Who Can Help?

In 1999 a pharmaceutical company invited me to a conference in sunny Miami Beach at a hotel that I could not afford to stay at to help them assess a product that I prescribed with some frequency but had come under regulatory scrutiny.  They gave me an honorarium in addition to hospitality and transportation.  I assigned the money to an acquaintance who runs a charitable organization.  He responded with a note of thanks but included something he had written for publication in the near future.  With Passover approaching, he composed Danny's Four Questions.

1. What do I like to do?
2. What am I good at?
3. Who can help?
4. Why not?

I revisited this 25 years later when I attended a reception for a charitable institution.  The host was a synagogue in my county where I had not been in at least a decade.  The drive, just after prime commuting time, went well.  Since that time, their Rabbi who I knew had retired and passed on, a few successors came and went, including one that generated some discord.  This year they settled on a very worthy man who I knew well, a Rabbi of admirable accomplishment and ability.  I had been meaning to attend a service there, but this charitable event arose first.

Their synagogue sits in a sparsely built area, apparently zoned for places of worship, as I rode past some churches nearby.  After parking my car and walking up steps into an impressive entryway, I took my event ID badge, hung my winter coat, and wandered around in this large public space.  Like many suburban synagogues, they have a sanctuary.  I estimated 200 pewed seats, eight rows with sixteen cushioned seats per row.  At my last visit, I remember a raftered ceiling, which has since been revised.  A movable partition connects the sanctuary with its fixed seating to an open multifunctional space.  No doubt, on high holidays or bar mitzvahs or VIP funerals, some movable seating will get set in that area.  For this evening, a dairy buffet table had been placed in the center, beverages in a far corner, and round tables with about eight chairs each surrounding the central food placement.

My interest, though, had me wandering their oversized foyer.  A Holocaust Torah set to Mincha Yom Kippur's reading appeared in a glass case adjacent to the sanctuary entrance.  At the short wall connecting the doors to the worship area on the right and the all-purpose area to the left, the congregation had placed a table with neat stacks of papers filling most of its surface.  People could get this year's Jewish calendar with the congregation's name printed on the bottom.  What attracted my attention, though, were two invitations, both very different from how my synagogue solicits engagement from its members.  One stack towards the left of the table's surface contained vignettes of  five families their outreach committee thought the congregants might be able to help during the winter holidays.  I assume they are Christian, but there are needy members of synagogues too.  For each household, the members were listed individually with suggested gifts the Temple might fulfill.  Clothing sizes provided for each individual, ages and clothing size for each child.  All mothers seemed to wear plus size clothing, which sells for a premium.  One was apparently pregnant.  They needed basic clothing, but maybe a candle or other pleasantry thrown in.  The children also needed clothing, but the gift lists included a few recreational items.  Christmas and Hanukkah largely coincided this calendar year.

When I make a donation for my mother's Yahrtzeit each winter, I divide my remembrance three ways. One third goes to the remnant of what was my childhood congregation.  While that shul has closed, the current version had the courtesy to import the names on the memorial plaques, including my mother's, to create smaller uniform brass memorials in their rather posh new sanctuary.  Another third goes to a memorial fund named after one of my mother's friends, which supplies Kosher meals to the observant needy of my childhood county.  And the final third, supplied by check with a note of appreciation, goes to a project run by one of my high school friends who belongs to that congregation.  She collects toiletries for the homeless on behalf of the congregation.  No doubt people donate shampoos from hotels or maybe trial size cosmetics.  I provide my friend money to pursue her project in the best way.

My congregation does not excel in ministry to the poor, though we do not ignore it.  Three days a year we supply food to a soup kitchen and employ our congregants in its supply and preparation.  I'm sure the people who eat there appreciate the security of a daily lunch.  But it's less personal than holiday gifts customized to individuals, adapted to their unique needs.

The other paper, a single sheet printed front and back, lay in a short stack front and center on the table's surface. It contained a form.  People come to the congregation with skills obtained from other parts of their lives.  People enter the synagogue anticipating new connections with people they do not already know who can engage them, including creation of new talents or enhancement from novice to proficient.

The Congregation divided their personal engagement or contribute abilities form into six categories that their President, Board, Committee Chairs, and Rabbi might tap.  If only they had a database of who had what skill, now easily retrievable in our digital age.  They would like to know about:

1. Business Skills
2. Creative Arts & Technical Skills
3. Religious Proficiency
4. Educational Experience
5. Social Engagement Ability
6. Anything Else 

They have people among them who have managed small businesses or done public relations.  People might be members of the IBEW, work as decorators, or act in regional theater.  Every synagogue needs people to lead services and sometimes give a sermon.  Hebrew Schools need not only teachers but sometimes aides. Babysitters enable parents to attend events that they might otherwise have to skip.  Congregations need people proficient in the kitchen and to interface with organizations external to the synagogue.  These people float around, though not always visibly.  Identifying and engaging them apparently has high value to that synagogue.

Within the form, people are asked to estimate their proficiency.  As Danny's Four Questions hint, what you like to do is not always the same as what you are good at.  The Temple makes that distinction.  People can be Expert, Proficient, or Novices.  They can also be Enthusiastic irrespective of real ability.  Sometimes gung ho fills the need, but some projects are better performed deferring the Walter Mitty's to people of training and experience.

One of the joys of wandering through entryways, whether the synagogues, JCCs, schools, or libraries, the organizations set out on their tables what seems most important to them.  My message as a visitor that evening is that this place takes Engaging more seriously than my synagogue, despite having Engaging on its letterhead banner.  Our method is a few key individuals filling their inner circles by people they know about and won't give pushback.  It is unlikely that any Committee Chair in recent years ever solicited talent from somebody they heard about but did not know, though maybe they have an informal grapevine.  It's a method that gets you by but never advances untapped potential.  You just have to be acceptable to a Dominant Influencer or two.  It is probably more expedient than inviting talent or maintaining a database to call upon people who already possess skill or want to advance what they already have.  And it has become our core culture, one that creates stability at a price.

 

This congregation's showcasing what they do internally to draw in the less engaged or find the people who lurk unrecognized made a very favorable impression.  So did their listing of five families and the individuals within each household, intending to enhance them in some way for the Winter Holidays. I exited this synagogue, where I had not been in decades, knowing that their new Rabbi, who I have known for decades, will continue to make them what they aspire to become.  Engaging and Embracing.

Respect

My hospital got its docs a new device called a Dragon Dictation System where I can speak into a microphone and mostly correct text appears.  It is modified for the reality of having learned spoken English in the Bronx.  It has two options for text, one general English and the default of an Endocrinology vocabulary as nearly all its use has been to dictate patient consultations.  I tried dictating a more general article once, ended up typing it myself, but this week took another shot at something I've been meaning to prepare into an article called "The Places I Like to Daven".  It's mostly past tense, but for all my Beth Sodom and Aliyah Sound Bite quips of my contemporary shabbat morning options, there were and to a lesser extent are places that serve as prime destinations on a shabbos morning.  Eventually as a youngster I got to like our shul's Junior Congregation, despised the teen experience, and would inconvenience myself to leave home early to get to that shul now 100+ miles away if possible when passing through the area.  WashU and Penn Hillel could expect my presence most shabbos mornings.  Beth El Quincy, z"l, for my final year of residency.  Beth Tfiloh in Baltimore once a quarter, again at a little personal inconvenience and needing some advance planning.

I tried to tease out common themes.  Like the Rabbi?  For sure at the adult synagogues but the Hillel experiences had no Rabbi.  Friendly congregants?  After multiple visits to Beth Tfiloh the total number of people who have come over to me sitting by myself and chatting with me is ONE, their assistant Rabbi who serves as Torah reader.   Personal participation?  I've been a very active Bimah participant by default at my current shul and the one before it, neither of which makes my must be there list while often serving as the destination of my many verbal harpoons.

After pondering the Why as I dictate the Where, the common thread seems to be the level of respect that I have for the composite experience and the people that I am with.  The JCC of Spring Valley, my Bar Mitzvah congregation, seemed bimodal.  It distilled to how I was treated.  Contemptuously by the teen director who played favorites, inconsistently by the Rabbi who presided over my  Bar Mitzvah, to be followed by a Rabbi of my later high school years who endeared himself, not only to me, but forty years later when high school classmates post photos of their wedding, his picture appears with a note of his kindness and sometimes his professional competence.  Services were done expertly.  Those in attendance were were more my mother's friends than mine, but as a an adult visitor who made time to stop there while in transit from the Delaware Valley to New England these people gained my respect for their ongoing dedication even as their congregation was aging and eventually failing.

Hillel I was more a part of.  People were happy to have me there whether they needed another tuchis for a minyan or not.  There were interactions about exams.  My first Kaddish obligation was fulfilled there.  It was the custom that mourners should not stand alone, a custom exported by me to subsequent places.  Not having a Rabbi, the Hillels brought out the best in what Jewishly committed students could do.  There were no fights over Mechitza, just a recognition that the Orthodox needed one and we would set our own druthers aside to enable their worship.  Somebody had to prepare Torah reading, even if an Organic Chemistry test loomed in the near future.  People rose to the occasions.  I'm very respectful of that to this day.

I only lived in Quincy for one year, my final year of residency.  The town at the time had a kosher butcher which folded a few months after we arrived.  My first experience at Beth El occurred for the Holy Days which might have been my last as the Rabbi rambled and the crowded sanctuary could have used better climate control.  But while I spent the summer at an arduous hospital assignment, my wife attended shul, assuring me that the spectacle of Rosh Hashana did not occur on shabbat.  As my medical assignments got a little more tame, I started going with her.  The experience was the closest I've ever had to a Hillel duplication in a Conservative synagogue.  Personable, knowledgeablle, interactive Rabbi.  Cantor davened and read Torah expertly without the flourishes of a Cantorial institute alumnus, having acquired his skill in Europe.  Not a lot of congregants but enough, ranging from Harvard professors to younger people who had just escaped the Iranian Revolution but still had family left behind.  The role of women was in transition then but both my wife and I got invitations to be among the haftarah readers.  Kiddush was mingling and chat time, something never duplicated for me since.  Then mostly home and rest afterwards.  If they had macher swoops I was unaware of them.  I know they had a benefactor, an owner of a small regional home improvement chain.  I never met him and never sensed I was being manipulated in any way.

So those are the basic models, diverse but with a common theme of being among people who I basically admire.  Sounds like something fairly easy to duplicate or at least aspire to, though strangely elusive.