Mobilizing a Movement
 | Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner is the Director of Just Congregations, the Reform Movement's congregation-Based Community Organizing effort, under the auspices of the Commission on Social Action. |
This week The Nation published an article exploring the fast-growing trend of synagogues becoming involved in congregation-based community organizing. Writers Drier and May correctly observe that across the country, more and more Jewish congregations are joining broad-based organizations in order to build power for social change in their own communities. We have seen this trend most significantly in the Reform movement, with last year’s launch of Just Congregations, an initiative devoted to this work, of which I am the founding director.
In synagogues across the country, the impact of organizing is incredible. Last weekend, I attended an assembly at Congregation Solel in Highland Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. More than one hundred temple members attended this gathering, an amazing turnout on the Sunday after Rosh Hashana and the first day of religious school. Clearly, they were committed to the project.
The assembly was the culmination of a one-to-one campaign, in which 113 members of the congregation met for nearly an hour in pairs to discuss their visions for a more just community. Part of the assembly was a celebration of this campaign. Having more than one hundred members of a congregation share their stories and concerns is a tremendous step in building a real community. The majority of the meeting was devoted to telling some of the compelling stories heard during the campaign. One member wept as she described the discrimination her adopted son faced at the town’s majority-white high school. Another told of the struggle to care for her aging mother. The assembled members committed to join together on behalf of the synagogue to work on issues related to education and elder care.
The meeting was organized by Lake County United, an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation started by Saul Alinsky in the forties (and described in The Nation article). Attending the meeting were leaders of various community churches and synagogues. A highlight came when a leader from the local mosque spoke on behalf of the five Muslims who attended with him. He not only celebrated Solel’s commitment to working with the churches and mosques through Lake County United, he also thanked the Reform movement because of Rabbi Eric Yoffie’s historic speech at ISNA.
Having built the relationships within their temple walls, and also having reached beyond to other Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Solel is ready to act powerfully on the issues of social justice its members care deeply about. We are seeing work like Solel’s all over the country.
I want to offer one last reflection about The Nation article. Though it tells excellent stories of successful organizing campaigns in Boston and California, reflecting work across the county, the piece alluded to this work as “left wing.” I would argue that organizing transcends the neat categories of the political spectrum. The organizing approach is thoroughly non-partisan, although it is totally political. Let me explain this distinction further: organizing teaches local institutions how to engage collectively to promote the common good, not fulfill the platform of any particular party. It brings synagogues into full civic engagement, but congregations involved in organizing never endorse candidates or parties. Instead, by seeking out community passions, we often see Democrats and Republicans uniting around common stories—air pollution creating asthma, school truancy, nursing care quality. None of those are partisan issues. Indeed, having myself organized for nearly a decade in Massachusetts, where we currently have single party rule, I have seen for myself how often organizing leads to holding Democrats accountable. By organizing, congregations build power for the just society they envision, regardless of the party in power.