Not long after the Israelites left Egypt, camped in the wilderness with a whole people to govern and no government yet, Moses sat alone from morning until night, judging every dispute in the camp. The line outside his tent never got shorter. His father-in-law, Jethro, told Moses plainly that his approach would wear him out. Jethro advised Moses to find capable people and build a structure: chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, of tens. 

The detail worth noting is this: The capable people were already there. They had been in the camp the whole time. What the camp lacked was not talent. It was a way of finding it, and a structure worth inviting it into. 
 
We are in Moses’s position more often than we like to admit. In our last essay in eJewishPhilanthropy, we argued that Jewish leadership itself is changing: more distributed, more collaborative and more dependent on strong lay-professional partnership. But how should leadership development evolve to meet these changes in Jewish leadership? That’s where we find inspiration from Jethro.  
 
For generations, leadership development has largely been understood as a pipeline. 

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We identify promising people. We invite them into meaningful experiences. We mentor them, teach them and prepare them for positions of increasing responsibility. Along the way, we measure success by participation, graduation, board service or the next leadership role someone assumes. 

That approach has produced extraordinary leaders and strengthened Jewish communities for decades and will remain a critical factor into the future. But it is no longer sufficient. 

Pipelines are linear. Communities are not. The pipeline is just one structure inside the ecosystem, not an alternative to it. 

The world and its challenges have changed. Our communities are more geographically dispersed. Much of our lives are mediated online. Our country has become far more polarized. What has not changed are the places our community exercises leadership. Every day, parents, alumni, professionals, young adults and neighbors stand up to lead in schools, on campuses, in professional associations and in government bodies. Although “tried and true” still works, if we want to strengthen our communities we must strive to connect those spread out civic and Jewish leadership experiences with greater intentionality. 

We need to both prepare Jewish communal leaders for their formal roles and engage those already involved outside the community to bring their experience into our organizations. The traffic runs both ways. A healthy ecosystem sends leaders out into school boards, professional associations and civic life — and counts that as success rather than loss.  

They do not ask people to choose between local and national leadership. They connect them. Ecosystems do not separate lay leaders from professionals. They develop them together. Ecosystems do not treat mentoring as informal. They make it expected. Ecosystems do not wait until someone is board chair to teach governance. They cultivate judgment long before authority arrives. And they assume leadership is already happening all over the community, not only in the rooms where we hold meetings. 

Most importantly, ecosystems allow seamless connections among experiences. 

People enter Jewish leadership through different doors, at different stages of life and for different reasons. Some begin with philanthropy. Others through Jewish learning. Some become advocates because they experience antisemitism firsthand. Others discover leadership through governance, volunteering, crisis response or simply because someone invited them into a meaningful conversation at exactly the right moment. Some step away for a season and return years later with a new perspective. Others never hold a formal title but become indispensable leaders within their communities. 

A parent who organized around her children’s school runs for the school board. Someone who spent a year advocating on a single issue turns up on the Community Relations Committee. A volunteer who chaired a campaign becomes the mentor to the person who replaced her. Knowledge is passed thoughtfully and as a matter of organizational culture. Trust is built over years. Leadership is renewed because it is connected. 

The question is no longer simply how we prepare individual leaders. It is how we build communal ecosystems with the capacity to continually discover, develop, connect and renew leadership over time. 

Jewish tradition institutionalized this long ago, in the Sanhedrin. Modern leadership research has arrived at many of the same conclusions: resilient leadership cannot depend on exceptional individuals alone. The Center for Creative Leadership describes leadership as a social process that creates direction, alignment and commitment across a community rather than residing in a single person. Ronald Heifetz has argued for decades that adaptive challenges require leadership to be exercised throughout a system, not concentrated at the top. And in Building Servant Leaders at Scale, Max Klau reminds us that leadership is formed by shaping who people become (Be), what they understand (Know) and how they act (Do) over time, not simply by teaching skills. 

The same pattern emerges across sectors. The U.S. military has long understood that leadership is cultivated over a lifetime through mentoring, increasing responsibility, peer learning and shared accountability, not through isolated training experiences. National service organizations such as City Year, whose model helped inspire AmeriCorps, have similarly recognized that their greatest impact comes not only from a year of service, but from creating lifelong networks of leaders who continue to serve their communities in new ways. 

Different sectors. Different missions. While one program does not make an ecosystem, we know the strongest leadership cultures share the same underlying architecture.  

That is what ecosystems do. 
 
Changemakers — JFNA’s national leadership program for young adults — built “Root and Rise” to hand graduates back to their own communities. Most of the Dallas cohort arrived knowing little about Jewish life where they live. They left having learned the federation’s committees, met their rabbis and sat down with community relations professionals. Not with a certificate, but with a real introduction to someone accountable for what came next and doors leading in different directions — local and continental, inside the federation and beyond it. 

The challenge is greatest where no one owns the work of leadership development, where it lives in the margins of five other jobs. That is how communities end up asking the same handful of people to do everything and never asks the qualified others, who would gladly say yes. It is a solvable problem, but not one any single community solves alone. Smaller communities in particular will solve it by banding together, and by looking outside the channels we are used to. 
 
No institution in North American Jewish life is better positioned than the federation system to build out the leadership ecosystem. We connect local communities with continental learning, lay leadership with professional expertise, emerging leaders with seasoned mentors and one generation with the next. The federation system has the ability and capacity to adapt to the new reality we face. 

That is the work of a leadership ecosystem. 

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks often reminded us that Judaism is built not only through great leaders, but through great communities. Communities endure because they create cultures in which responsibility is shared, wisdom is transmitted and leadership is continually renewed. 

The future of Jewish leadership will be determined not only by who is willing to lead, but by whether we build communities capable of continually producing leadership. 

That is the work before us. 

Shayna Kreisler is the vice president of lay leadership for Jewish Federations of North America. 

Robin Stein is the chair of lay leadership development for Jewish Federations of North America.