Leading with Hope in a Time of Fear and Guilt and Isolation
The framing question was “With what are you struggling at this time and what is it that is giving you energy?” For the next 40 minutes I listened to responses, one after another, of the 20 rabbinical and cantorial students spread across the United States, who participated in an HUC-JIR summer course entitled “Leading Through Change and Crises: A Journey of Hope.” They spent seven weeks reading, watching video Webinars, listening to podcasts and engaging in hours of synchronous class sessions as they attempted to make sense of being a Jewish leader in the midst of the pandemic while personally living through this plague.
They shared their experiences: “I am exhausted.” “I feel so much uncertainty.” “I just feel loss.” “Everything is just the same…so much sameness. I miss milestones.” “I have decision fatigue.” “I do not know what a holistic experience is anymore.” “I am always at the same spot…the screen.” “Am I really in my late twenties and still living with my parents?” “I feel so isolated.” “Will I get a job?”
None of it was surprising to hear. One of the learning modules for the course was “Leading in a Time of Fear and Guilt and Isolation.” The questions driving this module were, “Why do I feel the way I do right now?”; “How should I feel?”; “Are my feelings normal?” The students read several essays related to personal well-being, mental and physical health during the pandemic. They attended a Webinar on creating well-being in a time of adversity and another on how not to be afraid of the dark.
In an article included in the course and studied by the students, “17 Totally Normal Things to Feel Right Now, According to Therapists: There is No ‘Right” Way to Handle This,’” author Anna Borges lists and describes the psychological state of so many in America. To name some sentiments on the list: “You are burned out. You are angry. You are spiraling about what might happen. You are struggling with working from home. You are mourning canceled events. You are yo-yoing between hopefulness and hopelessness. You are craving a freaking hug, damn it. You are stuck and unsure. You are guilty about your relative safety, security, or privilege. You are deep in some existential regret. You are grieving. You are feeling inadequate about your productivity. You are dealing with a resurgence of unrelated past trauma. You’re numb.”[1]
My not-so-random survey of the HUC students revealed a close and loud echo of the “normal” feelings that psychologists noted.
Our students, like their loved ones, friends, and peers, are grieving. Altogether, they are experiencing loss, isolation, guilt, and fear. Along with the horrible loss of life, psychologists say we are capable of “losing places, projects, possessions, professions and protections, all of which we may be powerfully attached to…. This pandemic forces us to confront the frailty of such attachments, whether it’s to our local bookstore or the routines that sustain us through our days.”[2]
“Rabbinical, cantorial and education students, as all of us, are confronting so-called ambiguous losses, the ones that lack clarity and definition.”
Rabbinical, cantorial and education students, as all of us, are confronting so-called ambiguous losses, the ones that lack clarity and definition. There is the loss of a sense of safety, of social connections and personal freedoms, and of jobs and financial security. It is about grieving a living loss, one that keeps going and going.[3] The students asked how are they to be leaders in this very difficult time. The world seems quite dark and everyone seems afraid.
Dr. Marcia Reynolds teaches both that we should not be afraid of the dark and how not to be afraid of that dark.[4] “What makes the dark so scary?” she asks, “The less we know for sure, the more we imagine the worst and believe it exists … The one thing you must not do is to give in to feelings of resignation and hopelessness.”
I very much agree with her. Hopelessness and resignation are not part of Jewish vocabulary nor part of a Jewish world view. We cannot live and we cannot lead if we are hopeless and afraid. That is not the Jewish way. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks teaches, “Judaism is a sustained struggle against the world that is in the name of the world that could be — but is not yet. The Jewish People invented hope.”[5]
A key concept in the HUC-JIR course was learning about the idea that we live in a VUCA world. VUCA is an acronym adopted in the early 21st century by the US Army War College as military planners began thinking about a post-Cold War world. It has since been used by corporations, organizations, and institutions as they strategize and plan for their future. The VUCA world is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous. A bit more explanation:
Volatility refers to the nature and dynamics of change itself and the nature and speed of change forces and catalysts
Uncertainty refers to the lack of predictability, potential for surprise, and sense of awareness and understanding of issues and events
Complexity refers to the multiplex of forces, confounding of issues, and the chaos and confusion that surround an organization
Ambiguity refers to the haziness of reality, potential for misreads, and mixed meanings of conditions; cause-and-effect confusion.[6]
The HUC-JIR students with whom I was in close contact over the summer were grappling with the context in which today’s leaders are leading—in the new reality of the increasingly complex world of the pandemic. They felt challenged in how to prepare as a Jewish leader for the future as a corrective to these most difficult, if not almost incomprehensible times.
Bob Johansen, author of The New Leadership Literacies, the core textbook for the course, offers an antidote to VUCA.[7]He teaches that leaders need the skills to transform VUCA into a new set of terms, a new acronym that shifts meanings:
Vision: Volatility can be countered with vision because vision is even more vital in turbulent times. Leaders with a clear vision of where they want their organizations to be in three to five years can better weather volatile environmental changes such as this pandemic, for example, by making decisions to counter the huge turbulence while keeping the organization’s vision in mind.
Understanding: Uncertainty can be countered with understanding, the ability of a leader to stop, look, and listen. To be effective in a VUCA environment, leaders must learn to look and listen beyond their functional areas of expertise to make sense of the volatility and to lead with vision. This requires leaders to communicate with everyone in their organization and to develop and demonstrate teamwork and collaboration skills.
Clarity: Complexity can be countered with clarity, the deliberative process to make sense of the chaos. In a VUCA world, chaos comes swift and hard. Leaders who can quickly and clearly tune into all the minutiae associated with the chaos can make better, more informed decisions.
Agility: Ambiguity can be countered with agility, the ability to communicate across the organization, institution, community, and to move quickly to apply solutions.
“Our history, tradition and texts teach us to have vision, understanding, clarity and agility, skills absolutely vital for a vibrant future.”
This new expression of VUCA is at the heart of learning how to be a leader in the Jewish community while in the midst of a pandemic. Our history, tradition and texts teach us to have vision, understanding, clarity and agility, skills absolutely vital for a vibrant future. We are already seeing congregational rabbis, cantors and educators innovating as they practice and program a new VUCA. The professionals and their lay partners are delving deeply into a vision of the congregation that projects out five or more years from now. Distance, remote, online congregational life is yielding powerful shivaZoom minyanim where people at great distances from one another come to share thoughts, feelings, photos and videos about a friend or family member who has passed; b’nai mitzvah emphasize a “religious experience” in tandem with or prioritized over social aspects of party planning; adult learning has been enhanced with numerous resources shared on the screen; Hebrew school classes provide students individually guided instruction; dozens of self-organized small groups meet for intellectual stimulation and community building. At the same time, these congregational leaders are learning how to communicate with all congregational stakeholders in new ways and determining mechanism for how to continue to examine the congregation’s mission so as to align programs to their community core values[JS1] .
Rabbi Sacks writes, “No one can know the future because it is not predetermined. We are free, in God’s image, to create the future, which must necessarily tend toward the good — because that is how God has created us.” Elsewhere he teaches something we know we will repeat often: “Judaism is humanity’s faith in the future tense; the Jewish voice is the voice of an inextinguishable hope.”[8]
It was so important to create a course for rabbinical, cantorial and education students right away, even as the pandemic unfolded. Our mission at HUC-JIR is to prepare the very best professional leaders for the Jewish world. Assumptions about Jewish organizations, institutions, and community formed over the past decades are no longer valid. Now is the time for innovation and risk taking which requires leaders to lead with vision, understanding, clarity and agility. Foundational to those leadership skills is hope. It is no accident that the national anthem of the State of Israel is “Hatikvah.” “Our hope is not lost; it is two thousand years old….”
“The Jewish way is to rescue hope from tragedy.”[9] That is precisely what our soon-to-be rabbis, cantors and educators will do.
[1] Anna Borges, “17 Normal Things to Fell Right Now, According to Therapists,” SELF, April 10, 2020. Anna Borges is an award-winning writer, editor, podcast host, and mental health advocate. Currently, she is a senior health editor at SELF, and has previously worked at BuzzFeed and Women's Health. SELF is an important and award-winning digital magazine dedicated to wellness. It is one of several important resources concerning culture and health. Borges interviewed a number of highly respected psychologists and mental health professionals for this article, written in the midst of the pandemic
[2] Kirsten Weir, “Grieving Life and Loss,” American Psychological Association Report: COVID 19, June 1, 2020
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2020/06/covid-grieving-life
[3] Ibid
[4] Marcia Reynolds, “How Not To Be Afraid of the Dark,” The Daily Connection Webinar, March 25, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK2TrpkQM20
[5] Jonathan Sacks, “How the Jewish People Invented Hope,” My Jewish Learning, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/how-the-jewish-people-invented-hope/
[6] Krista Skidmore, “Preparing Leaders for the Future: The Antidote to the VUCA Challenge,” January 5, 2020 in Flash Point https://www.flashpointleadership.com/blog/preparing-leaders-for-the-future-in-a-challenging-world
[7] Bob Johansen, The New Leadership Literacies: Thriving in a Future of Extreme Disruption and Disputed Everything (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler, 2017).
[8] As quoted by Sue Fishkoff, “Judaism’s Message of Radical Hope,” Jewish News of Northern California, December 7, 2020
[9] Jonathan Sacks, Future Tense: Jews, Judaism and Israel in the Twenty-First Century (NY: Schocken Books, 2012) pg. 20.
