emerging Jewish communities

Jewish Communities of Meaning: An Emerging Trend

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I have spent a considerable amount of time over the past 20 years in the synagogue transformation space.  I currently direct CLI, a two-year fellowship for rabbis on visionary thinking and change management. On our website, we curate a monthly synagogue innovation blog which includes some truly transformational ideas that are re-imagining synagogues for the better.

But notwithstanding the work that I do to help transform synagogues into vibrant spiritual communities, I am persuaded that, in the future, synagogues will no longer be the only platform where American Jews will experience Jewish life. This is why in 2015, I helped to launch Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network,  whose objective is to identify, convene and build capacity among a growing network of new models of Jewish identity and community.   

 

This article appeared in The Jewish Peoplehood Papers, Vol 26a, published by the Center for Jewish Peoplehood Education in September 2020. It was subsequently distributed by eJewishPhilanthropy on September 29, 2020. 

The premise of Kenissa is that, even as legacy Jewish organizations continue to lose market share, there is a growing ecosystem of new organizations and communities that are capturing the interest of next generation Jews who long for contexts of meaning that can enrich their lives. And while many Jews will find such experiences outside of Jewish contexts, a large percentage of Jews are more than open to having those experiences delivered in a Jewish key. I advanced this idea in an extended fashion in my 2013 book, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future.

The Kenissa initiative, an outgrowth of the book, has allowed us to support the emerging network of Jewish communities of meaning that are attracting Jews within one or more of the following six thematic frameworks:

  • Chochma – engaging with the wisdom and practice of our inherited Jewish heritage;
  • Kedusha – helping people live lives of sacred purpose;
  • Tzedek – inspiring people to work for a more just and peaceful world;
  • Kehilla – creating intentional, covenantal communities that bind people to one another and to a shared mission;
  • Yetzira – the human ability to imagine/invent/create ideas, science, art and culture.
  • Shomrei Adama–Pursuing a lifestyle that is ecologically responsible and sustainable, including new communal living arrangements.

These frameworks will be familiar to anyone who is actively engaged in Jewish life. Synagogues, JCC’s and even Federations, could likely categorize many elements of their respective programs into one or more of these themes. These legacy organizations helped to define Jewish life in the 20th century and they were the primary institutions that shaped the Jewish identity of American Jews during that time. Today, however, with some rare exceptions, those same institutions are having a hard time attracting next generation Jews to their programs.  The decline in membership at JCCs and synagogues and the dropoff in the number of donors to Jewish Federations has led to much concern on the part of the stewards of the organized Jewish community.

But one would be misled about the future trajectory of Jewish identity in North America if your only metric happens to be membership in legacy Jewish organizations. The social economy today is such that a person with a good idea can, without too much difficulty, use the organizing power of social media to gather Jews (along with their non-Jewish partners and friends because it is rare for the younger generation to be exclusive in the way previous Jewish generations were) to do, just about anything.

In fact, since 2016 Kenissa has been identifying and convening new models of Jewish identity and community and inviting them to be part of a national network of creatives who can learn from each other, partner with one another, and acquire the tools, skills and strategies to be successful entrepreneurs.

We have found that many of the entrepreneurs themselves tend to be bnai bayit, young people who benefitted from Jewish youth movements, camps, day schools, Hillels and trips to Israel. Yet they did not want to partake of their parents’ version of Judaism. Typical of millennials, passion for their respective projects grows out of their ability to own and re-mix Judaism in their own, unique generational and cultural idioms. Not surprisingly, the projects that they are launching attract next gen Jews in ways that much better funded legacy Jewish organizations cannot hope to do. Each represents a relatively new organization or community that is attracting Jews who might otherwise never affiliate with or even walk into a Jewish legacy institution.

There is certainly a narrative out there, supported by data, that suggests that Jewish life is in decline. Having worked closely with Jewish social entrepreneurs and their organizations for many years now, I see a very different story. Our database now lists close to 400 organizations that have been created since the year 2000. Many of them are attracting Jews who never previously had an association with any Jewish organization. On our website, you can read about how each community of meaning has succeeded in attracting people to their program. Despite the fact that most of the organizations we work with are small and under-resourced, legacy Jewish organizations have much to learn from these start-ups.

In the next phase of our work, we will be exploring how to build partnerships between these emerging communities of meaning and legacy Jewish organizations. Each could benefit from collaboration. Stewards of Federations, synagogues and JCC’s should not try to coopt these entrepreneurs and their organizations. They should provide financial support, organizational expertise, mentorship and then…prepare to do a lot of listening. The Jewish community is being reimagined in exciting ways. Pay attention.

Jewish life is not the only dimension of our culture that has experienced a flip from top down to bottom up. We are living in a “maker” culture—people want to have a hand in shaping the very culture that they consume.  There are many who will bemoan the weakening of Jewish institutions, the decline in affiliation rates with the organized Jewish community and the departure from longstanding norms regarding everything from intermarriage to gender identity to the relationship with the State of Israel. For sure, some of these trends are cause for concern. But this is not the Judaism of the last century; it is the Judaism of the 21st century. We have had numerous leaders of the Jewish community come to our Kenissa national gatherings and walk away deeply impressed with the passion and creativity of this next generation of Jewish leaders. 

I think that it is cause for celebration, witnessing the ways that Jews are engaged in the redefinition of Jewish identity and community.

Covid-19 Update:

What a difference a few months make! Our lives and the way we engage with institutions has been radically altered. And, at least from the vantage point of the U.S., it does not seem likely that we will return to our pre-Covid reality for at least six months, and perhaps, for a year or more.

The Kenissa Network continues to be active with weekly blogs, occasional webinars and periodic collaborations between Kenissa organizations because of the relationships that got built at nine national gatherings we held over the past five years. Yet other parts of our plan are on hold. Specifically, for the last two years, we hosted senior executives from about 20 of the largest Jewish Federations in North America. We wanted them to see, first hand, what we had been seeing: a group of social entrepreneurs, passionate about Jewish life, who were devising new ways of exploring Jewish life and community and attracting a good number of next Gen Jews to their programs. The vast majority of the organizations we invited were not known to the Federation professionals, even though most of them held the “engagement” portfolio for their respective communities.

Since “seeing is believing”, our plan over the next several years was to loop back to the Federations that sent us their senior staffers and to begin exploring with each community what it might look like to pro-actively reach out to these younger, edgier organizations and to explore some combination of collaboration, seed funding, skill training and/or cohort based leadership development. We had clearly succeeded in making the case for this agenda and the next few years were going to be our opportunity to advance this agenda, community by community.

This part of our plan is now on hold. These very same Federations are faced with trying to save their legacy institutions from imploding. Buildings sit vacant, fundraising is way down, valuable professional staff are being let go or drastically cut back. Ironically, many of the organizations in the Kenissa Network may prove to be more nimble than legacy institutions with budgets exponentially larger than their own. It may well be that as the Jewish community is forced to re-assess everything from scratch, they may find in the robust network of Jewish start-up organizations, new ways of manifesting the heritage of a 4000 year old tradition.

Jewish Communities of Meaning: Ideas Matter

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I recently was invited to make a presentation to deans from eight different rabbinical seminaries. The topic was how to better equip their students with some tools so that they can be more successful at driving innovation in the institutions that they will serve in the future. I observed that when I founded a synagogue (Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda, MD), and a national educational foundation (PANIM: The Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values) in the late 1980’s, there was neither grant money available for Jewish social entrepreneurs nor customized training programs for the handful of us who were trying to build new organizations. Today, there are several pots of money available to Jewish social entrepreneurs and numerous options for training. These are developments to be celebrated.

Note: This article originally appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy on May 15, 2018.

When we launched Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network in 2015, it was with the express purpose to do more than just replicate other communal efforts to provide training in the hard skills of fundraising, board development, branding/marketing, taking projects to scale, management, etc. As necessary as those skills are, we believe that we, in North America, are witnessing a sea change in the way next generation Jews will access the core values and content of the Jewish tradition. We are not trying to build a better phone, a faster computer, or a more fuel-efficient car. We are exploring new ways to pass down a sacred heritage in a cultural context in which conventional religious institutions are distinctly out of favor, especially among millennials.

We distinguish the way we are building out the national Kenissa Network from most programs designed to support Jewish-content social entrepreneurs in three ways. First, we take as a premise that many Jews today resonate to core values of Judaism if delivered in a culturally relevant manner. Not only do we reject the Jewish-lite approach; we believe that the more authentic the Jewish content is, the more compelling it is to next generation Jews.

Second, we have identified five core themes that we think animate most of the organizations in the Jewish innovation ecosystem. We often call these themes “portals” because they are the passage-ways that Jews will take to encounter Judaism on their own terms. It is this understanding that yielded our initiative’s name, Kenissa, the Hebrew word for “entrance-way”. The themes/portals are:

• Chochma – engaging with the wisdom and practice of our inherited Jewish heritage;
• Kedusha – helping people live lives of sacred purpose;
• Tzedek – inspiring people to work for a more just and peaceful world;
• Yetzira – the human ability to imagine/invent/create ideas, science, art and culture;
• Kehillah – creating intentional, covenantal communities that bind people to one another and to a shared mission.

Having identified these themes, we set out to identify discrete sectors in the Jewish community that are using one or more of these themes to create new models of Jewish identity. They include groups focused on Jewish learning, social justice, spiritual practice, eco-sustainability, the arts and new models of spiritual community.

When we invite the “creatives” who are building organizations focused on one or more of these themes to join the Kenissa Network, they often find the initial gathering disorienting. We are bringing together people with very different approaches to Jewish life, Jewish practice and Jewish identity. In fact, most of the leaders we invite tend to know fewer than 10% of the rest of the people in the room. And yet, at the end of our three-day Consultation, they share a powerful commonality of purpose. They recognize that, despite their differences, all take their Judaism very seriously and all understand that their ability to succeed may benefit from the support, wisdom and insights of the other people in the Kenissa Network.

Third, the Kenissa initiative places unique emphasis on covenantal community and what it takes to create such cultures. I wrote about the idea of covenantal community previously in these pages and won’t repeat it here. Because we believe that “the medium is the message,” we design the National Consultations that Kenissa convenes to model covenantal community. Part of the strength of the national network we are creating owes to the fact that, in three days, we can take a “company of strangers” and forge a relational community of leaders who are eager to stay connected to one another and to the mission of Kenissa. Among the array of communities of practice that Kenissa sponsors year-round, one on “covenanting” and one on “communal culture” are extremely popular. Most of the leaders that we invite have not even thought about these issues before they come to our gathering.

Most of the institutions that characterized the Jewish community of the past 50 years are transactional in nature. Nobody saw anything wrong with such institutions as they reflected the cultural patterns of American society of the times. But 21st American culture has moved decidedly away from top-down organizational structures towards networks and do-it-yourself (DIY) cultures. Institutions stuck in the 20th century paradigm are destined to lose market share and fade into irrelevance. Yet just because an organization was created in the last ten years does not prevent founders from defaulting into dysfunctional organizational cultures. They are just mimicking the organizational patterns that are most prevalent in our community. Among the most important value propositions that Kenissa brings to this field is our use of the concept of covenantal community to explore how to create healthy and generative organizational cultures.

We can summarize the three features of the Kenissa Network outlined above in two words: Ideas matter. Anyone who visits our website will find a rich set of commentaries on the state of the American Jewish community and the ideas and values that inspire this generation of Jews to connect to a sacred, ancient tradition. Every Monday we post a new commentary that anyone can receive by signing up for the Kenissa blog. Members of our Kenissa Network also are invited to create graphic representations of the five themes at the core of our Kenissa framework. While we started with one Venn diagram as a way to help our leaders enter into conversation with one another, we quickly discovered that our leaders had their own ways to understand their work in the context of the Jewish tradition. We invite you to visit our gallery of new models of Jewish life and to read their creators’ commentaries on those models. We believe that you will find it a most mind-expanding experience.

We are growing the national Kenissa: Communities of Meaning network in a very intentional way. We believe it represents the new face(s) of American Jewish life. If you are a social entrepreneur who is working in one of our five themes/portals, we invite you to register your project here, which will make you eligible to be invited into the Network. We invite 50 founders/leaders into the Network each year. If you are working in the organized Jewish community and you want to explore how your institution can benefit from the Kenissa Network or partner with some of our projects, contact me at RabbiSid@Hazon.org.

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/)