The Outs and Ins of Federation
Fein, Leonard
LETTERS TO TWO FRIENDS THE OUTS AND INS OF FEDERATION LEONARD FEIN People have roots; so do institutions. One of the signal achievements of the American Jewish community has been its ability...
...Of course there are wealthy Jews who lose it (or win it) at Las Vegas or at other circuses...
...Are there no other ways to link up to Jewish life save through check-signing, and are there no other ways to give money than through institutional/ bureaucratized philanthropies, and must the favors of the wealthy be so curried...
...You say that even the heart has to be pried open...
...Do you know that one-tenth of one percent of our donors provide twenty-five percent of our funds, that the top eight percent contribute 85 percent of the total...
...But if a religious civilization is what we are, or want to be, and if a government is what Federation is, or is becoming, then we may yet inherit a situation that was not intended nor even desired...
...Further, and more important: by absenting yourself, you insure more of that which you criticize...
...and even if yours were a used Pinto, the argument holds...
...In Denver and in El Paso, in Detroit and in Portland, in all those places where so many Jews continue to lose themselves and to be lost, some—more, these days—seek to find themselves...
...But a place—and there aren't very many such places, there most likely never were...
...We turn now from the sources of that activity to its expression, and especially to its expression through local Jewish federations and through the United Jewish Appeal...
...When the turned-on students demonstrated at the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations back in 1969, you stood with them, accusing the Federation leadership of insensi-tivity to Jewish education, of ignorance, of philanthropizing as a form of ego-tripping...
...We are advancing, and we need supplies for that advance...
...Some poor care, so do some rich...
...in America, we have been about the raising and giving of money...
...We are not a democratic community, nor can I imagine the way in which we might become one...
...Those folks see themselves as not one whit less responsible, or less knowledgeable, or less committed...
...Money is power, and power is control, and we know enough from other places about how difficult it is for those with power and control to place limits on themselves...
...We need, do we not, one central address for certain purposes, another for other purposes, and a host of non-central addresses for all the conventional work-a-day purposes of most Jews most of the time...
...They work as hard, know as much, care as deeply...
...We'd fight a rearguard action here, but Israel was clearly the wave of the future, and, as such, entitled to the lion's share of our effort...
...Not yet a revolution, but very, very close...
...Most of us accept the notion of Judaism as a religious civilization, whether or not we are ourselves observant...
...There is diversity on Federation boards—rather more than you might expect— but, by and large, the guiding principle is to avoid fracturing debate...
...You, however, do not like the keys we use...
...But it is not in the category of a "necessary evil," not by a long shot...
...Other expressions of tz'dakah are touched on in the pages that follow, but only barely...
...Poverty, we were taught, was at least respectable...
...If you talk, really talk, with Federation leadership around the country, you learn that they are most often very well informed...
...Again, a part of it is natural resentment, abetted by the sometime arrogance of Federation...
...I begin with a curve ball: I believe that the period of Federation ascendency is now drawing to a close...
...The young...
...At the same time that more and more agencies, strapped for funds, find that they must turn to Federation—which, for all practical purposes, exercises a near-monopoly on fund raising—there is growing resentment concerning Federation's "territorial imperative...
...But if you're genuinely concerned with the way of our community, there is a seat for you on the subcommittee of the allocations committee that must review the budget of the home for the aged...
...It's not the wealth that inhibits radical change, it's the fragility of it all...
...Why guilt...
...that many of them are struggling with the same question that haunts you, the question of Jewishness and Judaism in one's private life...
...we are one some of the time, and that is good, and we are many much of the time, and that, too, is good...
...anthropos: man)—in our own and better word, tz'dakah— we have soared beyond anything our People had earlier achieved...
...I have in mind especially the very tender issue of our allocations to Israel as against our allocations for local and national needs...
...Can you imagine any other organization proposing that we view our gift to it as a form of "self-taxation...
...Jewish scholarship in this country is at least as productive, in its totality, as Jewish scholarship in the State of Israel...
...Federation is too meddlesome...
...You know the groups—the doctors, my colleagues at the universities, the hundred and five hundred and thousand dollar givers who should be thousand and two thousand and five thousand dollar givers...
...Yet those others perceive that if recent trends are not soon checked, Federation will become our government...
...You know the type: give them a good show, and they'll care...
...on the day, of course, he'd announce the Messianic era...
...And this in a setting where the old social sanctions are missing, where the face-to-face community is dead, where so many other options tempt, where nothing has remained spontaneous...
...As to power, and the exercise of it, and your fear that our communal emphasis on money insures that only those who have the capacity to make large gifts will occupy the seats of power, you've got a point...
...Not the only place they are, not without excesses and errors either...
...And so on...
...his collection is one of the finest in the land, and through art he has learned history as well...
...The rabbis and the synagogue people regard Federation as an imposter, an inauthentic articulator of Jewish values which seeks to siphon off their own most enthusiastic supporters...
...Israel's needs will not diminish, and our own will increase...
...But comprehensive Jewish concern is now an irreversible commitment on the part of Federation, and I am happy to help spread that news...
...In Spain, which we honor, the three-hundred-yearlong Golden Age was about poetry and theology...
...A good solicitor—and there are many— is, above all, a healer, and what he heals is the pervasive disease of American Jews: double amnesia...
...Israel wanted, still wants, money rather than advice...
...They know themselves to be in crisis, but they know as well that Jews turn more and earlier to the synagogue than to Federation, and they know also that it is they, and not the Federation, that lays claim to our tradition in its fullness...
...No, you'll never be tendered a testimonial dinner...
...In the meantime, most of us—including the wealthy, including even the followers of Milton Friedman, remain latent socialists, coins in our pockets, guilt in our hearts...
...We are a generation of Jewish illiterates, and the best that most of us can (and increasingly do) hope for is that our children will know more than we...
...I don't view fund raising as egg-cracking...
...it is replacing the chain on the door with the chain of Jewish continuity...
...And then, thunderously, the song proclaims that the rich will die (shtarb'n vet dock der nogid), while tav (t'chiyas hamesim)— the poor will rise up with the resurrection of the dead...
...the lower middle class, unable to spring for tickets to Miami, recreates the Fontainbleau at the local caterer...
...You remember how we used to quip that poor Jews are just middle-class Jews without money...
...For this reason—as well as for more obvious reasons—we've got to reach very much larger numbers of those whose philanthropic capacities are limited...
...It is because Israel—Ben Gurion, Sapir, Pincus especially—found it far more comfortable to deal with the apolitical gentry of the American Jewish community than with its partisan ideologues...
...On a bad day, Elijah would merely provide for the Shabbat...
...Does that violate your aesthetic sensibility...
...We began by worrying about Jewish individuals in need...
...We still await a literature that will speak to the problems of affluence rather than to the problems of poverty, for affluence has become our general (not universal, but general) condition...
...But there is also fairness, an openness to gradual change, a deep desire to respond to the incredibly diverse needs of the Jewish People worldwide...
...But that's too easy, and misleading as well...
...I do worry, as I think you should, about the changing demographic structure of the community and its long-term implications for the fund raising effort...
...Jewish education and Jewish elderly here are as meritorious as Jewish education and the Jewish elderly there...
...emboldened when we see nothing, we open the door— just as far as the chain will allow, for fear that instead of Elijah it will be the kids next door, come to beat and rob...
...In Morristown, New Jersey, a Federation activist—not rich, not at all—devotes countless hours to publicizing and promoting Tay-Sachs screening programs (yes, that too, is a Jewish concern...
...No breakfasts, no brunches, no lunches, no dinners...
...But I say these things as a reasonably energetic Zionist, not as one of those whose orientation has always been more to our local institutions than to Israel...
...no awards, no pressure, no playing to guilt or pandering to fear...
...Those who have time often have time because they have money, and those who would lead must have time...
...One to combat anti-Semitism, one to insist on church-state separation, one to intercede with the secular authorities, one to set standards for Jewish education, a flood of initials...
...One of the signal achievements of the American Jewish community has been its ability to translate roots—we call them ''sources"—into institutions...
...You wouldn't want to be rich, the literature taught: the rich are unhappy misers, abandoned by their children, afflicted by gout...
...The rapid and auspicious growth of Federation was bound to create problems in its wake, and it has now come to turn to those problems, not with shock, nor even with distress, but with concern and sensitivity...
...In their view, Federation's claim to speak for k'lal Yisrael—the entire House of Israel—is a hoax...
...That is why it has expanded so...
...I do not know, not at all, that we would be better managed were our boards more representative of the genuine diversity in our community...
...Hence we shall have to work with the agencies and institutions that are already there, out in the boondocks, trying so hard and with so much frustration, and feeling themselves far too often fighting a two-front war: one against apathy and assimilation, the other against Federation itself...
...It's hard to fault our effort thus far...
...That is so...
...Only later—only recently, to be blunt about it—did Federations come to take as a critical part of their mandate the whole set of issues regarding Jewish life and Jewish survival, what we might call the welfare of Judaism (as distinguished from the welfare of individual Jews...
...Just now, the immediate purposes of Federation are perhaps more pressing than our intentions as a Holy People...
...Here, now, far from the mystic wood, far from the Temple Mount, there is sacred work going on...
...Here my Woody-Allenish fantasy conjures up Pesach, seder night, time to open the door for Elijah, and we are in New York: first we look through the peep-hole...
...The point is that it is silly to carry into the last quarter of the twentieth century stereotypes of the wealthy that derive from the culture of its first quarter and before...
...you said incredulously, meaning, I suppose, "What's a nice Jewish intellectual like you doing with the mon-ied, with the country-clubbers, with the ignorant and arrogant types whom I associate with Federation...
...Willie Sutton said it all: you go where the money is...
...We know that such a civilization is concerned with Torah, and with k'dushah, and with mitzvah—with learning, with sanctity, with commandment...
...It sought to make poor Jews feel more comfortable with their poverty...
...To reach these people, we shall have to speak to them in their own languages—and they do speak many different ones...
...Federation is too middlebrow...
...Most local agencies and institutions are perfectly happy to defer to Federation on questions affecting Israel and its welfare...
...I do not pretend to know where such linkages begin, or should...
...And so on (the rich smoke tobacco, the poor chase the aroma...
...Consider: Jewish educators have no confidence in the competence of an institution they see as "belonging" to a combination of social workers (Federation professionals) and the rich (Federation donors...
...The poor lack even bread...
...In Miami, a doyen of the philanthropic community has become a specialist in Jewish art...
...Vast changes have taken place in the intervening years...
...Remember how many of our children's stories were about the inarticulate and illiterate poor being welcomed nonetheless by God...
...Giving is money, and it is remembrance...
...Of course check-writing is not the only way of linking up to Jewish life...
...And so on...
...Tz'dakah, in all its diverse manifestations, may well be the primary activity of American Jews...
...I think not...
...So we continue to vote for liberal programs despite having achieved a financial status that points most people elsewhere, and we wonder how long it can last...
...In Jewish life today, there's just one "have," and that is Federation...
...Come because that's where decency and responsibility are...
...You know the arguments...
...And I'll tell you a smallish secret: in my experience, the signers themselves also share the ambivalence...
...The rich man owns all things...
...And we know how many don't give at all, and how many more give only token gifts...
...Has the world stood still ever since...
...Who among us is a learned Jew...
...The others have a different agenda of complaint, and much of it centers on a funny kind of issue, half obsolete, half just emerging...
...Nothing in the background of Federations as institutions, and little in the background of very many Federation leaders, professional or lay, prepared them for the task...
...And open hearts, withal...
...No decline in prospect, but an end to the heady expansion of recent years...
...But it is those intentions that justify all the effort, and our present situation is not our permanent condition, and a specialized agency that draws its primary support from a limited segment of the community, that must, each year, deliver on its "bottom line," cannot and should not want to be seen as the premier spokesman for the comprehensive concerns of the Jewish People...
...there are ten times as many who are not...
...But the other organizations and their leaders do not view themselves as less committed to or less concerned with Israel...
...that most of them sit on the boards of half a dozen Jewish agencies and institutions, from hospitals to day schools, that face difficult choices and lack adequate resources...
...There, we imagine (incorrectly), doors up and down the street were flung open to greet the wayfaring stranger, to ask him in...
...Yet it remains an elusive truth, so confused are we about money...
...it was to repair the world...
...Here we even subsidize our own competition...
...I think because of the awareness, however dimmed, that there is little connection between the pleasures of wealth and its desserts...
...So we were taught, so, in fact, we learned...
...What more do you want...
...it is not an easy or a pleasant task...
...Federations have, I think, gone about as far (not yet as deep) as they can go...
...We shall simply have to find all those who show up only when Israel's giving a war...
...The wise ones know how dismal their own achievement has been, but they see no reason to believe that Federation can do a better job— and not much more reason to believe that Federation really wants to...
...We don't mean to diminish their worth, to slight them in any way...
...Does that shock you...
...Come now: they don't fit any better in your faculty club than you in their penthouse lunchery...
...But that is not what Federation is about...
...But people most often prefer Shabbos at home, where the tablecloth is white, not green, where the melodies are familiar and the company is close...
...You asked that I share with you some of my thoughts on the current condition of Federation, and I am happy to, for whatever they may be worth...
...we dine on kosher meat bussed in from eighty miles away...
...Only the Zionists have a real grievance, and they are still too traumatized by their neglect to do much more than sulk...
...So Federation's "Jewishness problem" stems in part from a lag between people's perceptions and a changing reality, and in part from a natural resentment...
...Whose is it, whose shall it be...
...I say them because I think they will be said louder, and by others, in the next few years...
...Rich or not, given the other choices they might have made, given the choices so very many of their peers have, in fact, made, I value them, and think it insolent of you to deprecate their good will or their good works...
...Here...
...I can only hope that a group of people—so many of whom have had considerable experience in business—will understand that Federation must look to the health of the private sector...
...Do you want them to be learned Jews...
...It needs those institutions, and it needs them robust...
...The agencies...
...Why should we discriminate (I hope God does not) against the inarticulate and illiterate wealthy...
...Quite literally, we cannot afford it...
...And we carried the learning with us...
...The kind of educational outreach programs we have recently begun, based on the principle that to raise money you must raise Jews, are all to the good—but not nearly enough, and, ultimately, inadequate...
...half the Chassidic tales were about just such people...
...You want the funds, but not the fund raising...
...But if you listen well, you'll learn that it was not for the plaque...
...The ones you hear about are often rich...
...what we have is ours by luck and by the rules of this strange system rather than by personal merit alone...
...The answer, I hope, will lie with the fund raisers...
...And when it does stop for a look, its response is critical, harshly critical...
...Let me say it baldly: in wide precincts of the Jewish community, Federation is viewed with resentment, suspicion, even hostility...
...I mean the issue of Federation's Jewishness...
...But it says something about Jewish life these days that the obvious point of departure for an examination of tz'dakah in our own lives is the Federation/ LJA complex...
...You...
...beginning as a joint campaign effort of some Jewish welfare agencies, it has become the treasurer of Jewish life...
...It appears that the disposition of the children of the entre-peneurs to go into the professions, as well as the tendency for the family-owned businesses to be gobbled up by the conglomerates, may mean, before too long, that we will have less of the out-landishly wealthy who now carry the brunt of the burden...
...Perhaps with observing the Sabbath Day, perhaps with study . .. perhaps, too, with the signing of a check or participating in the allocations process...
...others do better at history, and at destiny...
...But it would be a mistake to say that's all there is to it...
...But you can't expect the others to be happy about it...
...Reluctantly, they may concede Israel to Federation...
...Better, I think, to look to the causes and their cures...
...each has his own style, and the point is not—at any rate, should not be—style, but substance...
...Too early still to boast of achievements, but which of us can...
...I know especially how painfully difficult it is for any organization on the rise to say, "Here we stop...
...And why not...
...Now, it's clear that we're not fighting a rearguard action any longer...
...There are those whose only connection is the annual check, as there are those whose only connection is the annual excursion to the synagogue...
...is there no way of practicing organizational vasectomy...
...In the home of the richest Jew and biggest giver in a medium-sized Midwestern city, I watch the family light the Chan-nukah candles: the father chants the first blessing, then asks his daughter—a student at the local Lubavitch day school—to do what he cannot do, to recite the she'asah nisim...
...Other organizations existed to worry about the collective interests of the Jewish community, as also about the quality of Jewish life (though we didn't know the phrase back then...
...Much of this is, of course, the natural resentment of the have-nots towards the haves, the outs towards the ins...
...Federation has successfully appropriated itself (at the local level) the preeminent motive for tz'dakah in our time—to wit, the State of Israel...
...They did it because the others were failing, and they did it because they had the resources, and they did it because they were pressed to do it by an articulate minority of Federation activists...
...Do you want them to be ascetics...
...What have they to do with Jewish life, with real Jewish life and values as we both know them...
...Federation is too bourgeois, too elitist...
...Even to mention them out loud is to be accused of something less than total commitment...
...First comes Israel...
...That's where Israel went, and Federation has been the beneficiary...
...It's no fun to solicit, and I've not known more than a half dozen people, among all the stalwarts of the fund raising endeavor I've met, who claim to enjoy the work...
...The trucks grind past outside, the air conditioner rattles, the computer whirrs, telehones everywhere, and attache cases, pledge cards and quotas and plaques—a strange setting for sanctity...
...There is still a very widespread assumption that Federation is as uninterested in the quality of Jewish life as it was just yesterday...
...Those with memories know full well why it is that Federation rides up front with the driver, while they are crowded into the back, eager to be noticed, straining to overhear the conversation...
...Here we defer to others...
...Then praise the hearts that are still available for opening, and praise those who care enough and know enough to do the prying...
...But there is a growing edge of reluctance about the vastness of that effort, as we come to realize that Israel's emergency is, for all practical purposes, chronic, and we develop at the same time a new confidence in the viability of Jewish life in this country...
...The easy response is that you can't make an omelette without cracking eggs...
...The alternative, it seems to me, is to try to draw some sensible lines, some boundaries, around what Federation can and should try to do...
...At the local level, such sentiments don't matter much...
...So this is just a beginning, and we begin, of course, at the center...
...Of course the lines are fuzzy, and the purposes unclear, and the distinctions therefore difficult to draw...
...For the largest portion of its history, Federation was primarily concerned with the plight of individual Jews in distress...
...And the Jews—not the educators, not the rabbis, not the Orthodox, but the masses of Jews "out there"—don't trust Federation (if they even know of it) because they remain persuaded that Federation is interested only in their pocketbooks and in their checkbooks, not in their lives...
...I share some of your ambivalence towards checks, especially big ones, and those who sign them...
...There are far poorer Jews who win what they win, or lose it, at the racetracks or at the temple bingo games around the corner...
...Federation is about current events...
...It should not...
...We were, almost all of us, raised in a Yiddish culture which was a culture of consolation...
...You don't like its feel, and you don't like its consequences (it's not the money that bothers you, but the fact that those who raise it and those who give most of it end up, you say, "owning" the community, or thinking they do...
...Federations are Jewishly alive, the General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations has become an important Jewish happening, Federation leadership, professional and lay, is changing and is changing itself, Federation has no longer any cause to be ashamed of its Judaic intentions...
...When it comes to all the rest, to the timeless promises and hopes, it is to others that we must look for leadership...
...Even ask the one over there, the one with the plaque...
...on a better day, he'd leave seven good years behind...
...But in philanthropy (phil: love...
...We claim to be the "central address" of the Jewish community, but they see us as the house on top of the hill, parvenus who forget too readily that there are other houses on the street, modest though they be, and people in them who mean to tend their own gardens, not selling their little plots to a distant agribusiness directed by people they do not know or do not trust...
...In virtually every other arena of Jewish life—in Jewish education, in observance, in governance, we have yet to learn how to accomplish what earlier generations did with apparent ease...
...they won't concede Judaism...
...Of course we're impatient with them, of course we're disappointed by them, of course we're eager to get on with the job...
...How many of those who refrain from such signing in fact pursue the other beginnings...
...This is a different place from our imagining, it is a place of closed doors...
...Some rich are misers, so are some poor...
...Thanks for listening...
...Federation is about a remarkable group of some thousands (not nearly enough) of people who have decided, for a widely diverse set of reasons, that they are responsible...
...It is not disloyalty to Israel that prompts their saying, but a growing confidence in our own capacities—hence also a growing awareness of the need for investment here...
...But to reach them—since they have for so long resisted our blandishments—we shall have to try some new devices...
...It has to do with the abiding religious commitments of the Jewish People...
...But now, increasingly, there is resistance to that expansion...
...the rich are vain, the poor are squalid) right up to the next-to-last letter, shin...
...That is why the period of your tenure is likely to be marked not by a continuing expansion in the scope of our activity (except, of course, for fund raising) but rather by a much-needed redefinition of Federation's relationship to the rest of the community...
...But how long will it take us to learn that this is not and will not be the shtetl...
...Once in a while, they'll accept an invitation—but if it's in the form of a summons, they'll resent it...
...Only God is One, always, everywhere...
...And so the doing of it remains very uneven, and the news of its doing has yet to reach all those who had been accustomed to a different kind of Federation, to Federation in its earlier form...
...There is no way that we can do it all, and all alone...
...You are offended by the plush carpeted clubs in which they gather to attend to the needs of their People...
...De facto, the American Jewish community is Reconstructionist...
...I imagine that you'd prefer shtetl-style giving, open hearts and open doors, an alms box to which even the poor contribute, and a naturalness, a spontaneity about the whole thing that makes our computers, our solicitor training sessions, our dinners and our plaques seem vulgarly technical...
...Wealth is a taint, and poverty, while no blessing, a vindication...
...Even with this self-imposed restriction, we do not claim that we have done a "definitive" job...
...LETTERS TO TWO FRIENDS THE OUTS AND INS OF FEDERATION LEONARD FEIN People have roots...
...In time, we came to add to this microscopic focus the macro-problem of Jewish survival...
...no visiting Israeli colonels, no honorariumed American Senators...
...Indeed, in future issues, we will necessarily be calling attention to them, for a magazine that seeks to describe the ways in which Jews live cannot avoid the subject of the ways Jews give...
...I've yet to see any correlation, one way or the other, between one's location on the money tree and decency, grace, kindness...
...In my view, providing aid, comfort, respect, and real partnership to those institutions is the job, for us, now...
...But I do know that for a large number of the check-signers, and for a very large number of those whose dreary responsibility it is to encourage the check-signers, Jewish life does not end with that act...
...The poor had come by their penury honestly, and if lucky, would be visited by Elijah...
...The fact is that because we are a voluntary community, and because the money is so urgently required, the politics of Federation life is necessarily a politics of consensus—and that's inherently a conservative politics...
...Dear S: You were surprised when I called this morning to solicit your gift for this year's Federation campaign...
...I am also concerned about some of the problems we will almost surely face in the very near future, and for which we are as yet thoroughly unprepared, problems which could easily fracture our fragile consensus...
...Neither Federation leaders nor leaders of the other agencies and institutions would want that to happen, or let it happen...
...You and I both know that it would be absurd and futile for Federations to pose as the praesidium of a religious civilization...
...But very, very real...
...The story is simply too vast...
...A while back, it was fashionable to suppose that the Zionists were right, that Diaspora communities would fade away, that there wasn't much point to debating such priorities...
...He won't use the word "sacred," being too self-conscious for that...
...The rest of it is far more subtle, and far more important...
...I remember one of the favored folk songs of my childhood, a Yiddish acrostic, each line beginning with a new letter of the alef-bet: Alef...
...I know, I know how simple this is...
...They don't want to be treated as country bumpkins, or as peripheral to Jewish life, or as flies in the Federation anointment...
...I am concerned, of course, that we are not always one even when we need to be...
...To what end...
...If that's what you're after, just sign your pledge card and go about your other business...
...then, to manage these, a coordinating body—and then another, and finally a coordinator to coordinate the coordinators...
...The intellectuals...
...The specific wonder of the American Jewish philanthropy is that we've adapted the traditional instincts of the community to a vastly different setting, and scarcely missed a step—or a pledge, if you will—in the transition...
...Just ask the kids in Kiryat Shmonah or at the local Hebrew High School, or the folks in the Home for the Aged or in the family counseling center...
...And the rich...
...It's only at making babies that we lag behind...
...I must have read and heard a hundred...
...You would prefer something simpler, understated...
...Again, style vs...
...For the present, we transfer huge sums of money to Israel, and we do so happily, fully aware of the urgency of Israel's needs...
...Now we threaten to subvert the institutions that claim to have some part of the answer to that endemic problem...
...Others, we know, have worked as diligently, often as intelligently (our own parents and grandparents in the sweatshops, perhaps...
...We now raise half, at best, of what we should be raising...
...Yet even among those who have been part of the change, the skepticism remains...
...Take him aside to a quiet corner, and ask him...
...Boy, did other organizations exist...
...Should we subsidize Israeli scholars and starve our own...
...The single most successful philanthropy in mankind's history," and all that...
...In Providence, a national leader undertakes to raise funds for Yigal Yadin's political efforts in Israel...
...I imagine you reading this, and thinking to yourself, "There he goes again, maudlin, inundating me with images, playing on my emotions...
...Shall Malben flourish while our own parents are neglected...
...From an organizational standpoint, the remarkable rise of Federations to the central place they now occupy in the lives of our communities is surely the most striking development in American Jewish life since the 1940's...
...No, don't come grudgingly, because Federation is where the power is, and because you want a piece of it...
...only as less well-endowed...
...Dear D: My congratulations on your accession to the Federation Presidency...
...Let me say it plainly: if, heaven forbid, the American Jewish community were to disappear tomorrow, a millennium from now it would still be remembered as that Jewish community where the concept of tz'dakah was most fully realized...
...That is not our business, that is not what we know, that is not what our address is for...
...But we've proved to ourselves, again and again, that we can adopt—and meet—goals we once thought quixotic...
...And, by and large, the rich who commit their fortunes and their energies to Jewish public causes, to the world of philanthropy, care, and care deeply...
...The Orthodox community goes its own way (or ways), paying as little attention to Federation as Federation typically pays to it...
...Good for you, good for them...
...Double amnesia is where you forget not only the past, but the future as well...
...You are merely President of Federation, and outside our narrow precincts, that doesn't count for very much...
...Your Volvo is not so much less expensive than their Seville that you have the right to impose asceticism on others...
...Our capacity to organize emergency response is still fledgling, and that may end up being more than a shame...
...substance...
...Between wars, just when the dollars may make the difference between war and peace, they're nowhere to be found...
...Many of us, of course, are deeply involved in other and more specialized philanthropic activities...
...Or, a different metaphor: Federation wants, or appears to want, to make Shabbos for the entire community...
...But it will do us little good to get defensive, to insist on our own innocence and on the narrowness of others...
...Not exactly your thing...
...Federation is not less concerned with these aspirations than are others, but its explicit commitment is to just one of the 613 commandments, to tz'dakah...
...In short, Federation is not The Jewish Community, nor are you President of the Jews...
...Back, in short, to where I started...
Vol. 2 • June 1977 • No. 8
