Congregational Board Meeting

It was my intent to appear in name but not photo and not say a word at the recent Board of Governors Meeting, to which all congregants are nominally invited.  And that's exactly what I did.  No agenda on my part but a lot of observations on the Board's agenda, what went well, what did not, the missing parts, and the significance of what was discussed and how it was discussed in relation to trend toward congregational denouement.  There have been no personal invitations from anyone to me for any meaningful participatory role that requires any discernment on my part. Bimah skills are really a form of my possessions, which seems to be what they want.  Yet I might be the congregations most astute observer, so if that's the role it needs to be pursued in a meaningful capacity to the best of my INTJ gift to me from God, perhaps.  

Grand Rounds begins with a patient, followed by a discussion of what the patient has.  Board Meetings begin with a Rabbi statement.  He spoke about the role of diversity of expression and tolerance for it.  Much better discussion topic than presentation topic.  Actually pretty easy to skewer or in the spirit of the presentation challenge in a polite way using Torah sources from the weekly Parsha of Bereshit.  As the congregation rides to its destiny, so did creation.  The congregation has loose ends.  So did Creation.  As twilight moved toward shabbos but not quite arrived, ten final creations came in to being just in the nick of time for the first shabbat.  The first of the divine afterthoughts?  פִּי הָאָרֶץ  Korach's dissent was a necessary part of our history and later heritage.  It was planned for from the time of creation with a means of dispatching unwelcome or hazardous dissents.  וּפִי הָאָתוֹן also appears.  They knew Bilaam would one day arrive and a means of suppression dates back to creation.  Derech Eretz doesn't really arrive until Talmudic times, once the experience and downside of withholding civility becomes more tangible.  I would not expect the Board members to appreciate that.  I would expect the Rabbinical comments to be more profound than they seemed to me.  But it's the failure to challenge what the titled propose, be that the Rabbi or the Officers, which more than anything has harmed our congregation one cumulative whack at a time.  And the Board discussion played out in that pattern from there, one of immense Group Think, with reasonable challenges, nods to the head, but not a whole lot of why or alternatives.  Definitely not one those stimulating discussions I viewed as the norm in my university or professional years or see routinely a few times a week on Zoom as agencies of all types previously inaccessible to my peasant class assemble people who have large funds of knowledge and experience to joust with each other verbally and invite questions from listeners which invariable expand the expert discussion.

Our Congregation has two very big challenges that don't do well with Group Think.  First we are homeless, cashing out for expediency with desperation on the horizon though not yet arrived but now with the reality of having a large amount of cash that will be spent down in a predictable way without a means of replenishing either the funds or the people who generated it over a protracted time.  That situation is largely unique to us, a direct result of decisions that went through our governance one drip at a time for a long time, much like creating that stalactite that you knew would eventually appear but not be appreciated until it does.  

We share the second challenge, coronavirus limitations with everyone else.  This has been a very mixed experience for most individuals.  Some institutions were able to draw on their creativity, others more content to adapt business as usual to the altered circumstances.  I used to attend shabbat services with reasonable regularity.  I understood why better in my college years than my maturity years but had enough of an aspiration for a satisfying Jewish experience to change congregations when Beth Sodom transitioned from a fast quip to more of a situational imprint.  Has covid given me a better experience or a worse experience?  Depends.  I don't miss shabbos services nearly as much as I thought I would, stopped driving until being at home devoid of electronics and mobility became a form of sensory deprivation.  I wasn't an individual participant in the congregation as it became more virtual.  We can argue whether I was blackballed from intent or insensitivity but with Covid it didn't really matter.  

There are places that used their resources or created new resources.  My acquaintance Ron Wolfson had an op-ed in The Forward summarizing how different congregations invested in making their Holy Days ones to remember. https://forward.com/news/national/456279/theres-no-going-back-what-rabbis-learned-from-the-extraordinary-high/  Admittedly, his professional circles are the uber machers who work out of Jewish Cathedrals, with resources to hire professionals and special talent, but all successful projects begin with somebody's imagination.  They also require an element of what have others put on their menu that will enrich our plates, and once imagined, then the internal why not? And while anyone could pop into these worship pageants, most people defaulted to their own congregation for this year's Yomim Nora-im experience.  As I skip services that I don't really miss, not exactly picking Hallel as a central necessity around which my Jewish spirit revolves, I also get an awareness of what was already there that I underutilized, things like yutorah.org or the commentators of outorah.org, and what has come on the scene that would not have existed without the necessity of Zoom.  I have access to great minds in the form of AJC or Moment Magazine seminars.  I must say, one of my most heady experiences has been having my question with my name attached announced and submitted to a worldwide audience to be answered by an expert previously inaccessible to a guy off the street like myself.  Now that I can differentiate expert from title, I read and respond to tweets more, though very selectively.  The Jewish world is global and you need not be a Macher or an inveterate schmoozer to partake of it.  If my own congregation assigns me observer status, I can be an equally good observer immersed in the most vibrant of Jewish institutions as well.  The need for my own congregation seems much better defined post covid, and I find myself a little more intolerant of not being a desirable participant there when my mind is valued at some of the most elegant Jewish institutions in the world who are content with my inquisitiveness and not in quest of my possessions.

The meeting itself had a single agenda item, a new building to upgrade our congregation to an address rather than a postal box. Ironically, as we transitioned from our longstanding building to the CBS Homeless Shelter, the Rabbi opened many a congregational meeting with the concept that the congregation was the people, the building assembled the people.  Not at all the view of this BOG meeting.  In fact there was a secondary item on reaching out to congregants alloted ten minutes at the end, whizzed through with the illusion of self-congratulation by what seems the Jewish Covid-19 version of the USY Clique, though far more important to the congregation's destiny looking forward than whether the building under scrutiny has suitable architectural features and unmolested parking.  Everyone at the virtual BOG meeting had their say, something offered to me as well but declined, though it was more a series of brief monologues than a series of exchanges.  A long way from the Talmudic tradition of Chavrusa or even my usual doctor-patient exchanges in the exam rooms or bedsides.  A vote was taken, accepted by all present.  I suspect it won't matter if Congregational Development in a precarious time is subordinate to anything else on a governance agenda.

So we really didn't have those final ten minutes.  I can say my household got a call from the individual who I would have assigned to himself.  He spoke to my wife, didn't have the saichel or the script to ask if I were home and invite my opinion.  But in AKSE fashion, memberships are counted by checks received and not by the totality of who resides in the household.  BOG can either create the culture or reinforce what is already there.  I would have expected the Rabbi of stable tenure to challenge some of this more than he has.  I do get a birthday call, "how ya doin', nice to talk to you." Never what do you think.  There was a landmark book written about thirty years ago by a linguist Deborah Tannen called You Just Don't Understand.  While the theme of the book was imprinted gender variations in speech, she also identified to broad patterns.  The male pattern was to convey information, the female pattern to use speech to generate connectedness. Since the BOG phone call I was not important enough to receive eluded me, I do not know if the content was one of telling people what the BOG put into their AKSE Trough for congregants to have their fill or whether it had more of a conversational, exchange agenda that creates connectedness as Prof. Tannen described it.  There is data, a quest that only comes naturally to a few of us.  Zoom gives clues.  I know how many people sign in to yizkor or attend a Rabbi class, as Zoom takes attendance.  It's not many, never as many as who populated that BOG session that I observed.  Harder to say if its a few people latching onto all offerings or different people having expressing different preferences.  Exploiting this information offers a lot more benefit to the congregation than  making projections of when the proceeds of the building sale fully deplete.  Might we need a Cruise Director to toss everyone into the pool and make sure they are all having a good time dancing to rhythm?  It is necessary to evaluate major initiatives with big financial implications.  But as many Rabbinical and a few Presidential messages made very clear, our future depends on the identification of people with the congregation, a bond that invited participants retain but observers or correspondents, no matter how skilled or experienced usually don't. No Board Meeting, and few committee meeting, should have anything other than enhancing connectedness as its central agenda item.

Talk about the building.  But conversation to create connectedness has long been neglected, more so as our Nominating Committees make the governance more inbred.  I saw quite a lot of recessive genes expressed amid the Board's proceedings.

Seeking Feedback

 

It had been a while since I attended Kabbalat Shabbat at our Reform synagogue, once a Friday night destination during my year of kaddish when I needed a quorum of ten Jewish men at a time when my work obligations would permit my attendance.  Having had a fond experience, I continued to attend periodically in the years thereafter but a congregational decision to move the service an hour and a half earlier, similar to the other two congregations, made attendance unrealistic for me.  Then recently I got home early, the candles were lit early in winter, dinner served, and still time to get there.

Shabbos most anywhere comes with a handout on arrival:  who will be davening, which Rabbi or guest will give the sermon, events in the coming week that cannot be missed and might even be worth the price of admission.  This time at this congregation, a summary of a congregational survey and related focus group opinions accompanied the usual Shabbos bulletin.  Ordinarily I would expect some confidentiality to this but I was probably the only non-member other than the organist present.    It made for brief but thought-provoking reading.  Their members had been questioned on how they became affiliated, what keeps them engaged, what they might like the congregation to be like five years hence.  Very little of the reported results constituted a surprise.  People liked the clergy, past and current, friends who were members often brought them along as the initial contact with the synagogue, some were consumers of things synagogues offer from Hebrew school to Sisterhood.  Interestingly, though not surprisingly, the strongest attachments came from personal initiations to participate.  People joined committees because an individual asked them to.  A sign-up sheet to volunteer to daven shacharit is probably less likely to get the schedule filled than a personal call from the gabbai inviting you to do shacharit next Shabbos.  Not all congregations grasp that, and those that do not grasp it adequately can create some rather inflexible USY cliques that carry on to reassembly at Hillel in college, but these folks seem to know better.  And they like having kids present in the building.  It makes everyone feel like they have a future.  So yes, the survey and its results were proprietary but with conclusions that probably could have been projected without having actually done the project.

While the conclusions had a measure of pre-survey predictability, there is no surrogate for being asked what you think.  Sometimes the feedback is very simple.  You call a service rep at the help line and an email comes the next day asking you to rank several attributes of yesterday’s phone bank contact.  However, after half a century of being a consistent participant of a Jewish community, whether Hebrew school, teen group, Hillel of two major universities and a few congregations, nobody has ever asked me what I think about my participation and how it might be upgraded.  I’m more of a consumer perhaps.  The leaders build a trough and count how many snouts partake of what’s in it with no regard for whether the contents might be refined from what is offered.  Certainly people making small talk will ask what I thought of the Rabbi’s Yom Kippur sermon or the fundraiser gala, but they seem to be counting dollars or attendance as the metric of what people think.  I’ve never been asked about a composite experience and don’t often volunteer the thoughts though I imagine the Federation annual solicitor can figure out that requests to be put on the Do Not Call List reflect organizational interaction to some extent.

The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism recently announced that they have engaged a professional firm to tease out what their members think about their experience to date, what they might aspire to moving forward, and maybe even acquire a better sense of how to put a cap on some fairly consistent attrition.  You not only have to solicit opinion but be sensitive to the opinion, something which the Reform congregation seems to have done very well. 

A few year ago a book called Relational Judaism by Ron Wolfson became a focus of moving congregations from a top down model to more of a people matter model.  It’s still a work in progress.

Counting Members

So how many members does AKSE really have?   I asked that of the membership VP within the last year and as expected was given the count of dues paying families.  But then I followed up the question with how many people, what is the census?  She hadn't a clue.  But isn't that what you really want to know to service people?  "Them, their wives, their sons, their daughters and all there dear ones" we recite silently as we prepare to return the Torah to its Ark.  In that mode of thinking there is Them and everyone else might as well be an appendage of Them.  One person writes the dues check or submits the credit card information to the synagogue office and a family count then goes into the computer.  Or we can give a half-shekel which might not correlate with the family count as some families have more than one person eligible for military service while some households might have none.  Counting people usually has some type of ulterior motive that drives how the census is taken.  For AKSE it is to keep financially solvent, for the United States it is to apportion Congressional representatives among the states.  If there is a benefit to the people being counted, it is usually a byproduct of the count more than its purpose.  Ten decent people would have save Sodom, if that count could have been inflated slightly, but the evil people are saved as a parenthetical consequence of saving the good people.

So should AKSE think of my family as one source of money or should they think of my family as two individuals that derive different benefits from affiliation?  Or the reverse, perhaps, having just passed Federation's Super Sunday fundraising effort.  While I have been on the Do Not Call List for some time, when I was on the list, it was customary to shake down my wife and me with separate calls, not to serve the community better but to squeeze a little more money by one individual not knowing what the other individual might have pledged.  For money, family assets are generally pooled.  For nurturing interests and talents, individuality prevails.  Both synagogues and Federations need to think of its participants as resources for keeping the treasury sufficient to sustain organizational mission, but if they then ignore the talents and passions of the people who earned that money, their mission will always be less than it could have been.

One returning project for me, perhaps, would be to take the membership list and do census properly, creating the congregation's real cast of hundred, cataloging what they do or what their interest are, enabling the membership VP or committee to then invite people to engage in the various committees or activities in a more rational way than they do now, which is somewhat akin to setting up a giant trough for people to immerse their faces when they feel like it.  Not exactly Ron Wolfson's concept of Relational Judaism.  If my Facebook or Google page can select out advertising that I might like specific to me, the congregation should be able to go down that path as well, though in a less sophisticated way.  But you have to change the way people think in order to do this effectively.

Unworthy

Why have the mainstream Jewish organizations spiraled downward during my adult lifetime?  That's been my exploration while I put my own principal organizational attachment, the synagogue to which I pay an exorbitant fee to belong, on the back burner for the second half of this calendar year.  I've now read pretty much what I plan to read on this and take Ron Wolfson's advice to tell my story.  We each have our story.  For every patient encounter I start by soliciting theirs, either verbally of by review of records or more typically a combination.  If I am successful as a physician, the ability and the obligation to connect with those multitudes of tales has enabled that.

So I'll start with two vignettes, same theme but fifty years apart.  The first took place as a camper at Ramah in Wingdale,NY the first year it was opened.  The grand poobah's of Conservative Judaism put a lot of effort into this, creating a living Jewish environment, deluding themselves into thinking our evolving language capacity will enable reasonable facility with conversational Hebrew, all to attract their most promising students, the people that their crystal balls told them would propel Conservative Judaism into the next generation as a vibrant and enduring branch of American Jewish ideology.  At the conclusion of the summer, the head counselor assembled all the campers to offer his final charge to the departing crew.  Few remarks remain with me for half a century but he indicated that the dozen or so kids who got homesick or did not have a good enough time to tough it out and left early were not real Ramah caliber campers.  They were inferior in some way, not the leaders that the camp sought to develop.  Well, it turns out that I did not have an Ace time there either but toughed it out partly for lack  of a better alternative and not wanting my parents to experience financial loss.  But I made it clear to them and to my Rabbi who was very much attached to the Ramah program, that I would not be going back.  Most of our congregational children had a similar experience and similar response.  While they tried to negotiate with me the option of waiving the camp's rules and allowing my attendance at a site other than the one determined by my home town, I would want no part of chancing that type of summer again.  And of course the assumption was that there is something wrong with me for not appreciating what was offered to me, irrespective of my assessment of the actual experience.

We fast forward to the most recent High Holiday where I encountered the same thought process transposed to a different situation.  Again, amid attrition threatening existence, the treasurer appealed to the congregation for voluntary supplement to dues, including in his remarks that the people who remained were the worthy members.  Anyone who preferred something else or even nothing had to be less worthy in some way.  Not, let's become more adaptive but let's get more money so we can do more of the same for the people who really deserve it.

In between, there have been no shortage of similar messages.  How can you snub a communal leader?   I found the experience with him or her vile, that's how.  How can you not give to Federation's SuperSunday campaign?  Like the other 18% who decline, I had an adverse experience with the leadership or the funded agencies.  There must be something inferior about me if I walk away from irritating Aliyah Sound Bites and find the congregational leadership too inbred.  It takes a while but eventually this Leadership Development Cloning Experiment yields its results.  They are left with worthy loyalists who tell each other how wonderful they all are while the human chaff floats around someplace else in the Jewish environment, adding to its entropy.

Opting Out

My third and final ACP renewal notice came in the mail yesterday, still unopened.  While the ACP remains the medical organization for which I hold the greatest fondness, I decided last spring to let the clock run out on the membership without renewal.  The reasons are multiple, reflecting on a mixture of the organization and of me.  I'm in the middle of reading a well considered book called Relational Judaism by Prof. Ron Wolfson who I've met a few times.  He describes the atrophy of once strong Jewish organizations which now struggle, partly through no fault of their own but partly through decisions of how the leadership and policy makers related to constituents.  It is very easy to look at synagogue membership or ACP membership as a consumer purchase.  In one sense, the rather high fee is of secondary importance since my hospital pays for one membership a year.  I could ask them to pay $600 to the ACP instead of half that to the Endocrine Society but my professional attachment has clearly evolved with the specialty.  But as a consumer purchase you have to assess what is received and set a value on it.  It's probably better for medical organizations or Jewish organizations to promote relationships, as Ron suggests in his book, than to sell a product that is often difficult to define.  I've not read an Annals article in a few years, attended a local or national meeting in a few years, bought insurance or studied from the MKSAP in some time, while the products have always been top notch and the people very gracious when I have attended.

No, it is not a purchase but an assessment of personal and organizational values that are always in evolution, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.  I think I became a continuous member circa 1982.  That leaves about 30 years of experience and transition.  There was a time when Masters got their designation by becoming the people who advanced medicine.  Some undoubtedly still do, though increasingly the designation reflects loyalty to the organization more than the gurus of clinical studies who transform out ability to function professionally.  That can only be a reflection of how the leadership of the organization assesses its purpose.

In 2011, I took what I hope will be my final recertification exam, especially if they decide to do drug screening on illicit Namenda which I will probably need to protect memory at age 70 ten years from now.  To be fair to the ABIM, the experience this time around seemed pretty decent, though cumbersome, unlike 1991 and 2001 when it was more of a fraternity hazing.  I think some of that credit goes to ACP alum, Dr. Cassells.  But the reality is that while my scores are comfortably above threshold, there is an endocrine failure rate of about 12% whose professional lives are disrupted while they remain worthy and competent colleagues.  More recently, the ABIM has made the MOC process more burdensome with little benefit to the public.  This seems like an obvious place where the ACP dropped the ball as the advocate of its members and no particular incentive to cap this type of regulatory excess.

Over that same 30 years the role of the internal medicine specialist has become more amorphous under the ACP's organizational watch.  There are places in our State of Delaware where a Board Certified, fully trained ACP Fellow can request expert consultation and have their patient assessed primarily by a nurse practitioner in lieu of the expert they were hoping to capture.  Not only has the ACP never challenged this but now they have taken a position of boosting membership by absorbing professionals of lesser training into the organization.  This, of course, never came up three decades back but sometimes the physician advocacy organization has a lot more credibility if they put expediency on the back burner and take a stand for consistency with the values that I think most physicians have.

And as Ron writes, it's about relationships.  Would I approach a large check as a contribution for noble cause rather than a purchase if the cause was really noble and if I had a fair amount of skin in the game?  Jewish organization and to a lesser extent medical ones design programs hoping that people will come.  I've designed my share for Adas Kodesch in recent years, some highly well attended.  But are they successful?  If attendance is the goal, then sure they are.  If developing an enduring attachment that withstands strained times and invites a measure of forgiveness for policies that do no go your way, then no, programming does not cement relationships.  In my decades as an ACP member and later a fellow, I was only invited to two meaningful projects the entire time.  Both involved my skill, by the way.  One was to create a wallet card with essential patient information that they could bring to office visits, the other was to attend a national meeting in Philadelphia to critique how the organization could be more responsive to its dwindling subspecialist members.   Total time spend on meaningful projects about eight days.  Never been invited to a standing committee all that time.  Never invited to share my expertise or experience at a meeting, never been invited to suggest an expert to share their special ability with the group.  These are the things that generate loyalty which transcends personal experience that will inevitably have its favorable and unfavorable times.  I do not know if ACP has as part of its mission to bring people on the sidelines into the group, hear their stories, fill in some of the voids that are inevitably part of professional life.  There have been a lot of Governors and a lot of projects in thirty years.  My guess is that the Pareto Principle where 80% of the activity is generated by 20% of the people prevails in the ACP as in anyplace else.  The question is whether the leadership ever thought seriously about how to change the proportion to 70/30 or whether they have the same complacency with A-lists that my synagogue does.

I eventually opened the final invoice letter. sending back the invoice unpaid with a note wishing the organization continued success.  The ACP has always had dedicated well meaning people at its helm.  But they may need to pause to reassess what their own constituents desire from affiliation and a fair amount of financial commitment, then provide it.