Haviv's Blog: Part II: Networking creativity

Bertrand Russell once complained that philosophy never gets credit for anything because whenever it invents something useful the new creation is given its own distinct name. When philosophers think clearly about numbers, it’s soon called mathematics; about mind, cognitive science; about society, it becomes sociology, political science, or ethics. The net result is that philosophy is assumed to have produced nothing, even when the basic project, the rational uncovering of truth for its own sake, may be given much of the credit for producing the modern age in which we live.

Russell’s complaint comes to mind in the wake of KolDor’s late-October conference.

In itself, the conference was not especially remarkable. It mixed the feel of a youth group convention – singing at meals, multiple-bed hostel rooms – with the ambition of a think tank – sessions included discussion of worldwide Jewish education policy, models of Brazilian environmental education, and a mental exercise involving an autonomous Jewish region within Israel that would “redo” the institutions of a Jewish state modeled on what one participant called “Zionist peoplehood,” rather than mere Zionism. The conference was heavily Anglo and conducted in English, since almost half the participants came from outside Israel and many did not speak Hebrew.

Yet, unlike the confusion surrounding the star-studded Jewish People Policy Planning Institute conference in Jerusalem in June – an establishment get-together looking for new strategies for Jewish life that couldn’t decide whether it was merely a “planning body,” as institute president Yehezkel Dror insisted, or, as some bitter participants had expected, a mechanism for directing implementation – the KolDor conference was clear from the beginning.

No policy paper emerged from the KolDor event, and no actionable reform plan for Jewish institutions was suggested. There wasn’t even a mapping-out of the problems of the Jewish world – standard practice ahead of your average Jewish-survival discussion group.

Yet when conference organizers said the event was a success, their reasoning wasn’t as far-fetched as you might think. Since KolDor isn’t about conferencing, but about “the power of the network,” it was never the get-together that mattered, but rather the people – young, clever and eager – who are supposed to discover each other and develop relationships that will produce new ideas and initiatives that can rejuvenate Jewish life.

Until the KolDor conference, I didn’t know about Aharon Horwitz’s MavenHaven, Eganu.com or Ahava Zarembski’s Yesod. (If you’re curious, take a page out of KolDor’s tech-savvy way of doing business and google them.) The expertise, ideas and criticisms of Horwitz, Zarembski, Mavoy Satum’s Inbal Freund and many others – MK Ze’ev Elkin is a KolDorian, too – are the resource that KolDor brings to the table.

As with philosophy, KolDor doesn’t look like it’s accomplishing much. It’s even a step farther away from its achievements than philosophy – it does not seek to create new ideas, but rather to streamline the cross-pollination that can produce them. True to its origins in the business-think of the dot-com age, it is a minimalist mechanism for spreading around what turned out to be quite a lot of content. In my brief personal experience with it – I’ve already connected with and learned from many of the folks I met at the conference – it works.