Earlier this year a contest was held for the best idea for a book that would transform the way Jews think about themselves and Judaism. Sponsored by a wealthy Jewish philanthropist, the contest was billed as the Jewish equivalent of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant” program, which bestows no-strings-attached gifts of a half-million dollars to a handful of do-gooders around the world each year. The winner, a bright young man named Yehuda Kurtzer, got a two-year teaching gig at Brandeis and a book deal.
Forget the question of whether we needed to commission a book to transform how Jews think about themselves. (I was under the impression that we had that covered a few thousand years ago.) The bigger question is this: Why do we continue to shower even more grace, fame and riches on geniuses in our community?
Look around: The Jewish community has no end of genius. And if you doubt that, just ask anyone in the community. They will tell you all about the many geniuses they know. Why, they may very well be one of them.
Thousands of new geniuses are minted every year, in day schools, high schools and colleges across the country. We elevate these young lions to positions of status and honor. A synagogue in Washington recently lost out in the competition for a young and gifted rabbi. The winning bidder bagged its prey with a package fit for an Ivy League university president: large salary, day school tuition, apartment and so on.
I am a Republican, and I believe strongly that the market alone should dictate compensation for people of accomplishment and promise. But here is the problem: Geniuses are a lousy investment, failing consistently to produce a return on investment.
This isn’t necessarily the fault of the geniuses. These young lions are indeed dazzling in their talent. Kurtzer, for example, is already putting his ideas to work as the founder of an innovative young shul in Boston.
The problem is that the Jewish community, convinced that mere ideas will transform the community, routinely turns to young talent for fresh thinking but rarely puts that talent to work in meaningful ways. Which is to say, nobody ever lets the geniuses actually run the show.
The ranks of America’s leading Jewish community organizations are led by men who were there 10 years ago and will probably be there 10 years from now. They are not going anywhere. And why should they? They have their donors and their dinners. They don’t need much else.
Meanwhile, many potential geniuses hang around the periphery of the community, working on special projects, such as Kurtzer’s, funded by foundations. Yes, they receive much admiration and praise. But the levers of power are set too high. Ultimately, being a genius is a curse. (Thankfully, that’s a problem I myself have never had to face.)
In an ideal world, geniuses would create a parallel leadership structure in the community, taking with them not only talent but dollars and programmatic success. But that is not the case.
Why not? Young geniuses think big, talk big and act big, but have little experience focusing on the small details essential in building functioning organizations and lasting agendas. Some could develop those skills, but are sidetracked by the lure of major funding for the next big idea.
They never develop the discipline and management sense that come with a few years plodding away at a single purpose. So they go from geniuses with promise to mere luftmenschen, bright young men and women with few practical insights or skills.
Fact is, we make it easy in our community to be exceptional. What we don’t do is make it rewarding to be ordinary. So we get bursts of creative output at one end of the spectrum, while the rest of the community suffers.
Consider the following opportunity for improvement: Each year, countless local chapters of major Jewish organizations hold fundraising dinners that are epic in length and devoid of any content, save for self-celebration. How is this possible?
We are the people who invented Hollywood, dominate Broadway and fill concert halls. Yet when we gather to entertain ourselves, we bore ourselves to sleep.
We don’t take our talent for showmanship, on display at the highest levels, and translate that to the day-to-day life of the community. Our geniuses are not put to work.
Yes, we nourish and raise our geniuses to do great things. But in the end, their successes matter little, because they don’t focus on competent, plodding and incremental work — such as executing the ideas dreamed up by the last generation of geniuses.
We are a community of generals, desperately in need of sergeants: People who can take authority without complaint, cope with disappointment, make adjustments and move on to new tasks efficiently. We need the equivalent of firefighters and welders — people who do their jobs without fanfare, even when the work is dangerous, messy and financially unrewarding.
The problem, of course, is that in the Jewish community, everyone wants to be a prince or a princess. Nobody, except perhaps the emissaries of Chabad, wants to take directions from someone else.
Is it any wonder that Chabad is so effective? Its message is simple, its mission is simple and its followers are persistent, steady, committed and incredibly effective.
Of course, that takes faith, not just in the mission, but in the community and its future. We do our geniuses no favors by asking them to save us, over and over again, with fresh ideas.
We don’t need more fresh ideas. We need simple ideas, executed brilliantly. Geniuses could do that quite well, if they knew that was the path to leadership.
Perhaps instead of commissioning yet another book about the future of the Jews, we ought to hire people to organize fundraising dinners lasting two hours or less — now that would be a true stroke of genius.
Noam Neusner served as President Bush’s principal economic and domestic policy speechwriter from 2002 to 2004.
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Reviving one American minhagim might help. When George Washington was inaugurated, there were 6 shuls in America. They sent 3 letters of congratulations instead of one letter from the entire community. This signafied a shift from the old country, where the royal courts included a single Jewish representative who spoke on behalf of all Jews. In America, we related to the government as individual Americans. New independent shuls could implement local ideas. Then we would spend more time testing ideas and lest time debating them.
So why, if there is so much talent about is the Middle East problem so hard to solve? http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/zionism/history.cfm http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/news/currentarticle.cfm?id=141
Why is the Forward printing editorials by Republicans? This is a socialist paper for real Jews, not you sellout neocon apologists for George Dubya Bush. Get out of our newspaper, get out of our synagogues, get out of our communities, and go to the White suburban churches you dream about belonging to. You and your ideology are killing our people.
Rapahel- a great illustration of paranoid atavism. The next time somebody tells me Jews own the Democratic Party, I'll quote you.
You want a genius that is dedicated and committed to all of the details of seeing an idea or project through? As every "wise" person I know has foolhardily chased after the "image" of wealth and stardom as the only agenda in their lifes pursuit, I have painstakingly planned and thought everything out from beginning to end with much (personal) success! However, I have yet to find one person in a position of leadership that is willing to allow me the honor of working on an important and far-reaching project. It seems as if they are too self-absorbed in the status quo!
One example of how Mr. Nuesner must be correct leaps out at me. How is it that American Jews have not done what American Catholics have done for generations, that is create, staff, and fund matriculation into schools to educate the young in the faith and in the way of life (however locally defined)? The answer may lie in a dearth of "sergeants," a surfeit of "geniuses," plus "generals" (fundraisers, lions annd lionesses of large Jewish organizations) who cannot perceive the obvious and crucial need for greater availability of day schools. If you build them (schools, that is) and help with tuition, they will come.
Mr. Nilsson: I take issue with your accusation of paranoia. One need look no further than the Bush administration's disastrous foreign policy blunders, and the attendant rise in anti-Semitism throughout the world, to see that Republicans and neocons are bad news for Jews. As for your accusation of atavism, I make no apologies for that. Atavism, tempered by a healthy culture of halakhic reinterpretation and exegesis, has kept our people alive and vital for nearly 60 centuries. It is important to differentiate between Jews having a home in the Democratic Party and Jews "owning" the Democratic Party. The former is an unfortunate political reality resulting from the lack of relevant Leftist organizations; the latter is a fallacy perpetuated by racists with an anti-Semitic agenda. As the trend toward assimilation into "mainstream" American society has pushed Jews towards the Right (and the "White"), our own institutions have been co-opted or destroyed. The Democratic Party, with all its imperfections and shortcomings, is what remains as a political outlet for Jews who still keep the social commandments of our Torah. Mr. Cahill: While Jewish day schools are not as prevalent as Catholic ones (just as Jews ourselves are not as prevalent as Catholic people), they do exist, particularly in cities with large Jewish populations. I went to one myself as a child. I think the problem with Jewish day schools is that many fail to engage young Jews in a way which is relevant to their daily lives. Instead, they focus on Christian-style indoctrination into a "traditional" Jewish dogma and into Zionism. Without debating the merits of either, suffice it to say that Judaism differs from Christianity in that is it less about finding the right answers than learning how to ask the right questions. In our zeal to assimilate over the past 50 years, many of us have forgotten this important fact. When we no longer remember what makes our people unique, we cease to be unique: we enter the wilderness of mainstream America, a moral and cultural bazaar in which deracinated ideas compete in a marketplace whose common denominator is consumerism sans context. This is not a criticism of American multiculturalism or social diversity; rather, it is a reminder that what has sustained Jews living in Diaspora for millennia is that while living among others, we have never forgotten what sets us apart from them. Without differentiating factors in the "marketplace of ideas", we wander aimlessly through stall after stall, perusing moral and cultural goods of seemingly equal worth. A final thought: six decades ago many American Jews dismissed reports of systematic mass murder of European Jews as paranoid. Let us never forget.
The spirit of this article (too many generals, not enough regular soldiers) is true about the Jewish reality in America in general. There are many talented Bible scholars, but generally the average Jew couldn't quote the Torah. Yiddish research is remarkable, but the language and its culture have been abandonded. There are tip-top Hebrew experts as well, but the typical American Jew probably doesn't know how to write his own name in Hebrew (let alone actually look at a Hebrew book, ancient or modern). In short, there is a very impressive core of talented and committed American Jews, but in general the "masses" have a very meagre connection with Jewish expressiveness. Only a select few even know that there's even a crisis in Jewish life; most feel that all is just great.
Rapahel- I couldn't agree more about Bush and the neocons being OBJECTIVELY very bad for the Jews, in Israel and beyond, but it was all with the best possible intentions and the Congressional policy towards Israel-- abject obeisace-- is bipartisan. There has never been a Republican administrastion, or possibly a Democratic one, so eager to comply with the wishes of the bellicose, imperialistic and corrupt political Zionists who now rule Israel and whose fellow travelers in the billionaire boys' club call so many of the shots in the States. According to this very newspaper, "socialist" or not (what time capsule did you come out of BTW?, or are you Bernie Sanders in disguise) Jews supply the Dems with two-fifths of their national campaign finance. If that's not owning the party, it's surely effective control. Telling Jews who vote Republican, for any reason, that they're not real Jews is worse than offensive, it's meaningless when it comes to matters of life and death for their Israeli cousins. We saw from Barack Obama's abject performance at AIPAC, even blurting out that Jerusalem must forever be the undivided capital of Israel, that he dances to the tune of big Likudnik money as neatly as any other presidential aspirant. It is mortifying to Jews who consider themaselves loyal citizens of the nation they and their ancestors were born into to see fellow Americans kpwtowing to a foreign country, no matter what sentimental ties (and often they are no more than that, and dissolving) nowadays. Liberal Jews-- I don't just mean Tikkun peaceniks, but the sensible majority who are tired of being tarred with the brush of their self-appointed "community leaders" and neocon megaphones-- have to apologize for this "51st state" mentality all the time nowadays. Liberals have no more salience in the Democratic Party tnan among the Christian Zionist wackjobs of the GOP. Money talks, its name is Sheldon Adelson and Edgar Bronfman, and it screams for the USA to die for Israel and abet the continued persecution and enslavement of its near neighbors. The time is fast coming when the double talk has to stop and all Americans who put "Jewish" on the census form have to decide which country's interests they uphold. That entails abandoning the casuistical pretense that the USA's and Israel's interests are identical. Because the gentiles we live among sure don't all believe it, and they pay to keep Israel afloat. If you'd rather dwell in some early 20th century immigrant dream of a socialist America with Isaac Bashevis Singer, feel free. The Forward, you may observe, has moved on.