Who's Better Me or Nobody?

Zero usually starts both an ordinate and an abscissa, the point of comparison.  Right upper quadrant is fully positive, left lower quadrant doubly negative and the other two a mixed message, one given to me by my synagogue this past week.

There is a Presidentially appointed nominating committee.  The recycling of officers has done great harm, being reaped for several years, accentuated by wandering around our new shared space where the landlord seems to have their people more engaged with new ideas and initiatives.  We have experience, as the trademark of our VP's either 10 years experience or one year experience repeated 10 times.  But turnover is low and desire to give up the comfortable niche to become President even lower.

More striking though, has been two slots of the Board assigned to NOBODY in the current and prior slate.   They will claim that they cannot get people to accept, and as I've not been asked, I will take a safe assumption that in the wisdom of the President's trusted advisors, NOBODY would have more discernment as a person to advance the future of our congregation than I would.  NOBODY must be pretty good; he or she has two seats times two years, or four seats.  It would be interesting to take a poll at the Annual Meeting where the official election occurs to see who else the Nominating Committee acting in good faith blackballed, or judged less capable or valuable than NOBODY.  Doubt if I am the only one or if the virtual blackballing might even be received as a personal slight.  But it was.

There are indeed times when I am better than NOBODY.  Torah has to be read by not only SOMEBODY, but an adult male past Bar Mitzvah.  Knowing how to do it helps but technically is not required.  I do not know if NOBODY is an adult male past Bar Mitzvah.  I do know that if he is, he doesn 't know how to do it.  That makes me definitely better than NOBODY as a Torah reader, and this year as a Megillat Ruth reader.

And as Woody Allen taught us, 80% of life is showing up.  NOBODY has a way of not showing up.  I guess the Nominating Committee opted for the special 20%.

While I do not particularly like entering the building of our landlord, where a lot of my down experiences with organized Judaism occurred, I still take Ben Zoma's advice, trying to learn from all people.  They've done better with Kehillah development than we have and defining their purpose.  They once had machers who swooped on peons.  Now it looks like they have more targeted leadership that asks the question of who can help with their initiatives.  We have fallen behind and don't seem to want to seek out talent or evaluate individuals for what strengths they might bring.  We default to NOBODY.  NOBODY ever gives you a hard time or tilts the vote.  He or she doesn't contribute a lot of skill or insight either.

Disengagement

This year marks the Chai anniversary of a seminal, oft cited sociological treatise, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone.  I've never read it but plan to when I complete the novel that I had earmarked for the second half of 2018.  Basically, he traces the decline of participation in organized social activities over about a generation prior to its publication.  As I retire, I find myself removed from my last pageant, the daily professional adventures of endocrinology.  I pay dues to a few things, the national and Philadelphia Endocrine Societies, Adas Kodesch Shel Emeth synagogue and its men's club.  I no longer pay dues to the American College of Physicians, the Medical Society of Delaware, the American Medical Association, nor have I been a financial participant with the Jewish Federation of Delaware for over 20 years.  I register Democrat, vote Democrat more often than not, but have never been a more than a nominal donor.  I am a proud alumnus of two fine universities.  Any donation to the larger one would not move their fortunes at all and would not be sufficient in amount to get my name engraved on a flush handle anywhere on campus.  My fondness for my medical school knows no bounds and they do get some money with no hesitation, but I do not really belong to any of its organizations.

Since Woody Allen accurately recognized that 80% of life is showing up, I do not show up all that much.  There is the annual Endocrine Society Meeting, too expensive now without the hospital subsidy.  The local Endocrine Society Meeting which occurs monthly will continue, though I have not really made a lot of new friends there.  I go to shul on shabbos but I never get the sense that my intellect and energy have much value to the leadership so activities of years past have atrophied.  As soon as I retired, I volunteered for a Democratic campaign.  One candidate took interest but not much became of it.  I signed up on their web site as a willing participant but I think their executive director would prefer Beautiful People with money or yes men who will not have the candor to tell them when they might be undermining their own potential electoral support.  In summary, I look like a prototypical Bowling Alone  individual model.

Despite not having been a meaningful Federation donor since 1994, though supportive of some of their constituent agencies generous with funding of Jewish projects elsewhere that would likely have gone to them were the experience better, for some reason I found myself back on the mailing list of Federation's monthly, used to be biweekly, publication.  It is kept on a display rack at shul, where I have browsed titles, clenching my teeth perhaps when I come across something that praises one of my travails of decades past, but never read any of the articles.  I recognize some authors, sometimes written by people of laudable presence, sometimes by people I found venal, but mostly not known to me, with expected turnover of participants expected over my twenty odd years of avoidance or maybe more active shunning, while I become a part of a larger trend of Jewish participatory entropy.

Two articles appeared in print recently, one from a globally distributed publication The Forward and the other a locally distributed Jewish Voice, the periodical of the Jewish Federation near my home.  They look at the Holy Days and at Judaism's trends in America very differently.

https://forward.com/opinion/407183/so-called-jews-of-no-religion-are-the-impetus-for-a-jewish-revolution/   "So Called Jews of No Religion are the Impetus for a Jewish Revolution"

Has the significance of the High Holy Days changed for you across the years?http://www.omagdigital.com/publication/?i=521893&p=&pn=#{%22issue_id%22:521893,%22page%22:36}

Has the significance of the Holy Days changed?  For the Rabbis responding to the question in The Jewish Voice, they are the anchors of tradition, at least in their homes, where families gather.  It's a form of keva, familiar people not seen in a while, familiar recipes on the table, familiar tunes that get brought out once yearly.  There are some elements of that for me, though very different from what it once was.  My attachment to the Yomim Noraim probably ended in college.  In high school teens were isolated by my synagogue to sit for a reduced fee in the mezzanine of a local movie theater that was rented for the occasion.  The people with me I knew from school, yet for those days we were separate from school.  While afforded unimportant status, we had the best seats and always air conditioned.  In college, the Holy Days were always a mixture of new people, the freshmen, and old friends not seen since the year before. There was community, even if limited to showing up there while the rest of the students threw frisbees in the quad.  We wore ties, something that would not happen again for a lot of us until next Rosh Hashana.  There were no longer familiar foods,  We separated from our families to be with other students.  I could sit anywhere in the auditorium I wanted, or at least on my side of the mechitza.  We had students conduct the service.  It was ours.  Graduations came and that was all gone, never to be recaptured.  Returning to a suburban synagogue, something just shy of a cathedral, with lots of people there who would never be seen again, not at work, in class, or in synagogue until next year prodded my cynical yetzer, neither tov nor ra but probably accurate.  I stopped focusing on the Holy Days as central, looked at those services as maybe a civilization reversal from the core of Judaism which is how you live on all the other days.  The respect for institution took a hit and it never recovered.

From the perspective of the Forward, in the article written by their editor in chief, I may have been a generation ahead of my time.  Attachment to the institutions and even to the practices did not sustain itself.  We can argue whether I helped bring it down as part of my generation or simply watched others do the things that made participation in the institutions unattractive, but there really are Jews, very valuable ones, who have departed not only the institutions but the beliefs that those institutions were designed to promote.  They have no compelling reason to recapture the recipes their grandparents made or to fly back to their hometowns, something their great-grandparents could not have done even if they wanted to.  While assembly of family for the Holy Days re-establishes this as sacred time for some, in the greater reality of Jewish history and American Jewish history in particular, there is a bit of myth to this.  People changed towns frequently, which is why the various desciples of the Ba-al Shem Tov are all known by their name and by the place they established their community.  In America, the reassembling of families only goes back about three generations though may be a central attribute for that middle generation, which is mine.

Rather, Bowling Alone, the hesitance to affiliate, affects Judaism as much as it affects political participation, attendance at PTA meetings, or enrollment in bowling leagues.  While the Holy Days offer a focus, a set time or keva to declare Jewishness if only for a few days, they do not really reverse what seem to be mega-trends, and alas, probably for cause.

Showing Up

Woody Allen once observed that 80% of life is showing up.  Probably true up to a point.  In some aspects a couple of folks whose main attribute is their Y-chromosome keep our daily minyan in the double digits most of the time while impeding the more critical decisions that keep the other elements of our congregation attractive looking forward.  A shabbos morning has about 2/3 the attendance it once did but showing up is sufficient to keep from exploring what happened to that other 1/3.  Nominating committees select officers and a board that will show up.

It is that other 20% of life that makes it sparkle or fail.  But you have to get to step 1 and assure that it is attractive to move beyond that.

Suggestions to the President

Our congregation elects a new President every June, according to the By-Laws.  It actually doesn't.  There is a Nominating Committee Cabal that creates a slate of indefinitely recycled VP's, then since all are non-promotable by virtue of the Peter Principle, a search then goes underway to merge the two attributes of capable and willing.  The slate arrives in the mail of each member and a perfunctory election much like takes place in the Third World has the new group of honchos installed by acclamation.  Then each VP presents his or her achievements for the past year and keeps an extra copy to present next year.  The By-Laws technically mandate a congregational historian, but I don't think anyone really wants any history majors pouring over documents and drawing learned conclusions from them.

So like every place else, we have a few glories and an abundance of could be betters.  They have to come to terms with the Women Thing, AKSE's perpetual Achilles Heel.  The kiddush crew seems pretty well established and Sisterhood initiatives raise money and create an element of gender camaraderie.  But that's not the core mission of our synagogue.  On a broader perspective, making the various activities attractive enough for people not already there to show up, or at least minimize attrition of people who used to show up but no longer do, needs to be a very high priority.  As the great Chacham Woody Allen noted, "Showing up is 80% of life."  I show up a lot less than I once did.

So some real suggestions:

1. Get the committees in order and list them on the Web site along with contact information.
2. Invite people to do things.  
3. Have a really candid and private discussion with the Rabbi on what his vision for advancing the congregation is and make that publicly available either from the bimah or from the Web Site.
4. Solicit feedback from the defectors.
5. A few Golden Handshakes to VP's who do not have a meaningful agenda.
6. Take attendance.

Giant sigh.