My guess is that anyone who has ever attended an OIA committee meeting has heard someone eventually ask: "What is our purpose, anyway?" I've certainly heard it dozens of times, and I received only a 10-Year-Service pin last November. No matter how long you've been around the OIA, you know what I am talking about. If the question were a person, I bet it'd be wearing the 27-Year-Service pin, having been present probably at every meeting since the OIA was born in 1976. The question is as unvarying a part of the OIA as the good food and the bad wine. Any debate can trigger it: What starts as a discussion about which applicant should get the last scholarship or which caterer has the best rice may turn into a collective self-colonoscopy. The question of how best to improve OIA's new home is merely the most recent on-ramp to the freeway of perplexity. There is not a more self-doubting bunch out there, save, perhaps, the student body at the Academy for Beauty Contestants.

If you still don't see what I mean, just think about this essay a moment.

So, that's settled: We're much given to communal soul-searching. Now, let's ask why. Why are we so prone to question our purpose, and why can't we come up with a good answer, at least one that everyone can remember until the next OIA meeting?

Of course, I discount our declared "purpose," the one on the OIA website: "To preserve the Armenian heritage, traditions, and culture through its literature, education, sports, and other benevolent methods." That declaration is not all that helpful. Aside from the funny grammar, it's too vague about how or when the OIA's purpose is fulfilled. Even more important, it doesn't quite distinguish us as Istanbul, or if you will, Turkish Armenians living now in Los Angeles. If our purpose were to preserve the Armenian heritage, traditions, and culture, then it's not clear that we'd need an organization of Istanbul Armenians at all. Plenty of other organizations would serve the function just as well or better.

The question that keeps coming time and time again—"What is our purpose?"—aims at something else: What are we, Istanbul Armenians of Los Angeles, supposed to do as a community?"

Of course, part of the difficulty is that we do have a choice about what to do, about how best to apply our collective energy. We face no real external restrictions; we live in a society that's almost pathologically permissive. We feel as free as any group ever hoped to be. Paradoxically, that liberty robs us of the confidence that guides the oppressed. When the instinct for survival no longer leads, the horizon grows hazy. Clear skies portend a storm. How is one to survive the absence of threat? And what is one to survive as?

The truth about our "purpose" eludes us because the answer may be too obvious. We are so conditioned to thinking in terms of explicit, tangible goals that we forget how big an accomplishment it is just to be together and to recognize each other as somehow alike. One might go so far as to claim that OIA's purpose is served every time there are enough of us around the meeting table for one person to ask, "What is our purpose, anyway?" Building on Saroyan's boast that any two Armenians will recreate Armenia anywhere they meet, we might say that the OIA will thrive so long as any two "Istanbul" Armenians meeting under its roof question why they are there. Just talking to each other, taking an interest and being aware of what's happening to others in the "community" is enough.

The organization and the community can survive if we as individuals remain interested in and intimate with other individuals "like" us. Such simple things as doing each other favors, showing up at funerals and sick beds, lending money and giving advice all go a long way to preserve us as a community. Individual interaction is the bedrock of communal fitness. The point is to learn from (and teach) each other how we may better live as individuals in our new life. We need each other, not necessarily a community. Community will follow and form around us; we need not—nor can we—look to it as our guide or to create it with conscious effort. Personal allegiances are the pistons of the communal engine, not the other way around.

The goal cannot be to preserve some fixed identity or ideal community. There is no such entity save what emerges spontaneously from the network of individual relationships. Like every other people at every other time in the world, Armenian communities have adapted to local conditions, evolving at different paces in different directions. That has meant an archipelago of Armenian identities separated by real differences in thought and taste, views and values, united only by a conscious, and not always even, effort at some distinct peoplehood. As in the case of other ethnic groups, the essence of Armenian identity is its constant obsession with preserving its essence. This is not to say that our identity is a fiction, mere fabrication, only that it is something that emerges from the interaction of individuals who are inescapably shaped by their environment and whose notions of a vibrant community depend on how they see themselves and their peers as individuals. So long as individual identities are in flux—and they always are—so will be the communal character.

To put it a simpler way, our purpose cannot be the achievement or preservation of some fixed ideal of a community or identity. Attempting to recreate some glorious past or space is futile, if only because any such standard is necessarily a work of fiction. No "community" worthy of the designation or emulation would ever have thought itself ideal or complete, if it thought about itself as a community at all. The pursuit of self-perfection may be the hallmark of communal vitality but it must also be an implicit admission of imperfection. Genuine community rests on ineffable bonds.

So as we look around and are distressed by such trends as the decreased use of the Armenian language, the increased rate of divorce and out-marriage, or apparent cultural and moral drift, we ought to consider that our grand parents and their parents were probably just as troubled by changes in their time, that the fading brilliance of the past is a permanent lament of any present. What's more, we should consider that their survival probably had little to do with any conscious effort to preserve the past or their community per se. They most likely looked after their own affairs as best they could and left the bigger, collective picture to draw itself. How could they have done otherwise? How is one to "save" a whole people or a way of life if the individual relationships and incentives lying at its heart are no longer tenable? Yet our grandparents succeeded; at least, what they did proved good enough to be considered by the coming generations as success.

That brings me to the happy end. So long as we live well as individuals and stay close to each other, our community will thrive and OIA's purpose will be fulfilled. In the end, we may not look like any other Armenian community past or present or even like the community we foresaw, but that's to be expected. Ultimately, we will need each other much more that we will need some intangible ideal. We ought not be like some people who love their nation but can't stand each other.

That our purpose is so elusive is good news, not bad. Our apparent groping for the true path is a sign that we are well on it. It's not so much what we do that matters but that we do it together. The OIA is in good health so long as there are people coming there to question its future.