Netzah: Men’s Work in the Ma’alot Atlanta Jewish Community
Last weekend, around the fire, under an auspicious but urgent Venus/Jupiter conjunction and a pleasant gibbous Moon next to Spica, 12 builders in the Ma’alot community who identify with men’s work were inducted into the second and third circles of Netzah (נצח) [Commitment]. The event was exhausting for me, but its success brought me huge relief. After roughly two years of slow, uncertain building, men’s work is underway in our community.
In March 2022, Rabbi Ariel, to whom I am married, selected me and three other men who have been part of Ma’alot since the beginning to be the first experimental men’s circle. Two large women’s circles had been underway for a while, and it was time to begin making this kind of space available to more people (a queer circle has also since formed). One of the other men and I had facilitated one open meeting for men’s work at a Wilderness Torah festival many years ago, and I had met regularly with a small council of men in the latter years of Ariel’s time in rabbinical school (the others were all students and are now rabbis; I was the only spouse). This felt like it constituted some prior experience with the work itself. The overall task — to establish this work as a community-wide container in Ma’alot — was more of a reach.
The initial concept was simple: We would rotate homes hosting fire circles in our backyards, we would offer each other confidentiality and active listening, and as we came to trust and know each other, we would figure out the conversations, practices, and goals for men’s work in our community along the way.
It took months for us to even find our footing as a circle of four. It was the heyday of the @taalumot online discourse era, and I went in stoked to test out all that extremely-high-openness internet-age spirituality stuff IRL. I was in for a very rough landing. Turns out most urban liberal Jewish American dads are not as readily open to the full spectrum of human weirdness as people trying to speed-run Buddhist enlightenment on the internet!
But, it turns out, they can be trained (and so can I). We had difficult conversations about what we needed out of this in order to trust each other, we listened, and we changed. We kept at it, with the backyard fire circle as the template, and we branched out into other modes of gathering and changing things up: a summer evening hike, a jump in the river, a baseball game.
The river dip was a pre-Rosh Hashanah ritual immersion, a practice brought here by another guy in the circle from his previous Jewish home in California. They had a practice there of doing their pre-High Holiday mikveh in the ocean, and he missed that practice and wanted to recreate it here, where we don’t have ocean access but do have a broad and ancient river and its tributaries. Before we even left the water, it was obvious this practice and its blessings — its nakedness, its vulnerability, its shocking clarity — would become a tradition.
But as for the dynamics of our circle, it was the baseball game where I knew things had become solid and dependable. I allowed myself to share that I had cast a horary for the outcome of the game, which was vulnerable for me given the way my spiritual bent had created discomfort in the circle at the beginning, but by this point, the guys were at least open to witnessing my practice. Also, the prediction came true in spectacular fashion, which felt good.
By the second year, we had begun to understand how to expand this work to the rest of the community. We had a format — or at least a way of working — in small circles. We had done some of the hard language work, including settling on a vernacular of “people who identify with men’s work” rather than “people who identify as men,” using “men” only as a shorthand when appropriate. And we had a name, which I proposed, and though I left it open for discussion amongst my circle as well as with the rabbi, I knew it was the name, and I just kept using it until it had settled. Netzah (נצח). I translated it as Commitment, a translation I find shockingly lacking in the conventional unpackings of this concept. To me, the term נצח completely conveys the orientation each participant must have to men’s work, and which the whole collective of people doing men’s work must have toward the community at large.
We had our first large-format open gathering to introduce the community to Netzah at the Ma’alot Campout in spring 2023, and we invited all those participants to join us for the mikveh at the river before Rosh Hashanah. This began a cycle of more gatherings open to all people in the community who identify with men’s work. I ran a couple of them: one discussion of the collapsed temple of masculinity on Tisha b’Av amidst the ruins of an old waterworks in town, and one hike, discussion, and Havdalah ceremony during Passover.
I wouldn’t have made it through — or even made it to — these gatherings without the help of Andrew Stein, another member of the founding circle and holder of many deep infrastructural and volunteer-channeling capacities in Ma’alot. Andrew’s ability to specify the components of making such a thing work, and to facilitate the group through that defined process, was essential, as I was really bringing more of a “let’s just get together and do stuff and magic will happen” energy to the whole thing. These qualities really worked in combination.
We were settling into a two-layered structure for Netzah activities: large-format gatherings open to all who identify with men’s work, and closed circles like ours, which would be supported by the rabbi and other core community members and thus only open to people who support Ma’alot as Builders. We began to send out a survey to people who had indicated interest in Netzah activities to figure out who else was going to be part of this.
This led to some final questions about how new circles would be formed, as well as how the overall project of Netzah — and Ma’alot circles for other identities and affinities — would be sustained and supported. Frankly, I felt like I was reaching a limit in my capacity to wrangle this thing into being, and fortunately the other members of my circle stepped up as well. But we and Ariel reached the conclusion that we would have to support new circles with formal facilitation — alongside our circle’s peer example — in order to make sure they formed stably and got off to a good start.
We found an experienced local Jewish therapist and facilitator, Dan Arnold, and brought him into the process of planning the launch of new circles. He agreed to work with Ariel to get the new groups off the ground. We formed two circles from the 12 new participants, which was surprisingly easy and sensible. We planned the launch event together, which would be a mix of framing for the importance of men’s work in general and demonstration (by our circle) of how the circle process works. Then we would break up into our circles for the first time for some bonding and discussion, and I would close with Havdalah.
With that event concluded and three Netzah circles now in the field, I feel deeply relieved that this work is now alive in our community. Masculinity and masculine gender roles in this society can so easily be allowed to sit as idle, unquestioned defaults, to which everyone else’s roles and performances must conform. Ma’alot’s values cannot support that. Men’s work in this community needs to be intentionally chosen, interrogated, and developed, and that’s what Netzah is for. The way men, people identifying as men, and people perceived as men show up here must be virtuous, holy, committed. When someone new arrives in this community, it’s important they feel that. This work must be ongoing, and it must support everyone. Netzah is the engine for ensuring that’s the case.
And that’s not all it is. Too often, it is part of the pernicious default that men don’t have space for intimacy, vulnerability, and sensitivity with anyone, much less with each other. Netazh will guarantee a container for this in the Ma’alot community as well. My circle alone has been invaluable to me in this regard, especially as I have endured the vicissitudes of trying to build community online, and I can hardly imagine what it will be like now that this work is distributed throughout Ma’alot.
I am sure I will continue to hold some capacity as a guide or guardian for this work, but my hope is that leadership for the open gatherings will pass into the more traditional volunteer structure of Ma’alot, giving people who don’t have the built-in job of rabbi’s-husband the chance to lead and create according to their visions. The circles will now have the backing of the rabbi and a trained facilitator, with more forms of institutional support and training in development. Every so often, as new participants show interest, new circles will be formed. Perhaps old circles will dissolve after a time. We’ll see what this work needs.
Though the logistics of building something like this were not quite my thing, the heart-to-heart work within it certainly is. Netzah and other forms of spiritual guidance for Ma’alot people have been powerful tests of the practicality of the values I espouse online, and I am heartened by how it seems to be going. I am not sure how this offline work will feed back into the online work, but I can see the outlines of it. Pursuits that pull people away from deep relations with those around them and into the virtual social medium are not the work. Pursuits that use the capabilities of planet-scale coordination to bring people into ever deeper relationship very much are.
