What Are We Trying to Protect?

We spend a ton of time thinking about change.  And especially now during the Jewish holidays there is much reflection that we all go through for both our lives and our organizations.

AI. Technology. New ways of working. New expectations. New possibilities.

And as we approach Yom Kippur, many of us are thinking about change personally too.

What should I do differently?

What do I need to repair?

Where can I be better?

I think the questions ultimately fall into two buckets

What do we want to protect?

And what do we want to unlock?

Because not everything needs to change.

The teacher who knows when a child is having a bad day.

The rabbi who notices when someone hasn’t been around.

The person at the JCC who knows your name.

The traditions that connect generations.

The relationships that make a community feel like a community.

Those are things worth protecting.

But protecting them doesn’t mean protecting everything around them.

Sometimes we confuse protecting the mission with protecting the way we’ve always delivered it.

The same processes.

The same programs.

The same committees.

The same ways of doing things.

And sometimes we hold onto all of that actually gets in the way of what we’re trying to protect.

That’s where the second question matters.

What do we want to unlock?

More time for teachers to teach.

More time for rabbis to be with people.

More capacity for leaders to lead.

More room for relationships, creativity and connection.

That’s why creating capacity matters to me.

Technology can help. Better processes can help. Removing unnecessary friction can help.

But capacity isn’t the goal.

Possibility is.

And that’s true in our own lives too.

Yom Kippur asks us to look at what needs to change.  But we should also why we are changing it.

What matters enough to protect?

What could we make room to unlock?

Not changing everything.

Not protecting everything.

the key is Knowing the difference.

G’mar Chatimah Tovah.