It's been an ambivalent relationship with my synagogue, which reflects a great deterioration from the enthusiasm of arrival and many elements of participation and contribution in the ensuing 23 years. But this week, for the month of November which has 30 days, I declared them Snoozed in the manner of Facebook. The monthly bulletin arrived in the mail yesterday. Headline, breaking news, they established an outdoor Covid compatible Mincha service once a week. Flashback of Hebrew school where we also did mincha. Of all that Judaism puts on the menu I don't think I would select abbreviated worship as a focus, whether it would be Zoom Hallel on a day when Hallel isn't recited in anticipation of a day when it is, a parsha class where people take turns reading from the portion, and other expressions of group mediocrity.
None of this engages me for a number of reasons. I had no role in its design or in any decisions. When the various Nominating Committees meet, they have vacancies on the slates. Not being invited, the logical conclusion is that Nobody would be a better congregational asset than me. There are committees. We even have a list of them published every Yom Kippur. I have never seen a committee report since I was last on one some time ago, have no idea if they meet, if the chairman has invited anyone on it, if their are agenda items other than repeating what was done before. Institutionalized mediocrity, expected by the increasingly inbred governance, and not challenged in any visible way by the Rabbi who presides over a dwindling unengaged membership. And to be blunt, with a measure of resentment on my part.
Easy to kvetch, particularly when I have no influence on outcome. A little harder to replace what is there with something better. No, I don't want to go to Mincha in a parking lot or recited Hallel from the screen. Neither do most people which the Zoom attendance tallies or the size of the gathering in the parking lot attest. The congregation, ours or any other, is about getting people to identify with it. Making it a restaurant where people read from a menu and select will send it the way of other restaurants dropping like flies in a Covid era. It's about interaction, it's about writing the menu, it's about that invitation to a seat at the table and solicitation of your thoughts once seated there.
This has been created in the past. In my childhood shul, the Rabbi would invited kids returning from college break to his living room. No planned lectures, just a few questions opened to the group and conversations. Real conversations, not a line of people waiting for their two minutes at the microphone like our meetings. Our congregation has had brainstorming sessions modeled after a DuPont idea mining process. People were discussing what they thought. No designated leaders. Everyone had their seat at the table. It is that table that needs construction, not another trough nailed together by people of title to fill with what they think everyone else will immerse their snouts into. The members have decided that about 15 of them will want to be there for mincha, at least a third of them the designers of that mincha.
If there were a Covid friendly chat room with a subject, I might go. Assign Board Members to man it at designated times. If there were online Rabbi Office Hours, might attendance exceed what mincha in the parking lot generates? And why mincha or any other Hebrew School surrogate? Why not shabbos? That why not has disappeared for congregational conversation.
But for now, being on the periphery when there should be no periphery, Snooze Congregation for 30 Days at least gives me a chance to intercept my own response to what has become an increasing unwelcome experience that needs a better alternative. And the alternatives are out there, but generally external to the business as usual ruts the Executive Committee and Rabbi seem to find comfortable.
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