Disillusioned

Made my first Shabbat morning visit to Beth Tfiloh since the pandemic, and since their senior Rabbi's retirement.  Not at all like what spurred me to make an hour and a half trip each way to experience the upside of what Shabbos morning could be.  The morning reminded me a lot like an observant Conservative service of the 1970s with a mechitza preventing their eviction from their parent OU affiliation.  They have an incoming Senior Rabbi who will be having an Installation formality next shabbos.  I do not remember Orthodox clergy getting publicly installed.  They had Riffraff, two of them, each summoned to his Aliyah with a lyrical baritone Ya-amod cubed, the type the Cantor would do at a Conservative Bar Mitzvah.  As much as I abhor the interruption of the weekly Torah portion with those InterAliyah Sound Bites, something that never happened under the direction of the Rabbi Emeritus, not only have they been introduced but as designated Squaw Work to make the women have a bimah presence.  At least the Emeritus, a master of Divrei Torah, took his turn this shabbos.  Great start but ran aground making his central point.

Well attended men's section, or perhaps the illusion by scattering people with seating distances, sparsely populated women's section.  Nice kiddush though, including meatballs and cholent which I did not have to stay pareve.  Helped myself to cookies and rugelach, though.

The New Senior Rabbi needs his chance to make his imprint.  Also needs his chance to make mistakes.

Respite from Shul

Too much.  When our Torah reader took ill, I overextended my skill by pitching in.  I don't think my skill really expanded from the effort.  They needed a ba-al shacharit or a haftarah done on short notice.  No problem, though that haftarah had more tongue twisters than I might have expected.  Need somebody to give a seminar at AKSE Academy?  I'll pitch in.  Too much.  I'm taking a month off, though not exactly since they got a little desperate for another Torah reading at mid-month.  I was not really the last resort but the easiest low-hanging fruit to pluck.

And we have Super Sunday which resurrects some of my worst Jewish experiences.  And two guys who I thought I could generated a learned discussion resorted to sloganeering as its surrogate.  I need a break.  I just lack the patience of a rabbi and any compensation for having that level of patience.

February almost never has five shabbatot but I lucked out this year, probably for the last time in my lifetime.  I put myself on the Gabbai's Do Not Call list.

So what might I do with four shabbatot off?  Haven't been to Chabad in ages.  Usually I worship at Beth Tfiloh one shabbos in February each year.  No real interest in driving to a shul I've never been to before, though I have done that in the past.  Or I could just say no shul in February, other than what I have already obligated.  Depends on whether it is shul that irritates me or my shul that irritates me.  Not sure yet.

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.

Shabbos as Spectator

Made it to Beth Tfiloh for shabbos.  Understudy Rabbi this time, with a D'var Torah on the disappearing derech eretz in politics, one that can get quite a few cards & letters, perhaps even mine.  Yet going there, despite the substantial round trip has its allure that I find hard to duplicate.

The drive is quiet time.  No radio.  One stop for either breakfast or coffee, subsidized by the State of Delaware, since the route to the WaWa takes me around the toll.  Once there, I take my seat, having staked out two places, one on each side of an aisle which affords me a few seats of personal space and a good view.  I do not know anyone and nobody knows me, until the end when I typically encounter somebody from my home shul who now lives in Baltimore and attends there.  The Torah reader usually comes over to greet me, but I might as well be a spectator in a theater, which adds to the attraction if once a quarter but would end the attaction if I went every shabbos and remained alone amid a crowd of hundreds.

Lately I've been arriving a little earlier, typically at the Amidah repetition.  Their sequence of prayers is a little variation of AKSE's.  The Torah processional is limited to the return.  Women do the Government and Soldier's prayers in English.  Prayer for Israel is part of the Torah processional.  Torah reading is expert in accuracy and fluency.  There are no Aliyah Sound Bites, which is worth the drive in itself.  I've been there enough now and read additional sermons online to suspect they are written de novo without recycling AIPAC or other organizational FAX broadcasts to American rabbis to adapt to their weekly shabbos message.  Those messages are OK, but I think I can tell that the rabbis function as an organizational conduit and not people of personal insight when they do that.

No Bar Mitzvah this shabbos.  Musaf zips along, services conclude and we go to kiddush, not very different in content than ours but on a larger scale.

Looking around, they probably can assemble a minyan of men under age 50, but it won't be a very large minyan.  To be fair, they have parallel services elsewhere in the building and the people at kiddush seem younger than the men in the main sanctuary so that may be where the younger men worship.  The women on their side of the mechitza seemed younger than the men in the main  sanctuary.  Children come up to the bimah for kiddush.  There were about 30 of them, so generational attrition will likely happen though at a much smaller pace than at AKSE. 

So if I want to watch something done well, I go there.  If I want to be more of a participant, even a sometimes irritated one, my home base supplies that need.

Due Dates

Shabbos approaches.  I've scheduled my roughly quarterly shabbos morning at Beth Tfiloh tomorrow.  Easy dinner to make today, defrost the previously made chicken and make Hasidic Noodle Kugel.  Will try to use a water bath this time to promote more even cooking in the loaf pan. 

I don't have a sense of urgency to get everything done in time that I once had, even with the return to Standard Time this week bringing sunset much earlier on the clock.  Dinner will get done.  Everything else on  a long daily task list really has no deadline other than paying my Medicare premium and renewing my state medical license where the deadlines are not imminent.  Our motivation and ultimately our success, though, depends on how we handle the things we want to do without the external impositions, whether the natural sunset or the legal due dates.

Departures

Our congregational rolls have been having a net loss pretty much each year since my arrival twenty years back.  It is unlikely that I had anything to do with any of the megatrends of American Judaism, though I did move from the Conservative shul for cause and have not been as valuable to the larger Jewish community as my resources my have been were I treated better when I was there.  Those are trends that reflect on success and failure of the leadership class, which I am not.  Some are external forces that nobody really controls, deaths or nursing home transfers, retirements to Florida, new jobs in new locations.  We've had five these past few months, each with their own story and their own legacy while among us.

The first is a tragic relocation, a couple who dedicated themselves to our congregation as long-time officers, and more importantly, as parents whose children benefited from our shul to transfer their legacy to their next destination.  A protracted illness took its toll on the gentleman, leaving his widow with some decisions.  Her ties to the community were many but she also has observant children and now grandchildren about five hours away in a somewhat larger Jewish center.  Her decision to relocate near them seems most understandable.  While we are lesser for her absence, it seems more like a deserved retirement after an adult lifetime of effort.

The next two take a different track.  About once a quarter, I make an effort to attend shabbos morning at Beth Tfiloh in Baltimore, the yardstick of modern Orthodoxy that I would like my congregation to strive towards.  There are two Wilmington families that I see there. One is an elderly man who attended shabbos morning regularly.  I never knew his children.  His wife passed away.  Being less than fully independent, he move in with his son in Baltimore.  They attend Beth Tfiloh and I make a point of greeting them each shabbos.  We chat momentarily about our congregation and its progress or setbacks.  I'm not sure the senior fellow understands but his son has an appreciation of what his time there, many years ago, enabled for him today.  He attends shul.

The other Beth Tfiloh members are also AKSE alumni, among the most accomplished of the Hebrew school, modern Orthodox in their own right.  I ran into him at Kiddush recently, noting that I've not seen his folks in a while.  I assumed they retired and relocated, as they are my contemporaries and the big employer of the area divested itself of a lot of their scientists.  It turns out that after an adult lifetime at our shul, they defected to the USCJ affiliate.  Did not pursue why but asked him to give his parents our best wishes. 

The next two deplete our desperately scarce young people.  The member with most future promise worked as an Assistant Professor at the state university.  During his time with us he married and started a family.  He had dropped off the radar a while.  I knew he was up for tenure and trying to produce scholarly output which diverted him from other things, to say nothing of being the best dad he could to his infant son.  After not having seen him in a while, I asked about his family, underestimating the age of his son by about half.  Tenure did not come through and he would be departing to a major state university in the midwest, a household name during football season and a very respectable academic center.  It is not near a major city but as a mega university, there are enough Jewish faculty to maintain a congregation, one not that much smaller than ours.  They have acquired one of the Jewish gems, though at our expense.

Our final one took me by surprise, largely by its suddenness and mystery.  We have virtually no 40-somethings other than the Rabbi, and even he relocated his family to a more heavily Jewish area where there are functioning day schools.  But one fellow became ubiquitous.  He never missed a minyan or a shabbos.  When we served cholent at kiddush he made it.  When there was a gathering worthy of barbecue, he made the hot dogs and hamburgers.  After several years I never grasped what work he did or what brought him to our town.  He got his medical care at the VA so he was in the military, but he did not seem disabled.  He just seemed eager to do what he can for the congregation, driving our visiting cantor to catch his train after shabbos and parking his own Harley next to the Rabbi's space.  He would occasionally give the shabbos dvar Torah, always homespun with an Arkansas speech pattern, but always tied appropriately to the portion and enjoyable to listen to.  It came as a surprise yesterday when the Rabbi requested one of the men who would be coming for Havdalah take the Hazzan back to AMTRAK as his usual source of transportation relocated back to one of the Dixie states on short notice.  No advance notice, as he would have merited some type of recognition kiddush, just no longer here.  Our minyanim get less secure.  Other people can grill the food at the Annual meeting and the Hazzan will get home.

Some turnover is expected, some a puzzle, all a loss of varying degrees.  Unfortunately, the entering class has not materialized in a meaningful way for some time.

Respect

My hospital got its docs a new device called a Dragon Dictation System where I can speak into a microphone and mostly correct text appears.  It is modified for the reality of having learned spoken English in the Bronx.  It has two options for text, one general English and the default of an Endocrinology vocabulary as nearly all its use has been to dictate patient consultations.  I tried dictating a more general article once, ended up typing it myself, but this week took another shot at something I've been meaning to prepare into an article called "The Places I Like to Daven".  It's mostly past tense, but for all my Beth Sodom and Aliyah Sound Bite quips of my contemporary shabbat morning options, there were and to a lesser extent are places that serve as prime destinations on a shabbos morning.  Eventually as a youngster I got to like our shul's Junior Congregation, despised the teen experience, and would inconvenience myself to leave home early to get to that shul now 100+ miles away if possible when passing through the area.  WashU and Penn Hillel could expect my presence most shabbos mornings.  Beth El Quincy, z"l, for my final year of residency.  Beth Tfiloh in Baltimore once a quarter, again at a little personal inconvenience and needing some advance planning.

I tried to tease out common themes.  Like the Rabbi?  For sure at the adult synagogues but the Hillel experiences had no Rabbi.  Friendly congregants?  After multiple visits to Beth Tfiloh the total number of people who have come over to me sitting by myself and chatting with me is ONE, their assistant Rabbi who serves as Torah reader.   Personal participation?  I've been a very active Bimah participant by default at my current shul and the one before it, neither of which makes my must be there list while often serving as the destination of my many verbal harpoons.

After pondering the Why as I dictate the Where, the common thread seems to be the level of respect that I have for the composite experience and the people that I am with.  The JCC of Spring Valley, my Bar Mitzvah congregation, seemed bimodal.  It distilled to how I was treated.  Contemptuously by the teen director who played favorites, inconsistently by the Rabbi who presided over my  Bar Mitzvah, to be followed by a Rabbi of my later high school years who endeared himself, not only to me, but forty years later when high school classmates post photos of their wedding, his picture appears with a note of his kindness and sometimes his professional competence.  Services were done expertly.  Those in attendance were were more my mother's friends than mine, but as a an adult visitor who made time to stop there while in transit from the Delaware Valley to New England these people gained my respect for their ongoing dedication even as their congregation was aging and eventually failing.

Hillel I was more a part of.  People were happy to have me there whether they needed another tuchis for a minyan or not.  There were interactions about exams.  My first Kaddish obligation was fulfilled there.  It was the custom that mourners should not stand alone, a custom exported by me to subsequent places.  Not having a Rabbi, the Hillels brought out the best in what Jewishly committed students could do.  There were no fights over Mechitza, just a recognition that the Orthodox needed one and we would set our own druthers aside to enable their worship.  Somebody had to prepare Torah reading, even if an Organic Chemistry test loomed in the near future.  People rose to the occasions.  I'm very respectful of that to this day.

I only lived in Quincy for one year, my final year of residency.  The town at the time had a kosher butcher which folded a few months after we arrived.  My first experience at Beth El occurred for the Holy Days which might have been my last as the Rabbi rambled and the crowded sanctuary could have used better climate control.  But while I spent the summer at an arduous hospital assignment, my wife attended shul, assuring me that the spectacle of Rosh Hashana did not occur on shabbat.  As my medical assignments got a little more tame, I started going with her.  The experience was the closest I've ever had to a Hillel duplication in a Conservative synagogue.  Personable, knowledgeablle, interactive Rabbi.  Cantor davened and read Torah expertly without the flourishes of a Cantorial institute alumnus, having acquired his skill in Europe.  Not a lot of congregants but enough, ranging from Harvard professors to younger people who had just escaped the Iranian Revolution but still had family left behind.  The role of women was in transition then but both my wife and I got invitations to be among the haftarah readers.  Kiddush was mingling and chat time, something never duplicated for me since.  Then mostly home and rest afterwards.  If they had macher swoops I was unaware of them.  I know they had a benefactor, an owner of a small regional home improvement chain.  I never met him and never sensed I was being manipulated in any way.

So those are the basic models, diverse but with a common theme of being among people who I basically admire.  Sounds like something fairly easy to duplicate or at least aspire to, though strangely elusive.

The Yom Tovim

We're not quite done.  Midway through Chol HaMoed Sukkot, not yet bentched lulav.  

It remains the time to think about Judaism, what went well, what did not.  I kept to my synagogue plan set in November 2014 to go to my congregation if somebody else benefited from my being there, usually as bimah participant but to honor a special guest as well.  Will continue that through the end of the calendar year.  Been to Chabad once a month and Beth Tfiloh once a quarter as planned.  Went to a transdenominational Rosh Hashana, one in existence for 25 years but only attended by me for about five.  I think it's where my synagogue experience tops out.  Participants have been top notch.  No pretense   No formal Rabbis.  Probably the best application of meritocracy to a synagogue that I have encountered anywhere.

Rabbi Robinson, our community's Reform spiritual leader and in my mind the most articulate Jewish thinker of my town posted his YK sermon: 

 http://rabbiyair.blogspot.com/2015/09/yom-kippur-morning-5776-holiness-of.html?showComment=1443689618718#c1564464014608044707

He often focuses on synagogue development for his congregation with implications that are applicable anywhere.  He took an interesting approach, maybe even a nihilist one, to isolate the strengths of his congregation and move them ahead while not trying to remedy the short comings.  His reasoning, which I always hold in great respect, is that if you do something well you can proceed to excellence.  If you focus on correcting a weakness, the best you can hope for is mediocrity.  It's an interesting perspective with all sorts of applications.  If AKSE cannot move women ahead effectively, then write off the project, accept the reality that young families will see us as a dinosaur and promote our excellent kiddush and Sisterhood and small cadre of daveners.  Accept shabbos morning as a variant of Hebrew school beyond redemption with those interAliyah Sound Bites and make the AKSE Academy project sparkle since it has the potential to sparkle.  I'm not sure that this type of writing off one's deficits is really in keeping with the spirit of the High Holy Days, but I can respect the reasoning behind it.  

My own initiatives of what I might like to pursue Jewishly still come in June and December but the fall holidays set the background.

No Bar Mitzvah

Got to see Beth Tfiloh sans Bar Mitzvah for the first time in about eight visits.  No guest speaker either, just their shabbos morning as they assemble it.  Attendance was about 2/3 of what I have encountered before, which is still a lot of worshippers.  I am probably in the younger half, or maybe about the median in age.  I got there earlier than usual.  Like AKSE, attendance is relatively sparse at shacharit, so much so that the Assistant Rabbi was able to recognize me as an unfamiliar person sitting alone and come over to greet me shortly before he headed to the Bimah to chant a double portion flawlessly.  The Hazzan led both shacharit and musaf.  He has an engaging style, some chazzanut, some more lyrical.  No Torah interruptions, one of the premier attractions.  Simple but elegant DVar Torah from another Assistant Rabbi on Yom Ha-atzmaut.  Haftarah done well by a man celebrating his 70th birthday.  Some Yom Ha-atzmaut participation from their kids.  Younger kids came up with a flag, got their treat from Rabbi Wohlberg, then headed off.  The teens came up at the end, boys proceeding on the men's side of the mechitza, the girls on their side, then meeting in the middle as they ascended the Bimah together, performing two songs.  Simple Kiddush with middle eastern food to put into pita, noodle and potato kugels and a pastry table.  Then home.

I go partly as a spectator, partly as a participant in worship.  The experience probably is what it is for them, it enhances me, enough to justify the effort of getting there and back.  A good shabbos experience goes into memory storage.

When Shabbos is No Longer the Centerpiece

As a child, Mr. Zeisel, my Orthodox friend Howie's father took me aside one Rosh Hashana and suggested I return one shabbos to see what his synagogue is really like.  I did.  From then onward, more than half a century later, shabbos has been the centerpiece of my Jewish observance and the experience through which I judge the synagogue experience.  High Holy Days could be absolutely wretched, a performance in processing people through Judaism to subsidize fifty other weeks in which the Jewish pageant really plays out.  People go to the Beach Outlets to make themselves memorable for Rosh Hashana.  But there is a subset of us that have no need to feel memorable but to isolate some time each week to put away the studies and courses of college and medical school, seeing people as friends who share the college journey and not as competitors for the next professional destination.  After graduating, I no longer had the same people at my side all week, leaving shabbos as the time to reacquaint with people I missed during the work week.  Shabbos took on more of separation of time.  I attended shul because I wanted to attend shul.  There were the formalities of the worship, the type of ritual or formality that encourages a mixture of community and respect.  Torah got read, tunes chanted, kiddush made, sometimes lunch eaten, then off to a quiet afternoon, usually alone, sometimes with recreation not available to me at other times.  The shabbos morning destination only failed me once before, I relocated its venue, restoring it to what I had come to expect.

Unfortunately, it has been failing again.  I can assign blame if I want, and until recently that was what I wanted.  But not now.  It really isn't anybody's fault that I show up ever less frequently, rationing my shabbos mornings at my own congregation to twice monthly and now to when I have an invitation to do something useful to somebody else while I am there.  I'm not indifferent, I'm actively disappointed with the experience, would replace it once again if it were as easy as last time.  I have been going to AKSE out of my perception of obligation more than any desire to worship there on shabbos or renew acquaintances with anyone I've not seen in a week.  I sit and stand, stare into space, no desire to interact or challenge myself.  I've almost returned to Hebrew school when I am there.  Rabbi's vision of what he wants to impart to us and my vision of what I might like to receive just don't mesh.  I can protest but the baalebatim seem deaf to any opposition,  perceiving probably correctly that they have pretty much already lost as many members as they are likely to lose.  Yes, the concept of shabbos is the same everywhere, but I guess I am not the same everywhere.  There is salvage at Chabad and Beth Tfiloh but not really replacement of the experience that once made me an AKSE shabbos advocate and more eager participant than I have been in recent years.

Only a relatively small subset of our Board attends with any regularity on shabbos morning.  They pay dues, rather large sums at that, so there must be some attractions to survive when the shabbos experience implodes.  And there is that experience of Temple Square, where as a non-believer, I am formally excluded from entry into their building of worship, yet remain in awe of the parts to which I have access and in admiration of the people who enabled this.  Even within an American synagogue mindset, the baalebatim of fifty years ago probably appreciated that worship may not be their sustainable centerpiece, designing their buildings with sanctuaries that took up only a small amount of floor space, improvising for the few occasions when large crowds came for worship, but expanding the activities of the shul to be more of a club, a House of Assembly.  As worship deteriorates for me at AKSE, there are elements that seem to be going well when they have a champion to make it go well.  Kiddush and other food presentation have become more attractive.  Money seems to be handled in a more responsible way.  The Sisterhood events seem stable.  So maybe there are participatory surrogates to compensate for a deteriorating worship experience.  These can never be the centerpiece but they can you by, at least for a while.

Shopping Downward

As I was finishing med school and needed to start looking presentable for patients, a best seller called Dress for Success by John Molloy had gathered considerable public interest.  He described how one's appearance correlated with one's future employment and promotability, something very relevant to me at the time.  I got the book from the library and read it over a few day, absorbing the hints of how to make clothing fit and select colors and patterns that added 10 points to one's virtual IQ.  Needless to say, the senior executives made a lot more money than senior executive wannabes and got where they are by adapting to the sartorial pageant of where they worked.  Peasants of lesser means, including myself to this very day, had to give the illusion that they were purchasing good stuff without actually spending money that they did not have.  He suggested a form of shopping down, wandering through Brooks Brothers where the boss shopped, noting what is on their most expensive racks, then going to the less expensive racks and seeing what features were maintained and what were deemed expendable.  Then onward to the Value City where I really shopped for clothing and trying to duplicated as much as possible from the upper end.

This strategy has served me well for a long time, not only for clothing but for my cars and my house, pretty much every large purchase except universities for my kids where I bought the real thing.  Shopping down seems similarly tempting though with my ultimate synagogue purchase predetermined, what I really get are a few shabbos mornings of the type I'd like to have most but not really the chance to purchase the closest facsimile available.  In order to do that, there would need to be a menu of experiences with different values to choose from, something not available in my community for some time.  But you take what you can get, which for me is a lovely morning at Beth Tfiloh, none of which is transferable to my usual shabbat morning.

I got there as they were starting the repetition of the Amidah.  This particular shabbat was not only a bar mitzvah, something I've come to expect but the BNai Mitzvah of a male-female twin set.  The boy excelled with flawless Torah and haftarah chanting and very appropriate speech about what it is like to  be a twin, the tension between being bundled with another person and the need to protect one's individuality.  Lest her sister remain subordinate, she had her own limelight within the local parameters, chanting the first two Aliyot from the next Parsha, as section about twins.  She then spoke of being a twin, followed by the twins speaking jointly, sometimes in unison and sometimes in alternating sentences.  Not to upstage Rabbi Wohlberg, the Dvar Torah drew on a current event, the passing of President Reagan's astrologer and the interface between fates that you cannot control and personal efforts that guide destiny.  Many parallels to this in the Parsha.  And extraordinary kiddush when it ended.  No interaliyah Sound Bites.  No contrivances like changing your seats so the Rabbi can look at everyone when he speaks.  No, it was a service suitable to college graduates who mostly work all week and could have been doing other things on Saturday but opted for the experience of shabbat morning worship.  That's what I aspire to and will have to relocate myself on shabbos morning to get a little closer to that ideal.

As Theodor Herzl noted, "If you will it, it is no dream; and if you do not will it, a dream it is and a dream it will stay."  Our baalebatim don't seem to will that type of shabbat experience and our Rabbi's style cannot deliver it.  So I think it might be time to will it for myself.

Inspired

Work days can be long with many necessary tasks, some immediate, some not, filling the allotted time and spilling over most days.  Immediate stuff like patient care and phone calls get done faithfully.  Less urgent stuff like signing charts or billing eventually gets done, though not always in the timely way that it should.  And then there are things that I should do that lack negative consequences if I don't so too often I don't.  And amid this task clutter lurk things that I want to do so badly that I will assign specific time.

One of them approaches this shabbat, my periodic outing to worship at Beth Tfiloh in Baltimore, partaking of Rabbi Wohlberg's comments in person, though tend to keep up with the transcripts of his sermons on the web.  Something about being in that particular sanctuary engages me.  Part of it is my intellect but a substantial part transcends that.  They have separate seating for men and women with a discrete transparent mechitza which I accept readily, even though my own tradition is to sit with my family, to get something else in return.  What I get in return may be immersion with a few hundred other people who also want to be there when they could have been doing something else.  I get a sense of sitting among experts who chant well, reason well, and show sensitivity to women when others of that OU stripe are often callous.  Is it the friendliest place I have been?  No.  Do they have macher swoops as part of their governance?  Haven't a clue but I suspect that the Rabbi has sufficient authority and temperament to resist it if they did.  Yet a morning there captures the AKSE logo of Embracing/Engaging/Enriching more that most experiences that I have.

The week after, I have an appointment to donate platelets.  That is another destination for me, an experience that I will seek out.  While I function as an individual donor there, anonymous to the other donors and to the platelet recipients, being part of that project keeps me in a community even if I never interact with other members of the community.  Since breakfast is mandatory before donating, I have a large leisurely meal.  For two hours I have peace and quiet with the beeper turned off and nothing else to do but watch Create TV while whole blood flows from one antecubital vein into a machine, then returned minus a few components into the other arm.  Usually there are some perioral paresthesias from the calcium chelating agent causing me to have transient hypocalcemia which reminds me that I am doing something to benefit somebody else.  Eventually the session concludes, they offer me a souvenir which adds to my sense of community, and I have some Keurig coffee before proceeding to my next destination, which is usually an appropriate expression that this is part of my personal leisure time.

I agreed to do a long Torah portion Thanksgiving weekend.  While I do not generally regard a two hour block in my own sanctuary as particularly inspirational, the challenge of learning a new and difficult piece of Torah usually is.  It takes preparation which in itself forces a respite for a half-hour or so every night for a few weeks when TV or Facebook or other usual activities get set aside for this special activity.  In order to do this well, I also have to review what the portion is about, so I learn a little more Torah than I otherwise might as a byproduct of the effort.  And it is usually performed well in the end, so people who attend more out of obligation than desire derive some benefit with enhancement of their usual shabbat morning experience.

And finally I have my work.  Much of it is work but infused among the tasks are challenges and interactions with people who rise to the occasion, whether they be patients who return to the office better than they were, patients in the hospital whose lab work looks a lot better on day 3 than on arrival, residents who thought a problem through before seeking the answer from me, collaboration with other experts.  I do not often recognize this as inspirational while I am doing it, but on reflection it often is.

So amid much of the ordinary of the waking hours comes a few moments of mostly planned investment in time that generates psychic dollars of ample return.

shtick

Next shabbat the Rabbi devoted his sermon time to a discussion of the Shabboton guest's suggestions for making the shabbat service experience more of a personal connection to the worshippers.  He offered a number of suggestions regarding new tunes or discussions or acting out portions of the service by turning the Bimah into a stage.  True, the AKSE services too often come across as perfunctory with little of interest.  Their purpose is ostensibly to fulfill a religious obligation for the men, which they do.  This may be why the attendance has been lopsidedly men for my entire tenure there.  There are shabbat morning experiences that I seek out from time to time or remember fondly as destinations on a Saturday morning. Creating desire out of obligation remains a challenge since you need one or the other to assure attendance.

Beth Tfiloh gets two visits a year.  My loyalty to Hillel on Shabbat morning endures and I would leave Wilmington earlier than I needed to on a weekend to be able to make it to Shabbat morning services at the JCC of Spring Valley and its subsequent incarnations.  If there might be a common link to the places I prefer to daven it may be fulfillment of the unexpected within the familiar as one element, impeccable execution as another, and an enhanced aura of common purpose among the attendees that AKSE has never been able to achieve.  I do not recall anything approaching shtick at any of them.  Moreover, I think in many ways the decline of the USCJ experience can trace its roots to either Rabbi-generated or officer-generated surrogates to replace a diminishing capacity to deliver the formal components of the traditional service experience with the proper level of expertise.  AKSE has an audience, as does Beth Tfiloh to a large extent.  Hillel and the JCC of Spring Valley had participants.

So how might one get the unexpected amid the expected?  As a casual visit to Baltimore or Spring Valley or anyplace else, this becomes fairly straightforward.  Tunes are endemic to a congregation but differ from what I am used to each week.  Rabbi Wohlberg of Beth Tfilah and Rabbi Palavin, the final Rabbi at the JCC, had a good deal of experience crafting their messages each week.  But were it not for the preparation of Hillel, I doubt I would be able to appreciate any congregational experience, let alone most congregational experiences. Universities have a way of gathering its participants from varied places and backgrounds.  Tunes differ.  At each assembly you can expect to greet people that you did not greet the week before, either because they were not there or you were immersed in a different crowd at kiddush.  The people there were part of the same community all week long, eating dinner together in the Kosher cafeteria, fretting over common exams, checking out the girls.   While there were no sermons, conversations among college students often have substance beyond the formality of a handshake with a goot shabbos appended.  It is harder to judge Beth Tfiloh or JCC where I am a visitor but the other people are not.  At the JCC there was often a curiosity about me by those there before as drop-ins were few and I had a past there to which those remaining could connect.  My presence automatically made me a center of attention.  Not so at Beth Tfiloh where Bar Mitzvah rituals with out of town guests were the norm and attendance always huge by AKSE or Hillel standards.  In many ways I function there as a spectator, doing my best to function as a participant as well as circumstances permit.   The women's section there was always well attended, one of the few ways to assess who shows up to fulfill obligation and who takes time from other possible shabbos activities to attain what can only be attained in shul.

So where might this fit with the AKSE experience?  Balancing obligation with attractiveness does not always go well.  First, I think it would be a mistake to go down the road of the Conservatives, assuming that the people in attendance are ignorant roobs who would have no Jewish connection or knowledge were it not for their Rabbi.  I never dumb down my presentations to residents or medical students to accommodate their limited capacity.  There purpose is to elevate people to standard, whether medical trainees or Jews in transition, rather than to diminish the standard to adapt to the people.  Gimmicks have a way of doing that unless flawlessly executed and appropriate to circumstance.  That is not to say special events have no place. The Senator's visit engaged the teens present like no experience they ever had at AKSE.  It is just that they need to be done very selectively and implemented in a way that nobody would assess as amateurish or tircha d'tzibbura.  Other guests given appropriate bimah time or guests at Shabbos dinners which have been well attended could fulfill this niche.  I think having women really do the parts of the service that the Rabbi deemed acceptable would be another, something that has remained dormant for some time.  At Beth Tfiloh, Rabbi Wohlberg has decided what women are permitted to do on his Bimah and in his sanctuary.  Every time I have been there, women do those things set aside for them.

The shabbat experience does not have to take place at AKSE in its sanctuary.  My most critical comments of the Rabbis and the lay ritual leadership has been that they do not insist that the Women's Tefiloh Group make a concerted effort to attain parity in performance with the main sanctuary to the extent that their permitted content allows.  You can claim respect for female congregants but never sell that as reality outside AKSE, or even within, if excellence is not the standard in any of its subgroups.  The shabbat dinners by their attendance and flexibility offer enormous opportunities for innovation that would be tircha if done in the sanctuary during services.

Should AKSE appoint a Cruise Director?  Is the role of Rabbi one of Cruise Director?  It is one thing to have a plethora of activities to offer people, quite another to goad them into taking advantage of what is there.  In many ways the congregation's stability depends to a large extent on its inertia.  Schedules need to get filled, and they do.  Officers are selected from the Recycling Pool.  Growth and development of the people does not seem a particularly self-driven process the way it would be at a Hillel Foundation.  One very simple way to shake up services and bring people along would be to establish a rule that no individual may recycle a Torah or Haftarah reading more than two consecutive years so that everyone would be forced to prepare something that is new to them.

While congregational discussion has been set aside for this with enough heads-up notice to make it thoughtful, these type of analysis tend to be seat of the pants expression of druthers rather than careful teasing out of expected outcomes of things that might get implemented.  There is a ritual committee, now relatively diversely populated without the ideological dominance and manipulation of years past.  Not that AKSE committees of any type excel at analytical thought but ultimately this seems the best forum for alteration to a shabbos morning experience that may need only minimal tweaking so that it may proceed while keeping the process transparent and the consequences accountable.

Weekend Off

While it was my intent to seek my highest level of amusement for shabbat, I had also intended to see patients in the hospital on Sunday.  It was my good fortune, though to have nobody new to see other than a gentleman that I called in about on Friday night and who seemed to have something that can wait the weekend to sort out so I spared myself the round trip on Sunday.  Three more came my way on Sunday afternoon so I will be playing catch-up but the extra day to myself felt at least welcome if not deserved.

For shabbos I convinced Irene to attend services with me at Beth Tfiloh in Baltimore.  I try to go twice a year, usually only make it there once.  It never disappoints.  Bar Mitvah boy read the entire Parsha Bereshit, all 146 p'sukim largely error-free and with a nice early teenage voice.  Rabbi Wohlberg crafted a sermon that drew on multiple sources to expand his theme.  Even the Hazzan, who had been largely perfunctory on my previous visits, demonstrated why he holds a position in a large Orthodox congregation when most mechitza congregations no longer support them.  A fair amount of what they do there can be incorporated into the ordinary function of AKSE but the sense of pursuing excellence does not seem to be there nor does the Rabbi  seem to have a vision for what that might be.

I always wanted to visit the Boordy Winery on my way home.  Once I stopped by but they were having a Festival of some type that I did not want to spend the money to attend.  This time it was an ordinary tour day.  For $5 they gave you a glass and enough samples to want to have the Maryland Police perform breathalyzers on the visitors as they returned to the public roads.  For the first time, I declined to proceed with the full tasting after about six pours but Irene enjoyed the full spectrum.

Home in time to watch Mizzou lose.  A rebuilding year.  Shabbos concluded so after three days sans computer due to Yom Tovim and shabbos, I caught up with Facebook and e-mail, then off to sleep while the Cardinals were having a slugfest in Game 3 of the World Series.

Sunday had its own agenda.  Irene wants to make the downstairs presentable.  I want to make my bedroom a sanctuary, in not exactly a man-cave.  My finances need some major attention.  The sukkah has not yet become a temporary structure.  I need to learn the haftarah and shacharit for next shabbos at AKSE.  Some loose ends need to be tied up prior to vacation in only two weeks.

I ended up doing all the fleishig dishes, most of the essential laundry, made by living room desk nook functional, removed clothing intended for donation from the living room, deposited funds to my office account to pay the remaining bills, bought and installed a lamp for the bedroom, set aside some of the clothing I plan to take on the trip aside so I can put the rest of the summer clothing in a storage bag, and worked on the upcoming haftarah.  While enough other stuff still need completion, this remains one of my more accomplished Sundays.

Beth Tfiloh

There are some destination synagogues for me.  While saying kaddish, I took a liking to the experience and clergy at Beth Emeth, our local Reform congregation.  While initially attracted by the security of a minyan and the convenient time for Kabbalat Shabbat services, it did not take long for me to admire the Hazzan's musical skills and the Rabbi's intellect.  My own religious preferences aside, I always return to my car after a cup of soda at the oneg, about the only thing there I can consume after a fleishig shabbat dinner, thinking I have been to a place of kedusha.  My own congregation does not seem to put holiness among its aspirations.

About once or twice a year, my destination congregation is Beth Tfiloh, a nominally Orthodox gathering in the northern suburbs of Baltimore.  If I leave Wilmington at 8AM I can generally arrive at the end of Shacharit, and have never been disappointed.  Each visit has a Bar Mitzvah, which I utterly loathe at all of the Wilmington congregations, where the boy effectively pre-empts shabbos.  I make a point  not to go those weekends, substituting some Pikuach Nefesh activity like being on call or donating platelets, which is what I was supposed to due yesterday until I botched the prep by taking aspirin from my pill case within 72 hours of the scheduled donation.  So I went to Beth Tfiloh instead.

Beth Tfiloh has a mechitza, which my wife loathes. It is only about four feet high, made of plexiglass with an unobtrusive design. From my seat yesterday, not far from where I usually sit, I did not notice the physical barrier right away, just a lot of women on one side of the sanctuary and a lot of men on my side.

Each time I've been there, they have a Bar Mitzvah.  I'd expect that from a congregation of over a thousand members.  Yet the Bar Mitzvah never seems to intrude on the service.  Twice they had invited guest speakers, Ruth Messinger of the American Jewish World Service last spring and Martin Fletcher the Middle East correspondent for NBC News yesterday.  It would be unthinkable at AKSE or Beth Shalom to ask a Bar Mitzvah family to share their assigned day.  Rabbi Wohlberg always has a presence, even if it is only to introduce the guest.  Who is honored? One who honors others.  Avot 4:1.  The rabbi has had a word of tribute for all he mentions, from the Bar Mitzvah to the woman observing her 100th birthday in absentia.  For an orthodox congregation, he finds a suitable role for women.  I would not be surprised that if in private he is apologetic for not being able to offer more.  This being machar chodesh, the women have a role of gathering for t'hillim or Psalms.  He mentioned a women's tfilah group in passing.  Attendance of 45% women by my estimate speaks for itself.

And there was no amateur hour.  All participants came across as suitably skilled, even the Bar Mitzvah bachur who did a more limited amount of worship than some of the others.  A morning's delight.  Worth the shlep each time I go there.