Hornstein Commencement Address 2012
by Dr. Erica Brown
A contemporary writer observed that there are two phone calls that parents never
want to get: 1) “Mom, Dad – I’m in prison,” and 2) “Mom, Dad, I’m writing a
novel about our hometown.” When you take a role as a Jewish communal
professional, it’s a lot like writing a novel set in your hometown. You learn a lot
about people. More than you probably wanted to know. You learn a lot about
institutions. Probably more than you wanted to know. And you learn a lot about
what isn’t working. And if you’re smart and a good observer and a talented change
agent, you begin the process of fixing what’s not working because ultimately,
where other people see problems, you see possibilities.
This September I will celebrate 25 years as a Jewish communal professional. And
when I’m finished, you should come up to me and say, “But you look so young.”
In response, I will say that the field keeps you looking young. It’s great for your
skin and hair but may be a bit of a challenge for your waistline.
In these past 25 years, the world has become virtually unrecognizable from when I
started. When I began working for our community, the Berlin Wall was still up,
Nelson Mandela was still in prison and the Former Soviet Union was not yet
former. No one could have imagined a 9/11. There had been no Hurricane Katrina,
no tsunami on the other side of the world and no earthquake in Haiti. We knew
nothing about genocide in Darfur. We never had a black president. There were no
e-mails. There was no Internet, and friend was still a noun…There was, however,
electricity.
And as the world changed, the field of Jewish communal service also changed.
Year after year, professionals were better educated Jewishly, had more mentoring,
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and more learning targeted at their specific needs. Twenty-five years ago, an MA
in Jewish communal service was still in its infant stages. Decades ago, the
historian Salo Baron, observing changes in the American Jewish community, said:
[the American Jewish Community] has seen the mantle of world Jewish
leadership thrust upon its shoulder.... American Jewry and its leadership
have become keenly aware of that new responsibility. There are
incontestable signs not only of a cultural awakening, but of a certain
eagerness of the Jewish public to pioneer in the unexplored realms of a
modern culture which would be both American and Jewish.
We began to explore that unexplored realm. The year 1925 brought us our first
“Training School for Jewish Social Work," which in 1932 became the Graduate
School for Jewish Social Work. Its stated purpose was to create a Jewish civil
service. In the 1960s, Bernie Reisman was trying to create a program here and, in
the company of Leon Jick, approached three well-known Jewish communal
leaders to ask their advice. These old-school leaders believed that it would be, as
Jick retells it, a “grave injustice to our students because we were ‘trapping them’
in the Jewish field and thus severely limiting their professional opportunities.” As
they left the office, Bernie Reisman turned to Leon Jick and asked, "What now?"
Bernie answered that question, and that’s why you’re here today, and why I am
here today to share some observations with you over this quarter of a century of
personal experience. Among my friends who are generally happy with their
professional choices, there are recovering lawyers, doctors disgruntled about
changes in healthcare and bored accountants, but I wake up energized virtually
every day to a job which provides me with a profound sense of meaning and
purpose. And whatever you will hear from the pessimists among us – and there are
a few - this optimist thinks you are a very lucky bunch of people to have chosen a
noble and sacred career.
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There are two ways to answer the question “what now?,” and I would like to offer –
without ever having met Bernie – that there are two possible responses. The
question “what now?” can be asked in resignation, with shoulders shrugged when
we think of intractable problems and hard-to-solve dilemmas. Or “what now” can
stimulate the next act of the imagination. To this last “what now?” I would like to
offer you five professional career recommendations that I hope will make it on to
your business card because the field needs you to embrace these behaviors and
attitudes:
Be a multiplier: A recent tome on leadership, Multipliers, talks about two kinds
of leaders. Diminishers and mulitpliers. Diminishers say no, take the credit but
share the blame, don’t thank others or compliment them on their work because it
might diminish from themselves. Diminishers find ways to disengage
conversation, to stop robust communication, to make us small believing that they
become larger as a result. We all know diminishers.
Multipliers try the reverse tactic. They build us up. They stretch us and give us the
encouragement to do things that we might have thought impossible; they challenge
us to engage in rigorous debate and to act in collaboration. They love to make
others feel good. Their charge is to grow those they work with. They take the
blame for themselves and give others the credit.
“What now?” in the mouth of a diminisher is the equivalent of “I’m giving up.” In
the mouth of a multiplier “what now?” means what is the next thing I have to do to
actualize this idea, to make it a meaningful reality? Diminishers are all too easy to
find in our field. True multipliers are a rarer breed. I challenge you to become a
multiplier. We need more of them. We need to be multipliers at a time when there
are many diminishers who are negative, who pop our optimism and take away our
shine.
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Be an Educator: Related to the diminsher effect, we have to be on the frontlines
as educators all of us – teaching degree or not. We need to teach people how to
speak with respect, how to value opinions unlike their own, how to create genuine
and authentic dialogue. Be civil, model civility and expect civility. Make no
mistake. We live in an era of entitlement, one where people feel entitled to express
their opinions strongly and often diminish others who don’t share them. This has
gotten to such a point of crisis that people cannot speak peaceably at a Shabbat
table about whether or not they are Republicans or Democrats, if they are for
Jewish settlements or against them. It is impossible for people to learn and grow if
they cannot be challenged by views unlike their own.
As a result of entitlement, I have witnessed a decline in lay/professional
relationships. I’ve seen an increasing level of incivility and hostility waged at
Jewish communal professionals, in my office and at board meetings. I’ve seen
young people enter this sacred work with every ideological drive they can muster
to be told to sit in the back of a room and take notes instead of participating in
board meetings, even though they may be the most informed person in the room
on a particular issue.
We also have be wary of our own sense of entitlement. I interview and mentor
many young, talented professionals every year. It gives me great hope and
satisfaction. But sometimes I see behaviors that aren’t going to make the grade.
We want to skip the line, get the promotion before someone else, say and do as we
like. Wear what we want. If it doesn’t suit us, we’re off to somewhere else. I
watch young professionals move around way too much today for them to grow
properly in place, with the kind of mentoring and supervision that helps people
mature in place. Demand good supervision, but don’t believe that you are always
better that those supervising you and that another workplace will always be better
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than the one you’re in. Challenge from a place of commitment, and your voice will
have much greater influence.
Be a Cultivator: I am wary today of the breadth of networking that takes place
without the depth of relationships that is critical to inspiring and motivating people
to care. I worry that we use technology as a cover and a mask instead of a way to
deepen what’s already there. We send an e-mail when a hand-written note is that
much more meaningful. Without authentically cultivating relationships, we don’t
foster the kind of professional and lay friendships that carry us through darker
moments and help us celebrate the joy of our work.
And in the arena of cultivation, cultivate integrity. In the past decade, I am
ashamed of the number of Jews involved in high profile crime. We have a former
president of Israel in jail right now and a glittering roster of Jewish names
associated with jail time. I consulted some years ago for a global Jewish institution
that was trying to reimagine its work. I suggested that they take on the issue of
enhanced Jewish ethics so that we can live up to a reputation that has taken
thousands of years to build. The CEO looked at me and said, “That’s not our job.”
How wrong he was. That is my job, and it will be your job as well.
Be a Fascinator: A fascinator is a type of hat – and as you might have guessed,
it’s quite an elaborate arrangement. What I mean by this is: be interesting and
interested. Be curious about the world and others because so many Jewish
communal professionals over time are bored and boring. They don’t read the latest
literature in Jewish sociology and keep up with trends in Jewish life. They often
give presentations that are stale or predictable. They don’t see their job as
inspiring others to take the next step in their Jewish life. In a recent Steve Cohen
survey of Jewish communal professionals, he found the shocking statistic that
although we are better educated than ever as Jews, our commitment to Jewish
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peoplehood and Israel is down. Intense conversations about attractive Jewish life
need to take place in our offices and in our meetings because Judaism is a
fascinating religion/culture/history/ethnicity, and we are on its frontlines. Let’s
represent it well.
Be an Innovator: Steve Jobs said that his goal was to make a ding in the universe.
And what a ding he made. So when a colleague recently asked me “What would
Steve Jobs have done had he bought the federation system?” I was knocked off my
chair. It’s not the kind of question I hear in my hallway at work, but it should be.
Clayton Christenson in The Innovator’s Dilemma speaks powerfully about
disruptive technologies. Acts, behaviors and ideas which interrupt the normal
ways of thinking and acting in the universe and cause, as a result, a sea change in
the way that we think. In the follow-up book, The Innovator’s DNA, Christensen
and his co-authors identify five traits of an innovator: Innovators, in their words
are associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting leaders.
They make broad and often uncanny associations. They constantly question what
has always been done and why. They look carefully at what is when thinking
about what could be. They network, and their networks are wide. They experiment
and are not afraid to fail as long as they learn from failure.
The authors ask: “Why do innovators question, observe, network and experiment
more than typical executives?” There are two common themes that surface in the
study of innovators: “First they actively desire to change the status quo. Second,
they regularly take smart risks to make that change happen.”
You are entering an era of leadership where people are turning away from Jewish
institutional life. All of the research of the millennial population indicates that our
next wave of leadership is not interested in buildings and membership, dues and
long meetings. They do not have the brand loyalty that says get involved because
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your parents did. The American Jewish community has spent well over the past
100 years building a remarkable labyrinth of Jewish institutions – from baby to
bubbie – to be now told that Jewish institutional life is no longer relevant. Baby
boomers are deeply troubled by this behavior. I applaud it. For all the initials of
our Jewish alphabet soup, the one letter we’ve paid little attention to is the “J” in
Jewish and now a population is rising in leadership and asking “Why Be Jewish?”
We spent so much time thinking about institutional life and boards and fundraising
that we forgot to answer that question in a truly compelling way.
I am asking you today to become positive disruptive innovators. Every advance
and development I shared with you that has characterized my 25 years in the field
was a result of disruptive innovation, from the fall of communism to the rise of
terrorism. It wasn’t always positive, but it was always shattering and stunning.
Today is Yom Yerushalyim, a day that marks the unification of our holy city
because of what we might call disruptive innovation. Rabbi Abraham Isaac
HaCohen Kook, the first chief rabbi of Palestine, asked why the verse says “Torah
will go forth out of Zion and God’s word from Jerusalem”? He believed that these
are the same locations in essence but that, as we go out into the world, we go out
in two different ways. Zion stands for national aspirations that we have in the
platform of the world. Jerusalem, he argued, is the symbol of our particularism,
how we are ambassadors of a unique moral and spiritual mission in the world.
When we go out into the world as positive disruptive innovators, we play both a
universal and a particular role and cannot be complete if we ignore one or the
other.
For the past decade the tagline of Jewish life has been tikkun olam – go fix the
world. I hope I don’t offend anyone if I tell you the opposite. Do a little damage.
Make a ding. Disrupt the world. Change it and question it. Go out into this vast
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universe and break a few things, not for the sake of breaking them, but for the sake
of putting them together differently to maximize impact and efficiency, to force
meaning, to live a creative Jewish life that attracts others. I will add one caveat. Be
careful. Don’t break Jewish institutional life until you’ve figured out a way to
replace its core values and its incredible gifts. But make life a little uncomfortable
for yourself and others because we only grow from a place of discomfort. And do
it as a multiplier because you can speak from a place of abundance and blessing.
Ask “what now?” in the most positive sense of the word because someone before
you did and that’s why you’re here.
And with that I share my excitement as you join our ranks. Please invite me back
in 25 years, and we can schmooze a bit about how life has changed. But more
importantly, you can tell me how you broke something because you truly loved it.
And then you can share with me how your positive disruption changed the world.
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