Jewish start-ups

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.

JFNAs Remarkable Pivot, and Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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