Do You Give Belonging, or Earn It?

Is belonging something you give, or something you keep earning?

I have been thinking about that question since a friend and fellow head of school, who is brand new in his role, wrote to a group of us this summer. He was about to drop his oldest child off at college and, in the same week, step into the headship. Two thresholds at once. He asked the rest of us, plainly, for words of wisdom before taking a big step.

Here is what I wrote back: “Trust your gut, both physically and mentally. Know that you were chosen for this role because people believe in you, even (especially) during the times when you may not believe in yourself.”

I meant every word. I still do. But I have come to think that advice is only half of the job, and maybe the easier half.

Trusting your gut is how you walk through the door. It is the confidence to make the call, to sit at the head of the table, to believe that the people who hired you saw something real. New leaders need to hear it, because the quiet voice that asks who are you to do this? tends to be loud in the first year (and, if I am honest, in the tenth).

The harder muscle is the opposite one. It is listening. And it is here that I have learned belonging runs both ways.

We tend to talk about belonging as something a school hands out. We welcome you in. We save you a seat. We are a school with open seats, so here, we know there will be one. All of that is true, and I believe in it deeply. But a welcome at the door is a beginning, not a promise kept. People do not feel that they belong because we told them they do. They feel it when they are heard, over time, and especially when what they have to say is hard.

So, we ask. We ask our families how it is going, and we ask them even when they are weighing other choices, and we try to ask in a way that invites the honest answer rather than the polite one. (This is humbling work. Nobody enjoys hearing the honest answer.) The listening itself is not the hard part. The hard part, the part I am still learning, is closing the loop: going back to the person, telling them what we heard and what we are doing about it, so that a concern does not simply echo into silence.

That is the difference between hearing and listening. Hearing is passive. Listening is a promise that something happens next.

At Bornblum, where I have served as the Head of School since 2018, we have tried to build belonging into the bones of the school. We organize our community around eight values we call the Mishpachot, Hebrew for “families” (values like Chesed, kindness; Ometz, courage; and Kavod, honor). A child is not simply in a grade; she is in a Mishpacha, part of something with a name and a set of values that says you are one of us. Our teachers and board members are also part of these Mishpachot. At our opening Kabbalat Shabbat this past week, those new to our community found out which Mishpacha they had been placed in. As our new PE teacher, who has been talking about how he instantly felt as though he belonged in the school, even though he has never worked in or learned about a Jewish school, curiously asked me questions, he was excited to learn he was placed in Mishpachat Sakranut (curiosity).

But even a place that calls itself a family, and means it, cannot coast on the feeling. Belonging is not a banner you hang once. It is a conversation you keep having. The family that feels most at home is often the one that trusts you enough to tell you when something is wrong, and the leader who has earned that trust is the one who went back a second and a third time to say, I heard you, and here is what changed.

Which brings me back to my friend, and to the advice I gave him. I would not take a word of it back. Trust your gut. You were chosen. But I would add a second line now, the one I did not write that day: you were also chosen to listen. To trust the people in your building enough to believe them when they tell you the truth, and to trust yourself enough to do something with it.

I am, as always, better at describing this than at living it. (My family will confirm that the listening lecture lands a little differently at home – selective hearing runs in the family.) But this is the work, and I am grateful to do it.

Our Jewish Day Schools are among the last places many families experience belonging that is not transactional, a belonging measured not in what you pay but in whether, years later, you still feel that you have a seat. That kind of belonging is never finished. It runs both ways, and it is worth earning again, every single year.