Shabbat Message - August 20, 2021

This message has 929 words and will take a little more than 4 minutes to read.

Every once in a while we invite a respected community leader to take over our Shabbat Message and share their thoughts with you.

But before I introduce this week’s guest writer, I wanted to share that Jewish Federations are collectively supporting relief efforts in response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti this past week. Through our partners the Joint Distribution Committee, we are providing critically-needed medical supplies to local hospitals. We have set up a Haiti Relief Fund and are pleased to be able to match every donation made towards the relief efforts, up to a total of $5000. You can donate here.
 
As we reflected back on some of our past accomplishments last week, we knew that we could never have gotten to where we are as a community without the leadership of one of the most well-respected Jewish professionals there is: Mark Gurvis.

Mark led our Federation for over a decade before moving to New York to take on the role of executive vice president of Jewish Federations of North America. Today, he has a thriving consulting practice. Mark is an astute professional and a strategic thinker, but above all else he is a mensch—a truly good and kind person who had a knack for bringing people with different perspectives together. That’s no small feat in a community as diverse as ours. 

As we prepare to end one year and begin another, we asked Mark for his reflections and his thoughts on the future.

At this juncture, 17 months into dealing with the global pandemic and several other interrelated and overlapping crises - political, economic, environmental - we are likely all at a point of distraction. When will it end? Will we ever get back to “normal”? We approached summer with a sense of hope, with rising vaccination rates and falling rates of infection, looking forward to being together in larger numbers in more kinds of settings. As we approach summer’s end, with the Delta variant fueling a rapid rise in infections and hospitalizations, it is hard to be quite as hopeful. Vaccine hesitation, resistance to masking and other protective measures by some, and way too slow progress with vaccinations in too many places around the world, have magnified our risks.

On the one hand, we live amidst an astonishing bounty of scientific and technological knowledge and resources. This resulted in the first prototypes of the COVID-19 vaccine being created within weeks (most of the time involved in rolling out vaccines was related to testing and efficacy).  On the other hand, we live (and here I will clarify that I am speaking as an American) amidst an astonishing degree of ignorance, willfulness, and political opportunism. We face a likely scenario that there will be more variants, and one of them may be far worse, contagious, and lethal than what we have faced to date.

We are now in Elul, the preparatory month at the end of which we celebrate Rosh HaShanah, the beginning of our annual cycle of High Holy Days. Most of us look forward to hearing the shofar during these services, although more traditional Jews hear the shofar blown daily during morning prayers. That sound – sharp, piercing, primal – is a wakeup call for us individually and collectively. 

During the past 17 months the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, and sister Federations across North America, have mobilized their communities to face the greatest global crisis of our time.  They raised and allocated funds, convened and partnered with institutions across the community, sourced and distributed protective equipment, and lobbied governments for resources.  They have been, in short, a tremendous force for collective action in the face of overwhelming challenges. I’ve watched with great pride from afar as the Greater Vancouver Federation provided leadership and support through this crisis and as communal institutions across the community rose to the moment.

As CEO of Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, and later during my tenure at Jewish Federations of North America, I led efforts to mobilize our community for action in the face of crisis or disaster – wars in Israel, hurricanes in North America, terror attacks in France.  Responding to a global crisis that affects every single community at once is crisis response on steroids. We are 17 months in and it can be disheartening to recognize we are maybe not near the end. In March 2020, as it began, epidemiologists talked about a likely two-year scenario before the virus was truly under control and life could begin to approach “normal”. Most of us could not absorb that message then – it was too hard to think about two years of this.

As we listen to the shofar now, we have a choice, as Jews and as global citizens. As horrifying as the pandemic has been, it is not our most serious crisis. The bitter divisions and polarization that have made it so difficult to overcome the virus – that is our most serious challenge. Every other challenge – economic disparity, racial injustice, the literal burning of our planet – is derivative of our inability to marshal our collective will towards learning, cooperating, and solving problems together.

All our communal organizations are precious and vital to the fabric of our Jewish communal ecosystem. They each have their critical role to play.  Only one, Jewish Federation, holds the primary responsibility for stewarding and nurturing the ecosystem.

As we begin a new year, and as we face the next phase of the pandemic and the many other challenges of our time, may we resolve to look to collective solutions – the things that will strengthen us all.

Shabbat shalom,

Mark Gurvis
Community Network Consulting