The Tenuous Legacy of Legacy Institutions

For nearly a century, Jewish communities have relied on central institutions to give them the tools to lead fulfilling and secure Jewish lives. With the sharp rise in unaffiliated Jewish life and the growing atomization of society as a whole, these institutions have faced powerful questions about their effectiveness—questions that have become urgent in the wake of 10/7 and its aftermath: What have we learned from their response to the greatest wave of antisemitism in our lifetimes? What did they miss, and why? Do we need new institutions, and who would lead them?

About Our Moderator & Panelists:

Andrés Spokoiny

Andrés is a longtime Jewish communal leader with a history of leading successful organizational transformations. He served as the CEO of Federation CJA in Montreal and, prior to that, Andrés worked for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Community (JDC) in Paris. As Regional Director for Northeast Europe, he was responsible for a number of pan-European projects.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz serves as the senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California, and sits on the Executive Board of the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition. Following the events of October 7 and its aftermath, he penned his first book "The Case for Dual Loyalty," expected to be published in early 2025. The book challenges one of the oldest taboos in American Jewish life. He argues that proudly declaring Jewish loyalty forges a new path forward imbued with pride of peoplehood and collective destiny.

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield is the Chief Executive Officer at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, where she leads the staff, shapes the vision, strategy, and growth, develops the culture, and oversees programs and operations. She previously served as Executive Vice President for 8 years.

Rachel has served in the field of Jewish education and social justice for more than two decades as an entrepreneur, executive leader and educator. Previously, Rachel was Director of Experiential Education at the American Jewish World Service, and the founding director of the Jewish Greening Fellowship, the first organized effort in the Jewish communal space to address climate change.

Tova Dorfman

Tova Dorfman serves as the president of the World Zionist Organization. Dorfman was elected after serving as vice-chairman of the World Zionist Organization and as head of the Department for Israel and Holocaust Commemoration, and she will continue to serve as CEO of the Steinhardt Foundation simultaneously. In the past, Dorfman also served as chairman of the Herzl Center, associate chairman of the Foundations Forum in Israel, and managed the Israel and Foreign Department of the Jewish Federation of Detroit.

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Video Transcript

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: For those of you who are attending this this lecture, I just want to make sure this is the tenuous legacy of legacy institutions. And I hope we can deliver. It's my absolute pleasure to introduce the panel sitting to my left beginning with my immediate left. Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield is the chief executive officer, Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.

Rachel's the chief executive officer. Where she leads the staff, shapes the vision, strategy, growth, develops the culture, and oversees programs and operations. She previously served as Executive Vice President for eight years. She has served in the field of Jewish education and social justice for more than two decades.

As an entrepreneur, executive leader, and educator, previously Rachel was Director of Experiential Education at the American Jewish World Service and the founding director of the Jewish Greening Fellowship, the first organized effort in the Jewish communal space to address climate change. She's a founding advisory committee member for Dayenu, A Jewish call to climate action serves on the board of JPRO and has previously served on the boards and executive committees of Girl, Be Heard, and her synagogue.

Thank you for that. And I'm sorry. She was a fellow in the National Sela Leadership Program and is a graduate of the Molstein Fellowship for Jewish Professional Leadership. She serves as a mentor and coach to emerging leaders in Jewish life. Rachel graduated summa cum laude from Washington University, earned her MA in comparative literature at the University of Cal, Berkeley.

She lives in Riverdale, New York, with her husband, a psychiatrist, and has two grown children.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: Spokoiny, President and CEO of the Jewish Funders Network, is a longtime Jewish communal leader with a history of leading successful organizational transformations.

He serves as a CEO of Federation, CJA in Montreal, and prior to that, worked as a for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Community, JDC, in Paris. As Regional Director for Northeast Europe, he was responsible for a number of pan European projects. While at JDC,

also served as the Director of Leatid Europe, a leadership training institute for Jewish lay and professional leaders, and directed the International Center for Community Development, a partnership of JDC and Oxford University to produce applied research and knowledge management for community development practitioners.

Before his Jewish communal work, Andrés

worked for IBM and was responsible for training, development, hiring, and recruitment for IBM's Latin America Southern Region during a period of major restructuring. Originally from Argentina,

Has a multidisciplinary academic background including business, education, rabbinical studies in different institutions around the world.

He's fluent in Hebrew, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Yiddish, and is also proficient in Russian. He's the author of the novel El Impío and a non fiction book Tradition and Transition. Jewish Communities and the Hyper Empowered Individual by Geffen Publishing, and I will talk about it in just a minute.

And last but not least, I'd like to introduce Tova Dorfman. Chairwoman, Department for Israel and Holocaust Commemoration Worldwide. Deputy Chairwoman of the World Zionist Organization.

Tova Dorfman: Okay, that's been changed since. I'm President of the World Zionist Organization.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: President of the World Zionist Organization.

That's hot off the press. Didn't happen last night because this was printed a few days ago. It didn't happen about a year ago, but that's okay. They didn't change

Tova Dorfman: my CV apparently.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: Okay, terrific. Mazel tov, by the way. Tova assumed the position of Deputy Chairwoman.

President of the World Zionist Organization recently, obviously. In November of 2020, Tova was appointed the chair of the Herzl Center and Museum of the World Zionist Organization. Tova's a member of the board and the Yish Ati party since its founding in 2012. She's also the director of the Steinhardt Family Foundation in Israel.

In that capacity, she oversees the provision of assistance to a variety of non profits operating in the area of children and youth at risk, education and young adult leadership. And it's forged significant partnerships among other philanthropic foundations, private and public sector agencies, and non profits in a number of far reaching educational and social ventures.

She also serves as the co chair of the Forum of Foundations in Israel, a professional network of over a hundred philanthropic foundations operating in Israel. Raised in Oak Park, Michigan, Tova pursued her undergraduate and graduate studies in Los Angeles, and upon completion, she made Aliyah in 1984.

From 1984 to 1993, she worked for Melitz, the Centers of Jewish Zionist Education in Jerusalem, throughout her career. See? Throughout her career, as my, all of my cards have now been reshuffled somehow. Yeah.

She's always been at the forefront of innovative, creative programming and has been singularly successful in bringing around the table of all of these programs, key individuals and institutions that provide to them an invaluable synergy. Tova lives with her husband, Dr. Aviv Schwartz, and their two sons, Matan and Yaniv, outside of Tel Aviv.

My name is Rabbi Nolan Leibovitz and I recently completed my Ph. D. studies at Claremont through my Fulbright Scholarship. It brought me to study at Bar Ilan University. Three years ago, I was named the Senior Rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom. Small little 1, 200 family synagogue institution with a day school religious school, a preschool, and programming around the clock in Encino, California.

My upcoming book was plugged by David Hazony here. It is called The Case for Dual Loyalty, Healing the Divided Soul of American Jews. Welcome everybody to this conversation. I hope this is a free flowing conversation and Not so much driven alone by myself and so I want to begin with the framework of this conversation being that we all agreed on our Zoom call that we weren't going to go about naming legacy institutions.

So if you're coming here, if you're coming in hopes that you're going to hear some scuttlebutt about specific institutions, you're going to have to use your imagination a little bit in thinking about. who we're speaking about or what we're speaking about. I hope that we use buckets to frame this conversation, meaning we'll speak about educational legacy institutions or we'll speak about philanthropic legacy institutions, religious legacy institutions, and we can all then, I hope, use those lessons to each of the institutions with which we are personally associated.

In what ways do you think that the premise of legacy institutions proved mistaken, or they took the conception for granted before October 7th. In what ways did October 7th reframe the mission or the purpose of the legacy institutions with which we are associated, with which we are so familiar? Andrés ?

Andrés Spokoiny: Yeah first of all, great to be here, and thank you. So I think, first of all, I want to reframe something. The word legacy, it became a slur lately, and that's both unfair and wrong. The legacy, because, the fact the legacy means that they withstood the test of time. Not automatically everything that is legacy is bad. That doesn't mean they're perfect. There's a lot of issues, but I want to say that, many of the legacy organization, quote unquote, if they didn't exist, we would have to create them. it's funny that I defend legacy organizations when I represent independent philanthropy that came as a counter power, if you want The legacy organization, but I think it's important to realize how important those organizations are for the Jewish ecosystem.

The problem for legacy organizations, and for all Jewish organizations really, comes from before October 7th. Comes from the fact that the world has changed. The human being of the 21st century is very different to the human being of the 20th century. The world has become Very unpredictable.

Think about it, not just October 7th, but every major event that shaped our lives in the last 30 years wasn't predicted. From the fall of the Berlin Wall, that, surprised Helmut Kohl, even, that was on vacation in Spain at the time. Everything was a surprise. Our organizations are not built, were not thought, to deal with such level of unpredictability.

It's nobody's fault. It's just the organizational paradigm was an organizational paradigm built for times of relative stability. That's the first thing. The second thing that is even more important is the rise of what I called in my book that you mentioned, I called the hyper empowered individual.

We live in a time in which individuals, as individuals, are hyper empowered, they have a level of, power, agency and creativity that we never had in all human history, right? So that is gonna put a lot of pressure on organizations that are based on top down programming on collective framework, and they don't live in a space for that.

On top of that, We live in a time of disintermediation. Like, how, when was the last time you guys used a travel agent? We don't. We disintermediate life. And we disintermediate Jewish life as well. So legacy organizations that were predicated on being an intermediate between the individual Jew and the Jewish experience are structurally in crisis.

On top of that comes October 7th. Now, we're October 7, interestingly enough, had a dual effect on legacy organization. And again, legacy, as you said, the different buckets. One thing is a federation, the other thing is advocacy organization like ADL, AJC. Synagogues are legacy organizations too. But I think that something happened which is counterintuitive.

In October 7, some of the legacy organizations show a level of, I would call it, inadequacy or being too caught in the old conceptia, especially all the advocacy organizations. But others rose to the challenge and got a new lease of life. For the federations, for example, it was 1973 all over again.

Because we need to get money off the door fast. Who can do it? UJ New York, put the hand in the pocket and takes ten million dollars out of their endowment. the problem, and I hope, we're going to be talking about this later, is that the same thing that made it shine, the crisis, may make it very difficult for them to leverage the opportunities that this crisis is going to create.

Long into the future. Yeah, long into the future, and I would say in the issue of anti Semitism, there's a whole I don't want, I don't want to monopolize here, but I guess we're going to talk, we're going to talk about that later. But so let's pivot from the philanthropic to the educational.

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: Yeah.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: How do you see it, Rachel? Great. So first of all, I want to say people who are standing here, there are lots of empty seats I can see. So maybe we'll just take a minute to let people sit down. As a rabbi, I just assume the front row will remain empty.

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: front row

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: people. Okay, just assume.

Andrés Spokoiny: When your mom is not coming. That's right. My parents don't sit in the front row, they sit in the back row.

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: Okay, so first of all, I really want to thank andrés

for framing the whole conversation that way. I think it's a really useful framing and to pick up on what you were saying, I think it's so often The truth that where organize, the shadow side of organizations where we where we fail is also tends to be like the flip side of that tends to be the bright lights of organizations.

So these, many of these legacy organizations were able to do incredible work around crisis, raising funds federation getting, raising more than 800 million and getting it out the door. But the shadow side of that is it's much harder to organize people. and convene people around a kind of aspirational urgency.

Like something needs to happen in terms of us building a future for Jewish life. Let's get people really excited about that, right? And I think that's part of what has been missing, and there are all kinds of reasons for that, and perhaps we'll discuss some of them. I wanna talk for a minute about the bucket of education because I think there are a lot, there are a lot of anecdotes we could all share, I'm sure, from our personal lives and our relationships.

I'm as well as from news about the ways in which, I think Jewish education has failed our young people as particularly on campus. And I say this as a parent with one child left on a campus. I see it happening on a daily basis. I think that we hear this, in the field. We work with Jewish educators at the Hartman Institute, and we hear about the ways in which education, Jewish education has long bifurcated Jewish education and Israel education.

They are separate disciplines with separate experts. Now, what happens when you bifurcate those two things is that Jewish education becomes a values based discourse, right? I believe in tikkun olam. I believe in chesed. and I can express all of those Jewish values, and that's my Jewish identity.

In fact, if you look at the Pew study, more than 70 percent of Jewish Americans talk about expressing their Jewish identities through justice work, right? Through that set of lenses. But then when Israel isn't talked about in the same way, when Jewish peoplehood isn't seen as an intricate and integral value of Jewish identity.

It becomes a se thing that you can separate out from Jewish identity. It becomes a political conversation. It becomes an ideological conversation. Instead of me feeling as a Jewish student, no, actually Jewish peoplehood is a value that's important to me too. And what I'm experiencing right now after October 7th is a tension between my values.

I am feeling. Feeling distraught by the war. I'm feeling distraught by what I see happening in Gaza, but I also feel very connected to the Jewish people. I feel connected to Israel. That's my value too. And then guess what? We can have a nuanced conversation about what it means to support Israel. But not agree with its government, for example.

You can hold that position, that's okay. But I think because of the way our young people have been educated, they feel forced to choose between justice values, and what I call peoplehood values, and that puts them in a really difficult position. And I really think going forward, if we want to see a future where our rabbinical students aren't signing letters that are more empathic, Towards, Palestinian lives and towards Jewish lives in Israel if we want to see a future where our Jewish young people are able to see Jewish peoplehood in a wide variety of Zionisms we've had for, since the history of Zionism, all of which we can discuss and be a part of.

If we want to see that happen, we get better at educating our young people. in a values based discourse around Jewish peoplehood and Jewish belonging.

Andrés Spokoiny: Can I add something to that?

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: okay.

Andrés Spokoiny: No, I think that the main failure of the Jewish Education Act, I agree 100 percent with you.

I think that it all stems from a sense of cultural insecurity, right? At the left, we have this cultural insecurity, Judaism is not good enough, it's not compelling enough, therefore, we're gonna stress universalism and we're gonna weaken the sense of Jewish solidarity because that makes us look tribal and whatever.

And on the right, because we have cultural insecurity, we don't tolerate dissent or criticism of Israel because, oh, then people are not gonna be able to handle. And I think that to get out of the cultural insecurity and educate people to proudly belong and realize that solidarity and belonging works in concentric circle, that you can't be a universalist if you don't have a particular identity.

Your particular identity is the laboratory that teaches you how to be, how to have solidarity with the world. and to the right saying, listen, my own Zionist attachment became much, much stronger. by being critical of Israel because it, it taught me that I can eventually do something to improve it and to change it.

I would love for Jewish organizations to embrace what I would call Kaplan Zionism, go and demonstrate. And feel it as part of something that you can co create.

Tova Dorfman: So I'm glad you raised that because I was, I'm coming from the Israeli perspective.

And I think that what's happened is an opportunity to actually have real dialogue between Israelis and Jews around the world.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: Yeah.

Tova Dorfman: American Jews for purposes of, here, because we have not had a real serious dialogue, understanding of one another. Every time I speak to people here, I really feel like they just can't grasp what's happening in Israel.

They can't grasp what's going on in Israeli lives. As much as they visit it and as much as they want to engage It's not real. And the same goes for Israelis, have no clue, really no clue about American Jews, and understanding what goes on here. And so there's a big disconnect.

And I think this is an opportunity post October. Maybe I'm jumping ahead, but I do think it's important to start talking about that and to start talking about having this dialogue be nuanced. And that if you are critical of the Israeli government, it doesn't mean you can still love Israel and be critical of Israeli government policy.

I know it's problematic for people here because they get pegged, put into a certain corner. But I think that it's important, that's real conversation. And we need to look for those kind of opportunities. And it was great that everybody raised a lot of money. We needed it. I have my own opinion about what it's going to do to Israel long term, what we talked about, let's say the day after, which we talk about what's going to happen the day after.

So I don't know if I want to go into that right now, we can maybe do it on a second round. But I do think that the funding issue, although it made everybody here feel good. I'm not sure for Israeli society, it's actually a good thing.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: So let's come back to education for a minute, because Andre, I'm going to use your three revolutions in your book that you talk about, okay?

They

Andrés Spokoiny: are? Revolution of meaning, revolution of belonging, and revolution of organizational structures. Perfect. You passed the test. Thank you.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: I

Andrés Spokoiny: Yes, sir.

Tova Dorfman: First of all, call it a book.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: So in a revolution of meaning,

Andrés Spokoiny: I

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: was thinking during the plenary session today if students came out of a school after 12, 15 years, they were preparing for, name the topic, accounting, right?

Let's choose the most benign topic possible, okay? And they didn't believe in accounting or they detested accounting or they protested against accounting. We would think by and large that school had failed. Thank you. Yes. That's why you're in the front row. Very good. So that school had failed. We wouldn't have a conversation about.

How do we pivot the accounting methodologies of all of our accounting schools to accommodate the 10 percent that fail? The problem is that some of us in this room have children who have failed. And so we turn around and we say, how do we change a system to create a revolution of meaning? So that we can keep those 10 percent because my friend's daughter is in that 10 percent and my friend's son is in that 10%.

So it's instead of saying maybe we should concentrate all of our efforts on emboldening the 60 percent standing out there. all part of the protests themselves, all part of the pro Israel protests, Maybe we should focus our efforts on the education that's working, on the philanthropy that's working, on the whatever that's working.

Why am I wrong?

Andrés Spokoiny: All right it's not that you're wrong, it's that two things can be right.

My wife starts a lot of comments like that. It's not that you're wrong. It's not that you're wrong, but you are. No,

you're not wrong. Actually, I would say even more. I think that in, in this day and age the limitation of boundaries of community is very important.

So imagine you're in a hospital in a, God forbid, on an operation, And there's two, two surgeons arguing about how to operate and what's the best way and what's the, cut here or cut there. And in comes RFK Jr. and says, I think we shouldn't do surgery. I think we should light incense and then you start arguing with RFK Jr.

Huh. And the patient, in the meantime, dies. Now, that is a little bit of what we're doing with anti Zionist. At some point, anti Zionism is not that as an opinion is invalid, although I think it is but it is that it's just irrelevant, it's futile. Israel exists, Zionism exists, 95 percent of the Jews are Zionist.

Enough of anti Zionism. Doing everything in order to convince a 5 percent that it doesn't want to be convinced and doesn't believe in modern medicine and whatever. Like at some point you can have to protect the mainstream by creating some sort of boundary. That doesn't mean that you exclude individuals, but you exclude ideologies and you stand and you say clearly what you stand for.

That's one thing. And the other, on the other hand. A lot of times when somebody tells you I'm not a Zionist, there's a lot of closet Zionists out there. Meaning a lot of people tell you, I'm not a Zionist, I disagree with Bibi. I disagree with Bibi too, just look at my Twitter. Like it's not but oh, so then what does it mean to be, like that's a nuance there too.

And then to your example of accounting, let's say people don't come out of the school saying I don't believe in the double entry method, but. I think that there is a much, much better way to do accounting. You want these people in the tent. Correct. So that's why you're right. And the other side, they try to include those people.

once you set the boundaries, I think it's very important. And in terms of the revolution of meaning, one of the things that I say in the book, and I say all the time is something, what you refer to, the lack of accountability. Positive vision for the future. Politics in general, and Jewish politics in particular, are defined by what we want to prevent.

There's a French political scientist called Piero Sanvalon the rise of the negative politics, meaning it's all to prevent stuff. Conservatives want to prevent stuff from happening, liberals want to prevent stuff from happening, Jews want to prevent anti Semitism, they want to stop Netanyahu's coup, but what are we standing for?

And I think that's what will ease the crisis of meaning. And that's why legacy organizations, that's what legacy organizations are not engaging enough in developing those. So Rachel,

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: I totally agree. And I want to give a statistic that underscores what you just said about there are more people who would identify, I think, in a Zionist camp than who would proclaim themselves to be actually supporters of Israel.

Boundless just did a study, they interviewed 18 to 40, a huge number, I don't remember the exact end, but 18 to 40 year olds and they found when they asked the question are you a Zionist? Only 30 percent of the Jewish respondents 18 to 40 said yes. But then when they asked do you believe in the right of a Jewish state in the, as a Jewish homeland in its current land of, that it exists.

I don't remember exactly how it was written. Sorry. Then the numbers doubled, right? So there was something about just like giving a definition to the word Zionism, which was significant. But I want to respond to something you said about the 10 percent and all that. So education is not a tactic.

Education is an expression of the values that we hold dear as the Jewish people. And I want there to be good education, not just for the people who I would hope would stay in the camp, who are on the margins, but I want a great Jewish education for those who identify, As fully on board.

I want them to continue to have a deep and meaningful and aspiring, forward looking values, education to be engaged with. And so I think that if I really, truly believe that if we offer educational models that are deeply rooted, in Jewish values that set clear boundaries, clear ideological boundaries, but say, these are my ideological boundaries, but if you're willing to come and learn in my classroom, Vakasha, come in, because you're part of the Jewish people, and part of who we want to be are the kinds of people who educate and who bring deep meaning.

So I think that it's not a question of a 10 percent or anything like that. I think it's about who do we wanna be as educators and what kind of aspiring vision do we want to build for the future? And how do we wanna co create that vision with our young people?

Tova Dorfman: So I wanna just say that part of this problem of defining Zionism is that we've left it out of the conversation for, I don't know since I remember being part of American Jewry.

It was never, very few organizations, this one was bold. Z3 was bold ten years ago to actually create a conference that dealt with Zionism. We've left it out of our conversation in the community at large, in synagogues, in JCCs, and in federations, and we just never dealt with it.

Very different than the rest of the world. Even the federations of the rest of the world are called Zionist federations. And we, the American Jewish community left it out because it was so problematic. All the issues, we don't have to go into dual loyalty and everything that really was there in the background that made it very uncomfortable for a Jewish community to say, we also want to be called the Jewish Zionist community.

Andrés Spokoiny: But American Judaism did that for a reason. we don't talk about Zionism, but we also don't talk about God. And we also don't we don't talk about anything because the fear is but here's what it's coming from. It's not that because people are stupid or bad intention.

The paradigm was, we don't need to put barriers of entry, right? That was the idea. assimilation is such a big problem and we're losing so much people that the solution for that is lowering entry barriers and not impose an ideological test, not to make not to put conversations that may turn people off.

But it was a good intention idea, and Let's create programs like Birthright, for example, which is a great program, but it's content light, because the more content you put, the more you scare people off. it's a well intentioned, but wrong assumption, because people, especially because of the crisis of meaning, People want content.

People want to wrestle with issues. And we need, we don't need to be afraid of talking about Zionism, God, values, internal solidarity, people who don't like with more content.

Tova Dorfman: And I think that's what happened on college campuses. That, I don't want to mention which organizations, because we're not supposed to mention organizations, but they really avoided, they could do, they could have falafel night, but the minute you brought in anything heavier in terms of content or political in nature, even though there was, apartheid week on college campuses, they didn't want to deal with it.

They wouldn't even let their own student body get involved because they didn't want any conflict. So that was going on way before October 7th for the last 20 years, if not more.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: And just to bring it back to religious spaces, as we talk about meaning and we talk about how content has been perhaps depreciated in an effort to.

Welcome more people. There was a philosophy of radical welcoming was the rabbinical school experience that I had, right? Radical welcoming was more important than Parshana. Cause you didn't need to know necessarily what all the commentators thought about the Torah because we're basically trying to welcome people into this building.

That's the most important thing. People should feel welcome and comfortable wherever they are on their religious journey. And I have found that the rabbis who have been most successful since October seven have said. We know where this journey is going to take us. We're actually going to stand for something.

People have gravitated towards that sense of meaning, even if all of those individual religious leaders have not articulated an exact message, because Jews are not good at all articulating the same exact message one after another, by standing up for Israel, by taking groups there, by Encouraging congregations to stand for ha tikvah for all of these other steps that could have taken a million different forms a myriad of different options Has presented itself it has brought people back into the synagogue spaces Without rabbi standing at the doors with cookies and juice and trying to do radical welcoming because people are seeking meaning again, it's not either or radical.

It's not either

Andrés Spokoiny: radical welcoming is a valid technique But I think that people Especially young people, but all of us. We all, in a way, operate like Gen Z in some part of our we value authenticity. there's a whole thing that, even, I'm not gonna get into politics, but there's something about the last election that people value a malignant authenticity, but an authenticity nonetheless.

So I think that in a way, The fact that we don't say what we're there for, what we stand for, it backfires. And you can do that by being radically welcoming, right? It doesn't think it doesn't, you go, by the way, you go to a Christian Pentecostal church.

They're extremely radical welcoming, right? Extremely. For example, newcomers. Have a special parking spot. .

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: Right.

Andrés Spokoiny: Extremely. but it's very clear what they stand for. Now. We are not like them in the sense that we wrestle with what we stand for. The wrestling I'm all okay with.

But from a place of stating clearly what we believe in.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: Yeah. Stephen Wynn Miller just wrote an article called Reimagining Liberal Judaism. Yes. And in that article he talks about this pull in terms that we have adopted much of the traditions, outlook of our Christian neighbors here in this country.

That's why we adopted denominations, right? In this, in the modern period. That's why we have the bimah raised, right? And the clergy stands and gives a sermon the way that it does. and that's not the way that our grandparents saw and experienced sermons in Anatevka, right? We have changed the way that Judaism expresses itself.

The post October 7th world, is it about now pulling back to Jews being authentically more Jewish, divorcing ourselves from the kind of American traditions that we have adopted, or legacy traditions, or legacy institutions, rather, are about somehow synthesizing all of this to create a next chapter.

Rachel, you were shaking your head no. In disagreement.

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: yeah, I want to give Tova a chance to speak first. No, I'll talk. Go ahead. Okay. Yeah I think Judaism is an interpretive tradition. No Judaism looks like the Judaism of the generation before it.

Andrés Spokoiny: a thing as authentic.

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: exactly. Judaism in New York is going to look different than Judaism in Anatevka, which is called Judaism. so that, I think what's worked really well for American Jews is that the liberal order has been a place where American Judaism can thrive.

In a way that Judaism has never thrived in a diaspora before, right? The fact that universities, until recently, have been multicultural centers of high level learning to which Jews have had access. The fact thatthe democratic process, the free and fair elections is something that works great for Jews, right?

All of the features of American liberal democracy have been very good to the Jewish people, and a free media. All of these aspects of American

Andrés Spokoiny: Independent

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: judiciary. Judiciary. All of these have been critical to the thriving of American Jewish life. And I think that, you're going to ask later what we can do going forward.

protecting these features of American democracy is going to be really important for the future of Jewish life. I think we can do all of that. We can be fully American. And also fully authentically Jewish and fully clear about what our values are, what our aspirations are, what our commitments are.

And that's on us to not shrink away from that. But I don't think that means that the shul needs to look like the shul in Anatevka. I think it means like actually the opposite. We have to figure out how to live fully into this moment, both as Americans and as Jews.

Tova Dorfman: from the Israeli perspective I think that we saw some kind of connection pre October 7th when the whole judicial reform issue came to the surface.

My feeling is that there's certain segments of American Jewish life that have no problem with the judicial reform. saying what they want to say and even being connected politically. And there is a part of the liberal, I would say liberal center left that has been, we don't want to, it's not our place.

It's no, we don't want to be involved. And I think it changed a little bit pre October 7th during that year, which we almost forgot about, by the way. that was a really tumultuous period in Israel and certainly here for the American Jewish community. That was confronted with a lot of issues of how to respond to what was going on where it was, defined as the demise of, possibly the demise of democracy in Israel.

And they were used to saying Israel is the only democratic state in the Middle East I think that the, again, I'm looking again at opportunities. of how we can engage better, and then I'm going to make a plug for the elections to the World Zionist Organization, which most people don't have any clue that there is a election every five years to the World Zionist Congress, which is the parliament, democratically elected parliament of the Jewish people, That was created by Theodore Herzl in 1897.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: Talk about a legacy institution.

Tova Dorfman: the legacy institution and it is very important that people vote because your vote actually has meaning and has a voice in changing policy. And of things that you may not agree with because it also has money attached to it. I don't want to go into the whole explanation, but that's one of the things I think that we don't know about as an American Jewish community.

last election there were 120, 000, 123, 000, I think, votes out of how many millions of Jews?

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: Six million. Okay.

Tova Dorfman: that number is anymore, if we can even count that. And we really have the ability to make change. I keep saying this and people go how am I doing this?

That's one thing, and anybody wants to know more we can talk about it at a different time, but I think that's really important to know that American Jews have the ability to change the reality in Israel, because there's a lot of money going to things that they may not agree with, that they could change the priorities.

of where those funds are going. That's right.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: I sit on the executive committee of Merikaz. Okay, so you know that. This should be a priority of the entire Jewish world.

Tova Dorfman: And this is the year to do it.

Andrés Spokoiny: Thank you for that plug. But I think going back to the, authenticity question.

When I was talking before about authenticity, the right word should be consistency rather than authenticity. Because Jewish authenticity, What does it mean? Like an atefka is not authentic either. If we want to be authentic, we need to be like Bedouin in the desert and do sacrifices like that. That's not a, like there's no authenticity.

Judaism is an evolving culture and it evolves organically. What happened was that we stopped that, that evolution, that's, that organic evolution and we have to kick start it again. , I was very confident in how legacy organizations would react in a crisis. I'm less confident of how they can serve as a venue to recreate that synthesis that new synthesis you're talking about.

The reason why I'm, a little bit more skeptical is because of the way that individuals build meaning today, which is as a personal journey and collective organizations are by definition. It's hard for them to provide individual space for search and for building your own identity. The main difference between the 20th century and the 21st century, in the 20th century, we could choose between identities.

Today, we're forced to build it, legacy organizations and non legacy organizations need to provide a platform for Jews, To engage in a meaningful conversation with their tradition that allows them to build their own identity.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: let me push back against that just for a minute because I was thinking about this example in the book.

You use all the examples of Rachel through the generations. Correct. Yes. Okay. So I sit down with Rachel's as well sometimes and thank God since October 7th, our synagogue has been one that's we grew by more than 5 percent this year in membership and lots of things to be grateful for in Encino, California.

But, sometimes I sit down with people, with members, and they say, membership is too high. Yeah. And I'm sitting with them in the dining hall of the country club where they belong. And they say that membership is too high at the synagogue. And also, the synagogue expects us to conform in X, Y, and Z.

Now, I'm sitting in a place where I'm not allowed to wear a hat, right? I'm not allowed to wear gym shoes. I'm not allowed to wear this. I'm not allowed to wear that. Because we're in the dining hall of the country club. But the synagogue has expectations on them, right? And I sit there and say, the synagogue's expectations are the right expectations for you.

You have somehow mixed up the different expectations in your life, and it's my job to come in and say to you that the synagogue needs you to come back home. You've spent too much time on the outside world. And so that way when you say there's no real Consistent Judaism, I say that's right.

Jews don't act in Sicily. They're not really authentic. There is consistency, but not authenticity. So I'm saying to you that, I think that what legacy institutions might offer in the long term, bringing it back to our conversation, is some notion of chadesh shaminu kekedem. We're able to renew the The tomorrow in accordance with what was yesterday.

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: I think the other challenge facing legacy institutions in this context Another thing that's really changed is polarization, right? So it used to be that legacy organizations could build consensus pretty easily around the middle, right? Right now, legacy organizations are being either fill, they're experiencing advocacy and pull on different sides of issues.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: Yeah.

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: And it's much harder for them to build some kind of message that speaks to, people broadly and brings people along.

Tova Dorfman: They're also scared of it. The Iran deal, which was, what year was that?

I can't remember. It was the first time that federations took a stand one, way, and that was real divisive, so they're scared

Andrés Spokoiny: They're very scared. And I think, it's fascinating what you're saying because all legacy organizations, all collective organizations, for that matter.

are predicated on reaching a consensus at some point and in a culture in which consensus disappear. And it's not only that we're polarized. We live in epistemic chaos. We live in parallel universes. Like the conversations around this latest election is not really different opinions.

It's different. Epistemic universes like people it's really from literally different and living in different realities. So how do you create? How do you maintain? Collectivity in that it's very it's gonna be very hard and probably they are, you know We're gonna get to that however, but the role of independent philanthropy in working together with legacy organizations Can help in a brief, you know creating that consensus or not penalizing You know, dissenting opinions.

Like one of the reasons why we fail in many aspects in October 7th, both in Israel and in the diaspora, is because of a lack of cognitive diversity. Meaning everybody at the Matkal believed that, at the General Chief of Staff in Israel and the Shavak and whatever, everybody believed that Hamas wasn't going to attack.

There were people that were saying no, they cannot, like the Tazpitaniot the girls in the, they were saying they're preparing for an attack the surveillance. Now, because everybody had the same mindset, that's what happened. The reason why we were caught so unawares about this,

It is the lack of cognitive diversity. And I think that's the real danger of polarization. . That we tend, that we, it drive us to living echo chambers and then it makes us much more fragile. And much less effective in dealing with challenges as they arise.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: So how do you counter that vulnerability?

So the vulnerability is arises in almost every sector of life today. There's whether. Right or left or traditional and more progressive. However, we want to understand the two sides. We live according to the, according to these teams, okay? What is the hope in Israel in terms of trying to have people speak with one another?

Tova Dorfman: Okay, so it's, right now it's, I don't even I, it's hard for me to even articulate because we are really in a mess. We had a Two, things happen so quickly. Two weeks ago, was it two weeks ago, I can't remember, the Minister of Defense was fired.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: Yeah.

Tova Dorfman: And then you had an outpouring, but because of what's happened in Israel, even that outpouring in the streets was very minimal.

And I think people are just worn down. And so everybody's in their own little camp. We don't see elections coming up so that we can actually express the differences that we have and make it happen. And so I think that we are in a really difficult position today to be able to have dialogue.

I know that there are people within Israel to understand one another. There's an attempt. I think the one thing, and that also got very politicized, unfortunately, and tragically is the hostage issue. That was the one thing that I still think though, bottom line, it's the unifying factor in Israel.

Everybody, and there was a poll yesterday, or the day before, 69 percent of Israeli public believes that returning the hostage is the number one issue. Okay? And only 30 percent feel like we need to continue with the war, regardless. And so that's a huge number.

I keep saying this because if we don't return our hostages, that will really be the beginning of, the destruction of the fabric of Israeli society because one of the biggest issues is you never leave anyone behind. It's the contract between the Israeli public and the state. And that's been destroyed up until now.

We had our first deal, and that's why when Alana talked about this morning about, we need a deal now and to push both sides. It's not only, we're waiting for Camas to say yes, we also have our government who has a responsibility to move forward and get those people home. And I just want to add one thing about that, given the context of these, of the organizations that we're talking about.

I think, and I keep going back to the struggle for Soviet Jewry when I said to somebody last November, I think the first group of hostage families I brought here to Z3 last year, and both of those kids are not home Romy Gonen and and Gal, they, since then, what's happened? We've raised awareness.

We wear our yellow pins. We do. But it didn't. get the same kind of attention that the struggle for Soviet jury got where people were out on the streets. There were rallies. They were working multifaceted approaches to getting them home. And I think that's a bit of a failure on the part of organizations here.

And somebody said to me what went in back November. I said, we should really create people should have departments and federations in different community centers. to have somebody working on this, like they did with the struggle for Soviet Jewry, which was successful in the end. And they said, no, but it's not going to go on for very long.

And here we are more than 407 days later, and we're still here. So that's my call to action.

Andrés Spokoiny: Yeah. And that's again, going back to how destructive it is to focus on the 5 percent that doesn't want to belong anyway. And doesn't share, because at the bottom, yes, we're polarized and we live in echo chambers.

But there is, I still believe, an exhausted majority in the middle, like it's silent because it's exhausted. So I think that one of the roles that both legacy organizations, quote unquote, and philanthropy and independent philanthropy can find ways of elevating and empowering the exhausted majority. To rise up against those extremes to hold, the center must hold in a way and there is a lot that we could do there.

There is a lot donors and I work with donors and funders like that's my day job and they can be part of the problem or they can be part of the solution Like they can foster dialogue. They can give organizations permission to dream, to innovate. Like it's very, it's unfair sometimes to legacy organizations to say, you should, but I'm not going to donate to you.

You can't have it both ways. So I think that there has to be an alliance. I don't believe in big alliances, but at least a conceptual alliance between, Legacy organizations and donors that give them the permission to do certain things. And to empower that majority that agrees on most of the stuff, that is roughly on the same space, and that is just needing that safety net to be able to express itself.

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: Just to add to that, the legacy organizations and philanthropy are only part of the ecosystem, and the legacy organizations are designed to move slowly. they're built for that consistency, that we know they're there, that we know what they do, that we know we can give to them and trust them, but there is an entire ecosystem of organizations, educational organizations, mine's one of them, and who are absolutely able to move.

More quickly, more nimbly in response to crisis. sometimes we need to do some coalition building, and work in ways that complement each other's efforts towards creating systemic change, towards really moving things much faster, because otherwise we'll get stuck waiting for legacy organizations to tell us what to do.

Andrés Spokoiny: And sometimes legacy organizations. are very courageous in the processes of change that they do. We're in San Francisco now, which is a federation that change, or is in the middle of a change process, like it's very radical. We don't know, it's in the beginning, but I think that the role of funders is to support those processes of change.

Because you can't, again, you can't have it both ways. You can't say, oh, they don't change, they move slowly, they this, they that. But when they want to change, You don't support them. And I think that also a division of powers is very important, right? There are things that federations, major organizations are not set up to do.

We shouldn't ask them that, but we should recognize the role that they can play. And then philanthropy, one of the things, for example, that I say all the time about philanthropy is that philanthropy's role is to absorb risk. Like a federation, and they run a federation, right? You can't gamble, or you can, but it's harder, and it's ethically problematic to gamble donor's money away.

Because you have a fiduciary responsibility, the donors gave you money for, it's like the taxpayer, you need to be conservative in a way because you have a fiduciary responsibility. Now, philanthropy that doesn't have that. can be the risk absorber of the system. Can say, we're gonna take the risks because you guys can't.

We're gonna test if birthright works, because for you it would be ridiculous to fund rich people to go to Israel for free. But now we absorb the risk and we prove it works. Now it makes sense for you to fund it. But before it didn't. Right? That type of partnership and I think, and the same, and not only with legacy organizations, with institutions like Cartman and the like, I think that they're going to be critical now,

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: So I feel like young entrepreneurs view disruption in a very positive light, right? That's a term that's used in with a lot of admiration. And Judaism is really good about categorizing different things, right? That's what we love. We're big into categories. So we have traditional funding sources.

We have funding sources that are open to more risk. We have young people coming into the system who want to be disruptors and I feel like they also want to be involved in the institutions that actually, quote unquote, make a difference. And so all of this is a new landscape of the American Jewish world, okay, is that, I find it's less and less compelling.

When you sit down with rabbinical students and talk to them about the salary package, that's not at all what they're interested in, and what they're interested in is really, whose lives are they going to change, and pointing at the lots and lots of people who are there on Shabbos or holidays, that's not what they're interested in.

So how do we incorporate these disruptors into a system that's really built on legacy institutions and allow them to make their mark and build within the system?

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: Yeah, I don't know if our goal is to incorporate disruptors as much as it is to build a shared future based on the knowledge of, that we've built up over hundreds of years of legacy institutions and the new perspectives of young people who are living in reality right now and whose futures are at stake.

I think there needs to be a lot more conversations Between our generations and younger generations. I just came this past Shabbat. We held a teen Shabbaton. There were 330 teens from across the country gathering all to learn Hartman Torah to be together from various different perspectives, backgrounds, etc.

These are some wise young people. They got a lot to offer. I think that there's room here for some co creation and for some shaping of the future together. I think it was amazing that the panel this morning had these college students on it. And I think we got to listen to them and then share with them what we know about what we've learned, what works, our wisdom, but not get so caught up in what we think is the right way that we fail to create an aspirational future vision that they can get behind.

Tova Dorfman: And I want to say also that was mentioned this morning with the panel that we had a generation of Israelis who really. gave their lives. And no one expected, these were Gen, whatever they were called Gen Z, or not even Gen Z, Alpha Generator, I can't remember what generation they were.

But everybody assumed that they were lazy, that they really didn't have any ideology. These were the people who just rose to the occasion. You'llrefer to them as Dora Arayot, the lion generation, the ones that went out and were able to, But really, without any question, rise to the occasion because they felt that their country was, under existential threat.

And they're still giving their lives. We've had over I spoke at a synagogue two weeks ago and it was, the number was 808 soldiers killed. And we've had in the last two weeks, more than 10 more. So we are really losing that generation. I think that we have to have these two groups of people speak and that's going to be key.

To moving forward and I think that's what we have to do It's good. This is we this is a time for a whole revolutionary Sort of since the biggest we are if we're already talking about October 7th is the biggest tragedy since the holocaust, and what happened after the holocaust?

There was major change, the state of Israel was created. Today we should have some kind of major change happen.

Andrés Spokoiny: But there was a positive vision right after the holocaust, which is what we were talking before. But I wanted to say just a word about disruption, but then I think that people are just raising their hands.

But I think one of the, when I think about disruption, sometimes I feel like, the guy. Sipping a whiskey in the deck of the Titanic and say, I know I asked for ice, but I think this is too much, like this eruption there is now they're getting, now they're getting, Oh, I get

Audience Member: it.

Okay,

Andrés Spokoiny: Yeah, anyway, no but the point is, disruption is very good, but we in the Jewish community in special in certain areas. We idolize disruption and we don't have the corrective mechanisms that the startup economy has, for example. In the startup economy, yes, there's disruption all the time, but we forget that 90 percent of the startups fail and disappear.

In the Jewish community yes, we need disruption, but to think of the field of fighting anti Semitism. We desperately need disruption. At the same time, we at GFN are doing a survey of how many organizations are fighting anti Semitism. We're at 160 and counting. Now I'm not exaggerating, like actual numbers and counting.

Every week somebody comes to my office, I have this great idea, it's gonna revolutionize the way we fight anti Semitism. Yes, disruption is very good, but I think that we need to learn as part of this reality. How to manage disruption and how to balance that with collective action

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: one more thing.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: We're about to open it up for questions for 10 minutes. Okay, those questions will come in the form of one sentence. I'm just warning us as a Jewish group. Okay, so if you can't form your question into one sentence, I'm going to have to cut you off so that we can keep moving.

All right. So this is not the time for sermons. So start thinking how to put it in one second. I

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: want to say one more thing about shaping the future, which is that we need to make sure that we have the institutions that train the kind of moral, courageous leaders that we need for the future. And that might be a place for disruption.

It may be that we need new kinds of training programs for people who want to be Jewish educators or who want to be Jewish leaders. And I want to say to all of you who are here now, the thing that makes young people pursue a future as a rabbi or as a Jewish leader or as, a CEO of Jewish, any kind of Jewish organization is oftentimes they get tapped by an older person who says to them, I see you, I see your potential.

We need you. Let's go. Let me know how I can mentor you. The WNBA and the NBA do this. They tap people when they're 15 years old and they know they're gonna be great future players. We need to do more of that. But then we need to build the educational institutions that are worthy of these young people and that are going to give them the actual tools that they need to lead and what you rightly call a future that's going to be full of disruption.

they need to be energetic. They need to be entrepreneurial. They need to be creative and they need to have a core center of deep Jewish values. Thank you.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: So right over here, front row gets rewarded.

Audience Member: How should legacy institutions reframe their scopes that balances The size of the tent, so in other words, support, with the focus of action.

Those have to be in proportion to each other. How can we do that?

Andrés Spokoiny: I have a particular view of that, and it's just my view. That's not Torah miSinai. I think that the organization of the 21st century is more a platform than a provider of goods and services. That could solve that problem. Because if you are Like, let's say, let's put it this way and this is not a perfect example, but if you don't understand the difference, you can have a fleet of 10 taxi cabs, or you can have Uber as a platform, and have limitless number of cars.

So I think that there is an element there of how organizations see themselves, that allow them to empower the creativity of the community. Individuals and groups of individuals within that organization. So the organization that doesn't need to do everything They need to be a catalyst of things that are happening in the world Like is the YouTube example like you it's user generated content, right?

That's what makes it so vibrant and that's why people like it So I think that it's for a long it would be a long conversation, but I think that the first thing I would say is Just trying to reform, to change the understanding of an organization from a pyramidal, classic organization to more like a network, that is a platform for different things to happen that you don't necessarily need to control or own, but you need to facilitate.

Kind of like the JCC that's here, in a way, yeah.

Audience Member: From the panelists this morning, I had reinforced this question, which is how can we nurture Jewish identity and Zionist identity in younger people and go along the framework of the values? How can we, or maybe the legacy organizations to feed into the entrepreneurial mindset or the non legacy?

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: Great. So we need a radical kind of retraining, I think, across the fields. It's funny, this is a story my colleague Yigita tells a lot, but if you're a teacher in a classroom and you get kids to argue about, say, like a passage in the Gemara you're just like, yes, I totally killed it.

I'm such a great teacher. But if you're a teacher in a classroom and you've got kids arguing about Israel. You feel like you want to hide and you want to just set everything right. So we need to be able to create an environment where our teachers, our educators, our leaders are able to convene really smart conversations about the things that matter most to us and our parents.

And I think it's going to mean a radical re imagining of what Jewish education looks like and how we talk about it. And this is the work we do at Hartman.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: So I'm going to say something absolutely antithetical to Hartman. Okay, just to be, sometimes I stir it up. And that is, there's a time for the Beit Midrash, and Judaism is not only the story of the discourse in the Beit Midrash, it is the story of Jewish leadership that stepped forward and said, this is inbounds, that's out of bounds.

That is not

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: antithetical to Hartman.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: If you study the Talmud long enough, you'll realize that different rabbis took control of the Beit Midrash and said, actually, what you're saying is no longer applicable, right? We don't follow that anymore. So the people in this room, the people, there are a lot of people in this room who are board members, involved in lots of different institutions.

And now I'm going to say something absolutely radical. At my synagogue, we don't interview rabbinical students who sign their names to letters that we don't like. Why don't we interview them? Because I don't want those views espoused from the bimah. I don't want to engage somebody in an interview process to find out, What kind of trauma they're carrying with them that then they're going to work out for our entire congregation.

It's not a place for that. That's not what the synagogue is. And this isn't a problem that we have to reinvent right now the wheel. There are lots of organizations. I was fortunate enough to be part of the very first Leffel Fellowship. run through AIPAC, Michael Leffel and Lisa Leffel, visionaries.

there's now a second. Rabbinical school, Israel fellowship that rabbinical students can choose. if you look at a resume, and this goes not only for synagogues, of course, this goes for all the different legacy institutions we're talking about. If you look at a resume and you don't see Hartman listed, and you don't see, all these different fellowships listed, and you don't ask why, before handing the person a microphone, then that's on us.

That's on us. We can no longer afford to say that Zionism was something we didn't talk about for 30 years. That was the previous chapter. So to turn the page and begin a new chapter, we have to actually decide that we're going to make choices based on that new chapter. Okay.

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: Can I correct him? Perhaps misapprehension?

Sure. Okay. Just to be clear. The Hartman Institute is a liberal Zionist organization. We're very clear about our ideology. Yes. And the idea isn't just to have conversations and debate midrash with no end point. There is an end point. My point is more this, that our educators aren't confident.

They're not confident in allowing those conversations to happen and for young people to explore it and to get there in an authentic way.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: 100%. Yeah. It wasn't to dig at Hartman. Hartman has world class educators. Everybody should go spend time at Hartman. That was absolutely not the point of what I was saying.

I was saying endless baby draw should not be the takeaway of Judaism.

Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield: description of this session,

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: Yeah.

Andrés Spokoiny: Great. No, I think that the, the surge is, there's no silver lining of this awful war and this awful year, but the, but the surge is an opportunity that we should seize. And I think that as I was very confident about legacy organizations capacity to respond in the crisis, I'm less, confident on our collective capacity to respond to the surge. And it would be a tragedy if we don't. I think that there are many So how do

Tova Dorfman: we do it?

Andrés Spokoiny: So I think there are many things. So first of all, basic affordability. If things are not affordable and yeah, some people don't want to pay, but it can't be that the wealthiest, safest, most prosperous community in the history of the Jewish people cannot ensure.

Affordable Jewish day school for the children. It simply can't be. Like, now, that's a very concrete thing that both legacy

summer camps, which we now

Summer camp, like the affordability of Jewish life, I think it's a critical thing. The second is to not try to afford In a time of crisis, people are going to do anything.

You give them low quality programs, they're going to come because they want to be among other Jews That's not going to cut it six months from now. I think that now is the time to really allow innovations, work with, grassroots disruptor innovative groups to allow new avenues into Jewish belonging and into Jewish practice.

I think that, Hillel should reach out to students, for example, but it also should offer students the possibility of creating new stuff within the program. If not, the search is not going to hold. The search is going to hold if it really becomes the engine of something new and something powerful.

If the only thing we want is 10 percent more members of the synagogue, we're going to be missing the boat.

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: That'd be great.

Andrés Spokoiny: Let me answer

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: This is based on my experience of the last year, because the search is phenomenal. It's the Jewish people's response saying, we know what matters.

And as people come into the door of whatever legacy institution, I think it's the mission of that institution to grab onto them with direction to say, we're going to provide you the meaning, we know the direction of where we're going, and be open at the same time. So I'll give you an example of this, which is that it was only after several months of, we do achenu, and the prayer for the state of Israel, and hatikvah, at every single service, right?

We have a board of every member of our congregation who has family in Israel who's either been kidnapped or murdered or serving in the IDF on the wall so that we can pray for them on a regular basis. And we go about all of these things. A Shinshin walked into my office, who is an Israeli in our community dealing with our day school and religious school kids, and teaching them, and said, what if we began reaching out to all the other Shinshinim who were here last year and the year before and the year before that?

And they zoomed in to talk to the kids from their army bases about what they're going through. Now, I don't know that any rabbi has ever taken the advice of a, right, 17, 18 year old Israeli before. But what I mean by disruptor is that we can no longer be afraid of advice or recommendations coming from places.

If it's a good idea, we should follow it. we shouldn't be afraid anymore of where the source is that good idea is coming from. Last question and then, yes. I promise

Andrés ,

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: he got to get to the airport.

Audience Member: My question is, you mentioned that the surge, the federation, the big funding might be an issue for the day after.

What was not good for the foreseeable Israeli society in the long term?

Tova Dorfman: so that it's not necessarily the surge. I think that the amount of money that came in or is coming in and I'm Give you my opinion. Let's the government off the hook of taking responsibility for certain things that they need to take responsibility for Our government and everybody knows this.

Andrés

Tova Dorfman: knows this from philanthropy They've you know, his team in Israel has done an amazing job really identifying the gaps that exist But our government was nowhere to be found. Not only on the battlefield in the first few days, but months later, even a year later in providing services and fulfilling those gaps.

So rightfully philanthropy came in, but then the money is there. It's just going to certain segments of the population that because of a political coalition structure are getting the funds and others aren't. So I think sometimes that's problematic because at the end of the day it's just perpetuating a system that we need to change.

Andrés Spokoiny: Yeah that's a big dilemma in terms of Israel. And it's a dilemma in terms of every moment of sort of emergency respond and sort of disaster relief long term and the like. That who are you really healthy? On the other hand, philanthropists say, what do you do?

Exactly? What do you do? People in Una they don't have government support,

Tova Dorfman: or even basic shelters. So it's, they just pain to the federation system and said, could you please help us fund. Building shelters in the north. And at some

Andrés Spokoiny: point, somebody's going to say don't give it so much to the yeshivot and give it there, or to the settlements and give it there.

It's going to be, it's going to be a big question coming. Like now, we're not there yet, but we're going to be there when the things

Tova Dorfman: come,

Andrés Spokoiny: that's going to be brought up by the Israeli philanthropists before it's going to be brought up by the Americans. And I need to

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: I just want to close by thanking Rachel and

Andrés

Rabbi Nolan Lebovitz: and Tova. I also think I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge that the greatest of all of our legacy institutions is clearly the State of Israel at this moment. And after 400 days of war, I want to thank everybody in this room for sticking with it for your persistence and your strength and your courage for showing up day after day, week after week and supporting this new chapter of Zionism.

Thank you all for being here today.