Justice & Judaism: Community Organizing in the Conservative Movement

by Daniel May and Peter Dreier

After three years of stalling from Tiburon’s city council, Rabbi Lavey Derby was looking for new ideas. His synagogue, Congregation Kol Shofar in Marin County, north of San Francisco, was badly in need of expansion, but work on a new building required city council approval. “Their opposition was based on the fact that if we brought more traffic to the neighborhood, we would bring down property values,” Rabbi Derby reported. “‘Tiburon is a bucolic village,’ they said. ‘And you are ruining it.’”

Rabbi Derby decided to try a different tack. He asked clergy from congregations throughout California – Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish – to pack the chambers at the council’s next session.

At that meeting, Rabbi Derby described a vision of community based not on the value of property but on the value of relationships. When dozens of clergy – Catholic priests and Baptist ministers, Latinos, African Americans, Filipinos, and Asians – silently rose to show their support for the synagogue, the few dozen Kol Shofar members present let out a collective gasp.

“For the first time, we felt as if we were not alone,” Rabbi Derby said. “It was one of the more dramatic moments I’ve ever experienced as a rabbi.”

Kol Shofar member Gail Dorph was there that night. “It gave you the sense of what you could accomplish if people really stood together,” she said.

Most of the clergy weren’t Rabbi Derby’s friends, but they were his allies in a growing movement of faith-based community organizing. Their congregations were affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, a network of community groups that has been teaching leadership and organizing skills to religious institutions for 60 years.

This approach, often called broad-based organizing or congregation-based community organizing, brings together various religions and denominations to work together around mutual concerns. The major networks – IAF, PICO (People Improving Communities Organizing), Gamaliel, and DART (Direct Action Research and Training) – represent thousands of congregations of nearly every religious denomination in almost every state.

From the early labor and settlement house movement to the civil rights and antiwar struggles to environmental and women’s rights organizing, Jews have been involved disproportionately in social justice causes. Yet despite their many liberal and progressive members, synagogues generally limit their social action to the safer realm of charity projects, such as tutoring or donating food to homeless shelters.

But a growing number of rabbis and their congregants are pursuing organizing as a means of living out the Jewish tradition of justice. One hundred synagogues across the United States are exploring or engaging in organizing and 38 are dues-paying members of the faith-based organizing networks.

While only nine of those congregations are part of the Conservative movement, many Conservative rabbis and lay leaders believe that this number is set to grow. Organizing not only offers an exciting approach to social justice, they believe; it also is a way to revitalize synagogue life. To these rabbis, organizing provokes a reframing of the meaning of halakhah, and with it a rethinking of the very purpose of Conservative Judaism.

Organizing typically begins with one-onone and small-group conversations where members share stories about their own lives, motivations, and concerns. This sharing process pushes members outside their comfort zones, and many find it draws them into a stronger sense of belonging.

“Part of the excitement is finding kindred spirits in the congregation,” said Glenn Rothner, a union lawyer and former board member at the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center. “Consciously engaging members of the congregation about social justice helps forge a stronger sense of community.”

Dr. Dorph, who recently became director of the Mandel Teacher Educator Institute, a professional development program for senior Jewish educators, was drawn to organizing to deepen her ties to her new community. “For adults like us, getting connected to a community is not a straightforward path. This was a way to meet new people by doing something worthwhile. It was a way to sink our roots into Marin County.”

Richard Lederman, until recently United Synagogue’s national director of public policy and social action, began to see the power of these one-on-one conversations at a retreat sponsored by the Jewish Funds for Justice, a national private foundation that has worked to involve synagogues in organizing since 2002.

“I realized that this wasn’t just about social justice but about a new way of re-organizing synagogues,” Dr. Lederman said. “People were sharing personal stories and a deep sense of concern for their communities.”

For Rabbi Ahud Sela of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, this was a radical departure from rabbinical school education.

“At the Jewish Theological Seminary I was taught to be as imaginative as possible in providing for congregants, rather than asking them what it was they were interested in,” he said. Once he enrolled in an IAF and JFSJ sponsored course on organizing at JTS he envisioned a different model. “I needed someone to tell me, ask!” he added.

Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater believes that the community-organizing model challenges congregants to take more responsibility for the synagogue’s social and spiritual health. “Moses helped to organize the first Jewish community by learning how to delegate and empower others to take charge of their own destiny from his father-in-law, Yitro,” said Rabbi Grater of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center. “It doesn't take the entire congregation to make this successful. But it needs a dedicated group to follow through and organize.”

At Congregation Kol Shofar, this emphasis on conversation now permeates every aspect of congregational life. “This is the hallmark of our synagogue culture,” Rabbi Derby said. “Nothing happens that doesn’t begin with people sitting down and talking to each other about what matters to them.”

As Gail Dorph said, “The listening, the relating, that is the hard stuff, that’s the real work. It is true that we’re building infrastructures that make people’s lives better, but it’s the relationships that we develop to do so – that’s what will save the world.”

In most synagogues, activism is delegated to a social action committee that picks issues from a menu of social causes. With some exceptions, these become mitzvah projects for the religious school students and bar/bat mitzvah classes.

The community-organizing model inverts this approach. Instead of the issues emerging externally, they surface from within the synagogue. People don’t engage in social action simply as do-gooders, but because they see, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”

Simon Greer, a former community organizer who now directs the JFSJ, said, “Jews have always supported social justice issues, but they often see those issues as affecting other people.

“People may say, ‘I don't know where to find affordable care for my aging mother’ or ‘I can’t find good public schools and we’re priced out of the private schools,’” he continued. “But theyusually see those as personal problems, not political issues. Community organizing helps people see that those are political issues, too.”

They also discover something surprising, that they share many concerns with those whom they had viewed as disadvantaged.

“My congregants understand that their concerns about growing old in the community are no different than the concerns that Latinos, Christians, and African Americans have about growing old in this community,” Rabbi Derby said. “We all worry about public health, about transportation to hospitals, about the spiritual wasteland our culture provides for teenagers.”

Rather than approaching low-income communities with the resources of an affluent and professional membership, these congregations approach Latino and African American churches out of a mutual interest in acting together.

“Anyone going into this work to do something ‘for those poor downtrodden folks’ is going to be frustrated and disappointed,” Rabbi Derby warned. A strictly charitybased model of social justice limits what congregations can achieve. “If we only do for a poor family we’re never building relationships of real equality or real power.”

For Gail Dorph, the connections between the needs of the Kol Shofar congregation and the larger community are obvious. She points to the needs of her synagogue’s teenagers as an example.

“It’s not hard to think of ways to strengthen teen programming at Kol Shofar, but that will not solve the fact that there is no local hangout in Mill Valley or Tiburon for teens just to have fun,” she said. “The only way we're going to create such places is if we partner with other congregations and organizations that also worry about the quality of life of teenagers.”

By strengthening bonds within the synagogue, congregations create the power they need to exercise influence in the world of public policy. For example, after several months of one-on-one and small group meetings, congregants at Congregation Tifereth Israel – a 1,100-family synagogue in Columbus, Ohio – concluded that there was an urgent need for affordable housing in the community. They joined with 40 other congregations that were part of Building Responsibility, Equality and Dignity, an affiliate of the DART organizing network.

After several years, BREAD finally won a commitment from Franklin County and the city of Columbus to create a $10 million affordable housing trust fund.

The group’s annual assembly, held to solidify the victory of the housing trust fund, drew more than 1,000 people from Catholic, Protestant and Jewish congregations. Cantor Jack Chomsky described the achievement as an example of creating the justice that is part and parcel of daily prayer.

The organizing process also brings new participants into synagogue life.

Many of Kol Shofar’s board members got involved in synagogue life only after an encounter with organizing. Four members of the core organizing team actually had left the synagogue but rejoined in order to participate. For Karl Rubin, a member of Tifereth Israel, his interest in organizing began with his son’s bar mitzvah. “I wanted Jacob to see that being Jewish transcended simply being in a building,” he said.

“In a world where people are not willing to make a commitment to serious observance they seem eager to engage in a conversation about what it means to commit religiously to improving the world,” Rabbi Derby said. It is the possibility of bringing disconnected Jews into congregational life that most excites many Conservative Jews.

Cantor Chomsky agrees. “Why is the Conservative movement worthy of surviving?” he asked rhetorically. “Because we provide prayers that some people connect to once a week? What is worth saving about that? We need to connect people joyfully to the possibilities of Jewish life, and organizing can do that.”

Yet with a handful of exceptions, Conservative congregations have not embraced the community organizing approach. Rabbi Leonard Gordon, chair of the Rabbinical Assembly’s social action committee, said, “For many years, we thought a commitment to a halakhic-centered Judaism was in conflict with social justice work. The logic went: Either we’re going to put energy into Shabbat and kashrut or into homelessness, but not both.”

But a growing number of Conservative clergy and lay leaders recognize that this choice – between Jewish observance and social justice – is a false one.

“I want to live an integrated life,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, rabbi-in-residence at the Jewish Funds for Justice. “When I buy into the halakhic system, I am not only committing myself to regulations about what I can or cannot eat, or what I can and cannot do on Shabbat, but I am buying into a system that guides my relationships with individuals and my obligations to the community as a whole.”

Marshall Ganz, the son of a Conservative rabbi and a long-time organizer with the United Farm Workers, is now a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he teaches community organizing and citizen participation. An active member of Harvard’s Hillel, Professor Ganz believes that the split between internal congregational commitments and external social ones is corrupting for synagogues.

“We need to get beyond this divide between Jewish practice and the practice of justice, between the external and the internal,” said Professor Ganz. “We are operating in a dichotomy that runs counter to the Jewish tradition.”

Citing Hillel’s famous admonition, “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I?” Professor Ganz argues that “Hillel teaches us that the self and the other are interdependent and related to each other.”

Any conversation about organizing within Conservative synagogues becomes a conversation about the Conservative movement – its legacy, challenges, structure, and purpose. According to Professor Ganz, this conversation ultimately is about the meaning of halakhah.

Rabbi Jacobs adds, “The central role of the Conservative movement should be in taking halakhah and ethics seriously, and in committing ourselves to the full body of halakhah.” Rabbi Gordon poses a similar argument in the form of a question: “In the aftermath of the women’s ordination decision, the gay and lesbian ordination decision, many people were asking how the Conservative movement can claim to be concerned with halakhah.” He answers his own question. “It lies in the rabbinic tradition.”

For Rabbi Gordon, “Halakhah is not just about decisions that are taken. It’s about how we come to those decisions. So we are true to halakhah even if we move in directions that might be surprising.”

This emphasis on process runs counter to the philosophy that generally undergirds much Jewish social justice work – “prophetic Judaism,” the tradition’s long legacy of speaking truth to power. But Rabbi Derby argues that the prophetic model was replaced with the rabbinic model.

“The prophets were not successful in the real world!” he said emphatically. “They were idealists. They saw the world in blackand- white terms. They were not able to create a structure or a strategy to move communities toward justice. They pointed the way, but rarely did they create change.” Rabbi Derby said that the rabbinic revolution moved away from this top-down theology to a Judaism of conversation and deliberation.

“The early rabbis engaged in a process of discussion, deliberation, and debate. And that tradition is immensely valuable in our democratic culture.”

While synagogues may be slow to embrace this work, a growing number of rabbinical students are flocking to it, according to Rabbi Jacobs. “When I started at JTS in 1987 and said that I wanted to do social justice work as a rabbi, I got a lot of blank stares.” Today, she meets regularly with students interested in careers in social justice. “It’s gone from being unusual to being totally normative.”

Rabbi Derby recognizes that the story of his Marin County congregation’s expansion is unlikely to inspire other congregations to action, but he argues that the building expansion was essential for building the foundation for later action. Last year dozens of his members stood with Catholic congregants in the Bay Area to urge a halt to raids at workplaces with undocumented immigrants.

“I can’t say the expansion of our synagogue is the moral equivalency of halting the separation of mothers from their children,” he said. “But I can say that we were not there because of the urgency of the issue alone. We were there because we were standing with our neighbors. And that can only happen because they stood with us.”

In bringing together churches, synagogues, and mosques around issues as specific as a building expansion and as controversial as an immigration raid, organizing cuts to the heart of questions Jews have debated and argued for centuries. To whom are Jews obligated? What is the meaning of halakhah? And what does it means to live an integrated Jewish life?

Spiritual leaders like Rabbis Gordon, Derby, and Jacobs and Cantor Chomsky argue that these questions lie at the heart of any serious Jewish reflection. Organizing, they say, can be a way to engage with the tradition’s key questions.

As Rabbi Gordon said, “We know how to wrestle with ambiguity. Judaism has been doing community organizing for a few thousand years. We ought to draw on that tradition and continue it.”