Building Community AND Connection

As the pandemic lockdown eased, we talked a lot about rebuilding community. We thought about how and when to bring people together, aware of the trauma of isolation and the fears we had about socialization. How did we return to work? To social spaces? To religious spaces? Would we sit near each other in shul? Did we hold onto our masks or fling them away?

Each of us needed different amounts of space. Many of us immediately went to see the family we had not seen for 18 months. Airlines were full of people going to hug those they love.

We thought a lot about how communal spaces could and should reopen. And we talked a lot about community – how to rebuild it, how to acknowledge our losses.

Recent research tells us that, despite all of our best efforts, we are still remarkably isolated. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that most of us spend about 35 minutes a day socializing, regardless of age. This represents a 6-minute decrease from our pre-pandemic levels. Not a huge amount,15%, but a worrisome trend.

Here’s the issue: community is not connection. When we are watching a presentation or attending a worship service, we’re in community – but not making connection. Attending a sporting event or a concert doesn’t deepen relationships. We may be surrounded by a community, but we are still isolated within it.

We’ve managed to rebuild community. Many of our JCCs and synagogues are thriving. Communal giving is up. But are we connecting?

What is connection? Connection happens in discussion, in information exchanged. Connection happens when I tell you a story over lunch, when we walk together. It happens in chavruta, at times when we truly listen. It doesn’t happen in frontal spaces, because frontal spaces only truly allow me to connect with the presenter.  People at a Taylor Swift concert, a basketball game, a movie – they have shared experiences but they don’t often deepen connection.

Oddly, I think that lots of us have spiritual experiences at concerts and games. I’m sure the people who saw the last game of the NBA finals (or at least Knicks fans) felt like something magical, even spiritual was occurring. For some of us, community is part of spirituality. But is connection?

How do we deepen connection? We begin to move away from a unitary focus on community and try to crate spaces where there is a real, deeply experienced person-to-person exchange. We build trust, one step at a time, by being vulnerable and attentive. We ask hard questions and don’t demand facile answers. I need to know you will miss me when I’m not there. You need to know I’m thinking of you. Only meaningful human contact can make that happen.

Here’s the challenge: can our institutions support connection? We can call each other rather than emailing. We can create spaces for shared meals and other activities with opportunities for deep discussion. Our learning experiences need to include real opportunities for discussion and exchange of ideas, preferably in small and intimate settings, not just the transmission of information.

In fact, this is Jewish tradition. In our best communities, people make connections easily. They bring food to a shiva house and stay after the minyan to hear stories, they visit shut-ins, they stay for the Oneg, they study together. Whether it’s a knitting circle, a prayer group or a book group, we need to find ways to promote human connection as an explicit goal.

Isolation is bad for human beings. 35 minutes a day of socializing sounds like isolation to me. Dr. Vivek Murthy, our previous U.S. Surgeon General, says that loneliness has the health equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Only 40% of us feel deeply connected to others. Jewish communal spaces need to be spaces of important social connection, and we need to make them so.