Nobody expects an oak tree to grow in a year. Farmers do not dig up crops every fortnight to check whether the roots are growing. 

We understand instinctively that some things take time. They require patient investment and consistent care, sometimes for years before anyone notices the results. 

Mariia Vitkoska

Illustrative.

Yet when it comes to how the Jewish community responds to antisemitism, we seem to abandon this intuition entirely. 

Every year, we ask whether our advocacy has worked. At each budget cycle, we ask whether our investments have paid off. A leadership transition becomes another opportunity to rethink the strategy. We behave as though the Jewish community’s ability to organize ought to operate according to the logic of quarterly earnings, then wonder why the necessary infrastructure is missing when we need it most. 

I found myself thinking about this again after reading Ben Ehrenkranz’s recent essay on Jewish political organizing (“How to beat the anti-Israel machine,” eJewishPhilanthropy, July 16). His central argument is straightforward: Communities that consistently exercise political influence rarely do so because they spend the most money or produce the most sophisticated campaigns. In most cases, they have spent years building volunteer networks, neighborhood leadership, trusted relationships and habits of participation long before any election arrives. 

People often mistake successful advocacy campaigns for breakthroughs, overlooking the years of work that preceded them. The visible victory may be the first moment when years of invisible investment become impossible to ignore. We admire the outcome while overlooking the long, repetitive and largely unremarkable work that made it possible in the first place. 

I think Ehrenkranz is right about organizing. I also think organizing is only part of the story. 

Author Malcolm Gladwell popularised the claim that mastery requires roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. The precise number has been disputed, but the underlying principle remains persuasive: competence emerges through time and accumulated experience. We accept that nobody masters the violin after a few lessons or becomes an elite athlete after a single season, yet we routinely expect Jewish communities to become politically sophisticated after a single crisis, with networks, trusted relationships and experienced volunteers somehow already in place. 

Communities, however, do not acquire collective competence any faster than individuals do. 

An organization begins another year convinced that it is falling behind, prompting revised messaging, shifted priorities, structural adjustments or some new methodology. Change itself isn’t the problem — strategies sometimes need to change; assumptions can prove mistaken. What matters is whether the change follows from evidence or from irritation that the results have not arrived quickly enough. Often, approaches are abandoned before enough evidence has accumulated to judge them.  

One thing that muddies the waters is that learning and impatience can seemingly prompt identical behavior. After all, good organizers experiment, observe and adapt all the time. But sometimes adaptation reflects learning, and sometimes it reflects anxiety. There is a difference between adjusting your route because the road ahead is blocked and changing direction every few miles solely because you are frustrated at not yet having arrived. 

We evaluate our response to antisemitism through the wrong lens. We ask whether we have won when we should be examining whether the Jewish community is becoming more capable of winning. We are delighted when members of the Iranian diaspora stand alongside Jews at a rally, but too rarely invest in the ties and ongoing work that might turn momentary solidarity into lasting cooperation. Standing together once is encouraging. Whether that develops into a relationship people can rely upon years later is a different question.

Long before legislative victories appear or universities change their behavior, there ought to be signs that our organizing infrastructure is becoming stronger. Are networks growing denser? Are volunteers recruiting other volunteers? Can local communities respond without waiting for instructions from national organizations? Is knowledge becoming more widely shared, or does it still sit with a handful of exceptionally capable professionals? These are hardly consolation prizes awarded while waiting for the “real” results. They are tangible evidence that the work is taking root.

Human beings can be mobilized with astonishing speed. A crisis, a compelling cause, or a surge of fear, hope or outrage can move thousands of people almost overnight; since Oct. 7, 2023,  Jewish communities around the world have demonstrated exactly that. But while mobilization and organizing are closely related, they develop on different timescales. Organizing depends on trust, habits and relationships capable of outlasting the emotion of the moment. Crowds matter, but organizing produces leaders and expectations that make the next mobilization less improvised than the last.

We keep asking why the Jewish community appears unprepared whenever antisemitism intensifies. The question assumes that preparedness can be summoned once the danger is obvious. By then, much of the necessary work should already have happened. It may be more revealing to ask how often we’ve treated the absence of immediate results as evidence that no progress was being made. 

How many organizing efforts have we abandoned just before years of invisible investment began to become visible? And how much of what we describe as inadequate Jewish communal capacity is the accumulated consequence of institutional impatience: the repeated interruption of the slow work of developing relationships, leadership, organizing infrastructure and collective power before it has had time to mature?

Yos Tarshish is a Jewish educator, writer and community strategist based in Kingston, Ontario, helping Jewish communities for more than a decade in Canada, the UK, Israel and other countries to strengthen leadership, deepen identity and build resilient institutions.