I recently heard a teaching that I experienced as an epiphany. The context was the Spark mission to Israel to celebrate its 75th anniversary leaving in a few weeks. Three hundred people from Greater Jewish Boston are going on nine buses. Marc Baker, the CEO of CJP, was speaking to the folks who were leading each of these buses.
He shared that when he was still at Gann Academy, he was hired by CJP to lead a mission of young Jewish leaders from Boston called Acharai. The first thing he did was to change his title. He was hired to be a scholar. He did not want to be a scholar. He wanted to be a Jewish journey facilitator. The purpose of a scholar is to share facts. The purpose of a Jewish journey facilitator is to work with, to walk with, the people in your group to help them make meaning of the experience that they are in the middle of.
He shared that on one very hard day the group went to one of the Nazi concentration camps. After confronting this unimaginable inhumanity, they were on the grounds outside the camp. All they wanted was space and silence to process the enormity of what they had just seen. But there was a concentration camp tour guide who started talking at them. Facts and factoids and figures about the camp. This talking head went over very badly.
Marc cautioned us not to be that kind of talking head, who does not read the room, who sees their job as a one-way path of transmitting content and not as a two-way relationship of making sense of complexity. Then Marc shared a question that I have been turning over in my head ever since:
Do you make space, or do you take up space?