It may seem odd, in reviewing a book, to begin by discussing a hypothetical different book that the authors didn’t write. But in order to illuminate and appreciate one major choice that Dr. Ron Wolfson and Dr. Jason G. Goldman made in crafting their new book on Jewish leadership, I hope you’ll indulge my oddity in doing just that.

If all I knew about a book were that its title was Jewish Communal Leadership, I might expect the book to be structured around things like:

• Rules or principles for Jewish leaders to follow
• Mistakes for Jewish leaders to avoid
• Styles, personality types, or other general archetypes of Jewish leadership
• Field-specific categories of Jewish professional leadership (rabbis, school principals, camp directors, JCC heads, Federation chiefs, foundation leaders, etc.)

Within these categories, I might expect that real people and real stories would be used to illustrate these rules, mistakes, styles, or positions. But the primary focus (in the hypothetical book I would expect) would be didactic, while people and stories would be roped in as secondary supports to the primary materials.

If I then learned that the subtitle was “Lessons Learned From Leading Practitioners” (emphasis added), then I would feel confirmed in my suspicions. “This book,” I would think, “must be structured around lessons.” Even if I then learned that the main research process for the book was interviews with ten leaders, I would assume that stories and case studies from these interviews would fill out a book structured mainly around lessons and concepts.

But the reality of this book confounded my expectations — and in a way that may be almost as instructive as the book’s contents.

Jewish Communal Leadership: Lessons Learned From Leading Practitioners is not structured around lessons. It is structured around individual leaders. Each chapter is not a principle, a rule, a style, or any other artificial construct — each chapter is a transcript of a conversation with a leader who is making an impact in the Jewish world.

Here are the ten leaders whose stories and reflections we read:

• Dr. Ron Wolfson
• Rabbi Denise Eger
• Zack Bodner
• Dr. Erica Brown
• Barry Shrage
• Dr. Bruce Powell
• Barry Finestone [a non-voting member of Leading Edge’s board]
• Rabbi Mike Uram
• Dan Libenson
• Daryl Messinger [board chair of Leading Edge]

It’s not that these conversations lack things like lessons, rules, principles, mistakes, styles, and information specific to various Jewish sub-fields. Each conversation is rich with both stories and conceptual insights, and my copy of the book now has many colorful book flags sticking out marking quotes and points I found valuable. Indeed, in a recent article promoting the book, Dr. Wolfson himself extracts ten generalized “takeaways” you can read right now. Still, what strikes me most about this book is that these takeaways and abstractions are never stripped of their narrative contexts. Instead, the personal stories and experiences of the interviewed leaders, with all their messiness, take primary focus. 

In choosing the messy and human over the streamlined and polished, and the personal and specific over the general and didactic, Wolfson and Goldman follow in the footsteps of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) itself — another book of “lessons” that enmeshes its legal codes and linear abstractions in a much larger web of complex narratives. The result is far more demanding of the reader than a simple, clean law book would have been — but also much richer and deeper in its potential for transforming the reader and the community. Discussing the Torah’s dual nature as law and story, the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ztz”l wrote:

That Jewish Communal Leadership focuses on individual specific leaders’ stories, then, is one layer of wisdom in its structure. But another layer is to present not only the interview subject’s words, but the conversation between the subject and Wolfson. For fans of Wolfson’s prior work — including Relational Judaism and the Relational Judaism Handbook — it should come as no surprise that the give-and-take of two human beings encountering each other receives such a central place in this book.

In that sense, this book’s title should be read as including a knowing wink. Jewish communal leadership (the actual practice, not the book title) can’t fit into a shelf of books, let alone a single volume. It’s something living and changing, which we can only apprehend in the form of breathing, changing people. As the brilliant Dr. Erica Brown says in her chapter:

Books, articles, words on pages can only ever gesture in the direction of the stories, the lives, the people who make Jewish communal leadership a reality. This book is a worthy invitation into that larger and more vital encounter.