Opinion

LET IT GO

In Short

Consider what your organization has let go of; what did that make possible?

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“If we did not do this already, would we start it today? If the answer is no, the question then is: how quickly can we stop?”

— Peter Drucker, Managing the Nonprofit Organization

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Management and leadership sage Peter Drucker believed that organizations carry the seedsof their own decline inside their greatest successes. The programs and structures that once transformed lives and matched communal growth, the service that once met a pressing 1/4need. These can, in time, all become the very obstacles to renewal. He called the discipline of addressing these obstacles “planned abandonment.”

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Drucker’s observations on nonprofit strategy and leadership should stop every Jewish communal professional in their tracks. Most organizations spend most of their energy defending yesterday, not out of bad faith, but out of loyalty, habit and the very real sorrow of letting go of something that once mattered deeply. Drucker called this “the tyranny of the past.”

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The question we must face is deceptively simple, genuinely difficult, yet it is the engine of organizational renewal. It is not a question about failure, but about honest stewardship: Are we deploying our community’s resources where they are most needed now, or where they were previously most needed?

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Why abandonment is so hard in Jewish life

In most sectors, abandonment is painful but straightforward. If a product is not selling, you drop it.

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In managing or leading a Jewish nonprofit, almost nothing is that simple. Donor legacy sustains programs, and community identity drives services. Over generations, federation partnership agreements, Israel connections and social service mandates have been built and are fraught with memory and meaning. In our Dallas JCC, the pool is not just a pool, the kosher kitchen is not just a part of the catering business model and the preschool curriculum is not just a pedagogical choice. They are expressions of communal values, lived relationships and inherited obligations.

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Drucker understood this. He did not advocate efficiency as an end. What he argued, with characteristic bluntness and moral seriousness, is that loyalty to the past at the expense of the present is not stewardship. It is a failure of responsibility to the community we must serve today.

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Following Drucker’s logic, there is a need for a systematic review process that is adaptable directly to the rhythms of Jewish communal life. When applied to the Jewish and general nonprofit field, three essential questions emerge for our programs, services or structures:

Does “X” still serve the mission? Not the 2003 mission that hangs on the wall in the board room, but the mission as understood by the community today. Does it represent the dramatic shifts in Jewish identity, affiliation patterns, and communal need over the past two decades?

Is “X” meeting people where they are?

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Is “X” producing results? Drucker is clear in this area, and his bluntness is what is needed.

Good intentions do not substitute for impact. What would we see in the lives of the people we serve if this program were succeeding? Are we seeing it? And are we honest enough to look at the data, even when it tells us things we would rather not hear?

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If we stopped this tomorrow, what would we build instead? This is the innovation question. Abandonment without innovation is just shrinkage. The discipline Drucker prescribed is to pair every honest act of letting go with an equally serious inquiry into what new approaches the community’s evolving needs might call for.

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What innovation actually looks like

Drucker identified several sources of genuine innovation opportunities for nonprofits. Two are especially relevant to Jewish communal organizations right now.

Demographic and community change are not a challenge; they are catalysts for innovation. The American Jewish community in 2026 is, in nearly every metric, more diverse than at any point in modern history. These are not problems to be solved. They are facts about who our community is and, therefore, invitations to imagine new forms of connection, new service models and new definitions of what it means to belong.

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Unexpected success, even if it wasn’t planned or didn’t fit existing frameworks, should not be overlooked. In my over 30 years as a Jewish communal professional, the field has seen unexpected successes with immersive experiences, peer-led engagement models, and social justice partnerships that reached Jews whom traditional institutional models had not. A number of these successes weren’t planned or fit existing frameworks. Therefore, they were either overlooked or not viewed as a true inflection point. These successes were and are not accidents; they are signals worth following.

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The Jewish dimension: Renewal is sacred work

The Jewish tradition of hiddush (innovation), which demands we honor what came before, also commands that we engage it freshly, in every generation. Drucker’s principle of organizational renewal is, in this sense, deeply consonant with Jewish spiritual logic. The practice of abandonment in a Jewish organizational context requires something more than managerial discipline. It requires the capacity to grieve, to honor what something was, to acknowledge what it did, and to release it with intention rather than simply letting it decay. The process of letting go is itself a profoundly Jewish activity.

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The act of building something new, of imagining new forms of community, new pathways to connection, new ways of expressing what it means to live a Jewish life in this moment, is not a departure from tradition. It is one of tradition’s most ancient demands.

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If you lead a Jewish communal organization, or sit on its board, Drucker’s framework suggests a concrete first step: set aside time at your next planning session, not to add new programs, but to list everything you are currently doing and apply the first question honestly. If we did not do this already, would we choose to start doing it today?

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You will likely find that most of what you do passes the test. Some of it will be in a gray zone — worth examining more carefully, worth piloting an innovative approach alongside the existing one — and some of it, perhaps more than is comfortable, will be something whose time has passed. What you do with that knowledge is the leadership question. Drucker would say there is only one honest answer.