No Shir HaShirim

My two monthly shabbatot for April at my home congregation include Shabbat Pesach, where I agreed to serve as ba-al shacharit.  It can be a long service, extended further by a very pretty but lengthy chanting of Song of Songs which many congregations do on that day.  The Torah portion is brief by shabbos standards so the morning has some reasonable though late conclusion while the Rabbi should have the saichel to keep his remarks brief to allow for this.  For AKSE, this event has been contentious, a dispute over whether women may chant part of it in public, complete with some activity that I would classify as dishonest on the part of some to get what they wanted on this issue and one in which my respect for the Rabbi as mara d'atra took a hit.  But it got read.  The string ends this year, in a way that probably illustrates AKSE's soft underbelly as well as any other happening in the last couple of years, though it would surprise me if any of the many Somebodies would care to address the fundamental weakness which has other expressions that infiltrate what will probably be the congregation's closing chapters.

It's easy to to identify the core business of my hospital, which is usually given pretty high priority.  We take care of patients.  The money and the loyalty ultimately derive from how well we do that, though at times it may seem that financial or process concerns dominate the management mindset, only to return to the core activity for which the medical center exists.  The core business of the synagogue, its central mission, may be more elusive.  It needs to be a Beit Tfilah, a Beit Knesset, a Beit Midrash.  It also needs to be self-perpetuating and highly dependent on volunteers, unlike the hospital that hires the people they need to fulfill the various tasks.

So how might Shir HaShirim or BINGO or Board Meeting or fundraiser fit the congregation's mission?  They really don't.  They are expressions of the mission, but not the mission itself.  The goal should be to create a kehillah of people dedicated to doing these things and acquiring the learning needed to advance one's participation in Judaism.  The sad reality is that virtually none of the current Bimah participants learned their skills at AKSE.  A few kids did, most now departed, but only one that I can think of who acquired a level of proficiency to that would make him a peer with the skilled people AKSE once imported but no longer does.  People did make the effort to run a BINGO program.  The Board, and in particular the officers, are highly inbred with the recessive genes that come with institutional incest.  If your mission is really to advance people Jewishly and create community while you do it, which is what I think I would put on a yellow pad if asked to outline why a synagogue exists, you need to put people in place with the skills and vision to do this.  There need to be mavens, salesmen, visionaries, explorers.  You need a few Marco Polo's who've been elsewhere who can disrupt the Not The AKSE way.  And you need a few people to look at outcome devoid of the emotional attachment to rationalize as OK what really is not OK.

So when will Shir HaShirim be chanted from AKSE's Bimah again?

Tapping the Experts

In my hospital venue, I am an expert.  If your labwork looks funky or you look like your adrenals are making you fat and hairy, the request for assistance finds its way to my pager or an appointment is set up for a session in the exam room.  Data gets analyzed, key historical and objective information solicited and a plan devised to make things better.  Most of my consults come from capable physicians who have done their best to manage what is before them but sometimes the cavalry needs to be called in.

In a parallel fashion, the synagogue has not done well so the president decided an expert opinion might be in order.  We can argue whether or not the primary care givers of the synagogue, its officers and Rabbi, have performed due diligence or even tapped the resources or made the assessments that they should, but the outcome has definitely lagged.  There is a certain amount of delusion that the officers routinely buy into, much like doctors think that if their diabetics stop eating doughnuts their sugars will become normal.  They will become normal if not all that deranged at the start, otherwise more significant intervention is needed, and often something that the referring physician knows must be done but is too timid to proceed.  The young personable Rabbi will attract people willing to pay a substantial part of their not so substantial early in career income to bolster the census of young people and the congregation’s future.  Negatory on that one.  If we develop a mentoring system for the young members they will be socialized into the shul’s way.  The leaders never quite recognized that sometimes the shul has to adapt to their way.  We don’t need to deal with the elephants in the room, whether the literal elephant of morbid obesity that occupies my exam rooms or the figurative element of learned women who are unwilling to occupy our sanctuary and take care to teach their offspring why.  Delusions abound.

My congregation has had consultants with valid recommendations before.  There was even an implementation committee that did not implement or even understand that the heart and soul of the recommendations involved a redirection of governance and committee structure.  They have had focus groups.  This begot BINGO which was carefully planned and seems to be serving its intended purpose.  Little else is as carefully planned and fulfills its purpose.  There were brainstorming evenings that went nowhere.  There were focus groups attended by people on the A-list recommending more of the same.  We have a desire for membership but a series of membership VP reports that read like an accounting exercise.  They don’t even have an accurate census of who the members are.

Where this consultation seems to differ from a medical or legal consultation may be in who gets examined.  What strikes me as most bizarre about the proposal, sent to me by a Board member which I no longer am,  was that the consultant focuses on the Board which is increasingly incestuous and this time largely hand-picked by the president rather than constructed objectively by the Nominating Committee that functioned more as a telephone squad to convey invitations.  I never examine the referring physician, only the product of the decisions made by that physician.  I never ask the physician to change anything.  I assume the authority for those changes.  This type of examination should not involve the Board who really needs to take responsibility for the disappointing outcome.  Historical information is better solicited from people who used to be there but no longer are, whether the departure had been from the shul’s membership roster, declining presence in the sanctuary or not renewing participation on a committee.  There is a certain amount of objective information that a consultant would be expected to review, provided by the officers and the board and rabbi but interpreted or placed into context by the consultant.  This could include financial data and attendance data or the contents of the Shabbat bulletins three years ago compared to last year or contents of the publications that our congregation disseminates to its membership and to the wider community.

Reading the proposal for spending $3G’s on this, it can be done a lot more economically by having the officers understand the great sage Reb Pogo who met the enemy and he is us.

Proceeding in a Thoughtful Way

Bingo will continue at AKSE for another six months or so votes the Board, with my vote in the majority, even though I personally regard Bingo as the wrong business for a synagogue to pursue.  They do not generate enough revenue from this to defray financial shortfalls in a conclusive way.  I concur with a negative voter who commented that the revenue does not justify the effort expended on this and the financial risk of an unsuccessful venture.  Yet it is one of the few projects at AKSE that I can honestly say has been thought through in an objective analytical fashion by the people developing it.  Its potential exceeds other fundraisers by a little yet is very labor intensive.  Getting forty volunteers to help out, including many who have this as their main form of time donation to the synagogue, keeps the needed labor fairly secure to say nothing of the need to engage people in synagogue activities.  Yet under best circumstances this is 8% of the congregation's budget.  The bulk of revenue comes from dues paid by membership units and from voluntary donations beyond the dues structure.  Still, the $8000 start-up investment required the organizers to analyze its potential and its risks, make corrections to inevitable missteps, then reassess outcome.

Very little at AKSE follows that outline, my own project of AKSE Academy included.  If the honchos are serious about growth and financial stability, they will have to apply similar due diligence to membership.

Nominating Committee

AKSE Board Meeting upcoming in a few days.  This month's agenda contains one dominant item, whether to continue Bingo as an ongoing fundraiser.  My position is currently neutral, but could be influenced by how the last year's experience is presented, or even by its results.  Less obtrusively on the agenda will be the announcement of the creation of a Nominating Committee.  While funds enable activities, people create the experience of engaging in those activities.

Being a nominal democracy, AKSE's members did themselves in for their own convenience a few years ago when they agree to a bylaws change that eliminated term limits for all officers other than the President.  While holding a position for a long time can create expertise, that really has not happened with the possible exception of the Building VP where there has been some turnover.  More characteristically, inbreeding stifles the ideas and innovations that are needed to make a place sparkle.

I do not know the composition of the Nominating Committee but can hazard a pretty safe guess that it will contain a small group of the President's A-List, a cadre devoid of anything that has a scintilla of entrepreneurial experience or intent.  AKSE will always function as a top down organization as an unintended consequence, despite the very sincere belief of the participants that all members have a stake in what happens there.

Investing in Bingo

Many synagogues, including mine, have their financial challenges.  There is actually a literature on this, though my sense of the officers is that they really haven't explored this much, opting instead for a quest for fundraising which in a good year may add 5% to revenues though it usually comes with a significant financial risk to get that 5%.   Memberships make the place financially solvent, either in the form of dues or contributions beyond dues.  There is a limit, though, to how much of our own member funds we can wring out, so there is always an interest in getting income from other sources.  Synagogues and churches have rented space in their buildings.  Some have elegant catering facilities that generate a profit.  Some have public events.  Our officers opted for Bingo.  Without  getting into the propriety of this, which the Rabbi approved so it must be OK, its only direct purpose was to generate revenue with perhaps an unintended by important benefit of generating a rather strong group of volunteers dedicated to the project.  It was expected to lose money the first six months, which it did, to the tune of $8 K which required re-examination.

As AKSE projects go, this one seemed to be handled reasonably well.  People did their homework in advance, knew what to expect, analyzed trends, and expanded participation beyond the President's usual A-list people.  Will it ever make money?  What about serious money?  What about the value of having a project that members are committed to for its own sake?  Any indirect benefit to member retention?  My interpretation on these questions is mixed.  It can probably make some modest profit, about what a successful fundraiser would make.  

When all is said and done, there is still a budgetary deficit forecast this year and no serious intervention to erase that, let alone repay what is owed other than Bingo.  Until something else arises, break even with a measure of community development as a beneficial unintended offshoot needs to continue a while longer.