Ben Fleisher lives and breathes Jewish community, something he’s part of professionally, personally and in a volunteer capacity.
Fleisher has worked with Jewish nonprofit organizations for the past three years with the consulting firm Third Plateau. He’s also a resident of the recently launched Moishe House Adams Morgan in Washington, D.C., with three close friends.
He previously worked with the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and J Street. Fleisher is a former Jewish Service Corps fellow with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the leading global Jewish humanitarian organization, according to JDC’s website.
He lives in D.C., where he belongs to DC Minyan and attends services at Adas Israel Congregation. In his free time, Fleisher enjoys swing dancing.
Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I was raised Reform and participated in Reform Jewish life after college. When I went to college, I met Orthodox Jews for the first time in a real substantive way, and was really impressed with their sense of spirituality, their intellectual rigor and interest in Jewish tradition, and the real community that Shabbat seems to create for those students. That got me on the path of, ‘Oh, there are other ways of being Jewish than the ways I was raised, and maybe some of those other ways could be interesting to explore.’
After college, I spent a year in Jerusalem teaching English to Jews at risk, and kept meeting more Jews who had different ways of thinking about Jewishness. Eventually, when I moved to D.C. for the first time, in 2017, I decided I wanted to fully explore what it would be like to engage in Judaism from a more halachically oriented perspective. I started going to a partnership minyan, Rosh Pina, which is a lovely community. Now, I hang out at DC Minyan and Adas regularly and identify with traditional egalitarian Judaism.
What does your professional work entail?
I work at an impact consulting firm called Third Plateau. They have a specific team called the Jewish community impact team that focuses on helping Jewish organizations achieve their intended outcome. In that role, I get to help our community organizations with things like strategic planning, evaluation, research tasks, really a whole [array] of products, services and deliverables. I really enjoy it — I get to see a huge cross-section of the community. I get to see how different people are thinking about doing Jewish things, and I get to help those organizations, which is wonderful.
You’re deeply involved in the Jewish community. Why?
I love Jewish community. I enjoy getting to ask intellectual questions through a Jewish lens and to wrestle with Jewish text. I like Jewish folklore; I’ve read a couple of books on that subject. I appreciate the spirituality of it. I went to divinity school in part because I’m really curious about questions about how human beings think about and relate to the divine, and Judaism is one way that I try to do that. And the people, honestly. I really appreciate all of the individuals that I get to meet and connect with and form friendships with through Jewish community.
What is most fulfilling about your role as a Moishe House resident?
I really appreciate getting to know and getting to consistently meet new people. There’s something just refreshing about meeting another human being and [realizing] they have a completely unique way of thinking about the world, and I get to understand a little bit of that now. I’ve really appreciated the opportunities that Moishe [House] has created to meet new folks in the D.C. Jewish community and to learn about them, about their Jewishness, all of it.
What goes into planning a Moishe House event?
A number of different things [that] depend on the event. First, we want it to be something that we’re excited to go to, so [my roommates and I] put together a list of all the things in D.C. that we hadn’t had a chance to try, but were interested in — the things we tried once and want to go back to. If it’s an event, [we make sure it’s an event] we would show up to.
That’s the starting point, then we want to make sure that it’s accessible to people as much as possible. For our science fiction and fantasy book club, for example, we made it accessible for people to show up virtually because one participant couldn’t be there in person. We just want to make it an interesting, accessible community-building event for everyone.
What are your goals?
I just want to keep doing good work, keep helping Jewish communities be pluralistic, functional and able to bring in new people and be welcoming spaces, which they were for me.
