Rabbi Daniel A. Septimus

What we talked about

The territory is much bigger than the city

He describes the organization as the hub of Jewish life in Central Texas, and he means Central Texas rather than Austin. The service area runs as far south as San Marcos, which he notes San Antonio occasionally tries to claim, and as far north as Sun City, where there is a large retiree population, and Georgetown, where young families are arriving. There are members in Temple now.

The framing he reaches for is Mayor Steve Adler’s argument that the region has to be thought about regionally, past municipal borders, the way Houston and Dallas are. His own version of the point is demographic: very few people in this community grew up here, they are arriving from elsewhere, and, in his words, most of them are staying.

What he would tell himself on day one

Be patient. He inherited a capital campaign and a mandate to take the campus to its next level, and he arrived eager to move. His retrospective advice to himself is a sequence: be patient, listen, then strategize, then build, because you have to bring people along with you and that takes the time it takes.

He is also candid that there was repair to do when he started, both internally with the staff team and in how the community came together around a shared vision. That is a more honest answer than this question usually gets.

Outreach is not engagement

This is the most portable idea in the interview and it came out of his time running Texas Hillel. He calls it twenty-first century engagement, and he draws the distinction sharply.

Outreach, as he learned it, is someone shaking your hand and pulling you into what they are already doing. Come bowling with us next week. Engagement is the opposite direction of travel: what are you interested in, what excites you, what keeps you up at night, and how do we build something around that answer. Sometimes what already exists fits. Sometimes it means creating a smaller experience, a micro community, for a handful of people.

He is clear-eyed about the obligation that creates. If you ask people what they want, you owe them ground rules about what you can and cannot do, and an honest answer when your organization is not the right home for it. He says they refer people elsewhere regularly, because someone else is the better fit.

A building designed to make people stop

The campus opened in 2000 and was transformative at the time, bringing what became three synagogues onto one site. His own project was the expansion, and the design thinking behind it is specific rather than architectural.

The premise was that if you drive in from Cedar Park you should have a reason to stay longer than a workout. So there is a living room where you can sit and work, coffee to get up for, a class in the gym with the same people in it every week, a tennis lesson with a group. His theory of community is not a program calendar, it is a floor plan that produces a hallway conversation.

They ran a market study before they built

Someone advised them to test the assumption before doubling down on health and wellness, so they did a market study first. The finding was that the demand was real, and that the thing they could offer which almost nobody else could was a genuinely multi-generational space. They leaned into that.

He is careful to say the campus is not just the building. It is the meditation garden, the terrace behind the community hall, the greenery, the spiritual centers as partners, a K through eight day school that is its own separate nonprofit, and the human services branch, which was moved onto the campus during his tenure.

Multi-generational, defined precisely

Asked what he actually means by it, he gives the concrete version. A grandparent, a parent and a child can all do something in the same building on the same visit. If you do not have children or grandchildren, you can still have touch points with people much younger than you.

The mechanism is an inspired aging program, and early childhood students who come in to spend time with what he calls the sixty and better population. The day school students do the same. Bringing demographics into contact with each other is, in his account, the value proposition that a fitness center or a school on its own cannot match.

Good philanthropy is about relationships

He had given his outgoing speech to a major donor dinner the week before this was filmed, and he repeats the line here. Good philanthropy is about relationships. It is not about the money and it is not about the buildings, and then, with the timing of somebody who has given the speech, he adds that of course you need those too.

The part that matters is the condition attached: to get to the money and the buildings, people have to feel they are in relationship with you first. For anyone running a campaign, that is the whole argument for storytelling, in one sentence, from someone who just finished a forty million dollar one.

The highlight he names first is his team

Asked for one highlight of the decade he says it should really be three, since things come in threes in Judaism, and then settles on two of equal weight.

The first is his executive team, and the way he puts it is a leadership lesson rather than a thank you: put people around you who help you think and who cover the places where your own strengths run out. The second is the campus, which he frames as transformative for the community rather than for the organization. The order of those two is the tell.