Blackballed

 

Each spring, typically soon after Memorial Day, a letter from my congregation arrives.  It typically contains several pages, announcing the date and time of the Annual Meeting required by our By-Laws.  The meeting mostly has a predictable agenda.  Our budget needs approval by a majority vote of a quorum.  I can anticipate some nit-picking, somebody questioning whether we spend too much on Kiddush pastries or whether we could enhance revenue by a more assertive approach to securing sponsors of more of our Kiddushim.  Bupkis amount relative to the size of the budget.  Somebody will invariably remark about the declining fraction of revenue that accrues from membership dues, as our dues paying headcount has been bleeding a few members annually for decades, virtually without replacement.  Some disaffiliate for potentially preventable dissatisfaction, but never enough in any budget cycle to change congregational financial fortunes.  Our Membership VPs handle this as an accounting exercise:  One new member, four left, most often a reflection of our congregational Kaplan-Meier cumulative mortality graph.  I also have a small gripe, one probably noticed by nobody but me.  As our revenue becomes more insecure each year, it has been a while since there was ever a budget line for spending an amount to promote congregational advancement, whether a social event that better enables people to identify with us or inviting a guest scholar to teach us or an independent consultant to stem our attrition.  No matter how poor or cash strapped a person or organization is, some advancement allotment needs consideration as an investment in what we are and in what we aspire to become.  But the numbers will be teased a bit, as people make their statements.  It will be approved by a wide margin, though with a dissenter or two, also making a statement but not making a difference.

Some years we have a single big-ticket item that needs formal majority approval.  This year it is the contract for our incoming Rabbi.  Again, expect somebody who wished he had more authority and wisdom than he really does to wangle usually confidential numbers like salary.  I would like to know about performance incentives built into the contract, as they announce what is important to the organization.  But the congregation being financially strapped, and the incoming Rabbi among the long-term unemployed, I anticipate some form of low-ball package for him in exchange for the security of a regular paycheck, one of known amount that can neither be reduced nor enhanced.  Performance incentives, or even knowing what constitutes effort related excellence, is beyond the conceptual capacity of our influencers.  It will be approved.

And we vote on officers.  As in previous years, there is a board vacancy not filled, yet the Nominating Committee bypassed me when filling their positions.  Nobody would make a better contribution to the governance than me, apparently literally.  I’ll take that as a snub, or perhaps a blackball.  However, maybe I am too harsh.  Most of the people on this year’s Nominating Committee, appointed and chaired by the President, were the very people I personally advised him to put on it.  The kingmakers, the Influencers, the people who dismiss you with the wave of a palm, those familiar faces of past years, were not on it.  And I got snubbed just the same.  There was one new VP, the Membership specialist who I think a long way from anything specialist.  Pretty much everyone who appears on the roster, which will be approved unopposed, appears at Shabbos services, which contracts the pool from maybe 200 possible people to about 30.  And I do not know who they asked but turned them down, other than my wife, and who else like me is on their worse than nobody list.  But it does not strike me as the people who can implement a reversal of the inexorable waning of interest in signing on and then paying dues.

And since the people doing the nominating were people I asked the President to do the nominating, I can have some fun over the rest of the year needling them about the snub.