Shopping Downward

As I was finishing med school and needed to start looking presentable for patients, a best seller called Dress for Success by John Molloy had gathered considerable public interest.  He described how one's appearance correlated with one's future employment and promotability, something very relevant to me at the time.  I got the book from the library and read it over a few day, absorbing the hints of how to make clothing fit and select colors and patterns that added 10 points to one's virtual IQ.  Needless to say, the senior executives made a lot more money than senior executive wannabes and got where they are by adapting to the sartorial pageant of where they worked.  Peasants of lesser means, including myself to this very day, had to give the illusion that they were purchasing good stuff without actually spending money that they did not have.  He suggested a form of shopping down, wandering through Brooks Brothers where the boss shopped, noting what is on their most expensive racks, then going to the less expensive racks and seeing what features were maintained and what were deemed expendable.  Then onward to the Value City where I really shopped for clothing and trying to duplicated as much as possible from the upper end.

This strategy has served me well for a long time, not only for clothing but for my cars and my house, pretty much every large purchase except universities for my kids where I bought the real thing.  Shopping down seems similarly tempting though with my ultimate synagogue purchase predetermined, what I really get are a few shabbos mornings of the type I'd like to have most but not really the chance to purchase the closest facsimile available.  In order to do that, there would need to be a menu of experiences with different values to choose from, something not available in my community for some time.  But you take what you can get, which for me is a lovely morning at Beth Tfiloh, none of which is transferable to my usual shabbat morning.

I got there as they were starting the repetition of the Amidah.  This particular shabbat was not only a bar mitzvah, something I've come to expect but the BNai Mitzvah of a male-female twin set.  The boy excelled with flawless Torah and haftarah chanting and very appropriate speech about what it is like to  be a twin, the tension between being bundled with another person and the need to protect one's individuality.  Lest her sister remain subordinate, she had her own limelight within the local parameters, chanting the first two Aliyot from the next Parsha, as section about twins.  She then spoke of being a twin, followed by the twins speaking jointly, sometimes in unison and sometimes in alternating sentences.  Not to upstage Rabbi Wohlberg, the Dvar Torah drew on a current event, the passing of President Reagan's astrologer and the interface between fates that you cannot control and personal efforts that guide destiny.  Many parallels to this in the Parsha.  And extraordinary kiddush when it ended.  No interaliyah Sound Bites.  No contrivances like changing your seats so the Rabbi can look at everyone when he speaks.  No, it was a service suitable to college graduates who mostly work all week and could have been doing other things on Saturday but opted for the experience of shabbat morning worship.  That's what I aspire to and will have to relocate myself on shabbos morning to get a little closer to that ideal.

As Theodor Herzl noted, "If you will it, it is no dream; and if you do not will it, a dream it is and a dream it will stay."  Our baalebatim don't seem to will that type of shabbat experience and our Rabbi's style cannot deliver it.  So I think it might be time to will it for myself.

Kehillah

Ran into a synagogue acquaintance at Shop-Rite this weekend, wanted to pose a question to him but we ran in different directions in our quests for nutrition and bargains so  it did not materialize.  I thought about telephoning my question to him later in the week, looked up his phone number and still might, but decided to save it until I see him on shabbos morning at Chabad, which will probably occur soon.  This fellow does one critically important project for AKSE, almost entirely on his own, the relatively thankless job of arranging our High Holy Day proceedings, contacting large numbers of men to honor with Ark openings and making sure the Rabbi has an accurate list to announce from the Bimah.  He does this exceptionally well and with an attention to detail that eludes most of the AKSE participants.  During the year he will take his turn as haftarah chanter, maybe two or three times, and show up a handful of shabbatot beyond that, but for the most part he can be found at Chabad near his home on shabbos morning.  At the moment I can only speculate why.  Similar reaction to the experience of sitting in our sanctuary on Saturday morning?  Being more absorbed into the Chabad community?  Having meaningful things to do at Chabad that occur more than once a year?  Just have to ask him.

In anticipation of his soon to be released series of essays on Continuing Education for Rabbis, Rabbi Hayim Herring has presented a series of You Tube interviews on the subject.  One explores the difference between broadcast and social media.  For a broadcast, you partake of what you are given but you are on your own to accept, reject or pursue what is given to you.  Social media is more interactive, more personalized, as is blogging.  My disappointing shabbos morning experience can be traced back about three years through my blog.  In one respect it is what it is, a presentation to me of shabbos, take it or leave it.  That's not very hard to deal with.  I find it much more irritating to try to express what I encounter, its negative consequences which diminish community, only to have multiple layers of baalebatim never even acknowledge the comments.  That is no more community than a bunch of fans watching the home team as an aggregate of individuals at a stadium, at least until they express themselves by booing as a group.  Yes, shabbos morning at AKSE is less than it once was, it is less than it once was for cause, and those doing something else instead, myself among them, could be a kehillah in its own right if we had a way to interact other than disappearing into the woodwork as individuals.

There is also the illusion of community.  Shabbos dinner and kiddush do not make a kehillah unless discourse occurs there.  Being responsible for each other, being sensitive to each other, enabling talent to emerge without suppression, that creates community.  By that definition, which I think is accurate, the grand American community may be in decline in parallel with AKSE's shabbos morning.

So what are my kehillot at the moment?  Primarily work and Sermo.  I'm a contributor to both.  People tolerate my mind, people at both do not hold a grudge when that mind becomes an irritant.  Nobody at work has invited me to dinner or any other social activity outside of work.  I've only met a handful of the grand collection of fellow physicians on Sermo.  Yet both are forms of pageantry that welcome whoever comes by, irrespective of what they think.  Nobody gets marginalized at either.  There are some basic rules of Derech Eretz, but not a lot of them, and nobody can say they are ignored because of what they think.  That's a functional kehillah, one that I do not think the leadership of my congregation is really prepared to pursue.  The Rabbi probably might if he understood it better.  But for now, it seems the right circumstances to join my congregational amigo at Chabad for a while.

Grass Roots Shabbos Morning

We almost did it.  Rabbi away for a family simcha.  Cantor present for shacharit and Torah reading.  Everything else either not done, particularly those annoying Aliyah Sound Bites, or done by volunteers including a wonderful D'var Torah, simple, insightful and with a piece of herself revealed, not something looked up on the Internet during the week.  One of the better experiences on a shabbat morning, much like the congregants of Temple Beth Hillel-Beth El getting together, ditching their very capable clergy, and creating a fully traditional shabbat morning experience.  I understand fully why transdenominationalism is taking hold and maybe understand a little better why the AKSE service is underattended, or at least why I have been rationing my mornings there.

There was an intriguing presentation on yutorah.org a few years ago:

http://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/755055/Rabbi_Ari_Kahn/Have_the_Rabbis_Ruined_Judaism

The speaker was not talking about Rabbinical Judaism, which is how we function, but the experience of dealing with an ordained class of people as focal points.  There is certainly great demand for the right Rabbi in a congregation or community which may be why Rabbi searches are often contentious and why placement organizations insist on manipulating the selection process.  But once in place, it is not entirely clear whether these people augment or mar the Jewish experience.  I am certainly rather uneasy admitting to a more satisfying experience without the Rabbi, though that is the reality repeated a few times for certainty.  That grass roots experience of shabbos morning at university Hillels conducted entirely by students has never been surpassed at any dues paying congregation that I have attended either as a member or visitor.  I've limited my attendance in the past based on disappointing if not unfavorable experience and I've gone so far as to change congregations once, but never with the formality that I do now.

This all has implications, of course.  Congregations like AKSE struggle for membership looking at their membership as a source of revenue with volunteer participation as a bonus.  Yet that membership has to be contingent on deriving something of value from it, be it worship, learning, fellowship or social action.  But ultimately the experience is rather fluid and not that hard to individualize.  If shabbos morning fails to inspire me, I can either remain uninspired or replace the experience, which is what I seem to be doing.

Variations of Tzniut

Once in a while something special catches my attention, a brief insight into Torah nor more than a few minutes of length which has any number of widespread application and insight.  One of these came a a pre YK Dvar Torah by one of the younger Roshei Yeshivah of Yeshiva University.  The rabbi spoke of elements of modern life that we acquire from the outside mainstream culture, absorb into our usual and customary practice but are really contrary to what we are supposed to be extracting from Torah and its many expositions.

http://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/818624/Rabbi_Jeremy_Wieder/The_Counterculture_of_Judaism

The Rabbi selected three:  Shabbos, Tzniut, and elements of law that run counter to our best assessment of what our concept of Din ought to entail.  The reality is that my pager and cell phone never shut off, as I am the only endocrinologist on staff at my hospital.  I carry them to shul on shabbos, assuring that the concept of shabbos does not disappear.  Electronics shut down except for immediate patient care.  For the last three years I have been treating myself to a leisurely breakfast to mark Saturday morning and for the most part the shopping centers are off limits.  While maybe the car ought to be put away too, it enables me to do things not available to me the rest of the week.

I'll reverse the order slightly.  Election day approaches next week.  I live in a Blue State where I am within the majority, and in small state where I've met nearly all my representatives, chatted with most at one time or another and do not have any particular ethical problems with any of the people I have voted for and few ethical problems with the people I've voted against.  At one time I was a swing voter.  That stopped with the last election.  There can be no moral defense of Legitimate Rape, enslavement of workers by their employers, science denial or accepted maneuvers whose intent is to deny people their access to cast their ballot.  Sorry, very nice Red State people I encountered in Utah, Idaho and Wyoming this summer.  Torah requires a certain commitment to laws that reflect justice and the reality of what HaKodesh Barechu put into place in the world, at least as I interpret it.  In that context, Judaism's values run separate from a significant fraction of the mainstream.  While we tend to vote in the same manner as much of America's underclass, we make our electoral statements the way we do primarily because it represents the right choice, and less because we got the gimmes for ourselves.

Tzniut requires special mention as it has a lot of implications beyond maximizing skin and hair covering among women.  While I'm still a product of the suburban debate nights of the 1950's when representatives of the Orthodox and Conservative shuls would meet on neutral turf to solicit membership from beneficiaries of the post World War II GI too good to pass up home loans, the reality is that Orthodox and Conservative worship were not very different.  Mixed seating and open parking lots were the main differences, with my parents opting for those elements which inevitably imprinted on me.  Fifty years later, the differences have exaggerated considerably, not only in the decline of shabbos and kashrut and even population among the Conservatives, but in the mindset.  Tzniut has eroded as well, not so much in clothing or hair covering or who can worship where, but in how people are classified as important vs convenient.  Macher swoops, small in-bred assemblies of wealthy operators running their organizations with entitlements due large corporate shareholders violates any application of Micah's L'Hatzneat Lechet.  We have tyrannies of small minorities who can leverage what they want by threatening funding or in our case withdrawing from an already tenuous daily minyan.  We have tyrannies of the majority undermining the quality of the Hebrew school curriculum so that kids get processed through to Bar Mitzvah with little of enduring da-at or binah to show for the five years of afternoon and Sunday effort.  We have Federation Machers who want your money but not your ideas for how to best allocate what gets collected.  The Rabbi asserted that theses assaults on tzniut derive from applications of exposure to common practices of our secular world adapted to our Jewish agenda.  I'm not so sure this quest for status or influence that has really devalued status was really imported.  Where I think the Rabbi scored, though, is in his assessment that resistance to this remains a core element of Judaism, one that could be asserted more consistently by more participants than it has been.

Conducting Judaism's Business

Simchat Torah evening used to be fun.  As a kid, families would come out but it was really a kids' evening with marching, flag waving, fencing duels with the sticks, some acapella singing, swinging Torah scrolls back and forth.  The elders of the shul knew how to chant their verse of Atah Haretah, or as we called it Ataw Hawresaw.  Torah would get chanted at the end with all of us squeezing under the blanket of a tallis held above us by the four tallest men.  It remained an evening not to miss in college.  Some hijinx, some underage wine, now thoroughly taboo by University policy, rigidly enforced.  And moreover, an evening's solidarity with our Soviet Jewish counterparts who for some reason unknown to me selected Simchat Torah evening as their forum to publicly display their Judaism and the measure of joy it can bring, even in troubling circumstances, while the hostile authorities looked the other way for one day.

As a suburbanite devoting myself to parnassah while allotting time to raise my family, circumstances began to change, though not unravel.  My congregation, the local USCJ affiliate at the time, had kingmakers and other forms of leadership which effectively partitioned celebratory events to adult time and kids forums.  It said right on the High Holy Day tickets, still in my possession, that no children under the age of 6 would be permitted in any service.  It cost them some very valuable young members who took exception that anybody in authority would think that way, and they no longer do.  My current congregation runs by those members that they could have had.  Kids time was assigned to Purim Eve and Simchat Torah Eve.  Kids cannot sit through readings, so they reasoned, so a truncated selection of Megillah was chanted while an often unsuccessful attempt at a full reading took place before the official festivities in a side room.  I offered to read on Simchat Torah eve, as I was the reader on Simchat Torah morning, but was turned down cold by the Rabbi, a young parent himself, who just wanted to process the kids through their allotted time in a merry way.  There did not seem to be a lot of opposition to this tradition by anyone outside my household.  Eventually they became lenient on kids attending but the traditional children's events remained that way with nary an adult who was not a parent of one of the kids in attendance on Purim or Simchat Torah.

My current place expects the festivals to be participatory for everyone.  On the Holy Days, our seniormost member was 96, our juniormost barely old enough to be carried in safely by her parents.  We do not have a lot of kids ourselves, but for the Holy Days families gather including the grandchildren of our members.  That reality became starkly apparent at Simchat Torah and most shabbatot when the entire contingent of pre-Bar Mitzvah tykes can be counted on one hand, the Rabbi's four girls.  The majority of the adults could still sight read their verse of Atah Haretah, though some opted for the English translation when their turn arrived.  Torahs were carried, the Hazzan led the usual songs in between each Hakafah, but it did not seem festive.  The business of Simchat Torah got conducted in its ritualized way without any of the spontaneity that would in another era bring great pride to the Soviet Jews, if even for one day.

Unfortunately, much of the synagogue experience has taken a similar course.  There is an agenda to get through:  the portions of the service, the Aliyah Sound Bites, a sermon, the obligatory handshakes from those in the Torah procession.  There has been no give and take, no genuine curiosity of how somebody's week went, what anybody thought of anything, not even at kiddush.  The middle part of our logo says ENGAGING.  Not sure at this point if it is even a work in progress.

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.