Writing a Short Story

My entry to Moment Magazine's Short Story Contest lost.  I thought it might be competitive, as did the ChatGPT review.  Then I reviewed, though not carefully read, the three that got published.  They had a subtlety that mine lacked.  Moreover, the writers were either pros, quasi-pros, or had experience with previously successful submissions.

My own writing tends more towards journalism and essay than creativity. With some experience, both what I submitted and what got chosen, I think I can give a second try.  They allow three months.  The 5000-word limit is more than ample.

Sometimes the winners gave a single story like spending a Christmas Eve shift as a homeless shelter volunteer.  The grand winner gave three stories, all set in the same place, marginally connected.

While I work at a disadvantage, there remains the challenge of creating a work of longer length and different style than my usual output.  This year I also have an automated editing program.  I should be able to assemble something more competitive by the deadline.

Repackaging Community

On my Whiteboard, at my line of sight when I gaze left, is a column of core values listed on the right third in multiple colors.  It includes Kehillah, or Community, something that has challenged me, as my experiences when there have often prompted me to seek community someplace else.  I have my loyalties, though.  Banding together was probably an evolutionary residual to enhance the likelihood of personal and species survival, which it still might.  But as threats to defend become less, the willingness to trade off some personal autonomy wanes in proportion.  Defections from previously established communities have accelerated over about fifty years, quantitated in a compelling way by such works as Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, now thirty years post-publication.  Moment Magazine recently examined the changing nature of community with comments from about twenty or so distinguished and accomplished minds.

https://momentmag.com/community/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=getresponse&utm_content=Why+Debates+Don%E2%80%99t+Solve+Problems&utm_campaign=Moment+Minute

Many of the swamis, as agency heads, focused upon and promoted their agencies.  Others took a more abstract approach to communities, including a co-author with Professor Putnam of a recently released book that offers contemporary solutions to the challenges that Bowling Alone exposed. Affiliations exist for the evolutionary purpose they always have, attaining security or compete amid perceived scarcity beyond what individuals could do for themselves. The process of assembly seems to me ethically neutral  though the social results are not, nor are the affiliations entirely voluntary.  Military drafts existed in the USA and still do elsewhere.  Most of us have a nationality or a religion into which we were born and for which some type of permanent imprint was offered.  Groups can be small like nuclear families or large like a national political party.  Most people seem to find more meaning, though, from being with identifiable people who can be recognized though the senses of appearance, voice, handshake.  Moreover, the second half of the twentieth century with its mobility and communication enhancements have redefined groups.  Geographic and employment mobility, less permanence to marriage, our fickle nature as consumers, transience of our ideologies, and the option of electronic friends whose interest overlap ours but we will never meet personally have all redefined our voluntary affiliations.

Of the various comments, the theme that captured my attention most categorized allegiance to a group either as a consumer of what that organization offers or as a contributor to the offerings.  As we recover from Covid-19 restrictions and my synagogue plans to reopen, I'm not ready to return.  They are not evil people, they just excluded me from development of anything meaningful.  Instead, the weekly email announcement comes as a menu of activities for me to select from their buffet.  I feel as a pure consumer, which gives me about as much loyalty as I have to which loaf of bread I prefer.  At my doctor's she needs to be in charge, but she cannot function professionally if I fail to provide the information she needs and volunteer myself for exam and lab work.  It's a partnership, though of necessity not an equal one.  She has my interest paramount but needs me to provide the information she needs to function on my behalf.  The shul has me more as an interchangeable customer, part of an attendance figure if they care to take attendance at all.

At the other extreme has been my favorable experience with the Delaware Community Foundation, a community resource that distributes funds for current benefit.  Ironically, I latched on when I attended a public presentation by Professor Putnam himself a few years ago.  After the speech, they solicited volunteers at tables in the foyer.  I thought it would be interesting to review scholarship applications of high schoolers.  They seemed appreciative of my interest, invited me aboard, and this spring I completed my third year of application review.  I take nothing in return other than a parking voucher.  My purpose for being there is entirely contributory.  The psychic dollars of what I do there far exceed anything I could possibly derive as a passive attendee of any event from the synagogue buffet, worship included.  People know when they do something important and they know when they are more convenient or inconvenient in lieu of important.  Not to mention the Kavod that comes with being invited to do something.

From a Jewish perspective, which is what the Moment Magazine forum focused upon, I had an interesting encounter with a venerable agency that does important work well.  They have an Executive Director of world prominence whose work I greatly admire.  Not being a great Twitter enthusiast, but finding it selectively useful, I put his comments as my premier Go To tweet, as they generally come by in the morning.  He generated a few comments, occasionally mine, never the hundreds that a famous author or entertainer or elected official would get.  Then one day I found the response option blocked.  Well, not really blocked but blocked to me and any other peasant he thought too much of a Nobody to be worthy of expressing a polite, though sometimes challenging remark.  He was very effective.  His feedback went down to zero.  I Unfollowed him, but opted to follow some of his younger subordinates who would often retweet the boss's message without the feedback exclusion.  But I very much resented being excluded that way.  I was no longer a contributor, other than financial, but a consumer of what he had to express on behalf of his agency.  He must have gotten some feedback similar to my thoughts, since when reconsidering a couple of weeks later, the restriction on having to be a Somebody to express a thought to his agency on his behalf had been lifted.

At present I am nearing the end of a respite from Facebook and Twitter.  I thought they would be communities, particularly FB where I knew all the Friends personally, nearly all from my high school, but over about ten years of subscription, people either established themselves as sloganeers, got fed up, perhaps resented the many successes that some of us have had.  High School comprised real people. While my close group was smaller than many, I knew everyone else well enough to carry an impression from forty years back.  Some reinforced what I thought, some enhanced my impression, some detracted, but a virtual community, even with a fundamentally fond common link, falls short of the real thing.  On Twitter I don't know the people.  Mostly I find them interesting but the exchanges of ideas have been minimal, mostly perfunctory.  I doubt if I will return there in any meaningful way.  The people on my FB list really were part of a viable community, some valuing me at the time, all at least tolerating me.  I always had my own niche, never a pure consumer.  And even on FB now, it's always an exchange of ideas, valued greetings for notable events, admiration for their achievements with no resentment on my part, and a little pleasant banter or electronic small talk.  It's community repackaged in a decent though far from ideal way.  I'll be back if I can manage my own presence more wisely.

Discussing Women

The Forward ran a feature on 36 American rabbis from around the USA recommended as outstanding clergymen by testimonials submitted by their congregants.  Among the lamed-vav was a gentleman I knew in college who worked the cash register at the Hillel Dining Room.  He was a year ahead of me in school and I never thought about him again until about ten years ago when Moment Magazine published a landmark article that he had written in response to a critique of Conservative Judaism.  My crystal ball from college days never would have presented him as a Rabbi, let alone a prominent one from the Chicago area.  He faded into the background again until appearing as one of The Forward's 36.  One can find out a little about most anybody in cyberspace these days so I did a quick search of his congregation's web site where the Rabbi usually has a short bio and a more substantial paper trail reflecting ideology.  His congregation, while Conservative, announced itself as Traditional, as does mine.  That has become shorthand for mixed seating at worship, open parking lot on shabbos but Y-chromosome for most ritual performance.  Shuffling though their web site, egalitarian did not appear but neither did non-egalitarian, which has less membership recruiting baggage than its euphemism Traditional.

Exploring further, it seems that my acquaintance of old appears again at the peak of his public prominence in 2001.  Another Conservative Rabbi in the region, this person the son of a man who I got to know well and admire when he lived near me, decided that his congregation really ought to make the transition to egalitarianism. Much to this Rabbi's credit, he did not impose the new policy as he could as mara d'atra.  Instead, he set aside a year of status quo to explore the options and ramifications.  Among the guests invited to discuss positions was my old college acquaintance who presented the case for restricting bimah participation to men, something which had become a minority view in the Conservative movement by then and remains even more of a fringe now.  The discussion by that congregation in Wisconsin centered around the religious propriety of the change and its implications for bringing new opportunities to women already in place who could expand their capabilities.

My congregation has also started to explore some measure of this change.  Propriety and religious opportunity for women has a much smaller place in the discussion than prospects for reversing membership attrition and acquiring a better market position for attracting new dues paying members.  What actually becomes of those women seems subordinate to what becomes of the congregation's checking account.  Advance the role of women not because it is consistent with communal values in 21st century America but because it is expedient.  Women are not really being served in that type of analysis as much as they are being made pawns for a goal that has little to do with the core mission of the synagogue.

In reality, women thrive Jewishly in many types of synagogues.  Conversely the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism experienced its talent depletion in the very years they were advocating an expanded role for women as baalebatim and as rabbis.  Stable membership participation and communal growth are really byproducts of what is offered to any member of any gender or age to enhance their Jewish experience and reinforce their Jewish identity, irrespective of mode of worship.  At a forum of a Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox rabbi in San Francisco a couple of years back, podcast on www.yutorah.org an audience member asked the Orthodox representative whether the policies of his congregation diminished the importance of the women members.  He responded very insightfully that his women were more knowledgeable by far and more committed to transmitting Judaism to subsequent generations than the women of any place else in the city.  Worship takes about 1.5 hours each day, a little more on shabbos.  But the synagogue building and its resources are open from dawn until dark pretty much every day.  It is his women that take best advantage of what is available to them and have the most available to them.

My congregation's leadership likes to categorize things with labels.  Membership is who came and who went.  Education is what classes are on the schedule when it should be what benefit did people derive from the classes.  There is a Women's Tefilah Group that puts a priority on attendance when they should put the priority on parity with what the men perform.  That is how you distinguish our congregation from Brand X around the corner which lets women chant Aliyot but at a level of skill too paltry to even get an invitation at our congregation.  Discuss women, for sure, but discuss them in the manner of servicing them, not as a vehicle to strengthen a precarious financial situation.