Creative Aging: The Joys of Working with Chabad

Editor’s note: Ninth in a series 

Sixty was the breaking point. 

On June 27th, my 72nd birthday, it will be 12 years since I was first labeled as old. Women tell me that I had 20 years on them. They say they’ve been considered old since they reached 40. 

The first sign of my perceived old age wasn’t my body, my graying hair or a feeble mind. It was the words spoken by my clients in the nonprofit world, about half of them representing Jewish organizations. During my 50s there had been a generational change, and the new guard was younger than me. They preferred to work with people of their own generation. And occasionally, some of them brazenly questioned that at my age what could I possibly know about technology and its application to marketing?  

I soon understood that ageism in America is the last acceptable and at times embraced form of discrimination, even by those who are the first to call out any other kind of discrimination. I myself was probably as guilty of it when I was younger, as a new generation is now. It’s inherent in American culture. 

And sad to say, it is also inherent in the way the organized Jewish community operates. In Jewish life, whether it comes from the central Sh’ma prayer — v’shinantam l’vanecha — and you shall teach them diligently to your children, or whether it is the fear that young people may consider the offerings of the Jewish community irrelevant, the focus on the next generation has become a relentless, and often an exclusionary, passion. Through the massive amounts of free money that support young Jews’ social interaction, start-up nonprofits, and their Jewish travel experiences, young Jews are given the message that they are special. The embrace and the easy money tells them that in a changing world, they may have better answers to the complicated problems facing Jewish life than those with years of experience. (Unfortunately, not a lot of that money goes into lowering the cost of Jewish education.) 

Today, I maintain only one client, who I have worked with for 35 years. 

Chabad. 

Say what you want, but they are absolutely, undeniably, the most successful Jewish organization on the planet. And they care. When my father died at 99 1/2, on the second night of the shiva, several Chabad rabbis who had flown out from Brooklyn rolled in. They came, they told me, “because your father died and we knew we had to be with you.”

Right now I am working with 15 Chabad women who lead day schools around the country. They are riveted on building the best and most affordable Jewish day school system.

Right now I am working with 15 Chabad women who lead day schools around the country. They are riveted on building the best and most affordable Jewish day school system, just as Chabad groups have professionally built Chabad Houses all over the world as well as Chabad on Campus, the Jewish Learning Institute and many other Chabad institutions and programs that have touched countless people around the world. 

They have a great sense of humor, even about themselves. I often joke with Chabadniks that they are the McDonald’s of the Jewish world. You can find them wherever you go. 

I maintain my relationship with Chabad because they are always willing to do the ultimate work of marketing, which is delivering to those you serve. They go far beyond what other organizations want to believe are the instant, magic answers: branding and social media. In all my years of experience, I have yet to see a nonprofit that has succeeded based on those tactics alone. Unlike products and service companies, nonprofits don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars to pour into the branding activities that are required for success. 

Chabad understands, even if at times they themselves don’t recognize it, that the real work of nonprofit marketing and communication is in the creation of ideas of engagement. It’s in their DNA. Stopping women to ask about Shabbat candles and asking men to lay Tefillin, for example. These aren’t only mitzvot; they are strategic marketing tactics that bring them into personal contact with the Jewish people. When I work with them, it’s a challenge of Jewish idea creation. And then they take off with vision and commitment until they succeed.

I love them for their passion for the Jewish people and for doing mitzvot. I love them that they are willing to take their families and move to Uzbekistan, Nepal, or Guatemala and know that they are there for life to build a Jewish community. 

There is another reason I work with them: I love these people. I love them for the fact that I can be honest and open about what I disagree with and don’t believe in.  And they, in return, can be honest and open with me. And still love me. I love them for their authenticity in loving every Jew. I love them for their passion for the Jewish people and for doing mitzvot. I love them that they are willing to take their families and move to Uzbekistan, Nepal, or Guatemala and know that they are there for life to build a Jewish community. Of course, because they are orthodox, that audience has to be Jewish, according to Halacha (Jewish law). 

If the Jewish world’s most successful organization wants to continue working with me, I am honored. It means a lot; it also means that I am not that old and irrelevant. Okay, maybe old.

Gary Wexler woke up one morning and found he had morphed into an old Jewish guy.