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There’s a lot of talk about new ways to engage young families. Many of these younger folks tell us they don’t want to follow the same path we followed. They say they want to learn “where they feel comfortable.” Wouldn’t it be incredible , and productive for Jewish life, if when we heard someoneRead More
I spent last week traveling between Omaha, Denver, and Richmond, attending three sets of JCC Maccabi Games—the twenty-ninth year—and I was moved again by seeing thousands of Jewish teen athletes in the midst of an incredible experience.
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Having been around as long as I have, I have watched Jewish organizations adapt to new realities of the marketplace when they go out to seek staff. When we needed marketers, development people, IT specialists, HR professionals, we did what we needed to do to attract these people to work for us. In staffing, that translates to offering competitive salaries, benefits packages, and other enticements. Our actions do not match our rhetoric when it comes to teachers, however.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about how difficult we make it for people to try us out, to get to know us and feel welcomed by Jewish institutions. All too often, the first word they hear is “membership,” which immediately puts a price on coming in the door. While this model made a lot of sense for a very long time, it just isn’t the way that people think today.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the need to change the rules of engagement in Jewish life. For too long ,we’ve lived by “unwritten” rules that we just seem to follow. It’s an unwritten rule, for example , that synagogues “do religion and ritual”, yet numerous organizations are responding to the clamoring for Jewish spiritual connection that may not include traditional prayer.
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