Learning a lesson from religion that could be applied to politics
According to a recent story in eJewishPhilanthropy.com, a new rabbi is coming to Martha’s Vineyard. His name is Tzvi Alperowitz. He is 25 years old, and with his wife Hadassah, they are parents of a newborn. Also, with the help of local benefactors led by a philanthropist named Terry Kassel, they are buying a house on the island, where the median price of a home has skyrocketed since the pandemic to $1.3 million. Kassel, who is reportedly the longtime girlfriend of rightwing billionaire Paul Singer, is “helping fund [Alperowitz’s] nascent operation, whose $600,000 budget for this year includes the cost of a down payment,” according to eJewishPhilanthropy.
A week ago, the new Chabad center on the Vineyard held a housewarming event at its new permanent home in a large house in Vineyard Haven, complete with a buffet dinner and a bar with cocktails. Alperowitz is planning to hold more community events, including lectures, classes meals and children’s programming. “People are looking for connection much more than you think,” he told eJewishPhilanthropy. “People are waiting for you to reach out and people want to be part of a Jewish community,” he said. I’ve heard that one of the first acts of a Chabad emissary, upon their arrival in a new community, is to buy a local burial plot for themselves and their family. It’s a statement of commitment; they’re not parachuting in for a few years of community-building but in it for the long haul.
I bring this up not to enter a debate about the merits of Chabad as a religious organization, though it is worth noting that two Russian Jewish oligarchs, Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky, and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner all have been tied to it financially and it has been criticized by some as a messianic cult. As a branch of Orthodox Judaism, it is more welcoming than its very staid counterparts, which explains a lot of its attractiveness to many unaffiliated Jews. But its core goal is the expansion of a very tradition-bound, patriarchal form of the religion.
Instead, I’m flagging this story as an example of what serious commitment to community-building might look like. Imagine being able to kickstart a community center with someone giving you the money for a down payment on a home, along with a six-figure budget for programming and rent. Twenty-five years ago, when my wife and I joined with a small group of friends and new acquaintances in creating a Reconstructionist Jewish congregation to meet our young family’s needs, we made a conscious choice to not try to raise the funds needed to buy a building to serve as a synagogue. Noting how other congregations around us seemed to spend a great deal of their time raising money for their building fund (and then having to elevate the wealthiest members to higher status to thank them for their help), we chose to stay lightweight and egalitarian. That has allowed us to persist as a community of roughly 50 households on a modest annual budget of about $60,000 a year, but it has also meant that we ask a lot of our members as volunteers. When a Chabad center opened nearby, we noticed that its ability to offer free services (along with a charismatic and welcoming rabbinic couple whose salaries were paid in advance by outside benefactors) inexorably pulled people towards them.
Community-building is not cheap. But consider how much money is currently spent on politics in America. In 2020, the Democratic Party’s three main fundraising arms (the DNC, DCCC and DSCC) raised and spent more than $1.8 billion. The lion’s share of this money went to pay for political ads. If somehow the Democrats diverted just five percent of that money into the kind of community-building investments made by Chabad, they could fund 150 year-round community centers with core staff. NARAL, Planned Parenthood Action Fund and EMILY’s List recently announced they would spend an unprecedented $150 million on the 2022 midterms to ensure the election of reproductive freedom champions up and down the ballot. If the Democrats had already invested in building community centers, that money could go much further.
Alas, right now only one of our two political parties seems to understand the value of investing in community and in experimenting with strategies that pull voters towards them. It’s the Republicans, and they’ve been building a network of local community centers oriented towards attracting Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American voters since last year, as I reported last November.
Of course, before people can commit to investing in community, they have to agree about their community’s core values. Right now, the Democratic party’s leaders are committed capitalists, while many of its younger adherents are attracted to social democracy or socialism. So don’t hold your breath waiting for national Democrats to lead here. On the other hand, progressive Democratic funders could easily decide to start funding experiments in community-building. What do they have to lose?