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.
No comments:
Post a Comment