Inviting Paricipants

It was one of Judaism's periodic public fasts, a sunup to sundown food deprivation with some enhancements of our assigned daily prayers.  Torah is read in the morning and late afternoon, with a section of Prophets in the late afternoon as well.  To fulfill this, a Minyan, or ten men, need to be in attendance.  This being a summer Sunday, that was unlikely to assemble.  In the morning it didn't, or so I am told, not being there myself.  The announcement of the service at a well attended special event Saturday, including the desire of a prominent man to recite Kaddish memorializing the anniversary of his father's passing, did not generate sufficient interest.  Around midday, I received a phone call and text message, neither of which I answered immediately.  Could I join the minyan in the evening so that the Torah reading and Kaddish can proceed?  If physically present, I always agree to help out.  Enough invitations delivered personally generated more than enough men to attend.  My synagogue had its scheduled service done in its entirety that evening.  My friend memorialized his father in our traditional way.

Most of our congregational activities come from a few insiders broadcasting what's in the trough they constructed, asking for hungry snouts to sop up what's there.  Some will, but fewer than will respond to a personal invitation, either to sample the contents or even to help build the trough and decide what goes in it.  That doesn't happen at my shul, where comfort zones prevail.  There's an element of paths of least resistance, or from my medical framework, I'd even say laziness.  For a thriving enterprise, the broadcast announcements for participants are fine.  For a declining one like ours, being acknowledged personally as somebody whose participation is valued makes all the difference, as we learned from yesterday's AM/PM gradient in being able to attain the obligatory minyan.  

In another era, a pharmaceutical company needing practical advice in keeping a teetering product viable asked for user opinions, an invitation extended to me personally by the company's office representative.  I provided mine, for which I received $400, which I donated to a small Tzedakah Fund run by somebody I had met.  He sent me a “Thank You” note with something he had recently written, an article on how to enhance the meaning of our upcoming Passover Holiday.  Danny, the agency head, posed his four questions:

1. What am I good at?
2. What do I like to do?
3. Who can help?
4. Why not?

For a congregation of scientists, that element of curiosity has largely remained dormant.  If our President were to ask each committee chairperson to tell him who they purposely invited onto their committees in the last two years because they had knowledge or insight that would enhance the work of their committee, I think the null hypothesis would prevail.  I was asked onto a nascent health committee to assess covid reopening based on my professional background.  Or as my friend asked, what am I good at? Who can help?  This time Me.  But my sense is that we function by a corrupted version of the Pareto Principle where 20% do 80%, mostly by default.

Ironically, it wasn't always that way.  There was never a lot of accountability, at least not at parity with my professional expectations, but there was more outreach at one time.  We had an initiative with rewards to develop Torah reading capacity.  My suggestion to revive this to the appropriate VP was offered a negatory in one minute.  When your tush gets epoxied to the Comfort Zone seat, it's much easier to take the crew and see if they will do this year what they did last year.  At least those are invitations, but never an outreach to what might challenge even the experienced reader a little more.  Eventually that approach takes you to the senior citizen version of the USY Clique, where we seem to express ourselves a little more starkly each passing year.  You never really determine what your pool of people really likes to do, has talent to contribute, and would be reticent to turn you down.  But our Nominating Committees and Chairmen whose purpose is nominally to engage people, or even function as talent scouts, encloses themselves in their comfort zones.  They make do.  Trying to enhance seems too much trouble.  There is no why not or what might be possible.

Many of us ran small professional practices where we had people who did not pay their bills.  There's a literature on collections that any of us who did this know quite well.  The highest yield to achieve payment is to have somebody call or meet the person in arrears and directly ask for the overdue fee.  When my medical organizations embark on a project, they don't broadcast that they are forming a committee.  They assign a chairman who seeks out the best composition for the project, based on skill and temperament.  That's how you move ahead. That's how you imagine excellence as your destination.  My congregation has not gone that route in a long time with results that reflect complacent officers who broadcast when they would do better inviting.

At the Crossroads

Somebody sent me JTA synopsis of the biennial United Synagogue Convention, recently held.  The one two years back created a lot more interest than this one, but for all the quest for new initiatives, not much seemed to come of the effort or it escaped publicity.  I saw very few news reports of the current convention though I suppose eventually some of the comments will become podcasts to be tapped on the www.uscj.org site.  In his book, Getting our Groove Back, Scott Shay recognized that for all the problems organizational Conservative Judaism has endured over a few decades, a fair number of them self-inflicted, implosion of the middle ground may be one of the great Jewish calamities of our day.  The problems seem to me so ingrained into a self-perpetuating culture, that I think remedies are better imposed externally than by insiders who thrived under current system, though at the expense of attrition.  Edited JTA Report.  My analysis for what it's worth.


JTA - Conservative Judaism is at a crossroads.
The movement is committed to Jewish tradition, but it’s seeing a growing number of its young people walk out the door — most often to Reform Judaism.

American Jews who self-identify as Conservative increasingly are leading lives at odds with the core values and rules of Conservative Judaism, especially when it comes to intermarriage. And the number of Conservative Jews has shrunk by one-third over the last 25 years.  In this movement meant to occupy the center ground between Orthodox and Reform, Conservative leaders are struggling to figure out how to appeal to a new generation of Jews without abandoning their core values or becoming a near-facsimile of Reform Judaism.

I'm less convinced they were ever really in the door.  Organizations that focus on institutional development often do that to the neglect of the people.  The kids there had Hebrew School which may or may not have given an education but exposed them to peers.  Ramah succeeded.  USY no doubt had the same cliques of times past, you were either in or out.  There was not a lot of attention given to creating loyalty.  Had there been, things like excluding athletes or musicians from USY office if their teams functioned on shabbos would not have happened.  They basically ranked obedience over autonomy, maybe even over talent.

“Tradition and change has long been considered a tagline of Conservative Judaism, a concise statement of what we are about,” said Margo Gold, international president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the movement’s congregational arm. “But in the 21st century, the vision of Conservative Judaism requires that we rethink this as a community and see what we really want our core message to be.”

I think they need to think less about the institutions and more about the people they would like to be participants.

<snip>

“We’ve bought into the narrative of decline of our own movement,” United Synagogue’s CEO, Rabbi Steven Wernick, said in his address. “We need to stop shraying our kups [ Yiddish for ‘screaming our heads off’] about everything that is bad and get to work.”

In order to get to Mechilah, you have to start with Tochacha, then Tshuvah, then Selicha.  My sense is the leadership does not differ a lot from that of my shul which has also watched attrition.  They want business as usual but with better affiliation.  There's something a little irrational about this.

The focal point for the dilemma over how much to stick to tradition versus how much to change has been intermarriage. Though the movement forbids it and does not count as Jews those whose fathers are the sole Jewish parent, four out of every 10 Conservative Jews is marrying out of the faith, and community leaders want to reach out to intermarried Jews.
“We’re in an awkward situation where the sociology is pushing us in one direction, but our organizational structure is hindering us moving in the direction we need to be moving,” said Rabbi Charles Simon, executive director of the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs and an outspoken Conservative proponent of embracing interfaith families.

Some history for those younger than me.  Intermarriage became a focal issue about 50 years ago, my Bar Mitzvah era, prompted by a widely publicized article in a now defunct magazine entitled "The Vanishing American Jew."  The initial response from the Conservative Rabbi's was brisk, akin perhaps to what we see from the NRA on gun issues now.  Oaktag in various colors announced guest lectures by regional or national rabbis who would talk about intermarriage, with the recommended approach being a form of shunning directed at reversal.  Intermarrieds could not be members, the births of loyal members'  grandchildren could not be acknowledged with a faceplate in the siddur from a donation given to honor the occasion, some children could not attend Hebrew School.  Intermarrieds could not work as secretaries or math teachers at Schecter Schools but nuns could.  Eventually there would be kids, some halachically Jewish, some not, who themselves would need Education, USY, burial of their parents and grandparents, services where shunning is generally destructive, but at one time had widespread support not only from the Rabbis but from the baalebatim as well.  That approach, while nominally still there in a number of policies, some with the imprint of the Rabbinical Assembly's Committee on Law and Standards, has a natural history and reasonably predictable outcome of moving those affected to their next destination, which happens to be either a Reform affiliation or no affiliation.


There was perhaps no better illustration at the conference of the movement’s identity crisis than at its penultimate session. Led by Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, some 200-300 participants tried to brainstorm a new tagline for the movement – something that could convey its essence, appeal to young Jews and fit on a bumper sticker.

<snip, proposed slogans deleted>

While Sound Bites of various forms have digested anything from the Weekly Parsha at my synagogue to the news we get of the world, certain things require Machshava, thinking and analysis.   The flashy car ad might get you interested in getting a new car, the purchase requires that car be suitable.  A branding logo does not really address the substance of the organization and the often adverse experiences that people had while there.  Those are the roots of attrition and also the opportunities for its reversal.  Many places, including mine, are asking $2000 for a seat at the table to participate.  It does not fare well in competition with  other consumer purchases, magnified when the hype falls short.


<snip>
That’s bad news for United Synagogue, which has seen the number of its member synagogues fall to 580 today from 630 in 2013 and 675 in 2009.
United Synagogue has acknowledged the problem. The opening session of the conference, held Sunday to Tuesday, was called “Moving Beyond the Crisis.”

Less people and less synagogues are only partially related.  My bar mitzvah synagogue and the place I looked forward to attending each shabbat as a resident are both gone, one largely a victim of demographics and aging, the other partially demographic and maybe some inability to attract newcomers.  The great congregations of the Lower East Side are long gone as well but the descendants of those who once worshiped there keep many a current place vibrant.  The synagogue membership figures can be deceiving, as there is sometimes tension between the United Synagogue, a sometimes heavy handed Rabbinical Assembly, and a local congregation trying to meet its own needs.  A better figure, which I've never seen, is what happened to the 95 congregations that are no longer affiliates.  The interpretation would be very different if they disappeared, merged, disaffiliated without disappearing.  The answer to disaffiliating would be to offer individual memberships, something that I have through the OU but which the USCJ feels might jeopardize congregational membership.

<snip>


Rabbi Ed Feinstein of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, Calif., said that for the Conservative movement to survive and thrive, it must make adaptive changes for the 21st-century, not just technical changes.
“We will not find our way if we say: ‘Let’s have better board meetings and more strategic plans and better fundraising and different dues structures.’ Those are all very important technical changes; none of them are going to save us,” Feinstein said. “We’re only going to get saved if we start by saying: What is the truth of this movement and how can we best convey it to a new generation?”

Never found candor to be valued.  Congregations often dominated by modern day Nimrod's who impose their will, a Rabbinical Assembly Placement Service that just invites us to confess to Latznu at the next Viduy, and a very real sense that if you are not happy with what is there, something must be wrong with you or you must be inferior in some way.  Those are cultural changes.  Ten Year Plans directed by a Planning Maven using Power Point slides to Sulam alumni really doesn't fix something so scripted into the participants.

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

Keeping People Immersed

From time to time a published essay captured my attention along with my imagination of what might be but generally isn't.  This essay from Rabbi Alex Greenberg of Pittsburgh found its way to the USCJ site, interestingly in a section on developing congregational finances.  His remarks, My commentary.

Everyone wants to have a welcoming shul. Everyone thinks they have a welcoming shul. But, it's time for Beth El to no longer be a welcoming shul. It means nothing to be welcoming, if we are not engaging. Our goal, from now on, is to be more than welcoming. I want us to be known as an engaging shul.

Can't say I've ever been chased out.  I have sat through many a service wondering if my shabbos morning could have been utilized better.

    To “engage”: To attract and hold, to cause to participate, and to connect with. More members are not enough. Having a bunch of names on a piece of paper does not make a synagogue. We could have the largest synagogue in the nation; but, if we don't engage our members, then that's all they are - some letters on a piece of paper.

Our Executive Board doesn't even know who our members are.  They count how many credit cards they debit for dues.  While each household usually has only one checking account, they typically have multiple individuals with different needs.  One need only to scan the sanctuary of shabbos morning and count the half couples in attendance to figure that out.  Some things are a little harder to figure out, particularly one household member extended invitations for multiple elements of participation while another with the same checking account never gets invited personally for any activity.

    What is the ideal Conservative synagogue? Not the largest one, but rather the Conservative synagogue in which its members are willing, learning, and striving Jews. The perfect Conservative Jew is not perfect. The ideal Conservative Jew is always a work in progress. The ideal Conservative synagogue is filled with not Jews who are perfect, but rather filled with Jews who are willing, learning, and striving. It is not about the numbers, but rather about the people and how we engage them. Joining Beth El is not success, success is what happens next.

That probably applies to any organizational effort from workplace to political campaign to school to place of worship.

    We do not have an apathetic synagogue. We have a passionate synagogue, filled with passionate people. We are filled with willing, learning, and striving Jews. And that is our goal - not more members, but more passionate members. We have greeters at the doors, but do we have engagers in the seats? Every single member of Beth El must be an engager. Part of engaging in a Conservative shul is about outreach to our own membership. About 1/4 of our congregation has been members five years or less, 25% of our congregation is new. We have a responsibility to fulfill the needs of all congregants within the Conservative movement. The Conservative movement is not a special, secret club where you need a secret handshake to get in. It is a movement that respects all, the traditional, the observant, the liberal, the intermarried, and so on. Judaism is not a democracy, it is about pluralism, always has been, always will be. And, the Conservative movement is the place where pluralism is cultivated.

We do not seem to have a passionate membership at AKSE.  The Board's behavior to say the least has been more members.  Disciples of that medical cult book, The House of God whose motto was "We're Not the Best but the Most."  I think our baalebatim would give one of their relatively marginally functioning gonads to have a situation where a quarter of the people are new entrants but I doubt if they would look at that as a source of new talent.  More likely it would be a subsidy for those entrenched longer.

I would challenge the comments about the essence of the Conservative movement.  It only recently became pluralistic and to this day creates various litmus tests that stratify people based on Kashrut observance and intermarriage.

    We are a lay led congregation. We are engaged. But, how can we teach engagement to others? How can we instill it? Motivate? Invigorate? Engagement is accomplished through participation over performance. Engagement is having a congregation where everyone has a say, where we recognize that being a good Jew has nothing to do with how kosher you are or how well you keep Shabbat, but rather how well you treat your fellow human being.

The restrictions on office holding at USY differ from that suggestion that Conservative Judaism is a meritocracy.  And I must say, machers who swoop to override more general consensus within many a Conservative kehillah and at the intercongregational level do not seem to have their honored and disproportionate place at the table challenged because of what many would regard as misdeeds, many of them prime contributors to their movement's loss of adherents over a generation.  But as Speaker O'Neill observed, all politics is local and within a large collection of kehillot there will be some places like Rabbi Greenbaum describes of his and some Beth Sodom's in the mix as well.

Our shul, being independent of a formal movement, does not have that banner.  How well you treat people seems to matter less than how often you attend morning minyan, as a few key individuals can and do leverage that important but precarious niche to impede a more overriding need of the congregation to offer more to women, the one visible element of AKSE that has inhibited any realistic attraction to the younger families.  And they do it with the consent of the last two Rabbis.

If you look at the Nominating Committee slate, it has been recycled officers for the last three slates.  Who else may have been invited but turned the invitation down.  Doubt if anyone was.  And you cannot ignore performance.  Probably a mistake to regard Mediocrity as the Promised Land.

    Judaism is a religion of action over belief, of deed over creed. Words are cheap. We engage by being engaged. We walk the walk. We lead by example. We are one congregation, one community. We are a team. The question is not how do we get more members, but rather how do we get more members who care. How? By embracing our synagogue. If every single person in our shul is proud of being a member of our shul, then we will attract more caring members. All we need is a bunch of Jewish people who are happy where they are. (sounds easy) We must believe in ourselves. A synagogue only exists for its members, not the other way around. A synagogue cannot be engaging, only its membership can be. Beth El is no longer a welcoming synagogue. We are now an engaging synagogue. Watch out, because we're coming for you.

This is where the Rabbi needs to be at the forefront.  Beth El may be putting forth the effort to draw its passive members into its pageant.  AKSE does not seem to have a parallel initiative at the top of its agenda, at least in observable evidence.  They probably should and it can only happen if the Rabbi insists upon it as part of his tenure and pushes the structure among the baalebatim that enable its success.

Grooming Leaders

Jewish leadership of my generation has left me underwhelmed.  Institutions already existed for worship, camaraderie, support of communal educational and social needs, burial.  They came from somewhere by people who often created something from nothing, people of vision and energy who got some measure of deserved kavod as their reward but the work had value without the public honors that came their way.  Like any successful entrepreneurial venture, these institutions reach maturity after which maintaining takes priority over innovation.  Thus we have my generation now holding the senior synagogue and communal positions, groomed as clones of the people who groomed them, no longer receptive to the challenges, analyses and clashes that brought about the original success, or at least trying to keep an arms length from disruption and marginalize the people who may bring that disruption about.  It has not been a good outcome, or maybe it has depending on what you like to measure.  Head count has certainly declined over my adult lifetime.  There is more alienation and considerable cynicism from some of the best potential contributors around.  Those that keep in the loop have more resources to commit, which they do.  Whether the kingmakers' empires are really bigger or smaller can be rationalized both ways.

What seems beyond argument, though, is that Jewish leadership grooming has become less of a meritocracy than it was a generation ago, with more accusations of self-promotion or exclusion of the best and brightest in favor of the most loyal or obedient to the agenda.

We see this in a rather public way with recent reports of a central conclave of USY leadership.  For readers unfamiliar with the background, USY has been a successful USCJ arm designed to keep teenage members of Conservative Judaism attached as they head off to college and beyond.  I was a nominal member, participating primarily in weekly bowling league and basketball where my team was invariably The Skins.  Some of my friends from there are my FB Friends today.  No religious requirements were imposed upon me and none were pursued.  The one or two times I went to a meeting, there were officers, though I was never notified of an election or invited to be a participant in anything.  We had a kosher home, attended shul on shabbat though I would attend school events on shabbos and practice on Saturday morning a few times a year with our All County Orchestra.  Nobody ever asked me which girls I found the cutest so they could apply a shiksa test, something first starting to emerge in the mid 1960's just a few years after the publication of  "The Vanishing American Jew" in Look Magazine, z"l,  the year of my Bar Mitzvah and treated by the congregational rabbis much more harshly than now.  I do not recall ever seeing the USY officers in shul with me on shabbos.  This organization served as both an effective recruiter and effective deterrent to seeking out college Hillel once parents could no longer insist that you go to meetings or services on shabbos morning.

With maturity came formality and litmus tests.  Shabbos was the big one, so that participants in the high school athletic, dramatic, and music extracurriculars that conflicted with shabbos forfeited their eligibility to be officers, irrespective of the talent or dedication they bring to the organization.  And so compliance gets you on the A-team and self-fulfillment gets you on the B-team.  You can still be a member and your basketball team might be designated The Shirts but you still wore that invisible yellow star with six points that had JOCK inscribed in the middle.  That same form of thinking never quite changed.  Woody Allen once observed that 80% of life is showing up.  Show up on shabbos morning and your chances of being a USY officer then or a congregational officer now were pretty good.  And as intermarriage became more common and more difficult to apply shunning effectively to offenders, another set of litmus tests arose, one that depleted the interest of some very fine talent in a way that really cannot be recovered, though we could argue whether the honchos now sitting on the organizational dais really want to recover it.

So where did the talent that was gradually depleted over my generation and continues to be alienated from the central institutions in my children's generation end up instead?  Some of us stand outside the tent and pee in.  Some write a perfunctory check on request though for a smaller amount than they might have if they had more personal commitment.  Some nominally stay with the organization but nurture a small cadre of associates with only minimal regard for where the larger organization tries to position itself.  Others go the way of the writers of the Jewish Megatrends anthology and reassemble to embark on new ventures.  But by and large, this just does not really look like the kind of circumstance that generates G'Dolim B'Dor.

Most institutions will have a time of formation, growth, maturity and senescence.  The Federations will plod along as mature organizations that no longer have a concept of disruptive innovation as something beneficial. Many synagogues, mine among them, have become organizational zekainim, though without the wisdom that should accrue with years.  Yet is seems like we put a lot of effort into perpetuating what perhaps we would be better off disrupting.

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.