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Jews, Christians, and Muslims organizing for a stronger and healthier community in Columbus, Ohio. Photo provided by PJA & JFSJ.
I recently began my first semester of rabbinical school. I’m in kita aleph (beginner Hebrew) and learning to chant Torah for the first time since my bar mitzvah. It’s an exercise in humility. For some, this is the beginning of their Jewish leadership story. For me, it represents the culmination of 15 years as a community organizer developing leaders, in and out of the Jewish community.
As an organizer, I supported the growth of hundreds of leaders, rabbinical students, college students, and Jews working for social change. At the time, I defined a leader as someone who had a following and who developed others and their capacity to make change. Now that I am studying to be an “ordained” Jewish leader, I wonder: What qualifies me to do the job?
As I begin my rabbinical training, I find myself reflecting: What does it mean to be a leader of the Jewish people? What separates a Jewish leader from any other leader? You can find thousands of books, podcasts, videos, and seminars on leadership. I leave the question of defining leadership to the experts, but I have yet to see media that proposes being more Jewish in order to be a better leader.
Once I started digging into the question of Jewish leadership, I found as many opinions and positions as there are ways to make matzah balls. Speaking to others was illuminating; I uncovered varied ways in which Jewish leaders distinguish themselves and began to understand my own position on Jewish leadership.
I have identified three components vital to Jewish leadership: seeking to understand the Jewish narrative and entering it; developing a personal Torah; and investing in relationships with others.
Entering the Jewish Narrative
One summer in college, I visited the Birkenau concentration camp in Poland. The tour guide bent down, scooped up a handful of earth, and told us, “These might look like white pebbles, but they are bone chips.” My eyes rose to absorb the emerald green of the forest and the bright blue sky. Immediately, the black and white photographs of the Holocaust—history itself—went Technicolor. I could almost feel my breath coming into alignment with the breath of history.
Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with Rev. Martin Luther King, the American civil rights movement, ghettos and shtetls, the dynamic and scrappy Diaspora communities, the destruction of the First and Second Temple. All became more palpable after that day in Birkenau.
Many communities have their unique narrative simultaneously defining a history while illuminating a future direction. African Americans might understand their narrative through the stories of the slave trade, Jim Crow laws and the struggle for civil rights, or through individuals such as W.E.B DuBois, Zora Neal Hurston, and President Barack Obama. Each community, each person, creates and contributes to framing a personal historical narrative.
After that moment in Poland, when the Jewish narrative came alive for me, I understood I was not only bound to its past, but needed to participate in shaping its future. I don’t want to overdramatize it. There was no burning bush; it was more subtle. Individuals experience this connection in small and large ways all the time: at a Passover meal, walking a picket line, working at a food bank, or joining a Jewish organization seeking to make the world more whole. Study, action, and reflection, in their many forms, are the gateway.
This can play out in myriad ways. Meir Lakein, lead organizer for the Jewish Organizing Initiative, succinctly describes how a connectionto our narrative impacts how we show up as Jews.
“A solid Jewish leader has to value the universal and the particular. The writer Doug McAdams researched people who went to the South for freedom summer in the 60s, who stayed and who left over the course of the rising tensions. Those who stayed were more likely Jewish than other faiths, like Jonah fleeing the responsibility to serve the community, and then getting swallowed up by a large fish. We are obligated to serve more than ourselves, and when things get hard, you can’t just drop it.”
Approaching leadership moments from the standpoint of the Jewish narrative and seeking to serve the universal and the particular has pushed me to be more expansive and creative in how I approach challenges, identify resources, and explore solutions.
Cultivating a Personal Torah
When I say Torah, I mean one’s personal truth. From two of my teachers, Rabbis Sheila Weinberg and Jeff Roth, I learned that “Personal Torah” is what we have to give over in the world; it is our master teaching; our individualized flavor packet, if the world were a ramen noodles package.
I uncovered my personal Torah when I started organizing in my congregation as a lay leader. Rather than working solely as an advocate or organizer for others, I became a leader as a Jew, standing for justice, shoulder to shoulder with other communities. I began to understand the interconnectedness between our capacity as Jews to effectively make the world a better place and our tradition’s wisdom relating to sustainability and building community. I now know in my kishkas: The deeper we delve into our tradition, the stronger we become in our lives, and the more capable we become in affecting positive change in the world.
This shift was monumental. I began to feel I was in conversation with my Torah and the arc of Jewish tradition. I was neither a good nor bad Jew. Whether I ate bacon or kept the Sabbath, I was still in the mix. That is where I feel most Jewish—in the messiness of life, acting to make the world a better place informed by my Judaism. What would it look like if we all entered the messiness and had the chutzpah to put our personal Torah out to the world? As leaders, we must model being comfortable in our own personal Torah.
In real time, one’s Torah can be operationalized in communities and organizations. Ruth Messenger, President of the American Jewish World Service, often speaks about how she draws on Jewish values for guidance and inspiration when making leadership decisions: “How an organization does its payroll, its benefits, its personnel policies, its sensitivity to labor and environmental issues, etc. is all part of what we should talk about as qualities of [and perhaps measurements for] Jewish leadership.”
Investing in Relationships
Finally, Jewish leadership is about investing in relationships. Central to my conception of Jewish leadership are relationships both with Jews, and as a public Jew, with secular people or people of other faiths. Martin Buber thus summarizes the power of relationships: “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.” If God isn’t for you, it might be humanity, nature, goodness, or justice. How do we understand ourselves, our relationship to the Jewish narrative, and our own personal Torah unless we are in relationship with others?
Last summer I refreshed my understanding of prayer through several relationships with Muslim organizers developed during an interfaith organizing training program at Jewish Funds for Justice (JFSJ), my former employer. During one of the training days, everyone was invited to observe the Muslim call to prayer and service. I was moved by the beauty, sincerity, and physicality of the prayer, and felt compelled to reengage my own prayer practice. Concurrently, several of the Muslim organizers relayed to me an appreciation for sharing stories and reflections, successes and failures, from my first few years organizing as well as my evolving relationship with Judaism. Through these relationships, I better understand my own story and am inspired by hearing theirs.
It is nearly impossible not to connect when we retell our stories, listen to one another, identify shared interests, values, and history, and act together. These relationships awaken a new perspective or understanding, and we are challenged to rethink our narrative. Relationships, with individuals and our traditions, animate our understanding of ourselves. Who are we when we are not in relationship with others?
The dynamic interplay between entering the Jewish narrative, my personal Torah, and the relationships I cultivate propel me forward and help prepare me to be a formal Jewish leader. Although I may not yet be able to banter in Hebrew, chant Torah fluently, or retell the entire story of the Jewish people, I’m in the mix.
Before I left JFSJ, I sketched out a list of nine qualities of leadership I have sought to cultivate to be a more skillful leader in the world:
1 Soft eyes: Allow your gaze to soften and take in the larger landscape. Sometimes our laser-like focus leads us to miss the bigger picture.
2 The power is in the relationship: Everything we accomplish is through our relationships with others, from creating to actualizing a vision. Everything is ultimately co-created and co-founded.
3 Cultivate any practice: The discipline and regularity of a practice (daily journaling, prayer, yoga, working out, meditation, or walks in nature) is the stable force allowing us to see the impermanence of everything.
4 Seek mentorship and mentor others: This might also be called co-development. In my experience it has always been mutual, never unidirectional.
5 Listen, allow for silence: This goes two ways, both with those you are with, as well as with what is arising internally. Too often we listen for what we want to hear, or we cut people off when we think we know what they are saying. Or we are uncomfortable with silence.
6 Set intentions and goals, then reflect: Get crisp on why you are doing something, what you are seeking, and where you want to go. Often our greatest growth occurs through reflection. Without being clear on what we out seeking, it is hard to assess if we have been successful.
7 Don't give up on ideas or people. This doesn't mean cling to an idea that should pass or remain in an unhealthy or unproductive relationship. Hold that there is a bigger vision to be filled; that relationships serve us in ways that are known and unknown; that our future and well-being are bound up in the future of others.
8 Be the team. Understand that being part of, accountable, and contributing to a team will allow for your best self to succeed and others' best selves to show through. The struggles we face are so massive, and our capacities are so miniscule, that the only possible way to overcome will be in highly invested partnerships with others. This necessitates releasing some control, both to create room for others to contribute best thinking and to increase buy-in.
9 Holiness of wholeness: As Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.“ There is something we are part of that is greater than the individual goals we seek in our day-to-day work. There is something holy in each person we engage, in each meeting we facilitate, in each leader we support on their path. However one defines sacred: God, nature, waves crashing, possibly something else, there is the opportunity to contribute to this greater wholeness.
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