Somewhere inside The Jewish Catalog, past the mezuzah instructions and the Talmud primers, is a document that reads less like a religious reference and more like a mutual aid network’s founding charter. It’s called “Blueprint for a Havurah,” written by Burt Jacobson, one of the earliest members of Havurat Shalom. The editors included it because they understood what it actually was. Not inspiration. Instructions.

Jacobson doesn’t open with theology. He opens with the problem: American living patterns are individualistic and institutional, and a community that wants to become genuinely interdependent has to fight that conditioning on purpose, over years, not weekends. Anyone who has tried to organize a tenant union or keep a food distribution running past its first burst of enthusiasm will recognize the diagnosis immediately. The hard part was never the idea. It’s the part where people have to actually depend on each other and mean it.

What follows is not a manifesto. It’s a system. Leadership roles rotate on four-to-six-month terms specifically so no one person becomes permanently necessary, and every member is expected to serve in at least one work group. Meetings are capped at two hours, called only when there’s an actual decision to make, which is the kind of discipline every organizing space claims to want and almost none enforces. There’s a built-in mechanism for members to confront each other honestly when tension builds, because Jacobson knew tension would build, and pretending otherwise is how communities rot from the inside instead of failing cleanly.

Then there’s the economy section, which is where this stops being a nice historical parallel and becomes a direct ancestor. Jacobson lists a food-buying co-op, shared group insurance, a communal treasury fund specifically for members in need, and shared income among the options a havurah should consider. He even flags the mechanism most mutual aid organizers rediscover on their own: pooled resources create leverage that individuals never have alone, whether that’s buying power or, in his example, combined stockholder proxies against a company’s policies. This is not a metaphor for solidarity. It is solidarity, itemized.

Jacobson also builds in something most modern mutual aid writing skips past: an honest account of how hard this actually is to sustain. He warns that a community’s culture develops slowly, that shared values only widen as members actually get to know each other through real shared labor, not through a shared feed or a shared cause. He borrows a line from an anonymous Canadian commune pamphlet to make the point that a community is never finished being built. That’s not inspirational language. It’s a warning to anyone expecting the work to end once the structure exists.

None of this required a grant, a nonprofit status, or anyone’s institutional blessing. It required a house, a rotating set of people willing to take a turn leading, and a treasury fund built out of what members could actually contribute. Jacobson wrote this in 1973 for people trying to build Jewish community outside synagogues that weren’t meeting their needs. The document reads exactly the same if you strip out the word “Jewish” and hand it to anyone starting a mutual aid pod today, which tells you something about how little the actual mechanics of solidarity have changed in fifty years, and how much of what we call new organizing theory is really just rediscovery.