In this time when a lot of us feel like we don’t have much power to make the world as we wish it to be, one place where we may have some range of motion is in the quality and intensity of our interactions with people around us. I’ve spent the past two months reading, thinking and talking to people about community. My specific question has been about how to make the experience of community in a group like a synagogue stronger and deeper. My interest has been in basically healthy, functional communities in which people might wish to experience a stronger sense of connection and passion together. Is community a "teachable" thing? Are there tactics, interventions, techniques, approaches, practices that would accomplish this deepening? Of course these specific questions have led me into reflecting more generally about what community is and isn’t and what makes a community strong and alive in the first place. I’ve come away from this with a feeling that there is a lot we can do to make life more meaningful and connected for ourselves and the people around us.
Early on in my sabbatical I spent some time up in Spokane WA with Kent Hoffman, who has been my friend and teacher since I was ten years old. Kent is presently a psychotherapist who is passionately involved with "attachment theory." I’m not sure of the syntax here, but he works with both the theory and practicalities of how infants and their caretakers, often their mothers, bond with each other. Kent says that human beings are "hard-wired for relationship." The fact that mothers and babies typically bond so intensely is not just a function of the baby’s need to be fed. It is a manifestation of a basic template in the makeup of people. We yearn to be in intimate relationship. Given the opportunity, we connect. Deprived of healthy connection, we will seek it over and over as best we can. Kent even suggests that this basic template of loving relationship, which most of us experience to a greater or lesser degree with our first caretakers, is the nature of the universe itself – that at the greatest possible scale as well as at the smaller, the world really is a loving "holding environment."
This seems really, fundamentally, importantly true to me. All of us are walking around needing to be in connection with other people. We may be frustrated; we may be cynical; we may have found other compensations; we may look like we don’t need a thing. But we are all actually yearning more than may appear on the surface. We need to be in relationship.
One of the most joyful parts of my exploration has been talking with people who just seem to have a knack for being in community. It has been my hunch from the beginning that in any vibrant community there will be a core of people that do something special that sets the tone for the whole group. So I asked around and thought about people here on the Coast and other places I was planning to visit who seem to be these kinds of "core people." And I asked them about what it is they do to make community. At first I thought that these people would have special gifts; and indeed many do. Betsy Teutsch says that she is organized by nature, and so, when a member of her minyan was seriously ill, it came naturally to her to organize food and laundry and personal support for the whole family for an extended period. Judy Tarbell is good at getting people together and so, while she likes to think she’s doing it for a higher purpose than just throwing parties, it comes naturally to her to organize festivities to build community in her town. Melissa Crabbe will go to enormous lengths to bring people together who she thinks ought to meet each other – not always easy since her constituency is prison inmates. Steve Siler is an organizer’s organizer; he knows how to bring people together by affinities and then set them loose, to deal with troublemakers and to "feed the group" with amazing ritual experiences. Nancy Margulies is fascinated by the "inherent wisdom of the group" and keeps experimenting with group processes like the "World Café." She just sent me an excited e-mail in which she mentioned that she is learning new techniques of Socratic questioning!
But then there are other wonderful people who are not necessarily leaders and innovators, but who still have a huge impact on their communities because of something about how they are and what they do. Underneath all the specific gifts and knacks, I believe that these people all have something in common. They all want very much to be in community. And they ask for what they want in a certain way. I now think that the fundamental community-growing behavior is something like this:
-- You feel a longing for some certain quality of relationship, some sort of support, some kind of shared experience. I don’t just mean that you think some kind of structure or activity should exist, but that you genuinely and personally long for a certain kind of experience with others.
-- You make that longing known to others by saying, in effect: "I am willing to go to such-and-such a place if others will meet me there." In other words, you do not just ask for others to do the work for you, but neither are you taking sole responsibility for manifesting your heart’s desire by yourself. You are offering yourself as a partner in fulfilling this wish if others support it.
-- Once you have made your offer you are willing to let go of it. If people show up to meet you, great. If not, you accept that information and go onwards. People saying "no" is part of your learning, about people’s limits and priorities and perhaps about your own longings.
I think of meeting Charlie Steinbuck, the very first time I came up to the Mendocino Coast (almost nineteen years ago!) Charlie was one of an impressive handful of Bronx-born back to the landers that I met in the Jewish community here. When I met him, he was close to death with a brain tumor. And, as he got even more ill, he started asking the local Jews for some specifically Jewish kinds of support. After my short visit, I got letters from people telling me that, in addition to cooking and cleaning and helping to finish building his house (all of this loving service shared with other friends and neighbors,) people from the Jewish community on the Coast sat with Charlie and chanted psalms and sang to him in Hebrew. When he died they washed his body in the Jewish fashion, sat with him around the clock, built his casket, dug his grave and buried him.
And this behavior, this kind of presence, became part of the self-understanding of our Jewish community. It was never voted on or formally instituted. Charlie asked. He was met with a great deal of heart and soul. And then this group began to see itself as the kind of community which extends this kind of support when one of its members is dying.
I can think of lots of examples of people speaking from their heart’s yearning and being met, and way more examples of people doing the same and not being met. An example of the latter came up very strongly in a conversation I had recently with Zo Abell. Zo lived for something like twenty years in an intentional community which raised children in common, shared money and the like. She ran an alternative school during that period which reflected these same values. She has been powerfully engaged in the women’s community on the Coast and, to some degree, in the Jewish and Buddhist communities as well. And this is just part of her deep and overlapping experience in this realm. She is in her early sixties. Zo is questioning the fact that many of us are making individual plans for our old age, buying homes, putting money away, investing and so on. She is trying to do the same thing, in fact, but she is deeply conflicted about it. She feels that this kind of individualism is caving into the worst of our materialist American culture, that it is neither wise nor generous. By now some of the people she knows have received inheritances, while others are still scraping by at poorly-paying jobs. Even the wealthy ones will end up isolated in "their castles" on our rugged coast, without transportation or help making the firewood and cooking when they can’t do it themselves. And the less well-off will be even less lucky.
What is our responsibility to each other? Zo asks. Why can’t we work on growing old together instead of each toughing it out on her own? She has put this challenge out in many different ways in her various overlapping circles of community, and the truth is that she is really not being met. The rest of us either disagree with her, or we are committed to our own plans. Or the whole thing makes us tired. Or it scares us. Or whatever. Certainly in the Jewish community at this moment we do not see this as part of our core pact with each other. That could change as we age. Zo herself isn’t sure what she would do if, at this moment in her life, someone were to take her up on her challenge.
But she is asking from a deep place within.
Charlie said "I yearn for my community to care for me while I die." Zo is saying, "I yearn for my community to face old age together with me." Or we might better understand them to be saying, "I want this quality of experience, and I am willing to show up for it if others do too." Of course nobody ever speaks this neatly. They might say, "I demand X!" or, "Studies show that you all really need X." Or, "If I can’t get some X I will leave."
An amorphous but important aspect of community that people often negotiate in this gentle way is the level of intensity and disclosure that will become part of the group’s self-expectation. People frequently say things about how they want to relate to each other: "I yearn to share mystical experiences." "I yearn to talk about difficulties with my family." "I yearn to share my political rage." "I yearn to be openly gay." "I yearn to let you know that I am lonely." "I yearn to be able to cry when I feel like it." "Excuse me! I don’t express my yearnings. I would just like to feel comfortable being more reserved than other people in this group." These various ventures in yearning, and the ways they are met or not met, establish the tone and texture and quality of how people will be together.
Sometimes these yearnings are met and supported by others, and that becomes part of the self-understanding of that community. Sometimes these yearnings are not met and supported by others, and this too becomes part of how the community understands itself. I think that the "no’s" are actually as important as the "yes’s." Saying "no" to the direction a person wants to move is often about keeping people safe. One might say that the "yes" is the flow of the group and the "no" is its container. Sometimes there is too much "yes" or too much "no." Groups get reflexively permissive or conservative. That’s something to keep an eye on.
I’m writing a lot here about yearning and longing and wanting and desiring, and I suppose it could sound kind of selfish and petulant. In fact it’s not easy at all to know what we truly, deeply want. We are all barraged with a million messages telling us that we want all kinds of junk. This is true in the world of community as well. Do any of our hearts really yearn for a building? A big budget? Fancy dinners and programs? In recommending wanting, I am talking about that kind of core yearning that Kent Hoffman describes, the kind that is hard-wired into us. That inner longing for connection, which I believe in so fundamentally, may very well be served by buildings and budgets and programs. But they are not themselves our heart’s desire. I am depending on all of us to listen deeply to ourselves, to be able to suss out from all the noise what it is that would deeply satisfy. And then to ask for it. Not an easy task at all…
I’ve talked to people in places where they really don’t feel like the people around them are likely to respond. All of us are closed in different ways, and it seems like some people are closed in a lot of ways. I talked to one woman who said she started meeting with other Jews in her isolated area and it never went anywhere. People didn’t want to pray or study or discuss; they didn’t want to get to know each other; they didn’t seem to want much of anything. So she started commuting an hour to a different community, and in that group she finds people who really seem to care and want to grow. If you are in the former situation I think that all you can do is what this woman did – search until you find a group that seems like it wants to be a community. That’s where the work I’m talking about here begins.
One of the books I have loved the most this past two months is Jean Vanier’s Community and Growth. I love this book because it brazenly talks about the movement of people’s souls as they live in community. Vanier is a French Catholic who, over something like forty years now has started and lived in communities called L’Arche, in which, by intention, some of the participants in the community have mental illness. He talks about life in community as a kind of spiritual practice, in which people choose to place themselves in the constant friction of life with other people in order to experience love, to be in love, to offer love to the world. I didn’t see this word love written nearly enough in other books I read, and I didn’t hear people talking nearly enough about it for my taste. I really feel like love is the core issue in community – community exists for the purpose of love. And I guess I think we all exist for the purpose of love as well. All this talk about the heart’s yearning, about being hard-wired for relationship. We exist to love and be loved. We long for nothing more. We experience a certain kind of love with our intimates, with our families, with our friends. And there is a certain kind of love which you can really only experience in community, in a bigger, less perfectly-chosen, more diverse mix of people. Jean Vanier says that most of us come to community because we think we will get our needs met. But then at some moment some of us have this awakening, this reversal, and we realize that what we really need is to love and serve others. "People enter community to be happy. They stay when they find that happiness comes in making others happy." (p.78)
Vanier says that a community needs to have a mission greater than perpetuating itself. And he says (at least I think he says this) that there are really only two fundamental kinds of mission for community: "yearning and searching for communion with God" and "the quest to be close to the poorest and most broken people." And, he says, these two do not need to be mutually exclusive. Vanier doesn’t make any effort to universalize his religious language, but I think we can understand his two basic missions as having something to do with delving within and offering ourselves in service to others. I found myself pausing for a long time with this challenge. Does my Jewish community, for example, have a purpose greater than its own continuation? What is our mission for being a Jewish community?
When I was in rabbinical school my father said I should read Alfred P. Sloan’s memoir, My Years with General Motors. Apparently Alfred Sloan had an awakening that my dad thought rabbis should think about. Sloan says that he had always thought that GM was in the business of making cars. But one day he realized that they were not in business to make cars; they were in business to make money. My dad used to ask me, "What’s your product?" In slightly more elevated language, I think Jean Vanier is asking the same question. And I find it unnerving but also invigorating to think about mission, as Vanier does (and Sloan doesn’t!) in these kinds of ultimate terms. It makes all the daily work of community feel like it matters more.
At the same time Vanier writes repeatedly of the "smallness" and ordinariness of life in community. This certainly corresponds with my experience! The daily activities and responsibilities of life in community are definitely "small." It is an endless series of phone calls, making tea, vacuuming the floor, xeroxing. It’s relating to a small circle of people, with all our little peculiarities. But Vanier reminds me that our little tasks needs to be done with a sense of ultimacy – that every small piece should in its small way increase love, bring each of us closer to people in their poverty and brokenness and help us feel the presence of God. Because daily life in community is small, it helps to be reminded of this. I am sure there are ways to do the same tasks which either move in the direction of ultimacy or away from it. The communion with God part is more mysterious, but it seems obvious to me that all the various ways we try to be with people who are "poor and broken" and to be in genuine connection with them (us?) we are serving the latter mission.
I read a great book called Counterfeit Community: The Exploitation of Our Longings for Connectedness by John F. Freie. Freie says that we poor Americans are so hungry for experiences of connection with others that everybody in the world wants to sell us community. He writes about the Cheers Bar in the airport in Boston – it has dummies on barstools that say cute, homey things that make you think of the Cheers bar on TV "where everybody knows each other." And we fall for it, forgetting that Cheers itself is a television show, not even a real bar! We are vulnerable to simulacra of community because we lack experience of real community. He writes chapters on planned housing developments, "mega-churches" and internet chat rooms as examples of counterfeit community.
Too often we are presented with the relatively easy opportunity to "feel" a sense of community without undergoing the more challenging task of working through difficult and often uncomfortable relationships that are at the base of communal experience. Counterfeit community severs our feelings of community from the web of relationships that link us to our environment and to others. (p. 4)
Guilty! I traffic in the "feeling of community" all the time, often not expecting myself or others to go to the work of being in that web of relationships. How often I have wanted someone to "feel like the Jewish community cares" without expecting the person I am concerned about to actually know people in the community, without expecting people in the Jewish community to actually demonstrate that they care. How often I think that I can be a whole community for people, that if people relate to me they are relating to "the Jewish community."
Freie makes me realize that if you want to be in community you have to be in relationships. Or, as my neighbor Sandy Berrigan said quite elegantly, "If you want community, you have to talk to people." Real community, says Freie, means that people see each other, they do business and play with each other, they have a variety of formal and informal kinds of experiences with each other over time and, he claims, connected to a place (such as a neighborhood) as well. And not only that: "My image of community," he writes, " is one that asks that we struggle to create a world that is more united, more connected, more sharing, and more meaningful for human action than the one we live in now." (p.23) I like this, of course!
So by this line of thought, the endeavor is not to get people to feel more connected with each other but to get people to be more connected with each other. And, while programs and projects and leadership and teaching are an essential part of getting people together, programs and projects and campaigns can’t be a substitute for the real thing, which is individual people stepping into the ring and relating to each other in a sustained, ongoing way and in an intense and meaningful and important way.
As I’ve been walking around talking about these ideas with people, I hear back a lot about fatigue. That "web of relationships that links us to our environment and to others" takes a lot of work to be a part of. Right now as I write (on the last day of 2001) most of the good people I know are in some kind of despair. We are in a war that many of us despise. We’re all still reeling from September 11. Money feels tight. It’s rained for twenty days straight. Personally I have just had the immeasurable gift of two months’ sabbatical, and I’m not tired at all. I’m full of juice. I’m not fatigued in large measure because for the past two months I haven’t been taking care of people. I haven’t tried to be present while people suffer. I haven’t talked much and haven’t listened much either, except in conversations which I have set up. I haven’t cooked for anyone except my own household and our own guests, haven’t made any long lists of phone calls, haven’t gone to any meetings. I’ve taken a break from putting up with all those irritating, weird, demanding things people do. But I am about to go back to my regular life of rabbi-ing and being back in community, and I have some idea of what that entails.
So I realize that I should be gentle in my urgings here, since I may be reading this some day when I am at the end of my rope too. It’s important to remember how tired we all really are, how sore our muscles are. My most general recommendation is go for love; go for depth; go for ultimacy. But we can do that gently, I suppose, a little at a time, realizing that our friends and communards may not show up for what we ask for, not because they don’t care or don’t want to but because they are already swimming as fast and as far as they can. Kent Hoffman quotes studies that show that the most perfect parents, who nurture their babies the absolute best, actually respond to what their infants need 30% of the time. 70% of the time they miss the cues entirely.
Still and all, the real stuff is not quantifiable, and so we should probably try not to think in terms of scarcity. There is always more love; there is always more God; there is always more depth. I really do believe that as times get and stay tough and draining, we will be able to sustain each other. And that these small connections we all make may actually, in some small measure, help to sustain the big world.
THANK YOU!
Zo Abell
Sandy Berrigan
Melissa Crabbe
Donna Feiner
Rabbi Dayle Friedman
Evrith Giovenco and friends at Temple Bat Yam
Kent Hoffman
Andrea Luna
Nancy Margulies
Cathie Mellon
Donna Montag
Steve Siler
Jhos Singer
Jim Tarbell
Judy Tarbell
Betsy Platkin Teutsch
Rabbi Shawn Zevit
THANK YOU TO THESE BOOKS AND THEIR AUTHORS:
Eileen Caddy, Foundations of a Spiritual Community, Findhorn Press 1978
Melody Ermachild Chavis, Altars in the Street, Bell Tower 1997
Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center, Counterpoint 2001
John F. Freie, Counterfeit Community: The Exploitation of Our Longings for Connectedness, Rowman and Littlefield 1998
Charlotte Sophia Kasl, A Home for the Heart, Harper Collins 1997
David L. Kirp, Almost Home: America’s Love-Hate Relationship With Community
Alphonso Lingis, The Commuity of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Indiana University Press 1994
Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days, Meridian 1994
M.Scott Peck, A Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, Simon and Schuster 1987
Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, Paulist Press 1989
Dick Westley, Good Things Happen: Experiencing Community in Small Groups, Twenty-Third Publications 1992
© 2002 Rabbi Margaret Holub
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Updated 01/20/2002(rge)