Leadership to create the world as it could be
How to create effective, bottom-up community leadership
When my daughter was seven years old, she came home from yeshiva and proudly announced that she had been unanimously elected to represent her second-grade class on the student council. Her view of what it means to be a leader—handing out candy to her classmates—indicates that she understands the desires and interests of her constituency, always the starting place of effective leadership.
My early impressions of leadership came from growing up in an extended Catholic family in a racially mixed, working-class neighborhood in South Bend, Indiana. On our wall hung a picture of John F. Kennedy next to the crucifix. One of my most vivid childhood memories was waiting impatiently for hours on the street near our house, in 95-degree humidity, for presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy to drive by in a convertible and shake our hands. I was hoping some of Kennedy’s star quality would rub off on me. I believed that leadership was something you were born with, or something bestowed upon you with a title and money. And since I lacked those things, leadership did not feel accessible to someone like me.
Today, as a Jewish mother, I am determined to help create a community—one that my daughter and generations of our family to come will inherit—that puts legs on its values and understands how to operationalize community leadership. I believe that top-down congregational leadership, still a prominent model among clergy from many faith traditions, is not the kind of leadership we need to turn our congregations into covenantal communities or to create the world as it could be.
What I’ve observed is that many people believe leaders must have charisma, multiple degrees, and the ability to manage huge budgets. Some leaders feel they must be charismatic to win—and keep—the loyalty of others. However, management guru Peter Drucker said that the only quality that is not essential for effective leadership is charisma. The charismatic model of leadership is so focused on and dependent upon one leader’s vision and legacy that the community is held hostage to that leader’s whims and perspective, which may not represent your concerns or mine. You’ll often hear charismatic “social justice warriors” speaking “truth to power” about the cause of the day, even when the people with the actual power to change it are not present to hear it. This model does not advance a community’s capacity to craft and implement a collective vision, nor does it broaden or deepen a base of leaders capable of making change in the world.
We are embarrassed when some of our leaders are caught in scandals, or when they model an Enron-like culture that lacks any semblance of accountability.
We also often value bureaucrats who manage big budgets and armies of staff, gatekeepers, and consultants. The bureaucratic model of leadership focuses on developing leaders who can manage large institutions, hold degrees and awards, and oversee organizations that primarily serve clients. I have found that this model does not equip our leaders—clergy and lay leaders alike—to strengthen and transform our institutions into covenantal communities, where our futures are bound up with one another.
Both the charismatic and bureaucratic approaches often create an isolating, market-driven culture in our institutions—one in which leaders relate to members transactionally around tasks, and constituents are treated as consumers or clients rather than as untapped leaders.
My grandmother’s story illustrates how being a recipient—a client of services—can ultimately isolate and marginalize families by failing to equip them to claim their own power and agency.
My grandmother, Mary Goetz, was less than five feet tall and a force of nature. She said the rosary every day, was on a first-name basis with the saints, and had her sights set on me becoming a nun. I disappointed that dream when I converted to Judaism 33 years ago and resigned my role as the poster child for Catholic education, valuable as that experience was.
Shortly before her death at age 98, she shared with me the origins of her fierce loyalty to the Church, as well as the isolation that sometimes accompanies being a client. Her father died when she was very young, leaving my great-grandmother with five children and no way to make a living. My grandmother and her sister Ann dropped out of sixth grade to work in a rubber factory to help put food on the table, but it was not enough to keep the family above the poverty line. Local authorities threatened to tear the children away from their mother and place them in an orphanage. A young priest at their church stood up to the authorities and provided my great-grandmother with odd jobs at the church, rent assistance, and groceries. He did the right thing.
However, this leadership approach—still employed by many clergy today—falls short in one important respect. When I asked my grandmother whether she ever spoke to other parishioners about her family’s experiences, she replied, “Of course not. My mother lived in fear of anyone finding out.” My great-grandmother could not voice questions like, “Why should authorities be allowed to break up my family?” or “Why are there no laws protecting families from this violation?” When I asked if others in the congregation had similar experiences, my grandmother told me she had no idea. No one in her church spoke about “private” matters. They attended one another’s weddings and funerals but never shared their struggles or dreams.
This approach to leadership meets the needs of individuals, which is an important and often necessary role. But by itself, it lacks the capacity to equip individuals or communities to change their circumstances or forge a collective future. Had the priest connected my great-grandmother to others who had also suffered under abusive power, they might have joined together to fight for laws protecting families. They could have interpreted their experience in a broader context, acted on their own behalf, and experienced the dignity and power that accompanies collective action. Instead, my family internalized shame.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the late Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, writes in To Heal a Fractured World that the Israelites were not transformed by the miracles they witnessed—neither the plagues, the splitting of the sea, nor even receiving the Torah. Taking the Israelites out of Egypt did not, in itself, take Egypt out of them. In fact, they built and worshipped the golden calf just 40 days after Sinai. Rabbi Sacks argues that we are transformed only by what we create, not by what we receive. It was only after building the Tabernacle that the Israelites abandoned Egyptian idolatry for generations. As Rabbi Sacks writes, “The Sanctuary was a place they had constructed themselves…they had contributed their money and possessions, their time and skill, and thereby acquired the dignity that comes with the act of creation.”
What would it look like to truly build covenantal communities—not only within our congregations, but across race, class, and religious lines? What if our schools, organizations, and congregations fostered cultures where people are engaged around their talents and passions rather than tasks; where developing people takes precedence over magic-bullet programs; and where private struggles are voiced and justice is pursued?
More than 1,500 rabbis, cantors, rabbinical and cantorial students, and lay leaders whom my colleague Meir Lakein—Co-Executive Director of JOIN for Justice—and I have trained and coached over the past 22 years are embracing this approach. While there is certainly more than one effective leadership model, I believe this one is worth serious consideration if our goal is to build communities where members take ownership and lead alongside clergy, working shoulder to shoulder with neighbors across race, class, and faith to achieve long-term, systemic change.
This approach originated with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) over the last 75 years. Through JOIN’s Seminary Leadership for Public Life classes—which I co-created with Meir Lakein, Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, Rabbi Noah Farkas, and others—we have helped unleash leadership capacity in nearly 2,000 rabbis across the country.
As Michael Gecan of the Industrial Areas Foundation explains, the basics of this approach are easy to list and hard to practice:
First, leaders must have followers and networks of relationships; reciprocity between leader and follower is central.
Second, a leadership culture focuses on identifying, engaging, and developing people around their own drives, interests, and gifts—not prepackaged issues or causes. Temple Israel’s process of conducting 800 one-to-one meetings, which uncovered struggles around inadequate nursing home care and affordable housing, illustrates this point.
Third, covenantal relationships begin with one-to-one meetings built on shared stories and go far deeper than transactional relationships focused solely on tasks or individual needs.
Fourth, relationship-building must lead to and be tested in the public arena by acting on our interests with those who hold decision-making power—through public negotiation, not backroom deals.
In 2007, millions of Massachusetts residents gained access to affordable health care because thousands of leaders from churches, synagogues, PTAs, and unions stood shoulder to shoulder and publicly pressed state legislators and members of Congress to pass historic legislation. It is far easier to hold leaders accountable for commitments made publicly before thousands of constituents and the press than for promises whispered behind closed doors.
In my work as Senior Organizer and Trainer at JOIN for Justice, I’ve been privileged to partner with rabbis in the field to help cultivate a new generation of leaders who value partnership and accountability over bloated budgets and armies of consultants. These leaders are building boards of directors who earn their authority by acting publicly on their values and mobilizing networks of relationships.
If we want to create meaningful social change—and begin building the world as it could and should be—we cannot rely on clothing drives and soup kitchens as the primary expression of our prophetic tradition. If we want to truly partner with other communities, we must stop pretending we are immune to rising health care and housing costs, inadequate elder care, and unemployment. If we believe leadership requires more than charisma and legacy-building, then we must rethink how leadership for public life is defined, developed, and rewarded.
Like our ancestors, we can be transformed by what we create: a new generation of leaders for public life, weaving a just world from the threads of our grandparents’ hopes and our children’s dreams. I can think of no greater legacy of leadership for my daughter.
