Reflections on reflections about leadership

This week I attended two events that were each celebrating the achievements of others in memory of someone tragically killed too early in life. Both Yoni Jesner and Adam Science accomplished more in their shortened lives than most do in a lifetime of many years. The legacy of the Yoni Jesner Award Scheme and Adam Science Foundation Leadership Programme is that hundreds more people are giving of themselves and making a lasting difference.

The Yoni Jesner Award Scheme recognises the efforts of pupils at Jewish schools who complete 20 hours (and often a lot more) of volunteering for causes and charities within and beyond the community. Yoni volunteered for many projects in his hometown of Glasgow including being the youngest ever member of the burial society, nationally with Bnei Akiva and what is now UJIA JAMS, and internationally with Magen David Adom. Yoni had hoped to be a doctor and in a touching testament to his desire to save lives, and powerful given the tragic nature of his death at the hands of a suicide bomber, Yoni’s organs helped save many lives, including that of a little Palestinian girl.

The Adam Science Foundation Leadership Programme finds leaders in their 20s & 30s and helps make them great – providing access to training, mentors, a cross-communal and strategic approach and a matchmaking service placing them in positions of responsibility across over 100 charities. This “shidduching” of leader and opportunity is very much in the style of the young man who according to those who so movingly shared their memories of him, would schmooze his friends, get them having fun whilst doing good and then push them to step up and lead.

I did not know Yoni or Adam personally, though both have touched my life and impacted my leadership journey. I was just starting my Gap Year in Israel when on Erev Sukkot in 2002 Yoni was murdered. At the time I was arguing with one of the programme staff about over cautious security restrictions, and displaying an arrogant sense of entitlement because I was a volunteer and a leader – a trait I have thankfully overcome though am grateful for the regular reminders to keep it at bay. Many years later I would spend a couple of years managing the Yoni Jesner Award Scheme and I was inspired by his family, in particular his mother Marsha Gladstone. The hundreds of young people completing the award also provided one of those reminders about my poor understanding of leadership by demonstrating a far more humble approach to volunteering and leadership than I had. These shared associations with Yoni’s memory remind me of the quote we cited in presenting the scheme to pupils: “What does your God require of you but to act justly, love kindness and walk humbly with your Lord”

In a previous communal role I was fortunate to work with and learn from Nicky Goldman, currently directing LEAD who facilitate the Adam Science Foundation Leadership Programme. Together, Nicky and I conceived and initiated LEAD NOW. I feel we both brought a sense of how this scheme could raise the profile and status of sabbatical leadership roles, whilst at the same time contextualise the experience of running Youth Movements and UJS within broader communal leadership. Nevertheless, it was Nicky’s experience running the Adam Science Foundation Leadership Programme, and Adam’s spirit expressed through that programme, that infused LEAD NOW with the ethos that brought Lay Leaders into contact with young community professionals in order to highlight that whether you work in the private, public or third sector, you Lead in the community now and have to stay committed to leading in the future.

I’ve hinted that I may have been foolish in some of my understandings of leadership in the past, and I am grateful I’ve been encouraged to keep challenging myself as a leader, and learn from others around me. At the Adam Science Foundation Leadership Programme 20th anniversary, we were fortunate to hear from Ron Heifetz, Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks and be given a collection of reflections on leadership from alumni & current participants.

I heard many insightful and interesting comments about leadership, but two stuck out and also provoked some possibly uncomfortable observations.

Ron Heifetz discussed his personal leadership journey, how he trained ad a physician and after working with prison inmates he decided he wanted explore how he could be a “Doctor on the systemic level”.

Talent without training is wasted, training without talent in uninspiring, but talented leaders who train hard can propel their passion to affect purposeful and impactful social change.

One of the driving motivations of Adam Science Foundation Leadership Programme was that cost should not be a barrier to accessing leadership opportunities. A key aim of the Yoni Jesner Award Scheme is to inspire people to give of themselves and their time, not their money. Yet despite this so many of the people who have graduated the Adam Science Foundation Leadership Programme and gone on to the most senior communal roles, whilst no doubt hardworking and utilising their experience of the Adam Science Foundation Leadership Programme, also have the capacity to be significant donors. Moreover the most common type of the volunteering pupils participating in the Yoni Jesner Award Scheme did, and graduates of Adam Science Foundation Leadership Programme go on to do, is fundraising. So I wonder to what extent our leadership development of the next generation isn’t just cultivating fresh enthusiasm within the next cohort of big givers, but also challenging the structures of our community and the pervading prominence of leadership by donation.

The place of money in our communal leadership still posses obstacles. In wider society, the systemic inequalities very much linked to poverty are desperately in need of ‘doctors on the systemic level’ yet the two most mentioned charities at the event were World Jewish RELIEF & Jewish CARE. These and many other welfare organisations that are attracting passionate and talented leaders & volunteers do fantastic work. Yet I can’t help but sense that these organisations treat the symptoms of social inequality and breakdown rather than seek to find and administer systemic cures. Perhaps we need to increase the focus on diagnosing and prioritising what it is within society that needs changing and reconsider what it is we are training and inspiring leaders to do?

I think the times call for us to reevaluate our community’s and wider society’s relationship with money in general and extreme wealth and growing gaps between rich and poor in particular. I believe my generation of Jewish leaders want to see a rebalancing whereby we spend as much time and resource working alongside others of different backgrounds in pursuit of a fairer and more sustainable world as we do sticking together supporting our own needy and assisting Israel.

Thankfully even those you may expect to be against this change are embracing it and sometimes leading it.

World Jewish Relief are a good example, increasingly focusing on development in the global south alongside their aid to poorer Jewish communities around the world. Just this week World Jewish Relief have employed their first campaign manager looking at how they can mobilise their supporters on policy and activism in conjunction with their financial assistance.

Stephen Lewis, as Chairman of Jewish Care needs the community’s efforts to raise tens of millions of pounds to deliver the fantastic services Jewish Care offers to senior citizens, Holocaust survivors, those with mental health needs, those with dementia as well as those who care for a loved one. Despite this, Stephen was clear in his essay that whilst there is a lot of competition for our support, we must support causes and charities in the wider society.

In his reflections on leadership, Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks makes it clear that Jewish leadership is about leading in a Jewish way, not simply being Jewish and a leader. Lord Sacks closes by stressing “The wrong way is to emphasise anti-Semitism and the assaults on Israel, to exaggerate the tensions between the different streams in Jewish life, and to bemoan the lack of Jewish leadership. The right way is to make friends within and beyond the Jewish community, to emphasise the ethical and spiritual dimensions of Judaism, to find social action projects we can work in across other divides, and to find ways of making Jews feel proud to be Jews”

What makes me proud is that Jewish ethical values as I understand them place limits on ownership, articulate true wealth as happiness and offer an alternative to being either a conscientious universal citizen or a greedy global consumer by insisting on our cultural difference whilst cultivating us to connect with and act for all. What sometimes unsettles me is despite this and the many good intentions of a number of leaders, we are still a community where senior leadership requires significant wealth, where material affluence is prioritised over happiness for ourselves and fairness in society at large and energy is expended on remedying the effects of society’s failures rather than mending the system, or dare I say it – repairing the world.

The lives and legacies of Yoni and Adam illustrate the spiritual rewards of leading and seeking to improve the lives of others. I hope my efforts and the efforts of those developing leaders in their name can take this to the next level by leading change on the systemic level, but as Yoni teaches us, it can still start with simple and small acts and changes in attitude.

“When you find it hard to motivate yourself, do something useful and then ask yourself, at the end of this week will I have watched TV or watched my actions? Will I have changed my hairstyle or changed someone’s life? Will I have spread gossip or will I have shared knowledge? Will I have spent money on young people or spent time with them?”

Pursuing what?

A Jewish service organisation, Pursue, finds itself embroiled in a ‘controversy’ over a planned service learning trip to Israel, that may or may not involve meeting with Palestinians and addressing the conflict and occupation.

I am fortunate to be involved in building Siach, a network of Jewish social justice and environmental organisations and activists. As well as building connections and fostering collaboration, we are hoping to stimulate conversations on some of the significant issues within the Jewish social justice world, and consider the role Jews, who identify strongly with the elements of our tradition that push us to seek a fairer and more sustainable world, can have in the shaping of Jewish identity.

At our first conference in May this year we had a very honest, challenging yet constructive conversation about the place of Israel within Jewish social justice. Everything people shared was treated as their own views and not those of any organisation or community they are associated with. I hope that the same goes for the feelings expressed here.

I struggled to articulate at Siach a view that at the heart of being Jewish and the Jewish imperative to fight for social justice is a sense of being the other and a sensitivity to otherness (For those interested in more see Jewishness & Otherness, the rest are saved from an even longer piece!).

But all this concern for otherness does not exist in a vacuum – it comes from more than 3000 years of rich history and culture, a culture in which Israel plays a significant part. To draw inspiration from this culture in working for social justice, yet not identifying with the society from which it came is somewhat anti-social. It’s almost like feeling that you care about others, and wish to fight for their rights and opportunities, because of your understanding of being Jewish – but don’t wish to understand or engage with some fellow Jews that don’t agree with a worldview that ostensibly is based on social justice values connected with Judaism.

Of course with American, and to some extent Diaspora Jewry more generally, this isn’t just about the conflict with the Palestinians and the policies of a state. For some there is this strong dissatisfaction with the notion that Israel is central, or even necessary, to Jewish life and Jewish identity.

Personally I think some individuals can live very fulfilled Jewish lives without a connection to, or understanding of, Israel. Certainly Israel does not need to be considered the central Jewish community.

Nevertheless, it surely deserves to be considered a Jewish community, and like my own in Britain, or the one I am visiting now in Australia, or others I have spent time with in Hungary and Belgium, or those from Turkey and Latin America, don’t they deserve respect that they offer something unique and important to the ongoing creativity and challenges of the Jewish people?

Even more so in the case of Israel – if you believe Jewish values and way of life has the ability to build communities and societies that are equitable and environmentally responsible. What better opportunity than a nation state of the Jews to have those values applied on a huge scale?

Moreover, whilst individual Jews can create meaningful Jewish lives without any focus on Israel, Jewish communities, and Jewish organisations with a basis in Torah, simply can not ignore the place of Israel both literally and the place Israel has had in our history and culture.

Judaism can not be separated from Israel – not the state or a particular government but the idea of Israel. The idea of struggling with God or a higher purpose (Yisra-El); the notion for us as individuals, of going, Lech lecha, for yourself and to yourself by challenging the spiritual and physical place in which you are brought up; the concept for us as a people, of aspiring to reach a destination in which we are free, not just from bondage but from submissively following the dominant culture of the time, whether that be Egyptian, Hellenist, or American. By offering a particular identity grounded in values connected to the universal, the idea of Israel also undermines the current false dichotomy of globalisation, which suggests you can either be a global citizen only or a selfish consumer.

Of course, for those of us inspired by Judaism to pursue social justice, the current situation in Israel poses huge challenges. It is worth highlighting that the overly used line from which the organisation in the middle of this current ‘controversy’ take their name, is found in a conditional sentence that maybe sentences us all to a shared fate and judgement;

Tzedek, Tzedek, tirdoff….

“Justice, Justice, shall you pursue so that you may thrive and occupy the land which the Lord your God is giving you” (Deuteronomy 16:20)

Elsewhere the Torah tells us that if we defile the land, which I am interpreting as failing to pursue justice rather than some of the questionable morality found around that part of Leviticus, the the land will vomit, or spit, us out Leviticus 18:28).

Clearly there is a warning about the type of society Israel should be striving to create, yet here I also read another warning to those pursuing social justice inspired by Torah and Judaism; If they forget how intrinsically linked their heritage is with the land, people and idea of Israel, they too will find themselves thrown from the ground on which their identity is built. Collectively Jewish communities will find one of the foundations on which they stand removed, and I’m not sure that the rest will not crumble.

Ultimately social justice and cohesion will come when the plurality of truth and narrative in the world is acknowledged, and appreciating the otherness within ourselves and between groups can not just be tolerated but celebrated.

There will hopefully be a settlement to the settlements and the conflict, but true peace will only come when Israelis and Palestinians can acknowledge the narrative of the other without diminishing the power of their own story.

If those of us who passionately seek the realisation of this peace can not also reconcile the plurality of perspectives within ourselves as a Jewish people, then I do not feel we are constructively adding to any resolution of conflict, including that which that has so accentuated our divisions.

What are we pursuing if it is not peace for ourselves, our families and our communities (shalom bayit); peace for Israel (ose shalom v’al kol yisrael); and as they say in the Progressive and Sheva versions, peace for all humanity – ose shalom v’al kol bnei adam… od ya’avo shalom aleinu v’al kulam