“Who will pay for this?” is the question Rabbi Noa Kushner asks in her thoughtful S3K report “Doing Jewish Stuff”—An Experiment Called NITA.” NITA—meaning “we will plant, we will grow” is a program run by Rabbi Kushner in Marin County, California, a region of 15% affiliation rates, that connects young unaffiliated Jews with their Judaism. Not an easy task.
Her astute question reminds us of the observation from Pirke Avot that Ayn kemach, ayn Torah—without flour, without sustenance, without resources, there is no Torah study. In the asking she begins to bridge the mitzvah of learning Torah with the bread of ensuring we have resources for that effort. And a key question it is.
I returned from the General Assembly in New Orleans—with its emphasis on digital technologies—amazed by the wide variety of experiments underway in the American Jewish community. What a tribute to our collective creativity and engagement; what a wonderful source of new possibilities; what a remarkable set of options for moving Jewish practice into a new digital era. Yet I was also struck by the realization that we live in a world where resource availability is increasingly polarized. On one side are a vast array of small, hand-to-mouth entrepreneurs whose creative programming responds to local needs. They operate in a single locale and on a small scale so they need minimal funding and they know that with digital technologies they can be heard around the globe. Theirs are among the most creative efforts we have, and they are highly responsive to local needs because if they are not they will die a quick death. Yet they affect only a few individuals. Most importantly they’re funded on a shoestring, often without the resources to broaden their reach; they are kept alive by the sweat and personal commitment of underfunded young people who literally and figuratively have religion.
On the other side are large, usually philanthropically funded efforts of broader, perhaps national scope. They too are creative. They are run thoughtfully, systematically, and they assess their impact carefully. We learn much from their successes as well as their failures. They consume a significant part of our community’s financial resources, and when they succeed, they offer solutions to that may work in any locale in North America. This larger philanthropic world with its substantial resources exerts significant influence and appeal . And the efforts in this world are focused with laser-like sharpness on what the patron—the financier—wants to provide, rather than on what Jewish educators, parents, and children want to learn. Ultimately it risks becoming detached from, or misinterpreting, the needs of the larger community.
This is the polarized world I saw in New Orleans, and I ask: do we want to live in it? It seems a world in which people engage in the mission of Jewish learning primarily as hobbyists—either in small efforts while they hold down day jobs to earn a decent living, or as well-heeled philanthropists who made their fortunes elsewhere, (and of course employ a few other people to help them implement their vision).
Where is the middle ground? We know that much innovation—from this firm and others like it—has come from the private sector, which depends for its survival on producing materials that are effective, engaging, and that stand the test of whether educators want to use them, readers want to read them, and gamers want to play them. And so I wonder: how dependent do we want to be as a community on centrally planned programming and giving? Obviously it has a place in the nonprofit world. And yet I know from prior experiences—including strategic consulting for, among other places, two significant museums on the East Coast—that philanthropy can be fickle. Funding builds bricks and mortar, yet often neglects the need for ongoing operating cost support—who will heat the building?
Central planning does not always account for the interests, passions, and needs of those who want to learn, who are seeking a new Judaism—i.e. the needs of the marketplace. What is vibrant and active one day can disappear the next, as patrons shift their focus and interests. And how dependent can we afford to be on the tireless efforts of a small band of young people who can barely make a living from their efforts on behalf of us and our children. What happens as they grow up and want to establish and support families of their own? We need a more robust and sustainable model. One in which educational and learning ventures can create dynamic lives of their own, lives that build on and then outlast the initial investment that created them. They need to be allowed to develop into sustainable enterprises that endure by attracting the ‘funding’ that a marketplace of products, ideas, and services provides—or fail if they cannot. Where, then, is that middle ground of innovation? Who, in Rabbi Kushner’s words, will pay for this?
