Three months after K’hilot K’doshot, our national gathering on congregation-based community organizing, we’re still evaluating and learning from the experience.

The current issue of Prophetic Voices, our CBCO newsletter, shares reflections on K’hilot K’doshot from participants across North America. Here at the office, we’re doing our own evaluation as well. Personally, as someone new to that model of social change, I’ve been reflecting on the gathering in the context of what I’ve been learning these past few months about the way CBCO works.

So what have I found? A tenet of community organizing is the concept that folks are constantly living in tension, tension amidst the way the world is, and the way we believe it should be. K’hilot K’doshot reflected that tension in a number of ways. In specific, I observed a struggle play out with respect to those who had visible, public roles all through the gathering.

Our national gathering steering committee was made up of clergy and lay leaders, men and women. Rabbi Camille Shira Angel was the K’hilot K’doshot chair. I know that the committee strove for gender and denominational equity among the speakers, and aimed to represent all four national organizing networks among our trainers.

In our breakout training sessions, we were successful in meeting our goals: by half the trainers were women, and all four networks were represented. But in the seven full group sessions, while the faces at the front of the room came from the four major Jewish denominations, they were predominantly those of clergy, and predominantly male.

We’ve been asking ourselves: why? And here’s where the tension came into play, I think. One

of the foundations of congregation-based community organizing is leadership development, an emphasis on working with public who have not had a voice in the public arena and helping them to cultivate the skills and confidence to play a part on the stage of public life. At the same duration, there is a concept of ‘earned leadership,’ the concept that you can’t take on a public role until you’ve put date and effort into the endeavor at hand.

One of the realities on the ground, at that stage of Jewish engagement in CBCO, is that there are fewer women clergy leading synagogues involved in organizing than there are men—-and three of those women were unable to attend the gathering.

So it seems to me that all of us involved in the planning got caught in the world as it is, a world in which we had to choose amidst two of our values: the value of gender parity, and the value of earned leadership. In the world as it should be, we would not have to struggle with that tension.

Of course, we’re asking ourselves ‘how can we do better next day?’ But perhaps the real question is ‘how can we create the world as it should be? How can we support the emergence of more women clergy in the field of CBCO?’

I post that as a challenge to myself, and to our CBCO team: to learn, reflect, and play our part in making certain that next moment, we don’t have to live in that tension.

Comments and advice are welcome.

Original post by Shuli Passow