Wexner Foundation Newsletter

Wexner Newsletter:  December 10, 2009  23 Kislev 5770   Parashat  Vayeshev

Wexner Graduate Fellowship/
Davidson Scholars
Program's Class XX
Mid-Fellowship Retreat


Class XX Wexner Graduate
Fellows & Davidson Scholars

Creating a culture of reflection on our leadership challenges and successes remains at the core of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship/ Davidson Scholars Program. By providing a comfortable environment with trusted colleagues our fellows have been able to draw on each others’ wisdom and insights to grow as leaders through reflection. Our Mid-Fellowship Retreat provides a special opportunity for our 3rd year class to do just that.

Last month at Capital Camps in Waynesboro, PA the members of Class XX gathered for a 3-day retreat and shared a Shabbat experience to both celebrate and reflect on their growth over the past 2 ½ years. Through a committee the fellows planned and executed the retreat themselves. Challenges arise and creative solutions emerge when the class embarks on celebrating Shabbat as a group. Negotiating and learning from the religious diversity of our fellowship classes has been an important leadership development tool for the fellows. Shabbat observance brings up issues that are not dealt with otherwise by the fellows. It is their challenge to find a system that will provide a Shabbat experience that all can find meaningful.

The fellows are also responsible for planning significant time for group reflection. This year, Class XX asked each fellow to prepare in advance and present a significant leadership challenge that they are experiencing regarding their graduate education, professional aspirations, volunteer roles, personal life or leadership style. Based on the “Critical Colleagues” protocol from the field of Education, each fellow presented their leadership challenge to a group of 8 other fellows who asked clarifying questions and brainstormed diagnoses and solutions for the presenter.

This system allows for the presenter to gain new insight into his/her leadership challenge in a way that maximizes the limited time. Among the many benefits of this protocol is that the presenter and the consultants are given a structure through which they can listen without interruptions and side tracks. The protocol also builds in opportunities for peer-consultants to test assumptions so that their feedback is based on all relevant and correct data.

The retreat follows personal reflections that each fellow did as part of our renewal process. After two years in the four-year fellowship program fellows are required to renew their fellowships. This process includes writing a 5-page essay that addresses growth experienced and leadership challenges over the course of the first two years of graduate school and the fellowship. Fellows often comment that being asked to write an essay in the middle of a learning process helps them to refocus and remember the nuances of their original intent in choosing to become a Jewish professional leader.

The mid-fellowship retreat expands on the renewal reflections by allowing the fellows to present their thinking to their colleagues whom they have developed trusting relationships with over the past two years. The retreat takes place over Shabbat – the first and only official time that the fellows are brought together over Shabbat by the Foundation.

Finally, in addition to celebrating Shabbat and the group reflections process, being together over the weekend was an excellent opportunity to have fun together as a class. Icebreakers allowed the fellows to integrate their families into the community and everyone had a great time on Saturday night working on improv games with a master improv teacher then hanging out around the campfire.

It was a transformative weekend that was a catalyst for both individual and group growth.

 

 

 

Abigail and Leslie Wexner, Chairmen
Larry S. Moses, President
Rabbi B. Elka Abrahamson &
Cindy Chazan, Vice Presidents 

Leadership Learning:  A Defining Leadership Moment

"Evolving Leaders for Evolving Communities"
By Dr. Michael Kay, an alumnus of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship Program.  He is the Director of Judaic Studies for the Upper School of the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, MD.  He can be reached at makay@post.harvard.edu.

 In our circles, we speak often about the notion of “community leadership.”  And while we spend a great deal of time analyzing the ways in which “leadership” has evolved over the past century, we have paid less attention to the ways in which “community” itself has changed.  In her 1998 article “Postmodernism and Community in Schools,” Gail C. Furman described a transition from a “modern” conception of community in America to what she called a “postmodern” one.  Whereas communities had previously been based upon a “strong center of sameness” and aspirations of homogeneity, the new model is centered much more around the “inescapable awareness of others, of multiple cultures, of values and belief systems, and of interdependence with those who are different.”  In the Jewish world, we have seen this shift in the increased prevalence of pluralistic institutions and the enhanced celebration of the diverse ways in which we approach our common heritage.

In February 2007, interest in history and leadership—and some minor masochistic tendencies—inspired me to take on a new personal project: I would read a full-length biography of each President of the United States, in chronological order.  Thirty months and 19 Presidents later (24 to go and counting—only one bio of Grover Cleveland necessary, thank you very much), it has been fascinating to follow the evolution of both leadership and community in this country during its formative stages.  The conception of community grew—for the most part—progressively wider and more inclusive, and governmental leadership became alternatively more centralized and more diffuse.  While Gail Furman’s community-definition revolution of the 1990s has certainly had a major impact on our society, it was by no means the first such change in our history.

As we contemplate our own leadership in the Jewish community, we should be mindful of the ways in which we must adapt our practice to changing notions of community, as well as the ways in which we can use evolving leadership practices to craft the community as we see fit.  The trend toward less stringent homogeneity within communities has brought with it (and in turn has been influenced by) the expansion of distributed leadership, broader empowerment, greater emphasis on cultural education, and decreased dogmatism.  Moving forward, we should seek to be proactive in anticipating the skills and traits that will be most important as we navigate the challenges of leadership in a Jewish community that is at once—in Furman’s words—both “modern” and “postmodern.”

To volunteer to submit a Defining Leadership Moment article please contact Karen Collum at kcollum@wexner.net

“I’ve Been Thinking…”

"Vayeshev:  Balancing Acts"
By Harry Nelson, a Wexner Heritage alumnus from Los Angeles and an attorney at Fenton Nelson, a healthcare law firm, in Los Angeles. Harry can be reached at harry@fentonnelson.com.

 “Vayeishev Yaakov B’Eretz Megurei Aviv …”  “Jacob dwelt in the land of his father's sojourning….”  (Gen. 37:1)  Buried in the opening verse of this week’s parsha are two competing ideas of how we, as children of Abraham, live.

First:  “Vayeishev” – [he] “dwelled.”  Second, “Megurei” – “sojourning.”  These words share the identical root (shoresh) in Hebrew with the message Abraham delivers to the Sons of Chet  in buying a separate burial place for Sarah:   “Ger v’Toshav Anochi Imachem”  --  I am a stranger [Ger] and a resident [Toshav] with you. (23:4)

Vayeishev, like Toshav, draws on the root infinitive “LaShevet” -- to sit, conveying a sense of permanence in Jacob’s residing in the land.  After a lifetime spent on the run, Jacob has finally settled down in the land, just as Abraham had done.  Megurei, like Ger, draws on the root infinitive “Lagur” – to sojourn, conveying a sense of impermanence and temporariness in his father’s wandering in the land. 

The Torah is signaling that, Jacob, like Abraham, lived with two contradictory notions of relating to the world:  he was settled, rooted, connected and engaged in the place, and yet, at the very same time, in a place where his father was transitory, a short-timer, not wholly of the place. 

It’s curious that Isaac of all people is characterized as the transitory one.  In contrast to his father and son, Isaac never actually leaves the land of Canaan to go into exile. In his book, Unlocking the Torah Text, Rabbi Shmuel Goldin observes that perhaps Isaac’s preference for Esau  (almost cutting short the story of our people!) stemmed from too much connection with the life of the land and a corresponding deficient sense of being a stranger. In this understanding, Rebecca, the literal stranger hailing from Aram-Naharaim, possesses and provides the corrective balance; being both a resident and a stranger, she sees and ensures Jacob’s place as successor. 

Taking this a step further, perhaps Jacob didn’t quite match Abraham in achieving the right balance.  After all, in contrast to Abraham who declared himself to be both resident and stranger at the same time, the opening verse above describes Jacob passively only as a permanent dweller in the land where his father was impermanent. We see evidence of Jacob’s sons adopting foreign values, most famously in selling their brother into slavery.  It is only in the next generation that Judah, the one who wanted to profit from his brother’s sale, serves as the corrective, first as Tamar’s rescuer and then ultimately as Benjamin’s savior.

The tension between permanence and impermanence is essential to our existence as Jews.  The model of Abraham may be holding these two ideas in tension, but perhaps the most we can hope for, like the narrative, is to modulate between them.  We do so when we flip back and forth between our deep engagement in society and in Yiddishkeit.  On a deeper level, we flip back and forth between the week, our “sojourn” in this physical world (physicality, a/k/a gashmius), and Shabbos, a temporary taste of the redeemed world to come (spirituality, a/k/a ruchnius).  Too much one way, and we cease to be Jews; too much the other, and we have no ability to impact the broader world. 

Recently, besides working on balancing the tension in my own life (too much gashmius in fast-paced life in L.A.), I’ve been wondering how we can effectuate even a mild correction in the trend of Jewish life.  My own sense is that, like Jacob, we feel a sense of deep integration in the life of the land, and remember ancestors as the transitory ones.  The result is an abundant sense of permanence, but an every growing deficit of impermanence. 

Among the many great projects underway that offer a possible channel to greater balance on the permanent/impermanent axes, one that’s captured my imagination lately is the Shabbat Tent (http://shabbattent.com/), an emerging independent movement I learned about from my fellow Detroiter-in-exile and Jewish hero, Rabbi Yonah Bookstein. 

The idea of Shabbat Tent is to go to where Jews already are, in significant numbers, at the big camping music festivals, each of which draw tens of thousands of people across the country seeking a spiritual connection in the communal enjoyment of the great jam bands of our time.  Taking a cue from Abraham, for three days or so at a time, the Shabbat Tent folks set up a tent and provide open hospitality, from meals and snacks to shade to davening to a space to connect in the midst of a transcendent spiritual experience.  In so doing, Shabbat Tent represents an effort to integrate Jewishness and make God’s presence felt in the process.  We could use more projects like this across the Jewish world.

May we be blessed to find more balance in every facet of our lives.

To volunteer to submit an “I’ve Been Thinking…” article please contact Nancy Neuberger at nneuberger@wexner.net

 
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