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.