High Holiday Honors

Each year the chairman of my congregation's High Holiday Committee, which really isn't a committee anymore like so many other things there, send out participatory invitations for the men, which contain a financial solicitation.  This year for the first time, it included check boxes for amount, all in excess of what I want to give.  Indeed, considering the decline in attendance by a few men each year accumulating over many years, they probably should be paying me to help out.  I've been dissatisfied, declining my annual invitation to serve as Yom Kippur Torah reader.  In exchanged they requested that I bind the Scroll at the end of the reading and write a three digit check for the honor.  I really don't want to be more than a spectator, and certainly not a donor.  Yet the person who doles out these tasks, labelled Honors, has never been among the officers who have so callously bypassed me and dismissed me, probably the underpinning of my resentment.  He means well, likely gets more complaints than thanks, and there are a lot of Ark Openings to be filled and only men qualify.  I wonder how many respond by asking for placement on his Do Not Call List.  That's my inclination too.  They understand withholding a donation more than any verbal expressions of congregational negative transference reactions.   My check won't bounce, but I really don't want to create entitlement for what has really been a problematic relationship.