JCC Membership

For the second January in a row, I attended the Open House at my local Jewish Community Center.  For decades, I paid annual dues, enjoyed the many programs, used the facilities, enrolled my children in the programs, attended classes and events.  Some negative experiences arose, but I don't recall if I dropped my membership in response to them or just let the affiliation lapse as rather hefty dues became less cost-effective relative to use.  I've not paid membership fees for a very long time.

Now as a frequent responder on Reddit's r/judaism platform, people separated from their Judaism, or seeking entry, frequently ask how to enhance their personal involvement.  The majority of responses suggest reading a book or watching a video.  No objection to those, but Judaism depends on kehillah, or community.  Synagogues form the anchor, but they can intimidate the unfamiliar.  As an alternative, I will often suggest they consider their local Jewish Community Center.  They put no religious demands of shabbos or kashrut, have people around of minimal background, indeed many not Jewish but who like working out in the gym.  Some like the iconic 92nd St Y in Manhattan have abundant Jewish programming with resources to invite prominent guests.  Mine used to have a loftier selection of intellectual content, but has adapted to the clientele of Seniors and youngsters, with a relative paucity of adults in their prime years.

At the Open Houses, aimed primarily at revenue enhancement from new memberships, I spun the freebie wheel.  Each landed on Day Pass so I now have two.  They also have two lesser obligation options, a Summer Membership entitling people to indoor and campsite activities for about $400 and a try it out one month trial for $125 or so.

As a Senior, would I use the entitlements of membership?  I have done very well on my home treadmill, though it has limitations.  However, I need not get dressed or drive anywhere, park the car, get changed in the locker room when I exercise at home.  That's a big incentive to staying on schedule.  Their gym has weights, which I do not.  Their treadmill's incline functions, which mine does not.  And they have a steam room which I like, a hot tub, a sauna, and a pool, which all require additional time in the locker room.  Redeeming the day passes will immerse me in these for two days at no cost.  Used for sure.  Payment of one month would guide utilization more accurately.  I suspect that I do so well on my home treadmill over a prolonged time because it requires no preparation but will falter once exercising requires travel, even if more effective exercise.

Might I make friends?  I could use more friends.  The global pandemic largely tanked personal interaction.  Board and committee meetings are electronic.  Seniors at OLLI no longer congregate in the lounge or gather in the cafeteria.  My synagogue remains live of shabbos, though not all do.  When I am at the JCC, usually for a synagogue-sponsored class or mincha service, but even for the two Open Houses I attended, there did not seem to be very many people around.  However, the parking lot had ample cars, so people must be physically present somewhere in the complex, just not readily interactive with me.

And classes, guest speakers, and related mental boosts have followed the least common denominator pathway of so much of my other Jewish engagement.  I have OLLI as my upper-tier mental challenge, and that's without even taking them up on their offer to let me attend one mainstream class each semester at the University's main campus for a very nominal surcharge.

It's about money, perhaps.  More than perhaps; likely it's about money.  For $400 a year, I'm probably in.  For $1000 a year as an empty nester, probably not.  JCC Membership, and other Jewish affiliations including synagogue are often price elastic.  Neither a $400 or $1000 payment would change my financial situation very much, but I'm scripted to seek value.  A monthly trial might be, but it won't expand to a large annual commitment.  Use of the facilities for a summer might be worth $400 to me one time, then reconsidered.  My goals for membership would entail enhanced fitness, but at a personal imposition that I am not likely to sustain.  And personal engagement for which I have better options.  My membership lapsed some time back for legitimate cause.  No compelling reason has emerged to justify a Second Act, at least for me.

Have I misled guidance seekers who visit r/judaism when I advise them to seek out their JCC?  Probably not.  The organization can create connection, especially for young folks who do not require sophisticated Jewish immersion, which remains available to them elsewhere.  Like all organizations, the JCC has its niche.  A decent value to some.  For me, it remains price elastic.

ReportingThem

For all the rise in Anti-Semitism that has emerged over a few years gradually and over a few months more rapidly, I had not personally encountered any other than more honorable people retweeting a comment made somewhere on their Twitter screens for the purpose of criticizing what they had seen.  I got my first two yesterday.  They occurred on Reddit's r/Judaism, each just a phrase or a sentence.  Neither had any comments.  I selected the Report option, clicked the Hate icon, then submit.  My email contained two messages from u/reddit that the umpire, which I assume is what u/ designates, agreed that company posting policy had been violated.

Neither of these posts had received any comments from the users who engage in r/judaism.  And since the platform provides neutral names to its users to minimize any personal identification, I could not know anything about the poster.  Could be Islamic, could be American Nazi, could just be a conflict entrepreneur.

In the early days of AOL chat, there were Jewish virtual conversations that I would enter.  We would type about our synagogue, what we are making for Seder, where we are from.  Invariably Abdul would sign in, deface our screens with some anti-Israel or even anti-Jewish slogan, likely for the purpose of disruption.  AOL provided an Ignore option which any of us could click to exclude Abdul, but we would all have to exercise that choice.  If anyone wanted to retort Abdul, where invariably some of the people connected to that chat room at the time would, he would stay and post more slogans or individual demeaning comments.  We had no mechanism for AOL to deny him access.

Reddit, and some of the other platforms, can deny access.  But to do that requires another consumer of the service taking the initiative to make a report, then a process from which an employee of the platform makes a decision on whether company standards have been violated.  Not a lot different than our highways where people can drive in all sorts of hazardous ways, limited only by getting caught, something that happens a relatively small fraction of the time.  Our police have tried to randomize this with sobriety check roadblocks, radar traps, red light photo cameras.  The IRS monitors tax cheats with random audits.  But our electronic platforms really don't seem to have a better mechanism than depending on annoyed legitimate users turning in troublesome posters as individuals.  It's not a good way to clean up the enjoyment these platforms are intended to generate.  Or maybe they do have automated screening devices.  Or maybe they pay people to log onto places that have hateful posters for their version of the random audit.  Whatever the mechanism, it does not seem to be as sophisticated as it should be.

Notifications

My typical morning, excluding shabbos, begins with a screen once the preliminaries of dental care, newspaper retrieval, and a k-cup brew have been completed.  Restrict Social Media appears on my Daily Task List essentially automatically.  And I really do limit my access, though from time to time I will concentrate on either FB or r/Judaism as a personal focus.  But once coffee has been placed within reach of my laptop in My Space, I seek my notifications.  There are five:  emails, FB, Reddit, Twitter now Rated X, and my stats on Medium Daily Digest.  There's a habit to this, though an ambivalent one.  As Loneliness becomes rampant, with our devices as prime villains, there is a certain irony to the first connection to other people each morning should come from how people responded to us on our screens. Designers of these platforms, including psychology majors, have as their business models the attention time to their offerings preferentially to competitors' options.  And they helped create Loneliness so they know which crumbs to toss to offer a very transient reprieve.

All five forums for me are a little different.  Email is by far the most important, though very few messages come from people I know or from organizations I asked to contact me.  Still, there is frequently something from my wife or financial advisor that needs action.  Some of the passive notifications I solicited indirectly, whether notifications from the synagogue, receipts for payments that I made electronically, subscriptions of various types.  And then there are the unwelcome, transferred to spam, deleted without opening, unsubscribed after opening, or more often than not, just not opened.  And on occasion I will also find a notification that somebody else on another forum responded to a comment I had made on that other platform.

Next most important, though probably expendable, is Facebook.  It has taken an ugly transformation in the fourteen years since I subscribed.  FB's initial attraction was to reconnect with old friends and relatives.  Being some forty years past HS graduation, there was a not entirely healthy curiosity about where the decades had taken the people I once interacted with daily in the classroom, school bus, or gym class.  Most volunteered what they were up to.  I became closer to some that first year on FB than I was in HS, even got to see a few.  After establishing about a hundred FB style quasi-Friends, the number of contacts atrophied one or two at a time.  The nominal connections are still there if I ask for my Friends List, but the number of people who post in a way that reaches my daily passive screen has dwindled to just a few.  It has been replaced by algorithms, computer matches which my own keyboard use helps generate, or a perhaps degenerate, which then post things people want to sell me, donations I might like to consider for either causes or candidates, or updates on my preferred teams.  The real people no longer offer short posts about their lives or what they do, other than photos of destinations they are visiting as they visit them.  Still, every morning I can count on an icon that appears designed after the Liberty Bell with a red number next to it.  Open the bell, and I will get a summary of who liked something I had posted or commented upon. In a world of mostly Zero Responses, these are rarely zero.  And the Likes or related emotions nearly all originate with somebody I know personally.  Moreover, somebody on occasion exchanges an idea.

My Reddit feed differs a bit.  Anonymity is built into the platform and it is moderated for propriety, usually successfully.  Like FB, it has a Liberty Bell with a number attached to it.  However, it is a more multifunctional bell than FB's.  It does not ding for each like, but instead milestones of likes:  5, 10. 25. 50. That's as high as I've gotten, though I'm confident others have gone viral with the bell reflecting that.  It notifies me in duplicate when anyone has verbally responded to a comment that I have made.  One number appears next to the bell with a link to take me to the faux conversation, another notification is directed to my email Inbox.  And then there are unsolicited rings of the bell, comments that their algorithm personalizes to me, thinking I might want to read them, though I am not a participant in that Subreddit.  The bell gives me two options, other than going to that conversation.  I can delete the comment, my most typical response.  Or I can ask for no more notifications from that entire Subreddit, which I also do less frequently.  And while my preferred destination is r/Judaism, when I log on I get a Home feed with a lot of other topics other than my personal subscriptions.  Depending on interest, I will respond to some, an invitation to more notifications from that group, even though I am not enrolled in it.

While I do not know anyone on Reddit by platform design, I am quite helpful to a lot of other posters seeking knowledge and experience.  People come testing the waters of Judaism.  They are attending synagogue for the first time, maybe have let their connection to Judaism become dormant and would like to revive it.  We have guests from the Christian and Islamic world who wish to pose a polite question.  Being helpful to somebody else is one of the best defenses to established Loneliness, something Reddit enables far more than any other forum to which I subscribe.  And in some ways the comments, which are not length restricted, can be developed into forms of conversation.

The most problematic forum is Twitter, that public cesspool of ideas which unfortunately also had people of real public influence present in some way.  There are not many ways to give feedback to a journalist, elected official, top executive, or major scholar.  All generate hundreds of responses.  I know almost nobody personally, though many by reputation and by their public presence.  Likes are few, maybe one every few days, and rarely from the person of public prominence.  What I find, though, is that somebody of obscurity will read my comment and opt to follow me further.  These people, when their profiles are accessed, will typically be following 4000 people but have under 100 who follow them.  By contrast, I follow 37 and have 34 who have chosen to follow me. I cannot think of a more overt identification of Loneliness than seeking anyone who comes along randomly while attractiven nobody else in return.  I almost never initiate a political post, mostly share something I've written on my feed.  I've also deleted many a public figure, including some who have the most to say.  The reason, they post something every ten minutes through their waking hours.  And it arrives in my feed as clutter, since they say pretty much the same predictable things for every one of those q ten minute posts.  As a result, my time of that forum is severely rationed.  My most common Follow is The Atlantic, to which I have a subscription, and most common comment is a response to an article I have read there.  Responses in return have been minimal.  

Finally, I self-publish fifteen or so articles each year on Medium, which comes across as a daily digest.  While a freeloader, I have a handful of people who subscribe to my feed, and a small handful of people who read what I have written, or at least open the article.  While never a lot, there is always a measure of gratification to contributing to somebody else's mind.  I do not know these people and get close to zero comments in return.  But it takes only moments each morning to check.

So knowing how I relate, or really how my mind relates to people known and unknown, has an allure that seems difficult to set aside, though I do set it aside for Shabbos every Saturday.  I'm part of cyberspace.  The magnates who control cyberspace want me as part of it, which is more than I can say for people I know in person or through organizations who have done their best to exclude me.  It does not take a lot to feel included.  Mostly a bell shape on a screen with a single digit in red next to it.

Reddit as a Unique Jewish Resource

 

Dialog has been among Judaism’s most sustainable features.  Our Torah’s greatest heroes ask for advice, whether Avraham delegating the task of finding the ideal wife for his son or Moshe needing a resolution from God himself to assure fairness to the Daughtersof Tzelaphchod.  Our Talmud centers around the giants of our history posing dilemmas or queries to each other. Some as Hillel and Shammai were contemporaries who could present responses to each other.  More often, though, the sages lived centuries and miles apart, yet our Oral Tradition, eventually recorded for posterity, modifies these disparate ideas so that readers for all time will create a mental image of the most learned of men sitting across a table from each other, not only sharing their knowledge and perspective with each other, but with us as we study their legacy.  Sometimes we must study alone, but our most vibrant exchanges occur with a teacher or with a partner.  Minds intersecting, teachers of greater ability creating new peers has been among Judaism’s most enduring gifts to humanity.

Yet, accessibility has always challenged us.  At our Passover Seder we recognize one who does not know how to ask, and take the initiative to teach what we can.  But we also sidestep the reality of many who do know how to ask, ones who could be wise, but lack access to the conversation.  Even in Talmudic times, barriers existed in the form of fees or location or the immediacy of earning a living to support a family.  Later, access became competitive based on merit or wealth, far from universal, much like we have in our secular world where universities can only realistically accept a fraction of applicants.  And even when entry succeeds, we encounter masters who play favorites, nurturing some, excluding others, whether in the form of pay to play, clashing personalities, or yichus that generates entitlement by familiarity.  Jews take pride in literacy being nearly universal in all our scattered communities.  Bringing everyone into the dialog has lagged behind.

Our modern electronic connections, rapidly expanded in part by the urgency of pandemic isolation, has added an important element that our finest academies could not hurdle, one of maximum access, perhaps approaching open access.  Within months of mass closures, our venerable Jewish agencies began creating seminars for anyone with Zoom capability to join in.  Public leaders could be interviewed in real time by experienced questioners, with time left to answer selected inquiries by the international expert.  Where you lived, whether you could purchase an admission ticket or give a substantial donation, or which other affiliations you had no longer mattered.  Even a nobody like me could have his name introduced to the world by the moderator when my own question got selected.  Seminars were also conducted on a less grand scale on endless topics by local or regional experts, yet they remained primarily talking heads, still a long way from our traditional panels or chevruta formats that allow experts to speak to each other over distant locations and separated eras with a bidirectional exchange of minds between those teaching and those being advanced.

Our electronics also created Chat Rooms in real time and social media by minimally restricted posting, encountering disruptors of various types or posts of offensive content that no reputable editor would accept for a print edition.  Indeed, The Forward, America’s flagship newspaper of Jewish content, along with many others, had to discontinue its option of allowing readers to comment on its own articles online for lack of ability to maintain verbal derech eretz worthy of a dignified Jewish exchange. One very promising solution, however, has emerged.

Reddit’s r/Judaism originally came to my awareness by a feature article in The Forward.  https://forward.com/culture/478625/reddit-jewish-judaism-forum-r-judaism/ Once read, I signed up for access, enrolled in two subreddits, r/Judaism cited by The Forward and r/my home state, none others. Reddit assigned me a posting name, a short phrase so random, and used only for Reddit, that my anonymity almost certainly could not be breached.  While the site boasted tens of thousands of subscribers for r/Judaism on the entry display, then and now the postings never seemed overwhelming in volume or the number or subjects introduced for discussion, maybe about twenty in a typical day.

It’s easy to say what the virtual conversations are not, more difficult to delineate what they are.  They are not Talmud shiurim, though there is a daily link to the Daf.  They also are not Jews promoting their agendas, though there are some seeking some empathy or guidance as they lick their wounds, including some inflicted by Jewish sources.  There are really no people engaged in vendettas, whether political, ethnic, or other attempts at retaliation against thems who done me wrong.  Instead, we have mostly inquiry or invitations for conversation, that core element of dialog that our contemporary institutions have struggled to capture.  In some ways Reddit functions as a virtual Multiplex or a professional convention where several presentations appear simultaneously.  But unlike the cinema where a choice must be made on which movie to watch, which mandates which not to watch, the Reddit presentations can be accessed in sequence without disappearing.

What emerges seems to be the spectrum of interests that float around waiting to be displayed to people of similar interests, whether links to articles published in a variety of periodicals, notable art, queries about history, or how fragments of our literature play out in our daily lives.  But I don’t think we need an open forum to satisfy this.  Judaism in all its diversity really has three common end points that Reddit may have captured better than any other.  The compelling posts are more focused on what we have experienced, how we were treated, or uncertainties of upcoming new experiences for the poster that are not new at all to those able to respond.  What did I find bothersome, how can I best cope with what awaits me?

Common inquiries come from non-Jews.  People get invited to a synagogue or a shabbat dinner, completely new territory.  Proper attire, proper decorum, gifts, avoiding the innocent faux pas.  Many have no concept that congregations have non-Jewish guests frequently as members invite friends and professional colleagues to share their celebrations.  Many do not realize that our default is one of graciousness and tolerance.  Inquiries from converts or people in the process of converting or even contemplating conversion abound.  Amid their forum, they can expect to encounter people who have already successfully converted and others Jewish by birth who can reassure them that we regard our newcomers as All-In.  The curious include a fair number of Muslims, impeccably polite in their curiosity, seeking to clarify parts of our culture or belief that they had encountered in their own milieu but not in ours.  It is our chance to be the kind of friends that they haven’t made yet, and with rare exceptions those who respond rise to the occasion.

And within our own diversity, we have special challenges.  People often want to become more observant than they currently are, and often in difficult circumstances.  A fellow opened a discussion of trying to remain observant while living in a small American town, perhaps a university center or branch outpost of the corporation that employs him.  Within a few hours, dozens of responses came through from people not only sympathizing with the efforts he needs to gather, but from others similarly isolated geographically juggling parallel scarcities of Jewish living.  Sometimes we need a reminder that while Walmart brought Jews to Bentonville and NASA brought us to Huntsville, some Jews live as the Town Jew.  While many famous people, Soupy Sales and Edna Ferber among them, were raised as the only Jews in town, we think that as something of an historical relic.  As people in that circumstance relate their current reality, we realize that not everyone has a synagogue in proximity.  Moreover, not all Jews live in America or Israel, as we are scripted to believe.  Those in South America and Europe express different challenges to their aspirations as Jews.  And the Americans eagerly help out.

Antisemitism in America has become more overt, well publicized in both Jewish and secular media.  Yet for many of us, that’s where we see it.  Personally, we go to our workplaces each day, corporations or other agencies that take pride in their multiculturalism that make expression of ethnic animosity an enforceable taboo.  Then we shop for our needs at big box places, travel to other metro or resort areas where Jews are one more part of the mix, worship on Shabbos where we greet the guard who wasn’t there five years ago and is there now “just in case.”  Anti-Semitism is conceptually there, but mostly external to our lives and if present at all, a deviance from the accepted communal norm.  Some of the most poignant inquiries come from people living in areas where publicly expressed condescension of Jews, whether slurs, exclusions, taunts, or other unpleasant experiences are still within the limits of acceptance.  School children get mercilessly taunted by other students with school officials not wanting to set limits for fear of backlash from parents, or worse, accepting that community standard as a desirable offshoot of their commitment to their own local religious loyalties or traditions.  These victims do not have recourse, at least not accountability of those with rightful authority.  They either do not know about our Jewish advocates such as ADL or JCRCs, or be too isolated to access them.  Yet the stories that these people convey are also our surrogate stories, and perhaps never accessed by the agencies that can offer the most guidance.

Through these and many other requests for interaction, we passively receive the thoughts, or sometimes apprehensions, of people that rarely intersect with Judaism’s organizational infrastructure. For better or worse, upside and downside, our Jewish world has invested heavily in Leadership Development, assigning the movers and shakers special prominence, allowing choice of proteges for the future, creating programs, some such as Leadership Training Fellowship of my youth petering out, others more successful though presiding over an American attrition within our Jewish institutions slowly disconnecting us over decades.  But the anonymous, unrecognized people turn to Reddit.  Nobody on this electronic forum has power.  Nobody can manipulate either poster or responder.  Nobody has a title that requires submissiveness.  Nobody has to sit in the Eighth Row as Moshe did when metaphorically time-transported to Rabbi Akivah’s virtual class.  And my presence has value to somebody else who knows nothing about me but can still discern the breadth of my experience, familiarity with written sources, history, and organizational resources that they would find useful.  No agendas, no rejections.  Just people who have come to recognize the site’s presenting invitation, always appearing in the first dialog box:  No Such Thing as a Silly Question.  Or as the people who trained me professionally would say, continued when my proficiency enabled me to train the next generation, “the only dumb question is the one you wanted to ask but didn’t.”  And on Reddit, and arguably no place else in vast Jewish universe of ideas, do the inexperienced actually ask with no reason to fear a demeaning response. 

Yasher koach to the creators and to the moderators who understand fully what constitutes Derech Eretz.