Rosh Hashana Solicitations

Since I do not attend minyan on weekday mornings, I do not get to hear the Shofar to mark the approach of the Holy Days.  On shabbat morning twice a month, my current AKSE ration,  white adornments on the Aron and scrolls send their message.  But for those who do not show up at all, which is apparently much of the Conservative world and a fair fraction of the AKSE membership as well, the mailman brings a daily reminder of the season.  For the month of Elul I can expect a variety of requests for donations, some in exchange for calendars or greeting cards for the upcoming New Year, promoting a variety of global causes and many highly sectarian agendas.  I harvest the calendars, set aside the greeting cards, most of which have given way to e-cards and avoid relentless clutter by opening each envelope but making the recycling bin its next destination.

I suppose how I react to these endless solicitations notes characteristics of me that change a little on a long time trend but are resistant to the calendar driven transitions.  Many of these letters come from Haredi sources, promoting basically decent projects like relieving the effects of poverty in their community without pursuing things like employment that are more effective at reducing poverty itself.  There are requests to support their Yeshivot whose graduates admittedly have contributed to Jewish insight over time.  One organization gets a small gift each year, basically to support a retirement community for their men but for the most part I find myself sufficiently irritated by the underpinnings of what that same leadership does the rest of the year.  Their own Rav Dessler, whose lived in the first half of the last century and whose Michtav M'Eliyahu is still widely studied for its Torah insights, was fifty years ahead of candidate Romney in dividing the world into Givers and Takers.  I see my old school district which afforded me the opportunities that have had for my adult life being trampled by these people who do not use the public schools themselves by begrudge the education that the taxpayers gave me to the current students.  No, I will not support their yeshivot if that is the way they view entitlement to education and the investment required for it to succeed.  This summer we read about brave Israeli soldiers meeting an untimely end.  The security of the Haredi community there cannot come primarily with the blood of Russian immigrants.  Friends of the IDF gets a check from me.  Masorti gets a check from me.  Haredi solicitations go into the recycling bin with a hostile thought connecting my frontal lobe with my right hand as I toss it there.  You can learn what a person really thinks by inebriating him, irritating him and asking for money:  Koso, Kiso, Ka-aso.  Don't need any schnapps for this one.

Another genre of money requests come from international organizations, often with tribal undertones to resist anti-semitism of some type.  We've seen it emerge primarily in Europe but my friend's father's Kosher butcher shop in Philadelphia also fell victim to this.  Definitely something decent people want to try to reverse, but it's hard to purge what is actually in somebody's kishkes.  These various organizations do something very useful this season, however.  They take people whose Jewish identity is always there but largely dormant and offers them a brief opportunity to put themselves into the Giver class, no matter how transient.  After all, it is what is in their kishkes too.

A variant of this comes in the mail every Thursday when our community receives its weekly advertising from the local supermarkets.  One particular grocer dominates the Jewish shoppers in our community but which one varies from town to town.  Each supermarket ad has a half page or so of sales, or at least availability, of traditional fare that makes the Holy Days both festive and unique.  They sell grape juice and round challot with raisins and yahrtzeit candles and gefilte fish and honey.  Other than the challah being twisted, my household uses these products regularly, though jarred gefilte fish has become an expendable luxury for me.  But there are plenty of Pew Research expatriates who remain privately Jewish in their homes but have largely abandoned the institutions, other than this time of year.  And when they have finished their chicken soup and dipped the apple in honey, they will be asked to asked to press down the pledge tabs for an Israel Bond and donation to the congregation, not by daily junk mail but by a public Bimah request from a live person.

"To all things there is a season..." [Eccl 3:1]  Ironically, Kohelet neglected to include fundraising in his list.

Leadership Generated Attrition

Been thinking of writing an essay about how depletion of Jewish organizations and medical societies over my adulthood can trace its origins to the people who run these organizations.  I think it is true.  We saw it to some extent in the last Presidential election where the highly publicized donors in the Jewish realm could not capture the Jewish vote for their candidate.  That synagogues, JCC's and regional medical societies now struggle seems obvious.  The revered leaders have passed on, never quite grooming individuals of comparable character to take over.  Or perhaps they did groom them but at the expense of adaptability to the constituency.  Personally, I am down to my last medical organization, The Endocrine Society.  The JCC membership gave way, I have been repulsed by the experience with our local Federation and the Federation Types, my synagogue gets my dues but not the talent or creativity of thought that has far less value to the leadership than does the money.  I used to be a participant in all of these things and with the exception of Federation and maybe a previous synagogue, I did not really find any of the organizations outright objectionable, yet I am very much a part of their membership depletion.  To a large extent I am part of their talent depletion.  Ironically, the only medical organization left is the one where I would be regarded as too paltry a maven to be a serious intellectual contributor.

I find it difficult to detect a common thread that would not only capture me personally but a much larger population of former participants.  Rav Eliyahu Dessler divided people into Givers and Takers.  Maybe we are all Takers who found nothing worth taking.  Maybe we are fundamentally rebuffed Giver wannabes.  Each organization, Jewish or professional, exacts a serious financial commitment for which there is little return.  Certainly synagogue fees have escalated to where it really is not a good consumer purchase.  Medical organization fees usually run a few hundred dollars which is not really exorbitant relative to other professional expenses.  JCC is really  more of a consumer purchase of facilities and services while Federation expenses are to some extent voluntary.  No, I think the attrition has more to do with the value of connectedness than it does of expense, with the exception of the synagogue where some of the fees can be daunting and to some extent interpreted as a form of extortion to purchase a Bar Mitzvah.

Since it is easier to write about me personally than to generalize in the absence of assessed data, I'll go that direction, with a reasonable assumption that what I experience and act upon, others experience and act upon.  I used to attend Shabbat morning services every week unless I was on medical call or out of town.  Now I force myself to go about half the time to my own congregation, make a few entrances a year at other congregations, some more to my liking, some not, and for the last few years have dedicated one Saturday morning a month to my recreation, usually in the form of a day trip.  Guilt level = zero.  Number of people who have tapped into my mind to assess this transition also = zero.  And if they did, I'm not sure I could tell them.  But as an observer I feel little connection to the Rabbi or the relative triviality of the comments, I have found the operations of the governance sometimes offensive and have other outlets to enhance my engagement with Judaism.  Spending two hours enduring a series of Aliyah Sound Bytes does not measure up to what I could be doing instead, whether that be a schlep to Beth Tfiloh in Baltimore where I return with a shabbos that I could not otherwise duplicate or a day taking in the pleasantries of Hershey Park.  Shabbos, or really a form of half-shabbos, has not disappeared.  I do not write, service the car or use electronics as my form of reverence to the concept of avoiding melacha but I am not feeling any obligation to revisit some relatively negative encounters and impressions of synagogue leadership during limited time that I largely dedicate to myself.

For many years, as High Holy Day Torah reader, my very consistent observation was that the VIP olim had a generous generous handshake for embrace for each other but a perfunctory handshake for me from about half.  The work that went into this for their honor was their due.  Or they never quite captured Ben Zoma's concluding aphorism:  Who is Honored? One who honors all living things Avot 4:1.  And lets not omit USY which had its ongoing cliques that endure at a price.  But they also have a leadership that excludes holding office kids who opt for being on the high school athletic teams on shabbos.  They value obedience over talent.  Before long they find themselves with neither.

So yes, the organizations have depleted numerically.  But the people who depart for elsewhere or sometimes nowhere, as the much commented upon Pew Research report attests, take away talent and energy that could have been tapped but wasn't valuable enough or convenient enough to either seek out or accommodate once identified.  Cloning more of the last generation's leadership mindset only invites more attrition.  Reb Pogo's observation has been vindicated many times:  "We have met the enemy and he is us."