What Peoplehood Means to Me

Our Jewish organizations – lay and professionals both – need expert and long-term training in customer service to create uniform warmth and friendliness coupled with a standard of professional excellence.

[This essay is from The Peoplehood Papers, volume 13 – Jewish Peoplehood: What does it mean? Why is it important? How do we nurture it? – published by the Center for Jewish Peoplehood Education.]

By Erica Brown

In the many years since I co-authored a book on Jewish Peoplehood, I have watched the problem of Jewish identity escalate while the term “Peoplehood“ has dissolved into near oblivion. Defining and sustaining notions of Jewish Peoplehood is perhaps the most niggling and critical issue of our time, and yet the very intellectual nature of the conversation has meant that it has lost traction within Jewish communal organizations and has stayed largely in the Academy, where its impact is least significant.

Unfortunately, just as academics and community leaders began to probe how we define and strengthen Peoplehood, the world of Jewish nonprofits was hit with a financial recession that forced nearly everyone into survival mode. Programs to enhance Jewish literacy and identity were regarded as a luxury. Aggressive fund-raising to make up for acute losses took center stage and left Peoplehood in the dust. Sadly, without meaning it is hard to raise money. The immediate and urgent eclipsed the critical and important so that in the wake of Pew, we find ourselves less anchored and able to tackle issues of Jewish spirituality, membership, affiliation and engagement. And ironically, because of this tunnel vision, we offer less value add-on in the meaning department and the fund- raising in many communities has, not surprisingly, still not stabilized.

If we define Peoplehood as the psychic understanding that we are part of an extended family with a purpose then if we want to bring Peoplehood as a topic of concern, we should begin to think about how to generate an emotional sense of belonging to attract those who find themselves increasingly on the margins. Perhaps it will sound vulgar to many, but our Jewish organizations – lay and professionals both – need expert and long-term training in customer service to create uniform warmth and friendliness coupled with a standard of professional excellence. We have forgotten how to say hello to the stranger and make that stranger into a friend and that friend into a member of the family. We have lost touch with the Jewish values behind outreach and the Jewish texts that inspire it. We are so stuck in governance and fund-raising that we don’t realize how uninteresting these preoccupations are to the outsider and the in-speak they generate. “Where there is no vision,“ the book of Proverbs tells us, “the people perish.“ And where there is no vision, Peoplehood perishes as well. We can do better. We must.

Dr. Erica Brown is a writer and educator. Among her books is The Case for Jewish Peoplehood co-authored with Dr. Misha Galperin.

This essay is from The Peoplehood Papers, volume 13 – Jewish Peoplehood: What does it mean? Why is it important? How do we nurture it? – published by the Center for Jewish Peoplehood Education.