Values Statement
We’ve thought deeply about the best way to tell Making Mensches’ story, to reflect on our growth over the past three years, and to tell you where we want to go. The only way to truly understand Making Mensches as an organization, a labor of love, and an educational model for a pluralistic and inclusive Jewish future is to learn about us through our core values. Making Mensches’ core values guide all the work we do. We reconnected through shared values. We wrestled with our personal values and evaluated how we had compromised them in an effort to serve our community. Upon being lovingly challenged by those in our community, we emerged stronger: organizationally and personally. We embraced our personal values wholly and redesigned our organization to reflect the values we held close but feared to say aloud. We lost opportunities because of this choice. And we joined a community of brave Jews who proudly live their values, no matter the cost.
There is wisdom in our elders’ interpretations of these values and the debates about their true meaning are holy. We developed our interpretations from our educational experiences, Jewish backgrounds, and personal and organizational growth. Here are our core values:
Tikkun Olam - Repairing the world
Tikkun Olam is one of the most commonly used Jewish values in Reform Jewish spaces. We grew up in a socially-conscious Reform liberal Jewish community. Our small, suburban, predominantly white Ashkenazi Jewish community often engaged in social justice work by donating to food pantries, humane societies, or Jewish causes, like the Jewish National Fund or the Religious Action Center.
“Repairing the world” sounds like a simple concept. We accepted repairing the world as doing nice things for others or caring for those in our community. While tikkun olam can certainly encompass these values, repairing the world is a process that involves searching for motivation deeper than kindness. Why are we motivated to repair the world? Because we want to be kind to our neighbors? Or because we also suffer in a deeply hurting world, and we believe in a future that is free of oppression for all?
As Aboriginal Rights groups and elder Lilla Watson said, “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” For this reason, tikkun olam means challenging ourselves to see the ways in which we are harming our community members unintentionally or in an effort to preserve ourselves. It means that we have a responsibility as Jews to right historical wrongs. We have an obligation to confront systems of oppression. We recognize that these systems cannot be repaired and that we must transform the world for the liberation of oppressed people everywhere. Making Mensches primarily focuses on confronting systems of oppression that Jewish people have upheld, installed, or participated in. To repair, we must seek connections between different communities’ shared goals for liberation. We must evaluate practices and policies that harm those we want to build solidarity with and remove barriers to our liberation work. Repairing the world means confronting the truth, even when it challenges truths we hold deeply.
Emet - Truth
Judaism obligates us to tell the truth, emet, even and especially when it is inconvenient. Making Mensches was built upon this value. In 2020, when George Floyd was murdered and a group of passionate Jews of Color and their allies spoke out demanding change in Jewish institutions, We reconnected this letter, Black Lives Matter, and racism in Jewish spaces and decided to push our hometown synagogue to do better. We began to brainstorm. How could we, two white Ashkenazi former Hebrew school students, lecture the leaders of our community about the importance of racial justice in Jewish institutions? We decided we had to be honest: we had to talk about racism openly and how we as white Jews perpetuate it and benefit from it. We had to show the need for racial justice work in Jewish spaces and the consequences of our own biases clouding our judgment. After a 40-minute presentation, the board almost unanimously voted in favor of our proposal for six workshops on anti-racism over the course of fall 2020. To honor our roots, we named our project Making Mensches after the preschool we attended, Mentsch Makers.
Since our founding, Making Mensches has been committed to honest Jewish education and community building. We live this value by showing vulnerability during workshops and sharing our own stories: we are also trying to get it right and have long pasts of getting it wrong. When we reflect on Jewish rituals and holidays in our Not Your Bubbe’s Torah School Instagram series and podcast, we research the history behind these rituals and holidays, evaluate the different institutions, organizations, or causes that have reinterpreted or repurposed them, and develop an anti-oppressive analysis based on this context. Sometimes, we learn that we internalized an incorrect, outdated, or deeply biased understanding of an aspect of Judaism and we seek resources and practices to inform us, challenge us, and encourage us to find new meaning. We collaborate with other educators, storytellers, scholars, and organizations to learn from their expertise and interview some of them about their journeys to anti-oppressive Jewish work. We commit to facilitating educational experiences rooted in truth, even when the truth contradicts the narratives we internalized, and when it challenges us as Jews. Truth brings us closer to addressing the harm we’ve caused in the world and repairing that harm where we can. Truth informs us, so we can better develop a vision for a more just Jewish world.
Tzedek - Justice
Tzedek, translated as “justice,” shares a root with the Jewish value “tzedakah,” often translated as charity. We weren’t familiar with tzedek growing up, but tzedakah was a concept we understood well. As children at Hebrew school, “tzedakah” meant a small tin box on a teacher’s desk. We were expected to bring coins every class and put them in the box. At the end of the year, the money was counted and the class voted on where to send it. Often, based on our understanding of tikkun olam, students chose the humane society, a soup kitchen, or the JNF. After researching Jewish values, we confronted our narrow view of tzedakah. We realized that we had never understood tzedakah as a component of tzedek and a pathway to radical community care. We had never encountered Maimonides’ eight levels of tzedakah.
Maimonides’ eight levels of tzedakah is a framework for conceptualizing giving; the lowest form is giving money begrudgingly and the highest is giving money before someone needs it by investing in your community effectively. We connected this Jewish framework to Tema Okun’s ladder of empowerment from the piece “From White Racist to White Anti-Racist: The Lifelong Journey” in which white people move up and down a ladder of racial awareness. The lowest rung is “acting out of ignorance/innocence” and the highest rung is “creating community of love and resistance.” Inherently, our Jewish values aligned with our anti-racist values. Our narrow interpretation of tzedakah was expanded; tzedakah is not just raising money for a charity but a framework for communal care. Tzedakah is an important component of justice, but without understanding its role in creating communities of care, we couldn’t see its place in our work. We began to question: How are we understanding tzedek? What does it mean to fight for justice, with the end goal being creating communities of love, resistance, and radical care for one another? How does Making Mensches fit into that?
When we formed Making Mensches, we aligned our values closely with Not Free to Desist’s enumerated points. We determined that was sufficient; any other values would be superfluous. Racial justice was the most important issue, and it would detract from anti-racist work to try to infuse values from other anti-oppressive movements, right? We were, once again, wrong. Tzedek means fighting for justice for all, not isolating one movement and placing it above all others. We cannot separate our work from the struggles of all oppressed people. We seek to create more just Jewish communities, and part of this work means confronting the injustices we have committed as Jews and in the name of Judaism. Making Mensches is committed to all struggles for liberation, which include the abolition of prisons, queer liberation, reproductive justice, disability justice, anti-Zionism, the Palestinian Right to Return, the Boycott Divest and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, the LandBack movement, environmental justice, and the struggle against white supremacy. Clarifying our mission and our solidarity with all these other struggles enabled us to better understand tzedek, even when the pursuit of tzedek puts us at odds with others in the Jewish community.
Hocheach tochiach - Rebuke
Inevitably, we were bound to face criticism from other Jews. Hocheach tochiach is the mitzvah of rebuking a member of the Jewish community when they have done wrong. We are obligated to rebuke our friends and neighbors when they are wrong or have caused harm and guide them through repair. Making Mensches embodied this mitzvah upon our founding, but we limited our rebuke to racism and implicit bias about race in Jewish spaces. When asked about racism in Israel or where Making Mensches stood on the issue of Zionism, we refused to answer. We claimed that speaking about Zionism detracted from our anti-racist work and Zionism wasn’t as life-threatening or necessary to speak out against as racism towards Black Americans and others who had been harmed in American Jewish spaces. After an uncomfortable Zoom Q&A with a Canadian synagogue, we realized this limited interpretation of anti-racist work did not align with our personal values and didn’t accurately represent our vision for a just Jewish future. We decided we had to explicitly state Making Mensches’ values, including anti-Zionism, and commit to the consequences. We just wanted to put it off a little longer; we were working with multiple synagogues, developing partnerships with other Jewish institutions, and received a small grant. We knew that if we defined ourselves as anti-Zionists, we’d jeopardize our standing in the Jewish community. Couldn’t we wait a little longer? Then, the May 2021 assault on Gaza happened.
Zionism is not theoretical and it certainly is just as life-threatening as anti-Black racism. American support for the Israeli military is and was material; $735 billion of weapons had been sold to Israel just weeks before. Over 250 Palestinians were killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza in May 2021. As this happened, we heard the same old narratives about Israel repeated: Israel has a right to defend itself and had to destroy all those hospitals, Israel’s the only democracy in the Middle East, Jews needed a homeland and had to defend it. We had heard this all our lives and knew this propaganda continued to thrive in American Jewish communities because Jewish organizations and individuals refused to speak out against it. We knew we had become a part of this problem; by not speaking about Israel and trying to detach our work from Zionism, we enabled this one-sided narrative to continue. We had to rebuke our fellow Jews who perpetuated this narrative, but also against ourselves for refusing to speak out sooner. We published a blog post, “israel Won’t Save Us: Moving Towards Liberation” and urged other anti-Zionist Jews to speak out, too. We had no idea how that blog would change our lives.
Our commitment to the mitzvah of rebuke continues to guide us as we confront Jewish organizational practices that harm Jews and other community members. We support the #DropTheADL campaign and encourage those seeking to fight anti-Semitism to support organizations that do not harm Black, Muslim, Arab, queer, and immigrant communities. We firmly rebuke Zionism and the wrongful assertion that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. We hope that other organizations within our community will rebuke us and lovingly challenge us when we commit harm. We are grateful to those that hold us accountable and ensure that we will continue to fulfill the mitzvah of rebuke.
Lo ta'amod al dam reyacha - Do not stand idly by
In the same parsha that tells us we must rebuke, we are told, “lo ta'amod al dam reyacha,” or “do not stand idly by” when someone in your community is harmed. When we posted our blog about Israel’s attack on Gaza, many people asked us why we had to write anything at all. Why couldn’t we just stick to anti-racism? After all, we didn’t live in Israel and our work wasn’t about Zionism. Why not just let it go? We are commanded as Jews not to stand by when harm is done. We are commanded to speak up. We are commanded not to let it go. This value calls us to stand up against oppressive systems, such as mass incarceration, attacks on reproductive rights, and environmental injustice. We are commanded to stand up for those suffering and end the genocide Israel is committing against the Palestinian people. We cannot stand idly by while people commit genocide in the name of Judaism.
Others in the Jewish community didn’t agree. Jessie was fired from her job as an educator at a synagogue. She sought out legal representation and a letter demanding her reinstatement was written on her behalf and signed by 40 Jewish professionals, including rabbis, writers, and educators. Jewish Currents and the New York Times interviewed Jessie. While much of the public response was positive and supportive, the backlash was swift. We were not invited back to host workshops at our hometown synagogue. Members of our community tried to have us removed from leadership positions. Online, people left hate comments wherever they could and insisted we were only doing this for attention. “She doesn’t actually want her job back,” one critic shared, “Nobody who does this wants the job. She just wants to cause problems.”
Achrayut - Responsibility
The Jewish value of achrayut, or responsibility and accountability, is exactly why Jessie wanted the job back. She knew, when she took the job, that many people in Jewish spaces did not agree with us. But we want to be in community with them anyway. We’re all Jews and we’re all dedicated to Jewish education. There is still a place for us in the Jewish community. There is still a place for Making Mensches’ work, even if some Jewish organizations don’t share our values. We will remain in the Jewish community, doing anti-oppressive work no matter what because it is our responsibility.
We will continue to engage with and challenge Jewish institutions and rebuke them when necessary. We will seek partnership and collaboration with those who wish to work with us. We have a responsibility to remain in community with one another, even and especially when our values are challenged. We, like all Jews, have a responsibility to create the Jewish future we want to see. We do not back away when we are challenged or disappointed. We engage with those who challenge and disappoint us. We rebuke one another and demand better. We expect to be rebuked when we do damage, too. We will not stand by when people are harmed and we accept the responsibility of doing the hard work. We continue to fight for a just Jewish future, even if we will not see its fruition. As Pirkei Avot teaches us, “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” We will not desist from it.
Making Mensches is only three years old. In 2020, we were just two Jews trying to convince our hometown synagogue to say Black Lives Matter. Today, we’re Jewish professionals building a queer, anti-racist, anti-Zionist, disability justice Jewish liberation movement. We’ve challenged ourselves to better understand our shared values and develop an organization that reflects them. We’ve rebuked injustice in our community and faced criticism for our values. And we are honored to continue the tradition of wrestling with Jewish values, mitzvot, ritual, prayer, text, and community. This work is holy. We are very grateful to be able to do it. And we hope you join us, not because you want to help us, but because your liberation is bound up with ours.
