Tackling the New Testament

When I go to the state fair there is usually an exhibit by the anti-abortion lobby or a church that has that as its primary initiative.  I do not engage them in conversation but listen to the spiel politely and on occasion take one of the pocket New Testaments that they give out.  I have a handful around the house.  While under restricted activity, I read much of the Prophets on Sefaria.  My attempt at the Quran got me about as far as the chapter about the cow, which isn't very far into it. 

Time to read the freebie from the state fair, pocket size but very thin paper and small print.  It starts with the Gospel of Matthew which took me about a week to read its 28 chapters.  Well written, easy to read from the Gideons translation.  Largely written in the manner of history or biography, not a lot of theology.  Many of the often cited passages and parables originate there.  It was not really The Jews who had it in for Jesus but their Machers.  We have Macher swoops today.

Next in order is the Gospel of Mark.  My pace would require four days.  So far it reads as more goyish than Matthew, many of the same historical citations repackaged but I've only read about a third of it so far.  The other two Gospels and Acts are fairly lengthy, the rest fairly short epistles or commentary.  Will try to stay on pace.

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.

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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.

Respect

My hospital got its docs a new device called a Dragon Dictation System where I can speak into a microphone and mostly correct text appears.  It is modified for the reality of having learned spoken English in the Bronx.  It has two options for text, one general English and the default of an Endocrinology vocabulary as nearly all its use has been to dictate patient consultations.  I tried dictating a more general article once, ended up typing it myself, but this week took another shot at something I've been meaning to prepare into an article called "The Places I Like to Daven".  It's mostly past tense, but for all my Beth Sodom and Aliyah Sound Bite quips of my contemporary shabbat morning options, there were and to a lesser extent are places that serve as prime destinations on a shabbos morning.  Eventually as a youngster I got to like our shul's Junior Congregation, despised the teen experience, and would inconvenience myself to leave home early to get to that shul now 100+ miles away if possible when passing through the area.  WashU and Penn Hillel could expect my presence most shabbos mornings.  Beth El Quincy, z"l, for my final year of residency.  Beth Tfiloh in Baltimore once a quarter, again at a little personal inconvenience and needing some advance planning.

I tried to tease out common themes.  Like the Rabbi?  For sure at the adult synagogues but the Hillel experiences had no Rabbi.  Friendly congregants?  After multiple visits to Beth Tfiloh the total number of people who have come over to me sitting by myself and chatting with me is ONE, their assistant Rabbi who serves as Torah reader.   Personal participation?  I've been a very active Bimah participant by default at my current shul and the one before it, neither of which makes my must be there list while often serving as the destination of my many verbal harpoons.

After pondering the Why as I dictate the Where, the common thread seems to be the level of respect that I have for the composite experience and the people that I am with.  The JCC of Spring Valley, my Bar Mitzvah congregation, seemed bimodal.  It distilled to how I was treated.  Contemptuously by the teen director who played favorites, inconsistently by the Rabbi who presided over my  Bar Mitzvah, to be followed by a Rabbi of my later high school years who endeared himself, not only to me, but forty years later when high school classmates post photos of their wedding, his picture appears with a note of his kindness and sometimes his professional competence.  Services were done expertly.  Those in attendance were were more my mother's friends than mine, but as a an adult visitor who made time to stop there while in transit from the Delaware Valley to New England these people gained my respect for their ongoing dedication even as their congregation was aging and eventually failing.

Hillel I was more a part of.  People were happy to have me there whether they needed another tuchis for a minyan or not.  There were interactions about exams.  My first Kaddish obligation was fulfilled there.  It was the custom that mourners should not stand alone, a custom exported by me to subsequent places.  Not having a Rabbi, the Hillels brought out the best in what Jewishly committed students could do.  There were no fights over Mechitza, just a recognition that the Orthodox needed one and we would set our own druthers aside to enable their worship.  Somebody had to prepare Torah reading, even if an Organic Chemistry test loomed in the near future.  People rose to the occasions.  I'm very respectful of that to this day.

I only lived in Quincy for one year, my final year of residency.  The town at the time had a kosher butcher which folded a few months after we arrived.  My first experience at Beth El occurred for the Holy Days which might have been my last as the Rabbi rambled and the crowded sanctuary could have used better climate control.  But while I spent the summer at an arduous hospital assignment, my wife attended shul, assuring me that the spectacle of Rosh Hashana did not occur on shabbat.  As my medical assignments got a little more tame, I started going with her.  The experience was the closest I've ever had to a Hillel duplication in a Conservative synagogue.  Personable, knowledgeablle, interactive Rabbi.  Cantor davened and read Torah expertly without the flourishes of a Cantorial institute alumnus, having acquired his skill in Europe.  Not a lot of congregants but enough, ranging from Harvard professors to younger people who had just escaped the Iranian Revolution but still had family left behind.  The role of women was in transition then but both my wife and I got invitations to be among the haftarah readers.  Kiddush was mingling and chat time, something never duplicated for me since.  Then mostly home and rest afterwards.  If they had macher swoops I was unaware of them.  I know they had a benefactor, an owner of a small regional home improvement chain.  I never met him and never sensed I was being manipulated in any way.

So those are the basic models, diverse but with a common theme of being among people who I basically admire.  Sounds like something fairly easy to duplicate or at least aspire to, though strangely elusive.

Variations of Tzniut

Once in a while something special catches my attention, a brief insight into Torah nor more than a few minutes of length which has any number of widespread application and insight.  One of these came a a pre YK Dvar Torah by one of the younger Roshei Yeshivah of Yeshiva University.  The rabbi spoke of elements of modern life that we acquire from the outside mainstream culture, absorb into our usual and customary practice but are really contrary to what we are supposed to be extracting from Torah and its many expositions.

http://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/818624/Rabbi_Jeremy_Wieder/The_Counterculture_of_Judaism

The Rabbi selected three:  Shabbos, Tzniut, and elements of law that run counter to our best assessment of what our concept of Din ought to entail.  The reality is that my pager and cell phone never shut off, as I am the only endocrinologist on staff at my hospital.  I carry them to shul on shabbos, assuring that the concept of shabbos does not disappear.  Electronics shut down except for immediate patient care.  For the last three years I have been treating myself to a leisurely breakfast to mark Saturday morning and for the most part the shopping centers are off limits.  While maybe the car ought to be put away too, it enables me to do things not available to me the rest of the week.

I'll reverse the order slightly.  Election day approaches next week.  I live in a Blue State where I am within the majority, and in small state where I've met nearly all my representatives, chatted with most at one time or another and do not have any particular ethical problems with any of the people I have voted for and few ethical problems with the people I've voted against.  At one time I was a swing voter.  That stopped with the last election.  There can be no moral defense of Legitimate Rape, enslavement of workers by their employers, science denial or accepted maneuvers whose intent is to deny people their access to cast their ballot.  Sorry, very nice Red State people I encountered in Utah, Idaho and Wyoming this summer.  Torah requires a certain commitment to laws that reflect justice and the reality of what HaKodesh Barechu put into place in the world, at least as I interpret it.  In that context, Judaism's values run separate from a significant fraction of the mainstream.  While we tend to vote in the same manner as much of America's underclass, we make our electoral statements the way we do primarily because it represents the right choice, and less because we got the gimmes for ourselves.

Tzniut requires special mention as it has a lot of implications beyond maximizing skin and hair covering among women.  While I'm still a product of the suburban debate nights of the 1950's when representatives of the Orthodox and Conservative shuls would meet on neutral turf to solicit membership from beneficiaries of the post World War II GI too good to pass up home loans, the reality is that Orthodox and Conservative worship were not very different.  Mixed seating and open parking lots were the main differences, with my parents opting for those elements which inevitably imprinted on me.  Fifty years later, the differences have exaggerated considerably, not only in the decline of shabbos and kashrut and even population among the Conservatives, but in the mindset.  Tzniut has eroded as well, not so much in clothing or hair covering or who can worship where, but in how people are classified as important vs convenient.  Macher swoops, small in-bred assemblies of wealthy operators running their organizations with entitlements due large corporate shareholders violates any application of Micah's L'Hatzneat Lechet.  We have tyrannies of small minorities who can leverage what they want by threatening funding or in our case withdrawing from an already tenuous daily minyan.  We have tyrannies of the majority undermining the quality of the Hebrew school curriculum so that kids get processed through to Bar Mitzvah with little of enduring da-at or binah to show for the five years of afternoon and Sunday effort.  We have Federation Machers who want your money but not your ideas for how to best allocate what gets collected.  The Rabbi asserted that theses assaults on tzniut derive from applications of exposure to common practices of our secular world adapted to our Jewish agenda.  I'm not so sure this quest for status or influence that has really devalued status was really imported.  Where I think the Rabbi scored, though, is in his assessment that resistance to this remains a core element of Judaism, one that could be asserted more consistently by more participants than it has been.