USY President Message: Rosh Hashanah

I think we spend a lot of time in USY talking about how to make USY better.

Which, obviously, makes sense. I’m the International President. A pretty large part of my job is quite literally talking about how to make USY better. More programs, more people, better conventions, better communication, more engagement, more whatever other buzzword we decide to use at the next meeting. And I care about all of that but I also think sometimes we make it more complicated than it needs to be.

Rosh Hashanah is supposed to be a time where we look back at the past year and figure out what we want the next one to look like. I’ve always found that idea kind of funny because most of us barely know what we’re doing next week, let alone who we want to become over the next year. But I like the idea anyway. So when I think about what I want USY to be this year, I don’t really think first about numbers, programs, or whether an event went exactly as we planned; I think about why people come back.

There are a million reasons someone might walk into a USY event for the first time. Maybe their friends convinced them, or their parents made them, or maybe they really wanted to go, which makes them better prepared than I was for most things freshman year. But the reason they first walk in matters a lot less than the reason they decide to walk back in again. I think people come back because somewhere along the way, USY stops feeling like something on their calendar and starts feeling like their community. You find people who know when you’re loud, annoying, arrogant, funny, wrong, whatever, and still want you there. You find traditions that might have once felt distant suddenly feel like yours. You find people you probably never would have met otherwise and somehow end up wondering how you ever didn’t know them.

And I think that’s what we have to protect. That’s what I want this year to be about.

I want the person who knows every prayer to feel at home, and I want the person who has absolutely no idea what page we are on to feel at home, too. I want the loud person to have somewhere to be loud, and I want the quiet person to feel like they don’t have to become loud to matter. Maybe that’s too simple. Probably.

But as we enter this new year, I think that’s enough of a goal. Make people want to stay.

Shanah Tovah.

Jackson Powers

International President, USY