By Zach Benjamin, President & CEO

As I have immersed myself in the process of learning the opportunities and anxieties facing Central Pennsylvania’s Jewish community, I have also reflected upon my own personal challenges and triumphs over the course of the past five years. The story arc of a community is often similar to that of a human life, winding its way through peaks and valleys, shortcuts and detours, ultimately forging a path toward a destination that is, by nature, a moving target.

Our Jewish and broader communities have weathered a series of concurrent crises that have tested the most extreme limits of the human capacity for change, upheaval, and uncertainty. Since the dawn of the current decade, we have steeled ourselves against the pandemic, political turbulence, economic uncertainty, humanitarian tragedy, and a tsunami of antisemitism that erupted from just below the surface of polite society, yielding a collective sense of vertigo from which our Jewish communities still struggle to regain their footing. All of this has forced us to recalibrate our thinking as we look toward a Jewish future that appears quite different from the one that we envisioned on October 6, 2023.

In times of broad global turmoil, all of us experience in our own lives that same turbulence in microcosm. Just as humanity endured a perfect storm of layered crises, so were we as individuals thrust through a gauntlet of personal, professional, and emotional fallout.

In June of 2019, I moved with my family from Albuquerque, New Mexico—where I had spent four years leading the Jewish Federation of New Mexico—to Southern California, where I had been selected to helm the newly merged Jewish Federation and Jewish Community Foundation of Greater Long Beach and West Orange County. My wife accepted a data analytics position two freeway exits from the Federation offices—one that she still holds, having become fully remote after the pandemic—and we began settling into our lives in Long Beach.

Nine months later, the pandemic descended, and it was quickly decided that the local JCC—the only full-service JCC in Los Angeles County—must also merge into the Federation’s organizational infrastructure in order to ensure its long-term fiscal viability. This necessitated what would prove to be a three-year series of accelerated processes that included creation of re-imagined governance and staffing structures for organizations with diametrically dissimilar cultures, as well as compromises on a variety of necessary changes impacting programs and spaces with deep roots in community history. As part of the integration of the agencies, the community and its leadership underwent an 18-month strategic planning process, the objective of which was to lean into difficult conversations, necessarily resulting in painful short-, medium-, and long-term decisions to determine a reinvented business model that would eliminate deficits and ensure the sustainability of the community’s institutions while preserving the historic functions of each legacy organization.

All of this occurred against the backdrop of the pandemic and all of the anxieties, traumas, and challenges that it wrought upon every imaginable Jewish and broad community constituency.

By the time the pandemic ebbed, with the merger complete and the new Federation/Foundation/JCC hybrid model fully implemented, I had personally emerged a more skilled, knowledgeable professional, and hopefully a more thoughtful, analytical, empathetic human being. I was also completely and utterly spent of my energy and capacity to simultaneously hold the lines of consensus, compromise, pragmatism, realism, and common ground after emerging with our community’s leadership, battle-weary, from four full years of crisis-to-crisis hopscotch.

So, in mid-2023, I made the decision to step away from Jewish Long Beach and accepted the CEO position with a trade association based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, necessitating that our family backtrack 800 miles to the east, where we believed we would finally be putting down our long-term roots. Within six months, my position as it existed when I accepted it was eliminated, and we found ourselves again navigating the whiplash of uncertainty and upheaval.

The next eight months proved challenging, but also exceptionally rewarding, illuminated by varied profound and unexpected silver linings. Rather than chasing quick solutions to acute, time-sensitive crises, the false start in Santa Fe afforded our family the opportunity to be deliberative about both the type of community we wished to join and, for me, the type of organization that I would be best equipped to serve. The time away from what, during the pandemic, had become a career in crisis management, not only allowed me to fully recharge, but also to repair my physical well-being and deepen my relationships and connection with my wife and daughter.

By the time we arrived in Harrisburg, I found myself fully energized and equipped with a sharpened set of professional abilities, restored physical and mental health, and a renewed zest for the privilege of helping lead through change, challenge, and the long game of Jewish communal advancement.

The point of this personal vignette is to illustrate that each of us, without exception—Jewish and non-Jewish alike, regardless of background or socioeconomic status—is on a personal Jobian quest for peace that mirrors that of the Jewish people throughout our 4,000-year history. The challenges facing the Harrisburg Jewish community and its institutions are reflective of the Jewish people’s historic reliance on adaptation and evolution, which has enabled us as a people to not only withstand pressure, but to use it to produce the figurative diamonds of our culture and value system.

At age 11, I distinctly remember my dad instilling in me the understanding that “it takes rough seas to make good sailors and great captains.” The Jewish people represent the embodiment of this concept, both globally and here in Central Pennsylvania, where we will no doubt harness change and challenge to continue blazing our trail from strength to strength.