Soreness

End of the month.  To keep my exercise commitment humming, I need to build into the schedule recovery time and reward.  Every date divisible by 3, I let the leg muscles heal.  As one month transitions to the next, my treadmill time halts for three days.  A longer recovery and a small reward for dedication to exercise over the previous month.  It also serves as time to reflect on what my month's efforts accomplished.  Longer time, faster pace?  Some months, an unexpected layoff for illness, medical procedure, or travel.

It's been a mediocre month as I begin the first of three days of recovery.  One day off for a colonoscopy.  Reduced effort during the restricted diet.  Only partial recovery by the end of the month to where I had started at the beginning.  I worked through a sore right knee, getting by with an elastic brace but experiencing an ongoing soreness.  My breathing never limited what I could perform, but I could tell that my cardiovascular tolerance has ebbed gradually over six months.  And the last few three day recovery spans did not fully restore me to optimal for the next month.  

My legs, mainly thighs and knees, can tell that I did not shirk my best effort at optimal health.  I avoid oral NSAIDS, but have gotten benefit from topicals.  I could ice my knee twice daily, whether exercise days or days off.  

What I do not do is set treadmill goals for the month that follows.  I do not know what my stamina or soreness will allow.  Typically I resume at the intensity and duration where I left off.  That ache never fully disappears.  In the absence of real disability, my willingness to proceed with the benefits of an exercise schedule, which have been many, takes on a life of its own.  Within my capacity to cope.

Creating the Best Narrative

 

My news feed like everyone else's has no shortage of snipes at Jews, essentially ethnically profiled as supporters of the modern nation of Israel.  The linkage is true, the propriety of exclusion from activities of groups with overlapping interests, let alone physical attacks, is probably not justified.  While I read about this most days and think about it often, my own experience has not included any personal aspersions or threats.  Not that they aren't there. I knew the doctor slain at Tree of Life on shabbos morning from college.  That attack had no publi support, no rationalization.  More personally, though, my weekly Saturday morning now has me waving to a hired police officer in the synagogue parking lot and passing through a reinforced heavy entrance door, monitored by a congregant who must sit next to it as people seek to enter.  Other places, mostly larger, with doors leading to open space that must be crossed to reach the sanctuary, are often guarded by a uniformed officer, pistol in holster.  Some places will not let visitors past the entrance without a reservation obtained through the synagogue office during the previous week.

I miss the spontaneity.  Over sixty years, I've visited many congregations unannounced.  My classmates' and cousins' Bnai Mitzvah as a teen.  Travels for vacation or professional activities that spanned a shabbos.  Seeing a prominent Rabbi on TV and wanting to visit his shul if within reasonable driving range.  Getting irritated with my home shul and wanting a different shabbos experience.  I just went.  And as much as I've enjoyed the variations of worship and community, people have dropped in to my synagogue for a variety of reasons, always greeted as honored guests.  Our need to screen threatening people has burdened those whose entry would enhance the shabbos of the places they visit.

We serve as a useful target.  The people inside not only sustain these places of worship but maintain Jewish social organizations, stable businesses that depend on Jewish patrons, campus organizations from classrooms to Hillel Foundations, all now fair game for those seeking a statement of antagonism to Israel and to those who attach to it.  Interestingly, there also seems a curious element of sparing, though not entirely so, as the tragic shooting of a rising young philanthropist at Blackstone headquarters attests.  I've not seen Jewish summer camps, often set in remote areas, targeted for protest, even though these institutions invariably do their best to form a Zionist commitment to their impressionable children.  The medical centers with Jewish names also seem not to attract protesters toting anti-Israel placards.  Many of these places exist because that city's premier university-affiliated hospitals would not offer staff appointments to Jewish physicians.  Many of these places of Jewish origin now serve as desired residency destinations for top medical school graduates.  And Jewish people often drive wealth-creating businesses, from financial to high tech to communications.  Our financial upper crust.  The donors who make the Jewish organizational system thrive, who support Israel through donations and bond purchases, who sustain the budgets of the synagogues that now have enhanced security.  These businesses, even law firms with Jewish names on their entrances and letterhead, do not often have protesters nagging them. Boycott Dell?  Avoid Home Depot?  Hasn't happened.   The targets must be perceived as vulnerable in some way.  Or maybe not useful to the protesters.   Who is not targeted may be an important clue to reducing the threats to those Jewish organizations and individuals that are.

Approaching three years since a vicious attack on innocent individuals, complete with child abduction, hostages for barter or butchering while defenseless, displacement of people through the initial attack and warfare that followed, virtue has largely disappeared from the conversation.  We Jews have an opportunity to restore that lost element.  When Stephen Covey published his immensely popular work, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989, he opened his book by assessing two measures of success.  We can let superior tactics lead us to what we seek or we can let foundational principles guide us.  Both forms exist to antiquity, both forms have achieved successful and disappointing results.  How to attack and use vulnerable people as leverage is a technique.  It has also become meshed in principle, expressed as these people deserved it for how they treated us.  That has become the public narrative, the one that dominates social media feeds.  One that repackages repugnant as virtue, or at least the illusion of honor. For Jews, whether individually or through our advocacy organizations, to attack this directly has not worked out well.

We have succeeded as a people from the times of Exodus when our tradition establishes our Peoplehood, by a much different narrative. Our arc of success, with its fluctuations, moves ahead because we stay loyal to both our basic needs and our most noble aspirations.  The Jewish subset, whether small communities in isolation or now our sovereign nation to which we identify irrespective of where our house sits, has three basic elements.  We need a measure of safety, those basic survival needs that assure a tomorrow.  Jews historically have thrived and uplifted those around them when granted sufficient autonomy.  And once economic resources have been secured, the generosity embedded in our culture has enabled our very top talent to excel.  Jewish autonomy advances the world.  Those who snipe, those who attack do not fare as well.  That's the narrative that should dominate the modern global forum.  And it is one that we could control with some common ground rules.

Survival forms the base of Maslow's pyramid of basic needs.  The security measures of our synagogues and Jewish institutions appeared before the Hamas massacre.  October 7, 2023 served more as an inflection point.  It removed taboos, changed the attackers from fringe loners at the social margins to a more mainstream group of people with a future.  Students of selective colleges must have had something attractive about them to impress the Admissions Office.  Their professors who teach them the historical and social justifications for what they now promote have PhDs and have gone through Search Committees to get hired.  The Never Events of massacre get transposed to a historical timeline.  Our perceived victimhood justifies shifting who the victims are.  That's never a favorable narrative.  It also may be one that the Jewish community cannot effectively repel.  So we put our own masks on first.  Guard our gathering places, become less visible, buy pistols for our homes and cars.   And turn inward by inviting unengaged Jews to seek refuge, and maybe advancement, within our established institutions.  That requires no public presence.  We also have our measure of overt advocacy.  Enforce laws that already exist when an attack occurs.  Create new laws to discourage hostile mobs from harassing Jews or anyone else.  Exposing wrongdoers creates either celebrities or martyrs.  "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" our sage Hillel asked.  Protect ourselves..

The more neglected narrative may be our internal success.  Those with their fists in the air, the sign carriers, the trolls on the internet don't achieve what we have and don't prioritize the dignity of people the way we Jews have.  Our hospital wings have Jewish names, not Islamic ones.  Civil rights legislation in the 1960s served as a branch point for Jews along with people of color.  We moved ahead without the special compensatory or remedial program.  That's where our opponents are, people who could have done better than they did over those decades but pursued getting even.  The Jewish narrative does not exploit victimhood.  Certainly public support for a Jewish state gelled after an attempt at genocide, the real thing, not the usurped canard we see on our news feeds now.  But the nationalism that gives Jews our place was embedded with national movements before that, whether the breakup of the Ottoman Empire or dismantling of colonial domination of Asia and Africa.  Our narrative needs to be a common one.  And we know who opposed this.  The same Islamic populations that used terror as a deterrent, engaged in their own inept warfare multiple times, had alliances between totalitarians, including within their own caliphates.  That's what they are.  That's not what Jews are or what enabled our communities to forge ahead with commerce, science, and agriculture.  We are the world's winners.  We earn what we amass.  That's our story.  That's our contribution.  It may or may not be our attraction.

In order to fulfil this vision, I think our internal institutions need to be more welcoming in an unconditional way.  That is not what I've found over the years.  People point to titles, whether the organizations, their officers, or their benefactors.  While boundaries are an integral part of Judaism, leaving people on the sidelines or ignored is not.  Too many slights to too many people.  Invitations to engagement too restricted.  Easy to understand why touting institutional success sells less than it could when the sensitivity promoted by Dale Carnegie and other success-by-technique advocates has not become part of the foundation.  We've all encountered folks sitting alone in a crowded room with nobody approaching them.  And then we have people not even in the room.  If we hope to promote community and success, our best public face, we need to start by being fully welcoming to each other.  

And at the apex of our internoal growth we need to allocate for a veneer of excellence.  Innovations on a scale that our detractors cannot duplicate.  We've accomplished this in the financial realm.  Our talent writes books and essays that will survive them.  Perhaps we as a Jewish civilization have tolerated misuse of that excellence more than we should.  The IDF is effective, for sure, but not always functioning beyond public reproach.  The Israelis we support create for themselves decent places to live, without taking ownership of public and private damage that the expansion has caused.  Within American Jewish institutions we don't always value those of unique talent.

Multiple elements:  safety, widespread achievement, sensitivity, boundaries, value of excellence beyond our own interests.  That's a lot we could sell.  In recent years we may have gotten too defensive, letting our critics control the public face of Israel and the global Jews who see the sovereign Jewish state as an extension of the autonomy in other settings that have uplifted not only ourselves but other cultures in our midst.  Sometimes the best defense is an offense, a proactive expression of our story that our critics cannot control.

Staying Gracious

Tough couple of days.  My Jewish world mandates two fasts that I observe.  Yom Kippur in the fall serves as a climax of the calendar.  People gather in large numbers to plod through the designated Machzor.  Hundreds of pages get recited.  We hear a male choir, expert prayer leaders, Memorial for the Departed, finally reaching the very end when everyone can resume eating.  Despite the thirst more than hunger, I find the Holy Day and its requirements engaging.  By the shofar's sound marking the conclusion and a nibbble set up by the synagogue's Sisterhood, people seem satisfied with their accomplishments.

Tisha B'Av, which occurs in mid-summer, also has a fast which I do my best to observe.  I do not find the day particularly engaging, though synagogues and organizations try to make the observance meaningful.  There is some liturgy specific to this day.  While YK is more programmed, Tisha B'Av seem's more an Insider's Job with just a handful of invited participants, a sameness with a more difficult fast.  In my working years, I had to conduct my usual professional activities, with the food deprivation detracting from performance, or at least I thought it did.  In more recent years, I stay home, read a few things or watch fragments of video presentations about the lengthy history of Jewish tragedies, but mostly suffer through the fast until the end.  Due to the calendar, breaking this fast occurs close to bedtime, which means eating when I would normally have finished my calories for the day.  Physically I feel sore, sufficiently famished to make mental activities underperform, and anticipating some carryover to the following day or two.

And that's what happened.  It was not a total punt of a day.  I slogged through a few valued initiatives.  Reduced exercise but not zero exercise.  Read most of the things I us.ually read each day, though attention and ability to retain and respond clearly impaired.  I took my scheduled medicines without water.  The higher efforts, though, clearly needed to be postponed to a time of restored capabilities.

My reset day has arrived.  This being a recovery day from my treadmill schedule, I opted to treat myself to breakfast out during the time I would be walking at the machine's pace.  Not easy.  Sleep disrupted but I forced myself out of bed as at the clock radio music appeared.  Dental hygiene.  Then downstairs for what has become my daily starting mug of water, skipped the day before due to the fast.  The cafe would supply the coffee that usually follows.  Quick chores:  empty the recycling into the bins awaiting pickup later that morning.  Add some trash to another bin.  Water a plant.  Retrieve the newspaper from the end of the driveway for my wife's convenience.  Go out or pop a keurig pod into the Mini-Express?  I put on the same shirt and pants I had worn the day before, different shoes, and returned to the car for my treat away from home, still struggling with even those minimal efforts.

I chose old reliable nearby cafe.  When I eat there alone, I take a seat at the counter, usually the farthest from the entrance.  To the restaurant's credit, they generate enough favorable morning experiences to attract a lot of patrons most mornings that I've been there.  I had to settle for the stool nearest the entrance, which at least spared me having the Trump advocacy emblem in my line of sight.

This being a family enterprise, the owners or relatives greet me.  It has an open kitchen where the cooks all seem to be Latinos, a capable kitchen staff.  The servers got new T-shirts.  Cafe Logo in the front, "I stand for the national anthem" in block letters on the back.  I do too, being rather grateful to the opportunities that America has created for me, but we likely differ on our obligation to acknowledge and remedy some of the untoward parts of our national history.  

I still had not consumed any coffee for the previous 48 hours.  A man in a black version of cafe T-shirt, an older fellow, came over to my stool, confired that I wanted to eat at the counter, then brought me sizable mug of coffee with pods of half & half and synthetic French vanilla creamer in a small bowl.  He handed me their standard menu, where I picked out the vegetarian options and sorted out how much I was willing to spend.  He brought over a set of utensils wrapped in a napkin, along with a placemat.  I turned the placemat over from its advertising side to its blank side, then took out a pen from my pants pocket.  I had writing initiatives intended for the day if my mental acuity recovered sufficiently.  I jotted a few thoughts, not many, but topics that could be expanded.  The woman serving the customers came over next to take my food order.  I pointed to my preference.  She noted that I had come during their special hours so I could get the same thing for a dollar less.  I selected my eggs preference and rye toast.  She took away the menu, while I sipped coffe and struggled to convey the contents of my brain to the blank reverse side of their placemat.  I made little progress, but could tell that caffeine deprivation had started to ease.  She returned with my platter, which contained scrambled eggs instead of the over medium from the order. She noticed this error before me and offered immediately to have the kitchen make a new platter.  Scrambled eggs would be fine.  I squeezed some ketchup in a broad ribbon along the edge of the home fries, something this cafe makes better than any other local place I've sampled.  Then the toast came, already buttered, though with additional spreads to apply myself, which I did not.  and a refill of coffee.

Eggs with runny yolks as intended would have been preferable, but I thought it better to accept their busy day with its snafus.  I took my time.  Some hot sauce would have added to the experience but I neglected to ask for this with the coffee refill.  She brought the check while I was still nearing the end of my plate.  I opted to pay cash, as they discount this.  Between my wallet and coin purse, I found four one-dollar bills to leave as a tip.  Then at the cash register I handed her a twenty, which got me just over $9 in change.  Replenishing my wallet's small bills would come in useful.  I drove home, this time exiting quickly from what is often a difficult left turn from their parking lot to the road.

The morning's experiences had transitioned me successfully through a few important branch points.  After a physically and mentally tough day with sleep disturbance and not much residual hunger, I really did not want to arise on time.  Still, I did.  Restoring a part of my morning routine, that cup of water, retrieving the newspaper, dental care, morning pills all fell into place.  No excuses to skip any of them.  I did not want to get dressed and drive off.  Coffee at home would be fine.  But I had set this AM breakfast out as the transition from a day of fast to quiet time to think while eating something more nutritionally substantial than my usual coffee.  Despite not really wanting to go out, I put on the easiest clothes and headed off.

Once there, challenged by my inability to create on the back of their placemat, a food order delivered in error, looking at two dog whistle T-shirts from people who likely have a different worldview than me, I kept myself maximally gracious, as did the two servers with me.  They served me promptly, offered immediately to correct errors, offered to save me a little money without my asking.  I can stand for the anthem with them, as I should, then we each cast our ballots in secret.  Will they turn in their Latino cooks when ICE agents take off their masks to eat what they have ordered?  Hope not.  Think not.  And maybe the patrons won't let them.  The cooks, order error aside, demonstrated their worthiness in the cafe's kitchen.

Being gracious has not always been my default.  I have to work on it sometimes.  Today, when opportunities might make antagonism defensible, I stayed accommodating.  The day should go better from that starting point.

Protecting Prime Time

Like most people, or maybe not, my usual days divide into segments.  The majority of people, certainly me until retirement, had fixed obligations.  We needed to check in at work by a certain time and make provisions to get there.  Some people returned home with predictability.  To keep in good form, we needed to allocate sleeping and wake hours, often aided with an alarm clock.  Once at work, many of us had assigned tasks that did not take into account our natural rhythms, those parts of the day when alertness or creativity peaked while other hours were better suited to activities that required little input from our highest CNS centers.

In retirement, most days belong to me.  Over a short time, I've learned to restore structure that my work obligations once imposed.  Awaken at a fixed time every morning.  Avoid my bed thereafter until a specified time each night.  Lights out at a predictable time, modified to my wife's needs.  I can create environments at home.  My Space designed for focus and comfort.  Bedroom kept as dark as possible every night with a little coolness to enhance sleep.  

Between wake and sleep, many other activities appear.  Exercise on schedule. It traditionally has been what I make excuses to avoid, so that gets a priority right after coffee, even though it requires little mental agility. I remember to take my twice-daily medicines if I set the pills in my line of sight to where I will be, usually at my laptop sipping coffee in the morning or in the kitchen preparing supper in early evening.  Stretching at midday.  YouTube and reading after supper.

Other tasks occur less often, though still scheduled.  Weekly YouTube video created every Monday afternoon.  Weekly aspired task list done at my desk first thing Sunday morning, then selectively transferred to a magnetic whiteboard on the refrigerator.  Weight and waist measured every Monday morning, then recorded to an Excel sheet.  Shabbos dinner needs two minitasks:  defrost meat Wednesday afternoon, defrost minichallot Thursday, and one larger task, cook in time for sundown.  Every Thursday morning while my wife attends to one of her ongoing projects away from home, I tend to clutter in our family room.

All these items get done.  Most are finite.  Most are stand-alone, at least superficially so, though exercise fits into a grander aspiration of continued health and stamina.  Timing adapts to a blend of convenience, avoiding excuses to shirk what I should do, a desire to feel accomplished at the end of each day.

It comes with its downside.  Some highly prized aspirations such as expressing myself, engaging with others, and grappling with ideas, attending OLLI classes depend on my daily rhythms.  The brain has its best times for thinking abstractly, learning new things, and converting concepts to words that can be shared.  I think my optimal mind time fits with the majority, peaking at mid-morning with secondary surges with my first cup of coffee and an hour after supper.  These are the times to seek cognitive flow.  Too often, though, this time gets pre-empted.  When it occurs, distractions too often interrupt those demanding efforts.  Moreover, I'm not entirely certain when my mind functions at its peak.  Maybe when I am exercising, but changing the exercise slot risks not doing it.  For sure, the sorting of family room papers competes with mental prime time because I can count on my wife being away while I work on this.  A better approach, I think, one partially initiated, would be to isolate mental time and creative time just as I do the smaller chores, and as I do when I create my weekly YouTube video.  9-11 at my desk, first half hour thinking on paper, the rest expressing new thoughts and editing old ones.  Then a second effort after supper, 7:30-9PM.  Less TV, or maybe more rationed TV.  Big chunks of protected time for the projects that require undivided attention.  Without getting into my often challenged attention span, the scheduling that I've done the last two years has turned out well.  I need to implement more on a grander scale.  And take advantage of what nature set as cycling abilities.

Jewish Leadership Selection

As much as I admire the many people of wisdom and insight who have not only created their own Substack pages but post their analyses on a predictable schedule, subscription fees require me to ration how I interact with authors and other readers.  One of my very favorite, fed to my email every Sunday night and read without fail, is Rabbi Rabin's Moneyball Judaism. As much as I'd like to add myself to his numerous often distinguished subscribers, its annual fee runs about triple my other subscriptions. His subjects and how he presents them, however, capture my attention.  The Rabbi focuses on Jewish organizational life, with an emphasis on fundraising, as well as other elements of meeting challenges in the Jewish community.  As such, its subscribers include many machers, people whose prominence in the Jewish ecosystem makes this mandatory engagement or whose financial position makes the $180 annual fee chump change.  His last issue will have to get my public comment in the forum that I control.

 https://connect.xfinity.com/appsuite/#!!&app=io.ox/mail&folder=default0/INBOX

He wrote about a subject that has long intrigued me.  If the Jewish world invests so heavily in choosing the best leaders, why has so much of the experience that flows downward to nobodies like myself left me so unimpressed?  My Jewish world clusters locally.  I'm confident that the upper tiers of the legacy agencies attract capable people who embody the Chabad acronym of Wisdom, Insight, and Knowledge. I read about those people, sometimes comment in their public forums.  But I do not interact with any of them.   In my more limited orb, I share Rabbi Rabin's concern that some lesser criteria than Capable drives who gets not only a title but the megaphone.

The Rabbi's Substack always includes some studies and commentary from others in his essays, so I will start that way.  In his landmark opus The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey advised his readers to divide their attention into two realms, Sphere of Concern and Sphere of Influence.  Everyone has both.  There are gray areas, like does my vote count when there are 100 million others?  For the most part, though, it's probably a good thing that the trolls who pollute cyberspace really have no influence.  In my Jewish world, I control my level of observance.  I respect my obligation to share a portion of my treasure for community protection and sometimes its advancement. My skills with bimah activities make me useful, though not necessarily important.  In shul, I'm a consumer, occasional contributor, but largely separated from any input that could be called creative.  Some Dominant Influencer decides on a congregational agenda. I opt to attend or not; never create the activity or policy.  Are the people who do the programming the people most capable of doing this?  Or in Covey's analysis, I care about what goes on there, or at least how I experience it, my Sphere of Concern, but have no influence.  It comes with periodic rejection, a sting that remains in the background.

That's the question the Rabbi asked in his recent Substack.  Does our agenda or problem solving or future planning get done by the people who have the best analytical skills or foresight?  Or do we default to Dominant Influencers based on title, leverage as financial benefactor, protege to somebody important, or with some legitimate achievements in one area that do not transpose easily to solving the challenges of either my synagogue or the larger Jewish world?  And is the price for that system trading stability for sparkle?

The Jewish world as I've experienced it, now sixty years beyond Bar Mitzvah, has invested heavily in developing leaders, though not through a Darwinian soup that allows the most capable to emerge.  Instead, we identify and appoint.  Before he became a famous author, Rabbi Chaim Potok invested his early career to creating a forum for promising teens and young adults, which took its niche in the United Synagogue whirl of the 1960s as Leaders Training Fellowship.  It no longer exists, but its sister organization Camp Ramah continues with some institutional repackaging over the decades.  He made an assumption that kids at an early time can be identified as motivated, then socialized.  He could not assess talent.  So basically, LTF, to which I was appointed, captured kids who did above threshold in their Hebrew Schools or Day Schools and didn't give the teacher or the Rabbi any type of confrontational challenge. We were the kids who more often than not took the Yontif days off from school.  People could debate what the Youth Director valued.  Probably reliability, always a good thing.  Maybe obedience, not always a good thing.  Like classrooms that kids in their mid-teens attended, the invited participants were people who could listen to a presentation and feed back what they were told.  So we got tapped as future talent, went through the program, had no assessment of its efficacy, or even its propriety.  They created identity, maybe tried to instill a measure of obligation, current and future.  Rabbi Potock and the officials of many United Synagogue congregations predicted this identification process would pay off over generations.  I don't think it did.  Rabbi Rabin's Substack made a passing reference to Annie Dukes' Thinking in Bets.  Her book asserts that outcome does not validate or deny the merit of a decision made not knowing the future.  So the approach to Leadership then might have been the visionary approach, even if the alumni of these programs could not prevent gradual atrophy of many of Conservative Judaism's offshoots in my adult lifetime.

Fast forward sixty years, my generation had its days in charge, now presiding as the Elders.  Our legacy institutions that depend on a veneer of talent and megadonors have done well.  Our national advocacy agencies continue their mini-empires.  Every day, my email includes a report from eJewish Philanthropy outlining worthy projects funded by people who fared better financially than most of us.  But if they are really as good at this as they claim, they also need ownership of what did not go well.  We watch anti-semitism get linked to our faith's commitment to our ancestral land and the best and brightest among us still think we need more educational presence.  AIPAC has been assailed in the public arena, yet no reckoning of whether our designated leaders need to reconsider decisions or maybe seat people at their table who would have been excluded.  Would a system that generated decision makers and influencers of different strengths offered different directions that adapt better to today's public assaults on Israel and Judaism?  

Our synagogues have a high attrition rate. Some will run out of money, others run out of people. My Bar Mitzvah congregation closed in 2006, fifty-two years after its cornerstone was set.  My current congregation cashed out its building, a White Elephant as peak membership of 600 now stands at 110.    We are all products of our experiences.  Mine has been a very conditional form of engagement. I remember my exclusions, those psychological wounds, some simple insensitivity, others more intentional to protect a leader's agenda from challenge.  As a young adult at a different shul, I served as Torah reader rather frequently, including Rosh HaShanah.  While the congregation had been nominally egalitarian by the 1980s, I chanted for seven men, all older, the same seven, irrespective of whether the day of the week required five or seven Aliyot.  Even the Rabbi knew not to challenge the Dominant Influencer's agenda.  These seven men took their turn while I pointed with the silver yad and chanted an error-free High Holy Day trope.  At the concluding blessing, each honoree hugged the man preceding and following him.  I received two handshakes each session, from the same two men, each of the years I did this.  I'm still Yom Kippur reader most years, now at a more traditional congregation.  Culture is different.  No hugs to anyone.  Handshakes to everyone.  And the Olim reflect more tenure with the congregation than financial benefactor.  Culture matters a lot.  It drives behavior.

What Rabbi Rabin's Substack could have described better is an ingrained mechanism of acceptance and exclusion, one that pervades the Jewish world.  He notes what gets people in:  Title, Money, Yichus, Personal Benefactor, curriculum vitae.  He neglects the exclusions.  We are all familiar with this.  When we applied to college or med school, only a fraction could be offered a place in the class.  Our sports teams trade talent in and out.  Ironically, the author once presided over the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism's USY and Leadership Development programs.  USY Cliques in my 1960s era were notorious, acceptance or exclusion often the difference between seeking out Hillel in college or staying secular once on campus.  My list of exclusions, not suitable for the Dominant Influencer's Inner Circle, the one that gets a reserved table at synagogue shabbos dinners, is quite long.  What the Jewish world has created, and what the Substack recognized, are people of entitlement.  At Ramah of the 1960s, it was kids attending day schools.  In college Hillel, there was a certain homecoming of Ramah alumi who reconnected with each other in the Hillel dining room, though not exclusionary, as sharing classes had its own element of bonding social capital.  For two years, I attended our town's Federation Young Leadership Classes.  LTF grown up, perhaps.  Nobody  really interviewed me or my wife to assess our talents or temperaments.  They just figured that young doctors would in short time have high incomes with a portion allocated to Federation.  I was taught how to call small donors on Super Sunday.  They gave me a script.  If they offered $50, shake them down for $100.  I just said Thank You for your being part of the community before moving on to the next call.  I served on committees where people who mattered pushed their pet projects. Only Entitled People could discuss merits or cautions.  I lasted two years.  But I still went to shul on shabbos and read Torah when it was my turn.  The experience transformed My Judaism from communal to personal.

This was not a rare response to that experience.  My state's Federation eventually commissioned a survey of our Jewish population.  I was one of the thousand or so surveyed and was invited to the presentation a few months later when the project's director disclosed the results.  We fell amid the outcomes of other communities.  20% observant and publicly engaged, 20% vestigial personal practice but public service on committees or as meaningful donors, 20% personally observant but keeping a distance from Federation, and 40% fully secular and not communally engaged, though not Jewish Nones.

The Rabbi's Substack noted what did not get you sought after as a person who could move Judaism ahead, expertise.  In many ways, this has been devalued.  As Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise attests, being an expert, that rare man of Da-at, Binah, V'Hoskel, no longer translate to authority.  And to be fair, the experts get it wrong sometimes, limited by their own culture of whose opinion carries weight.  As a RH Torah reader I was technical help with a useful skill, not valued as a person who had to wade through many other elements of Judaism to acquire not only a Bimah presence but also a level of Jewish knowledge that could match initiatives with values.  Most of us function in a variety of realms outside our Jewish affiliations.  I grew tremendously in my medical world, a place where ability served as the coin of the realm.  Others had their workplaces, law firms, kids' schools, and avocations as places that also depended on developing leaders.  The title holders of my medical encounters had a very different fabric than those of my Jewish world. Like everyplace else, my medical world has its Amiables who stand for nothing, its Drivers who set agendas while objecting to pushback, our Dreamers who aspire but don't act.  But we own our unfavorable outcomes better than the Jewish leaders seem to.  

Hidden in Rabbi Rabin's Substack seems a hint of a Jewish organizational Peter Principle.  Laurence Peter, a management consultant, published in 1969 a bestseller that proposed that people get appointed properly based on their legitimate talent.  What suffices for one set of responsibilities is not always adaptable to a more difficult challenge. The talent eventually fails but the people stay on, no longer promotable.  They still make decisions based on the previously achieved authority, resulting in organizational stagnation or mediocrity.  That may be where the current system of Jewish leadership identification has its Achilles ' heel.  Our organizations often create closed systems that drift along.  To nurture better assessments and address challenges more effectively, a system that places less value on elitism, one that demands better accountability, would need revision.  The people who could do this often strike me as the beneficiaries of the cloning experiment that the Jewish organizational world seems to have implemented.

Am I an optimist?  Mixed review.  I do not see synagogues like mine where everyone is on Medicare while the officers over a generation congratulate each other on their great work, changing direction to a culture that rehangs its doors to swing outward.  On the reverse side, the Jewish world has more entropy now than fifty years ago.  People of means give more, some standing aside to delegate use of the gift to others.  I see the Jewish constituency as atomized in a helpful way.  People feel less obligated to synagogues and Federations but more dedicated to supporting whatever niche best captures their enthusiasm.  More specialists, perhaps, but that enhances the value of limited expertise.  Selective extinction, whether LTF or some of our synagogues, forces beneficial repackaging.  For all our challenges, for all the avoidable underperformance, we American Jews will probably continue to maintain our presence in the American and global mosaic.

Back to School Sale

Not attended school in a long time, yet each summer's Back to School sales promotions with in-store displays captures my attention.  It usually gets a small portion of my money.  Lest I emerge as a senior relic, past my IRA's Required Minimum Distribution age, the AARP itself acknowledges this special retail season.  My children have careers.  Their children are infants.  No schools to attend, not for me, not for my descendants.  Yet, stationery and office supplies have always not only captivated me, but gave excuses to find homes for things I didn't need, and won't need.

Right now, my desk displays stick pens in multiplle colors, some click pens.  Pencils both mechanical and wood.  Two cartridge pens.  Three zipper loose-leaf binders.  I use some of these, not others, yet I've always had a fascination with pens.  Pharmaceutical representatives once distributed them to me in quantity, always with the logo of something they wanted me to prescribe stamped to the barrel.  Some were even mid-end in quality.  I use three bound notebooks regularly.  One tracks my Daily Annoyance, one three Daily Achievements, the third my exercise progress.  My desk has things I do not use.  Rulers.  A slide rule of another era.  Two three-hole punch devices to adapt plain paper for a three-ring binder.  I have typing paper.  Art supplies.  Pocket folders, some with clips, others just the pockets, some from stores, others harvested from meetings I previously attended, serve some useful purpose.  Clips and rubber bands get used, though more in the kitchen than in My Space.  I keep three razor edged letter openers, but do not open envelopes at my desk.  Instead, I use them to take copier paper and slice each sheet in half to create each day's Task List.

So while not in school, and not under pressure to appear stylish, each summer I check out the displays.  The process of resupply has changed considerably.  Sunday newspaper ads no longer arrive.  My favorite stores for stocking up have liquidated.  I could always enter a Christmas Tree Shoppe in August and find a few things to take to their register.  Target remains active.  While the store's chain has swooned with little that I want to purchase, each summer they stock their seasonal section in the way back of their stores with yellow bins.  I can expect teaser prices on pens of some type, yellow pencils, marble books, spiral books.  I anticipate needing a new spiral book next month.  Walmart also promotes heavily.  It can be a treasure hunt.  Among my favorite pens were there mulit-color package of Magnatank liquid gel pens.  Only the purple remains, the other lost to use or leakage.  Apparently sales or user feedback did not justify Walmart maintaining them.  Perhaps they still exist on eBay.  I could always use more dry-erase  markers, as my two whiteboards have become productivity and scheduling hubs. There only the Expo brand will suffice, preferably with the thin barrel.  And I can never have too many Bic hi-liter pens in multiple colors.

What advertising still exists also promotes Back to College.  When I designed My Space, I sought to create the dorm room that I could never afford to have.  Color TV, stereo, comfortable reading chair, swivel desk chair, optimal desk lighting.  I spent a little extra on this, though my stereo is a low-end retro without turntable, and my recliner a major disappointment, offset by being better off not occupying it too much at the expense of desk work.  Target and Boscov's supply the college crowd.  Mini-fridges, storage items, irons, coffee makers, small microwaves, stylish backpacks.  I have my optimally stocked house with all the things I need to function.  Big refrigerator, Keurig machine, high-end iron, built-in closets.  My Space has elements of a dorm, but the rest of my house does not.

Fortunately, most of what I now purchase over the summer classifies as consumable, even if I do not wear much of it out.  It takes a long time to deplete the ink of a Bic Cristal, though I succeed with the black one about once a year.  Highlighters last until they dry out.  Pencil cases sort my writing implements by type.  Paper seems inexhaustible, other than notebooks which get filled up.

While I have enough supplies, I anticipate buying some more, looking for discounts.  I don't really need or crave any.  Instead, the Back to School season announces a reset, even though my renewal time has been the medical world's July 1 rather than Labor Day.  The close of summer still has its reset.  The Holy Days.  Resumption of OLLI.  Football.  Target and Walmart and The Christmas Tree Shoppe z"l have all convinced me to stay ready.  

 

To the Beach

Summertime.  Some of the living seems easy, some not.  Been an active month with synagogue obligations, medical care, and rendezvous with our infant grandchildren. As restful as 20 minutes of propofol must have been and admiring how well my descendants have turned out, I could use a short couples interlude, followed in a few weeks by a longer couples destination.  We have the good fortune to live within two hours of the shoreline, some bay, some Atlantic.

While resort towns now line the waterfront, attracting increasing numbers of prosperous retirees from DC to settle there and younger families to allot some of their annual vacation time to that sand and surf, my wife and I really do not want parking challenges, expensive hotel stays, or boardwalk amusements.  Our state makes these outings very easy for us.  As a senior, I purchased a lifetime state park pass.  My state operates three more than adequate beachfront locations with changing areas and usually ample parking spaces.  I only need bring beachwear and a sand chair for my wife and me.  One downstate excursion usually coincides with Wawa's annual Hoagiefest, so a quick stop for a low-cost portable lunch enables nutrition.  Access to all but the final few miles now comes as high speeed highway.  Main preparatory questions:  which day and which beach?

The experiences of the three parks overlap, though they are not identical.  I prefer the most distant of them for its isolation.  Its changing facilities appear more basic, and one time I almost got closed out of parking.  The middle location is the largest, near the popular stretch of beaches that people staying at hotels seek.  This location had an upgrade a few years ago.  The changing facilities were modernized.  A small play area for tots now offers young families a respite from the hot sun.  The food options expanded as did the concessions to buy t-shirts and sunscreen.  It seems the most attended of the state's beaches, with patrons seeking places for their chairs as close to the cabana as their luck will allow.  Yet the parking area during the weekdays always has ample space.  And the park has other amenities from history to inlet fishing.  The northernmost park sits where the bay meets the ocean.  A very pretty stretch of sand.  Parking never a problem.  Crowds never a problem.  This park attracts some campers.  It also offers an active wooden fishing pier where I seem to be the angler who has yet to hook anything.  They have a small nature center and a niche historical legacy as a military outpost protecting the mid-Atlantic coast in World War 2.

I don't know which one I will drive to during the upcoming week.  I've not even retrieved the two sand chairs from garage storage.  Seeking just a few restful hours, not enough to get sunburned, maybe a couple of short entries into the surf.  Apply lessons of previous misadventures.  Use spare glasses, having lost one pair of expensive bifocals to King Neptune.  Put cell phone in plastic protector, having ruined one when a wave from the rising tide soaked it.  Ample sunscreen.  Eye on the clock.