I walked back onto the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ campus in late 2005 after an absence of many years to unwrap the greatest gift any Jewish communal professional could hope for: the opportunity to create a new organizational entity. 

To thoughtfully engage with trustees who share a vision while possessing the diverse skills to animate that vision. 

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To collaborate on drafting our own rules without being beholden to the way it was done before. 

To have their support in recruiting the professional talent who would drive us to think better as they lent life to our shared purpose.  

They say that the real stuff at Jewish Federation of North America’s General Assemblies happens in the hallways, and so it was one year when a small group of community leaders — Shelley Levine, president of what was then the Jewish Education Association; Rabbi Amy Small, a rabbinic force in the community; and Ellen Goldner and Max Kleinman, MetroWest’s president and CEO — agreed that a community like ours deserved a dynamic and forward-thinking Jewish educational agency. The blessing of leading this effort was offered to me, and I chose December 27 — my father’s birthday — to begin.

In truth, what we wanted to build would stand on foundations laid by generations of Jewish educational leaders who established and maintained the JEA for some 70 years. My task was to dismantle it with reverence and shape something new. This would be an appropriate time to reminisce and recount our accomplishments; we did do wonderful things, many of them ongoing and others that, while modified or shelved, continue to shape our community. But what I wish to share here are the practices and culture we developed and employed and the things we learned along the way in the 20 years since the founding of The Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life and 10 years since its absorption into the MetroWest federation — information that I believe will be helpful to colleagues and communal leaders today, in a decade and 20 years from now as well.

1.) Your board is the corporate reflection of your culture

I remain influenced by a book I read in graduate school called Small is Beautiful, by E. F. Schumacher: While sometimes “the bigger the better” holds true, that’s not the case when it comes to the size of your board of trustees. New Jersey requires its nonprofit corporations to have a board of at least 15; and while we set that number as the goal at the outset, we found ourselves with so many terrific people who wanted a seat at our table that we stretched it to 20. It is a limit to which we held firm, and we accommodated new faces, new ideas and new energy by adhering to a clear term-limit policy.  

While the idea of a small board — tiny, really, in some Jewish organizational contexts — is not radical, check this out: we had no committees. No executive committee that pre-digested issues. No finance committee that held the power of the purse. Our presidents and I managed most decisions; only those issues which needed broader input or wider ownership were on the board’s agenda. The board functioned for the most part as a committee-of-the-whole because that is the way we envisioned our work. Not as “programs” in “departments,” but as coherent, coordinated, and comprehensive efforts that called upon all of our lay leaders and all of our professionals to color the panoramic vision of what our community might become.

2.) Your name is an invitation to explore your mission

While an organization’s name is its most unique possession, I believe we have some ideas of value to share in explaining how we arrived at The Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life.

For instance, we did not want to be “The Center” of anything. We wanted to decentralize, to democratize, to diversify what being or acting or learning or doing Jewish meant for anyone and everyone. So, we chose the word partnership, specifically focusing on the partnership between Jewish learning and life, and our mantra was “Bring Jewish learning to life.” At this time, there was another organization called the Partnership for Jewish Life and Learning. We deliberately switched those things around because in our view, there is no such thing as “Jewish Life” — there is just life, and this is a relevant aspect of our work for other communal leaders to consider. We believed we were going to change not only the Jewish future, but the future.  

3.) Principles of practice keep you simultaneously grounded and inspired

We had a mission statement. We had a vision statement. This is true of virtually all organizations. We also developed principles of practice and hung them on our walls. The mission, vision and principles were the top sheet of every agenda packet at every board meeting. They were in constant view on the back-sides of the name plates of the people around the table. While promoting broad and unconventional thinking, the lay leaders at the board level and my colleagues in our work all knew that if our ideas did not advance our mission and vision, if they were not grounded in our principles of practice, we would not adopt those ideas. This was our way of disciplining ourselves to focus on what our community created us and trusted us to do.  

To further ground our work in our principles, our president hosted an annual board dinner when we invited some of the most engaging scholars and practitioners of our work to be with us, to teach us, and to challenge us based on one of our principles of practice. Those conversations lived beyond that evening, informing our work while giving us strength. 

4.) First why, then what, then how

President John F. Kennedy was touring Cape Canaveral in the early 1960s when he came upon a janitor tidying up. President Kennedy asked the man what his job was at the Space Center. “Mr. President,” he replied, “I am helping to put a man on the moon.” 

In our re-telling of the story, the moonshot was to make ours a “community that left no one behind in fulfilling her Jewish destiny.” For every strategy that we put into place, we wanted people to understand why we were doing what we were doing. For example, we hired a full-time Jewish Service-Learning Coordinator because teens were attracted to service; if we could ground that meaningful service in relevant Jewish learning, the spiral of learning-based service would grow wider and deeper. We promoted overnight Jewish summer camps because data showed that young people would take that experience back with them to their families, to their friends, to the way they looked at life itself. We built Jewish family experiences around the PJ Library book subscription program because we learned that family was the building block of our community’s future. We incorporated all of the community’s Israel programming because we wanted to cement our relationship to the people and the land of Israel as part of an organic foundation for Jewish identity development.  

And we did not have to own everything. We offered free space for the Alexander Muss High School in Israel to recruit because their program best reflected our community’s pluralistic character in providing academic and experiential education. We supported the March of the Living, not to promote Holocaust education, but because its evaluations demonstrated a proven, long-lasting positive impact on Jewish identity development. It was OK that these programs were not home-grown. We had this expression for this ethos: “The more, the more.”  

5.) Nurture the partnership between lay and professional leadership

We designed a transparent onboarding process for every trustee. In addition to a required, significant annual gift to our organization, which was not unusual, we also required two other things.

First, we told our trustees that they will receive material to review prior to every meeting, and from time to time we would share articles or digests we prepared on various topics pertaining to our work that should be considered required reading as well. We wanted our lay partners to be conversant with the literature, to be exposed to the dynamics of academic and experiential education in the 21st century, to be able to challenge us with data and not with anecdotes and to be able to advocate for us with knowledge and not with bravado.

The other requirement was that every new trustee spend time with every professional in the organization. We wanted our trustees to know not only the why, the what and the how — we wanted them to know the who as well. And we wanted our professionals to know the genuine feelings and experiences of the people who would make their work possible.

6.) Allow time to think

Many organizations are so focused on what they do that they do not take the time to think. I do not mean that they are acting thoughtlessly, but they do often act transactionally.  

We allowed, even insisted, that our professional leaders would take the time to think through how they are doing the work and what might come next. One senior professional, for instance, was charged with developing educational initiatives for a cohort that was, and remains, especially challenging. We gave him the time to experiment, to fail, to learn, to try again. We knew that some people would have considered this wasteful. But again, programs were not our product; the future was.  

It’s a mature organization that understands the value of someone given the time and remove to see what might be coming next, what should be coming next and how to move the pieces to maximize every advantage. This should not only happen in the CEO’s suite but within the office of the pivotal leaders of every major organizational initiative.

7.) Call it what it is

Another way we kept focus on our goals was to use job titles that already anticipated the usual question, “So, what do you do?” When you met the person with overall responsibility for PJ Library, the public family experiences surrounding it, coaching parents on how to bring Jewish experiences home and ongoing and boutique professional learning for early childhood educators, you were meeting our “Director for Empowerment of Families with Young Children.” Similar to our “Director for Empowerment of Families with School-Age Children,” and so on.  Titles like these triggered mission-driven conversation.

This brings me to another area in which we re-imagined our community: Rather than traditionally defining the work space by the places where children were educated, we strategized our efforts by age cohort. Our mission was to nurture the Jewish identity development of young people no matter where they lived, where they may have prayed or where they went to school.

8.) Professional evaluation is an opportunity to deepen understanding

We created a process for my work to be evaluated annually. A standard practice, but again, we did it differently. We created a team of three evaluators: the president and two trustees,with one of the trustees replaced by another each year. We used this unique process not only as a formal evaluation, but as an opportunity to explore the respective attitudes and understandings in our relationships with one another as well.  

9.) Even Jewish communal professionals are created in the image of God

As the executive director, it was ultimately my decision whom to hire — and whom to fire. Many people have written many things about these kinds of decisions, but let me share my thinking, which I believe is unusual:  

I am acutely aware that when I hire someone, I am not only empowering this person to fulfill their professional aspirations; I am not only energizing my organization with additional talent; and I am not only paying them a very good salary. I am enabling this individual to enhance their life and that of their family. That family can now make plans to buy a house, to have a child, to better afford Jewish day school — whatever they choose, no judgements, the choices are theirs, but they are facilitated by my actions, the actions my board has empowered me to take. In this way, executives are invested with life-altering power. Of course, this holds true when we have to fire someone for cause as well, or lay them off because of budgetary constraints; either way, I am changing someone’s life and the lives of their loved ones. This is not an exalted power; it is a humbling one.

Our decisions one way or the other might be an administrative task for us, but it could affect the life of an applicant or employee in a profound way. That’s why, for instance, we made it our policy to acknowledge every job application we received with a personal email. We kept all applicants advised of the process as it went on. When we narrowed the field down to finalists, we informed and thanked everyone else. When we made a match, we called the other finalists personally to thank them for their interest and wished them well.

Never mind that the field of Jewish education needs to cultivate superb people, or that Jewish nonprofits do — or that all nonprofits do. It is just plain right to treat people with respect.

10.) The one principle above all others

When the time came to negotiate a merger with our federation, we found alignment on many matters; but, as might be expected, there were also areas of divergence. It was clear to us that some important elements of our culture and practice would no longer be cultivated in the new environment.  

Our board met to review the final proposal and we put the question on the table: Do we accept, or not? We had the resources to continue. We certainly had the talent and the will. But we had one more thing: the principle of shalom bayit, communal peace. Shalom bayit can be more elusive than anything; it is also the ultimate communal value. Our board agreed unanimously to the merger, as much to perpetuate many of our offerings within a larger framework, but equally if not more so to be a public exemplar, then and now, of building a community on a foundation of peace.

To learn more about the work of The Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life and how our work may be helpful to yours, please contact the Jewish Historical Society of Greater MetroWest, where all of our files are digitally archived and accessible to you.  

Robert Lichtman has served in senior roles at major Jewish organizations including UJA-Federation of New York, Hillel International and the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ, where he was the founder of The Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life and later the chief Jewish learning officer. Now an essayist, mentor and educator, he explores the challenges and possibilities of Jewish communal renewal in his writing and teaching.