To Be of Not to Be a Community

Exploring the Impact of Panim Hadashot Part 4 in a Series of Reflections by Rabbi Dov Gartenberg

To be or Not to be a Community

In the previous writing, I explored the debate within the leadership of Panim Hadashot about whether to become a community or to remain strictly an outreach and educational organization.

One concrete decision we made early on was not to offer worship services. Panim Hadashot offered an ongoing Shabbat gathering of study called 70 Faces of Torah. These took place in my home on a regular basis and in the beginning attracted 20-30 people each time. The experiment aimed to build a Shabbat community organized around dynamic and participatory Torah study.

One of the main ideas of Panim Hadashot at the beginning was to offer people experiences of community around celebration and study as opposed to communal worship. I believed that significant numbers of Jews would find this alternative approach, both more accessible and more stimulating than the worship and gatherings characteristic of synagogues.

While Shabbat around Seattle, our Shabbat outreach program kept on growing and attracting interest, the experiment to create a learning community foundered over time. The gatherings did not congeal into a community as I had hoped. We had also hoped that people attending our other outreach programs would join us for Shabbat learning, but this did not happen either.

Throughout the three years of Panim Hadashot, Shabbat around Seattle remained our most popular and sought after program. It was a pure outreach program which was created to turn people onto doing Shabbat at home. As we saw the Shabbat learning gatherings decline, we decided to stick with what had been successful. By doing this Panim Hadashot moved away from attempting to establish a unified community to providing outreach and educational experiences for Jews outside the community.

The impact of this evolution became evident. By not trying to be a community, we did find it harder for us to attract stakeholders who would volunteer and support Panim Hadashot. The real stakeholders had to be the communal institutions and far sighted donors that saw the value of Panim Hadashot. But as I have written earlier, we were unable to convince enough institutions and donors of the communal value of Panim Hadashot in the Pacific Northwest to make it sustainable.