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Hope for humanity
There was a Heineken advert that aired a few months ago. It arrived in the wake of one of the most bitter and divisive US elections in recent memory, as hatred, split along class, race and gender lines, boiled over across the country.
SIMON APFEL
Titled “Worlds Apart”, the ad features pairs of people – total strangers – who hold opposing views on hot-button social issues like feminism, climate change, and transgender rights. The pairs, who initially aren’t privy to each other’s views, go through a bonding activity before the big reveal. They are then given a choice: to walk away, or “stay and discuss your differences over a beer”. All six choose to hash it out respectfully; one pair even swap numbers.
At the time it was dismissed as cheesy and contrived; well-intentioned and not as tone-deaf as Pepsi’s widely lambasted civil protest ad featuring Kendall Jenner that preceded it, but also utterly unrealistic – the kind of thing that never happens in real life.
But what if it does?
Last month, 35 Jews of all stripes, from Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, gathered at the Old MacDaddy retro-caravan resort in the Elgin valley for a leadership retreat that became a real-life Heineken ad.
Over the course of just three days, a group that comprised rabbis and progressive leaders, social activists and captains of industry, creatives and straight-laced finance types – the kind of crowd that would be at each other’s throats on social media, or at best would have nothing to do with each other – found glorious, almost intoxicating, warmth and harmony.
It’s called LaunchPad, and truly there’s nothing like it. Modelled on a highly successful initiative that was pioneered in Australia in 2014, it’s billed as a “Platform for Jewish Community Innovation”; for “thinking boldly and creatively about the changing needs and challenges facing the SA Jewish community, and taking concrete steps to create meaningful change”.
And that’s exactly what the group – who could quite accurately be termed “change-makers” were it not for my own inexplicable presence among them – set out to do.
No topic was taboo: Jewish apathy among youth; marginalisation of certain groups; disaffection with traditional community structures; Israel and national identity; the shifting educational landscape; safety and security challenges; social support structures.
Thorny, highly contentious subjects, certainly. But through exhausting, wall-to-wall discussions in sessions entitled “The Elephants in the Room”, “What’s the Problem?”, and “Working Hub”, and culminating in a real-life “Dragon’s Den” enactment in which ideas were pitched to three of the community’s biggest social investors, we not only hashed out our differences, but put our heads together to map out potential solutions.
The glass auditorium, appropriately resembling a giant hothouse, buzzed with a low electrostatic murmur punctuated by the odd excited outburst, as groups sat on the floor, probing, proposing, drawing up plans.
Discussions throughout were robust, the level of discourse extremely high – but most notable was the almost shockingly respectful manner in which they were conducted. People spoke freely and listened intently. Faced with an audience sincerely receptive to what he had to say, one participant remarked how he suddenly overcame his fear of public speaking.
And, as fascinating and productive as the workshops and scheduled engagements were (a scintillating, TED Talk-ready presentation on the Johannesburg Chevrah Kadisha of all things exploded like a fire-cracker), it was in the casual interactions and “Processing Pods” between sessions where the magic happened.
“I connected with an Orthodox rebbetzin – how the hell did that happen?” wondered one participant. Another marvelled at having discovered “a better version of me”. An architect in his 30s said he felt “nourished”. A young, bustling community activist said she “hadn’t once felt the need to check my phone and didn’t even notice the non-existent WiFi signal”. A Johannesburg-born Chabad rabbi said he felt “totally present, totally engaged, totally switched on.
Each of us arrived at Old MacDaddy clutching fiercely-held positions and identities, backs arched ready to defend them to the death. Yet almost from the start, all the negativity and “stuff” seemed to magically dissipate. It was immediate and spontaneous, dissolving, much to everyone’s shock, as early as the first ice-breaker session.
Looking back on the experience, I guess we simply let our guard down, opened ourselves up and shared. And shared. And shared some more.
And there, in the rolling green hills of Elgin, amidst all of the brain-storming and conceptual bundu-bashing, we carved out a community. A living, breathing collective with common goals and a concern for the greater good.
Inevitably, though an overactive WhatsApp group and a number of simmering peer-led initiatives have kept the embers alight, this motley crew have gone back to our regular lives, and, very likely to old modes of thinking about, and relating to, the other.
But if nothing else, LaunchPad has been a glimpse of just what’s possible.
“I’m relieved, and I guess grateful,” reflected the suitably warm-and-fuzzy LaunchPad convener, Aron Turest Swartz, as the event drew to a close.
“It’s like we cast this net into the ocean and gathered up a group of diverse exotic fish, brought them together and made fish potjiekos. It’s a mysterious place and a mysterious process and the outcomes are a mystery at this point. But there’s magic that’s taken place here. And everyone has felt it.”