Stop Calling It “Crisis.” Call It a Season.

The word crisis has become the dominant lens through which Jewish communities describe the present moment. It appears everywhere: in funding appeals, strategy documents, campus statements, donor briefings, and board conversations. It is used to describe rising antisemitism, hostile public culture, institutional cowardice, student fear, and communal exhaustion.

The problem is not that the word is inaccurate. Much of what it names is real. The problem is that crisis carries with it a theory of time that no longer fits the reality we are in.

A crisis is an interruption. It is something that deviates from baseline conditions. It demands a response, and then, crucially, it implies a return. Even when the return is delayed, the underlying assumption remains: this is not how things normally are.

That assumption is doing quiet damage.

What we are living through does not behave like an interruption. Antisemitism is not appearing as a series of disconnected emergencies. Campus volatility is not episodic. Institutional equivocation is not anomalous. Public discomfort with Jewish particularity is not flaring and receding; it is settling, adapting, and normalising itself in new forms.

This is not a crisis.

It is a season.

And communities that keep designing their work as though they are managing an exception will continue to burn out, no matter how competent or committed their people are.

The difference between crisis and season is not semantic. It is architectural. A crisis posture assumes short time horizons, improvisation, and intensity. A seasonal posture assumes persistence, rhythm, and continuity. One rewards reaction. The other demands design.

Jewish communal life right now is overwhelmingly built around the former.

Emergency mode has become our default operating system, not because leaders are careless, but because emergency mode offers clarity. When something is on fire, roles become obvious. Priorities narrow. Decisions feel morally clean. You know what matters, what can wait, and where to put your energy. There is a sense of usefulness that comes with it, even a sense of righteousness. You are needed. You are responding. You are doing the thing that the moment demands.

Emergency mode also offers protection. It shields leaders and professionals from the slow, gnawing uncertainty that comes with long-term design. If everything is urgent, nothing has to be tested for durability. If the goal is always to get through the next incident, the next week, the next semester, then no one ever has to confront whether what they are building actually compounds, or whether it only functions when the original architects are holding it together by force of will.

I know this personally. Much of my own work over the years, even when it was effective, was better at triage than continuity-building. I could get a community through a semester. I was less consistent at building structures that would make the next cohort’s work meaningfully easier. Emergency mode made that feel acceptable, even virtuous. After all, the house was on fire. Who has time to think about load-bearing beams?

But here is the uncomfortable truth: emergency mode does not build power. It consumes it.

It produces motion without infrastructure. It produces events without rhythm, statements without leverage, and visibility without continuity. It creates moments that feel satisfying and exhausting in equal measure, and then vanish. Chairs are stacked. Posters come down. People exhale. And very little remains that changes the cost of the next flare-up.

This is why Jewish advocacy can look relentlessly busy and still feel like it is losing ground. The work is legible. It is visible. It is emotionally charged. But it is not designed to accumulate.

When emergency response becomes the centre of gravity, communities begin to confuse relief with success. The rally happened. The statement landed. The meeting was held. Everyone feels a little less helpless. That feeling is real. It is also fleeting. Relief is not leverage. And it is not resilience.

The deeper cost of emergency mode is not just burnout, although burnout is everywhere. The deeper cost is that emergency mode teaches the wrong lessons about leadership. It trains people to be reactive, heroic, and improvisational, rather than steady, relational, and structurally competent. It rewards intensity over consistency and visibility over fluency. Over time, this hollows out leadership depth even as activity increases.

At this point, an obvious objection needs to be taken seriously. Not every campus or community has the luxury of slow design. Some Jewish students are operating in environments where institutional access is minimal, allies are unreliable, and harm is immediate. In those contexts, emergency response is not a strategic indulgence; it is often the only thing that produces protection. Public pressure may be the only language administrators understand. Silence may be read as acquiescence. Waiting for infrastructure that does not yet exist can carry real cost.

That reality does not weaken the argument. It sharpens it. The more hostile and asymmetric the environment, the higher the price of having no continuity beneath response. Emergency mode may be unavoidable in the short term, but when it becomes the only posture available, it guarantees fragility. The failure is not responding quickly when harm is real. The failure is not building systems that make having to drop everything to focus on the emergency less necessary next time.

At some point, a community has to ask whether it is actually getting stronger, or whether it is simply getting better at enduring stress.

This is where the posture needs to change.

If the present moment is a season rather than a crisis, then the work cannot be organised around response alone. It has to be organised around stewardship.

Stewardship is not a comforting concept. It does not promise resolution. It assumes persistence. It accepts that pressure will continue and asks what must exist so that pressure costs less over time. It shifts the central question from “How do we survive this?” to “What conditions need to be in place so this doesn’t break us next time, like it did this time?”

Stewardship privileges unglamorous things: weekly rhythms that happen whether or not there is an incident, roles that distribute responsibility instead of concentrating it, leadership development that is planned rather than incidental, relationships built before they are needed, and metrics that track growth, retention, and institutional behaviour rather than applause.

It also requires subtraction. You cannot add stewardship on top of emergency mode without collapsing. Some things have to shrink or die, even if they are beloved, even if they photograph well, even if they reassure donors that “something happened.” If an action does not build leadership depth, relational leverage, or institutional fluency, it cannot be protected simply because it is visible.

This is the point where resistance usually hardens. People hear “stewardship” and assume it means acceptance. Lowered expectations. Getting used to hostility. Quietism dressed up as maturity.

That is not what is being argued.

Normalising hostility says: this is inevitable, so adapt yourself downward. Stewardship says: this is persistent, so raise your design standards. It rejects panic without surrendering moral clarity. It refuses the fantasy that one good response will reset the terrain.

Emergency mode asks how to survive the moment. Stewardship asks what needs to exist so the moment does not exact the same toll next time.

Institutions, predictably, prefer crisis framing. Universities benefit when Jewish advocacy appears episodic rather than structural. Episodic volatility can be managed as a communications issue. Structural presence demands accountability. Organisations benefit because crisis justifies short-term funding and output-driven evaluation. Donors benefit because crisis feels urgent without demanding patience or relinquishing control.

That sentence is doing less work than it should. It deserves more attention than I am giving it here. For now, it is enough to say that crisis is emotionally legible in ways stewardship is not, and communities often choose what they can explain over what actually works.

Here is the harder implication, and the one that lingers after everything else is said.

Stewardship threatens identities that have been built around urgency. It asks leaders, professionals, and institutions to give up the moral clarity of constant response and take on responsibility for continuity. Five years, not five days. Five years exposes design flaws that emergency mode conveniently obscures. It exposes whether leadership pipelines actually exist, whether authority is being transferred, whether knowledge is being hoarded or shared, whether people are being developed or simply deployed.

What does stewardship look like in places where there is nothing stable yet to steward? How do you design for continuity when the ground will not hold still long enough for design to take root?

If volatility is now the baseline, then responding well is no longer sufficient. The work now is design. And design always ends with a question that no amount of urgency can answer for you:

What are you willing to stop doing so that something durable can finally exist?

Because if everything remains urgent, nothing ever compounds. And if nothing compounds, this season will not just exhaust Jewish communal life.

It will empty it out.