This summer, the Jewish world is experiencing a moment of institutional reckoning. The iCenter, where I spent the last year as interim CEO, closed its doors in June. Across the country, other Jewish organizations are doing the same: closing, merging, consolidating, or fundamentally shifting their focus. It would be easy to call this a crisis. It would also be wrong.

What we’re witnessing instead is clarity. For years, we’ve treated institutional permanence as the primary measure of success in Jewish life. An organization that endures must be doing something right, while an organization that closes must have failed. But this framework obscures something more interesting and more important: the relationship between what we build and what we actually need.

When I led The iCenter through its closure, I learned that the opposite of failure is not longevity. The opposite of failure is honesty. The iCenter was founded on a genuine insight about how young Jews learn and develop. Over two decades, it created meaningful experiences for thousands of people. The decision to close came not because that work stopped mattering, but because we asked ourselves a harder question: given everything we’ve learned, what does this community need from us now? The answer was: something different. Something smaller. Something that could live inside a larger ecosystem rather than standing alone.

This kind of intentional ending takes more courage than building does. It requires leaders to resist the organizational survival instinct, which is powerful and natural. It requires them to measure success by impact rather than by whether the doors stay open. And it requires them to trust that the work that matters will find new forms.

Other organizations across the Jewish world are asking the same questions right now, but from different positions. Some are merging, some are paring down, and some are attempting radical reinvention. What they share with The iCenter’s closure is the recognition that we cannot preserve everything, and we should not try to. The question is not how to save every institution. The question is what the Jewish community actually needs.

This is where a different kind of work becomes possible. Over the past year, I was part of something that showed me another path. Leading national funding organizations convened hundreds of Jewish educators, leaders, and practitioners to map the field of Israel education. Not to preserve what exists, but to ask: what does this moment in Jewish life require? What do young people need to develop a sustained, complex, and genuine relationship with Israel and Israelis?

The result was the Reimagining Israel Education framework. This consortium — supported by the Jim Joseph Foundation and Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, and led by The Jewish Education Project with over 400 stakeholders and thought leaders — recently released ten commitments about how Israel education should work: cumulative, complex, constructivist, collaborative, courageous, continuous, contrasting, covenantal, connected, and caring. Some of these principles are as old as Jewish education itself. Others emerge from what we’ve learned in recent years. Together, they name what the field needs at this moment and create space for existing organizations to work toward it together. The work honors what has always mattered while shaping what comes next.

This collaborative model shows what becomes possible when we let go of institutional territorialism. Each organization brings its own strength, its own mission, its own learners. But we’re working from a shared vision. We’re leaning on each other. We’re building something larger than any single institution could build alone.

This is the connective tissue I’m talking about. When the organizations we counted on fade or transform, what remains is the infrastructure of people who know each other, who have mapped the landscape together, and understand what the work is really about. This is what holds us together when no single institution carries the whole weight.

I think about what the Jewish world looks like five years from now. I think about what institutions will have closed or merged. I think about my daughter who will be facing various successes and challenges in college. I think about which organizations will have transformed themselves into something unrecognizable. And I think about what will still be alive: the relationships, the people who have walked the same paths as others and worked across boundaries, and the networks that hold us.

We don’t get to the kind of Jewish community and education these commitments describe by preserving everything. We get there by asking hard questions about what’s worth carrying forward. We get there by trusting each other enough to let go. We get there by choosing to work together, even when working alone might feel simpler. That is the real work, and that is the only work that lasts.