Creating “Future Memories” at the JFN Conference

There’s a certain frenetic energy at any large conference. Even before you check in, you’re likely to bump into someone you know who you haven’t seen in a while. It’s exciting. There’s a sense of anticipation. It’s quite different from the energy at your local synagogue where week after week you see the same familiar faces. At a conference, you’re on the active lookout both for people you know and people you’d like to know.

I found plenty of both this past week at the Arizona Biltmore, where a record crowd attended the annual Jewish Funders Network (JFN) International Conference.

On its website, JFN bills itself as “a global community of private foundations and philanthropists whose mission is to promote meaningful giving and to improve philanthropy in the Jewish world.”

You can imagine the excitement, then, of attending a conference where at any moment you might bump into the head of a major foundation. Because money makes the world go ‘round, and Jewish philanthropy certainly makes the Jewish world go ‘round, there’s a special electricity at a JFN gathering that you won’t find at other conferences.

But like all other gatherings, it’s the encounters between the sessions that hold the most interest. If you think your teenage kids speak fast, you haven’t seen conference attendees trying to maximize and optimize how many people they can meet in a couple of days. Still, despite the frenetic social pace, I must divulge that in my own encounters the same sobering issue kept rearing its painful head.

Yes, the crisis in Israel.

How could it not get in the way? How could the biggest Israeli civil strife in memory not interrupt Jewish conversations, especially with Jews so concerned about the Jewish future?

As I wrote last week, friends in Israel (who are not alarmist) have told me they’ve “never seen it like this.” For a good three months now, we’ve all witnessed Israeli society tear itself apart over a judicial overhaul that has landed like both an earthquake and a volcano. In such a state of high anxiety, it’s hard to see beyond the next news cycle.

And yet, the JFN conference aimed to do precisely that. By some fortuitous (or divine) happenstance, as if the organizers anticipated a year ago what we would need to hear today, the opening plenary set the tone by urging attendees to think big, to dream big, to see far down the road.

The theme of the plenary was, “Taking a Long-Term View: What Can We Do Today That Was Not Possible 10 Years Ago?” with futurist Ari Wallach as the main speaker.

Wallach, who authored “Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs,” and whose TED talk on the subject has been viewed over 2.5 million times and translated in 19 languages, urged the attendees not to fall into the trap of “short-termism.” He talked about envisioning a positive future that we aspire to and working backward from that image; about starting with imaginary positive newspaper headlines or press releases and creating initiatives to meet those headlines; about becoming great ancestors.

But of everything he said, the phrase that stuck with me was “creating future memories.” That’s not just powerful, it’s poetic—to see our future not just as a function of time or growth or aging but as a repository of great memories. Our communal activities, our philanthropic initiatives, are thus seen through a poignant lens: What future memories will these activities create?

It’s hard to think of a smarter blueprint for the Jewish future than to create memories that will ensure a vital Jewish life.

Just as memories nourish the Jewish experience, they also nourish our souls. To look back on one’s life and smile at wonderful moments, to think back to events that changed our lives for the better, there’s no greater tonic to fuel our dreams. It’s hard to think of a smarter blueprint for the Jewish future than to create memories that will ensure a vital Jewish life.

There were plenty of useful sessions at the conference that are of interest to philanthropists, from impact investing, climate change, courageous leadership, Israel-Diaspora relations, Hollywood and the media, philanthropic collaborations, transformative education and the challenge of antisemitism, among many others.

In the end, though, what stood out for me was the call to think big and to see the long view. The energy at the JFN conference might have been frenetic, but the overall message was contemplative and reflective. Given the current turmoil in Israel, that’s the kind of future memory we can use.