Relentless Pursuit of Mediocrity

One shabbos per month, our Cantor takes off, leaving Torah reading to the congregants.  We have started a periodic service where women can be participants with a few strings attached.  While coming to the rescue grudgingly during the Cantor's illness, I thought I could have the subsequent month enjoying shabbos morning someplace else, whether Chabad, Beth Tfiloh, or atop my new mattress as our Cantor makes his return.  It is not to be, at least for one shabbos.  This has been assigned to our Partnership Minyan.  The Aliyah Meister assigned the readings from the weekly portion of Yitro.  All are short except for the one with the Ten Commandments which comprises less than a full column and is familiar to many of us.  Who does the Aliyah Meister ask to do it?  Three highly experienced men.  Based on availability it defaulted to me.  I suggested that in a month one of the women assigned a shorter on can learn that one and somebody with less experience can do the shorter one.  Then she offerred me that shorter one.

Sometimes they just don't get it.  I took the one with the Ten Commandments whose text I mostly know.  Our Logo reads Embracing-Engaging-Enriching.  If you reassign everyone what they did last time and never challenge anyone to enhance their capacity even when the opportunity and the need is glaring, the people can never progress.  This Partnership Minyan has been a showcase with mixed results for a few years.  It's purpose was to provide women left on the sidelines a chance to advance their capacity.  They have the same women and the same capacity.

Does anyone hold responsibility for this?  I would think the Rabbi who approved the project and set its ground rules.  You just cannot have people languish, watch them languish, and not try to remedy this.  In the Rabbi's absence we now have people reading other people's Divrei Torah.  Hello?  We are all university graduates who can write a 5-minute talk on a topic from the week's Torah reading.  Two people do that, one especially well and the other more than adequate.  Reading somebody else's work to me, particularly a short work,  just doesn't cut it, except for maybe an audiobook read by the author or professional actor.  Personal engagement will drive the future of our failing congregation.  We have some in the search for our new location lest we be homeless.  We had it clearing out the building we sold.  However too many decisions default to expediency when the better decision, from Rabbi's contract extension to how to get the weekly portion read at an acceptable level, involves some hardship but a chance to rise to the occasion.