This message has 2,015 lots of words, and will take a little longer than usual to read ;).

Reflections on my 10 Year Anniversary with Jewish Federation
I’ve recently concluded 10 years of service with Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, which was very warmly recognized at our recent Annual General Meeting.

I am grateful for the privilege of having worked with an outstanding group of community leaders over these 10 years. After almost 30 years in this field, there is no question in my mind that the greatest challenge we face is that of leadership. I am gratified by those who have stepped up in our community, and honoured to have worked hand-in-hand with them to strengthen our community and our people. In the coming campaign one of the key messages we will be trying to get across is that we are blessed to live in a great community – but we can be even better. The leadership who have been engaged are a big part of why we are a great community.

I am also very fortunate to have terrific colleagues on our staff. I am very conscious that I get a lot of the credit for our many successes over the past 10 years. And while I am happy and proud of the role that I’ve been able to play, I know that any leader is really only as good as his or her team. We have a great team of dedicated professionals and I am fortunate to be working alongside of them.

I have been giving a lot of thought lately to two important social phenomena that I believe are dramatically shaping and changing our world, and that therefore impact our work at Federation.

The first is increasing social isolation. It is already 17 years since American sociologist Robert Putnam published an essay on the decline of social capital in American society. Later published in 2000 as a book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Putnam painted an image that struck a nerve, and does to this day. I remember the shelf in my father’s home office that was lined with my parents’ bowling trophies. I grew up going to a bowling alley with friends on a weekend, but not participating in a league. For my children bowling is a very occasional novelty – a birthday party activity. How many of us know anyone who is actually in a bowling league today? That is just a metaphor for a broad range of social activities that brought people together and thereby knit communities together.

The Vancouver Sun published a few articles about a recent Vancouver Foundation study on social isolation and the lack of connection that people feel in our region. This was follow-up research after the foundation found in polling last year that social isolation was the biggest issue on the minds of people in the region – bigger than homelessness, drug abuse, or the lack of affordable of housing.

One-quarter of respondents in the study reported feeling alone more often than they would like. One-third reported that Vancouver is a difficult place to make friends. And these views are most prevalent among 25-34 year olds.

Technology is part of the issue – we are all so plugged into our computers, our phones, our tablets – that we are spending our time differently, and more often in less social environments. Other demographic and sociological trends also make our region more susceptible to this challenge:

• The region has gone through rapid growth with lots of transplants from lots of different places. We’ve got more immigrants than most places, and immigrants struggle to establish social connections, especially beyond their own ethnic sub-community.
• The very high cost of housing further contributes to social fragmentation and isolation as neighourhoods lose their unique characteristics, and therefore their ability to nurture the social fabric.

Overlay all these factors onto the picture of what is happening with teens, or 20- and 30-somethings, and it is not surprising that they encounter community in very different ways from the way we did when we were their age.

It isn’t that young people aren’t hungry for a sense of connection and community – the phenomenon of Moishe Houses springing up across the globe, offering home-based Jewish experiences to 20-somethings demonstrates that they are interested, even eager to be part of community – but, it isn’t going to look like it did 20 or 40 years ago.

The second social phenomenon is that of increasing political polarization. I think the moment of epiphany for me was last summer as I watched the train wreck in the US Congress over the failure to raise the debt ceiling. Already three years into a recession, and the political leadership couldn’t rise above their posturing and partisanship to actually address a problem for the sake of the common good.

The 10 years that I have been here has been a good period to be away from the US. Eight months before we moved I had read David McCollough’s biography of John Adams, the second American president. And so at the time of the September 11 attacks my mind was steeped in the idealism of America’s founding fathers, who launched a revolution over a set of ideals that were extraordinarily lofty in the grand scheme of things, when you consider the way most countries were dealing with governance and politics.

There used to be an ethos and spirit of bipartisanship in American politics that is gone. That is not to say that everybody always got along and cooperated, but when it was important and much was at stake, there was an ability to reach across the aisle and work together to make big things happen. While in Canada we are blessed to live in a kinder and gentler, or at least more polite nation, we are kidding ourselves if we don’t look at our own political system, and recognize that the loss of bipartisanship and multi-partisanship – the ability to rise above partisanship for the common good – is under serious threat here as well.

Every western democracy is facing these challenges, and we see it in our communal arena, too. People would often rather stand on their own self-defined principles than compromise. Too often, it is more important to win than to make sure everyone is still okay. People are often prone to lock in on their positions, rather than engage in the give-and-take that might mean they don’t take all, but everybody takes some.

At its most extreme, we see it in the ideological fanaticism that drives our fiercest enemies, who are prepared to pursue our destruction, even at the potential cost of their own people’s destruction. Here you can define “our” as Jews, or the West – it pretty much doesn’t matter.

So we are living in a time of increasing social isolation, coupled with increasing political fragmentation and polarization. What does it mean for Jewish Federation?

I think it means that we are more important today than we have ever been. When you boil down what we are about it comes down to two things:

• We generate financial resources to address critical needs facing our people; and
• We build community - we weave the fabric within which Jewish life happens.

The second of these two core missions is a direct hit on these broad sociological challenges. Our unique role is in championing the collective – at a time when social forces are moving in the opposite direction. Well, if anyone should know what it takes to swim upstream, you’d think it would be the people of British Columbia, nurtured on salmon instead of mother’s milk.

In that vein, there are five things I want to point to that we need to be working on. These don’t constitute breaking news, but I do think that the context I’ve shared perhaps provide greater focus and urgency:

1) Outreach to Regional and Ethnic Sub-Communities
Fifty percent of our population lives outside Vancouver, where we have little communal infrastructure to help facilitate Jewish connections. The good news is that many of these groups, including Russians, Israelis, Sephardi Jews and the White Rock community, are reaching out to us, asking for help connecting with the larger community. They are worried about what will happen with their children. We should be worried too, and we should be helping them more. In the process, we will be leveraging the diversity of our community as a strength, and knitting the community together.

2) Young Adults
The good news is that we can build on our successful investments in Birthright and Moishe House, but we need to do much, much more. As stressed and stretched as young adults might seem, especially single young adults, the truth is that they probably have more discretionary time now than they will for decades once they settle into families. We need to be capturing their attention now, and engaging them in community, so that it is a priority for them. The Moishe House model is instructive: give them the tools to build community, and they will learn the value of what we are doing and have been doing for generations.

3) Jewish Education and Identity
Not only is this not a new agenda, it is a timeless agenda. But, given the demographic realities of our community, we need to be moving in new directions. As a community we are strongly invested in our day schools, and appropriately so, but we are grossly underinvested in virtually any other form of Jewish education that would reach the majority of families that don’t choose day schools, or that would reach people through different, less formal means of Jewish education. This is not to devalue formal education. However, we are operating in an environment where many of our people have opted out of the formal channels in which we’ve historically invested. We need to meet them in new places to help draw them in. The concept of public space Judaism – where we introduce Jewish learning and celebration moments into supermarkets at holiday time, or hardware stores at Sukkot, or at the beach on Shabbat – would serve us well in this region. Bringing The PJ Library to our community was a great start, and we have lots more to do.

4) Global Connections
One of the things of which I am most proud is the way in which we have transformed our work in Israel. We are not only sending more young people to Israel, we are building enduring relationships among members of our community and our partnership community in the Upper Galilee, and we are leveraging our philanthropic investments there to have a lasting impact on the quality of life in that region. We should be doing even more to connect members of our community with Israel and the global Jewish community. Jews were doing “global connection” long before the information age made it an integral part of our daily lives. We should be using that historical knowledge and experience to capture the imagination of our people; it will deepen and strengthen their personal identity and bind them to community in powerful ways.

5) Leadership
This is key. If we want to nurture our collective future, we need to invest in developing leadership who will be the passionate champions of the collective in our community. We have struggled, honestly, with what we should be doing in this area, and at this time our investment in programming aimed at empowering young adults is at the core of our strategy. It is the right direction, but I’m worried that it isn’t sufficient.

When our family first moved to Vancouver there were two questions we were often asked; the first was “how long are you here for”? People thought I was I another community shaliach, and we’d be gone in a few short years. Well, it has been 10 years, and we’re still going strong. What motivates us to stay, and me to continue in this role, is the great potential I see for our community. Together, we can and will continue to do great things to build and strengthen our community, to make it a more cohesive and inclusive community, and to deepen our ties with World Jewry and with Israel.

Shabbat shalom!