by Mordecai Holtz
As an aspiring Jewish communal professional with 6 years of professional experience, a Masters in Social Work and a Jewish Communal Certificate, I feel aptly qualified to join the discussion about the future of Jewish Communal Leadership.
Do I want to be a Jewish Communal Leader? Absolutely!
Why? Because this is the best way for me to channel my love for Jewish values, my passion and commitment to Israel and Zionism, and my ongoing desire to impact the Jewish community at large.
I realize, however, that leadership is not something that can be quantified with a piece of paper. Schools can’t teach leadership. Schools can teach engagement, they can equip us with the necessary tools to build a thriving community, and they can even offer methods of strategic growth and development. A school can identify and educate the potential leaders but actual leadership is something that each individual must develop by themselves over time.
What defines a Jewish leader? Jewish leaders are people with a passion, vision, relentless dedication to the Jewish people, creativity, superior interpersonal skills, and a dynamic willingness to change direction mid-course. Beyond all of these attributes, Jewish leaders are, and should be, active teachers.
A proactive teacher/leader is proficient in identifying the needs of a community, understands its mission and core values but is willing to explore and invest in unique, innovative initiatives to serve as the foundation for engagement. It’s a much more of bottom up model. The role of the professional is to manage these initiatives rather than introduce new ones.
As young Jewish professionals, we’ve entered the profession at a unique moment of transition. We’ve been offered the opportunity of a lifetime! The Jewish community at large is searching for ways to engage our generation. Finally, after many years of being accused of being disinterested or disengaged, we’re being invited into the board rooms. CEO’s and Executive Directors want to include us, now, because they realize we have the will power, skills and desire to ensure the continuity of the Jewish future. Let’s leverage this opportunity and help conceive a Jewish space that makes sense to us, on our terms. We can define new modes of acceptable commitment, prescribe the values that are important to us, but let’s not ignore the basic precepts and foundations of the Jewish people. Together, we can and will guide our profession towards a future of Judaism that responds to the needs of our peers, but at its core is true to the values that have allowed Judaism to thrive.
Mordecai Holtz is an experienced nonprofit professional in community organization and development, nonprofit administration and management for almost 8 years. During this time, his areas of focus have been program development, driving constituent awareness, engaging and facilitating communication, and actualizing programmatic vision with a keen eye for detail. Mordecai is well versed in social media and enjoys helping small businesses and nonprofit organizations reach their fullest online potential. Follow Mordecai on twitter @mordecaiholtz Email Mordecai.holtz @ gmail.com
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Yasher koach!
I wish to take issue with your contention that, “Schools can’t teach leadership … actual leadership is something that each individual must develop by themselves over time.”
Leadership can and must be taught, and while meaningful leadership training ought never be limited to the classroom alone, dismissing the benefits of formal leadership education is unwise and fails to comport with an array of empirical data that argue otherwise.
Of course, there is much to be learned from the “school of hard knocks” approach, and seasoned leaders would be the first to say so. But to assert that students of leadership have nothing to learn from studying the experiences of others, from delving into the riches of serious case study analyses, from being challenged by the research findings and hands-on experiences of others who lead, lacks a kind of reflective awareness that is likely to impede the development of successful leadership skills over time.
At Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago we have been teaching communal leaders for decades. Our students and alumni routinely report that they are better leaders today for having studied leadership both in theory and practice in their classes. They attest that their formal exploration of topics including: Jewish sources on leadership, leadership ethics, the use and abuse of power, collaboration, alignment, visioning, and much more, have been essential to their application of these matters “in the trenches.” As students enrolled in formal leadership studies they have come to appreciate precisely the opposite of you assertion that “actual leadership is something that each individual must develop by themselves.” Serious students of leadership, like all great leaders, approach their classroom work with a level of humility that encourages them to learn from others in relationship, and not “by themselves.”
Consistent with best practices, today the majority of leadership studies at Spertus, whether graduate level degree programs or Certificate offerings, require a mentoring component. But even these pragmatic sessions include elements of traditional classroom analyses – peer review, reflection, challenge, and research.
To be sure, there is much to criticize about the organized Jewish community’s approach to leadership training and development. We must indeed seek to incorporate both the academic and the practical in any program that purports to educate leaders. But we would be well advised to focus on both if we, in your words, “desire to impact the Jewish community at large.”
Dr. Hal M. Lewis, President & CEO, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago
I’ll actually disagree with both of you. My feeling is that the basics of leadership are a set of innate character traits. Real leaders have an inner compass that is predicated on things such as honesty, integrity, and the golden rule of treating others as you would yourself. You can have all the formal and informal education in the world, but a person who lacks these basics will never be real true leaders. Simplistic maybe, rocket science, it isn’t, but if more of our so called leaders had these traits we wouldn’t have a leadership crisis.