Exercise Benefit

Intensifying my physical efforts has gone mostly well.  Treadmill schedule maintained over months.  Speed gradually advanced.  Duration gradually advanced.  Cool-down period initiated.  I might even approach a sense of Flow periodically, but not often.  Mostly it is a chore to complete with a daily end point but no future end point.  It has a purpose.  Feel more energetic.  And I do.  Sleep better.  Mostly improved, though harder to tie the consistency of my exercise program.

Everything has its downside, including exercise.  While I try to have a set time to put myself on the treadmill, with a ritual of placing a brace on my right knee, then adding the running shoes kept adjacent to the lounge chair adjacent to the treadmill, some minor deviations become necessary.  Morning appointments require me to exercise either earlier or later.  I prefer earlier, though when done on consecutive days during the OLLI school term, I can sense the disruption.  While I usually wear my designated treadmill shoes, I also have two other pairs of New Balance walkers.  Both are better quality running shoes than those generics kept on site.  And I walk more comfortably with the New Balance shoes, but I use them primarily as daily street wear because of their comfort and versatility.

I've also made an attempt to improve my flexibility.  Every MWF unless traveling I set the big flat screen in My Space to an eight minute Tone and Tighten program.  It had been M-Th for a long time, but due to inadequate progress, I added an extra session each week.  I feel less stiff but more achy, particularly the sacroiliac and thigh regions.  It does not seem to be the type of myalgia I can blame on each evening's statin dose.  And since adding the intensity and frequency, I've only had to postpone the treadmill once and the stretch program not at all.  Yet the soreness remains noticeable, even at each month's end when I give myself a three day recovery from the treadmill, though not the stretch.

For now, the commitment to this has been mostly good.  In addition to physical well-being, there is a mental boost.  Maybe it's Grit, that ability to perform on days I don't really want to perform.  I've not experienced Mastery, though I probably could not have endured what I do now at each session a few months ago.

It time, some illness or injury or maybe travel will disrupt what I have achieved, as it did previously.  Now I know I can reset the program, add to the intensity every few weeks, and restore what had been achieved.  Worth the effort, both to feel better and to prove to myself my ability to meet a difficult challenge and the excuses to avoid it.

Immunized

 

Fundamentally, I'm a good sport.  At the request of my son, who anticipates his first child and my first grandchild, I had the pharmacist vaccinate me against pertussis. Being a senior, my form would be a Tdap.  It protects me from tetanus and diphtheria as well as pertussis.  In my long medical career, I've never seen tetanus or diphtheria, in large part because everyone got immunized.  I do not recall ever seeing whooping cough, or pertussis, though I recall rounding with pediatricians as a student or resident where that was a consideration for a sick child.  While I've not encountered this, reliable American data anticipates about 10000 Americans will get pertussis each year.  Tetanus and diphtheria have largely disappeared.  While the bacteria that cause these things remain in the environment, vaccinated, herd, or anamnestic immunity is so high that clinical cases no longer emerge.  

Vaccines have become political.  They shouldn't be.  When I took my mandatory pediatric student rotation in 1976, polio and smallpox had been eradicated.  Kids occasionally got measles, as immunization had become available about ten years earlier.  On History and Physical exams that we wrote on patients of all ages, Usual Childhood Diseases were lumped as a unit, most patients emerging both unscathed and immune.  Mumps, chicken pox, and most importantly bacterial meningitis still cropped up.  Not everyone had a complete recovery, as some kids were left with hearing and cognitive effects.  Adults who got mumps, escaping the childhood form, might develop orchitis, which I have seen, and following my own mumps, inadvertently passed along to my friend's father.  These are conditions with widespread effective recovery, but not entirely harmless.  Polio immunization became available when I entered first grade.  I had a HS classmate with forearm crutches and calf braces,  presumably from polio, others with hearing aids, likely from measles.  As viral disorders, many do not have effective antimicrobial options once an established clinical illness arises.

Adults do not get off scot-free.  I've seen hepatitis, even lived through the era when the different forms of this infection became sorted through diagnostic testing.  Influenza can have severe outbreaks, with some patients who do not survive.  And Covid-19 caused a widespread lethal pandemic.  Shingles devastates older people.  And not all viral illnesses present acutely.  Cervical cancer fell dramatically with the incorporation of Pap Smears to periodic gynecological care.  But the young women who got this, even in its early stages, needed significant, often invasive medical care and future surveillance.  A vaccine to prevent this has reduced morbidity.

So what gives high-profile anti-vaxxers credence?  First, perhaps, is that excessive medical care is a variant of bad medical care.  Were it not for the need to protect a newborn, my Tdap would not have happened.  We stopped immunizing for smallpox when the risk of the vaccine exceeded the likelihood of getting a rare disease.  Polio, diphtheria, and tetanus are devastating but in America do not occur.  Still, even the anti-vaxxers don't seem to object to protecting people from rare diseases that will create great harm to even a few.  Bacterial meningitis, Haemophilus and pneumococcal, I've treated kids with both in a pre-cephalosporin era of Penicillin + Chloramphenicol, is memorable to patients, families, and the hospital staff that cares for those kids.  Nobody wants that to ever happen.  No push-back from the anti-vaxxers.   Hepatitis in adults is another life-shortening condition.  If an employer such as a medical center wants its staff protected, no political resistance to this.  Nor to pneumococcal immunization, as pneumcoccal pneumonia and pneumococcal bactermia can be lethal.  

So we are left with controversy over conditions from which people usually recover, particularly measles but also mumps and chicken pox, and vaccines that fall short of the protections offered by polio, DPT, and pneumococcal immunizations.  I've had Covid-19 while up to date on standard protection. My wife had life-threatening Covid while immunized.  This is not a real good immunization when placed against the tried and true medical advancements of fifty or more years ago.  Still, the medical treatment for established infection also leaves a lot to be desired.  And mass immunization capturing people not likely to incur serious harm from Covid, whether school children or healthy adults, remains a legitimate uncertainty for which properly conducted studies in lieu of public reasonableness policies, or even laws, may be a better public option.

My employer mandated flu vaccines.  Many years ago, I had an adverse local site reaction that kept me out of work for three days.  I went twenty years without voluntary winter immunization, taking my chances as a young healthy adult likely to recover.  And the efficacy of the vaccine from one year to the next falls way short of ideal.  Polio and tetanus are eradicated.  Influenza is not. 

The immunizations that reach the recommended preventions have very infrequent adverse effects.  A sore arm like I had.  Yet it can become political.  People of my era remember photos of President Ford, then also candidate Ford, receiving a Swine Flu injection, with the anticipated bandwagon effect getting other patriotic citizens to make their deltoids available.  Before long, a handful of recipients developed Gillan-Barre paralysis, a devastating condition with variable recovery.  And Swine Flu fizzled as an epidemic illness.  The political concerns today involve people whose wealth or prominence creating credence who believe that too many preschoolers who would have recovered from measles are permanently disadvantaged by vaccine-induced autism.  As Reb Tevye of Broadway reminded us in the 1960's "when you're rich they think you really know."  People with professional expertise, most of whom think the measles immunization prevents disability with little risk to the recipient, get marginalized.  However, the medical majority has its failures, too.  While my class had kids with polio and measles residuals, today's public school students carry Epi-Pens generated by mothers who followed the pediatric guidelines and withheld exposure of their toddlers to peanuts.  There are benefits to exposing youngsters to common allergens, with functional development of beneficial antibodies as the common outcome.  

So my own immunizations have been augmented to help somebody dear to me, if not myself.  No covid this year.  Flu would devastate me.  I got that one.  Don't want to risk pneumococcus.  Polio risk averted at my parents' insistence.  Hepatitis immunization as an employer requirement, paid for by them.  Still taking my chances on Shingles.  Maybe I shouldn't

Tolerating IKEA

Wandering IKEA's aisles, or really maze, never gets stale.  I can always count on at least an economical platter of gravlax and dessert.  My last two visits, a recent entry to their St. Louis store prompted by a need for a reliable restroom and to my local offering just a half hour away, did not go well.  Not even that gravlax, as they remodeled their cafeteria.  Still, getting there, followed by a lengthy walk from their parking lot to their furniture display, or even the St. L restrooms, does not deter my next visit, at least to my regional location.

Usually I have some notion of what I might want to buy.  At St. L nothing.  Mostly my local drives, which take a half hour each way through some parts of South Philadelphia shared with marine terminals, other big box stores, some gentleman's entertainment, and warehouses make me wonder how far into the future the next drive there should be.  At times I know what I want.  A mattress. A sofa. My wife accompanies me for those.  More often I go alone.  She and my daughter even stayed in the rental car as I sought out the St L facilities.  

Even when I don't have a specific item to assess, I create some imagined focus.  Shelves, kitchen ideas, closet upgrades, replace my desk chair, some kitchen or lighting tools from their lower level Marketplace.  Something to enable me to stop following the ubiquitous arrows they place on the floor.  I divert myself into a model room or an array of stuff on the floor.  I sit.  I touch with my hands.  I check the price.  For bigger things, can I get it home?  Do I really want to assemble this item in my living room with their shoddy disposable tools and language-free drawn instructions?  

Sometimes I just need to drive someplace other than my house.  A half hour seems the right distance, especially if rewarded with the Swedish version of chocolate layer cake and sodas in flavors that the WaWa does not have.

It was time for my next trip, as I looked at no merchandise while visiting their St. L store, which happened to be in convenient part of town, had readily available free parking and a restroom maintained by attendants.  At home I look at stuff when I visit IKEA, irrespective of need.  Two items:  maybe replace my desk chair, obtained from an office surplus clearance thirty years back.  IKEA has all sorts of desk chairs, price $100-500.  Not all had price tags.  Indeed, on this visit, many bins and individual items had no indication of price.  I sat on several, mostly high-backed, mostly expensive by their standards.  I liked some.  None truly superior to my current chair.  I looked casually at storage.  My Space might benefit from a new recliner.  IKEA living room furniture does not measure up to those of in-person or online furniture stores, either comfort or price.  I did not even seek these out.  As much as I like decorative things, I already have too many, having just purged some from my desk.

In their Marketplace, I look at all sorts of stuff.  I learned on Shavuot that I did not have milchig serving utensils.  Their salad sets looked shoddy.  I could use more milchig plates.  I prefer patterned of some type.  They only had solid white or light blue.  Storage I could always upgrade.  Nothing caught my attention. Gradually I have replaced the lighting in each room and outside.

IKEA creates the illusion of need, but what they really market is want.  I needed nothing, wanted almost nothing except a plate of gravlax and some cake for lunch.  This time they deprived me.

Thumb Typing

 

As an eighth grader, planning my HS freshman curriculum, I sat with my mother and guidance counselor in his cramped office.  He commented that my teachers invariably complained about my penmanship.  Legible handwriting meant more in the 1960s than it does now, when everyone has a keyboard at hand.  He glanced at my grades, then thought he would amuse us by taking me to a branch point.  Become a doctor or enroll in typing class.  Even future doctors had to write in essay books throughout high school and college.  The next fall, I shuttled just a few doors over at the end of my scheduled daily English class to a room filled with Royal and Underwood Olivetti office model manual typewriters.  Too big for anyone to steal.  None bolted to the desks.  My assigned seat brought me to a Royal, frame color robin's egg blue.  They prepped us for accuracy and for speed.  Mediocre on accuracy, though I would probably surpass anybody else in the class in a spelling bee.  Speed limited by the same manual dexterity challenges that got me mediocre grades in art and shop classes throughout Junior High.  My speed lagged behind everyone else's.  I probably could find most of the keys without peeking at them, but the mid-teen me was too insecure to risk typos, which happened anyway.

I got by.  My father had a manual typewriter from college that became our home device.  From then on, I typed my own papers.  When my mother typed them for me, the Greeks always appeared as Freeks.  Proofreading and white-out correction fluid would come later.  When I typed my own papers, the teachers often nudged the grade up a couple of points for the correct spelling and few typos.

I college, I bought an electric typewriter, one that allowed the line return with the hit of a button with my right pinkie instead of a lever to the left of the platen.  It served me for decades, until the advantages of word processing to touch typing became so overwhelming that electric typewriters disappeared, as did the J.J. Newberry store where I purchased it.  That skill of knowing which finger went with which letter served me well, though I never got the hang of numbers on the top line.  The numeric pad to the right of the letters compensated that effortlessly, as I had much practice with an electric adding machine long before hand calculators took over.

Desktops, then laptops.  No remedial effort needed.  Tablets with the keyboard as part of the screen, though, returned me to single finger hunt and peck typing.  And the smartphone, QWERTY keyboard of tiny letters smaller than the tips of my fingers, restored me to the same slow speed, poor accuracy of my Junior High years.  I'm the slowest again.

As I watch kids, though, including my own young adults, and HS and college age kids on buses and planes and other public places, they type fast.  It is not the touch typing that they made me learn in 8th grade, nor is it the nine finger tapping of a keyboard with real keys, whether desktop or laptop.  Instead, the speed comes with two finger typing, the thumb of each hand while the iPhone or Android cradles in a palm.  My OLLI course list does not offer a class in how to do this.  There are tutorials, though.  They date back to the early days of the iPhone.  YouTube videos.  Written monographs.  Maybe they even tutor this in grade school or other places where kids that young shouldn't have phones.

It's tempting to try my hand at mastery, though lack of this skill has not been detrimental. Acquiring this proficiency might be if I use it to text people incessantly.  Still, I cannot help but admire all those young folks tapping their pseudokeys at an awesome rate, even if they would be better off using their devices less.  Like my own entry to touch typing, now sixty years ago, skills enhance with practice.  They become useful, if not essential.  And at present, my left thumb remains mostly dormant on a standard keyboard.  I should try to find a useful purpose for that left-out digit.

Other Congregations

 

Busy week of places of worship, alternatives to mine.

1. My shul, Saturday Morning, worship
2. Episcopal Church, urban area that has seen better days, Saturday evening, concert
3. My former synagogue, part of city where few Jews live, Sunday afternoon, guest lecturer
4. Traditional Congregation in posh area of distant city, historical legacy, Saturday morning, worship
5. Presbyterian Church, distant city, middle-class suburban, Saturday afternoon, reception

All different, mostly different purposes.  Some familiar to me, others part of my more distant travels.  Some eagerly awaited attendance, others more grudging, purpose-driven attendance.  Using my familiar synagogue as the anchor, the other four sites, with my experiences there, expose what might be possible.  And some of our practices, particular to us, have their own superiorities not always appreciated until placed next to an active alternative.

Given a yellow pad with erasable pencil and assigned to create a synagogue teeming with my druthers, not subject to vetoes of clergy or Dominant Influencers, or even majority votes, my final product would have some features of mine, perhaps less focused on a legacy once more glorious than current circumstances. Each of the other four brings something to that yellow pad.

The Episcopal church has an active music program.  They hire a full-time music director.  Many Christian churches depend on music to engage people, to create a spirit.  It sometimes comes at a price when those in attendance sway to the music but never acquire significant literacy with either of their Testaments.  Still, the music there has elegance that we cannot hope to duplicate, or even want to duplicate.  Generous donors enabled restoration of my state's largest pipe organ.  They named it in memory of the sweetest pediatrician, a church member who became a dominant presence in our local medical world when women of that professional stature were scarce.  Organ specialists from Warrensburg MO, halfway across America, came to guide the organ's assembly and its majestic sound.  The music director auditions participants to ensure that musical skill exceeds a threshold.  The concert that I attended attracted musicians from the community as well as the church.  Difficult music in more than one language.  A detailed program with some advertising, solicitation of donors, and expert bios of key performers.  An amateur musical historian outlined each piece and its composer.

This church sits at the edge of a neglected part of town, a few blocks walk from a dangerous neighborhood.  Like my synagogue, it is a merger of churches from times past.  Its building is worn, parking adequate for the occasion, though people still need to find space on nearby streets.  They hosted a reception after the concert.  I had made 48 oatmeal chocolate chip cookies as a contribution, while others provided a mixture of sweet and savory handhelds.  The congregation has a recognizable political element, as the Palestinian flag that greeted committed Zionist me when I checked in caught my immediate attention.  At each concert, the chorale provides a feedback sheet to assess who attends demographically, motivations to attend, and other comments.  My own remark about expanding beyond European/American choral music was taken seriously, with this concert including a popular Israeli song.  It toned down that flag, but I still questioned its propriety in my comments.

What might I import?  We have a volunteer choir, restricted to males.  At one time, we supported a mixed choir that performed as entertainment once a year, never as liturgy, but very much part of my shul's signature events.  We do not take feedback seriously, a reality of a culture with a few Dominant Influencers who I think really believe any practices not their own are inferior.  For religious dietary restrictions, we cannot have random people bringing potluck food.  We sort of have a political stance centered around Zionism and support of a modern nation state with unchallenged Jewish sovereignty.  Within that framework, though, we have much diversity.  We also have former members who have made Aliyah to Israel We also have children of current and former members living there and subject to the Israel Defense Forces universal draft. While none have been reported a casualties, we are aware of the realities.  Some members are rather cavalier supporting an aggressive offense as the most effective defense.  Others are more acculturated to making win-win deals, limited primarily by a suitable partner.  Some members are MAGA and ZOA, more are registered Democrats who wince a bit at anti-Semitism from the left.  Many of our members have degrees from those elite campuses where the taboo on anti-Semitism has been lifted.  But as a congregation, we are neither Red nor Blue.  In Jewish tradition, we fall more toward analysis of the possibilities.  But the Israeli flag remains in a secure position at the front of our sanctuary and at all off-site events that we sponsor.

Often the harshest comments fall on the organizations that one has defected for cause.  Places that nominally share your heritage, sense of tribe, your manner of thinking, yet have a leadership on site and enthroned centrally that betray core personal aspirations.  The shul where I attended the lecture reflects that mixture of admiration for some things, but enough repulsion to others to relocate my synagogue affiliation after seventeen years there, with some visible positions along the way.  While Rabbis have come and gone, most personable, the macher-dominated influencers of old have been cloned as proteges.  I go there for worship maybe once a year, less now that they put bouncers at their front door to gatekeep those not registered with their office in advance.  After my congregation sold its building, they housed us there.  Their chapel was fine for worship, the people I encountered most weeks were cordial.  They have more money than we do, helped out by a few members of serious wealth.  And if we needed a tenth man, they never hesitated to provide one.  While not mistreated, we were clearly tenants.  It took no time for our officers and Rabbi to realize that we preferred finding our own place over renewing our lease.

Yet as I walked around the interior, I could see that they had useful undertakings. When people walk into their entryway, where our Kiddush would be held, they could see alphabetized boxes of name tags with lanyards.  They felt it important that their people, whether regular or sporadic, prominent or obscure, have people address them by name.  At the entry door stands a big flat screen displaying the Shabbos program and upcoming events.  At one time, our congregations were of comparable size.  Over decades, each has contracted, ours far more than theirs.  They have a spectrum of ages, including children and families in their prime years.  As a result, they have organized subdivisions with social activities as well as learning initiatives. Multigenerational without really being intergenerational. They lack members with the level of observance and liturgical skills that we have, but they are an educated collection of people who understand Jewish history and culture, as well as people who engage with the community's less fortunate on a much larger scale than our members do.  Yet the sting of the mistreatment of people very dear to me has remained in the background, nominally forgiven but indelible in its own way.

I go there for events.  This time a big one.  While we think of Orthodox congregations like mine as defenders of formality, the Conservatives have their institutional norms and tiered agencies as well.  New Rabbis for the past thirty years or so undergo an Installation.  This occurs over a weekend, with a committee of important people designing a program.  Elements of solemnity, elements announcing importance not only of the new Rabbi but of dignitaries from elected officials to people of public recognition in the national Jewish scene.  Their committee invited one of America's premier contemporary Jewish scholars.  I listen to his podcasts or TV interviews with some frequency.  While I'd be willing to pay to hear his presentation, this time the committee offered the chance for free.  It turns out, when the new Rabbi, the son of an interfaith marriage, made his first advance to a career as a Jewish professional, the guest speaker, also a man of obscurity but immense potential, guided the not yet Rabbi for a summer.  Over time, both succeeded grandly.  His mentor came to the synagogue for a Sunday afternoon.  

Only two people from my synagogue attended.  The attendance from the host congregation seemed an older cross-section of their composite.  The Installation Committee made sure sweets and drinks in abundance sat on tables at the perimeter of their auditorium while people sat at tables facing the stage.  I greeted the people I know, but as I usually do at gatherings of this type, opted for a table with people I did not know.  The presentation did not disappoint.  A man of great insight.  Following brief remarks, the guest and the new Rabbi engaged in a Q&A with each other.  Time for questions was not allotted, but I could not let this opportunity go by without asking the scholar about something I had heard from him on one of his podcasts.  Only three people of an attendance of about a hundred approached him.  He answered my query in the expected thoughtful way.  I got some layer cake, ate it quickly, drank nothing, and then headed home.  A fully satisfying afternoon.

By week's end, I flew to another part of America for a family event.  I once lived there fifty years back.  My son lived there much more recently, married a young woman whose family lived there, thus the location of this event.  While there as a student, Hillel was my Jewish anchor.  The students had a loose connection to an Orthodox synagogue nearby, which I visited a few times with other students.  The Hillel Rabbi became a friend, particularly after he accepted another directorship not far from me.  I invited him to my congregation as guest speaker shortly before his tragic passing in a freak accident.  I never attended any other mainstream synagogue other than Friday night service at a Reform congregation near my hotel when I returned to the city for a conference.  

One synagogue of interest, maybe the only one of interest, passed me by.  I never worshipped there as a student, yet knew of its pioneering presence.  On return visits, a few over the decades, I never had both a Saturday morning off and a car to get there.  This congregation still exists in a form very similar to my home shul.  In the mid-1960s, many of the social restrictions placed on American Jews by the Christian majority's upprer crust had broken down.  We often had premier educations, making us attractive to employers and the professions.  Restrictive covenants on houses either disappeared or became legally unenforceable.  Many Jews acquired prosperity and professional stature starting a few decades before, but becoming more commonplace.  Jews in that city lived in a particular enclave not far from the dominant university.  As businesses expanded westward, followed by luxury housing, a Jewish professional community established itself.  While all but a few could have commuted to the established congregations, at that time clustered near the university, enough wanted their own location, one that would hybrid Orthodox and observant Conservative traditions.  They opted for independence from an umbrella organization.  

The congregation thrived over the years.  More of the Jewish population moved westward, as did some of the established affiliated synagogues.  The new congregation invested in its own campus.  While Jewish demographics changed, so did accepted practices among those suburbanites.  Jewish neighborhood enclaves became harder to define.  Most importantly, the role of women in worship and congregational governance became the norm for most congregations with secular membership.  This congregation did not follow that trend.  While offering worshipers the option of gender separate or mixed seating, as my Hillel of that city did, and my home congregation did until very recently, the role of participation of women during formal services remained limited.  Over time, women were offered a few honors like reading the few English passages that congregations use in their liturgy, but leading worship remained a male obligation and a male fulfillment.

This visit, the event that brought me to town, would begin at 1PM, located just minutes from the congregation I always wanted to visit but never did.  The waning of anti-Semitism as a public taboo has changed synagogues dramatically.  All American synagogues now have limited entrance with a professional security guard, usually with pistol in holster, at the only designated entrance, which is locked.  I anticipated this.  Before my visit, I sent an email to the office, introducing myself and my reason for wanting to attend.  They accepted this, notified the gatekeeper that I would be coming, and had my name on a small scrap of paper in the police officer's possession when I arrived.  The rabbi and his wife quickly recognized the only person sitting among them unfamiliar to them.

Staying the course on worship format comes at a price.  Women the years I lived in that city did not have a role in conducting services.  Moreover, their presence in medical school, STEM, law school, and MBA programs was a pittance of what women subsequently achieved.  If accepted in education and professions, not having parity in synagogue generated  resentment.  Women largely gravitated to congregations that would function in parallel with the gender parity they experienced in their professional lives, with places like mine and the shul I visited contracting in membership and attendance.  

My Waze route from the hotel to synagogue directed me through a very tony part of the area.  Developments with McMansions spoked from the main road, a few with gates.  The congregation had created a stunning campus.  Upper and lower parking areas.  Parsonage for the Rabbi, who I suspect could not afford a McMansion of that type within walking distance of the sanctuary.  I parked my rental, then took my time walking a significant upslope to the main entrance.  The officer recognized me as a designated visitor, greeted me, as did the maintenance lady on duty that morning.  They had a weekly bulletin, far less informative than the one the volunteers of my congregation create each week.  I looked at the donation plaques in the lobby.  That tells a lot about the membership.  Some donations have inscriptions less than three years old, including some honoring a Bar Mitzvah.  I do not know if they have a Hebrew School, but wall hangings suggested they might.  

Two congregants in the lobby introduced themselves.  They directed me to Siddur and Chumash on shelves in the lobby.  They use primarily the Koren Siddur and Artscroll Chumash, but had other options and included page numbers from three different books for the week's Torah reading.  At the entrance to the sanctuary, I asked if men and women sat together or separately.  He indicated both options.  I took a seat in the center, one of the mixed areas, though a significant number of men and women, including the Rabbi and Rebbetzin, placed themselves in the gender specific section.

My arrival coincided with my typical entry at my congregation, late in Shacharit, a few minutes before the Torah Service.  A gentleman approached me, asking if I were a Kohen.  I am not.  The service took a choreography very similar to my home congregation.  Three men divided the Torah reading, one being the Rabbi.  They had the same portions led by women that we do, some English readings blessing the Military and Government.  It is customary to offer an Aliyah to visitors, so I received one.  The Rabbi gave his sermon of about twenty minutes, a few references to the weekly Torah Portion, more time devoted to his perspective on the disappearing taboos on anti-Semitism on our campuses and elsewhere in America.  Some parts of our service were shifted to other times, making the closing prayers a little shorter.  They had an interesting addition, asking people who would be traveling in the coming week, which included me, to identify where they would be going.  I planned my return home.  Another fellow had a business trip to China.

After the service, refreshments are customary.  It gave me a chance to trade notes, to get the comparisons clearer in my mind without expressing them.  Their rabbi knew my former rabbi and had served as a reference to candidates for his replacement.  I do not know the financial trajectory of this synagogue.  They have an exquisite campus, unlikely to be funded by annual dues.  Their current membership approximated ours.  I did not ascertain their peak membership or when it occurred, but mixed seating/ male exclusivity, which had been a Conservative Jewish norm at their founding, as were certain hybrid congregations, had fallen into public disfavor.  The members who remained seemed older, maybe a few years younger than ours, and attended weekly worship in larger percentages than the more secular membership of United Synagogue and Union of Reform Judaism congregations.  They have many more dues payers, but sanctuary attendance comparable to the place I visited and my home synagogue.  Since I had the event that brought me to the area approaching, I wished people a Goot Shabbos, thanked them for their hospitality, and then headed back to my hotel to retrieve my wife.

That event, located just a few miles from my hotel and the synagogue, brought me to a Presbyterian Church named after one of its saints.  It stood in a neighborhood of much more modest residences than the synagogue.  It had an impressive building, reasonably spacious grounds, but not the campus feel of the shul where I had just observed Shabbos.  A handsome building dominating a small hill.  Their entry foyer highlighted a few activities, the type that discloses what the congregation values.  They sponsor outreach to the less fortunate, whether by economic circumstances,  isolated by age or infirmity, or members of marginalized groups.  References to youth programming appeared.  We entered a multipurpose space where our event would occur.  It had multiple round tables occupying the bulk of the floor surface, yet with enough perimeter to allow some cushioned seating and adequate greeting of others sharing this event.  Their sanctuary was locked on this Saturday afternoon.  Its entrance had tinted windows which allowed a view inside.  A stage of ample size offered a lecturn for the pastor, floor space for choir or musical presentations integral to much Christian worship, fixed wooden pews encircling that stage, and traditional motifs of Christianity, if not Presbyterianism, on the back wall of the stage.  The sanctuary would seat hundreds.  

The building served multiple purposes.  I wandered into their kitchen, probably a secondary focus of what their congregation does.  Large space, modern commercial appliances and work benches.  To get there, I had to pass other rooms, likely educational or meeting spaces.  I did not encounter their administrative of pastors' offices.  It seemed a multigenerational congregation.  How well it functioned as an intergenerational worship institution I do not know.  There are things a visitor can ascertain from the surroundings, other vital elements of a worship community known only to the regular participants.  

In this age of modern websites, something virtually all American congregations have created, it is possible to learn more about each congregation beyond the impressions of personal visits.  Many present their monthly or quarterly bulletins on their site, with a list of events and activities.  The ability to assemble these without fail, weekly for my synagogue, monthly or quarterly for others, and to have members who load what the writers and editors create onto their public electronic forums is a notable achievement.  It goes on as daily work, much like the clergyman's weekly sermon or religious school curriculum.  Under the radar to outsiders, even many insiders.  My journey across five congregations in a single week brought a blend of what makes each unique, but also what creates common ground and what remains hidden to the intermittent observer.  Some seem more insular, others more insistent that their sanctuary doors swing outward, figuratively if not literally.  Some value left-brain didactic learning, others more focused on right-brain aesthetics.  They differ a bit in the spaces allotted to gathering, whether size of sanctuaries or public spaces.  In order for any to function, they each require small dedicated groups to allow dedication to priorities and critical masses to execute and participate.

As I visit four others plus my own, my mind gravitates to the familiar.  My synagogue does a few things very well.  The places I visited each have their own strengths, some of which we could tap into to enhance the things we offer.  There is also an inertia, most visible among the most familiar, as in mine.  An Elsewhere performing better is not always envisioned as something to seriously consider.  The unfamiliar, even when an upgrade, threatens something or some people's dominant influence.  I saw elements of imagination, particularly from the distinguished Jewish visiting scholar.  I encountered tenacity in preserving core practices, perhaps lamenting decline, but accepting it as the cost of traditions that cannot be diminished.  There are places for scholars of national stature, elegant worship campuses, sophisticated music, and external outreach to reinforce a mission of kindness.  These all exist in the places I visited, but not all in each place.  Design my ideal synagogue with a pencil on a yellow pad?  As much as I might want to include pieces of what I experienced, that's not the best option.  Adam Smith of Wealth of Nations had a better idea.  Accept the diversity.  Contribute what your place of worship does best, then share those things with everyone else for mutual benefit.  That best captures my week at different congregations.