Money Talks

This nicely written essay appeared in The Forward as an opinion piece by Jay Ruderman, head of his family's charitable foundation.  As a young physician more than thirty years ago, new to town and to synagogue, word got out that a new couple of young professionals with obvious dedication to Jewish life and with traditional observance had latched on to the Conservative shul. Invitations to join the Federation's Young Leadership program followed shortly.  It did not take too many sessions of attendance to realize that the local leaders who addressed us valued our potential future income a lot more than they valued the intellect and dedication that had gotten us to our entry point with them.  Attrition from the program was high, respect for leadership of that type a lot less than it could have been, and ability to withstand strains that inevitably arise over decades, basically non-existent.  They went for the money over the people and got what they sought but at an enormous and likely irreversible consequence. 

Jay Ruderman in The Forward.  Me  

 I don’t presume to know all the positive attributes that define true leadership in our age, but I can confidently tell you what does not, by itself, constitute a good Jewish leader: money.

Reb Tevye on Broadway challenged this "If I were a Rich Man" lyrics when he observed, "if you're rich they thing you really know."

Financial capacity to donate to an organization or a cause is not the same as leadership — and yet, all too frequently, Jewish organizations treat their funders as leaders. As a result, they end up with a lack of authentic visionaries.

It’s not hard to see why such a “leadership” culture has emerged in the Jewish community. Every organization is looking to expand funding in a fickle marketplace. In order to raise dollars, organizations identify the wealthiest people in the community, recruit them and cultivate their giving over time.

Not content just to give money to a good cause, many donors demand an outsized role in decision making, and organizations that want to keep them happy comply, fawningly.

They cultivate more than their giving.  In effect, they are often made proportionate share holders much like a corporation would, with elements of authority that go with it.  For self-made wealth, experience with assembling professional teams to carry out articulated missions may be part of what these people already do successfully.  For inherited wealth it is probably not.

Even when donors do not initially demand a leadership role, organizations often seek to empower them because they know they are more likely to clinch the donors’ gifts, turn them into loyal supporters and raise more funds from their friends. In effect, Jewish organizations have developed a wealthy cheerleader system that is optimally designed for raising money but not necessarily for accomplishing their mission.

But accomplishing the mission goes more easily when the funds are secure.

It’s understandable that wealthy people have a voice — even a disproportionate voice — in organizational life. The problem arises when that voice drowns out everyone else’s, completely obscuring the democratic ethos of Jewish civic life.

I'm not sure Jewish civic life was traditionally democratic.  Tanach is replete with hierarchy, mostly merit based until you get to Kings when the inherited nature of the position makes worthiness more hit and miss.  While Moshe was sensitive to the kvetch's of the rank and file, later on others would sell vulnerable people down the river for a pair of shoes.  In more modern times it would not be the Rabbi's son selected from the community to serve in the Czar's Army but an orphan who was deemed expendable.  The idea of everybody being a contributor, one man-one vote, is a very Western one that had infused itself into American life in all its facets, including Judaism.  Thus the great outcry in my former congregation when three machers got together, pooled their ample funds and took it upon themselves to overcompensate the Rabbi with a deal he could not refuse so that the rest of us would not have the opportunity to engage in a divisive discussion over contract renewal.  This is very real, and for those who are not nurtured into the organization, it invites attrition Pew Research style.

This dynamic undoubtedly exists in secular philanthropic circles as well, but it is decidedly more pronounced in the Jewish community. My experience is that in secular philanthropy there is often a much brighter line between giving and leadership. There is frequently an active group of donors who finance the organization’s work, and a set of leaders who provide vision, direction and insight. Sometimes there is overlap and sometimes there isn’t.

Much depends on the organization.  If you have a university, symphony or humanitarian organization, nothing would happen without relatively scarce talent being offered a chance to perform.  I could probably say the same about JTS or the Joint Distribution Community in the Jewish world where use of the funds is defined and Rabbis or humanitarian professionals need the freedom to implement what the organization does.  Not so for Federations whose purpose is to raise money or even synagogues, or churches for that matter, where the professional talent is not as scarce and does not need to be quite in the upper tier.

So the conflation of leadership with fundraising is not inevitable. What’s more, this perverse concept of leadership hurts the Jewish community in several ways.

First, it hands the keys to people who may have little leadership ability or insight, at least in the sphere of Jewish organizational life. Being a good businessperson does not necessarily make you an effective lay leader.

Second, it blinds organizations to highly talented people in our community who may possess tremendous leadership qualities but not deep pockets. With the need to raise more money, many organizations fill all the seats with big donors and overlook genuinely capable leaders.

Third, it makes us look like an elitist community catering to the few, and pushes away younger Jews who don’t find a donor-dominated establishment the least bit appealing.

And it affects how the upper tier views the others.  An anecdote serves well.  As a young physician in a congregation that did not have that many congregants with serious bimah skills, the one where three guys driving their Jew Canoe took it upon themselves to dispatch the Rabbi, I would read Torah on one of the Yomim Noraim days each year.  Since I could do any day, and did over the course of about a dozen years there, a who's who of the shul's law firm partners, retail moguls and the like would pay a handsome some for their reserved Aliyah each year, virtually all men slightly my senior, though the congregation had been egalitarian for some time.  As the  Olim came and went, they greeted each other with a generous handshake or hug but there were rather few handshakes to me as the Reader or the Gabbaim.  My yasher koach came as I returned to my seat from people who knew that these readings took some effort.  While I did my portion as a service to the shul with no expectation of a reward, the identification of not being one of THEM has remained long after my exit from that shul.  I am the reader again at my current shul, less of an annual Aliyah Recycling Center for big donors, and am greeted very differently by the Olim.  It is notice in ways big and small.

This confusion about leadership can produce abysmal results. Time and again, ideologically driven funders demand that their organizations shun left-of-center voices on Israel that criticize Israeli government policy. Numerous synagogues have invited and then disinvited speakers, such as Peter Beinart, simply because a small group or even a single donor has threatened to cut off financial support. These funders do a disservice to the organizations they support, which end up alienating younger Jews and appearing closed-minded and weak. In the end, the funders unwittingly strengthen the very groups and voices they try to weaken.  

This phenomenon is not necessarily money driven, but sometimes a reflection of authority as in the case of an Orthodox Rabbi who evicted a congregant on shabbat for following the Torah reading in his personal Etz Chaim Chumash.  We have some of that in our congregation where some of our congregants will openly disparage some regional college students at a Board Meeting for taking a lenient position on Middle Eastern affairs.  The irony is that these same guys would probably give their right gonad to have those highly educated, young Jews with good future financial prospects show any interest whatever in becoming part of our congregation as paying members, or even non-paying new courtesy members, especially men with bimah skills.

While it may not be easy, it is possible to say no to these donors. The leadership of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, for example, publicly declared that they would not give in to the pressure of outside agitators demanding that the federation defund a local Jewish community center for showing a controversial play about Israel. In an open letter to the community, federation leaders stated, “It is our job to live up to the ideals of Abraham, to create an open tent for all Jews, to demonstrate our love of Israel and the Jewish people everywhere.” That’s rare, but true, leadership.

At other moments, I’ve been struck at how weak-kneed Jewish philanthropists have been in the face of serious challenges. When Israel’s religious affairs minister, David Azoulay, declared that he “cannot allow” himself to say that a Reform Jew is a Jew, there was hardly a peep from anyone but the leaders of the denominations. Where were all the voices of courage, I wondered, to challenge this obvious affront to the interests of the American Jewish community, not to mention Israeli society?

Would it be too much to expect Orthodox Jewish philanthropists or organizational leaders who otherwise dedicate themselves to advancing bilateral ties to speak out against the attack on Reform Judaism?

Sometimes silence says a lot.  I'm sure that organizational leaders promote pluralism within their organizations.  In my relatively small community, interdependence of the denominations is essential though in larger communities the denominations are often more secure and insular.

The sad fact is that our donor-leader class often remains silent when it shouldn’t, and speaks out when it shouldn’t.

Unfortunately, except in blatant situations, it is not always obvious which situations merit the most vigorous response, nor is it possible to assess consequences of silence or in your face comments accurately.  Again, this is a leadership challenge, hardly unique to large donors.

By handing power to people with money irrespective of their leadership capacity or insight, we are cheating our community of what we all deserve. We can do better.

I'm not convinced it is being handed to them as much as they are assessing their own entitlement and taking the authority that they assess their generosity offers them.  

Lest we think this is unique to Jewish organizations, it is now well ingrained in other aspects of our lives including who we elect to represent us politically with parallel underperformance of public institutions.

My thanks to Mr. Ruderman, who I assume is a member of the donor class, for enabling some feedback from the peasant class.

Reversing Decline

One of my favorite analytical Jewish mavens submitted an Op-Ed to The Forward with an optimistic view on stemming Jewish participatory attrition, if not the population decline itself.  While I am less optimistic than Prof. Cohen, Judaism has always benefited more from the discussion than any pundit's conclusions.  I get little enough chance to be part of the discussion so I' ll treat myself to this one.s

Blog      Prof. Cohen's analysis

'In 2013, the Pew Research Center completed a landmark national study of American Jews. “Portrait of Jewish Americans” found evidence that the number of Orthodox Jews in America is rapidly increasing, and the number of active, Conservative, Reform and other engaged Jews is rapidly declining, with far fewer age 30-49 than among those age 50-69. Underlying this shrinkage and aging of active non-Orthodox Jews are several factors, most prominently:

• high intermarriage rates – 40% among Conservative Jews & 80% among Reform Jews-with non-Jews
• low birthrates: about 1.7 children per household
• high rates of non-marriage and late marriage
• only 7% of the grandchildren of the intermarried are being raised as Jewish-by-religion

Accept the data as presented

American Jewry can be divided into three segments

1) Orthodox

2) Jews who are episodically or partially Jewish, and not active in Jewish life

3) The “American Jewish Middle” who are not Orthodox, but participate and care about Jewish life. Many of them belong to synagogues, celebrate Jewish holidays, raise their children as educated Jews, feel attached to Israel, have Jewish friends, and donate to Jewish cases.

There are probably a lot of subclasses to #3

<snip>

Three basic principles to engage American Jews

1) Build social relationships and connections between Jews.

2) Convey meaningful Jewish content.

3) Target programs that appeal to certain stages of life — preschool kids, school kids and their parents, school children, adolescents, young adults, newly married couples, parents, older people, and other groups sharing demographic and psychographic features.

People knew this for centuries and made some effort to fulfill these needs.  Attrition in some form has also been present for centuries, well described in parts of Tanach, more recently historically in people moving toward the Hasidim or Bolsheviks from their more traditional communities or migrating to America.  All these disruptions led to reassembly of community and institutions.  In my own time we had synagogues built as people settled in new towns away from the core city, Hebrew schools leading to Bar Mitzvah, summer camps, Federations, Nursing Homes, teen programs.  Our current departure from participation has developed with the institutions already in place.  Presumably they did not create the ongoing connection that was desired of them.  That part of the analysis has been largely absent from much of the discussion of current demographics.  While there was certainly failure to engage people, in order to get the decline over about 40 years there also has to be disconnection of people who were once engaged.

Adolescence is the critical age

The most critical age for developing an identity and attachment to your religion, culture, and roots is during adolescent time, the period of 13 to 17.

The ball have been dropped before that through Hebrew School, both the kids' experience with it and the parents being inconvenienced by it at ready for an exit after bar mitzvah of the last child.  That still leaves some teen opportunity for continuation of the older siblings.

Jewish day schools are highly valuable, but only a minority of American Jewish parents will enroll their children in such schools, even if the costs were reduced. For the majority, seven or more years of congregational schooling yields measurable effects.

I found ours to be something of a disappointment, a little snot factory perhaps, breeding children of entitlement who were already engaged and easy to manage.  As a parent of a child who was more volatile I found the experience to be one of fair weather friends at a time when I could have used some real friends.  We departed.  I disconnected my Federation solicitor the next Super Sunday.  The Jewish institutions that I've entered are overflowing with these types of experiences from my childhood Rabbi who would speak well of you when you attended Ramah and turn on you when you told him the experience did not merit a return the following summer.

Most critical and effective are Jewish summer camps. Unfortunately, not every family can afford to send all their children to such camps. We need to make them by expanding subsidies, building more of them, and build a good number of low-cost Jewish overnight summer camps.

One of the challenges has been getting a critical mass of Jewish kids together in a setting where there are a lot of them in one place and they are there for the purpose of having a good time.  There are a number of experiments on this with places like Ramah and Habonim in operation for generations.  Alumni are plentiful.  Unfortunately my suspicion is that it may be those alumni of my era who get to the synagogues at age 30 having been programmed to rank Jews based on their observance who then disconnect the people they have been scripted to view as less worthy or less capable.

Youth groups are also effective when properly funded and run. Unfortunately, only two major national youth groups are currently well-funded.

The USY cliques are legendary.  As my Rav, the late Rabbi James Diamond z"l the Executive Director of the Center for Jewish Life at Princeton University observed, the best recruiter for seeking out Hillel in college was the USY experience but it was also the greatest deterrent.  There is a certain amount of manipulation that occurs there.  A person who has always gone to shul on shabbat and continues that way can be an officer but a more talented kid who joins an athletic team or musical ensemble that practices on shabbat cannot.  Once you convey a message that loyalty trumps talent, something utterly pervasive through the Conservative institutions as I have experienced them for many decades, you will eventually be left with less loyalty than you could have had and will have culled out the best talent.  If there is a message to how the Pew Report outcome got that way as the institutions function as it was getting to those results, that's it.  I think a real study on the Jewish lives and participation of Ramah alumni, if somebody of Prof. Cohen's stature might like to do it accurately would transform how Jewish leadership should set their programming to achieve their best result.

Lastly, just as Birthright Israel has proven effective for those 18-26, teen trips to Israel have the potential to transform Jewish lives, and to do so before teens reach campus.

If we can have more such trips and make them more affordable, this will have an effect on Jewish in-marriage, and help people form lifelong relationships within the community.

Again, the data might be open to question, though retrievable.  Sponsored trips to Israel for teenagers have been around for a long time and well subscribed.  Birthright excluded those alumni from its trips until recently.  The success of keeping those teenagers who visited Israel engaged in the Jewish future may have been the motivation for funding Birthright.  Those teenagers were already part of Jewish organizations through their families and the sponsoring organizations.  Whether they stayed that way as adults or became part of the Pew mainstream can probably be assessed if not already done.  It is much more difficult to assess those teens whose only connection was that Young Judea trip to Israel.

The College Years and Beyond

In college, Hillel and Chabad have a very positive effect on engaging college students. While there are many Orthodox rabbis on college campuses, not all students identify with them. We need more non-Orthodox rabbis serving on college campuses.

The large Hillel directors are a mixture of non-orthodox Rabbis and non-clergy Jewish professionals.  As graduates from the emerging seminaries and even the denominational ones find it more difficult to get appointed pulpit Rabbi, organizations such as Hillel have been acquiring their talent.  A generation ago, when the foundation for the current Pew results was being set, there were Hillels in the major universities with large Jewish populations.  They tended to attract the Orthodox, at least at the three I attended, though only one had an Orthodox Rabbi.  Effective programming for the non-Orthodox was very difficult with other competing venues for college students around the campus.  Kosher dining was the foundation for one of them as people had to eat, but maintaining Kashrut pretty much meant you were already engaged in day to day Jewish living.  Herding people from outside was a more difficult and less effective enterprise.  That is no doubt true today.

We are only beginning to systematically engage vast numbers of largely unmarried Jews during their young adult years. Among the most promising are programs to invite them to Shabbat tables, participate in Moishe Houses, attend Limmud and other Jewish learning festivals, and establish relationships with Chabad and other engagement-oriented rabbis. Any involvement of young adults in Jewish life increases the chances of their finding and eventually choosing Jewish marriage partners.

The number of people who find their marriage partners that way is probably minuscule compared to the number of people who latch onto each other in their college classes or their work places.

Non-Marriage Is a Major Challenge

<snip>

Engaging non-Jewish spouses

We can be better about inviting and inspiring non-Jews who marry us to convert to the faith. It can make a significant difference if the newly married are welcomed into the faith and the community, and are treated as one a fully equal member of the community.

Unfortunately, very few such husbands and wives ever do so. Obviously, conversion of non-Jewish spouses means that their children will be raised Jewish.

But even without conversion, we can do a much better job of making our non-Jewish family members feel fully part of the family and community.

It is important to note than an official conversion is not necessary. What is necessary is to make people part of the family and a part of the community. This can be very meaningful, and many people have been inspired by such warm invitations, and explore the religion further on their own.

This part has been in evolution, and not entirely voluntary evolution, for a considerable time.  I think all congregations now treat their intermarrieds courteously, but as recently as the 1980's that was not the case and various litmus tests still remain as part of organizational official policy.  As a teenager in the 1960's the Conservative Rabbis started responding to the first widely publicized exposee on intermarriage, Look Magazine's "The Vanishing American Jew" with a concerted effort at getting their congregants to support a form of what we would now call shunning.  You could not actually excommunicate Jews but you could keep them from becoming officers of Jewish agencies, restrict employment by Jewish agencies, deny aliyot and not acknowledge a donation celebrating the birth of a grandchild to a devoted synagogue member who's child intermarried.  Some of these policies remain nominally active today.  But for the most part the non-orthodox have become increasingly inclusive and some almost perfunctory in granting conversion.  It brings people into the fold but there is also a price to playing too loose with the Halacha that has sustained Judaism indefinitely.  These couples are part of the Jewish organizations and leave their imprint in many ways.  Whether they are able to challenge what they inherit as the status quo in a way that expands the organizations that welcome them has not been adequately tested.

I will close with an anecdote from about a year ago.  I attended a concert in which my wife was participating near the University just after shabbos one winter.  She had to arrive early so I wandered on the main street checking out a few pubs to see if I could get a craft beer before the concert.  I had a beard, knit kippah and appeared old enough to be a professor emeritus.  As I walked on the sidewalk and into a couple of pubs to check the crowd and selection, a few kids spotted me, wished me a goot shabbos which had already ended, expressed how I reminded them of the Jews of their home town, and made a remark or two about Hebrew school.   Being on a time budget, I exchanged greetings but did not engage in conversation.  These kids are not likely to be serious participants in the Jewish world now but they could be.  Somebody needs to pursue their interest personally with conversation and invitation.  Then once there, treat them as the important people they really should be.  

Derech Eretz Kadmah l'Torah

Chronicling Decline

Sometimes our nevi'im were not appreciated.  In contemporary times we have a few people who can figure out in advance that Woolworth's is going to disappear if the people running it don't fix it.  Some even understand what it takes to make the survival revisions but ultimately there is a Keter Malchut that must either take some initiative at reversal or rationalize staying the course amid evidence that there are wiser paths.

Whether those nevi'im really cared if the history that they predicted could dodge the inevitable might be open to conjecture.  They probably would have like to live to see vulnerable people treated a little better, but in the absence of that happening, a certain amount of calamity might fall into the category of justice.  But taken over a very long time trajectory, declines and revivals and reassemblies have always been part of the landscape, as they no doubt are now.  In my own lifetime, I have witnessed some of that realignment with unparalleled public acceptance, opportunities for prosperity, solid religious and social institutions, some too secure for their own good.  My childhood congregation once sponsored two Bar Mitzvahs each shabbos through the school year with an educational system sufficient to provide basic literacy to every one of those boys.  The girls did not fare as well but in my lifetime, much of the access has either become equal with increasing sensitivity to the religious desires of the women even in those sects that maintain gender separation.  There are homes for seniors, recreational facilities, schools, synagogues, social service advocates, and a measure of public prosperity and responsibility to assure funding into the foreseeable future.  Yet there has been something of a less than a welcome experience for some, a few who I might go so far as to classify as victims of an entrenched leadership, people excluded for participation for one reason or another at the time they needed it the most.  Those people are not coming back.  Neither are the witnesses of heavy handed leadership.

To a very large extent the decline in formal Jewish institutions, for which I might be the Pew Study Poster Child, have a certain amount of Leadership Generated Attrition built into them. As these institutions mature and move from entrepreneurial to mature, the people who run them become less receptive to challenges and as I can personally attest from a very severe adverse experience some 20 years back, very insensitive to people that a person of title might actually victimize. I've not been to my own shul in 2015 because I find some of the experience distasteful and need of change but when I convey the thoughts I am not important enough to merit an email response from the baalebatim I've tried to contact. Now if the baalebatim are going to treat people in a way that would be conceptually foreign to me as a physician responsible for the entire cross section of the population, at least target me because I have ample compensatory options to replace adverse experience. To do that to vulnerable people, and diminishes what Judaism is about and probably deserve the institutional decline that many of these staid bastions of Judaism are trying to reverse now.

We also recite at the closing portion of our services, "al tikrah bawnayich ela bonayich" or read the word (which has no vowels) not as sons but as builders.  There is a value to at least being in the game, to the extent possible, advancing what you find in place on arrival.  I'm less convinced that we need to tilt at windmills, though.   We have an entire segment of Nevi'im who are studied today because they pointed out faults that were in there Sphere of Concern with adverse consequences also in their Sphere of Concern but not within their Sphere of Influence to correct. That belonged to the Keter Malchut, a little less to the Keter Torah of that era, and to those very baalebatim who Amos accused of selling vulnerable people down the river for a pair of shoes. We also have a tradition of making the needed corrections with a cycle of Tochacha-T'shuvah-Selicha-Mechila. Much like the baseball diamond, you cannot expect to get to home plate of mechilah without getting to first base of tochacha first. And you are more likely to get stranded on base than to score. But you still have to try, and it always starts with Tochacha. However, if you get stymied enough or abused like Jeremiah was in his process, you can expect people to take their gloves and checkbooks back to the car and head home. In that regard, I think there's been an abject Jewish leadership failure, much of it probably the way the generation before my tried to create leadership clones out of mine and writing off talent that resisted or judging people who posed an element of skepticism as threats rather than resources, or perhaps even worse, as inferior. I don't expect it to improve, I cannot honestly say that my knowledge and candor has been welcome by my baalebatim any more than Jeremiah's was at his. So like the observers of the past, I salvage my measure of Jewish satisfaction more as an astute chronicler than as a welcome participant. And there are a lot of us, enough to be be transforming.

A Year Later

Somebody sent me an item from his local Jewish newspaper about an assessment of how the Conservative Movement has spent the year since the release of the Pew Research Center report on American Judaism trying to create a turnaround.  This reality is not limited to Conservative Judaism, of course, nor is it precipitous.  My own congregation once had 700 members, I am told, and even during my time in the on the membership roster as a USCJ expatriate, the membership households have declined from a little above 300 to right about 200.  Board meetings talk not about the talent and energy that a vibrant membership can bring to the congregation but the necessity of adequate membership to be able to pay everyone's salary and have enough left over to keep the power company from making the shabbos goy irrelevant.  In the Conservative Movement the Rabbis and officers have been aware of disquiet among their talent for some time.  As long as forty years ago people were reading The Jewish Catalog where a chapter on Havurot implied a need for alternatives to an often insipid experience watching Bar Mitzvahs on shabbos morning.  Some congregations, including mine, experimented with Havurot.  We would meet monthly for study and schmooze but when push came to shove, the other members arranged amongst themselves a Sunday trip to Jewish Baltimore, not inviting us so as to not have to deal with young children.  There is a book by Dr. Jerome Groopman, an active Conservative Jew who acknowledged his Rabbi in his How Doctors Think.  How Baalebatim Think remains to be written but understanding this probably determines whether the non-Orthodox branches of American Judaism have any remote chance of recapturing the children of the participants they have lost.  Getting defectors like me back to the organizations abandoned for cause probably has little prospect for reversal.

United Synagogue's "Conversation of the Century", the theme of their last convention approaches its first anniversary with either little to show for the effort or little transparency to the activities that will restore Conservative Judaism and the organizations they sponsor to their former glories.  As a Pew Research Report poster child, one who despite decades of engagement always felt estranged from the mainstream, external to the USY cliques, and leery of any place that valued obedience more than talent, the survey's findings hardly surprised me.  Conservative kehillot can probably trace this skepticism among their proficient young participants to the early days of congregational Hebrew schools where selection for the Honor Roll correlated a lot more with behavior than intellect.  I could say the same for USY participants disqualified from holding office for wanting to be on their high school athletic teams or performers in the arts, defaulting to less capable students who were willing to show up for services on shabbos.  When you set your organizational values that way, you will eventually be left with neither talent nor much participation.  The concept of disruptive innovation had not yet arrived in the business world but nothing made me feel less valuable than being sidestepped by a Rabbi or two who did not take kindly to even the most polite challenge and by baalebatim manipulators who thought they could run the congregation from the back seat of a Mercedes Benz while the Rabbi drove.

As I read the various responses from within Conservative organizational sources, or even Orthodox sources, I wonder whether any of them really interviewed any of their former members as they proceeded onto their congregational exit ramps.  We will expose them to the beauty of a shabbat dinner.  They've already been to shabbat dinner.  Our committees will give them what pleases us.  They used to be there and it didn't please them.  We will develop leadership.  Attrition is already leadership generated.  These machers think they can kick Lucy's football just one more time, perhaps, and this time make it sail through the uprights for a score.  There are certainly turnarounds but they usually depend on outsiders who understand the benefits of schecting a few sacred cows.  That's just not what I see happening at present, either through the organized Conservative Movement or in my congregation.

Fortunately Conservative Judaism, whether the modern USCJ or AKSE, the surviving relic on what mainstream observant Conservative Judaism once was, has not really disappeared.  It has reassembled and will continue to as denominational labels become ever less appealing.

We'll Go There for the Holy Days

Once a year my wife and I have our entry into Transdenominationalism.  For the past twenty-five years a dedicated cadre of observant Conservative Jews, still members of their USCJ congregations, depart from what can be an irritating experience, conducting something akin to what I aspire to, almost a College Hillel for the Alumni of the College Hillels at Rosh Hashana.  No Rabbis.  No new clothing from the fancy outlets.  No reserved pew seating.  Nobody checking tickets.  They have an honor system to pay $18 to cover the cost of building and chair rental, along with a small kiddush.  Nobody asking for pledges.  No interruption of the service to honor the congregation's machers and raise money at the same time.  Aliyot and petichot and gabbaim assigned that morning with no expectation of a donation for the honor.  No chazzan or Symphonic Choir, though each volunteer baal t'filah has been outstanding.  Sermons also superior in content and analysis from what I have come to expect of our congregational Rabbis.  No kvetches about faulty air conditioning or having to park the car too far away.  And we got done with the service in its entirety at least a half hour before our home congregation did.  It's the shabbos experience transposed to the Holy Days when the realities of congregational experience often corrupt what the congregation should be aspiring to.  If only they knew about it and did not mind either the drive or the gender equality, AKSE would not be competitive on the days the Board depends upon most for people to have a favorable experience.

Much can be said about shopping down.  When I need a new cars or house or suit, I look first at the ones I cannot afford, noting their special features that are most important, some of which are preserved in the offerings more readily available to me.  Synagogue membership has become a big ticket item, one rather expendable if the only thing derived is a three day, four service appearance that can be had for $18 a person per year.  Unfortunately for some, that outstanding experience invites other outstanding experience, which means ponying up for the membership which at its best includes some means of molding the congregation.  People can observe the Holy Days for free at any Chabad but they cannot influence what Chabad has become.  Congregational members can impact on who the Rabbi is, what the Rabbi does, the social activities that go on through the year, the educational offerings, maybe even the finances.  Inability to do that, particularly in those Beth Sodom's that have kingmakers or macher swoops greatly devalues the cost of membership, as many a congregational leader now grapples with membership retention as the ultimate goal with membership participation as the element that cements retention.

So as RH transitions to YK, I return to AKSE as a Torah reading participant, a curious listener to hear what the Rabbi has to say about the Pew Research Report, his announced pre-Yizkor topic and perhaps even a minor league schmoozer at the buffet that follows shofar blowing.

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.