mapping project to more effectively identify and understand the phenomenon of emerging Jewish communities of meaning in America today. We currently have identified several hundred leaders of such communities and we used that list to invite select individuals into the Kenissa Network during our first two years. But we suspect that there are hundreds of more such projects around the country and we hope that our mapping project will produce a robust database that will be of value to communal leaders and funders who are committed to the future vitality of the American Jewish community.

For anyone involved in creating new modalities of Jewish expression in North America, it would be beneficial to make yourself known via the national database we are developing. You may do so here. (http://www.kenissa.org/national-mapping-project/)

Taking “Service” to the Next Level

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Community service in the Jewish community has come a long way. I had the privilege of being on the ground level in the 1990’s when the Jewish community got on the bandwagon.

The passage of the National and Community Service Trust Act was signed into law in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. Building on the success of the Peace Corps and Vista, the federal legislation put the prestige and funding of the federal government behind programs that would allow young Americans to experience “giving back” to communities in need. Over the next several years, virtually every state in the country created community service requirements for high school graduation. New non-profits (and some private businesses as well) sprang up that “packaged” service experiences, ranging from a few hours a day to ambitious multi-day service missions, both domestic and international.

This article appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on Feb. 23, 2017.

During those years, I was serving as the president and CEO of PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values. In our early years, we focused on programs that combined Jewish values and political activism. But in the 1990’s we pivoted so as to incorporate elements of “service” into our educational programs. In 1996 PANIM published the first ever curriculum on Jewish service-learning called Jewish Civics: A Tikkun Olam/World Repair Manual. It became the centerpiece for a national initiative called the Jewish Civics Initiative which, at its height, enrolled 21 communities around the country in which high school students engaged in year-round learning and cutting edge community service projects in their respective cities.

Of course, PANIM was not alone in going down this road. American Jewish World Service was offering service missions to the developing world. National Hillel created a robust alternative breaks program for college students. Avodah: The Jewish Service Corps offered year-long, in-residence experiences for college graduates, first in New York but then expanding to Washington D.C., Chicago and New Orleans. Several of these organizations helped to found the Jewish Coalition for Service (JCS) to serve as the national hub for Jewish service learning efforts. JCS then expanded its scope and re-branded as Repair the World, which now promotes service among Jews all around the country.

I suppose it was because of my history in the field of Jewish service-learning that I was invited by an Israeli based organization, Tevel B’Tzedek, to travel to Haiti soon after the 2010 earthquake to do some educational work with a team of Israelis who travelled to that stricken country to do disaster relief work. It was during that trip that I met a young, charismatic pastor named Johnny Felix who had started both a church and an elementary school in Leogane, close to the epicenter of the earthquake. In a country where only 50% of elementary age students attend any school at all, Pastor Johnny gathered a few dozen children and started a K-6 school called the New Christian Institute of Leogane (NICL).

I was so inspired by the work that Pastor Johnny was doing under the most difficult circumstances imaginable that I decided to drum up some financial support for the his efforts at Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation (Bethesda, MD), where I happen to be the founding rabbi. Seeking to avoid the phenomenon of people providing one time support in the face of a disaster, never to be done again, I asked congregants to become Haiti Partners by pledging $100/year for five years to support the NICL school. About a quarter of our 500-family congregation signed on and for the past few years, Adat Shalom has been able to make up the difference between the tuition revenue and the full costs of the school, which has now grown to 200 students.

But the most unexpected outcome has, by far, become the most important piece of Adat Shalom’s Haiti Project. I was approached by a member who said that her family had already signed on as Haiti Partners but she was even more interested in travelling to Haiti to do hands-on service. “Would you lead the trip?” she asked me. I told her that if she found a minyan of folks interested, I would help to organize a service mission.

Thus it was that a year later, during Christmas week 2011 that 16 Adat Shalom members accompanied me for an 8-day service mission to Haiti. Just this past December, I led our fourth and biggest service mission with 22 people participating. All four of our missions have included youth (age 14 and older) and adults. All have entailed very vigorous work including building houses, painting, establishing vegetable gardens, etc. And part of our daily routine is to do reflection and Jewish learning every evening in our very modest dormitory owned by Notre Dame University, a short distance from the NICL school.

The service missions are powerful bonding experiences for the participants. The program we do at Adat Shalom after each mission, during which participants talk about their experiences has, each time, galvanized the community to higher levels of pride and support. (See this amazing video of our last Haiti service mission that we showed in shul.

The impact the service mission has on young people, both about their sense of purpose in the world and about their Jewish identity, could be the subject of an entire article itself. I spoke about this in my ELI talk, “Finding the Chosen People in Haiti”.

Of course, the most important outcome of this effort is about the children of the NICL school. On our most recent mission, we completed the funding and building of the third structure on the campus. We brought in a solar powered electric grid that resulted in the school going from 2-4 hours of electricity a day to 24/7 electricity. We created and dedicated a vegetable garden, called Gan haMazon (Garden of Plenty) which will literally help to feed these food insecure children. One mission participant was so motivated by the experience that he decided to underwrite a 15-work station computer lab for the school with high speed internet, unheard of in this part of Haiti. For a relatively modest investment of dollars we have expanded the potential of both students and teachers at NICL ten-fold.

And we fell in love, again. Because you cannot spend eight days working with adults and children who have not even a fraction of what middle class American Jews have and not be in awe of their dignity, their resourcefulness and their deep faith in the possibility that a compassionate God will make the life of their children better than their current reality.

Most of my professional work is with rabbis and spiritual communities around the United States. I do wonder why it is that such service missions are not a standard feature of what Jewish congregations do. Hundreds of churches do annual service missions all around the world as a way to “walk in the ways of Jesus”. Why aren’t there hundreds of synagogues doing these kinds of missions? It would galvanize their members to realize that congregations can do both cutting edge justice and service work in the world and, simultaneously inspire a love for Jewish learning and community.

To their credit, Repair the World provides small grants for service missions (Adat Shalom was a recipient, twice) but what might it look like if that organization, or some other Jewish entity, committed resources to encourage congregations to undertake similar service missions? I dare say, it would be a game changer, both for the communities served and for those participating in doing the service.

Because that is the way chesed/compassion works. It gives birth to a virtuous cycle that makes life worth living.

Jews and Racism in America

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Note: These are excerpts of remarks at a Shabbat morning service at Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation (Bethesda, MD) which featured many elements marking Black History Month.  

Two weeks ago, I was at a conference in New York City sponsored by T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. It was called “No Time for Neutrality” and it was planned in response to the wholesale assault on civil liberties and democratic values coming from the Trump Administration, specifically the attempt to curtail immigration from certain Muslim majority countries.

This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on March 10, 2017.

On the Monday night of the conference, some 200 rabbis, accompanied by about 100 others, marched down Broadway from 88th Street to Columbus Circle, stopping in front of the Trump International Hotel and Tower. In a planned act of civil disobedience, 19 rabbis sat in the middle of the street until they were finally arrested for blocking traffic (not even a misdemeanor but enough to garner major news coverage!).

This act of protest reminded me of an arrest of rabbis in June 1964 when 17 rabbis were arrested in St. Augustine, FL for their actions in support of Dr. Martin Luther King’s civil rights agenda. Part of the letter that these rabbis wrote from jail included the following passage: “We came because we could not stand silently by our brother’s blood. We had done that too many times before. We have been vocal in our exhortation of others but the idleness of our hands too often revealed an inner silence; silence at a time when silence has become the unpardonable sin of our time.”

How fitting for our own times! Many know the deep involvement of the Jewish community in the Civil Rights Movement: Jews played major leadership roles in the NAACP and in organizing the historic 1963 March on Washington; between a third to a half of all Freedom Riders who went South in the summer of 1964 were Jewish; much of the civil rights legislation drafted under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson was drafted in the conference room of the Reform Movement’s Religious Action Center in Washington.

But too many Jews point to a picture of Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma and feel as if our work for equal rights for Black America has been “covered”. Heschel would be outraged if he saw how many Jews used his acts of moral courage as an “out” for their own current inaction. Each generation is challenged to respond to the moral crises of its time. For our generation, it is abundantly clear that, even as the Civil Rights Movement eliminated most forms of racial discrimination in law, the de facto situation is quite different.

Racism in America no longer comes with hooded men and burning crosses. It looks like the “suppression” of tens of thousands of Black voters in over a dozen states. It looks like an incarceration rate of Black men that is six times higher than it is for White men. It has names like Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Walter Scott and Tamir Rice, age 12. What is most sad about the killings of these unarmed Black men by police officers is that it represents only the tip of the iceberg. Ask about it in the Black community and you will find out that such killings have been going on for years and the dead number in the thousands.

This country has a long way to go to reverse a pattern of prejudice and practice that negatively impacts every person of Color in our society. We are very far from being a land of equal opportunity and equal treatment under law.

How fitting it is that our congregation’s marking of Black History Month falls on the week that we read of the giving of the Ten Commandments. The children of Israel are transitioning from being an enslaved population to a people committed to a set of moral and ethical laws. This week we become a nation with moral agency. And with that agency comes the responsibility to act in the face of moral injustice.

Fast forward 3500 years. We are not only people with moral agency, we Jews are also people of considerable privilege. In my own personal work in the area of racial justice the past few years, I have learned how much I don’t understand about the implications of “white privilege” in this country. It is a concept that gets many people nervous and defensive but I am convinced that there is no way to make progress on racial justice in America without confronting some of these hard truths.

In planning today’s musical selections with Siera Toney, our African-American guest vocalist, she referred to Jews and Blacks as “Exodus People”. “We get each other” she said.  I think it was an overly generous comment. I wish it were more true than I expect it is. There is still so much that “we don’t get” about the Black experience in America today. There is much work for us to do.

Today we sit together, Black and White in sacred space (our sanctuary), in sacred time (shabbat), about to read sacred words (the giving of the Ten Commandments). We hope and pray that the experience might bring us closer to creating the “Beloved Community” that God envisioned for all of us.

Preparing Rabbis to be Change Agents

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A few weeks ago I was at a, first of its kind, gathering in Austin, TX. The leaders of more than ten national religious denominations came together to explore why their congregations were losing membership so rapidly over the last decade. The gathering included leadership from the Methodists, Episcopalians, United Church of Christ, Lutherans, Unitarian Universalists as well as top leadership from the Union for Reform Judaism, United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism and the Reconstructionist Movement. There were also a handful of consultant/thought leadership types who have created programs designed to better equip clergy to get ahead of the curve on the rapid changes in American society that are at the root of the declining market share of conventional religious institutions.

Note: This article appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on February 8, 2017.

Rabbi Sid Schwarz - Rabbis

One of the most important presentations at the gathering came from Dr. Gil Rendle, longtime lead consultant for the Alban Institute and the author of numerous books including Leading Change in the Congregation: Spiritual and Organizational Tools for Leaders. He outlined the 20th century social and cultural trends that gave rise to every national denominational structure represented in the room: a need for centralized national structures; standardized practices and policies; well-delineated decision making processes; and a chain of command with clear lines of authority and accountability from the national president (or Bishop or whatever) to the humble clergy-person serving a small congregation.

Rendle then charted out the characteristics of organizations that were founded in the 21st century and that are currently thriving. They tend to be decentralized; decision making is more likely to be “bottom up” than “top down”; they are fast and agile and bureaucracy averse; they keep overhead low and are wary of the “edifice complex”; and they are culturally sensitive to changes in society. It did not take long for the denominational leaders in the room to recognize on which side of the chart their organizations fell. In fact, even those denominations that were forward thinking enough to encourage their congregations to move from the 20th century model of organizing to that which characterizes 21st century organizations, understood that they had not heeded their own advice in terms of the institutions that they currently lead.

Before we are too quick to point fingers and ascribe blame, it needs to be recognized that there are few things more challenging than effecting real organizational transformation. Whether the organization is a Fortune 500 company, a non-profit or a religious congregation, the default posture of every organization is stasis. Managers are trained to guard against factors that can destabilize the system that they oversee. Most systems build in significant financial and social rewards to those in authority to keep the operation on an even keel. Nothing threatens this state of affairs more than change.

At this point, readers should be nodding their heads. Everyone is part of systems—places of employment, non-profit organizations and even families themselves—that resist change. Synagogues (and, of course, churches as well) have the added factor of representing an historic tradition. Those most committed and loyal to congregations are usually attracted to the way in which their faith community represents a link to a cherished past. Members spend their time and money to support religious congregations so as to pass on practices and traditions to the next generation.

So here is the crux of the dilemma that rabbis are facing. They are trained to be teachers and stewards of the Jewish tradition. They are hired by congregations to oversee an institution that has an investment in perpetuating that tradition. A rabbi can work 40, 50 or 60 hours a week fulfilling all the tasks that allows that to take place. That work is holy work. Congregants appreciate it and rabbis are fulfilled by doing it. But if the very organizational model of the American synagogue is out of step with the changing realities of American society and the social and cultural habits of American Jews, synagogues in their current model will fail to attract a sufficient number of next generation Jews to survive. This is not a hypothetical assertion. The declining membership rolls of American synagogues over the past 20 years is ample evidence of this state of affairs.

It was to address this dilemma faced by rabbis that we created CLI, the Clergy Leadership Incubator. In short, CLI’s premise is that rabbis have the positional authority to be the key change agents in their congregations. But having offered consulting services to congregations for twenty years, it became clear to me that very few rabbis get the training necessary to be effective at leading institutional change. CLI’s two-year fellowship combines the best insights and practices from the field of synagogue transformation with training in the discipline of adaptive leadership.

Adaptive leadership is a discipline developed at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University by Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky. It is now used by corporations, non-profits and even governments around the world to effect transformational change in institutions. We have worked closely with Marty Linsky to customize the principles of adaptive leadership for rabbis and we have made it available at a fraction of the cost it would take to enroll in an executive leadership program on adaptive leadership at Harvard.

CLI is currently in the midst of its second cohort and applications are until February 24th for Cohort 3. Rabbis interested in being in a supportive cohort of colleagues and who want to acquire a tool kit to be effective leaders of institutional change should consider applying. For more information on the program or to apply, go to: http://www.cliforum.org/apply-to-cli/

Changing the World from the Inside Out

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This year’s winner of the National Jewish Book Award in the category of Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice is a book titled Changing the World from the Inside Out: A Jewish Approach to Personal and Social Change by Rabbi David Jaffe. The book is an inspiring integration of Musar literature and practice with numerous examples of how one can take the insights of that “inner” discipline and use it to make a difference in the world.

Note: This article appeared in the New York Jewish Week on January 27, 2017.

The integration that is at the heart of the book is not widely embraced in the Jewish community although Jaffe makes a compelling case that this was the intention of many of the rabbinic sages throughout history. One can find many Jews who take seriously the study of classical rabbinic texts. The practice tends to skew heavily in the direction of Jews who are more traditionally observant and, because a large part of that world is Orthodox, the practice is also more widely manifested among men because in many quarters of the traditional Jewish world, women are not encouraged to pursue the study of classical texts. One can also find many Jews who are deeply committed to the pursuit of social justice. This tendency skews heavily in the direction of progressive Jews who, for the most part, are not particularly observant. In fact, it is not uncommon to find among such “justice Jews” attitudes that are, at best, suspicious of all religion and often overtly hostile to formal ties with Jewish practice or affiliation.

The distance between these two worlds is unfortunate. The recent Presidential election revealed a large divide between Orthodox Jews who voted heavily for Donald Trump and non-Orthodox Jews who voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton. The Jewish communal polarization around Israel reflects a similar divide. The more traditional elements of the community tend to support the policies of Prime Minister Netanyahu, are tolerant of settlements over the Green Line and are opposed to the Obama Administration’s deal with Iran. The more progressive parts of the Jewish community believe that Netanyahu has undermined core values of liberal Zionism, they feel that settlements are obstacles to a peaceful, two-state solution and they were supportive of the Obama deal with Iran.

This divide is a result of the failure of Jewish educational and communal institutions to teach and to embody the integration of two central premises of Judaism. In my book, Judaism and Justice: The Jewish Passion to Repair the World, I argue that there are two central principles of Judaism: tzedek, the pursuit of justice and kedusah, the attempt to create a unique way of being in the world that allows us to live lives of sacred purpose. The latter involves an embrace of and engagement with the wisdom of the Jewish tradition and its many religious practices and rituals. The polarization in our community is a direct result of many Jews privileging either tzedek or kedushah at the expense of the other principle.

Jaffe begins his book with the kind of paradox that is so often the opening to the wisdom of the rabbinic tradition. Olam is the Hebrew word for “the universe” but its root, ayin.lamed.mem means “hidden”. What is the implication that a word can represent the most public of all concepts—the universe—and yet also come from a root that suggests an inner, hard to access dimension? It hints at a similar paradox around the idea of God, an idea that so many Jews struggle with. God is both the “biggest reality” but also imperceptible to the human senses. With this Jaffe challenges his readers to explore the hidden reality of life.

The second paradox offered by Jaffe is no less pregnant with possibility. As with other spiritual traditions in the world, Judaism believes that there is some metaphysical Oneness that unites all humankind. And yet, human existence requires separation, otherness, uniqueness. Each of us is different from the other.

When, in the Shma, we say God is echad, “one”, we are stating that everything in the universe—humanity, the animal kingdom, nature—are part of one Cosmos. The teaching that humans are made b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God (Gen. 1:22) is a sub-category of the larger teaching of echad. I’ve long taught that this is the most radical teaching of the Torah. If only we could, in all our human interactions, behave as if we are all part of one greater unity despite our manifold differences—race, religion, gender, ideology, etc.—we’d bring about the messianic kingdom.

This only hints at the richness that one can find in the rest of Jaffe’s important book. He explores Musar soul-traits like humility, patience, dignity and honor, trust, helping us see how much inner work we have to do to be better human beings. But in every case, he pushes the point to suggest ways that these traits require us to engage in repairing a world that seems more broken than ever before.

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.

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