by Martin Levine
“There is a time for everything… A time to plant and a time to uproot…
A time to keep and a time to throw away.” Ecclesiastes
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Charles Dickens
There are times for gradual and adaptive change and times when radical, disruptive changes are demanded.
Imagine its 1995 and you are the owner-publisher of the leading newspaper in your city. CNN is 5 years old on the evolving cable TV landscape and reaches just a small number of homes. Something called the internet is being talked about and experimented with. Evolutionary changes or signs of disruption? Just fads that will quickly fade or early indicators of fundamental changes in the way information is created, communicated, given authenticity and sold?
So what kind of time is 2012 for the American Jewish Community? 10 years from now, when we look back at this moment, we will recognize that we have lived through a period of dramatic change that drastically reshaped the way we live as individuals and as communities. Will we also see that we were able to leap ahead and make the changes that were necessary or will we be looking back and wondering how we didn’t see what was happening around us?
The signs are all around us. Technology has compressed the world, enabled a global economy, made huge amounts of information easily accessible, redefined how we communicate and given new definitions to the meaning of community. Global warming is altering how we build our homes, what we drive and where we live and work. A new economy is confronting us with different career possibilities, different home ownership realities and a very different belief that our standard of living will be ever increasing. Political systems and power balances are shifting. Generational leadership is changing.
The signs of drastic change can be seen very particularly within the American Jewish Community. To note just a few: Shrinking membership in Synagogues and other Jewish Organizations, declining enrollment in non-Orthodox day schools, increasing numbers of children being raised in households with a parent/care giver who is not Jewish, many Jews seeing their Judaism as a matter of individual choice and not of communal obligation. And, Israel is no longer a dream and a vision but a reality with real world problems and challenges.
All indicators of disruptive change and of the challenges we face today and tomorrow. Individuals, nations, communities and organizations are affected by these disruptions and are all challenged to respond or fade.
Periods of disruption require us to question the validity of our assumptions, the assumptions upon which we have built organizations, formed communities and live our Jewish life. Those of us who lead must recognize that our strategies and tactics are now questionable and, perhaps, already invalid. We must recognize that what will emerge will be a new definition of normal, one that will be as fundamentally different as Wikipedia is from Britannica.
Within much of the Jewish community it seems these signs are not seen as much more than just the normal variation in an otherwise stable world rather than as the flags alerting us to serious disruptions already underway. This makes it difficult to mobilize Jewish leadership to directly confront the looming impact of a new social, economic and political environment.
So why not keep on doing the things that have proved effective? Why risk radical changes? Our Congregations, Federations, Community Centers, Social Service Agencies, Fraternal organizations stand as symbols of how well we have adapted Jewish life to the realities of 20th Century America. We can measure our success in the social and political standing we have achieved. The American Jewish Community has been so successful that to make drastic changes is to risk so much.
It is our very success that prevents us from seeing the nature of the present challenge clearly. The stability of the past 50 years has given us a paradigm through which we see the world. We have the score cards to measure how we are doing compared to our past and we can make straight line projections of how our past will lead to our future. In a stable world, these are the right ways to respond. Making radical changes will result in worse outcomes rather than the improvement as we desire. Difficulties and bad results, from this perspective, are a product of bad practice and performance which are best addressed by minor improvements. This view makes us resist making radical change. But in times like these this is a most dangerous option.
Our prior knowledge and experience makes it easy for us to fit information into patterns that are “comfortable” with what has come before. We view our world through a lens of stability and see signs of change as just the normal variation expected in any stable system. From this perspective, the ups and downs we experience are just minor fluctuations in an otherwise solid world. Rather than question flaws in our basic model we see flaws in individuals and organizations. We conclude that over the long haul our successful strategies will remain valid and no radical course corrections are needed. The ups and downs will balance out and our general path will continue forward. From this perspective, we lead by keeping our organizations focused on making small improvements, by holding onto the systems and structures that have been successful in the past. From the perspective of the “establishment” it is easy to ignore the voices of those who see the emerging world as needing radical change.
It is always easy to see disruptive periods after they have occurred. No editor of a paper today is unaware of how drastically different their environment is now than it was just a decade earlier. Only those who were brave enough to invent new models for accomplishing their core purpose had any chance of successfully leaping into the new reality. Making the wrong call about the kind of challenge faced can be fatal.
The questions facing us are daunting. Is it possible for existing organizations to make the kinds of changes that are called for in the face of disruptive change? Is it only from the outside and the fringe that the necessary innovations are possible? Must we see what we have built crumble and become irrelevant? Can new ways and structures only be built from the outside? At times of significant change must the existing order totally crumble away to be replaced by new forms and models of Jewish life which can flourish in these new conditions?
“In times of disruptive change your expected future is no longer valid.” (Doug Berger). In a period of disruption, we need to see beyond the paradigm of our past success. Unless we can do this we will not see the impending crisis. As individuals and as leaders we need to know when it is a “… time to keep or a time to throw away …” For each of us with the responsibility of leadership, the critical challenge is to use what we know about today to help us find a path forward toward our vision of the world we want to live in, even when that path requires us to make drastic changes.
It is that risk of not seeing our world clearly and of losing what we have invested so heavily that should be motivating us to engage in the difficult work of building for the 21st Century. We are living at a disruptive moment, one that requires us to challenge of all of the tried and true approaches we have taken because they are the result of a world that will no longer be the same.
Rather than focus on what we have done, we need to look at the world we live in as if we have just seen it for the first time. The question we need to ask is: “If we were starting anew, what would we create?”
This is not a new question for Jews to face. It was asked and answered as European Jewry chose to leave behind hundreds of years of precedent create a new era of Jewish life in the United States at the end of the 20th Century. It was asked and answered in 70 CE following the destruction of the Temple. Every component of the Jewish Community of the 20th needs, with urgency, to see the 21st Century as it is emerging and ask what would they create if they were starting anew? Our challenge is to allow our Judaism to authentically interact with these forces and help our community find where its value emerges as they confront this emerging new era.
We need to gather together with these questions as the framework for a new dialogue. We need to put aside everything we have done and built and start together with our knowledge of the changes that are underway. We need to, together, recreate a new, 21st Century American Jewish community. Our challenge is to rebuild our organizations in the service of this encounter. Our challenge is to be willing to make the changes necessary to allow them to be relevant under different conditions. Our challenge is to let go of much of what we have built in order to create what we need for the future. Our challenge is adapt what is valuable so that it can flourish in a new environment.
Judaism has much of value to say about how we can confront and respond to the world we live. These times require us to reinvent ourselves and to do so in a way that fulfills our values or we risk being cast aside and trampled by the changes that will come. This is a time where we need to rethink and retool. We need to leap forward bravely and find new ways. We need to believe that Judaism is valuable and that the value lies not in its form but in its very core. The forms we utilize to live our Judaism need to be forms of the present and future, not solely those of the past.
Martin Levine is General Director, JCC Chicago.
Having been involved in Jewish communal life — as a professional and as a lay leader — for more than 50 years, I applaud this article as one of the most significant and timely that I’ve seen in a very long time.
Saul Cohen
Stamford, CT
Shalom All,
Non Orthodox Judaism, its synagogues, its movements and its organizations, are for the most part broken, clueless and woefully out of touch with the vast majority of Jews in North America. The answer is not incrementalism, e.g., taking the ultimately fatal route that Kodak, Z’L took of trying to force an obsolete business model to produce measurably successful results. The answer to non Orthodox Jewish continuity most certainly does not reside in the peoplehood stuff of Jewishness (Shabbat, the Holidays, Israel, the Catskills, a Pastrami sandwich etc…). The further away from our families’ immigrant experience we get the more this vague ethno-cultural “Jewishness” melts into North America’s cultural crazy quilt, and the less meaning it has for us and our children. Most Jews in North America today are Jewish like “The Olive Garden,” is Italian. Check out this video for confirming evidence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77z2VsqEmXk
An answer begins with us disabusing ourselves of the notion of the existence of a non Orthodox Jewish community. This is a best a myth and it is one that keeps us from forging a new way forward. There is no such thing in any meaningful sense of the word community. And the fact that Jews may inhabit a certain geographic locale most certainly does not necessarily confer Jewish status on that locale nor does it necessarily make it a community.
An answer is to rediscover a meaningful contemporary, serious non-Orthodox Judaism that matters, whose teaching has the power to inspire the kishke level convictions (now there’s a seditious word for many non Orthodox Jews) that are the bedrock of the measurable success of Habad, as well as that of megachurches like Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL, Saddleback in Lake Forest CA, and Northpoint in Alpharetta (near Atlanta), GA . And to quote Hillel, “the rest is commentary,” for there can be no hope for any progress toward a real Jewish community (more than just a group of Jews in a similar locale), without the compass and rudder of an agreed upon 21rst century non-Orthodox Judaism.
And to paraphrase Hillel, so who wants to go study how to do this? I’m ready now; how about you?
Biv’racha,
Jordan,
eashtov@aol.com
Kudos to Martin Levine on this timely and thought provoking article. This is the conversation we need to be having.
Now is the time for the Jewish community to explore. What resonates? What is compelling? What’s next?
Now is the time to brainstorm alternatives. Would you like to be part of imagining “synagogue 2025”? The Synagogue Leadership Initiative of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey invites you to join us for, “Prix Fixe Offerings in a Tapas World: Think Tank on New Models of Affiliation” on Monday, February 13, 2012 at 6:30pm. All are welcome, but reservations are required. For more information or to register, visit http://www.jfnnj.org/sli.
Shalom Lisa,
Sadly imagining “synagogue 2025” as well “new models of affiliation,” is putting the cart before the horse; i.e., the delivery systems before they have something that’s considered of value for delivery by their presumed prospects (most Jews in North America).
First one must envision a new, relevant, practical, application oriented, meaningful, contemporary, serious non-Orthodox Judaism that matters, whose teaching has the power to inspire the kishke level convictions (now there’s a seditious word for many non Orthodox Jews) that are the bedrock of the measurable success of Habad, as well as that of megachurches like Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL, Saddleback in Lake Forest CA, and Northpoint in Alpharetta (near Atlanta), GA And to quote Hillel, “the rest is commentary,” for there can be no hope for any progress toward a real Jewish community (more than just a group of Jews in a similar locale), or their institutions without the compass and rudder of an agreed upon 21rst century non-Orthodox Judaism.
And to paraphrase Hillel, so who wants to go study how to do this? I’m ready; how about you?
Biv’racha,
Jordan,
eashtov@aol.com
Great article about disruptive change. I believe that the key is finding the right way to “let go” and allow individuals to discover Judaism on their own terms. I wish there was one silver bullet. But there isn’t one answer. For some, traditional synaogue services provide engagement. For others day schools or Shabbat dinners are how they want to recognize and celebrate their religion and/or peoplehood. But for a growing number, it may be reading articles on a website or paricipating in yoga with some Jewish theme in the background.
We need to find ways to support individual Jews as they find ways to practice…and I believe that over time clusters (chavurot) will form who want to practice the same way and small communities of meaning will develop. We can ultimately strengthen the Jewish people by empowering them to find their own way.
I think Mr. Levine is right. It is time to change. I would like to suggest that we learn to think small and connected.
If our organizations/communities are small, we keep the governance, choice-making, and change-making in the hands of the members. If they try something that does not work, they can easily evaluate it and toss it. If they try something that does, they can do it again.
Good examples of small organizations/communities are the Moishe Houses or experimental minyanim in many areas.
Social networking can easily and cheaply allow people in different small groups to communicate and to share intellectual resources.
For people who would like to start up these small groups of change, I would suggest looking to support people who are undergoing major life changes. For example, parents of new babies need places to connect with others, as do people fresh out of college who have just lost their source of social connections, as do people who are recently retired, as do mourners. There are, of course many other sorts of groups as well.
But the key, I think, is in the smallness and the direct connections it can offer.