We Need More Money

Dr. Simon Baruch, the renowned Confederate Army surgeon wanted his son to follow his professional path but Bernard took an early interest in the American capital markets, earning his first million while in his twenties.  His father asked him what he planned to do with that million dollars, for which the answer at the time was unclear.  Having a winning strategy was Bernard's end point with the amount as a method of keeping score.

That parallel approach to finances seems to have made its way into the psyche of the AKSE leadership.  About ten years ago, the congregation embarked on a Capital Campaign to raise $1 Million, coming fairly close to this somewhat arbitrary goal.  A congregational solicitor visited us at home accompanied by a fundraising professional to encourage us to pledge more than we ordinarily would for something like this.  I asked the fellow shul member what they planned to do with the money.  She seemed stunned by the question.  Some was to retire debt on the building but there would be quite a pot left over if the goal were reached, yet it was not clear why they needed so much more if there were no purpose for it to advance the congregation.  If the goal was to retire debt, we could pledge a lot less.  If the goal were to advance the congregation, there would need to be a plan in place for doing that.

The campaign sort of succeeded in raising money but the residual never really went to the congregation.  It served as a paper interest free loan for more operating expenses, to where it languishes on the books to the present.  The congregation has a secure building with secure economic value but not much else beyond that for all the effort that this project entailed.

As the congregation moves to its waning years, another project to raise funds for the sake of raising funds has emerged, a Dinner Dance, an evening of merriment done by many non-profits from museums to social service agencies to religious institutions, selling well heeled people a good time while allowing business a chance to sell stuff to them by purchasing space in an advertising book.  When the Diabetes Association does this they intend to take better care of people with diabetes.  When AKSE does this, the mission of the project seems less clear.

To perhaps make more sense of this I will take a fabulous lecture by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks recently presented at Yeshiva University and transpose his principles of personal happiness to organizational success.

http://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/804344/Rabbi_Lord_Jonathan_Sacks/True_Path_to_Inner_Happiness

He organized seven things people can do to make their lives more fulfilling, which organizations probably think they do, though maybe erroneously.  Let's see how the congregation did, or how I think they are doing and perhaps might do better.

1. dream:  I will assume this means aspiring to something rather than foretelling the future, more like Yaakov's dreams than Joseph's.  There was a time when the congregation did work toward something unique in the community, whether that be educating the kids, maintaining Kashrut, having secure minyanim.  If the congregation were to close next year, what would the community miss as a result.  Lord Sacks assessed the optimal vision as one where what you like to do merges with what needs to be done.  Raising money enables what needs to be done, but it is not a surrogate for vision or an accomplishment independent of the vision.  If I were to take a yellow pad and try to write down what AKSE's niche currently is and what it might be instead, I would have difficulty doing that.  But being a Nobody, that is not my task.  There are Somebody's in place, a Rabbi, a President, and Executive Committee who could come up with a logo of Embracing/Engaging/Enriching which is conceptually fine but it lacks the dream of what might be put in place that makes that logo an operating reality.
2. assess:  There is certainly a local, national and international Jewish landscape to which AKSE contributes.  Our members are the largest local purchasers of Israel Bonds despite being the smallest size.  We have embraced CUFI, which has its pluses and minuses.  But we also live in an environment in which the role of women is very different than it was in the 1960's and where the authority of the Rabbi is more limited.  People can and do walk away.  Most college or medical students remember the first time they walked out of a lecture in the middle.  Whether this happened for a good reason like the pager went off or an editorial response to the content of the class, most people had reservations about walking out until about the third opportunity, when it was no longer seen as something to avoid doing.  Moreover, there are things that are either AKSE exclusives or could be, whether afternoon minyan, members who are literate in Hebrew or the annual Cafe Tamar.  I think that officers and Rabbis who should be well versed in what other places are doing successfully have not made that assessment, even though cyberspace has made this much easier than it once was.
3. venture:  And then there was BINGO.  It failed in its mission of fundraising but it succeeded in gathering forty individuals to make the project happen.  And there is mixed Megillah reading and there is Pizza & Parsha.  Amid these ventures are also some dead horses that have lives of their own.  While it is OK to innovate and fail, I would question the wisdom of plodding on once the failure has been established.  And then there are the ventures that should happen but don't.  What do the membership people do, what do the ritual people do?  Why does Women's Tefillah Group function like a Junior Congregation indefinitely or more importantly why does the Rabbi permit this?  There can be no growth without these ventures, keeping the final segment of the logo Enriching either vacant or at best an illusion.
4. work:  People do work, they are dependable. They don't always do the work in a way that is productive but for the most part it is diligent.  Amid the yeoman's efforts that people put forth, there is also a reticence to undertake projects, most notably the governance.  I do not know for sure if the Executive Committee adopted its Peter Principle due to the Nominating Committee failing its role of talent scout or because real talent that was solicited declined the offer.  To be fair, I've also become more selective about what I will undertake there.
5. offer:  AKSE has a face that the world can see.  People support the hungry and on Christmas morning people volunteer at the Mary Campbell Center.  But social justice belongs to the reform congregation as a core tenet.  Missions to disaster areas get organized someplace else.  Even money for disaster relief never makes the AKSE agenda.  It's a very inwardly looking amalgam of people, yet there is a sincere desire to appeal more broadly.  Chabad as part of its mission understands that the door to success opens outward, as the shelichim reach out to Yiddishe Neshamas who have no formal affiliation.  They are the affiliation of default.  There probably is no barrier to people at AKSE organizing small groups to benefit others and better broadcast AKSE as a place that infuses the best of Judaism wherever it might be welcome.
6. recover:  I suppose the chronic depletion of members constitutes adversity but not nearly so explicitly as losing one's Hazzan suddenly right before the Holy Days or hiring a Rabbi who really isn't a Rabbi.  And they will weather the vacancy in the Presidency.  But are those things what you might regard as resilience, the incentive to change fundamental policies to be stronger?  They are temporarily setbacks viewed as temporary but the depletion of participation is a long term trend that has no finite pivotal point which changes direction.  I sense instead an acceptance of progression to the congregations final years, an unwillingness to set out on a bold new course that might give a different result.  
7. thank:  At the close of shabbos the person making the announcements has begun to include a work of thanks for showing up.  Ostensibly the synagogue exists as a resource so the thanks really should be the other way around, a thanks to the synagogue for enabling the enjoyment of shabbos.  There used to be more people so I suppose a word of gratitude to those who have resisted attrition becomes appropriate.  Whatever happens in the congregation happens because people make it so.  Things like the Women's Tefillah Group or the Implementation Committee or socialization of new members efforts all failed to reach their goal because people did not promote interest beyond the original concepts.  We do pretty well thanking people for what they do, not as well at thanking people for what they tried to do.  And while there is much to be said about having a measure of contentment for what is, there also needs to be a measure of discontent for what was but is no more and for what might be but either nobody realizes it or nobody steps up to the place to make the possible a reality.

So Rabbi Lord Sacks teaches about people and he teaches about groups of people.  Money becomes the tool for doing the things that move you forward.   If you are not planning to move forward with it, to make use of it to expand the horizons, you may as well just take your delight in the portion you already have.

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.

Congregational Achilles Heels

After a couple of years focused on the financial stability of the congregation, which is important, the poobah's decided it may be time to poll the congregants for their thoughts on arresting declining membership and participation.  It may sound grass roots but it's one more top-down transformation where people of an opinionated nature submit thoughts to a central authority without the invitation to comment themselves on the diversity of thoughts presented.  That will be done by AKSE's politbureau.  A giant trough will then be created to be filled with some form of slop into which members and I assume the non-paying public as well can immerse their snouts when they are hungry for Judaism, or at least need to be Embraced/Engaged/Enriched.  To be fair, much of the governance has been devoted to technique:  Bingo, branding, dinner dances.  Too little has been invested in the things that count more: the experience of sitting in the sanctuary, college level Jewish advancement, establishing a unique communal presence.  Maybe now it its time to recapture what has been neglected and pay real attention to the sources of attrition.  My comments unedited.  Submitted ones in orange, Kept to myself in green.

Irene brought home an announcement of a Congregational Meeting which will be taking place as we leave for vacation.  While the format that I read in the notice may not be the best one to accomplish what is intended, at least there is sensitivity to what a diverse constituency might think, something that has not often been conveyed well during my recent years at AKSE though was probably always there conceptually.  This being a forum for the opinionated analytical minds, I’ll take a rather large bite.

Being socialized into the world of medicine for a very long time, I tend to think in this context.  History and examination matter, then you choose solutions.  It always starts with background knowledge.  Yes, there is a background literature and publicly available resources on congregational growth, some very specific to orthodox synagogues, others more general to other synagogues and generic worship institutions.  While I am a long way from an expert on this, I’ve certainly encountered some of these assessments and real case success stories in The Forward and www.yutorah.org and even the Wall Street Journal.  The URJ and USCJ web sites have extensive offerings on congregational development and the USCJ even has its public announcements of Schechter Awards that go to member congregations for implementing these types of activities.  Given the importance of this, it would be my expectation that the Membership officials of AKSE not run their activities as an accounting exercise of who came and who went, but function in more professional way of exploring modes of membership enhancement, both in attracting people and keeping a better pulse on those already here to enhance satisfaction and retention.  And that means some effort to read, study and understand, ironically, the real underpinning of most things Jewish.

The indispensible theme of these, or at least those which I am familiar, is that the basic Orthodox congregational growth comes from attracting people who are not themselves Orthodox but appreciate things done well.  These are generally parents of young families, people who despised Hebrew school and got little out of it but took a liking to the Judaism of college.  They are indifferent to modes of worship but function at the upper tier of their professions and appreciate Judaism being presented to them at a level that stimulates thought and interactive study.  Aliyah Sound Bites don’t stand a chance in this population.  The development of loyalty amongst this population, which has an income capable of dues and a need to educate children either in day or congregational schools, seems to be entirely driven by the scholarly capacity and personable nature of the Rabbi.  And the growth can be quite dramatic, the place in Columbus being thoroughly revived and Rabbi Brander, who I often listen to onwww.yutorah.org expanding his Boca Congregation several fold over fourteen years before retuning to NY to become director of the Center for the Jewish Future.  Much of the effort requires meeting these people where they are, which is someplace other than the synagogue.  All these efforts and outcomes are publicly available for review with some basic computer and research skills.

With the recent election setting a new perspective, I am beginning to wonder if AKSE finds itself where it is for parallel reasons that Republicans find themselves where they are.  Republicans and AKSE have to divest a certain amount of baggage before a constituency not already in place will find the affiliation attractive.  AKSE has elephants in the room that either nobody talks about or that insiders rationalize while outsiders cast their votes elsewhere.  My last Board Term seemed like an endless array of A-List Beautiful people who were asked to do things and B-list people who were marginalized. The concept of the President thinking and expressing at a Board Meeting that the purpose of the Nominating Committee was to telephone the people the president appoints is a) offensive, b) not what my reading of the By-Laws infers, and c) creates the type of organizational incest that eventually expresses recessive genes.  It also perpetuates A-lists.  I have divested myself of all my committees because a recycle leadership caste checks boxes on agendas as a surrogate for innovation.  AKSE has created a recycling center for VP’s and Haftarah readers, much as the Republicans recycle their own platforms, incapable of understanding why a broader constituency rejects it.  Lying dormant is the ill-fated report of the original consultant whose comments and solutions were replete with suggestions for making governance and committees more responsive to a general public.  IMHO, AKSE did this to itself a while ago when it undid a bylaws provision that set term limits on officers.

The other obvious elephants are the female ones.  As I go to orthodox and observant conservative congregations in my periodic escapes and correspond with others of my mindset, it is obvious that female participation in classic orthodox Judaism is thriving nationally, but the places in which it is thriving have a clergy and lay leadership that understand that the red line of what women, converts, and non-Jews can do in their congregations within the bounds of Halacha is changing, as it always has.  The bias has been to expand participation and then see to it that the permitted expansion is in fact implemented.  Next year marks the Centennial of the Bais Yaacov movement around the world.  Sarah Schenirer who conceived of this in Cracow had a mixture of support and opposition, but once the Gerer rebbe gave his approval, he also used his resources to drive its success.  In my own time, in my native Monsey, the Gaon Reb Yaakov ruled that his women could teach at the afternoon non-Orthodox congregational schools that were growing around Rockland County at the time.  He set some limits but made sure that what he found acceptable was in fact implemented as best he could.  Josh Strulowitz, an orthodox Rav from a congregation in the San Francisco area made a very telling observation on this.  He was participating in a multiRabbi forum sponsored by the local JCC or Federation which was recorded.  In the Q&A session at the end, he was challenged about the role of women in his congregation.  He responded that Halacha indeed limits what his women are permitted to do ritually.  It limits virtually nothing else.  Worship in his congregation comprises about an hour a day, a little more on shabbos.  The rest of the time there is equality.  The women of his congregation are the best educated in the SF Community.  There is no squaw work in his shul where women who function professionally at the upper tier most of their lives have to settle for setting up Kiddush.  They teach, they govern, they command respect when they represent his congregation to the greater community.  None of this is the case at AKSE, where even women’s participation that the Rabbi permits languishes in the second tier.  If you want a Women’s Tefilah Group that brings Kavod to the congregation, you have to insist that it have parity to other services in its quality and you have to divest of contrivances like banning talesim on men and having men seated as spectators while women stand and worship.  That is the changing Red Line.  If having women read the prayer for the Government or do Kiddush is acceptable to the Rabbi, which he already indicated it is, then you need to have a mixture of men and women doing those things.  To do less leaves you with squaw work which any outsider will judge to be inferior, as would a fair number of insiders, myself among them.  And then there are people for whom even this is not good enough.  Rabbi Brander had an interesting comment about how he handled this.  He acknowledged the validity of what those women or their families wanted, helped them move along to their next destination if that was the right thing to do, but delivered them there with the best Jewish background that he could provide for them so that some of the light of the Boca Raton congregation was exported to the other place.  To do less leaves AKSE with the same baggage that the Republicans have, not only unacceptable policies but the justifiable image of insensitivity to what is most important to the other people.

While there is no shortage of what to address, and I’m confident that if enough people respond, many more significant opportunities to address the current situation will emerge, I remark on one more that I will call Dropped Balls.  To the Leadership’s credit, Bingo was thoroughly researched, risks assessed, an implementation champion identified and the project brought to successful fruition.  Cantor Search had a little bit more of an A-list participant feel to it, but candidates were identified and pursued in a diligent and successful way.  All sorts of other projects languish.  The ideas of the first consultant are as valid today as when they were submitted.  There was an Implementation Committee.  A decision was made to mentor younger members.  Despite its importance and good intent, it never happened.  Our gabbaim have their own A-list that they neither expand nor provide novices the time they need to grow into bimah participants.  Despite the congregation’s attempt to expand committee participation, it is always the more visible of a couple that gets invited, never the spouse.  I try to put teens on the Education Committee and I am dismissed out of hand by chairman and VP’s with some kind of lame rationalization that their homework will deteriorate as the excuse for why not.  While there is a sincere desire to have a broadly participatory congregation, the kind that not only succeeds from within but surreptitiously carries the enthusiasm to others, there is no means of accountability.  Over time your talent that could read Haftarah or design a great evening program, make a morning with Women’s Tefilah sparkle or even connect to other families LinkedIn style remains on the sidelines for either never having been asked or feeling like a member of the B-list when they are.  There are a lot of those dropped balls bouncing around AKSE’s hardwood.  You could upgrade the individual AKSE experience immensely without changing a single internal policy just by recognizing this form of systemic error and putting somebody in charge to create the checklists that fix it.

That concludes the comments about AKSE.  Not for formal presentation but some suggestions on gathering information in a better way.  When we teach medical students physical diagnosis, we start by bringing them to the bedside where they are instructed to look, observe but not touch or talk.  The observation of AKSE, looking only, is that attendance is down from where it was in many respects.  I only come about half the Shabbat mornings and not at all any other times.  I’ve not been to a Mens Club program or a class in ages.  At 10:00 AM on a Shabbat morning, there are virtually no women in the sanctuary and many less men than there used to be.  The Board has a fixed population but committees do not.  I am part of committee attrition as are others, mostly driven by some type of adverse experience, or the tacit message that the purpose of a committee is not to create but to process through.  There are people who have changed their allegiance.  There are people who have begun to look at synagogue membership as a consumer purchase that is overvalued.  The issue of the meeting, as I read the proposal brought home from the Board Meeting really has to do more with attrition than with individual policies passed along from the governance.  It is the financial consequence that catches attention of the Executive Board, though I assume participatory attrition would catch the attention of the clergy.  A much better way of assessing the problem would be to target comments from people who have reduced their activity in some significant way, which is generally for cause.  There is no shortage of people who used to be a more significant presence in the congregation than they are now.  It is unlikely that the Leadership has forgotten who they are.  Those are the people whose private candor is needed most and whose perspectives offer a much better prospect for change in direction than a random broadcast with feedback from those most energetic or articulate to provide it.

Wishing you well with this difficult but vital congregational analysis.

Richard M. Plotzker, MD

Endocrinology

Mercy Philadelphia Hospital