Passover 5771 may be past, but its lessons return in last week’s parashah (B’ha’alot’kha). Of all our holidays, Passover ranks supreme in that we were delivered from Egypt specifically with Passover in mind. Whatever else we do as Jews follows from this singular event in our past. In Temple days, therefore, the Passover sacrifice was the sole calendrical obligation whose purposeful neglect merited a form of capital punishment called karet – the divine sentence of being “cut off” from family ties after we die.

In an attempt to address the well-documented and growing gulf between the economic fortunes of the rich and poor--and almost in tandem with the onset of the recession and the collapse of the housing market--Rabbi Jill Jacobs published a book on the Jewish imperative to practice tikkun olam, or repairing the world, as seen through both rabbinic and contemporary activist perspectives.

This year, let's move beyond wasteful seder conversation dedicated solely to nostalgia, boredom and pediatrics. Let's go around the table and ask, "What question might keep us up in productive conversation all night long, if necessary?" We'd better have one; we no longer have a tamid to atone for us, if we don't.

Our institutions should follow the example of the Temple. They should be enlivening not deadening, to those who, like the priest, work in them.

That is not what boards of Jewish institutions report. Meetings are often desultory at best, litigious at worst - even downright nasty. They can be life-depleting, not life-enhancing. Committee assignments are like life sentences. Volunteers are hard to find.

But that is not the Jewish way. Jewish organizational life should be like the handwashing that characterized the original Jewish institution, the Temple.

The following is the installation speech of Steve Croft, incoming President of Congregation Beth Yeshurun in Houston, Texas, the largest synagogue in the Conservative movement.

I want to start by telling you a story---

A long time ago there was a young man, in his early 30's, very shy, who was ASKED to join the new Beth Yeshurun Young Leadership Group.

From Jewish people to Jewish purpose: The new age of social innovation in American Jewish life

Steven M Cohen, Director of Research for S3K, discussed the new age of social innovation in American Jewish life at a seminar for Jewish community professionals in December 2009. The seminar was organized jointly by JPR and JHub, the London-based Jewish Social Action and Innovation Hub.