New Job Upcoming

We settled on a start date for Mercy Philadelphia Diabetes Program, the Monday after Rosh Hashana.  Not having patients for the last month has made me a little stir crazy but it is also an opportunity to do stuff that I've neglected due to work obligations and fatigue.  Unfortunately, I've been less than diligent about my writing and finances and housekeeping but much better than before about studying parts of endocrinology that I have neglected.  I've tried hard, though with less success than I had hoped, at creating a schedule for myself to keep while my time resembles a blank canvas.  It's easy to create time slots, harder to self-impose deadlines.

AKSE Academy

AKSE Academy began last year, recommended and inspired and partly purloined by me as a way for AKSE's Education Committee to avoid having a Shabbat Scholar in Residence.  I had found most of them disruptive to our usual non-mechitza style, an invitation for Rabbi Dresin to cast disparaging comments toward us for resisting accommodating our guest and generally not worth the $2K or so and the aggravation of arranging dinner and the like.  Thinking that nobody is better than our Shabbaton visitor, we opted for nobody, or in this case a series of nobodies to assemble about eight classes on a variety of subjects.  I modeled it partly on nights of learning that other places do and partly on a medical conference that typically has a menu of several simultaneous presentations that those in attendance can select.  It went well enough, with an attendance of about fifty and a small financial profit, that there is a consensus to develop this into a unique event in the community.

I've become very possessive of my creation, not wanting anybody to interfere with the content and almost impervious to feedback as I try to push the envelope that will be necessary to make it a signature event for the synagogue.  I'm also the most inquisitive person on the committee, which has its pluses and minuses.  It is very tempting to create 5 of 8 classes from negative transference reactions from AKSE's Bimah.  There's no shortage of them, and some pretty good topics such as the role of self, titles and entitlement, physicians destined for Gehennom, Genevah, misconduct in the name of frum, et. al.  I'm also probably the principal laytz in the congregation.  There need to be a couple of benign topics, things with little emotional content, like travel or Draft Dodging Tzahal or Sacred Space or money or Talmud study.  Maybe the emerging hi-tech industries of Israel.  Speakers come later.  Imprint comes now.

Nurturing Talent

A Sunday off following Shabbat.  I attended my usual services, Beth Emeth for kabbalat shabbat and AKSE for shabbat morning but couldn't get it together for minyan this morning.  My daughter Rozzy came for a visit, so I really wanted to be home for her and I wanted to get some cleaning done this morning.  Minyan starts at 8AM on Sundays, so the real time away is about 7:45-9:15 if I keep the chats short over coffee.  They usually get a minyan on Sunday mornings so my presence has no material impact on the proceedings, among other rationalizations.  No getting around it, the only one that I inconvenience myself to get to is Beth Emeth's kabbalat shabbat.  I like that one hour's respite, scholarly rabbi, inspiring cantor, skilled organist and a hundred other worshippers who also made Friday night a personal destination.

Beth Emeth has a student from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College assisting this year.  They gave her a relatively benign trial by fire, allowing her to conduct most of the service and present the sermon, which was a minor let down, as I had hoped to hear Rabbi Robinson's always learned message.  Rabbi Stern did OK for a start.  She seemed perky and enthusiastic, reasonably articulate, and with a beginning, a middle, and an end to the talk though the Jewish content and citations could have been more thorough.  I think she'll develop adequately with Rabbi Robinson and hopefully Rabbi Grumbacher showing her the ropes.

AKSE lags behind in developing people's skills.  Some of the Bar Mitzvah boys advance their proficiency, but for the most part they disappear within a year or two.  There is a tendency to find people who already know how to do whatever and put them on the schedule.  Some very negative long term outcomes eventually arrive this way.

Kiruv Unfulfilled

Most Friday mornings I arise at 5:30, a little earlier than I need to, to make dinner for shabbat.  This is more important during standard time than daylight savings time, and probably not urgent at all in the summer when my wife's seniority permits her to take each Friday as vacation, but it is something I've gotten used to doing.  Most of the dinners are simple, most often chicken breasts or parts seasoned, then seared in skillet and finished in the oven, with boxed couscous and salad or vegetable.  Sometimes like today, it's a crock pot stew that serves as cholent for dfina for later.

Shabbat dinner may be the best opportunity for kiruv, but we hardly ever invite anybody and do not get invited any more than we extend invitations.  As an Ovel, I need to get to shul for Kaddish after supper, though technically it should be before.  I happen to be fond of the reform service Friday night which enables my usual eating times and has a better conveyance of Kedusha than AKSE where the onset of shabbos is more akin to checking the boxes that the assigned prayers were completed with ten men in attendance.

When we interviewed clergy candidates, both for Hazzan and Rabbi, each was asked about how they do kiruv, which may be AKSE's path to viability.  The people offered the position mentioned guests and personal contacts.  To be fair, the Cantor did invite my wife and me to lunch and we went once though by kiddush I usually have the afternoon planned and regard a spontaneous invitation as a disruption.  I do not know who the Rabbi has over.  It has not been me.  There were plans to have small groups at people's houses with the Rabbi present.  I've never been invited to one of those parlor sessions.  I do not have a good answer for why kiruv goes unfulfilled.

Annoying Colleagues

Al Tifrosh Min HaTzibur or "Don't separate yourself from the community," advised sage Hillel in Pirke Avot.  But sometimes a respite of uncertain duration may hit the spot.  This morning I opted out of Medscape Physician Connect discussions, where I tend to function as a sage, though perhaps politically more liberal and definitely more scholarly than most of the posters.  There's been too many diatribes, too much pooled ignorance, too much intolerance of other people's ideas.  When I started responding in kind, I knew it was time to neither read nor contribute for a while.

High Holy Day Prep

Yesterday I started learning the first three Aliyot of the Torah reading for the second day of Rosh Hashana.  I've done it before, though not in many years so I am rusty at it.  Then again, it is only half a column so I should be able to learn it my next week which gives me two additional weeks to polish it.  The three days plus YK mincha readings have been divided and for the most part the haftarot are recycled from year to year.  Nobody has to work especially hard and nobody has to challenge their capacity.  I've always been uneasy with that approach but it gets the slots of the schedule filled.  It does not create a setting where high level of skill is pursued or even valued, as it wouldn't get utilized even if available.  All the readers are my contemporaries or their teenage children, with a new slot opening up every couple of years when somebody goes off to college or a senior person decides to spend the Holy Days on a cruise ship.

People get their impression of the synagogue from those few days.  Beth Shalom, the United Synagogue affiliate, puts a lot of capital into showing patrons a good experience.  People come in their best suits, machers get aliyot and pat each other on the back on the Bimah, kids are showcased and clergy contract terms reviewed relative to congregational feedback.  At AKSE we are a little more laid back as a larger fraction of our membership shows up at other times during the year.  Still, we offered free entrance for our Rabbi's first year in the  hope that the experience would increase traffic, which it did, and paid membership, which it did not.

As a youngster attending the Community Synagogue of Monsey, Mr. Zeisel, my friend Howie's dad, took me aside and invited me to return for shabbos.  He predicted that I would find the Saturday morning experience of more spontaneity and less showmanship more to my liking and give me a better introduction to what living in a Jewish manner was really about.  He was right, of course, though the message has been difficult to convey.

Defunct Synagogues

Somebody forwarded a request for information on Bronx synagogues, of which I was familiar with one and had a vague memory of a Megillah reading at another.  My father's parents lived in a section known as Highbridge, which had its orthodox shul across the street from their apartment.  I do not know if my father's Bar Mitzvah, circa 1935 in the midst of the Great Depression, took place there or not.  His sister's children all had theirs in this building.  I was last there probably fifty or so years ago.  I remember it as being bigger and more imposing than the photograph suggests.  It had a balcony where the women either worshipped or chatted while the men engaged in shabbos sanctuary proceedings from the main floor.  My grandfather remained modern orthodox, his children went secular but even his grandchildren belonged to a synagogue and arranged for bnai mitzvah of his great grandchildren, so the place across from his apartment probably accomplished its long-term mission.

It is now a church, as are most of the other synagogues in the South Bronx, which I suppose beats being abandoned, the second most common fate.  Sanctity of space is probably transferable.  I lack a good sense of how that congregation depleted, whether similar to the depletion of AKSE slowly over a generation, or more precipitous.  Jews of the South Bronx scattered elsewhere in Metropolitan New York where other congregations grew.  Jews of AKSE migrated from the vicinity of the shul without really scattering but lacked any place else to go in their own neighborhood.  As we begin to observe AKSE's 125th year, predating the establishment of the Bronx shul by more than forty years, there is the looming prospect that its tenure is also finite though for much different reasons than what caused closure of the Bronx congregations.  Whether it fulfilled its mission of perpetuating Judaism elsewhere is also far less certain.