After two years of planning, the JCCs of Greater Toronto recently hosted the 2026 JCC Maccabi Games and Access, bringing together more than 2,500 Jewish teens and coaches from around the world. As we reflect on the week, there is one image I keep coming back to.

But it isn’t from 2026. It was taken 40 years ago.

Screenshot/Sonny de Cru

Closeup of the back of a vintage Maccabi Chicago zip-up sweatshirt from the 1986 JCC Maccabi Games hosted in Toronto.

A few Jewish kids are sitting on the hood of a car during the 1986 JCC Maccabi Games, the last time Toronto hosted the event. For four decades, the photograph sat in a family album. There is nothing particularly remarkable about it. It looks like thousands of other pictures taken by parents during thousands of other summers. But one of the children in the photograph was Alan Perlis, who would go on to become co-chair of the 2026 JCC Maccabi Games.

In 1986, Alan’s family opened their home to two athletes from Pittsburgh. Alan was a kid. He wasn’t thinking about Jewish identity, peoplehood or leadership. For him, the Games were about sports and having fun. But somewhere in the experience, something else was taking shape. His Jewish world was getting bigger.

Forty years later, Alan helped lead the effort to bring the Games back to Toronto.

There is no straight line between those two moments, and it would be too easy to pretend there is. One week did not determine the course of Alan’s life. But the experience became part of him. 

For those of us who lead, fund and build Jewish organizations, I think there is an important question buried in that old photograph: Are we creating enough defining moments — experiences in Jewish life today that will still matter to someone 40 years from now?

Jewish organizations have become increasingly sophisticated about measuring impact. We count participants and members. We look beyond participation numbers to understand engagement, retention and long-term connection. We survey participants, evaluate outcomes and report what we learn to our boards and funders. And we should, because we have a responsibility to understand whether the resources entrusted to us are actually making a difference.

But almost everything we measure shares the same limitation: we measure relatively close to the moment of investment. Alan’s story reminds us that human development doesn’t necessarily work on our reporting cycle. The most important return on an investment in Jewish life may not appear in the participant survey we send the following week. It may appear 20 or 40 years later, when someone decides to lead, give, volunteer or open their home to the next generation.

That raises a different question: If some of the outcomes that matter most take decades to reveal themselves, what are we trying to create today?

That question influenced how we approached the 2026 JCC Maccabi Games. Of course we wanted to produce an extraordinary event. We wanted great competition, memorable ceremonies and an experience our community could be proud of. But those were not the only outcomes that mattered. Our community opened its homes and provided more than 1,700 beds for visiting athletes. Volunteers gave thousands of hours. Donors invested generously. Municipalities, schools, community organizations and partners worked together for two years.

Then the teenagers arrived.

They played basketball and hockey and soccer. They rode buses together. They ate breakfast in homes that weren’t their own. They met Israelis and Jews from communities they had never visited. They traded pins, volunteered, celebrated and spent a week surrounded by thousands of other Jewish young people. None of those things, by itself, sounds transformational. Neither did two kids from Pittsburgh staying at Alan’s house in 1986.

That may be the point.

We sometimes talk about transformational Jewish experiences as though transformation is something we can design, deliver and then measure immediately afterward. I’m no longer sure it works that way. Perhaps our job is to create the conditions in which transformation can happen: give people opportunities they would not otherwise have, introduce them to people they otherwise wouldn’t meet, give them experiences that make their Jewish world larger and trust that some of those experiences will take root.

We should absolutely measure what happens next. But we also need the humility to recognize that we won’t be around to measure everything that matters.

During opening ceremonies, we projected Alan’s 1986 photograph onto a screen in front of more than 8,000 people. I found myself looking at it differently. In 1986, it was simply a picture of some kids sitting on a car. In 2026, it had become evidence of something we could not have measured when it happened.

That’s what has stayed with me.

I have no idea how many photographs were taken during the Games this summer. It must have been tens of thousands. Everywhere I went, someone had a phone out. Most of those pictures will disappear into camera rolls. But probably not all of them. Somewhere there may be a photograph from this week that a 15-year-old will come across in 2066. Maybe it will be a team picture. Maybe a picture with a host sibling. Maybe a terrible selfie with someone who had been a stranger five days earlier. We have no idea what that picture will mean by then. 

And that uncertainty should not make us less rigorous about impact. It should make us more thoughtful about how we define it. The challenge for Jewish philanthropy is to hold two ideas at the same time. We need to demand accountability for the resources we invest today. And we need to have the patience to invest in outcomes that cannot possibly be demonstrated today.

The Jewish future will require both.

There is enormous pressure across Jewish communal life right now to respond to immediate needs. Much of that pressure is justified. But while we address what is urgent, we cannot lose sight of what is generational. A teenager discovering that their Jewish world is larger than they imagined may not feel urgent today. Forty years from now, it might prove to have been one of the most consequential investments we made.

That is what the 1986 photograph now represents to me. We cannot know which experiences will shape a life, which relationships will endure or which young person will one day step forward to lead. Our responsibility is to keep creating the opportunities for those stories to begin.

Forty years ago, someone created that opportunity for Alan.

Now it is our turn.

Andrew Levy is the CEO of the Schwartz Reisman Centre and Prosserman JCC in Toronto.