Annual Meeting

Mid-June on a Tuesday evening every June.  My synagogue's by-laws, which a handful of people have read once, requires the congregation to meet at least once a year.  Pre-pandemic the assembly took place in person.  Once electronic interface became available a Zoom option was added.   After perhaps one or two Junes, the in-person option was suspended.  I don't remember.  But this year we met hybrid, with approximately equal attendance between our sanctuary and the parallel screen. I much prefer being on site with other people who I might poke in the ribs as speakers express ideas that could have been reasoned better.  Those always seem plentiful.

The evening's agenda has two mandated items.  Our members must formally approve a slate of officers and the coming year's budget by a majority vote, which usually approaches a unanimous vote.  A Nominating Committee recycles the VPs each year since a by-laws amendment eliminated term limits for all officers but the President.  Some have twelve years experience.  Some have two years experience repeated six times.  No new individuals added, though minor shuffling of titles.  The budget has become predictable.  Figures presented, trends noted.  As our membership and dues base declined over maybe twenty years, we live off our accumulated wealth much as the seniors who comprise nearly all our membership do.  Mostly an evening for the people who occupy many committees to tell the people either not on committees or blackballed from them how wonderful the past year's experience has been for them and therefore should have been for us.  Not all of us agree, and each year there are about five fewer of us.

It starts with a welcome from the President, who has led diligently for his three years.  The Rabbi offers some words of Scripture and Talmud.  Then a list of activities that he did in his official capacity.  Then the President speaks.  Then we vote on budget and Board Members.   For an organization that declines a little each year since I arrived there in 1997, a defector from someplace else, it would have been better to have the VPs each issue a page of what happened under their watch, attach these statements to the email notice of the meeting, and adjourn for pareve cookies. Instead, we heard recycled projects.  A list of Torah and Haftarah readers.  We have quite a few.  A list of people who performed one or more aliyot or haftarot for the first time would have abbreviated that list considerably.  I would still be on it.  Education Committee.  Ample projects.  None created by the VP, who still thinks people will flock to signup sheets.  Some things do much better when you invite people.  A High Holy Day committee.  This is rather complex, but it hasn't changed in either format or participants other than our Rabbi's relative newness.  We still have designated women's chairs with signs on them usurped by our all-male choir during their break.  

I like numbers.  Seeing them.  Toying with patterns.  Playing with them.  Imagining how they might be different.  What I saw were committees with names of people attached.  Mostly the same people on every committee.  One VP had the temerity to tell everyone not on them to step to the plate and get on them.  First guy I poked in the ribs, having been blocked from two that interested me by the Dominant Influencers who really don't want smart inquisitive types challenging their agenda or process.  They don't need or want no help.  One of the roles of titled people, one by which folks in my medical world are judged, is the ability to seek out people who can bring knowledge and insight to make each committee more effective.  Two Committees have done that, Security and arguably Ritual, with the Rabbi infusing it with imagination and technical knowledge.  The rest of what I witnessed registers as Group Think, that invitation to nod last year's activity with nary a what if we did this instead.  Nobody challenges anything.  Ways & Means, External Communications:  No committee, just honcho delegating, and often less than that.

They expressed a desire to reverse our annual membership decline.  You do that best by engaging the people you already have.  I think I would ask every chairman who they sought out in the last two years to make their portion of our Congregational programming more effective.  It's mostly none. Make them each seek out and invite two. Then have the Rabbi and Membership VP get a list of every man, woman, and child, putting a checkmark next to each committee or organization each contributes to.  Some will have so many that they should be asked to choose which ones they want.  More will have too few.  They were never invited, and a few shooed away.  Invite them.  And then give the VP who chastised those with too few checks next to their name another deserved poke in the ribs to broaden his understanding.  

Getting Invited

Non-Profits need to have a reckoning of their accomplishments each year.  They also need to take notice of their volunteer and contributors.  Some of this clusters in June, after the universities send their new grads into the world but before the families send their younger ones off to camp for the summer.  As much as I had hoped for a travel day in the coming week, PM invitations that I could not ignore fill the entire mid-week.  

My synagogue holds its annual meeting on Tuesday.  Relations with the leadership are mixed, but they offered me a spot on their Board of Governors, which I accepted.  There is perfunctory business, voting on the slate, renewal of a non-controversial contract, and sale of a real estate asset that is more useful as cash than as property.  This one takes place by Zoom.  It is primarily a business meeting.  There are advantages to in-person meetings which allow for better community building or at least getting to know other members, to say nothing of better give and take as people express their thoughts on the three agenda items.  But mainly this meeting is obligatory by by-laws.  Expediency rules the day.  I have skipped it, but as one given a spot going forward by a Nominating Committee that has often received my skeptical comments, I really need to sign on to the electronic forum that evening.  I suppose I can still take SEPTA to some Philly attractions and get home in time.

The following night comes the reception that I most want to attend.  For a few years, I have scored scholarship applications and critiqued the application process for the Delaware Community Foundation, a non-profit that distributes funds on behalf of local philanthropists.  They host a semi-annual reception for staff and volunteers that I always try to attend.  I invariably encounter a mixture of familiar and new people while I sip something with alcohol and sample some nibbles from a buffet.  The people, some staff, some community, are mostly more interesting folks with unique personal stories.  I find it easy to bond.  It's one of those wouldn't miss this events.

Then came an invitation that I did not expect.  My charitable giving goes to places that I think do important work.  While United Way and Federation have each earned a share of my scorn, the communal work they support still has to be done. The DuPont Company aligned with United Way, shaking down its employees, including my wife, for as much as they could coerce.  It made a mostly worthy, even essential effort something of a charitable cliché.  In retirement, I have a contribution for them each summer, as does my wife independently.  Unknown to me, if you donate above a certain threshold you get invited to their June reception.  While both my wife's and my individual donations fell beneath that amount, the staff elected to combine the household contribution, which got us one ticket.  For logistical reasons, I am the recipient.  Ordinarily, I do not engage in social climbing, but it has been years since I was invited to a place where everyone who's anyone will be on site.  Why not attend?

That gives me a busy week, one in which I have a few other ongoing projects to complete, including slides for an upcoming presentation.  But maintaining social interactions, particularly with people unfamiliar to me and likely more accomplished than me, has its own importance.  

Viewpoint Fatigued

I'm newsed out. I'm shuled out. Opinioned out. Not yet crossed over the line to Jewed out, but I can see that line not very far off. And the Iggles season endured too long.  I kinda know what Trump is about and who supports him.  I can tell who marches with a fist in the air while shouting a slogan for the disappearance of Israel.  And I know who refutes them and how they respond.  And I can tell who wants to manipulate me in some way.  I don't even have to go to Twitter for that.  The notices from my shul where the Influencers think I should comply with what they want me to do come to my email a few times a week.

I got the hang of this by now.  And I'm really not receptive to the next post on Twitter or even the FB politically oriented pitch, despite their being generated by some of the dearest people you can hope to know or the finest friends you can hope to have.                        

To make this more unbearable, somebody who attended lectures at a university that wouldn't let me attend took classes on how to keep me glued to my screen by selecting what to toss my way.  Eventually they are no longer right.  It moves from engagement to the rejection of the very engagement that the expert with the algorithm thinks I might most like to have.

Part of the limitation may be that very little of this is truly interactive.  My forty years as an active physician had me interviewing people multiple times a day, whether patients at the bedside or in the exam room, nurses on the in-patient units, residents sharing the care, or consultants who come to help out.  Art Linkletter knew that Kids Say the Darndest Things.  So do patients. So do people at committee tables. Often their comments or questions are not what I anticipated.  Yet each situation intentionally included me in the dialog.  And it is a dialog.  It is a back and forth of ideas that can take unplanned directions.  It is sometimes having more expertise, sometimes upgrading my ability, since I started with less knowledge or experience than my partner.  And because the directions shift within seconds, at least in my medical world as new information is piled atop what was there before, there is something engaging about it.

Our screens really don't have that.  On Twitter, properly now rated X, where I have had the good fortune to avoid the truly viral toxins, I can comment to people of public prominence and accomplishment, but it is never on their agenda to respond to me, and for the most part they don't.  Had I made the same comment in a public seminar, they would have to respond.  Indeed, my Senators and Congressional representatives have done just that live and in person.  I know not to pose a question whose answer I can anticipate.  

On FB I know most of the people.  I've seen some of them live since enrolling on the service in 2009.  They are very different live.  While I admire the things that interest them as individuals, be it science, their trips, their fondness for restaurants, coping with Covid, their interests in cooking, even their political stances which often differ from mine, the screen is not interactive.  They can figure out from my messages that I time my week to shabbos, like cooking dinner, and analyze a professional report expertly, and am part of the sports fabric of my hometown, they really don't quite know how my mind works, nor do I have a good grasp of any of theirs.

Of the places where I express myself, the most suitable may be Reddit in is various subdivisions.  People sometimes come to pitch their agendas, but they often come seeking guidance, and this is generously offered.  I do not know what question will be posed on r/Judaism tomorrow.  I do know that when I open my Twitter screen, there will be attacks from the Left, from the Right, the retired CEO of AJC who I thoroughly admire professionally will tell me the same facts too many times, the Opinion Editor of The Forward, which I read daily, will have comments not very different from the usual comments, somebody will call Trump a criminal, which I think he is, and somebody will respond how the Trumpists brought America closer to its potential.  I just don't want to be there, and I really don't have to.

Interestingly, my shul has started inviting me to do stuff worth doing, though it is not the Influencers who took that initiative.  They still run Nominating Committees who populate the Board with Vacant since Nobody could offer more insight than me.  So while I am excluded, I presume by intent by Influencers, from the creative elements, I have more of a niche that bypasses the Gatekeepers.

What none of these forums, not synagogue, not Social Media in its various formats, has been able to do is what David Brooks in his most recent book regarded as the essence of personal interaction.  That is the ability to get people who want to tell Their Story to tell it.  That is the essence of medicine which may be why I found my time there so captivating.  To a large extent, it is the essence of Jewish Scripture, yet squashed in the name of Leadership, both in Torah to some extent, and in our Jewish institutions by design.

Our social media, X, FB, Reddit, all attract millions.  But they don't really have millions.  They have one person replicated a million times who makes a comment to a poster who really was not somebody who accomplished anything on X but may have accomplished quite a lot external to X by the position they hold in Journalism, elected office, or some other form of celebrity, where they already have a forum to promote Their Story.  The rest of need a forum to tell ours.  And X, FB, Reddit, and my shul all seem not quite up to this challenge.

I'm screened out.  I'm shuled out.  I need people to tell me the Darndest Things.

Blackballed

 

Each spring, typically soon after Memorial Day, a letter from my congregation arrives.  It typically contains several pages, announcing the date and time of the Annual Meeting required by our By-Laws.  The meeting mostly has a predictable agenda.  Our budget needs approval by a majority vote of a quorum.  I can anticipate some nit-picking, somebody questioning whether we spend too much on Kiddush pastries or whether we could enhance revenue by a more assertive approach to securing sponsors of more of our Kiddushim.  Bupkis amount relative to the size of the budget.  Somebody will invariably remark about the declining fraction of revenue that accrues from membership dues, as our dues paying headcount has been bleeding a few members annually for decades, virtually without replacement.  Some disaffiliate for potentially preventable dissatisfaction, but never enough in any budget cycle to change congregational financial fortunes.  Our Membership VPs handle this as an accounting exercise:  One new member, four left, most often a reflection of our congregational Kaplan-Meier cumulative mortality graph.  I also have a small gripe, one probably noticed by nobody but me.  As our revenue becomes more insecure each year, it has been a while since there was ever a budget line for spending an amount to promote congregational advancement, whether a social event that better enables people to identify with us or inviting a guest scholar to teach us or an independent consultant to stem our attrition.  No matter how poor or cash strapped a person or organization is, some advancement allotment needs consideration as an investment in what we are and in what we aspire to become.  But the numbers will be teased a bit, as people make their statements.  It will be approved by a wide margin, though with a dissenter or two, also making a statement but not making a difference.

Some years we have a single big-ticket item that needs formal majority approval.  This year it is the contract for our incoming Rabbi.  Again, expect somebody who wished he had more authority and wisdom than he really does to wangle usually confidential numbers like salary.  I would like to know about performance incentives built into the contract, as they announce what is important to the organization.  But the congregation being financially strapped, and the incoming Rabbi among the long-term unemployed, I anticipate some form of low-ball package for him in exchange for the security of a regular paycheck, one of known amount that can neither be reduced nor enhanced.  Performance incentives, or even knowing what constitutes effort related excellence, is beyond the conceptual capacity of our influencers.  It will be approved.

And we vote on officers.  As in previous years, there is a board vacancy not filled, yet the Nominating Committee bypassed me when filling their positions.  Nobody would make a better contribution to the governance than me, apparently literally.  I’ll take that as a snub, or perhaps a blackball.  However, maybe I am too harsh.  Most of the people on this year’s Nominating Committee, appointed and chaired by the President, were the very people I personally advised him to put on it.  The kingmakers, the Influencers, the people who dismiss you with the wave of a palm, those familiar faces of past years, were not on it.  And I got snubbed just the same.  There was one new VP, the Membership specialist who I think a long way from anything specialist.  Pretty much everyone who appears on the roster, which will be approved unopposed, appears at Shabbos services, which contracts the pool from maybe 200 possible people to about 30.  And I do not know who they asked but turned them down, other than my wife, and who else like me is on their worse than nobody list.  But it does not strike me as the people who can implement a reversal of the inexorable waning of interest in signing on and then paying dues.

And since the people doing the nominating were people I asked the President to do the nominating, I can have some fun over the rest of the year needling them about the snub.

My Rabbinical Druthers

 Shtai Rabanim lashevet b-ambatiyah.  v Rav rishon omer l Rav Sheni, yo chaver, la-havir et ha-sabon.  VRav Sheni omer lo sabon, radio.

My Ranking for Me:

1. No Rabbi
2. Rabbi from Toronto
3. Rabbi from Long Island
4. Rabbi from Staten Island

Ranking as an agent of AKSE to enhance its future, were I a consultant for AKSE instead of for Me:

1. Rabbi From Long Island
2. No Rabbi 
3. Rabbi from Toronto
4. Rabbi from Staten Island

Some intro to the analysis.  It comes as a broadcast invitation to members, not as a targeted interest in my mind in any way.  And my comments, as thoughtful and detailed as I can make them, come at a disadvantage.  Having spent an estimated forty years interviewing about fifteen patients a day, conversing with colleagues, serving on committees, reading feedback of all types, I am well aware of the disadvantage of delegating to others not of my own choosing the abiltiy to question people, shift directions of conversations based on responses, and functioning as an end consumer in lieu of being a direct participant.  Still, sometimes medical encounters can be brief but revealing.  And those forty years of experience came with exploration of documentary evidence, which overflows for patients and exists in a more limited form for rabbinical applicants and my own congregation.  So with those limitations, on to the reasoning for my choices.

Choosing what I think would give me the best Jewish experience that an AKSE affiliation can generate, I would opt for having no rabbi going forward.  Not leave the position vacant to defer filling it, but really having no rabbi.  Acting as an agent on behalf of other congregants, I'd put this option second, but not a distant second.  Ah, but any macher would tell you that having a designated Rabbi is mandatory, a form of Sacred Cow that can never be schected!  Actually not so.  We've already conducted the experiment.  In many ways, the absence of a Rabbi brought about some of the best of what we have among ourselves.  We have a better understanding of the need to broaden participation, announced by the congregational President to his YK audience.  Perhaps the most visible task of a Rabbi is a weekly sermon.  We now have people doing this who do it very well.  People take their turn studying, if only for a few hours to prepare a talk worthy of a college educated audience.  For me, those Hebrew School flashbacks and InterAliyah Sound Bites effectively disappeared.  When our Rabbi would recite silent prayers for a congregant unable to do this himself, that slack was quickly remedied.  Our Partnership Minyanim have new rules, generated internally by ourselves.  All in a few months.

And guess what, this isn't new.  For myself, and undoubtedly many others, my Jewish high point might have come too early in life, as a university student immersed with other university students.  We had a Hillel or contracted Rabbi for the Holy Days, as we did at AKSE this year.  Everything else happened because the worshippers themselves insisted it would happen.  That's been my more recent AKSE experience.  University Si, Hebrew School No.

But we also have to address that Sacred Cow element, which in some way AKSE has, though indirectly.  At the congregational web site there is a page of congregational history. http://akse.org/history/ What is striking to anyone who reads it, after the retirement of our revered Rabbi Emeritus, the person whose imprint defined who we have remained, his successors do not seem to be important enough to even be named in our narrative chronology.  Were we really Rabbi focused, their legacies would have been promoted as well.  It wasn't.  And one of my childhood congregations also functioned grass roots with learned volunteers.  They had a Mara DAtra, a Rabbi of international stature who was on the Yeshiva University Biology faculty, but no person designated to show up, give sermons, teach classes.  AKSE at its best is really member focused, much like our Hillel experiences of decades past.  We have done admirably without a Rabbi and can continue indifinitely, contracting for High Holy Days or have a resource when halachic questions need both discernment and finality, for which we would be expected to compensate the selected individual.

While it's better to explore ideas than people, we are ultimately choosing from a list, even if expanded to None of the Above.  While my own assessment makes a distinction between what I prefer for myself and my medical imprint of recommending what is better for somebody other than me, both need to be justified.  Don't know if there are right decisions.  There are likely wrong ones.  As a group, all three men can capably deliver a sermon, conduct liturgy, keep track of what page we are on and share that info with people present who cannot, and read an aliyah or more from the scroll, none of which really require a salaried Rabbi.  Not a good source of product differentiation.  I don't know how well any of them would do at conducting a funeral, selling Chametz, or speaking candidly to congregational Officers who challenge or irk them.  We probably all want our Chametz sold hassle free.  But as we learned from the recent Georgia run-off, sometimes we vote for the candidate who will be obedient without resistance when the big boys tell him to do something, sometimes we value independence more.  I'm for independence, though I would guess there are Congregational Influencers who place a higher value on obedience, which is part of the Scout Law, while candor is not.  And the Scouts begin with Trustworthy.

So if picking for myself, Aseh L'Cha Rav as Pirke Avot advises, the young man from Toronto is really the only one I connected to personally.  He has a nimble mind. I'm a sucker for a nimble mind.  Who else would take the name of our congregation and create a source sheet from it? When I listen to lectures by his mentor Rabbi Torczyner of Toronto, a prolific presenter on yutorah.org, he refers to source sheets which those in attendance can read.  My own presentations to AKSE Academy had source sheets.  Everything we try to convey needs a basis.  And finding that underpinning takes some exploration, even if it is our own congregational name.  His instinct to do this and the elegance in which he created this left me impressed, knowing how difficult and time consuming this can be.  He regarded us as important enough to give us something we would not think to do on our own.  So he's my first choice after make a go of it without a Rabbi.  And he himself has a long audio and visual presentation trail for anyone to access.

Now as an agent of the congregation I would have some reservations.  His background could be judged quirky.  His appearance too, with payos accentuated by crew cut largely covered up by his Frik Kippah.  I was perhaps taken aback by the reticence of those at mincha to interact with him as he presented, though his implicit invitation to do this is easily recognizable to all physicians whose learning is largely interactive.  He has no congregation that he has led before.  And his public trail offers no hint as to whether he will be willing to schect an AKSE Sacred Cow, or how he might either use the authority that the Rabbi has or abdicate it.  But I think he is the only one who really has the capacity to make AKSE sparkle, both internally and as a unique interface with the larger community.  But it's a roll of the dice.

The largest separation between what I would choose for myself and what I would select serving as a consultant or agent of the congregation involved the gentleman from Long Island.  He presented himself on shabbos morning professionally.  He read from the scroll capably, davened with proficiency that I would expect from his simultaneous cantorial education, gave a fine summary of Ki Tetze as a parsha that is dense in mitzvot, and chatted amiably at kiddush.  That's my read of the congregation, that safe scoop of vanilla.  A person who can complete the relentless pursuit of mediocrity, or at least get all the boxes in the formal contractual Job Description checked off,.  I doubt he will ever challenge what the baalebatim order him to do.  Not the real me, but most like my perception of the membership, thus the gradient in what I would choose for myself and what I would choose for the congregation if AKSE were my patient.

The documentary evidence, though, has a lot of red flags.   Comfort comes at a price, sometimes a very big price, if the congregational aspiration is to have a larger membership that is financially self-sustaining.

There is a web site for where the Rabbi currently serves.  The site is more notable for what is not there than what is.  The Rabbi's bio is a list of what degrees he has, not much more than a LinkedIn profile would offer.  What is not there is what he thinks about anything or aspires to for his community.  The site itself pretty much ends in 2016 in any description of what happens there.  Adult Ed, something to the core of what our Rabbi will need to do is "Under Construction".  My expectation of any congregation is that the rabbi be the focus of its mission.  There is a Mission Statement, one that looks outward to the community, participating in relatively perfunctory events like legal holidays and Hanukkah, but little in the way of internal Jewish development of its people.  My expectation is that a Rabbi who has that little presence in his own congregation would be super malleable with us, which I think is too malleable. And not having his presence on his congregation's central internal forum seems neglectful.  On the plus side, his congregational role for women exceeds what we offer.  If we seek to grow, he will not be an impediment to that, though probably not a great contributor either.

There is also an instagram link to a concert he attended as a representative of his congregation in 2021, but again makes no note of his comments to the gathering in his professional capacity.  He received an award for chaplaincy work on behalf of the Orthodox community.  No date, and interestingly, the link was on MapQuest.  And he sponsored a kiddush at a large O congregation in Manhattan for his son's Bar Mitzvah, bulletin dated 2015.

To perhaps put this in some perspective, if AKSE were to ask its VP Membership or Membership Committee to pick 20 members at random and perform Google and YouTube searches on all 20, they would likely learn quite a lot about those twenty people, what they do, what they like, where they affiliate Jewishly and communally.  Our candidate, while he made a favorable impression, never generated much in the way of achievement over an extended period of time.  Can he make AKSE grow?  Doubt it, but I don't think he will offend anyone already here either.  As a result I put him as the default choice if we really need to hire a Rabbi, though a reasonably predictable letdown for me personally.

The Rabbi from Staten Island takes 4th Place of 3, whether selecting for myself or selecting for AKSE's future.  His personal presence, which I experienced at Mincha, fell above threshold.  At his class he seemed less interactive than I would have expected, as the classic Jewish teaching is where one comments and somebody else, teacher or chevruta partner, challenges the comment.  That interaction did not occur in the mincha class or in some brief small talk.  To be fair, that is better assessed at an interview and I could see a candidate who may see himself as being on display wanting not to challenge anyone.  

Cyberspace documentation seems scanty, though not absent.  Much of it comes from his present congregation's web site.  Apparently they have 80 members, which may explain why their Rabbi has another source of income.

Now, with over 80 families in our congregation with new needs and new aspirations for the future, the leadership is once again dreaming and planning for new growth and new directions.

Their congregation also provides a history.  Been around since 1935, homeless for a while.  Their history description stops in the late 1960s.  Apparently their fashion of worship stagnated from there as well.  I do not know whether their membership ever peaked significantly, though the description of the multipurpose building constructed in that era suggests that it's fortunes once included more than 80 families.  But now they are dreaming and planning.

To his credit, the Rabbi makes a statement, reading in part:

What purpose does a traditional Conservative congregation like ours serve? It allows people who, for whatever reason, are not comfortable within the framework of an Orthodox synagogue to still observe in a traditional manner. It provides a setting for the teaching of Torah and traditional Jewish observance that a significant segment of the Jewish community is comfortable with and can accept. Our synagogue is not a compromise. It is an alternative that allows those who choose it to grow and live as Jews, in a way that other variations of congregational life do not.

I would challenge the size of that siginificant segment.  Their demographics and ours suggest that we may need to count more accurately.  Geez, at our own YK services right here, the Women's Section, labelled as such in block letters and set aside to maintain our own tradition was disrespected by our own choir who sat there during the breaks, but would not let the women sing with them. We seem to respect the gender separation as a default, and as the YK episode suggests, not always in the most consistent or respectful way.  https://richardplotzker.medium.com/you-shouldnt-sit-there-9ac90f98352e  This model of worship has been put to the test, and basically it failed demographically, something that reflects in his congregation and in ours, behaviorally if not ideologically.  That's pretty close to a disqualification in my mind, however capably he may personally perform from the bimah or classroom.  It's not where our future lies if the ability to expand beyond people not already here is authentically what the baalebatim aspire to.

There is some other documentation.  In his younger years 1987-1993 he served as Rav at a congregation in Upper Manhattan near the Cloisters, where a lot of people from Columbia P&S live.  That congregation has a few statements of their history, the decline they experienced and the turnaround that they achieved and that we aspire to;

Membership and finances both declined steeply during the 1980s and 1990s, as the generation following the one that founded and built FTJC moved away from the neighborhood. Then, in April 2007, the congregation voted to establish gender egalitarianism.

Our commitment to spirited Hebrew prayer and social inclusion has brought remarkable growth in the past few years. A large portion of the membership now consists of young, growing families whose important lifecycle events, from bris to bnai mitzvot, bring excitement to the whole congregation.

My read:  our candidate presided over the decline and impeded the reversal.  And did the same for the next thirty years.  Probably not a good direction for AKSE to accept.

On my whiteboard, placed within my line of sight to the left of my desk, I keep two lists on the right half.  The upper comes from a graduation speech given to my son's class by Mayor Bloomberg.  Hizzoner asked the graduates to seek Independence-Honesty-Accountability-Innovation.  My asseessment scored three out of four, having been excluded from any meaningful position of accountability by many a Nominating Committee, but the other three elements seem fulfilled.  Below that in Hebrew are the initiatives recommended by Rabbi Sid Schwarz of Clal, editor of Jewish Megatrends.  He advised seeking Wisdom, Righteousness, Community, Sanctity.  I score my comments 4/4

Assessing Congregational Committees

Declining religious congregations usually have some means of changing their direction, not always, but definitely sometimes.  There is a literature on this, as well as ample online resources, usually from consultants to Christian churches which I reviewed for a PowerPoint I once gave for AKSE Academy on synagogue life cycles, but applicable to synagogues as well.  Do what you did that got you the way you find yourself pretty much invites continuation on the downward path, not always at the same rate, but not reversal to an upward path.  Restoration generally requires revision of internal structures, schecting a few Sacred Cows, and rehinging some sanctuary doors so that they swing outward instead of inward.

Some years back, maybe about twenty, our congregational officers sort of figured this out.  Board Meetings start with an assessment of income and expenses, always in the red.  Seasons end with a decision on a dues increase to offset the deficit, essentially fewer people paying more per family, until they max out and either depart or ask for a personal dues reduction.  The focus has always been on attracting more members, something that never really materializes in a way that augments revenue.  And clergy understandably want a raise with each new contract, though never take any measure of responsibility for membership attrition.  So the President, one with a day job in the financial industry, got the Board to authorize $3500 for a professional synagogue consultant to scour our policies and operations, then advise on how to best reverse our membership decline, financial constraints, internal operations, and public perceptions.  A senior consultant from Jewish Learning Venture did his analysis, wrote a report which was made available to the Board, if not to all congregants, then proceeded to Step 2, an Implementation Committee, which I was on.  We met two or three times with a facilitator, the daughter of a macher from the other shul across town.  As we conversed at small round tables distributed in our auditorium, I was not at all convinced that many people actually read the text of the report.  The facilitator realized that so she summarized it for us.  There are always external faces and internal revisions.  Recommendation externally, be what we are, which is Traditional, full liturgy, with clear gender distinctions.  Everyone knew what we are and a place that had already gone egalitarian decades before did it at the expense of reducing their liturgy to accommodate limited ability of their members to perform the full spectrum of Jewish ritual.  The internal face proved more difficult, as it involved taking a path other than status quo.  The consultant focused on our committees, a loosely structured collection of people doing different things with little formality, little accountability of the chairmen, which never changed, and repetitive submission of some very trivial activity reports to the Board as required each year if they were submitted at all.  

While our Implementation Committee met, I do not know if minutes were ever taken.  Not much accrued from our expense.  We have the same religious orientation that we did before, surviving two more sets of clergy.  Committees are loose, but at least we know what they are, as during a three day post-op lame period, I assembled a comprehensive list extracted from a mixture of weekly shabbos bulletins, monthly newsletters, and by-laws which mandated a few assemblages of people, though some defunct even then.  The President received the list, copied it onto our annual message to the congregation presented every Kol Nidre, and modified slightly from year to year, more activities disappearing than new one's coming aboard.

In my medical world, committees are the place where work gets done.  Hospitals need to make sure staff physicians are qualified so there is a Credentials Committee.  There are multiple pharmaceuticals that do the same thing, therefore a Formulary Committee minimizes duplications.  Residency programs require Education Committees.   In my Medical Society, I served on the Planning Committee that arranges the program for each annual meeting.  Synagogues have standing committees for Education and Ritual oversight, but also ad hoc Committees to select Board Members or recruit new clergy.  Places that sparkle and places that languish differ by the ability to bring talented, energetic people into projects.  That is where our congregational consultant assessed us, when we had maybe twice as many members as currently pay dues.  All the more reason to get people engaged.  People who have a defined responsibility tend not to leave.

Our current President, experienced with operations of a congregation elsewhere that had different internal operations and different outcomes assumed office.  He started by inviting people to volunteer themselves for a committee, providing not only the list of what they are, but a tab on the bottom to send in, so the committee chair could initiate contact.  I took the invitation, selecting my two from a list.  While we can argue whether volunteers are the best way to go, usually adequate if technical expertise not needed, then proactive invitation is better, the President responded, told me my selections both had the same chairman who would call me.  YK to Hanukkah is tad over two months.  No contact from the chairman.  The President did follow up with me.  So I asked him obvious questions that I'd expect an oversight officer to know.  Who's on these two committees, what do they do?  Other questions are better offered to the chairman, the important one being what would he like his committee to do but hasn't had the people to carry it forward?  Have either ever submitted a report to the board?  This is where formality and structure drives output.

I sort of know the answer.   I suspect the President does too.  Some committees have names but no people, no defined roles, no interest on the part of the chairman in doing anything different tomorrow than yesterday.  In some ways, like England in 1831, a place with Rotten Boroughs that sent men to Parliament but had no voters in what was really an abandoned geographic center.  Cleaned up by the Reform Act of 1832, but despite its obvious need, there was a lot of support for voting it down despite the tenuous nature of how Britain functioned at the time.  As I look at the committee list, keep my ear to the ground for what is happening, or at least what is disclosed to me via bulletins, we have our share of mostly harmful non-activity, from Nominating Committees that opt to keep spots vacant than to invite a few more people, including my wife and me.  I guess they assume Nobody is an improvement over us.

There's a certain blend of laziness, complacency, good enough, adaptation to routine.  That may be why the Consultant, who did the best he could, really couldn't change a culture.  That was 200 members ago.  They want new members and new participants, but as I found out from my volunteering initiative, perhaps not really me, or perhaps me as useful when they need bimah skill, but a nuisance with a nimble, challenging mind.

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.

Tenured In

How would a university reach its potential if all faculty were tenured?  Careers last decades, new talent either would never arrive or be temporary.  Not good.  But that is what has become of my shul with some very negative consequences.

Being a democratic organization that has to vote as a congregation but has officers and a Board, a nominating committee arranges a slate and the congregants approve it at a pre-announced meeting.  Some years ago, the term limits for officers was repealed, though not for President.  Virtually the entire slate of VP's has remained unchanged since.  There is no incentive to move on so nobody takes on the role of President.  Last year the President took an extra year by default.  Since nobody is better than our President, the Nominating Committee apparently upgraded by selecting nobody.  Without the medical jokes of space occupying lesions, or whether these officers really have developed any expertise over their 10 years there or whether they have one's year's experience repeated 9 times, this does not bode well for the organization.  Talent depends on advancement, and I just do not see it here.

There are board appointments, mostly same old who have been around for decades, but with the officers tenured in, there really is no upward mobility for them, making it a dead end rubber stamp type of minimally contributory effort.  Four of the ten positions are vacant this year, three last year.  I do not know who the three person Nominating Committee of former Presidents asked but declined or who they excluded.  I must be on the C-list.  Ironically there are gatherings of the Congregation that bring out a lot of people, meetings related to the sale of the building, High Holy Days where somebody parcels out Ark openings to as many men as can be recruited.  There are lists of who donated money published each month in the newsletter.  I suspect that the Presidents just have a very restrictive inner circle, some tasks to do with some urgency to the omission of the important, not a lot of vision, and no incentive to tackle a real problem, which is what you end up with when you neglect to develop the people that you have and take the path of least resistance, reappointing the same slate year after year.  I wonder if anyone of the three Presidents actually went over an attendance list from a well attended meeting to get names, or whether they even looked at the High Holiday peticha participants to get more names, or the membership list.  Judging from the actually submitted slate, it is more likely that they depended on their own awareness, which would be the people they see in shul on shabbos.  That is a very small veneer of the potential talent, and the slate reflects that.   It is a very ominous sign that portends depletion if not addressed effectively.

Rethinking Membership

Somebody sent me this article from Ha-Aretz.  As a non-subscriber, I cannot identify its author to give him or her due credit, but its a fine piece of thought.  A few comments, edited considerably due to the length of the article, help match the suggestions with my own reality.

Ha-Aretz    Furrydoc

Death of the Traditional non-Traditional synagogue

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/rabbis-round-table/.premium-1.721558

It is no secret that the traditional synagogue model is showing signs of age: Over the past two decades, membership has declined across the United States, forcing many synagogues to merge and even to close for good.

And mine's not too far off.

<snip>

One popular target is the traditional dues model that most synagogues today utilize as the backbone of their financial model. This model, which was developed and has been left largely unchanged since before World War II, stipulates a set fee that would-be congregants must pay in order to become a “member” of the community. Membership, in turn, grants the individual (and his/her family, if relevant) certain rights and privileges within the congregation.

<snip>

Members are free to utilize the services and programs offered by the synagogue as much or as little as desired or necessary, and are similarly free to participate in congregational life and leadership if they so choose.

Depends where.  Some places are still vibrant enough with kingmakers sufficiently secure, to make some elements of participation by invitation only.

Critics of this model often point to the high cost of dues at the typical synagogue, arguing that many American Jews struggle to afford them and, moreover, that many do not affiliate because of the expense. More to the point, critics of the traditional dues model point out that many Jews feel the expense of membership far exceeds the benefits. Considering that most synagogue members only attend their temple on the High Holy Days, and rarely if ever utilize the other benefits of membership or participate in synagogue leadership (especially after the last child has his or her bar or bat mitzvah), they might rightly ask what they are receiving for their two grand (or more) per year.

Not a great consumer purchase.  Yet Orthodox congregations continue to have a commitment from their communities, people who utilize the synagogue regularly, lower expenses and lower dues. These folks get stung financially by day school tuition.

<snip>

For these reasons, there has been a growing movement in the 

American Jewish community for synagogues to change their financial model. Advocates for change usually advance a voluntary-giving model of one kind or another, While there are a number of different versions of voluntary-giving structures (many of which are analyzed in detail in the exceptional new book "New Membership & Financial Alternatives for the American Synagogue" by Rabbis Kerry and Avi Olitzky (Jewish Lights, 2015)), they all more or less advocate decoupling membership from financial obligation. Membership is free, universal giving is encouraged.

It's hard to get away from the reality of needing secure funding, if not only to meet expenses, but even to be able to budget and set priorities.

<snip>

At the moment, my synagogue is one such congregation. Over the past year, a team of thoughtful and sensitive leaders was tasked with studying and analyzing these alternative models in order to determine whether changing to a new model would be right for our community. Ultimately, they concluded that the risks outweighed the potential rewards, and as people who cared about the congregation’s long-term future, they could not recommend a change.

As this taskforce presented its findings to me and our congregation’s “visioning” committee, I was disappointed. Years of studying the sociological trends and organizational best-practices had led me to conclude that voluntary-giving models were the wave of the future, not only because they were more in sync with the zeitgeist, but also because they were more in line with Jewish values of communal inclusion.

I'm not at all convinced that Jewish organizations ever really had Jewish values and communal inclusion as its sine qua non.  Neither was Amos or Isaiah.

But as the conversation progressed, something dawned on me: the major flaw in the traditional model is not necessarily the fixed cost typically associated with membership but, rather, the notion of membership itself. Voluntary giving systems will ultimately be ineffective unless they address the fundamental flaw inherent in the traditional membership model. Similarly, congregations unwilling to part with a traditional dues system can yet remain relevant, vital, and vibrant, so long as they address this flaw.

If they have money, they don't need members.  There are synagogues with large endowments that function this way, including two of my former places that held on long after membership dues could not meet even minimal expenses.

How did I arrive at this conclusion? The more I heard the word “membership,” the more I realized that it is an inherently transactional term. A member of an organization is typically one who pays some sort of premium in order to receive certain benefits that organization provides at no additional cost. It is, therefore, the very definition of fee-for-service. Consider the things we are members of today: I’m a member of my gym, of Costco, of Netflix and Amazon Prime. The one thing all of these memberships have in common is that I am a regular consumer of their products and services. The membership premium makes sense so long as I remain a regular customer.

And the people who run these places have the saichel to entice their customers' participation, my synagogue's poobah's don't.  They've not really invited anybody personally to participate other than broadcast offerings.  It's more akin to building a public trough for hungry snouts to sift through.

Synagogues, however, generally purport to be communities, not merely service providers. Community is supposed to be covenantal, not transactional. Communities are made up of people committed to supporting each other and to the infrastructure and systems that facilitate communal well-being. While a member of an organization is primarily interested in what he or she is receiving for him or herself, a participant in a community, while not necessarily sacrificing his or her own needs, is simultaneously interested in the welfare of his or her neighbors and in the success of the community as a whole.

Using the metaphor of “membership” to define belonging to a community reinforces and perpetuates a mentality that is the very antithesis of community.

But you have to make a distinction between wanting the people as assets to community and wanting people as financial assets.  My congregation does not really know how many people are members, they keep score as dues paying membership units, quite literally.  There has never been a census, there has never been an analysis of community.  I have never attended a Board Meeting in which service to a constituency was ever discussed separately from its financial potential.  That's the way the leadership thinks and the nominating committee perpetuates that thinking by creating a leadership recycling center.

It is precisely this reality that drives contemporary Jews away from the traditional synagogue model. Individuals who want Jewish experiences can consume it in any number of different venues, with much less baggage, and for much cheaper. One can effortlessly find a freelance bar mitzvah tutor or readily rent a rabbi to officiate his or her family’s lifecycle events. One can access all the Jewish information one could ever possibly need, for free, on the Web.

Not only that, but with the most talented rabbinical insights in the world.  But you cannot engage in the major elements of worship without some critical mass, in most cases a minyan.  The challenge is to make the minyan experience valuable.

Thus, even those synagogues that have adopted a voluntary-giving model won’t change the dynamic driving their decline unless they also stop identifying belonging as “membership,” because even free or pay-what-you-want membership is still fundamentally transactional. At the same time, synagogues that are unprepared to adopt a voluntary-giving model can still transform themselves so long as they reframe what it means to be a part of the community.

You pay your half-shekel and you are counted?  Or your half-shekel is counted?

How can synagogues do this? For starters, they can employ a term other than “membership,” something that connotes covenantal responsibility rather than consumer transaction. For example, a pastor friend of mine uses the term “teammates” instead of “members” at his rapidly growing startup church. I like that. “Partner,” “supporter,” or “builder” are also good options.

My humble suggestion? Use the term “friend” instead of “member.” Why? First, because the Hebrew word for member is haver, which also means friend. (Those who may find a change of this magnitude difficult can take comfort in the strong linguistic continuity between the two terms.) Second, because there are few words more evocative of a covenantal relationship than “friend,” a concept virtually synonymous with support, interdependence, and sharing, all essential elements of communal participation.

Comrade?  Didn't really work for the Soviets either.  Probably partner would be better, but since the relationships are really not equal as partnership or friendship often implies, there has to be some means of taming macher swoops or other leverage of greater upon the lesser built into the flattening of hierarchy.  Inability to do this or unwillingness of a dedicated leadership to sacrifice authority, no matter how limited in reality, seems like an obvious Achilles Heel to this type of transformation.

Friendship isn’t free. As a midrash puts it, “One only acquires a friend through great effort” (Sifre Devarim, Piska 305). Thus, it is not inherently antithetical for a synagogue to expect potential friends to give a specific financial amount as a statement of their dedication and as an acknowledgement that covenantal communities require resources to sustain them. However, the term “dues” is as fraught with unhelpful transactional connotations as “membership,” so it should probably also be replaced, perhaps with something like “investment” or “commitment.”

Before the Federation types totally teed me off to the point of departure about twenty years back, their machers would solicit less prosperous people like me with terms like personal commitment or being part of the community.  It did not take long to figure out that there was not a lot of sincerity to the scripted solicitation and once a problem arose, minor stockholders like me really had very little recourse other than becoming part of their calculated attrition, which I and numerous others did.

But synagogues must also make clear to potential friends that belonging to community is not a fee-for-service transaction. True friendship also takes a commitment of one’s time and talent. Becoming a friend of a synagogue community must thus also require active personal involvement – participation in programs and in leadership – in addition to monetary commitment. Only then can friendship fulfill the promise it implies, and only then can synagogues truly flourish.

I've actually not been invited to do anything at my congregation other than implementation of my bimah skills in quite some time.  My guess is that if the Rabbi or President were to take a yellow pad and write who they invited for any meaningful participation other than some perfunctory High Holiday Ark openings with a fundraising intent, the list would not fill a single page.  The officers, most recycled for ten or more years, just see slots to be filled in their agendas and take the path of least resistance in the invitations to the people who did them before.  You have to change the way people think and that's something that meets a lot of resistance, especially when these are the genes of institutional incest that are being expressed.

Synagogues in our era will only flourish if they cease being transactional, service-providing organizations and become true covenantal communities. Changing terminology won’t itself accomplish this task. But then again, recall that when God set about creating the world, God chose to do so through words.