It’s All About Relationships...Especially After a Pandemic

I write this sitting in a Hilton Rochester hotel room in what is known as “Med City,” Rochester, Minnesota. My wife Susie and I have been in this same room since February 10 when we arrived to enter the world-famous Mayo Clinic kidney transplant center. That amounts to more than 90 days, isolated from most family and friends. We were sheltering-in-place for weeks before the rest of the world, living like John and Yoko during their “bed-in” protest for peace at the Hilton Amsterdam in 1969. 

The good...scratch that...the great news is that Susie’s new kidney - she named it “Sydney” - is working magnificently. When we arrived here, her function was around 13%. It is now 75%. Twice as good as mine. I donated my “spare” to a lovely woman in Florida, whose husband is a Southern Baptist minister who studied at seminary with my friend Pastor Rick Warren, and who, after Googling me, wrote in an email: “I feel so blessed to have a Jewish kidney!” 

So, for the most part, we have been alone all this time. Yet, here’s the thing. We are hardly “alone.” We are surrounded daily by our kids and grandkids, our cousins, our friends, and our colleagues who call, who write, who send, who never let a day go by without letting us know how much they care for and love us. Much of this contact has come through the amazing CaringBridge platform where they see daily updates on our progress. We have come to depend on these virtual connections that lift our spirits. We have been alone....together.

Who knew that the entire Jewish world would learn this same lesson, simultaneously, across denominations and heretofore impermeable institutional borders? I have been absolutely astounded at the adaptability of most Jewish organizations in this Age of Corona. For years, I have advised Jewish educators, clergy, and programmers to ramp up their use of online platforms and streaming services. Yet, I would hear the usual pushback: “it’s too expensive,” “people won’t watch screens that long,” “our teachers have no idea how to teach online,” “why should we stream worship service when we want people in the sanctuary?” Well, for a community often resistant to new approaches, it took a nanosecond for us to change our content and contact delivery systems in order to keep our institutions present and viable.

“How will we continue to build on the critical understanding that our institutions are not buildings, they are not programs...they are people?”

As impressive as the flood of content now available online, let’s talk for a moment about the “contacts” we are making. Since the publication of Relational Judaism and now The Relational Judaism Handbook, I have been encouraging the leadership of Jewish institutions to find ways to check in with their constituents. So, for example, many synagogues began calling all their members once a year, just to say “hi” or “happy new year.” Today, I hear of synagogues that have called their members a number of times since the lockdown began, hearing in response an avalanche of gratitude from those receiving the calls, especially the elderly and those who live alone. 

The question to put on the table is this: How will we continue to build on the critical understanding that our institutions are not buildings, they are not programs...they are people? People who are in need of connection - with the leadership of our organizations and with each other. Delivering content is simple; building relationships requires a different mind-set, a paradigm shift from programmatic and transactional to relational. 

Our colleague Cyd Weissman in a recent column in eJewishphilanthropy points out that those organizations that have invested time, energy and resources in what my co-authors of The Relational Judaism Handbook: How to Create a Relational Engagement Campaign to Build and Deepen Relationships in Your Community, Rabbi Nicole Auerbach and Rabbi Lydia Medwin, call a relational engagement campaign, are seeing a tremendous return on investment from this work. Small groups that were meeting in “B.C.” - “Before Corona” - are continuing to meet, sometimes even more often, in “A.C.” - “After Corona.” 

All this is good. My fear is that when we do get back to “normal,” we will quickly forget to prioritize relationships. Today, we have all this extra time on our hands, stuck at home. What will happen when we return to our quick-paced, crazy busy lives, both personally and institutionally? Today, I’m receiving many long, detailed emails and messages from friends and colleagues. Will that continue tomorrow when things return to the way they were? Or, maybe we will change our approach to community building with the same pace we changed all our work by putting it online. Today, we had no choice but to go virtual. Tomorrow, will we be smart enough to change how we spend our time as communal leaders, carving out time in our busy schedules for those one-on-one coffee dates, those handwritten notes, those phone calls, those opportunities not to sell our product, but to listen to our people?

The virus has revealed the true Ikar, the true fundamental principle that ought to animate our work going forward: it’s all about relationships. How we continue to build those relationships between our leadership and our people, between our people and each other, and between our people and the vast wisdom of Jewish living will be our challenge in the post-pandemic era. Do this well, and we will lead our people to a Judaism that leads them to lives of meaning and purpose, belonging and blessing.

 Dr. Ron Wolfson is Fingerhut Professor of Education at American Jewish University in Los Angeles, author of Relational Judaism and co-author of The Relational Judaism Handbook (relationaljudaismhandbook.com).