My friend and colleague
Arnie Samlan posted about a conversation he had with Beth Finger, who is working on a project called
Jewish Without Walls. They suggest we "Forget about Jewish Affiliation, Think about Jewish Connectedness:"
"During
our conversation this morning, we both challenged the relevance of
"Jewish affiliation", which has been used in every Jewish demographic
study as a measure of community success in modern America. The problem
is, and has always been, that the operational definition of
"affiliation" is often "pays dues to a synagogue". Even those who expand
the definition someone, rarely get beyond handing money to an
organization (JCC, Federation, Hillel) as the operational definition."
He
explores several problems with using affiliation as a metric, including
leaving our serious Jews who are "not religious," those for whom
membership is of little if any value, and that it does not include
significant numbers of Jews who relate to their Jewishness
independently, including growing numbers who use social media to express
their Jewishness.
He (with a nod to Beth Finger)
suggests changing the metric to "Jewish Connectedness." He would like
Jewish sociologists to take into account the many ways of relating
meaningfully to being Jewish. He wants to find a way to include serious
Jewish paths that may not lead through a synagogue, federation or JCC.
He includes summer camping and independent minyanim as well as those
"who are doing Jewish in non-institutional spaces or in secular spaces,
Jews connecting online in meaningful ways
folks and who participate in Beth's Jewish Without Walls, in havurot
and in other groupings that are not (yet) dues-based groups."
I
think Arnie has the beginnings of an interesting framing of the
conversation that we have all been having for a while. And while those
who would overturn existing institutional frameworks might see this as
invitation Occupy Organized Judaism, I see it as a refreshing way to
begin talk about the apples and oranges in the same conversation. After
all, Apple Jews and Orange Jews are still all Jews!
I would press the idea a bit further:
How
can we in the synagogue world change the way we operate to increase the
CI - Connectedness Index - for each member family and individual?
While we in this world often do a lot to attract affiliation, we don't
always (or even often) do a good enough job of connecting them to other
adults in our congregations. We get them when they feel they need us
(religious school, nursery school, Bar/Bat Mitzvah) but we don't always
connect the adults in the family. So when the kids are ready to move on,
the adults do as well.
Using the CI as a way to
measure and improve what we do is as important as using it to find a
meaningful category for non-Congregational connecting.
I still like the word "affiliate" though. It makes me feel like we can
use it to affirm that we obeying Hillel's dictum not to separate
ourselves from the community.
Like Arnie, I am not the
statistician to figure out how to count these things in the larger
picture. I do know that in our synagogue and religious school, we have
begun to focus on connecting parents. Our room parents now focus on
getting parents together rather than doing the shopping or helping with
the seder. (
See article on page 6 Torah at the Center).
I challenge you to share more ways of connecting the people who ARE
affiliated! Because we need to raise the CI of all of our people!
Cross posted to
Welcome to the Next Level
