tales from the edge

Where are the people and organizations who have already created the new habits of thinking that will maximize our creativity for solving social problems in a new era? Sometimes it is important to look backwards for examples. In retrospect, cultural change is always easier to see. And cultural change has always been about getting unstuck -- moving from one paradigm of thinking and behaving to another.

One of the most powerful stories of this comes from Roman times. The story is of a rabbi named Yochanan ben Zakkai. Jerusalem was in flames, and the Romans were about to destroy the temple, the very core of Jewish practice. Ben Zakkai went to the Roman general Vespasian on behalf of the Jewish community but made an unexpected request. Instead of calling for a truce or begging for mercy, so that the precious temple could be restored, he asked the general to give him the city of Yavneh. Yavneh was where the embryonic new rabbinic movement was developing. A place of conversation and debate about Jewish law and practice and how to adapt it to changing times. It was also a magnet for a new kind of Jewish thinker and teacher – the people who became known as the rabbis who wrote the Talmud. So he asked for a place and for the “human capital and talent” that had begun to gather in that place.

It was a daring move on his part. Instead of fighting to preserve the old ways – the institution and related practices that formed the very essence of what most people thought defined Jews as a people -- he asked for a place for conversation to invent the new practices that would shape Judaism in its next era, in the face of a world in which practice was no longer centralized and where the temple priests were no longer the primary arbiters of what was right and wrong.

It would not be difficult to change the names and the places and see this story’s relevance for our time. What the rabbis went on to do was to suspend prior ideas about what was Jewish or not; what defined core Jewish practice, and to look at what was emerging and what was most alive and true in their own era.

What would it mean to do this in our times? Where are the people and places that have developed the new habit of standing back and looking at what is emerging, rather than immediately imposing upon it the categories they bring from the past. Those places are most likely on the edge of established institutions. They may not be on the radar screen yet as having significance. I'd bet on them.