Community is Dead. Long Live Community.

We all know the story. It used to be that the social norm was that you had to belong to a community: a country club, dare I say a synagogue. That was all well and good. But today, everyone has multiple identities, and that means that the idea of "belonging" to one place exclusively (yes, even any one online place) has fallen a bit out of style.

Here's the funny thing, though: we still yearn for community. We rebel against being labeled; against being committed to one place or the next. Yet we can't quell that part inside that wants to feel connected, to be part of something larger than ourselves with shared values and purpose.

At a recent event, I heard someone talk about how, as a teenager, he thought he was going to be connected to the Jewish community as an adult. Now, in his thirties, he looks back and sees that his life has taken different turns. He isn't attracted to the organized Jewish life in his locale. Nor has he really found community of another sort. He seems wistful about this. Clearly, he isn't actively trying to pursue such an elusive concept; indeed, he doesn't know what he could even do, if he wanted to. But, on some level, it seems to bother him.

I feel like a lot of us in my demographic are in this boat. Then again, as I shared at the same event, I happen to be obsessed by the concept of community, and therefore happen to have extremely high, not to mention idealized, standards for what it is supposed to be (which may explain the vicissitudes in my personal attempts to try to find it). I have continued to insist that community is simply a function of humanity - that it is the obvious answer to some of our most basic needs as human beings. How could something like that simply go out of fashion?

But the truth is that lately I have begun to believe that we are just setting ourselves up for failure. Yes, there are those who live in communities that have certain standards in practices, beliefs and patterns of behavior that are universally accepted and observed. For those of us outside such communities, I'd like to argue that it's not just that there are recognized patterns and routines of community which are not observed. It's that they don't even exist anymore to begin with.

TO BE CONTINUED...

The Jewish Community: What Are We For?

Ownership. Denominations. Lay leadership. Shuls. These were just some of the “idols” the table I hosted at yesterday’s Jewish Futures conference shouted out in a visceral reaction to what concepts the Jewish community “worships” – should be smashed. (Esther Kustanowitz reports on the idol smashing, sparked by keynote speaker Rabbi Laura Baum of OurJewishCommunity.org, here).

There is, of course, something liberating about smashing idols - or even just about voicing out loud (or on twitter) what is frustrating us or holding us back. Yet a different point stuck with me from another keynote speaker, Courtney Martin: “We’ve gotten really good at expressing what we are against on the internet, but we aren’t so good at articulating what we are for."

I believe this observation has important implications for "community and the cloud" (the theme of this year's conference) and the Jewish future. You can surely, for instance, rally people together, online and/or in person, around being against any of the proposed "idols," and there were indeed some popular ones. Doing so might create a network or even a community of those who develop relationships through discovering this commonality.

But what about the Jewish future? What are we "for" that is really worth not only preserving but also nurturing and growing for generations to come? Martin went on to say that what we need is more "imagining and utopian thinking," and I believe she's right. Here in the present, it's easier to say we should simply cast off whatever isn't working than it is to truly and honestly examine what is happening, what made it that way - and where there are tiny kernels of change that just may take off and lead us all forward. Are we prepared and do we have the courage to take those bold bets on which kernels, if nourished, will yield a better future?

Alongside the story of Abraham and the idols, I think we need to look at Abraham and his journey to Canaan. G-d tells Abraham not just to leave Haran, but to go to "the land I will show you" where he will be a great nation and a blessing.

Creating a vision of what the Jewish future could be takes perception to see trends; creativity, innovation, and imagination to dream up how those patterns could play out; and persistence to shape what is here now into what is coming next. This is not easy. It does not need to mean ignoring or condoning the "idols" of our community. But if you smash those idols without giving deep thought to what vision you want to rise up in their place, you miss out not only on opportunities to build from the values and lessons that informed the past, but also on the opportunity to really lead the Jewish community where our passion, creativity, and vision dream we should go.

Will you come along? What's your vision?

The Issue of Community

This post originally published here on PunkTorah.org - thanks to PunkTorah for enabling me to share my thoughts!

My memories of Camp Ramah are vivid but fleeting: smiling children dove and swam all the way across the screen as the projector rolled in my after-school Hebrew School in suburban Connecticut.

I never did persuade my parents to send me to Camp Ramah. But it certainly was not for lack of trying. Throughout my childhood years working my way through public school, I craved what those smiling children represented to me: a sense of community, built off the commonality of a shared Jewish identity; a place with people like me.

I first found this Jewish community for myself in perhaps the most unlikely of places – Princeton University, to be exact. I found religion too, and my husband. But when anyone would ask on a deeper, more psychological level why I choose to be religious, or start a family, I would come back to this core, human concept of the search for community (or my equally innate and possibly related desire to cook and feed people – but that’s a story for another time).

Post-college until the present, my husband and I have found ourselves in non-transient, suburban Modern Orthodox communities as young married adults with less-than-school-age children. We’ve discovered that, for better or for worse, the world is not a college campus. The casual observer of Modern Orthodox life might ask: really? Communal meals, organized programming, living walking distance from one’s closest friends – surely this all exists for both populations.

The truth is that my demographic is a hard sell, in Modern Orthodox circles and beyond. It’s not that the communities we’ve lived in haven’t given us a warm welcome, because they have. And it’s definitely not my lack of a desire to participate in local, community-building activities.

The usual excuses for my demographic holding back include our preoccupations with our budding careers and attention-demanding babies. While this may have been true historically and may even still be true currently, I believe the root of the issue comes to the complexity of the concept of community in today’s world. Who is your community? Your 1,067 “friends” on Facebook? Your family and friends developed over your 20-something years including, yes, former college roommates, who, probability has it, are now spread around the country, if not the world? The people in your inbox, Google hangout, or Twitter stream, who you may or may not have met in person? These avenues and more all lead to an inevitable feeling of hyper-global-connectivity, and the Modern Orthodox just as well as anyone else of this generation face multi-faceted decisions about where, how, and why to invest their community-building efforts, and with whom.

The issue of community has become so murky that there are those who declare it irrelevant and passé entirely. I beg to differ, and not only because of the weekly thud back into the territory of the local and non-virtual known as Shabbat. I differ because of this longing I have felt from such a young age to feel connected, supported, and identified with on a basic and intimate level. Technology’s increase of the number and variety of means to connect aids but does not necessarily abet such natural desires.

Given all of this, perhaps it’s not terribly surprising that personally, and rather unconsciously, I ended up professionally fixating on the issue of community and how to build it in a Jewish world, transdenominationally. I want to help people connect on personal, Jewish levels, to answer these needs for each other, and to create more ways to expand and spread this supportive community. I want people to see all the advantages of having opportunities to connect, locally as well as globally, personally as well as professionally – because the lines between these categories seem to be blurring all the time.

Through the process of doing this, I have even found ways to fulfill needs of community for myself. Yet while I have developed plenty of processes for community-building, I do not know of a singular answer to the questions around community – especially when it comes to the simplest ones, like what it is or where to find it. Rather, I believe engaging in the exploratory process is part of the point. I believe that community-building is a life-long journey, and however much effort you invest in it, relationship by relationship, you will see a corresponding reward. That’s the fabric of life, and one I want to teach my children to weave – whether or not I send them to Camp Ramah.