Reversing Decline

One of my favorite analytical Jewish mavens submitted an Op-Ed to The Forward with an optimistic view on stemming Jewish participatory attrition, if not the population decline itself.  While I am less optimistic than Prof. Cohen, Judaism has always benefited more from the discussion than any pundit's conclusions.  I get little enough chance to be part of the discussion so I' ll treat myself to this one.s

Blog      Prof. Cohen's analysis

'In 2013, the Pew Research Center completed a landmark national study of American Jews. “Portrait of Jewish Americans” found evidence that the number of Orthodox Jews in America is rapidly increasing, and the number of active, Conservative, Reform and other engaged Jews is rapidly declining, with far fewer age 30-49 than among those age 50-69. Underlying this shrinkage and aging of active non-Orthodox Jews are several factors, most prominently:

• high intermarriage rates – 40% among Conservative Jews & 80% among Reform Jews-with non-Jews
• low birthrates: about 1.7 children per household
• high rates of non-marriage and late marriage
• only 7% of the grandchildren of the intermarried are being raised as Jewish-by-religion

Accept the data as presented

American Jewry can be divided into three segments

1) Orthodox

2) Jews who are episodically or partially Jewish, and not active in Jewish life

3) The “American Jewish Middle” who are not Orthodox, but participate and care about Jewish life. Many of them belong to synagogues, celebrate Jewish holidays, raise their children as educated Jews, feel attached to Israel, have Jewish friends, and donate to Jewish cases.

There are probably a lot of subclasses to #3

<snip>

Three basic principles to engage American Jews

1) Build social relationships and connections between Jews.

2) Convey meaningful Jewish content.

3) Target programs that appeal to certain stages of life — preschool kids, school kids and their parents, school children, adolescents, young adults, newly married couples, parents, older people, and other groups sharing demographic and psychographic features.

People knew this for centuries and made some effort to fulfill these needs.  Attrition in some form has also been present for centuries, well described in parts of Tanach, more recently historically in people moving toward the Hasidim or Bolsheviks from their more traditional communities or migrating to America.  All these disruptions led to reassembly of community and institutions.  In my own time we had synagogues built as people settled in new towns away from the core city, Hebrew schools leading to Bar Mitzvah, summer camps, Federations, Nursing Homes, teen programs.  Our current departure from participation has developed with the institutions already in place.  Presumably they did not create the ongoing connection that was desired of them.  That part of the analysis has been largely absent from much of the discussion of current demographics.  While there was certainly failure to engage people, in order to get the decline over about 40 years there also has to be disconnection of people who were once engaged.

Adolescence is the critical age

The most critical age for developing an identity and attachment to your religion, culture, and roots is during adolescent time, the period of 13 to 17.

The ball have been dropped before that through Hebrew School, both the kids' experience with it and the parents being inconvenienced by it at ready for an exit after bar mitzvah of the last child.  That still leaves some teen opportunity for continuation of the older siblings.

Jewish day schools are highly valuable, but only a minority of American Jewish parents will enroll their children in such schools, even if the costs were reduced. For the majority, seven or more years of congregational schooling yields measurable effects.

I found ours to be something of a disappointment, a little snot factory perhaps, breeding children of entitlement who were already engaged and easy to manage.  As a parent of a child who was more volatile I found the experience to be one of fair weather friends at a time when I could have used some real friends.  We departed.  I disconnected my Federation solicitor the next Super Sunday.  The Jewish institutions that I've entered are overflowing with these types of experiences from my childhood Rabbi who would speak well of you when you attended Ramah and turn on you when you told him the experience did not merit a return the following summer.

Most critical and effective are Jewish summer camps. Unfortunately, not every family can afford to send all their children to such camps. We need to make them by expanding subsidies, building more of them, and build a good number of low-cost Jewish overnight summer camps.

One of the challenges has been getting a critical mass of Jewish kids together in a setting where there are a lot of them in one place and they are there for the purpose of having a good time.  There are a number of experiments on this with places like Ramah and Habonim in operation for generations.  Alumni are plentiful.  Unfortunately my suspicion is that it may be those alumni of my era who get to the synagogues at age 30 having been programmed to rank Jews based on their observance who then disconnect the people they have been scripted to view as less worthy or less capable.

Youth groups are also effective when properly funded and run. Unfortunately, only two major national youth groups are currently well-funded.

The USY cliques are legendary.  As my Rav, the late Rabbi James Diamond z"l the Executive Director of the Center for Jewish Life at Princeton University observed, the best recruiter for seeking out Hillel in college was the USY experience but it was also the greatest deterrent.  There is a certain amount of manipulation that occurs there.  A person who has always gone to shul on shabbat and continues that way can be an officer but a more talented kid who joins an athletic team or musical ensemble that practices on shabbat cannot.  Once you convey a message that loyalty trumps talent, something utterly pervasive through the Conservative institutions as I have experienced them for many decades, you will eventually be left with less loyalty than you could have had and will have culled out the best talent.  If there is a message to how the Pew Report outcome got that way as the institutions function as it was getting to those results, that's it.  I think a real study on the Jewish lives and participation of Ramah alumni, if somebody of Prof. Cohen's stature might like to do it accurately would transform how Jewish leadership should set their programming to achieve their best result.

Lastly, just as Birthright Israel has proven effective for those 18-26, teen trips to Israel have the potential to transform Jewish lives, and to do so before teens reach campus.

If we can have more such trips and make them more affordable, this will have an effect on Jewish in-marriage, and help people form lifelong relationships within the community.

Again, the data might be open to question, though retrievable.  Sponsored trips to Israel for teenagers have been around for a long time and well subscribed.  Birthright excluded those alumni from its trips until recently.  The success of keeping those teenagers who visited Israel engaged in the Jewish future may have been the motivation for funding Birthright.  Those teenagers were already part of Jewish organizations through their families and the sponsoring organizations.  Whether they stayed that way as adults or became part of the Pew mainstream can probably be assessed if not already done.  It is much more difficult to assess those teens whose only connection was that Young Judea trip to Israel.

The College Years and Beyond

In college, Hillel and Chabad have a very positive effect on engaging college students. While there are many Orthodox rabbis on college campuses, not all students identify with them. We need more non-Orthodox rabbis serving on college campuses.

The large Hillel directors are a mixture of non-orthodox Rabbis and non-clergy Jewish professionals.  As graduates from the emerging seminaries and even the denominational ones find it more difficult to get appointed pulpit Rabbi, organizations such as Hillel have been acquiring their talent.  A generation ago, when the foundation for the current Pew results was being set, there were Hillels in the major universities with large Jewish populations.  They tended to attract the Orthodox, at least at the three I attended, though only one had an Orthodox Rabbi.  Effective programming for the non-Orthodox was very difficult with other competing venues for college students around the campus.  Kosher dining was the foundation for one of them as people had to eat, but maintaining Kashrut pretty much meant you were already engaged in day to day Jewish living.  Herding people from outside was a more difficult and less effective enterprise.  That is no doubt true today.

We are only beginning to systematically engage vast numbers of largely unmarried Jews during their young adult years. Among the most promising are programs to invite them to Shabbat tables, participate in Moishe Houses, attend Limmud and other Jewish learning festivals, and establish relationships with Chabad and other engagement-oriented rabbis. Any involvement of young adults in Jewish life increases the chances of their finding and eventually choosing Jewish marriage partners.

The number of people who find their marriage partners that way is probably minuscule compared to the number of people who latch onto each other in their college classes or their work places.

Non-Marriage Is a Major Challenge

<snip>

Engaging non-Jewish spouses

We can be better about inviting and inspiring non-Jews who marry us to convert to the faith. It can make a significant difference if the newly married are welcomed into the faith and the community, and are treated as one a fully equal member of the community.

Unfortunately, very few such husbands and wives ever do so. Obviously, conversion of non-Jewish spouses means that their children will be raised Jewish.

But even without conversion, we can do a much better job of making our non-Jewish family members feel fully part of the family and community.

It is important to note than an official conversion is not necessary. What is necessary is to make people part of the family and a part of the community. This can be very meaningful, and many people have been inspired by such warm invitations, and explore the religion further on their own.

This part has been in evolution, and not entirely voluntary evolution, for a considerable time.  I think all congregations now treat their intermarrieds courteously, but as recently as the 1980's that was not the case and various litmus tests still remain as part of organizational official policy.  As a teenager in the 1960's the Conservative Rabbis started responding to the first widely publicized exposee on intermarriage, Look Magazine's "The Vanishing American Jew" with a concerted effort at getting their congregants to support a form of what we would now call shunning.  You could not actually excommunicate Jews but you could keep them from becoming officers of Jewish agencies, restrict employment by Jewish agencies, deny aliyot and not acknowledge a donation celebrating the birth of a grandchild to a devoted synagogue member who's child intermarried.  Some of these policies remain nominally active today.  But for the most part the non-orthodox have become increasingly inclusive and some almost perfunctory in granting conversion.  It brings people into the fold but there is also a price to playing too loose with the Halacha that has sustained Judaism indefinitely.  These couples are part of the Jewish organizations and leave their imprint in many ways.  Whether they are able to challenge what they inherit as the status quo in a way that expands the organizations that welcome them has not been adequately tested.

I will close with an anecdote from about a year ago.  I attended a concert in which my wife was participating near the University just after shabbos one winter.  She had to arrive early so I wandered on the main street checking out a few pubs to see if I could get a craft beer before the concert.  I had a beard, knit kippah and appeared old enough to be a professor emeritus.  As I walked on the sidewalk and into a couple of pubs to check the crowd and selection, a few kids spotted me, wished me a goot shabbos which had already ended, expressed how I reminded them of the Jews of their home town, and made a remark or two about Hebrew school.   Being on a time budget, I exchanged greetings but did not engage in conversation.  These kids are not likely to be serious participants in the Jewish world now but they could be.  Somebody needs to pursue their interest personally with conversation and invitation.  Then once there, treat them as the important people they really should be.  

Derech Eretz Kadmah l'Torah

Hillel Locked

Few Jewish organizations have commanded my loyalty as the St. Louis Hillel, where as a med student I would worship on Shabbos morning, sometimes walking three miles in each direction through Forest Park, study on Sunday afternoon, call schedule permitting, to be followed by a generous sandwich at their weekly Kosher deli night, which attracted the local community as well.  Their director, Rabbi James Diamond, z"l, became my Rav and we kept in touch after he relocated to Princeton.  My first donation with money given to me by the Boston Court system for testifying as an intern went there, as did many subsequent to that.

Trips to St. Louis have been few since returning east after graduation.  In 2007 I attended my alma mater's reunion which left me with a free Saturday.  I bought a day pass for the Metrolink Transit with the intent of starting with shabbos morning where I once attended regularly.  The train took me to the Skinker stop and I walked through the relatively uninhabited Washington University main campus to 6300 Forsyth only to find the building closed as the university had some sort of hiatus that October week.  With my son graduating from Washington University, I returned to the campus for Commencement.  After the proceedings concluded I elected to walk back to the Hillel building just a few blocks from the university Quadrangle, only to find it locked again, though this time with a few cars in the back lot.  I could have rung the bell to be let in, and may have had I been alone but with family less eager to relive my old time, we moved on.

Just a few days later I had visited the Mizzou campus where they also had a Hillel, a much smaller enterprise, part of a multipurpose building.  We just walked in, looked around, asked directions to the Six Columns and resumed our exploration of the campus.

As a college and medical student, the Hillels were open, welcoming places.  My college Hillel even voted to become a Miklat or refuge for draft dodgers where people could just come in during usual business hours.  In St. Louis, would just wander in, sometimes go to the living room to watch TV which I did not have in my apartment, sometimes take a text book into the library, eventually renamed in honor of my Rav, dividing my time between my medical studies and whatever was on the Hillel library shelf.  Barriers to entering the building just weren't there and maybe they aren't on shabbos when people are expected to stroll in at various times for services.

Security needs have changed and Jewish organizations in particular can be targets of violent attack.  Even in my college years, kids from the neighborhood would enter the sukkah and help themselves to the hanging produce as a snack.  Yet the balance of keeping threats out while not impeding those who derive benefit from partaking of what is offered inside remains a challenge to the organizations' boards.  How much of a barrier is too much.  Despite my enduring fondness for St. Louis Hillel, even ringing the door bell to explain why I wanted to be let in with no guarantee that I would be let in exceeded what I was willing to do to relive what had been an essential element of my past.

Aseh L'Cha Rav

From my blog 5-25-11:  My hero Rabbi Jim Diamond took a steadfast position that all students at Wash U and Princeton had a stake in Jewish life around the campuses and he will provide the resources to fulfill it.  

Rabbi Diamond passed away unexpectedly and tragically this past week, killed while trying to get into the passenger side of a car,  returning home from a Talmud class. He more typically rode his bicycle from his home to the WashU Hillel building. One Sunday morning about ten years ago when as Executive Director of the Center for Jewish Life at Princeton University, he afforded me the great honor of speaking to my congregation at my invitation, he took the train from Princeton to Wilmington.  The half hour in my car gave me a little more private time with him than I deserved.  To his final day I never knew him as the driver.   I knew he was married and had kids.  I also knew that he was raised in Canada, though I always thought Montreal rather than the more accurate Winnipeg which had a very vibrant Jewish Community at the time.  I knew very little about him personally over the four years of direct contact and many more of indirect contact.

Yet I had the great privilege of getting to know him professionally, keeping in touch long after I departed St. Louis.  When I first arrived in St. Louis as a medical student in 1973 I needed Kosher meat.  I called Hillel and Rabbi Diamond provided me the address of where he shopped, a place called Diaments, which only closed very recently, the penultimate Kosher butcher remaining in St. Louis at the time.  He must have not realized that I lacked wheels, since the schlep there and back on a Sunday morning using the Bi-State Bus from South St. Louis took three hours.  Yet he got me there and back, noting some pleasure that the reach of Hillel might extend beyond the Washington University main campus to the Jesuit university four miles away.  Over the years there were classes, a weekly Kosher deli run from their kitchen that attracted the community and many conversations about Jewish life and where the future might be heading.  The Rabbi had started like most Conservative Rabbis as an assistant at a growing suburban United Synagogue affiliate in White Plains, NY.  He observed that the GI's who were growing their families at the time, probably mid 1960's, and acquiring a stable measure of prosperity as well, were not investing in their children's Jewish future.  The congregants were generous with maintaining buildings and paying clergy, they sent their kids to Hebrew school, but generally did not have let alone transmit a sense of what Jewish excellence is really about.  When it came time to decide if he really wanted to be a pulpit rabbi, he opted instead to pursue a college ministry instead, a place where he could direct impressionable young Jews of all types, choosing their own Jewish journeys for the first time.  He went to Indiana University first where he obtained his PhD in literature while running their Hillel.  Then he moved on to St. Louis, arriving about a year before I did, staying until 1995.  I received a notice that year, that they were naming the library in the Hillel building after him, the place where I divided my Sunday afternoons my final two years of medical school between my medical texts and whatever captured my Jewish interests on the shelves.  With the Rabbi's guidance, I had become Jewishly inquisitive, an imprint that follows me to this day.  I will teach a class of any size, from one person on elective to a Grand Rounds, another part of the Rabbi's legacy.  And while there is still considerable laytzanos in my mode of thinking, the Rabbi got me to temper it, or at least direct the cynicism for a beneficial purpose, which I hope is what I do here, though with varied success.  I sent off a donation, as was requested along with a note suggesting a retirement might be premature.  He responded promptly on Hillel stationery that we would soon be figurative neighbors, as he was taking a position with Princeton University.  I framed the letter where it hung in my office until my practice closed.

I got to visit the Center for Jewish Life one time, taking my son on a Saturday morning to visit Princeton University as a place that might be suitable for him to consider attending.  The campus seemed largely abandoned that morning.  We parked nearby the exquisite building, financed by dedicated and prosperous alumni, nearly all of recent vintage as Princeton was not a Jewish friendly university until the 1960's.  I wandered through the many rooms, finding a fully attended orthodox service in progress and a few doors away, a couple dozen people, most too old to be undergrads, including Rabbi Diamond, sitting living room style either holding a discussion or conducting an egalitarian service.  Except for my son's impatience, I'd have gone in to join them and offer a personal long overdue greeting to my teacher turned friend.  That would have to wait another year for his Wilmington visit.

Rabbi Diamond retired about ten years go, passing the baton to a young female Rabbi.  He kept active and engaged with young students of high school age as well as Jewish adult education.  Just like the airline tells you to put on your own mask before assisting others, the Rabbi kept his own mind engaged in Jewish learning right to his final day.

From a Hillel presentation, there could be no more fitting tribute than to the person I sought out as my Rabbi:

http://www.hillel.org/jewish/textstudies/pirkei_avot/pa_c1_m6.htm

Board Meeting

My attendance at AKSE Board Meetings has been largely a complete one, as has my attendance at its committee meetings and at Beth Shalom activities before that.  I am hard pressed to think of any I skipped primarily because I didn't want to be there, finding them irritating or an undue depletion of time.  At many of them I've been something of a space occupying lesion but I've always shown up, sometimes at some inconvenience to myself.

I find myself undecided on whether to attend tonight's session.  It may be decided for me by a plethora of consults that keep me late at the hospital but looking at the agenda, mostly budgetary planning.  I've been there before, or to some extent this comes up in a minor form with the financial report each month.  Most of the big budgetary items are set.  There are staff payroll costs which dominate the numbers, maintenance of the building comprises the second category of expense, and most other stuff is relatively diddle.  There is not of discussion as to how well the big ticket items enable the mission of the synagogue as an institution but a lot of discussion on whether to save $500 on postage costs.

The income side may be more complex.  It is harder to predict than the expense side, the retrospective review invariably being wrong and too optimistic.  Yet the people who create the income side, primarily the members, are the very ones who need to be served on the expense side where the discussion never quite includes how well you serve them.  It is hard to think of budgeting as a fundamentally abstract concept, much like basic science, which then gets translated to reality.

From my own perspective, there are spheres of concern and spheres of influence.  On this I have little of either.  The cynical me realizes that for the most part a herd mentality prevails, which may be good since you don't want to be doing radical things with the money of congregants who are change and risk averse but who are at least astute enough to realize that uninterupted progression of current trends will have its day of reckoning.

So what would I, as a sage lurking under the rocks, recommend.  Just like I have a tendency to take patients at their word, I would take the task force at its word and proceed down the path of single clergy.  Without getting into a discussion of the attributes that single Rabbi ought to have, the best way to economize is to do the work yourself and hire expertise that you do not have.  Some of us can fix our own cars, some need an experienced person to change the oil.  Some paint our own rooms or mop the floors, others hire painters and cleaning crews.  Some of us who did not know how to paint or scrub even rise to the occasion and learn how.  The opportunity to make that transition plopped into the congregation's lap without even having to contend with contentious contract renewal or denial discussion next year and the leadership failed to take advantage it.  I think we need a certain amount of reliability on having a ba-al tfiilah and the expertise of a Torah reader.  The price of a hired prayer leader, both an economic one and a lost opportunity one to engage the congregants and have them advance skill and rise to a need, seems inordinantly high for what we get in return.  A school of AKSE's size should be a one or two room schoolhouse with a payroll to match.  The progress of its alumni in parlaying what they learned there into more sustained adult Judaism should be tracked as part of the duties of the school staff for the purpose of upgrading the program over time and if the results are superior to anyplace else, which they are likely to be, then to using that as a source of product differentiation that allows us to recruit members.  That would be a form of budgeting with a purpose.

Do we need a building that big?  It is part opportunity, part albatross.  On one hand, the proceeds from sale could provide enough interest to enable the congregation to live within its means.  On the other there is a clear attachment of the membership to the physical structure and a willingness to support it so that element of expense seems purposeful.  Rental of space with the building has gone nowhere.  The options would be to either set aside the project or hire a seriously professional consultant who knows how to market space.  And now we are out of big ticket items.

On the income side, the word on Bingo remains a work in progress.  While I do not think this is the optimal business for a synagogue, the majority does and it could be a source of revenue.  When all is said and done, the income side depends on membership, how well the current members are served and how well policies and experience attract or deter potential members.  The task forces were too inbred to think beyond themselves and their own needs with a result that reflects this.  They had an opportunity to capture other perspectives through the focus group but this had roughly the same impact as the paid consultant whose guidance never got implemented.  There aren't too many ways to enhance membership.  One would be to deal with the Women Thing.  There are ways that can bring women closer to parity and there are folks like me who thrived on Hillel environments which must accommodate diversity, often by enabling parallel offerings.  My hero Rabbi Jim Diamond took a steadfast position that all students at Wash U and Princeton had a stake in Jewish life around the campuses and he will provide the resources to fulfill it.  AKSE had one minor foray into this with its monthly Mechitza minyan and a second foray with the Women's Tefilah Group.  Neither fulfilled its potential and if I have any seriously negative clergy evaluation comments, it would be not prioritizing these two opportunities to advance the Jewish experience irrespective of whether the people are eager to be advanced.  Not doing this for the Mechitza minyan enabled Ritual Talibans to undermine more mainstream progress on the Women Thing.  Not doing this for the Women's Tefilah Group gave tacit or maybe even overt confirmation to the community that the Rabbi does not care about the engagement of women in his congregation to the extent that other opportunities are available for them elsewhere and that women who are really committed to their own advancement need to take their families to those places instead of AKSE.  The other opportunity for advancing membership in places where mechitza or other forms of gender policy place women in a disadvantageous position involves providing a valued service ranked higher in importance than mode of worship.  This can be community involvement open to women, but most congregations of all creeds offer this.  Orthodox Judaism has a uniqueness of high level analysis of Judaism and opportunity for engaging in tradition.  Most successful Orthodox congregations that have attracted substantial non-Orthodox membership have done this through the educational route.  That means capturing college experiences which created a fondness with most people and not recycling Hebrew school which is usually the source of Jewish disdain and youngsters emerge from parents making their Jewish decisions to the college years where people make their own way.  AKSE is still recycling Hebrew school as its standard. 

Again, that is how budgeting becomes purposeful, looking at what is not yet provided that could be to make the offerings more attractive on the income side and investing on the big ticket items to accomplish this purpose on the expense side.  Unfortunately there is not a lot of incentive to think of money as the means to the congregation's purpose.