In a recent documentary exploring his work, Harvard professor Robert Putnam describes the experience of standing on the national mall for John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration. As Kennedy intoned the iconic phrase “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” Putnam felt it was “like a trumpet sounding reveille” to a new generation of American dynamism. In the film, Putnam reflects during the twilight of his life and realizes that “it was not reveille, but taps.”
The early 1960s, Putnam discovered, were the high-water mark for American social trust, which has declined precipitously in the years since. He first announced his findings of diminishing social capital in his landmark 2000 book, Bowling Alone. As people pulled back from clubs and associations, their trust in others and in society’s institutions eroded. Despite hopes that technologies like the smartphone or social media would rebuild social capital, the opposite has happened. We are awash in technologies that promise connection while fostering isolation. In 2023, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a public health advisory noting that the mortality impact of “being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.” Life expectancy actually contracted in recent years, in part due to the rise of isolation and so-called “deaths of despair.”
While Putnam was documenting the dissolution of clubs that allowed Americans to come together and build civic trust, another scholar, Robert Wuthnow, was following a very different trend: the rise of small support groups. Twelve-step programs, Bible studies, prayer circles, and other support groups grew like wildfire in the late twentieth century. Americans reported finding meaning and comfort in these groups. Moreover, they used the word “community” again and again to describe their participation. Wuthnow noted that support groups “reflect the fluidity of our lives by allowing us to bond simply but to break our attachments with equivalent ease.” We might imagine these groups “substitute for families, neighborhoods and broader community attachment that demand lifelong commitments, when, in fact, they do not.”
But while support groups are helpful to the individual, they do not address the larger social problem of declining social capital. Twenty-five years after Putnam’s groundbreaking book, Americans are even more suspicious of large institutions. We are lonely, and we are not signing up to join clubs like the Rotary or neighborhood associations in any great numbers. Digital interactions are no substitute. Where, then, can we turn to new models? One unlikely place to look might be the history of hevrot, the Jewish practice of fellowship that has endured for two millenia.
Hevrot are small, local voluntaristic groups of individuals who join together to do good works or promote piety. The practice dates to at least the second century, when rabbinic literature speaks of hevrot in Jerusalem and throughout the land of Israel. Hevrot (the plural of hevra) buried the dead. They sponsored wedding feasts for the newly married. They helped observe the difficult and intricately complicated rules of ritual purity surrounding the Temple.
Wuthnow noted that support groups “reflect the fluidity of our lives by allowing us to bond simply but to break our attachments with equivalent ease.” We might imagine these groups “substitute for families, neighborhoods and broader community attachment that demand lifelong commitments, when, in fact, they do not.”
While their origin is ancient, hevrot became a more prominent feature of Jewish society during the second half of the thirteenth century, in the area of present-day Spain. At the time, the Iberian Peninsula, once a site for an efflorescence of Jewish culture, had begun to experience increasing levels of antisemitic violence. Jews were restricted from commercial activity. Many fell into poverty. The oligarchs who controlled Jewish communal life enriched themselves while leaving their brethren struggling, if not desperate. Letters from the time describe how the lack of an effective social welfare system left the poor to go house to house begging, compounding indigence with indignity.
Poor Jews in the towns like Saragossa took matters into their own hands. They organized societies like Kat Ha Havura (the Fellowship) and Rodfei Zedek (Pursuers of Justice). These societies raised their own funds to provide care and eventually burial for the indigent sick. Although the Jews of Saragossa were aware of Christian confraternities with overlapping purposes, they understood their activity in decidedly Jewish terms, emulating in name if not in practice their ancient forebearers. Within a generation, hevrot blossomed in communities across Iberia. They provided dowries for poor brides and clothes for the needy, as well as capital for business loans or ransoms for Jewish captives.
The work of these hevrot was never only in the field of social welfare. Some started their own synagogues to pray together. Some built study halls for their society to learn Scripture together. As conditions for Jews worsened, devotional acts of piety, like rising early in the morning to pray, or staying up late at night to study, or reciting psalms and incantations over the beds of the sick, became commonplace among the fellowships. For their participants, the hevrot became sites of both voluntarism and piety.
Hevrot provided dowries for poor brides and clothes for the needy, as well as capital for business loans or ransoms for Jewish captives.
By the time of the Jews’ expulsion from Spain in 1492, hevrot were a subculture unto themselves, separate and apart from the formal Jewish communal government and distinct from the yeshivot, or rabbinic academies. They were a way of upholding traditional good works but also an experimental space, innovating new devotional practices. There is evidence that the great mystical text of Judaism, the Zohar, was written by members of these small fellowships. Indeed, the central narrative that dominates the Zohar is a tale about a small group of friends who seek divine enlightenment while never setting foot in a synagogue or study hall. The characters of the Zohar, like the authors, are members of a hevra.
After the expulsion, Spanish Jews spread throughout the Mediterranean, bringing their fellowships with them. According to the scholar Federica Francesconi, societies for doing good works took root in Italy in towns like Ferrara (1516), Modena (1517), and Vernoa (1545). And in the land of Israel, mystical fellowships read the texts of their Spanish forebears, like the Zohar, and created pietistic groups, in an exquisite example of life imitating text imitating life.
By the early modern period, we have evidence of women’s hevrot in central Europe working to bury the dead, care for the sick, and make clothes for the needy. These “sacred sororities,” as Elisheva Carlebach and Debra Kaplan describe them, wrote their own bylaws and kept their own financial records. Like those of Spain, these groups at once performed acts of traditional piety while cultivating new roles for women as executives and treasurers, roles not available to them in normal communal life. At times, in Eastern Europe, the hevrot were considered more powerful and competent than the semi-autonomous Jewish governments. Their role was so outsized that modern Yiddish writers penned sardonic comedies lampooning the practices of local hevrot.
Jews brought hevrot with them during their mass migration to the United States. Burial societies, study groups, and charitable circles blossomed in every major city where Jews settled. A new formulation of the hevra, the landsmanshaft, emerged to help emigrants from specific villages settle in the new country. These societies procured cemetery spaces for their members, in keeping with the ancient tradition of securing a dignified burial. But they also taught classes, loaned money, and provided social services. Thousands of landsmanshaftn flourished across the United States, becoming the dominant form of social organization among Jewish immigrants in the late nineteenth century.
As Jews assimilated in the second half of the twentieth century, the practice of hevrot among less traditional Jews evaporated, leaving only the occasional burial society. Indeed, were one to speak of a hevra to a contemporary Jew, they would probably only know of the burial group, if they knew the word at all. In the late 1960s, some small groups, like Havurat Shalom, in Boston, and the House of Love and Prayer, in San Francisco, tried to revive the idea in the form of intentional religious communities that combined counterculture, mysticism, and hasidic tradition. They created hevra and imagined themselves, like Spanish Jews centuries before, as the heirs to the tradition described in earlier texts.
Could small, intentional Jewish fellowships offer a new (or old) model of association, neither a social club nor support group, but something entirely different? Perhaps we could take the Jewish model of hevra and apply it in broader contexts. What might that look like? Here are some guidelines for how they might work, and flourish:
One good work: Almost all hevrot have a single, unambiguously good work they seek to accomplish. Clothing the needy, burying the dead, and caring for the sick are all moral imperatives. These good works are other-, rather than self-, focused. This makes them distinct from a bowling league and different from a support circle. In a hevra, social relationships are a byproduct of working on a goal together, not the end in themselves. Because of this ancillary quality to the relationships that emerge in fellowship, one comes to collaborate with others who share one but not all of our moral ideals. We meet people we would not socialize with otherwise. Participating in a common important cause ends up enriching our social life, expanding the horizons of people we know.
Make some rules. Hevrot are highly organized. They are anything but fluid. Throughout Jewish history, whether in Renaissance Italy or medieval Spain, hevrot drafted rules, had leadership structures, and often assessed dues. This level of organization provides focus and a certain formality to the group. They are not just a gang of friends who meet up at a bar. Instead, the formality creates a mini-society. As such, hevrot, like civic organizations, became a microcosm for the kind of skills—following rules, adjudicating disputes, maintaining civil decorum—needed in any complex human organization, or in society at large.
Renew the old. Jewish fellowships are both traditional and innovative, often at the same time. Because hevrot seek to fulfill abiding moral needs, such as caring for orphans, they can be a locus of upholding religious tradition. And, because they respond to the cultural conditions in which they find themselves, they inevitably create new forms of practice, absorbed consciously or not from the larger culture. Thus hevrot in the early twentieth century in America looked like progressive societies, while those of medieval Spain resembled Catholic confraternities and religious orders. In the 1960s, hevrot reclaimed traditional practices while taking on the trappings of the counterculture. Older values get fulfilled and renewed by the culture of a distinctive time and place.
A hevra is not a vision to change the world, or disrupt a market. A hevra is a small group of organized people, in a specific place and time, who unite to perform a particular good work.
Do devotion, Perform Piety. While hevrot take care of an acute social need, they are also social spaces where Jews pray together or perform other devotional acts. Hevrot are sanctified religious organizations doing holy work. These acts are often associated with the good deed in the group’s mission. For instance, those who cared for the sick also recited psalms over their beds. Devotional acts were often great religious innovations that lasted for generations. The Friday night service of psalms and songs created by Isaac Luria and his group of twenty or so followers, five centuries ago, is still performed weekly by Jews around the world. If a new hevra were to form today, they should not only do good deeds but develop devotional practices as well.
Stay right-sized. Hevrot are rarely large. Usually, they were less than twenty-five people. This is a bit bigger than a group of friends, but small enough that everyone knows and works with everyone else. Moreover, hevrot, unlike the Rotary Club or the Girl Scouts, have no broader organization. They are purely local, for a specific place. We live in a cultural moment that seeks to “scale” most forms of organization to massive proportions. Hevrot have no such pretensions. A hevra is not a vision to change the world, or disrupt a market. A hevra is a small group of organized people, in a specific place and time, who unite to perform a particular good work. It is tempting to imagine a single great idea or practice that can lead us out of our multiple crises of loneliness, polarization, and political disfunction. Throughout history, many Jews turned to messianic hopes and did just that. But alongside the big ideas was a steady stream of small, local, volunteer organizations that performed works of kindness and acts of devotion. These groups not only provided a manageable sphere of action for average people. They also became wellsprings of cultural innovation that have lasted to the present day. They are more spiritual, and more attuned to social welfare, than Putnam’s bowling leagues, and they are more organized and demanding than Wuthnow’s support groups. They need not be the purview of Jews only. Instead they could be a template for people to work on social problems at a very local level in the company of others. Perhaps founding a new hevra, in this country, in this moment, might be just what we need.