We are more than the darkness
'We are woven into the fabric of Australian life. And that story deserves to be told as loudly as the darkness that others try to project onto us.'
Recently, I sat in a room full of Jewish community leaders from across Australia and, for the first time in a long time, I exhaled.
I realised that it’s going to be okay.
It was a genuine, bone-deep feeling that caught me off guard.
Before beginning the LaunchPad Leadership journey, I was told that it’s impossible to explain the magic that happens. I thought it was an exaggeration. Surely, anything can be described, especially being a writer.
Well, three Zoom sessions and 51.5 hours in the Victorian Macedon Ranges later, and consider me corrected, because I’m still struggling to put it all into words.
LaunchPad Leadership is a program run by the Australian Jewish Funders (AJF) for emerging and established leaders across our community. Following three intensive and insightful zoom sessions, Cohort 7 spent three days immersed together. Extraordinary people from different cities, sectors, generations and backgrounds, sharing a love for this community, and the weight of leading through one of the hardest periods in recent Jewish history.
I arrived still very much within the grips of trauma. We all did. October 7 and its aftermath, and the Chanukah terror attack in December didn’t just break our hearts. It changed the rhythm of our everyday lives. The low hum of vigilance that never quite switches off.
Community leadership is hard. If you’re in it, you know. It’s late nights, constant troubleshooting, competing agendas and trying to hold a community together while also holding yourself together. And doing all of that while living through the trauma of the past couple of years has pushed many of us to our limits.
But for those three days, there was light. There was connection. And it wasn’t networking in the hollow, business card-swapping sense. It was real. Connection built on shared values, knowledge, wisdom and a willingness to be completely open. Nothing was off limits. People were vulnerable and honest. Nobody was performing. And in that space, we actually helped each other. Not as a professional exercise, but because we understood that helping one another is helping our community. Every leader in that room strengthened meant a stronger community beyond it.
I don’t remember the last time I breathed that well. What became so apparent, and it’s something I have taken very much on board as someone who writes the community’s stories, is that we are more than the hate. We are more than the darkness and the antisemitism. We are more than the graffiti, the protests, the rising statistics and the headlines that reduce us to targets. We are a community that is vibrant, creative, generous and deeply, fiercely alive.
We are the donated fashion collections for women, the synagogues holding Shabbat services and dinners where strangers become family. We are the youth movements shaping the next generation, the educators, the artists. We are the people sitting on hospital boards, coaching local sports teams, the disability advocates.
We are more and we are here. We are woven into the fabric of Australian life. And that story deserves to be told as loudly as the darkness that others try to project onto us.
One of the most profound lessons I took away was a reframe of what it means to listen. True listening, we discovered, isn’t just about hearing the words someone says. It’s about hearing between the lines — the ‘song’ underneath the conversation. What is this person not saying? What are they carrying that hasn’t found language yet? That’s where real leadership lives. Responding not just to what’s spoken, but to what’s present. It sounds simple. It is genuinely hard.
What LaunchPad reminded me is that leadership in this moment isn’t just about strategy or governance or stakeholder management. It’s about how you hold people when things feel fragile, and how you stay curious when it’s easier to close off. How you build trust and how do you learn to receive it in return.
None of this happens by accident. It happens when people choose to be present, showing up with grace, openness and vulnerability.
The real proof of what we created together? Within moments of leaving the retreat, the messages started flowing. Requests for advice. Offers of support. Shared courses, introductions, opportunities to collaborate further. The room had barely emptied and the community was already being strengthened by the connections formed inside it.
As we closed the retreat, words of gratitude, encouragement and care filled the room. But perhaps most important was the shared understanding that real leadership happens within the confines of everyday life – the patterns we fall into, the exhaustion, the moments when collaboration feels harder than simply doing it yourself. But still, we show up. That’s leadership.
As I stepped onto the bus to return home to my family, I found myself saying it again: it’s going to be okay.
And for the first time in a long time, I’m truly sure of it. Not because our challenges aren’t real, but because I’ve seen the people stepping up to meet them.
Our community is in extraordinary hands.
Jessica Abelsohn is the national deputy editor of The AJN.