Who Can Help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Inviting Paricipants

It was one of Judaism's periodic public fasts, a sunup to sundown food deprivation with some enhancements of our assigned daily prayers.  Torah is read in the morning and late afternoon, with a section of Prophets in the late afternoon as well.  To fulfill this, a Minyan, or ten men, need to be in attendance.  This being a summer Sunday, that was unlikely to assemble.  In the morning it didn't, or so I am told, not being there myself.  The announcement of the service at a well attended special event Saturday, including the desire of a prominent man to recite Kaddish memorializing the anniversary of his father's passing, did not generate sufficient interest.  Around midday, I received a phone call and text message, neither of which I answered immediately.  Could I join the minyan in the evening so that the Torah reading and Kaddish can proceed?  If physically present, I always agree to help out.  Enough invitations delivered personally generated more than enough men to attend.  My synagogue had its scheduled service done in its entirety that evening.  My friend memorialized his father in our traditional way.

Most of our congregational activities come from a few insiders broadcasting what's in the trough they constructed, asking for hungry snouts to sop up what's there.  Some will, but fewer than will respond to a personal invitation, either to sample the contents or even to help build the trough and decide what goes in it.  That doesn't happen at my shul, where comfort zones prevail.  There's an element of paths of least resistance, or from my medical framework, I'd even say laziness.  For a thriving enterprise, the broadcast announcements for participants are fine.  For a declining one like ours, being acknowledged personally as somebody whose participation is valued makes all the difference, as we learned from yesterday's AM/PM gradient in being able to attain the obligatory minyan.  

In another era, a pharmaceutical company needing practical advice in keeping a teetering product viable asked for user opinions, an invitation extended to me personally by the company's office representative.  I provided mine, for which I received $400, which I donated to a small Tzedakah Fund run by somebody I had met.  He sent me a “Thank You” note with something he had recently written, an article on how to enhance the meaning of our upcoming Passover Holiday.  Danny, the agency head, posed his four questions:

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

For a congregation of scientists, that element of curiosity has largely remained dormant.  If our President were to ask each committee chairperson to tell him who they purposely invited onto their committees in the last two years because they had knowledge or insight that would enhance the work of their committee, I think the null hypothesis would prevail.  I was asked onto a nascent health committee to assess covid reopening based on my professional background.  Or as my friend asked, what am I good at? Who can help?  This time Me.  But my sense is that we function by a corrupted version of the Pareto Principle where 20% do 80%, mostly by default.

Ironically, it wasn't always that way.  There was never a lot of accountability, at least not at parity with my professional expectations, but there was more outreach at one time.  We had an initiative with rewards to develop Torah reading capacity.  My suggestion to revive this to the appropriate VP was offered a negatory in one minute.  When your tush gets epoxied to the Comfort Zone seat, it's much easier to take the crew and see if they will do this year what they did last year.  At least those are invitations, but never an outreach to what might challenge even the experienced reader a little more.  Eventually that approach takes you to the senior citizen version of the USY Clique, where we seem to express ourselves a little more starkly each passing year.  You never really determine what your pool of people really likes to do, has talent to contribute, and would be reticent to turn you down.  But our Nominating Committees and Chairmen whose purpose is nominally to engage people, or even function as talent scouts, encloses themselves in their comfort zones.  They make do.  Trying to enhance seems too much trouble.  There is no why not or what might be possible.

Many of us ran small professional practices where we had people who did not pay their bills.  There's a literature on collections that any of us who did this know quite well.  The highest yield to achieve payment is to have somebody call or meet the person in arrears and directly ask for the overdue fee.  When my medical organizations embark on a project, they don't broadcast that they are forming a committee.  They assign a chairman who seeks out the best composition for the project, based on skill and temperament.  That's how you move ahead. That's how you imagine excellence as your destination.  My congregation has not gone that route in a long time with results that reflect complacent officers who broadcast when they would do better inviting.

Danny's Four Questions

"He (Chanina ben Dosa) would also say: One whose deeds exceed his wisdom, his wisdom endures. But one whose wisdom exceeds his deeds, his wisdom does not endure"  Avot 3:10

As I do the semiannual planning it essential to keep in mind that when the six month review occurs, we are the things that we do, not the things that we intended to do.

So far my intentions for the first half of 2011 include decluttering the house, using an iPod to advance my path to sagehood, preparing for my Board Exam, meeting a variety of health end points, completing and implementing my post-retirement financial program, and nurturing a more gracious presence.  That is the wisdom that will not even arrive, let alone endure without some very specific means of doing them.

A passing acquaintance, Danny Siegel, an awesome sage who has devoted his energy to getting Jews to incorporate tzedakah into their usual activities, once sent me a note in response to a donation I had made to his Ziv Tzedakah Fund.  It being the Pesach season, he included a brief article he had written about Danny's Four Questions.  Years later, at each planning session and at each life's branch point, they still guide me.

What do you like to do?
What are you good at?
Who can help?

Why not?