Community and Society ArchiveWelcome to Community and Society where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the changing nature of community and society in America today. What are the challenges and opportunities these changes represent for the Jewish people in America at the dawn of a new century? To access the Community and Society Archive, click here.
"The Future of Social Change," a seminar of CLALs Jewish Public Forum held May 20-21, 2002 in New York City, brought together a dozen leaders in social advocacy, philanthropy and the arts. eCLAL is publishing a series of articles based on participants contributions to the seminar. To view other essays from "The Future of Social Change" seminar, click here. This seminar was part of Exploring the Jewish Futures: A Multidimensional Project On the Future of Religion,Ethnicity and Civic Engagement. For more information about the project, click here.
Ruth Messinger participated in "The Future of Social Change"
seminar. She is
the President and Executive Director of American Jewish World Service. AJWS is a not-for-profit organization that
provides financial support, technical assistance, emergency relief and skilled volunteers
to grassroots non-governmental organizations in the developing world without regard to
race, religion or nationality. These groups
are involved in community building, and in sustainable agriculture, education, health,
economic development, womens empowerment and civil society work in Africa, Asia,
Latin America, the Middle East, Russia and Ukraine. Under
Messingers leadership, AJWS is expanding its scope and visibility and creating new
service, education and outreach programs. At
AJWS, Messinger is continuing her lifelong pursuit of social justice, helping people take
responsibility for improving the quality of their lives and their communities.
Jewish Service: A New Option for 21st Century American Judaism By Ruth
Messinger
We
are at a new point in our lives as American Jews. We
enjoy affluence and security unique in Jewish history.
At the same time, there are immense needs in the world. Millions of people are victims of poverty, hunger,
disease and oppression. American Jewry
will be significantly shaped by our ability to reach beyond our
focus on Israel and on Jews in need to help the lives of all people in need around the
world. A
new model of Jewish service needs to be articulated that is informed both by Jewish
sources and by the radical new challenges of our time.
What
we need are ways to carry out the primary Jewish obligation to be of service to others--in
our own religious communities, in our cities, in our nation, in the world. We need to feed the hungry and care for the
stranger and help to throw off the oppressions that plague people in our time. We need a structure for Jewish service precisely
because it is an important way for us to fulfill our responsibility to our world. My vision is of a
place and time when service by Jews, in a Jewish context, has become a rite of passage in
and for the Jewish community -- something that Jews are expected to do. This service will be done globally, in the U.S.,
Israel, Europe and the so-called developing worlds of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. It will be done by people ages 15-75, and it will
involve work with Jews and with non-Jews. The
programs that provide the opportunity for this work will have several things in common:
they will take people outside of themselves to work for social justice in a place or with
people who are the other, who are in some ways different from themselves; they
will do this in a Jewish context and the work will, in the process, transform the
participants. To
help imagine what this vision would look like and how it might come about, I will present
a success scenario in which such programs come to thrive in a single city. Imagine that in 2015 in [lets say] Portland,
Oregon, Jewish service has become the norm. Each
year, for the past 10 years, more and more Jews of all ages have engaged in service
projects. Some college students have worked
over spring break, building homes in El Salvador. A
few congregations are part of a vast network of literacy volunteers in the Portland
schools, and some of these volunteers find the work so compelling that they then enroll in
longer programs that take them outside of their own community. A local Jewish high school has seen students from
its senior class sign up to work on an Indian reservation each of the last five summers. Many adults have spent two months sharing their
professional skills with NGOs in Latin America. Some
professionals are part of a health team that is staffing three clinics in rural Uganda. Others have given a summer to help rebuild the
Jewish community in Argentina or to reclaim a synagogue alongside a community in the
Ukraine. Another large group has gone to
Israel for six months each year to teach English to Israeli Arabs. And each year a sizeable group of recent college
graduates has lived together and worked with poverty agencies throughout the state,
learning organizing and advocacy skills. What
is different in Portland in 2015 is not the types of service that people are doing, since
programs of most of these types already exist in the Jewish community. What is different is the expectation that at some
point in their lives active and involved Jews ought to join a service program, ought to
give some time to one of these efforts at social change.
In
Portland, in my imaginary construct, this happened because two rabbis of large
congregations, a Hillel Director, and the head of the federation committed themselves to
developing and promoting the concept of Jewish service.
They communicated to students and to congregants that service was something
Jews were expected to do. They attracted the
attention of significant funders, and the existing service programs, largely originally
based in the Northeast, flocked to Portland to set up local branches. What
is different, as well, is the sense of critical mass.
In the last 10 years, 1,200 students have gone on spring break, 1000
have spent at least a year doing local service, and 5000 Jews of all ages have been part
of other projects. The numbers have shaped
the community. The various returned
volunteers speak regularly about their experiences.
Often they refer to this work as having transformed their lives, as giving
them new perspectives on the world and on their own ability to make a difference. Many of them say that realizing that social
justice was a critical pillar of Judaism has made them more serious about their
involvement in Judaism. People
are recruited for the various programs by the alumni who preceded them. Many program graduates have committed to work in
the non-profit social justice community, creating and staffing local change organizations,
working as volunteers, raising money for people they got to know in Kiev or Gaza, in
Portland or Peru. Some have chosen to take
their social change experiences into the Jewish community, and they are today leaders of
projects in which they once participated or they help promote new service opportunities
for the groups with whom they work. There are
annual retreats and conferences to provide further training in advocacy. Service for social justice is an expected and a
rewarding activity that defines Judaism in Portland. And
why is this my vision? Why am I so
particularly committed to service as a way to transform individuals lives and also
make a difference for people in need? The
simple answer is that I have had this experience myself, firsthand, and am now watching it
again with the volunteers in American Jewish World Service (AJWS) programs and with the
nascent Jewish Coalition for Service, a project of the Trust for Jewish Philanthropy,
which unites fifteen Jewish service programs. My
life was shaped by early opportunities to do service, work with others, and get a sense of
my own capacity to make a difference. I did
my major stint not in Peru or Senegal, but in rural western Oklahoma. The culture was different, I had to determine who
I was, and I had to learn fast how to work with people of very different backgrounds and
beliefs. I realized that for me doing this
work was a part of being Jewish. At
AJWS, we run programs for adult professionals and for college students who go to the
developing world to share their energies, interests and skills. Our volunteers confront the reality of the other,
learn firsthand the gross inequities in the world and discover the capacity of all people
to plan and work for their own vision of social justice.
They emerge with a sense of themselves as people able to make a difference. And because they do this in a Jewish context, with
Jewish learning, they find a new way to connect to their faith, to take seriously its
mandate to help heal the world. I
think this vision of making service a normative facet of 21st century American
Judaism will address several contemporary needs: It will help people who are looking to
get a sense of themselves in the world as effective agents. It will also help individuals to fight against
growing alienation, and to create a sense of community.
In addition, it will make a contribution in a world in which there will be
an increasing need for cross-cultural experiences that promote cross-cultural
understanding. One
way to move toward this vision is to concentrate energies for several years on building a
service culture in the Jewish community in one city.
That is part of the plan of the Jewish Coalition for Service; it would like
to be funded to do this in a few geographic jurisdictions.
The challenge is how to make change on this scale. I speak as a fundraiser and as a funder. Too often there is a new good idea, such as the
one promoted, in my hypothetical example, by a few forward looking leaders in the Portland
community. These kinds of leaders, people who
can envision a future that is different from the present, people willing to run risks to
make change, are essential to any such effort. Unfortunately,
in this project, as in most innovative and paradigm shifting projects, the status quo
rules the day. What usually happens is that
after significant effort, funding is secured and the innovative program is established. At first it is small and it is therefore seen as
marginal. Even were it to be very successful,
more often than not funders and evaluators would continue to see it in its initial
marginal context, as having served the small number of people who were part of it. Such innovative programs would almost never be
seen as the seeds of important new paradigms, worthy of funding on a grand scale. And
the institutional players (in this case the Hillels and local federations), which benefit
from having the new program available to them, do little to nothing to promote it, fund it
or imagine it as having a legitimate claim on existing resources. This is because the new paradigm is seen as being
in competition for what it is reasonable to imagine are scarce funds, although that may
not actually be the case. So funding is a
constant struggle, the programs benefit those who know about them and are accepted into
them, but there is no change in community norms. And
people in positions of power often boast about programs that they do very little to help;
they do not take the lead in trying to make such programs the accepted standard in their
communities. Real change does not occur. And
Jewish service, an idea I believe could make a dramatic difference in attracting Jews to
more active Judaism, in changing the ways in which Jews are seen around the world and in
changing the way in which Jews understand their obligation to the world, remains a
wonderful fringe activity. I
believe that forceful leadership could make the difference.
In the Portland example, I imagined the opposite happening. I described a situation in which the local
leaders were so committed and so forceful that they embraced the idea, recognized the huge
value of building critical mass, forced local and national funders to help them do this on
a large scale, and were able to show results. Unfortunately,
too many good ideas -- in this case ways for Jews to become more comfortable with their
Judaism -- are born, struggle for funding, live for a while and then shrivel up because
the existing institutional system has not made room for them. It
is my hope that it will be possible to alter this all-too-common pattern by joining forces
in the Jewish non-profit world, by creating a consortium of all the different service
programs to advocate for a shift in perspective regarding Jewish service. In this way, it might be possible for each of
these innovative programswhether it is Avodah which places college graduates in
urban poverty agencies in New York and D.C., or Otzma which sends students to work in
Israel, or the AJWS Jewish Volunteer Corps which sends adult professionals to the
developing worldto be recognized as essential players in the organized Jewish
community. In this way, it might be possible
to secure the funding that would allow these groups to grow and ultimately to change the
lives of a significant number of American Jews. To view other essays from "The Future of Family and Tribe" seminar, click here. To access the Community and Society Archive, click here.To receive the Community and Society column by email on a regular basis, complete the box below: |
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