In Ki Tetzei, this week’s Torah portion, we read about intergenerational accountability. Here we read:

Parents shall not be put to death for children, nor children be put to death for parents: they shall each be put to death only for their own crime.

Deuteronomy 24:16

This seems pretty straightforward. We should all be held accountable for their own action, full stop. Anything short of this would seem immoral. This stands in juxtaposition with what we learn in Shmot. There in Parshat Ki Tisa we learn:

God visits iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and fourth generations

Exodus 34:7

Here we see that the sins of the parents are revisited up the children. How do we make sense of this?

The Talmud in Tractate Brachot discusses the contradiction between the two verses:

Behold one verse says: ‘He delivers the sins of the fathers upon the children’ (Ex. 34:7) and yet another says: ‘And the children shall not die on account of their fathers’ (Deut. 24:16). These verses apparently contradict one another, but they can be reconciled by saying that there is no difficulty: one verse is talking about when the children are continuing the evil ways of their parents and the other is referring to when they are not maintaining the evil ways of their parents.

Berachot 7a

I was thinking about these issues recently in my work. Many organizations were hurt by Covid, especially those dependent on a membership model. In my work with camps I have found that by and large the camps have bounced back to close to their pre-Covid numbers, but this is not the case for their parent organizations. Inspired by our Torah portion I am forced to ask, how will the consequences of the parent organization be born out on the child?

I am not trying to rewrite history. I believe that there is a huge debt of gratitude that these “children” agencies owe their “parents”. They are due real honor and respect. But , what got us here will not get us there. We need a new organizational paradigm to thrive in this next chapter of North American Jewish life. Across the board there are real risks of the parent agencies schlepping down their camps amidst their own decline. The parent needs to cut the children loss.

Jewish camp is working to make another generation of Jews connect and feel like they belong to the Jewish people. Why would we put that in peril? We should not be using the revenue from Jewish camps to bankroll otherwise sinking ships. The camps need to be more agile to continue to be competitive. The camps need this money to invest in their own operations, program, and scholarships. This is a great investment. And we should feel proud of this use of resources. But, if the child organization will not adapt, well in these cases there is no love lost. As we learn in Berachot, if the child continues in their parent’s path the is no moral issue of revisiting the “iniquity of the fathers upon the children”. The Jewish community is like a family AND for this reason it is time to reimagine how we are organized.