December 30, 2008
"Clinging To Hope Amid The Madoff Gloom"
By Erica Schacter Schwartz, The Jewish Week

There was something uncanny about the timing of the Yeshiva University Chanukah dinner merely three days after the news came out of Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme. I had never been to the YU dinner before nor had I ever heard of Bernie Madoff, but that Friday before the dinner, I found myself repeatedly staring at the invitation, unable to believe that the name in the news was the very same treasurer of the school, and that his wife, Ruth Madoff, had actually been slated as the dinner’s “arrangements chair.”

It all felt surreal. Just like that, an annual institutional dinner was transformed into an opportunity to see how one established Jewish organization would cope, with barely a moment’s notice, with what is turning out to be the most devastating blow to the Jewish philanthropic world we have ever seen.

But cope it did. Yeshiva University’s president, Richard Joel, tactfully acknowledged that the school’s endowment had indeed been dealt a setback, but insisted that the university remained strong, and like other challenges it had experienced in the past, it would get through this difficult time and emerge stronger. And then the dinner went on.

What I realized that night was that what YU did with such elegance and class is what we are all trying to do right now — go on. We are trying to go on with our lives as individuals, as families, as communities, while everything around us is so gloomy. They were gloomy before Bernie Madoff, and they are that much gloomier now. In my apartment building, in my school, random neighbors and parents openly mention being out of work. In my own community, which was directly hit by the Madoff scandal, there is a sense of setback and of loss. And of course, in the larger Jewish community as well, as more organization names emerge from the Madoff storm, it is becoming clear how extensive the damage has been to Jewish institutional life. The sudden evaporation of endowments, of charitable trusts, of some people’s life savings — all of it is enough to leave us in a state of hopelessness and despair.

And yet somehow, like YU did, we go on. I attended a conference two weeks ago titled “The Lean Years: Strategies For Survival,” organized by the Samuel Bronfman Foundation and the Natan Fund to assist nonprofit organizations in getting through these tumultuous times. Financial experts and consultants helped organizational leaders recognize the full impact of the financial crisis — just how difficult the next few months and probably years will be — and then they offered some concrete advice for how to weather the storm. And not only weather it, but how these nonprofits might use the difficult times to restructure themselves and actually improve themselves.

What the conference exhibited is what we see happening all around us right now — the desire to find something positive amid the crisis. It is part of human nature, and the truth is it is part of our tradition as well. The prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah foresee the doom, but always remind us that there will be consolation once again. In Judaism, destruction and reconstruction simply go hand in hand.

But what I think the conference also demonstrated, and what we continue to see during these times — and particularly as the list of Madoff’s organizational victims grows — is that there is an unexpected sense of hope in shared loss. “The Lean Years” put a group of suffering organizations together in one room, and that in itself created a certain amount of hope. This is the hope offered by many support groups for victims who are suffering the same illnesses or have befallen the same tragedies. There is something uplifting about the collective experience.

Though no doubt we might all be experiencing the effects of these economic times differently as individuals, there is a sense that as a community we are all suffering a great loss together. Schools, hospitals, organizations fighting assimilation, organizations sending money to Israel, organizations keeping bone marrow registries, charitable funds set up by prominent Jews such as Steven Spielberg, Elie Wiesel and Morton Zuckerman — some have been wiped out completely, others majorly set back. But the loss is a collective loss for the Jewish people.

When a Jewish life is lost, we wish the mourners comfort “among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.” What we have lost today is less precious than a life, but nevertheless it is a loss that is also consoled by recognizing that we have lost it as a community, and that therefore it is as a community that we will soon rebuild.