The Rival Congregation

It's been a while since I attended services across town.  I had been a member for 17 years but defected for a variety of reasons, from excessive blue penciling of the traditional service to a Rabbi less than fully cordial to a macher dominated structure.  I moved my allegiance.  My wife joined me five years later.  A dear friend had been systematically mistreated by Important People.  We were not Important People.  Despite a new Rabbi of great talent, he could not change the culture.  We went more traditional, Orthodox Rabbi, full liturgy, no machers of special entitlement, nobody designated as deserving torment, all on the upside, but marginalizing women's participation on the downside.  And that's where we are twenty-years later, with my wife one of the pillars despite her genetics. A span is more than ample for cultures and circumstances to change.  For us, rabbinical retirement and transition, along with a cultural change.  We've become more inbred with recycling of officers, almost creation of the USY-Cliques of our youths.  I was not in the clique in the 1960s, nor am I now.  Everyone's cordial.  Nobody invites friendship, and to an increasing extent, nobody invites new people onto their committees either.  Like a CPR code in a hospital, once you have the key doc or two on site and enough others to compress and bag, you really neither need nor want the room cluttered and send everyone else who responded away.  And if you are more useful than important, even if the utility is limited to an annual dues check that can get successfully cashed before Rosh Hashanah, you will be treated as useful.  My check always arrived on time and never bounced, giving me a share in what had really become a Gated Community.  And we have full liturgy, that litmus test of the traditional Judaism.  Yet on shabbos morning, I follow in the appropriate books, daven shacharit, read my Aliyah or two from the scroll when they need me to, and do a good job chanting the Haftarah on the diminishing occasions when invited. 

It is that Invited, which has atrophied in a disheartening way.  On occasion, I suspect my current seat on the sidelines with summary squashing of any initiative I propose to the current In-Crowd targets me personally, but I give them too much credit to think so.  More likely it reflects a cultural shift, one where above threshold or good enough or easy to execute becomes the aspiration of those with the sometimes thankless task of filling the schedules.  My time in the sanctuary, and I really have no reason to be on-site other than the sanctuary, is devoted to following along in the appropriate book, having the Rabbi compliment my shirt during the Torah processional, and following my tradition, started at my Bar Mitzvah congregation z"l when I was underage, of pouring 15 ml of scotch into my cup in lieu of the hideous Manischewitz filled plastic cups.  In his anthology Jewish Megatrends, Rabbi Sidney Schwarz cited his four aspirations for meaningful Judaism:  Chochma or Wisdom, Tzedek or Righteousness, Kehillah or Community, and Kedushah or Sanctity.  That tetrad written by me in Hebrew letters onto the whiteboard that sits in my line of sight to the left of my desk has become my checklist for what my Jewish experience should aspire to.  And my shabbos morning experience used to score a lot higher than it does now.

What's not on the checklist at all is the means of reaching each of those four objectives.  Extent of liturgy or what the community permits its women to do may be appealing or not.  Who engages you in conversation at Kiddush to enhance personal connection or stimulate your thoughts is very much the essence of Kehillah as is the invitation to be a meaningful participant who designs the activities, not just partakes of the final product.  That cultural shift very much disheartened me, enough to think maybe shabbos morning services might register as more meaningful someplace else.

My community has a lot of potential someplace else's, even more when expanded to Philadelphia 45 minutes to the north and Baltimore an hour and a half to the southwest.  Indeed, my wife often seeks satisfaction at the congregation in which we were married outside Philadelphia forty-five years ago where women of her level of talent have parity with men.  Moreover, she has female peers of comparable skills there.  I saw an Orthodox Rabbi from Baltimore on Jewish Broadcasting Service a number of years ago.  I drove to his synagogue one Shabbat morning, found the experience fully engaging, and until Covid worshiped there quarterly.  My community has a Chabad where I migrate when I need a change of pace, always treated warmly when I go there.  And when saying Kaddish for my father, prior to my retirement, the local Reform synagogue offered the only Kabbalat Shabbat service with a delayed start that would enable me to complete work and have shabbos dinner first.  Lovely people to be among, though they mostly tended to leave me to myself.  Continued to seek out those Friday nights periodically after Kaddish concluded, again terminated by Covid.  "I'm not going there again" never emerged for any of these alternatives.  Yet, none of them were my congregation.  I was always a visitor to a place that really had no obligation to me beyond the derech eretz, or civility, that Jewish people are expected to convey to one another.  Each is what it is, each had a particular objective, be it Kaddish at a convenient time, the warmth of the Chabad rabbi, the intellect of the Baltimore rabbi, or egalitarian Philadelphia without any reduction of liturgy.  I enjoyed them all in their time and their contexts, felt entitlement to none.  For my own congregation where I have a financial share and presence in their Gated Community, I do have some entitlement with a strong measure of tacit reciprocity that strikes me as not having been fulfilled for too long. My entitlement to be a contributor had been sidestepped if not bludgeoned at its highest levels of operation.  I missed it.  To my own detriment, perhaps, I resented feeling this way, no matter how accurate, and even from the perspective of the Clique, justifiable.

Since loyalty evaporated as an anchor, I set a few criteria that would bring me to my home congregation on a shabbos morning.  All invitations to serve as leader of shacharit or chant the weekly haftarah would be accepted.  Torah reader would be suspended to a specified date with the provision that I would only accept invitations to read Aliyot that were new to me, not recycled from prior years except for yom tovim where they are all often repeated and I've done most at least once previously.   But even there, not the one I did the previous year. I had an obligation to my friends the Gabaim who schedule shacharit and haftarah, neither part of the governance, but not to the VP Religion who schedules Torah readers, or to any other VP or committee chairman that excluded me.  My wife has a more acceptable presence.  If she participates, I will be there in support.  And there are special events: Shiva minyanim, friends needing a minyan for kaddish, an honorary kiddush, a visiting rabbi candidate to replace our departing one.  There are enough of these that I will not really be absent, though I doubt anyone will identify the pattern of when I am there and when I am not.

Setting fixed criteria to ration my presence, go on strike metaphorically perhaps, seemed rather easy.  It's not really going on strike, though, as real labor discontents articulate what they want in exchange for their return.  Finding that what I want knowing it will not be fulfilled makes my project much more difficult than going on strike.  Probably what I want may be to respect the logo on the letterhead which announces Embracing-Engaging-Enriching.  I recall the Board discussions, given the agenda item "Branding".  It's purpose in those discussions was framed as attracting new members and their checks, not really changing the culture of the congregation so it can really deliver those goods.  And for me, it didn't.  But it remains a reasonable benchmark.

Where is it fulfilled?   I don't really know, since sitting in the audience as religious services proceed never generates all three.  That comes from interactions beyond worship, being invited to create something that will delight others, having a forum to politely but candidly express what you think without having it dismissed with the wave of a hand, never seriously considering that you've been blackballed or fenced out of the clique.  Perhaps I want to revisit my medical training programs, both as student and teacher, where Embracing-Engaging-Enriching was that coin of the realm which had a way of ultimately benefiting patients a generation later.  That's the model of Rabbi Schwarz'  Chochma/Tzedek/Kehillah/Kedusha.  Being in the audience or partaking what somebody else built for you without having a share in its creation does not really satisfy our letterhead logo, yet that's how it seems to be pursued.

This past week, no requests from either of the Gabbaim to place me on the bimah.  Wife limited to an indivual in the congregation without particular activity that requires her advanced preparation.  Did not meet my directed criteria for going there.  While going no place often offers the best alternative, it is still shabbos where the four commentaries on the weekly portion that I review each Thursday at my screen acquire a public reading.  There's commonality to ceremony along with its variations.  I did not want to stay home.  It's been years since I attended an ordinary shabbos morning at the United Synagogue affiliate where I once had my primary membership.  My congregation rented space in their chapel for two years after we sold our own building, always as something of a supplicant, but also our leadership drifting to its path of least resistance in a place everyone knew and associated with Judaism.  I did not dislike entering the building those two years.  Indeed, I admired what I saw as I wandered around.  An upgraded foyer, modern rest room, a bin with premade nametags.  Their officers, or committee conferences, judged it important that nobody be anonymous.  Guard at the entrance for the security that synagogues now require.  They had a flat screen noting events, from the name of the Bar Mitzvah to activities in the upcoming week.  They created a different type of community from when I had left, much less top-down or dependent on king makers.  Yet in those two years, I had only attended a few hybrid weekday morning services that we formally shared with our synagogue landlords.  Never shabbos.  Never Festivals.  And their High Holy Days are admission limited spectacles that always disheartened or irritated me the years I belonged there, even though I was one of their Torah readers most years.  Of my options, sampling their actual worship seemed my most attractive destination last shabbos.  

And so shabbos arrived.  I left my house in time to arrive about ten minutes after their scheduled beginning.  While parking in their lot is limited, at my arrival no cars sat along the sidewalk on either side of the building.  I captured my space, took my tallis bag from the back seat, then walked to the entrance.  A sign indicated they found it acceptable to skip Covid protective masks that morning, but I still slipped mine on.  No guard sat at the door to let me in, though it was locked.  I waved to some people in the foyer.  The young man finishing the table set-up came to let me in.  A past-President offered me a United Synagogue version of the siddur and Chumash.  After putting on my tallis, then clipping it to minimize slippage, I entered unobtrusively, picked a seat in the back row away from anyone else, and placed my tallis bag and idle Chumash on the seat next to me, though soon moving them to the windowsill behind me as more people entered needing chairs.

And then a few hours of shabbos delight commenced.  Their new Cantor, really an ordained Conservative Rabbi with musical skills, began at the beginning.  It is the congregation's practice to limit the preliminary prayers to ones with tunes, but once to the Morning Service proper, the liturgy was recited in its entirety except for repetition of the Amidah.  This being Rosh Chodesh, or the New Month, Half Hallel was inserted, georgeous chanting accompanied with guitar chords strummed by the Cantor as she chanted.  Torah service there has always been abbreviated to be completed in three years instead of one.  Several people divided the seven portions plus a supplement chanted by a woman from my shul from a separate scroll to commemmorate Rosh Chodesh.  The service itself has elements of commonality shared by shabbos worship all over the world but portions of uniqueness that display the imprint of the congregation.  Much of this occurs during the Torah Service and the sermon that follows.  Three aliyot were read interlinear fashion by a retired rabbi who used to do this in her congregation, something I had never heard previously.  

A worship gathering also does double duty as a public assembly, indeed the term used in Israel for a synagogue is House of Assembly, not House of Prayer.  Congregational business gets conducted during or just after part of the Torah reading.  Individuals from the congregation who are ill are offered a prayer by name for healing.  By then about 50 people sat in the chapel and another 18 were attending electronically by Zoom.  Each ill person noted by an attendee got a blessing.  In the diaspora, we request success of our country, then solicit Divine protection for Israel.  And Ukraine also received a word for the protection its people currently need.  Congregations celebrate special events.  A woman completed her conversion this week.  She chose a Hebrew name for herself, explained why she chose those two names, then received her honor of her first Calling to the Torah.  She is to be married shortly.  Her fiance then had his Aliyah, known as an aufruf.  And after the Torah was put away, the weekly message on the portion was masterfully presented by another ordained rabbi, the same gender spouse of the one who had done the interlinear Torah reading.  Another masterful presentation weaving three key words from the portion to a unified theme.  And while all this took place, the senior Rabbi, who because of geography and circumstance became the Rabbi to the current President of the United States, inserted short comments, insights into the supplements for this Rosh Chodesh day, and more importantly a word or two of prays for each person of honor from the convert, groom, their new Cantor, each Torah reader, the woman giving the sermon, all in real time as they took their moments in their personal limelight.

What I experienced to sum in a paragraph is the pageant that shabbos, or also expanded worship, is intended to be.  It is not as a former college classmate who became Chancellor at the Jewish Theological Seminary once remarked to a journalist, "rote prayers, dull sermons, and people strutting with great self-importance."  This was celebration of time and of people who came there when they could have been engaging in their Saturday morning recreation.  Some Jews were new to this but are now full-fledged Jews.  Many had to devote personal time to enhancing their skills, thinking what the selected passages of Torah were trying to impart.  Many people deserved praise, and the Rabbi never failed to publicly acknowledge each achievement in real time as it happened.  And I was part of that pageant, though  merely a visitor.  And for those two hours or so, if the sanctuary sparkled, I sparkled too. 

At a service's conclusion, it is customary to greet each other, drink an ounce of wine, maybe add a few sweet or savory calories.  How people familiar and unfamiliar are approached may say more about a Kehillah than the worship that preceeded it .  Many people there knew me for other settings, some Jewish, some professional.  I had  ample well-wishers, a few more curious.  What I did get to do was tell the Rabbi and a few old friends how much that morning in their sanctuary glowed.  It did.  I will be back.

Even better would be to export that more than perfunctory appreciation of for what the participants did, those celebratory moments for a brand new Jew, for a sermon guest who was sought out by the Senior Rabbi for her known knowledge, for people new at Torah reading who did more this shabbos than they could do before, a new Cantor inserting her liturgical talent to create beauty to expand some of that glow to my more usual shabbos morning experience. We have our culture too.  It's different.  But as every college Hillel alumni knows, it is that importation of the highlights of multiple elsewheres that generate a unique and inviting presences right here.  

And for the verbal praise:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN5VwaAsN5M