Engaging Volunteers for a New Kind of Jewish Community

The Gimmel cohort of the Schusterman Rabbinical Fellowship just finished up a retreat focused on creating a vision, managing strategic change, and working with volunteers and a board in a synagogue setting. David Spinrad, an SR Fellow from HUC-JIR in Cincinnati, shared these reflection about the gathering:

It's morning, and I'm at my desk. I arrived home last night from our August retreat at the Pearlstone Center in Maryland, but instead of feeling tired from the travel, I feel energized by the experience and encouraged by our subject matter. We covered a great amount of material in a relatively short time, focusing primarily on community building through creatively engaging members of the congregation and we also dug deeply into the mission, vision and values of our congregational communities. It felt great to be in a setting with other passionate people, talking, brainstorming and dreaming of what we can do to help the Jewish community and our communities at large pulse with life and meaning.

At the heart of the forty-eight intense hours we fellows spent with Rabbi Ellen Flax, synagogue and non-profit consultant Rabbi Hayim Herring and the innovative volunteer strategist Jill Friedman Fixler a thought kept spinning around my head and continues to fill me now: We can either see the world and our Jewish communities as they are, or we can practice holding and envisioning them as they might be. Or, maybe, there exists a third path, a middle path, a quintessentially Jewish path that requires courage, chutzpah and even a willingness to fail in order to breathe new life into Jewish life. We can think differently about our communities, our people, our institutions and how we live out our eternal brit. Our world is challenging us to both stand strong in our devotion to God, Torah and Israel and demanding from us a willingness to articulate this relationship with a vision that speaks specifically to where we'll be tomorrow.