Who are we responsible for and how do we best serve our community in this moment? These are key questions we are always asking ourselves at Federation but especially now as our world shifts.

However you describe this time we are living in, it’s clear to me that we are entering a new chapter of Jewish life. Whereas the last couple decades were about modernizing Jewish engagement, this new era must also focus on staying connected across lines of difference and working together toward a common future.

As I shared last week, I believe there are core values that have the power to bind us through any kind of tumult, namely the pursuit of justice and love for Jewish peoplehood. We may not always agree on the definition of each, but we can be in conversation about what they mean and what role they play in our lives.

In addition, I also believe there are first principles that must guide our work at Federation to strengthen Jewish life in Greater Washington.

The first is that we are here to serve all 400,000 people who live in Jewish households across the Greater Washington region. While we also have an important role to play beyond this, we do have a unique responsibility in this region for these people. We are committed to reaching people wherever they are in their Jewish journey, from the deeply engaged to those who have not yet found their connection. We are here for young adults, young families, seniors, and every other subset of our population. Our constituency spans the full breadth of the Jewish DMV.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t prioritize certain goals. Every organization must prioritize if they want to have an impact. We are proud of our work to ramp up engagement efforts in Northern Virginia and our partnerships with organizations serving young adults across the region, for example—but approaching our work with the knowledge that we are responsible for the entirety of our community is central to our theory of change.

The next principle is that we seek to create a community that expects and supports disagreement. There are boundaries to the Jewish people, but within those borders is a whole medley of individual and collective viewpoints that are constantly evolving. At Federation, we see how important it is to honor this. We want to see our community growing, learning, and building their ties to Jewish peoplehood and Israel. It follows then that we must make space for different views and experiences, so that we might stay in conversation and help each other forge and strengthen our Jewish connections over time.

The real work, however, is not in laying out these principles but abiding by their implications. How do we reach people who don’t know what’s on offer? How do we make decisions about where communal funds should go? How do we make room for people to grapple with questions about Israel or other elements of Jewish life even when it makes others uncomfortable?

None of these things have easy answers, but that’s what makes our work as a community so worthwhile. Our relationship with time is communal. We have always faced history together and have managed time and again to change it. As we stand together as a people on Yom Kippur, with all our great differences, asking for forgiveness, so must we stand together building our collective future.