How to be human - Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt on community and social justice

I’m currently completing a PhD thesis on the topic of Jewish social justice education. I was fascinated by the proliferation of social justice campaigning and educational work all over the Jewish world, and by the surprising absence of any theoretical or academic writing on the subject. The outcome is that while lots of people are trying to do Jewish social justice work, no-one has a clearly defined sense of exactly what this means.

For example, what do we mean by social justice – what is our vision for a just society and how does this inform our critique of existing political and economic arrangements? Are we concerned about human rights, the environment, poverty, the breakdown of community, international development issues, all or none of the above?

What is specifically Jewish about this vision? Does it derive from halacha, Biblical values, Jewish history, modern Jewish political movements – or is it enough to have a universal vision which happens to be pursued by Jews? Either way, is there anything specifically Jewish about the way in which we pursue justice? Can social action itself be recognisably Jewish and what might this mean? If we can’t answer these latter questions, perhaps it would be better to recognise social justice as a universal, political pursuit and throw our lot in with broad-based, secular campaigns and organisations.

My research has focused on interviews with 15 UK-based Jewish social justice educators, including the head of informal education at JCoSS, a freelance educator doing feminist education around gender within Orthodox schools, the directors of Yachad and the New Israel Fund, Citizens UK’s Jewish community organiser, a modern-Orthodox rabbi who specialises in interfaith work, the Reform founder of Tzelem – a rabbinic voice for social justice, our own senior rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, educators from human rights NGO René Cassin and the Jewish LGBT organisation Keshet, and Maurice Glasman, a Labour peer, community organiser and inventor of ‘Blue Labour’.

Despite the diversity of this group, they are united in their understanding that discrimination, exclusion and inequality oppress people by denying them their humanity. The remedy is the opposite of this: enabling all human beings to realise their human potential. But what does it actually mean to be fully human? Different people answer this question in different ways, but it boils down to three key ingredients. First, being human means being involved in critical thinking and action in the world – what philosophers call praxis. This is what distinguishes human beings from all other animals. Second, it means being involved with spiritual concerns – not necessarily God, but non-materialist questions of meaning and values. Finally, it means being in community and relationship.

Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt

But even this final idea raises more questions, as there exist radically different concepts of community and relationship, each of which has a different kind of humanising impact on its members. I’ve been exploring alternative versions of this idea as put forward by two seminal 20th century thinkers – the philosopher and theologian Martin Buber, and the political theorist Hannah Arendt.

In his classic book I and Thou, Buber teaches that human beings relate to each other in two different ways. Most of the time we deal with other people as parties to a transaction or as means to some end we’re trying to achieve. This is most obvious in the case of bus drivers, shop keepers or our tax accountants, but can also be true in the case of intimate relationships: we often use friends and partners to meet our own emotional needs. While human society could not exist without this way of interacting, it also leads us to objectivise other people and can be alienating and ultimately dehumanising. But Buber also holds up the possibility of an alternative way of relating to other people not as ‘It’ but as ‘You’. When we see someone as ‘You’, we refuse to instrumentalise them but instead encounter them genuinely in all their unique individuality. This is the true meaning of relationship.

Buber writes that the evolution of modern, industrial, mass society has made relational encounters more and more difficult to achieve. As a result, we have become progressively less authentically human. His solution is to rebuild society as a network of independent, organic communities, within which genuine relationships can take place and people can reclaim their humanity. It’s no surprise that Buber was among the early supporters of the kibbutz movement and always argued that kibbutzim should remain as small, intimate, community groups.

If Buber believes that being human is the ability to engage in genuine, intimate, one-on-one relationships, Hannah Arendt proposes a very different model of relational, community life. She harks back to classical Greece, where she claims there was a clear division between the private and public spheres. The private sphere or the family was not only the location for intimate relationships but was also the basic unit of economic production and social stability, ruled over in an autocratic style by the head of the household. The public sphere, in contrast, emerged at the point where material wellbeing had been assured and took the form of democratic politics: a process of deliberation among active citizens about the important matters that affected the community.

Arendt’s view of community is summed up by the cut and thrust of deliberation, debate and the exchange of views, through which participants realise their freedom and bring their innate uniqueness as human beings into the world. In this light, Buber is guilty of transplanting the private sphere (family-style, intimate relationships) into the public arena, thereby endangering the autonomy and agency of the participants. Against this, Buber would argue that Arendt’s model of political community risks seeing other people as tools for one’s own self-advancement, thereby destroying any chance of genuine relationships.

For Arendt, humanisation means nurturing the potential within each individual human being. Community is a means to this end. Buber believes that being human means encountering the Other: for him, community and relationships are therefore ends in themselves.

Want to find out more about my research? Please get in touch!

Failures of leadership – towards a Masorti response

The UK is reeling from a comprehensive failure of political leadership.  Whatever your view on the outcome of the referendum, it’s become clear that senior government leaders gambled with the future of the country for the sake of tactical advantage or even personal ego – sometimes to the extent of campaigning for a solution they didn’t even believe in.  Millions of people saw their vote not as an opportunity to influence the outcome, but as a protest against an establishment with which they feel no sense of connection.  Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Opposition, failed to throw his weight behind his party’s policy and is refusing to step down despite having lost the confidence of 80% of his MPs, being unable to fill his Shadow Cabinet, and the real risk of splitting his party for good. 

And in case we’re tempted to think that the answer is stronger leadership, a former charismatic Prime Minister stands accused of pushing the country into what has been described as the biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez by withholding information and strong-arming his colleagues rather than listening to them.

I’m reminded of the story of Rabban Yohanan Ben Zakkai the most prominent leader of the Jewish people at the time of the war against Rome, the siege of Jerusalem and, ultimately, the destruction of the Second Temple (66-70 CE)*.  At that time, the Jewish people was riven by sectarian conflict.  The Zealots, an extremist party who preferred death to what they saw as enslavement by the Roman empire (and whose story ended in mass suicide at Masada), had responded to the siege of Jerusalem by burning the city’s grain stores and bringing on famine – creating a situation so desperate that the people, they hoped, would have no choice but to fight.  But when Ben Zakkai, the leader of a moderate faction, walked the streets and saw the people cooking straw and drinking the water, he understood that there was no hope of defeating Rome. 

Ben Zakkai sent for his nephew – a leader of the Zealots – and together, secretly, they hatched a plan to escape from the besieged city and negotiate with the Romans.  Ben Zakkai faked his own death and two of his students carried his coffin to the gates of Jerusalem, knowing that the Zealot guards’ piety would require them to ensure that no dead body was left overnight in the holy city.  Upon reaching the Roman camp, Ben Zakkai sprang out of his coffin and presented himself to the Roman General, Vespasian, addressing him as ‘King.’  When, a few moments later, a messenger arrived from Rome to inform Vespasian that he had indeed been appointed Emperor, Vespasian interpreted Ben Zakkai’s words as an omen and offered to grant him any request he might make.  But rather than asking for Jerusalem to be saved, Ben Zakkai asked for the establishment of a rabbinical academy at Yavneh; this would become the foundation of a new form of Judaism which could survive the destruction of the Temple and which has now lasted for close to 2000 years.

This story (recorded in the Talmud, admittedly, by the descendants of Ben Zakkai’s moderate, rabbinic faction) contains stark lessons about leadership.  The Zealots, characterised by ideological purity and a refusal to compromise in the face of reality, failed to achieved their goals and condemned thousands of people to catastrophe.  Had they got their way, Judaism would have died along with them.  Ben Zakkai’s leadership, in contrast, was marked by pragmatism, a willingness to snatch partial victories from the jaws of defeat, and most of all by his success at building and capitalising on relationships.  He saw and understood the concrete situation of the people, he enlisted the help of his followers, he prioritised rescuing his colleagues and, most surprisingly, he built tactical relationships with his opponents and enemies.

A true leader is someone who has followers (look behind you – is anyone there?) and who knows how to bring people together to work for common goals.  This is no less true in community life.  A community is a network of relationships – the stronger the relationships, the stronger the community.  The most successful Masorti communities are the ones which prioritise relationship-building as an end in itself, where guests and new people are introduced to the members and invited into their homes, where community leaders hold regular one-to-ones and small group meetings to build relationships and find out what’s going on in their members’ lives, and where there’s a clear plan for how to get specific individuals more involved in aspects of community life which speak to them and make use of their talents.  Communities which struggle are the ones which spend all their time thinking about programmes and activities (which in the absence of systematic relationship-building rarely bring in more than a hard core of around 15% of members) and where the only time you get a call from the shul is when they want something from you. 

One of Masorti Judaism’s most important programmes is Jewish Community Organising, a training course for developing relational community leaders.  The cohort from this year’s course (including members from New London, New North London, Edgware, Elstree & Borehamwood and New Stoke Newington shuls) will now form the core for a movement-wide relationship-building exercise.  Each course participant plus leaders from additional communities will recruit a team of five ‘listeners’ who, after some initial training, will conduct five one-to-ones with their members.  The outcomes?   We’ll have built relationships between leaders and up to 50 members in each community.  Those leaders will understand the real needs of their members.  When it comes to planning programmes, we’ll know who to get involved, what we can ask of them and where our focus should be.  Most importantly, our investment in relationship-building means that when we invite people, they’re likely to show up. 

While synagogue life does not typically throw up the life-and-death dilemmas of national leadership, there are lessons here that some of our politicians would do well to learn.

*Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 56a-b

Marketing Masorti

Masorti is the smallest stream of Judaism in the UK with the potential, many of us believe, to be one of the biggest.  The challenge is how to get the message out to people who might want to join us. 

Challenge number one is to define our message.  We’ve got quite good at that over the last three years: Masorti Judaism has a genuine, soundly anchored ethos and set of values which generates amazing levels of unanimity among our rabbis, professionals and lay leaders.  They’re about the synthesis of tradition and modernity (‘traditional Judaism for modern Jews’ as we put it), warm, welcoming communities, and intellectual openness.  As these values are embodied primarily in the experience of our communities (rather than in intellectual or ideological statements) we’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to communicate them is by sharing Masorti people’s personal stories and journeys.

But even if we’ve made progress towards honing our message, there’s a second challenge which has so far left us stumped.  It involves a chicken and egg situation – how to communicate with people who by definition are not on our membership database and who we therefore have no way of contacting directly.  We can’t advertise on television (not only because of the expense – even if we had unlimited budgets, we’re trying to reach such a specific demographic that mass advertising would be 99.9% useless).  And social media, often touted as a marketing panacea, can only connect you to people with whom you already have some kind of… connection.

Last week I participated in a training session on marketing for charity chief executives (it was organised by Ella forums – recommended for charity leadership training and coaching).  The trainer said that modern marketing is not about getting your message to your intended audience.  Instead, it builds on the idea that the most convincing way of getting someone to buy a product or a service is through personal advice from someone they know.  I’ve just been decorating my house so I know this is true – I want my friends to recommend good builders they’ve used and I talk to them at any opportunity about this in order to get their advice.

A colleague from the United Synagogue once told me that they’re jealous of Masorti for this reason: our members always talk in a positive way about their shuls.  Masorti Judaism has lots of potential ‘recommenders’ – our challenge is how to enable them to get into conversations about their positive experiences in our communities with their non-Masorti friends who might be interested in trying us out.

At the training session, we learnt a good model for working this out.  It involves answering five questions: who are our potential influencers?  What is the ‘conversation moment’ – ie. who will the influencers be talking to, where and when?  What is the desired conversation – what will they be talking about?  What is the content we want them to be dropping into these conversations?  And finally, what are the accelerators – what means do we have at our disposal for making more of these conversations happen, faster and more effectively?

Here’s how I provisionally answered the questions.  My thoughts are based on anecdotal evidence at best, we’ve done no research on this, and I’m happy for people to disagree, suggest alternatives and prove me wrong.  Please let me know if the following rings But this is my starting point.

Influencers.  It seems to me that our most important target audience is young adults who are forming relationships, getting married and having children, who want to join a synagogue (or find one to get married in, or study for conversion, or where their kids can go to playgroup or nursery), but haven’t decided which one.  (By the way, I don’t mean to ignore the many people who are not in relationships and are also looking for community life.  Jewish communities often fail to cater to them and we need to try harder.  For the purposes of this article, I’ve simply chosen to focus a demographic which seems to reflect our main source of new members).  They might have grown up in Orthodox or Reform congregations and been dissatisfied there, or they might simply have moved to a new city and be shul-shopping with no particular agenda.  The influencers for this group are their friends who do happen to be members of our communities – maybe people who’ve grown up in Masorti and who have non-Masorti friends, or maybe those who are a few years (or months) ahead in the shul-shopping process.

Conversation moment.  I’m imagining a group of friends having dinner together, either at home or in a restaurant, maybe at a wedding or another event.  The conversation could also be happening between colleagues at the office.

Desired conversation.  The influencers and their friends are all at a similar stage of life – maybe approaching marriage, perhaps thinking about having babies, maybe already pregnant.  The desired conversation they’re having might start from these topics (I remember talking about them a lot when I was at that stage) – how’s the wedding planning going?  Where are you thinking about getting married?  Do you know of any good rabbis – I’m not so happy with the one from my parents’ shul?  Have you started thinking about nurseries and schools?  Which ones are good?  How can we get into the nearby Jewish preschool or primary?  A sub-species of desired conversation might be relevant to people in mixed-faith relationships.  How’s it going, what do your family think about it?  What are you planning to do about the wedding – have you thought about conversion?  What experiences with shuls, rabbis etc. have you had so far?  Are they friendly to non-Jewish partners?

Content.  What do want our influencers to be feeding into the conversation?  Here are some potentially important messages.  My (Masorti shul) is really welcoming, friendly, non-judgemental.  We were made to feel really welcome when we showed up.  My (or my friends’) kids love it – the children’s services/playgroup are really fun.  The rabbi seems nice – really approachable and interesting, not the kind of judgemental old man I remember from my shul growing up.  A second set of messages might be about addressing people’s concerns: it feels like a proper, familiar shul, but more open-minded.  If you get married there, your children will still be recognised as Jewish.  No, most Orthodox rabbis won’t recognise a Masorti conversion, but we decided the Orthodox process was too hard to go through, and this way we’ll still be able to have a proper Jewish wedding.  And so on.  The goal here is less about messages, but about having people give honest advice which comes out of their own experience.

Accelerators.  Whether or not I’ve got it right about the identity of our potential influencers and the content of the conversations we want them to be having, there’s one final question we have to address: how can we encourage more of these conversations to take place?  This means both ensuring the influencers know what to say, and to create a culture within which they’re prepared to have the conversations.  This is something of a challenge, since many of us naturally recoil from anything that smacks of missionising.  It also means letting go of any idea that we can tightly control the process or the message: encouraging people to talk means trusting them to talk about the right, relevant thing.  I want to suggest five ideas (none of which might be any good) which might accelerate the process:

1.       Most fundamentally, we need to put the idea into our members’ heads that they can and should talk about their positive community experience with their friends.  I think this should come from the rabbis and leaders of our communities, as they have direct relationships with their congregants.  If we can get our rabbis to become ‘influencers of influencers,’ creating the expectation that members reach out to their friends, it could be very powerful.  The networks of relationships already exist – the question is how to motivate people to get involved.  It strikes me that there are two potential motivators – and neither are about religious evangelising: one is a desire to help your friends by giving them good advice; the other is the desire to help your community by getting good people involved. 

2.       Giving potential influencers the confidence they need by providing information and messaging – via direct marketing.  Since they’re already on our membership database, it’s easy to reach them.  The trick here is getting the content right – but that’s a solvable problem with the right combination of research, hard work and creativity.

3.       Stimulating conversation at events – lots of guests come into our communities for weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs and the like.  Often the experience acts as a trigger for conversation.  What can we do to stimulate and focus these conversations?  One idea is to have effective, thought-provoking marketing materials available at events.  Another is to encourage community leaders as part of their sermons or announcements to explicitly invite these conversations to take place.  Maybe we could even follow up with event hosts afterwards, providing information and encouragement to continue the conversation with any guests who expressed interest.

4.       In the same spirit, perhaps we need to gather some data – who recently joined our shuls, got married, converted, had a baby.  These people are likely to have friends in the same situation.  We can then nurture them as potential influencers by targeting them with information and marketing which is relevant to their stage in life.

5.       Since conversations are about sharing personal stories, could we stimulate this by encouraging people to share personal experiences of our communities in an organised way?  This needs a bit of creative thinking, but maybe through an effective social media-based competition, backed up by some more traditional marketing.  This is about strengthening the positive culture we already have of people talking about their communities.

This time more than ever, I really welcome feedback.  Please tweet @MattPlen, tag me in a Facebook comment, or email me – matt@masorti.org.uk – with your ideas and especially if you think I’m wrong.

Get to the chicken without breaking eggs: how to grow Masorti Judaism without being Chabad

Lately the press has been full of stories about the demise of Conservative (Masorti) Judaism in the USA.  I suspect the reports are premature: Conservative Judaism is still very much alive and kicking.  But whereas the American movement - once the largest synagogue body in the world - is wrestling with shrinkage and the search for a new mission, here in the UK Masorti has a different challenge.

We’re the youngest stream of Judaism in this country and, despite rapid growth over the past twenty years, still the smallest by far.  I believe our unique approach to Judaism has the power to inspire people, connect them with other Jews, give their lives meaning and, in the process, counter the dominant trends of social atomisation, consumerism and assimilation which concern us all.

But we’re stuck in a chicken and egg situation: in order to reach out, we have to grow.  We need to found more communities to accommodate additional Jews in new areas, and we need to use the resulting growth in membership to gather the resources needed for further outreach and growth.  In an ideal world, this would form a virtuous circle where the flood of dues-paying members to our movement would enable us to train and recruit the rabbis, educators and community leaders we need to achieve our goals.

But the strategy has one major problem: it’s very difficult to found new communities. 

One organisation in the Jewish world seems to have hit upon a solution to this problem: Chabad/Lubavitch.  The Chabad model is to send ‘shluchim’ – rabbinic emissaries – into the farthest reaches of the world (anywhere from Manila to Birmingham) to set up institutions, draw people in and create community life.  And Chabad are amazingly successful: according to Wikipedia they are the largest Jewish religious organization in the world today, maintaining 3600 institutions in over 1000 cities across 70 countries, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of adherents.

But this model can’t work for Masorti – and not because as religious liberals we don’t have the religious passion to attract the masses (for a comment on this from the Christian world see http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2014/jan/18/church-growth-theology-evangelical-lesson-liberals).  Our problem is twofold and very practical: 1. We don’t have the financial or human resources to rapidly deploy enough new rabbis; 2. We are ideologically committed to a bottom-up, grassroots, lay-led model of community development.  We can’t afford to plonk down rabbis and, even if we could, we probably wouldn’t want to.

Our strategy has been different: find groups of people who are attracted to Masorti Judaism, identify potential leaders among them, and then support them to begin creating community life.  When they’re ready, they’ll grow, attract members, develop financial resources and become ready to employ a rabbi, rent a building and then embark on more serious growth.  At the same time it’s the movement’s job to identify candidates and train rabbis, and to develop the community development expertise that will enable us to support these nascent groups. 

Here are three recent, real-life examples.

1. Muswell Hill – I’m a member of New North London Synagogue (NNLS), a fantastically successful community which now has close to 2000 adult members.  But this success breeds problems of its own – it becomes harder for some people to find the kind of intimate community life which the shul once provided.  About two miles down the road is Muswell Hill, a neighbourhood with only one (Orthodox) synagogue, a cross-communal Jewish school, and lots of Jews – including many who are unaffiliated or in mixed families (my evidence for this is anecdotal but Haringey, Muswell Hill’s local authority, does have over 7000 Jews according to the 2011 census).  Informal conversations with NNLS members who live in the area revealed lots of enthusiasm for some more local, intimate Jewish activities.  So we identified some potential leaders, advertised in the shul newsletter, held an initial planning meeting with a handful of local people, and are now planning a launch activity for Saturday night, April 8^th (contact me for details).  

The initiative was started by Laurence Jacobs, Masorti’s small community fieldworker, but almost immediately other volunteers stepped forward to take on leadership roles.  The plan is to build on a core of Masorti members to draw in other people from the neighbourhood and to go from there.  This group might end up as a minyan or chavurah (informal prayer or community group) affiliated to New North London Synagogue, paying membership to the shul and using its facilities but holding its own, local activities; or it might take a different, more independent path.  Less than one meeting in, the time is not yet ripe for mapping out the future.

2. Noam and Marom graduates – Noam and Marom are, respectively, Masorti’s youth movement and young adult organisation.  Over the years Noam has been phenomenally successful at inspiring young people and connecting them with Judaism, but has not necessarily had the effect of building a relationship between them and synagogue life.  Marom’s aim is to continue to engage young adults with Jewish communal life when they’re done with Noam but are at a stage of life where synagogue does not yet appeal.  

Recently, the first groups of Noam graduates / Marom members have reached an age where regular Jewish involvement has become an issue.  Some of these people (again, despite our commitment to volunteerism, led by a professional – this time Naomi Magnus, our Marom director) have initiated a series of regular, monthly Friday night dinners, sometimes preceded by a kabbalat Shabbat service.  The events are hosted by members, in their homes.  As some of these people begin to get married and have children, we wait to see which direction this group will take – will some of them join other local Masorti shuls?  Will they want to sustain their own, independent group existence and grow into a more permanent community?  Or will some other path emerge?

3. Shenley (Hertfordshire): we know that Hertsmere has one of the fastest growing Jewish populations in the country (over 14,000 Jews live there according to the 2011 census).  It was a no brainer to supplement what at the time was a fortnightly service held by the Elstree and Borehamwood Masorti community.  The fact that Laurence, our small community fieldworker, had recently moved to Shenley provided an ideal opportunity.  He decided to hold a Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service and pot luck dinner in his home.  He leafleted his entire neighbourhood and advertised in local shops, cafes and online, as well as inviting his own personal contacts from the area.  

20 people showed up for the first event and future meetings are planned, with participants offering to host in their homes.  We’ve been careful to make everyone aware that there are two Masorti shuls in the area – Elstree and Borehamwood (which has now made a successful transition to weekly services) and St Albans – and for the foreseeable future we see the Shenley group as a recruiting ground for these fully-fledged communities.

So the model clearly works – at least in terms of seeding new initiatives.  And potential exists in additional areas: Manchester, Mill Hill and Primrose Hill are all in our sights.  Whether all these groups are sustainable remains to be seen.

But our approach faces one other challenge: while the movement wants to form new communities as part of our growth agenda, local synagogues are often – legitimately – focused on their own needs.  In particular, local shul leaders need to sustain or grow their membership in order to achieve financial stability and fund their important programmes, and are wary of new groups cannibalising their membership.  The last thing we want to do as an organisation is to damage our existing communities, but as the Jewish population becomes ever more concentrated, it’s harder to find areas with lots of Jews that aren’t perceived to be too close to an existing synagogue.  As a halachic movement, we’re also committed to setting up local shuls so people don’t feel they have to drive on Shabbat. 

To solve this problem, we’ve decided to go down the route of satellite communities: partnering with existing synagogues to set up new groups which will hold their own local services, learning and social activities but will continue to use the cheder, burial society, rabbinic services of the existing community and – just as importantly – paying it membership dues.  The model is an extension of what already happens at, for example, New North London Synagogue, where three minyanim share a synagogue and everyone is a member of one large community.  The only difference is that we want to enable new groups to operate off-site so as to draw in new, previously non-Masorti people.  And perhaps the model is sustainable into the more distant future as a new way of organising our community life – rather than basing ourselves around individual, self-reliant synagogues, a better structure could be clusters of small to medium-sized communities all sharing administrative, rabbinic and educational infrastructure.

It’s an exciting experiment and we’re confident in its chances of success – even if we don’t know for certain if it’s going to work  I look forward to reporting back on progress.