Moishe House DC monthly blog

DC is an odd place. I guess all places are odd places, but DC is odd in that the Jewish population of young adults in DC is one of transience. Roots are not growing here. In addition, people who are here are here for a reason. They are tethered here by work or school or sexual partner. Why do we mention this? We mention it because these are the conditions that we combat when trying to grow our community, a group of folks with no interest to be part of a community, a group of folks looking for a service provided. So to create actual community, the goal of our house, is to find a way to convince people that it is in their best interest to not treat every situation like a service to them. How do we do that? To tell you the truth, we try to do it in lots of ways, sometimes they are successful but much more likely they are unsuccessful. It's like throwing darts at a wall, knowing that most of the darts will miss. Of course, we all know that if we throw a big party, or a big shabbat dinner, then we will have upwards of 100 people. But that really misses the point.

The goal of this house, the mission statement if you will, is to take a community of Jewish young adults, a community that for the most part has always had access to Jewish life, and to stretch as a community in order to find ways to bring in other Jewish young adults less connected to Jewish life, and to try to connect with our community. The community in DC is also hard to connect with because they expect upper middle class white young adults (99% of our community) to have no interest in creating community. The way to create this community over the long haul is to find a way to incorporate intelligent and captivating content into our monthly activities. People enjoy going bowling, but it does not necessarily create lasting community. Actually learning something at our events would go a long way. However, this raises the question of how to incorporate intelligent content in a captivating way. This is something we still haven't managed to master. but we're working on it....