Even the ideas that aren’t big, huge, transformative are still presented with the scent of hope that somehow they will revolutionize Jewish life. We’ve proposed models to reinvent Jewish media, Jewish outreach, Jewish education, and pretty much any thing else Jewish. We’ve proposed — as Patrick Aleph did with idea #2 — to tear down the old and start anew. We’ve proposed — as Ami Eden did with idea #1 — to pool our collective resources in a broad new initiative, and we’ve proposed — as Ari Wallach did with idea #6 — to update old behaviors in tech-assisted new ways.

Most of these ideas are sexy. They’re bold and visible, impacting mostly on the front-end of Jewish life. They’re just the kinds of ideas that can seduce philanthropists, score seed money, and yield yet another Jewish venture. Few of them address the underlying weaknesses of or seek to reinforce the existing Jewish structures, because most of them are offered up on the premise that existing Jewish structures are inherently flawed.

Yet from everything I’ve seen, in the new Jewish ventures and the established Jewish institutions, there is more that can be done within the system than outside of it. Day after day, as I read Daniel Sieradski’s precursor to this project, I kept having the same thought, "This would be a wonderful project for the synagogue I work for to undertake." The irony is that so many of his ideas are born from the Jewish DIY movement and so many of them are geared to building a Jewish life outside the synagogue.

Why this false dichotomy?

To be fair, I’m painting with a broad brush. I know Daniel, know that he’d be thrilled to see a synagogue commit sufficient resources over a sustained period to see these ideas to fruition. Almost all of the contributors to this project are trying to work within the existing system, even if only out of practical necessity.

Yet there remains this implacable notion that institutional Judaism is a staid place where only the biggest checkbooks get any real say, where the inertia of the old ways and sociopolitical orthodoxies overwhelms any real innovation. It is true that big funders can have an outsized influence, and that organizations sometimes outgrow their mission. Old methods are sometimes too slow to evolve.

But that’s hardly the entire picture. Institutional Judaism is also a place where resources are available, funders are willing to bankroll merited ideas, and practically everyone is ready to jump on any idea that works.

And it should be said, there are lots of ideas that work, including many listed here. I have my job as director of communications at The Temple in Atlanta because of a commitment to exploring those ideas, and I’m lucky to see young families and young leaders pour into the community every day.

I’m less interested in changing the game than I am in playing it at the highest level of competence. The question, for me, is what are the weaknesses? What are the structural points that need reinforcing? How can I build a sustainable game plan for the institutions that will outlive me and my involvement?

So here’s my big idea: Stop having big ideas. Instead let’s all get together and do what Ami Eden and Ari Wallach suggested. Let’s pool our resources and build the strongest technical back-end we can for the organized Jewish world.

Time and again I’m struck by how under-resourced the back-end is, even at large Jewish institutions. Our user databases are static and full of holes in the data, making it near impossible to target our outreach and communications. So we rely on an outdated broadcast model and wonder why we have a hard time reaching people. That’s just one example.

In Idea #8, Rebecca Guber  proposed a residency program for Jewish artists. What if Jewish philanthropists came together to endow a communications and technology residency program, placing Jewish communications and technology professionals at synagogues across the country? (I keep focusing on synagogues, because I firmly believe they’re the one place where all Jews can come together regardless of their background, politics, or bank account.)

I guarantee you there are sexier ideas out there. This isn’t always fun work. In fact, it’s often a dreary slog. Funders will likely get more immediate bang for their buck elsewhere, but in the long run they’ll get more bullets for their guns by investing in the back-end.

(Bradford R. Pilcher is the director of communications at The Temple in Atlanta. The synagogue, founded in 1867, was listed by Newsweek magazine as one of America’s 25 most vibrant congregations. Pilcher’s work has included stints at Jewsweek.com, American Jewish Life magazine, and Jewish Funds for Justice. Visit The Fundermentalist  to read "Idea #8: jewish Artists Residency" and stay tuned to ejewishphilanthropy for Idea #10. You can also visit 28days28ideas.com for the full list of ideas as they progress.)

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Lloyd Blankfein, who with his wide, pursed lips looks for all the world like a Muppet, recently told the Times of London he and the rest of his colleagues at Goldman Sachs are “doing God’s work.” This is the point when you picture a Muppet in a suit and tie riding atop a giant vampire squid wrapped around our planet. Perhaps the Muppet would be holding a cross, except he’s Jewish. So there would be a Magen David in his hand. Take a moment. Picture it. It’s funny, isn’t it? Except it’s not. It’s an anti-Semitic wood cut yanked straight from the worst screeds of Henry Ford’s printing press. Some version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion probably features an illustration close to, if not identical, to my little depiction. I would be annoyed by this, even repulsed by the very image, if Blankfein and Goldman Sachs didn’t make it so fucking easy. This is a company that made $3.2 billion. In profit. In three months. This year. This year when unemployment has soared to 10.2 percent and rising. This year when that figure rises to over seventeen percent when you count the people who’ve stopped looking for work or scrape by on part-time gigs because they can’t land a full-time job with benefits. By benefits, I mean health care. I don’t mean the multi-million dollar stock options or bonus payments that line the pockets of Goldman Sachs employees, where the average pay this year is $700,000. This is a company that quite literally played both sides of the housing bubble, selling off $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities while secretly betting those mortgages would turn out to be worthless. When the bubble popped, the losses Goldman Sachs would’ve taken were already passed down the line. Instead, they made a killing. I’m using the word ‘killing’ on purpose. This is where I’ll point out, for no particular reason, that Blankfein sits on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation. That is a charitable group working to alleviate poverty in New York. Not laughing yet? Let me repeat it. Blankfein is on the board of a group fighting poverty. I will, for now, not even bother to disentangle the byzantine labyrinth of fecal financial instruments, shady legal dead zones, or government largesse employed by Goldman Sachs (and others) to keep themselves filthy rich. If you want to know, and you should want to know, you’re better off reading this article by McClatchy wherein the housing market double-dealing is laid bare. Blankfein didn’t want to be interviewed for that article. Or you could read the entire Times of London report. There is where Blankfein was all too happy to speak, saying simply that Goldman Sachs helps “companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle.” Ergo, he’s God’s fiscal trooper. Canny observers might otherwise recognize this as a textbook definition of trickle-down economics. That would be the widely discredited theory (by everyone not living in the conservative bizarro world) wherein if you give gobs of cash (usually in tax breaks and deregulatory sops) to people who already have gobs of cash, they’ll invest it and it’ll eventually trickle down to the rest of us. A trickle is about the only thing coming down, and it’s decidedly yellow. Look, I don’t begrudge people who believe that going out and making good money is a worthwhile goal. We do have an obligation to work, to support ourselves and our families. In a market where dollars often follow connections more than they follow smarts and merit, I can hardly blame anyone for working to build those connections. Every single system on earth is there to be rigged, if you can figure out how to rig it. But please let’s leave God out of it. We live in a society where the gap between the wealthiest fraction and the poorest mass has grown exponentially over the past forty years. We live in a country where illness can bankrupt a middle class citizen, and where our sickest citizens can’t even afford the insurance necessary to save their lives. We live in a world where, according to analyses of the latest job numbers, those who still have a job are being forced to work longer hours for minimal gains in salary, in order to boost the short-term profit margins of the invested class. So when one of those invested few, a Jewish boy from the Bronx who went to Harvard and then ruled Goldman Sachs, winks and says he’s just a humble banker doing the good Lord’s work, I’m more than a little annoyed. It’s a shanda, and as clear a case as there can be of the disconnect between the haves and the have-nots. If Lloyd Blankfein is doing God’s work, he’s doing a very bad job of it, and making a mint off the disgrace.

It turns out Bradford isn’t the only one taking issue with Goldman Sachs this week. A clip from Saturday Night Live’s "Weekend Update" mocks the financial company’s decision to immunize their workers against swine flu even though there’s a shortage of the vaccine:

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You might not be aware that Nazi Germany, in addition to murdering six million Jews, also managed to snuff out the lives of some five million other undesirable groups: gays, Roma (gypsies), and Jehovah’s Witnesses just to name a few. If you weren’t aware of that, it’s probably due in large part to the efforts of people like Dov Hikind. The occasion for Hikind’s remarks is a plan that would honor gays and other non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution at Brooklyn’s Holocaust Memorial Park. You’ve probably seen a memorial like the one in Brooklyn. They exist all over the country, virtually anywhere a sizable population of Jews reside. It hardly matters that the Holocaust didn’t happen here. Hikind and others in the Jewish community have made it a communal mission for several decades now to commemorate the deaths of 6 million Jews at the hands of Hitler’s minions. Good for them. I’m a fan of remembering the Holocaust. I think it’s a significant part of our history, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, and we have much to learn from it. As with all shameful moments in human history, it can be tempting to turn away from it, bury it, pretend it could never happen again. It is critically important that we not bury it, not forget it, if only because it certainly can happen again. During World War II we marched Japanese-Americans into internment camps. After 9/11 we didn’t have to march Arab-Americans and other Muslim citizens into camps. But we did persecute them in a similar manner. In a moment of fear, we repeated our historic mistakes. To avoid this, we study history. That is why it is there, recorded for posterity. That is how we learn. That is why Hikind is an unlearned fool.

The Holocaust, with a capital H, has become the purview of Jews. We demand that the memories of six million never be forgotten while doing everything we can to divorce their persecution from the same savage impulse that brought Nazi wrath down on gays and others. Does the irony escape anyone? It is fair enough to say the Nazis singled out Jews. They did, and they certainly killed vastly more Jews than gays or Roma. If you add up everybody else they exterminated, we’ve still got one million more victims. But if this kind of one-upsmanship is what our Holocaust remembrance has become, then go ahead and forget. Really, forget. We’re not learning anything from that kind of remembrance. If, instead, we hold out our hands and say, “Once Jews were singled out for extermination, but we were not alone in our suffering, then or now,” we can begin to integrate the very real lessons of that experience. Today, gays are not rounded up and gassed. But they are faced with the denial of their basic rights simply because they are gay. They are even targeted by violent criminals who would stone them for their identity. In Europe, Roma live as if in the Third World within walking distance of modern luxuries. Perhaps most difficult of all for us to face, in our own communities, Muslims and Arabs face the wary eyes of those who would let fear and ignorance govern their suspicions. Our suffering as Jews is not isolated, even if it is unique in some respects. If that suffering is to have any real meaning beyond our own bitterness, if it is to lead us towards any true understanding of our commonality as human beings, then we shouldn’t be drawing up borders between Jewish suffering and others’. We should instead remember the dedication of every Passover for thousands of years: that we have suffered and been strangers, so we much never waver in our concern for those who suffer so today. It is a sign of insecurity to say, “The Holocaust is a uniquely Jewish event.” The Holocaust was a human event, the resultant mixture of fear, political mastery, and a moment when racism masqueraded as science even in the halls of American academia. If it was our suffering alone that we should remember when we light our memorial candles, then we have missed the point entirely. Hikind, it should be no surprise, opposes gay marriage. Let him oppose it, but let’s move beyond the shallow rhetoric of trying to claim ownership over distinct suffering. There are no brownie points to be had in that, only narrow factionalism. It makes the day that much further away when we can all hold hands and recognize our share humanity.

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Named for Senator James McMillan, the plan drew heavily from the ideas of Chicago architect Daniel Burnham as well as New York architect Charles McKim, both of whom were responsible for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. That affair took place on Chicago’s South Side and featured an architectural masterpiece known as “The White City.” These were too designers who made grand plans and saw them carried out.

I like to remind people of this not so much because it’s an interesting bit of trivia, which it is, but so I can bring up a dictum often attributed to Burnham: “Make no little plans.”

President Obama comes into office with the highest of hopes behind him and he must, of course, make no little plans. It’s a time of grandeur and nation-changing events, so I feel more than a little timid in penning a bit of advice for the leader of the free world. Nevertheless, I am a citizen of the country and a Jewish writer, so I will respond to the latest batch of advice posted on Jewcy with a bit of my own.

As a Jew I have a very distinct definition of freedom. I have argued this in front of the National Museum of American Jewish History, in front of the Jewish Funders Network, in various publications, and at more dinner parties than I can count. The Jewish concept of freedom is at times very much at odds with the popular American conception.

America is the land of liberty, of freedom from things. Freedom from the government, from the religious beliefs of others, and so on and so forth are the hallmarks of this American view. It’s essentially the freedom to be left alone, more or less, which explains the resistance so many in America across the political spectrum have to government actions and regulatory restrictions.

Judaism envisions a very different type of freedom. If you go back to the story of Exodus, you quickly realize the whole exercise has very little point until the congregation of Israel finds its way to the foot of Mount Sinai. There they receive their marching orders, but in order to fulfill the covenant they first had to be freed. They were free to act, which is an altogether different thing from American liberty, or its popular conception.

This is not uniquely Jewish. The dichotomy between American freedom from outside intrusion and the American conception of citizenship and its obligations has been discussed at length. Yet it is a Jewish idea, nonetheless, and one that Jews are uniquely suited to advocate for. At a time of such national crisis, when our faith in virtually every institution is challenged, and when a popular president has alighted into office, I offer this small morsel of advice.

Champion citizenship, Mr. President. Your inaugural address certainly leaned in this direction, but please go further and never let up from this theme. Advocate for an America oriented away from the freedom to be left alone and instead centered around the obligation to act with our freedom for the betterment of all. This is vague, perhaps. This is easy advice to administer and hard advice to carry out, yes. But there may not be any more important element to our national renewal than this. If every American felt an obligation to serve in some capacity, if their freedom was not an excuse to cheerlead for American exceptionalism but instead a burden that could only be lifted by proving America’s exceptional capacity for progress, then our horizons might extend forever.

Only in such circumstances would the American idea, the only thing that binds us together as a nation in all of our diversity, light tomorrow. Only then might America do something other than ride into the sunset. Let the Jewish voice be heard on this matter, and let your voice, Mr. President, join with ours. It is no small plan, but as with Chicago in 1893, and as with the city in which you now reside, the capital of the nation you now lead, no small plan is worth making.

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You are an Individuation of Deity, a singularization of The Singularity, an aspect of Divinity. You are the Localized Expression of the Universal Presence… You are God… You are in the Realm of the Physical — what has also been called the Realm of the Relative…which is where Experiencing occurs.

Let us put aside for the moment that ‘singularization’ is not, I think, a word. What in the name of all that is holy does anything in that collection of words mean? This is where Experiencing occurs? Experience now apparently requires an extra suffix and a capitalized first letter, because I must assume that experience is a holy act we don’t do enough of. We must reorient ourselves to the reality that we are God. We are not God. Let’s put a stop to this right now. I am not God. You are not God. Walsch is not God. None of us are God. There are any number of religions that profess creation is a physical (and metaphysical) extension of God, and that we are thus manifested aspects of the divine, but that is a very long way away from saying that you are God. Because, and let me be clear about this, you aren’t. Not. Even. Close. Unfortunately, our religious discourse has been cheapened to the point of absurdity by the likes of Walsch and others. They’ve turned it into a steady stream of feel good platitudes and New Age bullshit. They’ve turned it into the ultimate self-help scam, wherein turning oneself over to the Lord can bring you riches, weight loss, and eternal salvation to boot. Jews get in on this too. We build synagogues that rival megachurches, and then we hold yoga classes in them. Yoga classes. Yoga! It’s easy to forget, in this time of yoga ubiquity, that yoga originated from the meditation and mystical traditions of Indian Hinduism. It wasn’t meant to be divorced from its larger tradition so we could exercise without shvitzing. To know this would require some knowledge of religion beyond what Madonna and her red-string clad wrist is selling you. But forget about the religious underpinnings of yoga. Forget about the deep study and incredible commitment required from Kabbalistic meditations. Religion light is the way to chill. Beliefnet has, for its Jewish audience, a little slideshow. It’s called “10 Simple Soul Exercises” and it’s written by Rabbi Brian. Rabbi Brian has a last name. It’s Mayer. Rabbi Brian apparently doesn’t like his last name much. Or maybe he just thinks you’ll like him better and feel more comfortable if he goes by Rabbi Brian. He’s written a book he’d like you to buy. It’s called “How to Find Out What (The) God (Of Your Understanding) Wants from You,” a title so hubristically inane as to boggle the mind. Rabbi Brian’s slideshow includes this gem: “Spend Time ‘Not Doing.’” Rabbi Brian just stole Buddhist philosophy and distilled it onto a fortune cookie. And this being spiritual commerce, that fortune cookie will be coming to a Chinese restaurant near you just in time for next Hanukkah. Nobody should be surprised that Beliefnet got bit on the ass by a writer playing fast and loose with reality. This is a site largely predicated on the most saccharine religious syrup imaginable. Therein the reality and complex traditions of religious communities and their sacred texts are nothing compared to spirituality that’ll make you feel oh so tingly. Their tagline is “Inspiration. Spirituality. Faith. Religion.” That order is telling, and all of it is a convenient stand-in for actual religious devotion. All of this, all of Beliefnet’s inanity and all of the spiritual tokenism that extends well beyond their digital borders, boils down to the single pompous conceit we’re all guilty of from time to time. We want it easy, and we want it to be about us. We don’t want God. We want (The) God (Of Our Understanding). We don’t want serious meditation and devotion. We want yoga classes. When all else fails, we want to actually be God, or the Individuation of Deity. May I just say, God called. He says you can blow him. You want to have a serious discussion about religion, let’s talk about perennial philosophy, it’s failings and its strengths, and how we might apply it in cross-cultural dialogue. God knows we could use some of that dialogue, but I seriously doubt any of the authors I’ve mentioned in this post have a substantive understanding of what perennialism is. I would be in no way surprised if most or all of them required a dictionary to define the term. Religion is supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to require sacrifice. It’s supposed to require scholarship. Judaism certainly does, and we deserve more than Rabbi Brian’s shilling. We deserve better than Beliefnet’s vapid offerings. Thankfully we can have them, but we’re swimming up a tide of popular culture obsessed with immediate gratification, even from God. Beliefnet is guilty of hubris, pride, and a few other sins. It’s not a surprise they’ve also been caught stealing.  Now what are they going to do about it?

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Jerry Springer would not have this man on his show. Jerry Springer would say, “You’re just too stupid. I’m sorry. Good day, sir.” “No one else in the world would have that name,” protests Papa. There is a reason for that. Dad doesn’t expect his children will have problems when they start school. May I reiterate: A fucking moron. I’ve known people who liked edgy things other people were offended by. I knew a man who often wore a T-shirt with a swastika on it. It was a backwards swastika, just like the tattoo on Papa Campbell. If you pointed out to him the problem with this, he would give you a dissertation on the widespread use of the symbol by Hindus, Buddhists, and Jainists predating the Nazis by centuries. Millenia even. He always said, “Millenia even.” He was not an anti-Semite, so far as I know. He was just a tool. He liked to push people’s buttons, period. The eastern religious diatribe was just his attempt to cough up a pseudo-intellectual veneer of being in the know. Everyone who met him was in the know too. We knew he was a tool. So we laugh. We ridicule. Fine. The man deserves it. He (and his wife Deborah) deserve the same fate as the New Zealand parents who lost custody of their daughter after naming her Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii. She was ridiculed so much she sought legal recourse. At nine years old. It took her that long, and I’m amazed at her stamina. Really, the Campbells actually deserve a fate worse than that. They deserve to have their three children renamed and parceled out to new parents: the Obamas, the Palins, and Woody Allen. But that’s not really the point of all of this. The point is that Wal-Mart happily made the damn cake, which just proves their evil assault on the dignity and intellect of our species. No, I kid, although Wal-Mart did in fact make them a “Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler” cake. I wonder if Barack Obama ever got a “Happy Birthday Barack Hussein” cake as a child. Does the First Family have a celebration with a pastry featuring the words, “Happy Birthday George Walker”? No, the point of the whole affair is to highlight our rather biased take on stupidity. We have absolutely no problem ridiculing and bemoaning these Nazi-loving Jersey fucks. I really don’t have a problem with it. I think we should ridicule them whenever we’re having a blue day. But, as a post on Jezebel (of all places) helpfully points out, lots of parents do suspect things and get a pass. Lots of parents do suspect things with their children and don’t face a hint of ridicule. So sayeth Jezebel: “I agree with Elisabeth when she said on The View this morning that [Campbell] is using his innocent kid to spread hate. But I also think that many Christians do the same thing with their children, for example, when they ‘educate’ them about how homosexuality is wrong. Except when they do it, it’s called evangelism. And when they vote on it, it’s called democracy.” Touche. Except, how do we draw the line? The difference between the Campbells and the evangelical political movement is the vast majority of people have repudiated Nazis, if not all prejudice. A pretty large chunk of Americans, on the other hand, don’t think depriving gays of their basic civil rights is a bad thing. In other words, we’re ridiculing the Nazi-lovers because they’re so far out of the norm that it’s safe to do so. Gay-bashing is OK for a plurality of people, just like anti-Semitism and talking down to the colored folk used to be. It’s not about moral right and wrong. It’s about being so incredibly unpopular as to bump up against absurdity. Do I think it’s spreading hate to tell your kids that gay people are sinners doomed to eternal damnation for being themselves? Yes. Do I think diminishing the hatred of Nazis by turning it into a publicity stunt is stupid? Yes. Do I think we’re bashing the Nazi-lover because we’re morally superior? Umm… No. At least not Elisabeth Hasselbeck & Co. Which is why, when we’re having a blue day, we should ridicule her right alongside Papa Campbell.

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Joining me on my excursion were a group of fellow newspaper editors, some Jewish and some not. After touring the museum we all sat down with members of Yad Vashem’s staff to discuss the Holocaust and its impact on our identities. I should say, we all sat down to listen to the Jewish members of the group discuss how the Holocaust impacted their identity. All of this was fine, of course. Some of them had lost family members to the Nazis. Most of them told how the indelible mark of the Holocaust was deeply ingrained in their sense of Jewishness.

I sat, quietly, and with an odd sadness. The Holocaust, then and now, had virtually no impact on my Jewishness. It played no role in my desire to convert. The irony was that my relationship with the Jewish community had became a very public affair when I, as a college newspaper editor at Georgia State University, helped end the yearly printing of Holocaust-denial ads. The local Hillel, which served all of metro Atlanta’s colleges as well as the University of Georgia, invited me to receive an award. There was a standing ovation, and like a good politician I delivered brief remarks deflecting any sense of honor onto the memories of six million.

Even when my Jewish studies evolved into a need for a formal Jewish identity, and even when two trips to Israel caused me to temporarily (and misguidedly) conflate a militant pro-Israel advocacy with my emerging Judaism, the Holocaust never intruded into my sense of self beyond those early brief remarks against Holocaust denial.

Yet there I was, in a room at Yad Vashem, having just walked through as moving a memorial of slaughtered children as has ever been erected, listening to a group of Jews my own age talk about the Holocaust and themselves. And there I sat, in the corner, quietly wondering to myself if I could be Jewish absent such a strong link to the seminal event of modern Jewry.

I got over it. I made a point of making myself as well-versed as possible in the details of Holocaust scholarship, but I was never able to connect emotionally with the Nazi genocide as so many of my fellow Jews do. All the moral outrage any sane person, Jew or non-Jew, can summon in response to genocide exists in my brain. I shudder at the sight of emaciated bodies, even after witnessing them countless times.

Still the Holocaust, the Shoah, whatever you want to call it, does not define even a modicum of my Jewish identity. Israel, with which I have a begrudging and awkward sense of emotion, matters more to me than the crimes of Germans (and Austrians, and French, and so on and so forth) committed almost a half-century before I was born.

Is that callous? Is that shameful? I do not know, other than to say I’m not ashamed of it. Hitler’s brutality is repulsive to me, but I’ve never been able to latch my brain around why it should define me as a Jew, or for that matter why it should define any Jew as a Jew.

Which is I’m somewhat happy to see a recent survey of Jews even younger than I am. It found only 21 percent of the Jewish teens in the survey (aged 15 to 17) “indicated they are Jewish in relation to the Holocaust.” Nine out of ten of them said the Holocaust had an impact on their worldview, which is fair. A genocide on such a scale should have an impact on all of our worldview, but a fraction of these young Jews let it define their Judaism.

I’m on record (somewhere, if I could find the right link… here’s the wrong one) stating my displeasure with the way the Holocaust and Israel have propped up Jewish identity for so many whose Judaism runs less than skin deep. I’ve never made a secret of my desire to see a greater philosophical and liturgical debate amongst Jews as opposed to the endless campaigns in support of Israel and the rote memory of the Holocaust. But I’ve always been a little fearful of admitting how little the Holocaust has to do with my own Jewish identity, even when I became more comfortable distancing myself from the Jewish state.

Thanks to some Jewish teenagers – 79 percent of them anyway – I’m a little less so today.

The post Holocaust, Couldn’t Care Less appeared first on Jewcy.

W. Edwards Deming, who you’ve likely never heard of, said that. He was a statistician and an engineer, and after World War II he proceeded to turn the Japanese auto industry into the titan it is today. If you’re an isolationist American royally annoyed at the utter subjugation of Detroit by Toyota & Friends, feel free to blame this son of Iowa, if only for the irony.

(As an aside, look this guy up. He died a decade and a half ago, but not before setting up an entire system of profound knowledge. He called it the "Deming System of Profound Knowledge," within which he included his Fourteen Points — a sort of Ten Commandments-plus for business — and his own variation on the Seven Deadly Sins.)

The subject of change is all the rage these days, and I’m a fan. I voted for change, for Barack Obama and his lofty rhetoric, but when asked one day recently how quickly I expected our new leader to change things, I found myself answering in a most unexpected fashion:

"As a Jew…"

What came next was surprising, even to me. It’s not as if I rarely think "as a Jew," but I’d sustained an entire electoral calendar without once linking my Jewish brain with the buzzword of the season. I don’t know why, but it wasn’t until after the election, after I picked up a book that has sat unread on my shelf for a couple of years now, that I began to link concepts into the daisy chain that poured out of my mouth in response to an innocuous question.

As a Jew, began the thought, I have a tendency to look at things over a very long span of time. As a Jew, I am an institutionalist. I believe in systems, rules, and the power of organizations working incrementally. I believe in the words of Max Weber — immortalized by Aaron Sorkin in The West Wing but originally from Politics as a Vocation — that politics is the "strong and slow boring of hard boards." I believe that Weber’s description of politics is no less appropriate a description of life in general.

Which is to say I don’t know how long Obama will need to match his lofty rhetoric with real progress in governance, but I won’t be terribly disappointed if it takes him longer than a few weeks, months, or even years. I take the long view, as I think everyone should, but especially every Jew. That’s the core of Judaism, the capacity to change the world. Eventually.

I’ve never, in all my life, been much impressed by those individuals — nor the movements they’ve inspired — who claim our culture can be changed so radically by so small a set of actions. To his credit, the president-elect has said as much, that change can be achieved but that it will take monumental effort. The implication is that such effort will take time as well, which is why I’m more than willing to let him use the full 60 minutes.

The book I mentioned, the one that sat unread on my shelf, is entitled Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. It argues, convincingly if repetitively, that the premise of countercultural thought is so far off the charts wrong that it’s not merely ineffective at achieving its goals, but dangerous to efforts for social progress. That it sat on my shelf next to a copy of Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House is all the more depressing, since that book ascribes to our Jewish forefather a primal countercultural impulse.

Am I the only one who finds it peculiar to paint Abraham as a countercultural maverick? He broke his father’s idols, which I’ve seen read as a criticism of middle management, but this was also the man who pledged his fidelity to a monotheistic belief system. He affirmed G-d, and in so doing, I was always struck by his retort to the father:

"How then canst thou serve these idols in whom there is no power to do anything?"

What is it to repudiate idol worship? It is, in Abraham’s words, a repudiation of willful impotence. Idol worship is the devotion to powerlessness, not just ascribing to an object power it never had, but abdicating our own ability and effort to that object. You have to skim pretty close to the surface to read Abraham as a counterculture guru knocking the system. If you look at it with any modicum of depth you see a man deeply committed to the idea that actions could be taken, effort mattered, and the mission of a single G-d with a discernible will was of more value than any collection of sculpture. Abraham embraced the ultimate system.

The idea that we could play a hand in the evolution of our world from one that broken and incomplete into one that was whole and just begins at Abraham, and the centuries over which that notion has evolved testifies to the Jewish understanding that the reparation of the world — let’s call it change — is a long, arduous process. It is Weber’s "hard board." We must keep slowly boring into it.

I will try hard now to bring this back to Dr. Deming, and his quote about survival and change. He was talking about business, about the necessity of companies to evolve as the times change, if for no other reason than failure to do so would end their existence. The world changes, ergo survival requires we change.

But the quote struck me, because my Jewish thought remains absolutely wedded to a thin paperback titled Why Should Jews Survive? written by Michael Goldberg. My ham-handed simplification of his thesis is, Jews must have a purpose. To exist merely because they have existed is an inadequate justification, and so the Jewish people must search constantly to hang on to their purpose, and that purpose is the completion of the world. Not just to change with the times, but to effect change.

Obama is just a blip. There’ll be plenty of work after he’s done. My hope is that my generation of Jews embraces that work, the slow boring of the hard board, and in the process forges their link in the chain. If, instead, they see disillusion in the slow increments and find more enthusiasm in brand-bashing and retail iconoclasm, well then… G-d.

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