Picking our people

“You don’t get to pick your Jews.”

This is an expression we have used regularly as community builders over the years. Usually, the two of us trot it out with one another when we’re lamenting a story we’ve heard about someone being asked to leave, pushed aside, or made to feel unwelcome in some corner of Jewish community.

It sounds like: “Come on, Rabbi So-and-So...don’t you know you don’t get to pick your Jews? You work with the people in front of you who are asking to be part of community.”

The idea goes like this: If we claim that we are, in some way, stewards of Jewish community, then community should be for all who seek it in good faith. Too often, we hear stories of people who sought out Jewish life and later came to understand that the community leader really just wanted to keep leading a select group: their friends, their long-timers, the “cool ones,” the ones who could afford it, or the ones who weren’t so...well...different.

We, too, have had these experiences in our own lives.

You don’t get to pick your Jews.

I’m thinking about this because I’ve spent the better part of this week serving on the selection committee for a prestigious professional fellowship. In this setting, my job is quite literally to help pick people for a limited number of spots. And while I don’t make the final decision alone, my observations and comments influence the selection process. I so infrequently inhabit this mode, and I am trying to meet this opportunity with as much humility and kavod, respect, as I can. Hats off to you, our community members who work in college admissions!

Because “picking,” as we know, is consequential. Those who aren’t picked may remember these experiences for a long time. Even as I write this, I can picture moments on the elementary school playground when I was drafted last — over and over — for kickball. In a community that promotes picking, people often feel they can’t be fully themselves, always trying to communicate: pick me, pick me, pick me.

Now, of course, communities are not without boundaries. A completely open community cannot keep people safe. Sometimes there are people who will indeed not be welcome because of their behavior. Sometimes it will be, quite simply, because the RSVPs are full.

But we try to remain steadfast in our commitment to not picking. All of the Jewish People deserve community. So while some moments, like a selection committee, require picking our Jews, we prefer to build a Jewish life where belonging is not something people have to audition for.

At Tzibur, our work is to receive the people who arrive. The people who are curious. The people who are lonely. The people who are joyful. The people who are complicated. The people who are seeking Shabbat, friendship, learning, song, meaning, a meal, a doorway in.

We do not get to pick our Jews.

But, we do get to choose how widely we open the door.

Week after week, this is what we choose: to build a community where more of us can stop asking, “Will they pick me?” and begin to feel, with more and more confidence, “I am already part of this.”