I can’t even think about how this past year, 5771, has been – full of an incredibly wide variety of activities, highs and lows. But really? I think I am getting that affliction my parents used to say was only for older folks (aka my Nana in particular, my father’s mother): you only remember the good – because I just don’t remember that much bad. Maybe there really wasn’t that much bad – certainly compared to the challenges of many I know, there wasn’t.  But could it be that I simply don’t remember the bad so much anymore?

I’m choosing to enter 5772 with the belief that there actually is less bad. For all the distrust in government (just read that the public’s trust in Washington, DC is down to 15%), just this morning a fellow elected called me with enormous glee at the reality that we are in fact having an impact – that those of us who chose to extricate politics from governing can be heard and agreed with and set a tone, and we’re not alone.  There is a place for politics – I love politics.  But I don’t like politics when they mess negatively with governing or the public’s trust.  And that’s a big part of what we’re getting year-round, every year, because there is no such thing as an off-year.

And so I’m going to keep working so that there is less bad all around. My kids are in demanding stages – rewarding stages, but demanding stages.  My work in my writing, at Council and now at The Civic Commons continues to be incredibly rewarding. I feel I’ve earned these opportunities but I never forget that that’s what they are and I must treat them that way to keep earning them.

And so I see 5772 as an opportunity – it’s a new year, I’ll be turning 50, I’ll be married 20 years, my oldest will graduate from high school (baruch ha Shem as we say).

Seriously – I can’t be heard to complain.  Or, as Connie Schultz’ sign says, No Whining.

Totally no whining.

L’shanah Tovah and thank you to everyone who has supported me – you don’t even know.

But today, I started to post a Facebook update that was just too long and decided to return to the blog to share the sentiments.

So – Passover cooking. It’s in a league of its own.  But Passover baking is yet another category unto itself.  And then, there’s the ultimate challenge: Passover baking for someone whose birthday is during Passover. Ah yes.

Here’s what happened the last time these events – a birthday in my house and Passover – coincided, in 2005:

If the pictures don’t tell you the story clearly enough, there’s the kosher for Passover cake I slaved over, there’s the imprint the cake made on the side of the refrigerator as I smashed the cake into the appliance in order to stop its slide off the cake plate, and there’s the cake as it looked after I smashed it into the side of the refrigerator to stop its slide off the cake plate.  Obviously, my talented move saved the cake for the most part. The frosting and candles? Not so much.

I bring up these memories because in my search this morning for another kosher for Passover birthday cake recommendation, I came across this great compendium of flourless dessert recipes for Passover at Smitten Kitten. And in there, as the blog author’s post comes to a close, I found a description that confirmed what my family and Passover guests have known for years:

“But I saved the show-stopped for last, because I like melodrama. And stuff. So drum roll…. Chocolate Caramelized Matzo Candy, adapted from Marcy Goldman’s A Passion for Baking. I made this stuff a couple years ago with Saltine crackers–but matzo can easily be swapped–and I seriously have not been able to make it since because it’s like crack. [Update: Come get your Chocolate Caramelized Crack(ers) over here!]“

Oh. My. Moses. SO TRUE – evil evil evil stuff – go make some (here’s the recipe in my posts but Smitten Kitten’s links will take you to versions too). I couldn’t find any photos of my batches through the years – we probably devoured the stuff before I could get any.  But here’s the final product (except without the blurriness for increasing the photo size):

Now, if only I could make a cake out of it…

Strengthening our Jewish community, building meaningful connections, and creating valuable experiences through opportunities that utilize the unique strengths and resources of women and maximize our personal growth and leadership potential.

Previously, I wrote about my anticipation of the day and followed up with a morning and afternoon dispatch from the Summit.

Now, I’d like to offer a few thoughts, looking back but also acknowledging that it is way too soon to fully appreciate – no pun intended – the ramifications of this unique and dare I say breakthrough gathering.

From the moment I walked in the room where we were to work from 9am through 4pm, the power was palpable.  The mere numbers of us present provided a baseline buzz, with tables set for six often accommodating more, especially later in the day as we moved through the process.

But more tangibly, I experienced the power as emanating from a shared desire to be there. I won’t lie and say that every single participant possessed the same joie de vivre from beginning to end. But I would venture that we shared it certainly through lunch and before late afternoon set in.  It isn’t simple – sustaining a day that requires intense focus with just working breaks (for the most part), and even with a facilitator and with up to 150 or more people you don’t know but with whom you have been charged with helping discover and create something that no one can even define yet.  But overall, everyone did function at a high, engaged level throughout.

Why? Why would so many women take a day to follow a specific program design and basically take orders all day in an effort that sought to pluck from each of us ideas and visions that we might not even realize we imagined?

For one thing, because of that shared desire – a love for our community. Our Jewish community and a woman’s community and a woman’s Jewish community and a community of Jewish women.  Nothing needed to be spoken or pointed out because these commonalities were a given.  And I feel comfortable in saying that no one who doesn’t love one or more of those categories attended.

So we were taking advantage of an opportunity to be with women who, like each of us, had an interest in one or more common attributes related to being a woman, being in the Cleveland area and being Jewish.  And if we didn’t know this when we arrived, by the time we finished the first set of tasks – which involved talking about ourselves to a partner and then listening to the partner respond to the same set of questions – we knew.

From there, we moved on to identifying what was common in our stories of success and leadership and then sharing those with the larger group. Then, we progressed to envisioning a 2013 version of our community – not so much about what we hoped it would be like, but more about what it is like, as if we were there already.  The main contextual difference I saw in how the inquiry program wanted us to accomplish this task had to do with the requirement of rejecting skepticism: we weren’t allowed to think in terms of, “if only…” or “this will never happen but wouldn’t it be great if…”.

Instead, we had to come up with newspaper headlines or some other contrivance that would be common and typical of our 2013 community.  As I wrote in a previous post, my favorite was the one that was represented by a text message declaring, “No more money needed – all needs met.”  I recall the room going kind of silent before erupting into applause – I still think that’s a fantastic focal point.

This period of time spent getting to know one another, identifying strengths and imagining what the future will be (see? I’m not even saying, “might be”), gave way in the early and later afternoon to tasks oriented more toward implementation: through what vehicles could we accomplish, get to that “no more money needed/all needs met” state of being? What do we need to do between now and then – what can we do between now and then to get there?

By working in slightly larger groups than just the six original people to a table, we came up with several projects or ideas to be implemented in service of what we imagined for the future.  Then, we selected one idea as the top pick to be pursued, and one as a second idea to be pursued.  This choosing was then followed by the facilitator going around the room and asking us to declare are choices, and having those choices mapped out on an “opportunity map” – probably a total of 50 or so ideas got listed.  Following that, we were given five sticky dots and a ten minute or so break to visit the map and place our dots on the ideas we wanted to see receive more consideration.

After that step, the eight or so ideas with the most dots became those around which we were allowed to gather and discuss how we they could be implemented.

And it was at this point that some of the more challenging moments for me and apparently at least a few others came.

Let me be clear: when I say challenges, I mean that at this juncture in the day, these eight ideas reflected the consensus of the consensus of the consensus.  And while there’s no question that reaching consensus is something without which few things can be achieved, it is also necessary, I believe, to recognize what a consensus process leaves out: anything that’s not getting the majority thumbs up.  I struggled with this because the consensus ideas did not represent, to me, particularly original possibilities.  I was disappointed and a bit discouraged by that.

But wait! There’s more!

Once I sat down with the collection of folks around one of the ideas – mentoring – the work of fleshing out what’s been done before, how might this be different, how can we learn from the failures and successes that have come before demonstrated that how much we’d only just begun: women in their 60s and 70s were talking about attempts and failures, women in their 40s the same, and women in their 20s talking up what they’d like to see.

In other words – just selecting ideas to be implemented and speaking with one another as though we were starting on that path was perhaps enough (or beyond what would have been enough) to expect for such a day of brainstorming (and that word oversimplifies what we accomplished).

So I want to close by circling back to the aspirations:

Strengthening our Jewish community, building meaningful connections, and creating valuable experiences through opportunities that utilize the unique strengths and resources of women and maximize our personal growth and leadership potential.

Frankly, last Thursday all by itself did all that. I witnessed it – the strengthening, the connecting, the using our strengths, resources and leadership potential. If nothing more was done, all those things happened and I know with lasting effect for many of the attendees.

But the truth is that that day really was just the beginning.  I’m pretty sure that most of us who attended don’t really know what’s next, and we may indeed go back to the ebb and flow of our activities not reviewing that day. But there are people with that opportunity map and a whole lot of other evidence of the work we did – the appreciative inquiry in which we engaged.  And I’m convinced that in the best interests of our community – Cleveland, Jewish, women and all the combinations of those – they are eager, and anxious, to figure out and let us know exactly what’s next.

Similar themes of a future are emerging with just enough panache to spark laughs and awed silence.  Through mock-ups of Facebook pages, newspaper headlines and other visuals (rainbows, growth, umbrellas), expectations affirm a confidence that we will reach a pinnacle, that we can reach a pinnacle – and stay there. My favorite slogan/headline to foreshadow the future is a future tweet that says, “No more money needed – all needs met.”

The effort, however, is not without its challenges. One I see is making sure that in every idea we consider, we consider how to be sure that we neither overshoot and be so ambitious that achievement is illusive, nor underestimate the challenges. For example, some well-known concepts (mentoring, conferences, mission trips) appear repeatedly, but why? Have they not been effective in the past – if not, how can we make them more effective when we implement them?  Or should we be thinking more out of the box?

Two action ideas that stick with me so far are engagement ambassadors, charged with making sure that at events, no attendees sit idle, and Pajewma parties, an idea which I’m not sure would attract me as an attendee, but as an idea, it’s simple, familiar (as in comfortable and easy to understand and open-ended), potentially a lot of fun and something for adults that is not tried enough (injecting youth and silliness into otherwise serious pursuits to connect and get things done).

As I sit here with an hour to go before we wrap up, there’s an enormous “opportunity map” in the front of the room.  In the center, it reads “strengthening our Jewish community by empowering our women.”  From that center cloud radiate many lines with the ideas to be implemented written on them.  The ideas that will move to an implementation stage will be those with the most “dots” – each participant was given five dots to place on the ideas they most want to see become implemented. I cannot see which ones are emerging yet, but what’s a wrap-up blog post for?

Instead, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland’s Appreciative Inquiry Summit is about making us feel like there’s something bigger than ourselves that we’re going to create, contribute to and implement in a way that enriches the community. And not just the Jewish community, but the women’s Jewish community, the overall community and the overall women’s community.

We are 27 tables with six women at each (some more), being led by Ron Fry, Chair of the CWRU Weatherhead School’s Organizational Behavior department in the AI process.  We’ve introduced each other and been given a chance to both listen to the accomplishments and strengths and personalities of each other but also a chance to hear ourselves work to describe the same in ourselves – for some of us, an unique and new experience.

We then took the common themes of our stories about the successes we’ve felt we’ve had and presented those themse to the entire room in bullet points (or poems, from one group!) listed or drawn on an oversized-hand (“yad”). Those yads now adorn the glass windows that surround the room.

From here, we’ll move on to imagining our future, presenting those images and strategizing on how to implement! Holding my breath that it will all fall into place, but as one of my tablemates says, messy vitality may be the real watchword of accomplishment – it’s not always neat and clean energy that gets us to where we’re going, but get there we do.  Especially when you’re talking about 170 of us.

“The Jewish Federation of Cleveland has enlisted CWRU’s Weatherhead School of Management to help design the future of women’s leadership in our community. We want your voice to be heard during this community-wide conversation.”

How could I say no? Women’s leadership. Community. Jewish.  Hello?

I couldn’t – and didn’t.

And so tomorrow, for several hours, I will be in a room with more than 150 women doing this very thing called Appreciative Inquiry.

What is it, really, you wonder? I have to confess, just hearing and seeing the words “appreciative” and “inquiry” next to each other were enough for me to say, yes! Luckily, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland has a page for the Summit and on it, some explanation:

The Appreciative Inquiry Summit will explore new and bold possibilities for engagement by Jewish women in our community, and then mobilize toward specific initiatives and projects. The success of this summit hinges on the diversity of voices in the room. We want your voice to be heard!

The Jewish Federation of Cleveland has enlisted Ronald Fry, Ph.D., Chairman, Department of Organizational Behavior at CWRU’s Weatherhead School of Management, to lead this unique Summit. By uncovering the diverse voices in our community, the Appreciative Inquiry process will generate creative and innovative outcomes for women to have a positive impact and shape the future of our community.

Our aspiration for this Summit:

Strengthening our Jewish community, building meaningful connections, and creating valuable experiences through opportunities that utilize the unique strengths and resources of women and maximize our personal growth and leadership potential.

Also, more generally, from CWRU’s Appreciative Inquiry Commons website:

Appreciative Inquiry is about the coevolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. In its broadest focus, it involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. It centrally involves the mobilization of inquiry through the crafting of the “unconditional positive question” often-involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of people. In AI the arduous task of intervention gives way to the speed of imagination and innovation; instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, there is discovery, dream, and design. AI seeks, fundamentally, to build a constructive union between a whole people and the massive entirety of what people talk about as past and present capacities: achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, elevated thoughts, opportunities, benchmarks, high point moments, lived values, traditions, strategic competencies, stories, expressions of wisdom, insights into the deeper corporate spirit or soul– and visions of valued and possible futures. Taking all of these together as a gestalt, AI deliberately, in everything it does, seeks to work from accounts of this “positive change core”—and it assumes that every living system has many untapped and rich and inspiring accounts of the positive. Link the energy of this core directly to any change agenda and changes never thought possible are suddenly and democratically mobilized.

And here is a great compendium of definitions of the same term.  Anyone who knows me even a tiny bit can imagine why involvement in such a process would excite me, especially when it has to do with two passions of mine, women in leadership and being Jewish.

During the day tomorrow, I will be posting two or three entries that say more about what exactly AI is like as I go through it in this particular context.

Have you ever gone through an appreciative inquiry process?  Again, just based on the phrase? I am quite confident that I’d love to have more of it in my life.

Also doesn’t get much more blatantly anti-Semitic.

Having had my own run-in with people who feared not having Christian elected officials, I have to say that I still cannot believe people still think this way.  But the reality is that way too many people do.

Hattip to Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice.

Now, in 2010, Mandel supporters are doing the exact same thing, except far, far worse – even after having been admonished and condemned repeatedly, and by people within the candidate’s own community for having broadcast, on TV and in print, the worst, false anti-Muslim innuendo this state has ever seen come from a political candidate.

Now, just two days before Election Day (though this campaign seems to have started on Shabbat, Friday night, of all times), Mandel supporters again are seeking to manipulate voters’ feelings and intellect with textbook fearmongering based on religion; they are trying to feed and feed on anti-Muslim fears. And again, Josh Mandel is keeping a virtual distance from the online smearing but is not shutting it down or condemning it.

I am writing about this because of my absolute belief in the sentiments of this extremely well-known poem, especially among Jews:

They came first for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

I am urging Ohioans to speak up and definitively reject the abject political and emotional manipulation tactics by Mandel’s supporters. I am asking this for two main reasons, though there are many more:

1. The smears have zero to do with the abilities of either candidate.  They neither help Mandel look like he has any abilities that make him prepared to run our state’s treasury, nor do they say anything about his opponent’s abilities to run the same.

2. If the unsubstantiated splatter of dots the Mandel supporters are praying you’ll connect were so critical to evaluating this political race, so scary for our present and future, so directly connected to concerns and danger about the functioning of the Ohio treasurer’s office for all these months, then Mandel and/or his supporters have 100% failed Ohioans already: they have withheld such knowledge from all of us and the authorities until just days before the election?? If they wanted to protect us, shouldn’t they have exposed all this sooner? If they wanted to keep us from harm, shouldn’t they have sought to have all these possible dangers investigated months ago? If they wanted to show how much they care about all Ohioans and our tax dollars, shouldn’t they have sought to protect us months ago from what they want voters to now fear?

We know the answers to these questions because of past Mandel and Mandel supporter behavior: this smear tactic is all about fearmongering through which Mandel seeks to gain political edge.  I will not link to the sources online now that are pushing the Mandel supporters’ whisper campaign nor will I give them the traffic. If you want to read about the specific ways in which they’re hoping you’ll be scared about Muslims (as if that has anything to do with how unprepared Mandel is to head up the Ohio Treasurer’s office) you will have to find it yourself.

What is most disappointing is that this current incident demonstrates a clear pattern of nasty politics as usual behavior by Mandel supporters that Mandel allows to be propagated but that should have been and should be rejected by him – precisely for the reasons voiced in the poem above.

To wit:

In 2008, when the Mandel supporters worked to make people think that his opponent was an anti-Semite, Mandel was many points ahead in the race and he won by more than 30, may even have been more than 40.  So why did he even need to smear his candidate with such stuff?

Additionally, the sentiments attributed to the opponent and his wife were nothing that hadn’t been said before: they committed the “error” of acknowledging what is well-known among political figures in NE Ohio (and something which Mandel himself has acknowledged on the record about identity politics among Jews): there are a lot of Jews in the 17th Ohio statehouse district, Mandel is a Jewish name and when Mandel volunteered to go back into service, just seven months after being sworn in for the first time in the statehouse, residents voiced feeling conflicted about not having their elected representative in the statehouse, not even 10 months after having finished running for office.

Mandel’s campaign took all that and said that the opponent therefore is an anti-Semite.  The campaign supporters played fast and loose with politically significant demographic realities as well as well-known concerns that constituents expressed in which they could easily laud his serving in the military but were very unhappy about not having a vote in the statehouse for months on end.

As someone who has agonized over the downward trajectory of Mandel and his supporters’ tactics, thinking with each religion-based attack this year that he cannot possibly go any lower in his attempt to try and win an elected position that insiders and outsiders have said he is too immature and inexperienced to seek, deserve or have, I am asking others to please reject the Mandel supporters’ politically-motivated attacks and critically question what it says about a sitting elected official, who is seeking an even higher elected position with even more authority, when he does not reject these fearmongering tactics and allows them to propogate fearmongering whisper campaigns based on unsubstantiated information, let alone connections.

If this is how someone runs their campaign, and allows their supporters to “support” them, I do not want to imagine how such a person would actually run the office that oversees my tax dollars.

If we don’t like politics as usual, we have to reject it.  Please reject the Mandel campaign’s politics of personal destruction – and failure to protect Ohioans if in fact there is actually something we should all be protected from, as the innuendo seeks to imply.