Sunday was SO. GOOD.

In thinking about what makes a Moishe House event successful, there are two questions to consider: what makes an event in general successful, and – embedded within that – what makes a Moishe House event in particular successful. What makes an event in general successful naturally depends on the goal of the event; but as a self-proclaimed experience designer, I gravitate towards a metric based on the quality of experience. In other words, if without solicitation, attendees express having had a new, spectacular, comforting, delightful, or otherwise enjoyable experience, I’d consider the event successful. And all of the above we’ve proudly heard in response to events at the Moishe House in Providence! I think my favorite feedback has been from our blind events – the blind feast and dancers in the dark – in response to which I heard, “Wow, I’ve never experienced anything like this before” (blind feast) and got the above message written on my Facebook wall (dancers in the dark).

As for a Moishe House event, besides being a successful event in general which gives its attendees a high-quality experience, it should somehow further Moishe’s mission as I understand it, to cultivate and maintain the young adult Jewish community, and act as somewhat of an ambassador of the young adult Jewish community to the young adult community in general. During the month of June, as Nathaniel (my co-host) and many other members of our community have been traveling, I thought we’d get higher attendance if I hosted events out in the community, rather than invite the community into our home. So I hosted a climbing night at the Rhode Island rock gym, Kabbalasana (yoga with a Jewish spirituality twist – pun intended) at the Motion Center, and salsa dancing at Olives. As a result, attendees ended up being mostly new and mostly non-Jewish, and as a further result, I gave them an introduction to what Moishe is all about. Attendees were intrigued with this model of cultivating and maintaining community, and at each event, my monolog evolved into more of a dialogue. So, besides the high quality of the events themselves, I’d consider our June events successful in the sense of furthering the Moishe mission, by introducing newbies and non-Jews to Moishe in an engaging way, and ending up with a few new friend requests! Oh and this definitely makes me wanna do a little Moishe sphiel at the beginning of all our events in the future…