Today marks the beginning of the Hebrew month of Elul: the last month of the year before the High Holy Days begin, and one filled with an immense amount of physical, spiritual and emotional preparation for the Jewish New Year. It’s also a season that rabbis over the centuries have loved to get creative with. When it comes to turning Hebrew words into acronyms, Elul has accumulated more of these than almost any word in the Jewish calendar.

I’ve been sitting with one such acronym that comes from Rabbi Natan Nata Shapira, a Polish rabbi and early kabbalist writing in the 16th and 17th centuries. He read the four letters of Elul as an acronym for aron, luchot, v’shivrei luchot — the Ark, the Tablets and the broken Tablets.

Hans/Pixabay

The reference is to the moment at Sinai when Moses, descending the mountain and seeing the people worshipping the golden calf, shattered the first set of tablets. But tradition tells us those broken pieces were never discarded. They traveled in the Ark alongside the second, whole set of tablets, for the rest of the journey through the desert. What was broken was not thrown away. The fact that it was carried alongside what was whole made the whole stronger.

I think about that image a lot when I think about the field in which we work.

The Jewish nonprofit ecosystem is a remarkable place. It’s also a field with a gap running through the middle of it. I don’t want to point fingers; no one put it there on purpose. But too often, the “Jewish” in Jewish nonprofit describes what an organization does, not how it does it. Jewish wisdom shows up in the mission statement and the holiday calendar, but not in the way we run a staff meeting, structure a review, handle a conflict or decide how our staff gets developed. The “Jewish” is real, it’s present — and it’s also, in too many places, closer to the facade than the foundation.

I want to be precise about what I’m not saying. According to Leading Edge’s latest data from the Employee Experience Survey, roughly 35% of the people working in Jewish organizations today are not Jewish themselves, and that is something our field should honor and celebrate. A commitment to Jewish wisdom as a source of organizational practice isn’t a commitment to religious observance or to any single interpretation of tradition. It’s an invitation, fully inclusive and fully pluralistic, open to everyone who has chosen to build their career in service of the Jewish people and Jewish life, regardless of their own background or belief.

So here’s the question I keep returning to this Elul: What if, as a field, we made a real commitment — not a rhetorical one — to let Jewish wisdom actually shape how our organizations function? Allowing Judaism to serve as a source for how we lead, how we build teams and how we treat the people who show up every day to do this work. What if we let thousands of years of thinking about human dignity, obligation, repair and growth actually inform our peoples’ practices, instead of leaving that thinking at the door of the boardroom?

I’ve seen glimpses of what this looks like when organizations take it seriously. I think of a previous employer where leaders built review processes around the idea of hocheiach tochiach, the obligation to offer honest feedback specifically because you’re invested in someone’s growth. I think of executive teams that have used the concept of machloket l’shem shamayim, disagreement for the sake of heaven, to build real cultures of dissent instead of forced consensus in meetings. They’re organizations that let a 5,000-year-old tradition do actual work on a Tuesday afternoon.

That’s the kind of practical Torah I came to Leading Edge to help advance. Leading Edge exists because we believe the Jewish nonprofit field deserves organizations that are not just mission-driven but genuinely well-run, where talent is developed with the same seriousness as programs and where culture is built with the same intention as strategy. And we believe the raw material for building that kind of organization has been sitting in our own tradition the whole time, waiting to be used for more than a pro forma dvar Torah before a meeting. Jewish ideas and practices can add value not just to the top of the agenda but to the substance of the whole meeting.

Elul asks us to be honest about where we’ve fallen short before we can move forward — to carry our brokenness rather than pretend it isn’t there — because it’s only in pairing what’s broken with what’s whole that we actually learn anything. I think our field can do that same work. We can look honestly at the places where our Jewish identity has become decorative rather than foundational, and we can choose, with intention and a spirit of inclusion, to close that gap.

If that’s a conversation you want to be part of, we’ll be continuing it at JPro27, April 12–14, 2027, in Atlanta — save the date. In the meantime, as we move through this Elul, I hope we can each ask not just how we can tap into this season of renewal to grow as individuals, but how the organizations we lead and serve might do the same.

May this be a month where we find the strength to carry the shattered pieces of ourselves and of our field, right alongside what is already whole.

Rabbi Adir Yolkut is the vice president of Jewish learning at Leading Edge.