Tag: unity

Thank goodness for basketball. And soccer. And aliens.

I can’t claim to be a Knicks fan, but I am a fan of joy and connection and that’s exactly what I’m seeing pour out of official and unofficial New Yorkers. What a pleasure it is to see people come together and bask in something shared. Witnessing New York City’s jubilation has made me happier and my team was out in round one of the playoffs.

Likewise, as a soccer fan, I am also very much enjoying the stories coming out of the World Cup. There has been a lot of heartwarming content about fans coming to the U.S. and delighting in the hospitality of everyday Americans (and our ice-cold sodas). We are enjoying each other’s company as fellow sports fans and that feels good.

From what I hear, a sense of large-scale connection is also an animating theme in Steven Spielberg’s latest movie Disclosure Day, which I’m hoping to see this weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve been to the movies but give me an intriguing premise, alien encounters, and a chance to meditate on our shared humanity and I’m there.

After all, our brains, and spirits, crave stories like these. Our desire to feel connected to each other and to something bigger than ourselves is hardwired. We don’t have to train or teach ourselves to seek this out. We want to belong. We want to celebrate and cheer and stand in awe in the middle of 5th Avenue. Watching the big game (or a UFO landing) is always better with a crowd.

What we do have to work at is acting on our instincts and lowering the barriers to connection. This is a major focus of our work at Federation. How do we build a regional Jewish infrastructure that can routinely spark and sustain meaningful relationships? How do we help people join and lead collective endeavors?

How do we ensure individual lives, experiences, and aspirations combine to form something larger, stronger, and more meaningful than any of us could create alone?

There’s a lot of darkness out there, but some of the highlights of the last couple weeks are reminding me that we have more in common than we think. So long as we work together, hatred and division don’t stand a chance against sympathetic joy, pride, amusement, and fellowship.

How do we build a healthier Jewish community rooted in respect, trust, and constructive dialogue, when it feels like we can barely agree on anything?

That’s the one million dollar question, and it’s exactly what brought 22 local leaders from throughout Greater Washington together over the last four months. From February through May, this group took part in the Courageous Leadership Fellowship, a partnership between Federation and the Shalom Hartman Institute, to sharpen their ability to lead with empathy, courage, and respect in a world that feels increasingly polarized.

Grounded in shared values of mutual understanding and encouraging belonging, participants explored what courageous leadership looks like in practice and left better equipped to lead meaningful change and foster constructive conversations across our community.

Instead of just talking about these ideas in theory, the sessions got down to the intricate reality of community work. Led by Hartman scholars Sara Labaton, Elana Stein Hain, and Masua Sagiv, the group explored various themes, including finding inner clarity, leadership in polarities, the challenges and importance of maintaining a big tent community, and finally the future through two lenses: repair and transformation. Through a “where do you stand” activity, they moved past case studies and tackled real communal dilemmas, followed by small group discussions.

By the time the fellowship wrapped up, these leaders walked away feeling far more confident in their ability to facilitate difficult dialogues and communal decision-making, and just as importantly, deeply connected to the leaders and institutions who are actively shaping the future of Jewish life across Greater Washington.

This work gets to the heart of one of Federation’s core commitments: creating a community where everyone feels like they belong, that they’re listened to, and that they can contribute to a vibrant Jewish future, not in spite of our differences, but with them.

A strong community doesn’t require us to always see eye-to-eye. It requires us to know how to talk to each other when we don’t. By investing in leaders and relationships across our communal landscape, Federation is helping cultivate the trust, respect, and connection our community needs to stick together and thrive.

Learn more about Federation’s work to build a strong, inclusive community here.

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I set off on a drive up to Boston to see our daughter graduate from college and then a few days later over to Pittsburgh to see our son graduate with a Master’s degree. It won’t surprise you to hear that witnessing these two milestones got me thinking about life’s transitions and the swirl of excitement, loss, and uncertainty that frequently come with them.

As Bruce Feiler points out in his book, Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age, we spend more of our lives in flux than we realize. Life events can be good or bad. They can be determined by a decision that we make on our own or something that happens to us. Major life events also typically last about five years, and much of our adult lives are spent in unsettled states. This isn’t necessarily a negative thing—change can indicate growth and evolution—but it is the reality of most of our lives.

This sense of unsettledness is pervasive for many of us today. The world is changing faster than any of us could have imagined. Deep assumptions about our security, identity, friends, work, etc. are being challenged. And that is beyond changes that may be happening in our personal lives. All of this can get to be overwhelming. But that sense of instability is lessened and, in some ways, even reversed when we find community.

Feiler argues that a well-constructed life is one guided by the ABC’s—agency, belonging, and cause. To thrive, we need to feel like we can impact the world around us; that we have people to lean on; and have a way to serve something greater than ourselves. These three factors keep us grounded through life’s twists and turns, and they are all on offer in our community.

That’s what I hope people who engage with Federation and our partners come to feel, that Jewish Greater Washington is a place where they can commune with the ABC’s, across every life stage and within the ongoing story of Jewish peoplehood.

Our work as a Federation, therefore, is to ensure our community remains host to a grand Jewish playground, where people can come learn about themselves and find people with whom to climb through good times and bad no matter what’s going on in their lives.

That’s what I see as the beauty of community building. In choosing to join forces on our quest for meaning, we vastly improve each other’s odds of success. By engaging in Jewish discovery and expression together, we multiply each other’s agency, deepen each other’s sense of belonging, and further each other’s ability to pursue what matters to us most.

P.S. happy to recommend Bruce Feiler’s thoughtful guest essay in today’s New York Times.

There’s a consensus brewing. Emerging across opinion pages, podcasts, and dinner tables is the idea that we’ve strayed too far from one another. The question driving many of our national and communal conversations is how do we renew our obligations to each other?

Just this week, I’ve listened to discussions about how generosity was meant to be one of liberalism’s founding principles. How our educational pursuits were meant to prepare us to be good citizens and servant leaders. How we were meant to talk to strangers. How we were never meant to bowl alone.

All these ideas are swirling within our Jewish community as well. For all our differences, the thing people want most is to connect—to feel like they belong and that the Jewish people would not be complete without them and what they have to offer. And, indeed, we are not. I believe wholeheartedly the Jewish community is incomplete without everyone at the table.

Which makes now a perfect moment to double down on the sacred, timeless work of community building. Next week is Giving Week and I am asking everyone who cares about the Jewish community and values the Jewish future to contribute. Your gift—of any amount—matters. Your participation matters. You matter.

Giving is a vote of confidence in our shared efforts to build a strong and joyful Jewish community, one that supports and brings together the full breath of Jewish life. It’s also what supports our work as a Federation to bolster a network of Jewish agencies and programs that care for people in need, engage people in every life stage in meaningful Jewish experiences, perpetuate and strengthen Jewish identity and peoplehood, and look after the safety of the Jewish people.

What’s more, the simple act of giving collectively, alongside so many others who care about Jewish life, makes its own powerful statement that we are here and that we believe in the promise of community and acting together to the benefit of others.

I lament the challenges and the tumult of our times. But I find incredible comfort and hope in the fact that our path to a brighter future involves so many beautiful things: connection, participation, curiosity, debate, and a love for Jewish wisdom and tradition.

It’s notable that in this era of hyper-individualism, people are hungry for mutual obligation. But that’s the punchline of responsibility and interdependence: it’s only in being tied to each other that we find the transcendence we seek. Obligations are on offer, I invite you to come claim them.

For the past several years, really ever since COVID, our communal agenda has been shaped in large part by external crises. There’s no shame in this. Federation, supported by a passionate Jewish community, is well suited to crisis response. We have the local and global infrastructure to reach people and deploy help, a core part of our role.

Through a pandemic, wars, antisemitic attacks, the devastation of October 7, economic uncertainty, and political and social upheaval, we, as a community, have been there to help the Jewish people and those in need locally and around the world.

Across our community and in conversation with others from around the country, I hear how eager people are to reclaim a sense of agency over the Jewish future. To not only fend off the destructive forces of the day, but to build something great. This isn’t to say that we should abandon our work to be there for the Jewish people and Israel in times of crisis, not at all. Without question, we will need to remain diligent in responding to a dysregulated world. But we can be serious about our dreams too.

As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks used to say, “Jewish faith is written in the future tense.” We are in close contact with our past, but we are also a people of possibility. We would be doing the Jewish story a disservice if we did not make the most of the opportunities in front of us to strengthen Jewish identity, pride, joy, and connection. This is the spirit that defines our community, and one we will continue to harness in our work ahead.

Already, we are working to grow and scale the things we know have significant impact. Shabbat dinners (as I wrote about last week), Jewish summer camp, youth groups, Jewish day schools, Jewish learning, and immersive Jewish experiences, including trips to Israel and local retreats, have tremendous effects on someone’s identity. How can we expand these offerings and make them more accessible to more people? How can we be a home for people with diverse opinions? How do we use our resources and relationships to maximum effect for people across all age groups?

It feels strange in this time of absurd and heartbreaking headlines to be talking about agency. But it’s precisely in this moment when things feel most out of our control that we are called to wrestle it back. Like so many times throughout Jewish history, we can define for ourselves who we are and where we are going. Between our collective responsibility and capacity to strengthen Jewish life, and Federation’s relationships, resources, and talent for convening, the future is ours for the shaping.

As we prepare for our family’s upcoming seder, I am thinking about not only the relatives and friends who will grace our table, but also those four allegorical children who are perennial guests: the chacham (wise) one, the rasha (wicked) one, the tam (simple) one, and the one who does know how to ask. It’s the rasha who I am most intrigued by this year. But I’d recast the moniker “wicked” child as the “skeptic” or “critic” or even “rebel.” As part of the Passover seder, we are instructed to entertain the questions of a child who doesn’t feel they are part of what’s taking place, and who may even choose to stand apart from it. “What does this service mean to you?” the critical child asks, and we answer the best we can. This always seemed like a sour note in the Passover program, but lately I’ve come to see the beauty in the exchange. How striking that one of our most sacred traditions insists we acknowledge skepticism.

Making Space for the Question

What if our role when it comes to the so-called rasha isn’t to scold them but to acknowledge and honor their questions? What if we came to see our cherished rituals—and indeed our people—as incomplete without those who criticize and doubt? We are not whole without those who push boundaries and challenge our assumptions and ingrained ways. How remarkable that our tradition does not cast aside this child, but rather provides them an invitation to our table year after year … and how remarkable that this child accepts the invitation and joins.

Federation’s flagship Jewish Community Leaders Program (JCLP) includes a visit to a megachurch in Maryland to learn about how they build communities of belonging. Our group was inspired to learn they didn’t define themselves by rigid red lines, while still holding a clear sense of their core values. Instead, they defined themselves by an ongoing relationship with a spiritual center. They considered anyone oriented toward a common set of principles as relevant and part of their flock. It’s got me wondering: in this post-October 7 landscape, how do we help shape our future by evolving our community’s relationship with boundaries? These are not easy questions, particularly in a moment when the need for clarity and certainty feels so real.

At Federation, we will continue engaging this question and find new ways to create space for the challenging voice, the uncomfortable question, the perspective that stretches our assumptions. After all, many of the shifts that now feel foundational—expanded roles for women, inclusion of LGBTQ Jews, the recognition of multiracial Jewish identity—were once at the edges of communal acceptance. They moved inward because passionate people pushed to widen the frame.

Our Community Leadership Council (CLC) has been using this year to listen to the broad voices of our community—nearly 200 people from 26 diverse groups—including those engaged in our traditional institutions, as well as people who have not affiliated, who have felt marginalized, or who have created their own communities to meet their unique needs. It’s critical to gather insights from all to help understand and shape our community priorities.

At the Same Table

In describing the four children at the seder, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks noted, “there is a message of hope in this family portrait. Though they disagree, they sit around the same table, telling the same story. Though they differ, they stay together. They are part of a single family… The Jewish people is an extended family. We argue, we differ, there are times when we are deeply divided. Yet we are part of the same story. We share the same memories. At difficult times we can count on one another. We feel one another’s pain. Out of this multiplicity of voices comes something none of us could achieve alone.”

Bringing the entirety of our community together across differences is a bold move. It’s clear that has been our work all along. The goal has never been to embrace uniform views. On the contrary, the thing we’re meant to embrace is each other, in all our messy, diverse, and divine glory.

With wishes for a happy and meaningful Passover,

Elisa

Credit: Chicago Haggadah, 1879, a historic American Jewish Passover Haggadah published in Chicago. It is a notable example of early American Jewish print culture, reflecting the growing Jewish community in Chicago in the post-Civil War era. Who do you see as the rasha?

My siblings and I held our Passover menu planning Zoom call earlier this week. I’m in charge of the brisket, among other things, and I’ll be making my mom’s recipe. No secret ingredients, no innovative twists. Just a tried-and true and beloved rendition. That, I suppose, is the unofficial theme of our Seder this year (though I may experiment with a new vegetarian soup).

Indeed, given all the volatility in the world, the thing I’m craving most from Passover is its sense of routine. For those of us who grew up with the holiday, the Passover Seder is, above all, familiar. How the Seder unfolds may vary from year to year, but the story, the food, the songs, and the traditions always combine to create a uniquely consistent touchpoint with family, Jewish identity, and peoplehood.

Passover also has a way of using the past to evoke new feelings of possibility. While the Haggadah stays consistent, the moment in which we live is continuously changing. In recounting our story, we may focus on new sections or have different reactions to readings or songs. We may uncover fresh sources of energy, clarity, and ingenuity, which we will need on the road ahead.

We have important work in front of us: to engage and connect with members of the Jewish community who are struggling right now, to be a steady partner for Israeli communities, to build strong, substantive, and joyful Jewish life, and to care for the people around us. And the first step to making it all happen starts by remembering who we are and the role we’re meant to play in the world.

I encourage you to gather some friends, invite someone new to the table, and connect once again to our story. In true Jewish fashion, it’s in connecting to our tradition and to each other that we’ll prepare ourselves to move forward.