A Wake-up Call?

Rabbi Michael Torop Temple Beth-El St. Petersburg Thirty years ago our community was given a gift when a small group of visionaries set out on the path to create the Pinellas County Jewish Day School. Two weeks ago the sound of the final death knell reverberated across the county when the school’s present leadership made the agonizing decision to close the school at the end of the current school year. Without rehashing the painful events of the past four months and without minimizing the tremendous efforts made by so many PCJDS staff members, students, families and community members and leaders to forestall this crisis, we must ask ourselves some very hard questions as a community.

Is the closing of what I have previously described in these pages as the “jewel in the crown” of the Pinellas Jewish community simply going to be an event that evokes sadness and disappointment, or can it be a “wake-up call” to us all about the serious issues and challenges our entire Jewish community faces as we begin this second decade of the 21st Century? None of us can be permitted self-righteous indignation. None of us should proffer excuses, nor level accusations at any single individual, group of individuals, professionals or lay leaders. This school was our communal responsibility, and its closure is our collective failure.

We are a small, but potentially dynamic and vibrant Jewish community. We are fortunate to have four Reform, three Conservative, three Orthodox and one independent congregations in Pinellas County. We have a family-owned and operated Jewish newspaper published mainly biweekly throughout the year and delivered free of charge to every identified Jewish household. We have a federation that has consistently raised money for Israel and to support key local beneficiary agencies and efforts. We have a Jewish family service that devotedly serves the neediest of our neighbors and friends. We are a community that purchases millions of dollars in Israel Bonds and donates millions of dollars to the Jewish National Fund. We are home to the fourth-largest Holocaust museum in the country. We have a Jewish home for the aged, an assistedliving facility, and an independent residence for seniors. We have a now-unified Jewish community center providing diverse cultural programming, including a wonderful Jewish summer day-camp. We have a kosher butcher and grocery store, serving Jews in four contiguous counties. We have youth groups and pre-schools, women’s organizations, service groups, scholarship funds to send our kids to Israel and to Jewish overnight camps. Soon we will have a facility to provide housing for adults with disabilities. But we no longer have a Jewish Day School.

This inventory reminds us of how blessed our community truly is. It is evidence of the strength of our community, the leadership skills of so many, and the generosity and support that provides the funding for each and every one of these precious opportunities. But the inventory also tells us that we are facing great challenges in the years ahead.

With so many diverse institutions, organizations and programs, we risk the divisiveness that is bred of territoriality, parochialism and competition. Too often we fail to collaborate, to cooperate, and to unify our community. Too often we have witnessed the failure of efforts to create community-wide programs because the organizers cannot get “buy-in” from North to South, from the religiously diverse, or from those whose concern is more about their power and influence than on the needs of the whole community. We all know the law of synergy: we are much greater and much stronger as a whole community than even the sum of our disparate parts.

If there is any lesson to be learned from the closing of PCJDS, it is this: We must find the way to weave our diversity together into one greater and stronger community.

We must look to the models of other Jewish communities who have created successful unified communal appeals and communal campuses, housing diverse institutions and organizations, taking advantage of the economy of size that no single entity could achieve alone. Parochial territoriality is the enemy of cohesion and communal growth.

We must learn how to pool our resources, to collaborate in our programming, to unify our fundraising appeals, to streamline our overheads, and to break down the barriers that keep us apart.

The time is now for us to truly embrace the principle of Klal Yisrael, a unified community, that cares deeply about one another, and works in harmony to create the dynamic future that our children and our grandchildren deserve.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner has observed that members of a community such as ours must nurture one another because we need one another. We simply cannot do it alone. “Hermits and monasteries are noticeably absent from Jewish history; we are hopelessly communal people. When the wilderness tabernacle is completed, near the end of the Book of Exodus, we are told, ‘And it came to pass that the tabernacle was one’ .” (“The Tent-Peg Business: Some Truths About Congregations,” New Traditions: Explorations in Judaism, Spring 1988).

Commenting on this curious expression, 19th century Rabbi Mordecai Yosef of Izbica observed: "In the building of the tabernacle, all Israel were joined in their hearts; no one felt superior to his fellow. At first, each skilled individual did his own part of the construction, and it seemed to each one that his work was extraordinary. Afterwards, once they saw how their several contributions to the “service” of the tabernacle were integrated — all the boards, the sockets, the curtains and the loops fit together as if one person had done it all, then they realized how each one of them had depended on the other. Then they understood how what all they had accomplished was not by virtue of their own skill alone but that the Holy One had guided the hands of everyone who had worked on the tabernacle. They had only later merely joined in completing its master building plan — so that ‘it came to pass that the tabernacle was one’ (Exodus 36.13). Moreover, the one who made the holy ark itself was unable to feel superior to the one who had only made the courtyard tent pegs.” (Ituray Torah, vol. IV)

The Rabbinically Speaking column is provided as a public service by the Jewish Press in cooperation with the Pinellas County Board of Rabbis. Columns are assigned, on a rotating basis by the board.