My Rabbinical Druthers

 Shtai Rabanim lashevet b-ambatiyah.  v Rav rishon omer l Rav Sheni, yo chaver, la-havir et ha-sabon.  VRav Sheni omer lo sabon, radio.

My Ranking for Me:

1. No Rabbi
2. Rabbi from Toronto
3. Rabbi from Long Island
4. Rabbi from Staten Island

Ranking as an agent of AKSE to enhance its future, were I a consultant for AKSE instead of for Me:

1. Rabbi From Long Island
2. No Rabbi 
3. Rabbi from Toronto
4. Rabbi from Staten Island

Some intro to the analysis.  It comes as a broadcast invitation to members, not as a targeted interest in my mind in any way.  And my comments, as thoughtful and detailed as I can make them, come at a disadvantage.  Having spent an estimated forty years interviewing about fifteen patients a day, conversing with colleagues, serving on committees, reading feedback of all types, I am well aware of the disadvantage of delegating to others not of my own choosing the abiltiy to question people, shift directions of conversations based on responses, and functioning as an end consumer in lieu of being a direct participant.  Still, sometimes medical encounters can be brief but revealing.  And those forty years of experience came with exploration of documentary evidence, which overflows for patients and exists in a more limited form for rabbinical applicants and my own congregation.  So with those limitations, on to the reasoning for my choices.

Choosing what I think would give me the best Jewish experience that an AKSE affiliation can generate, I would opt for having no rabbi going forward.  Not leave the position vacant to defer filling it, but really having no rabbi.  Acting as an agent on behalf of other congregants, I'd put this option second, but not a distant second.  Ah, but any macher would tell you that having a designated Rabbi is mandatory, a form of Sacred Cow that can never be schected!  Actually not so.  We've already conducted the experiment.  In many ways, the absence of a Rabbi brought about some of the best of what we have among ourselves.  We have a better understanding of the need to broaden participation, announced by the congregational President to his YK audience.  Perhaps the most visible task of a Rabbi is a weekly sermon.  We now have people doing this who do it very well.  People take their turn studying, if only for a few hours to prepare a talk worthy of a college educated audience.  For me, those Hebrew School flashbacks and InterAliyah Sound Bites effectively disappeared.  When our Rabbi would recite silent prayers for a congregant unable to do this himself, that slack was quickly remedied.  Our Partnership Minyanim have new rules, generated internally by ourselves.  All in a few months.

And guess what, this isn't new.  For myself, and undoubtedly many others, my Jewish high point might have come too early in life, as a university student immersed with other university students.  We had a Hillel or contracted Rabbi for the Holy Days, as we did at AKSE this year.  Everything else happened because the worshippers themselves insisted it would happen.  That's been my more recent AKSE experience.  University Si, Hebrew School No.

But we also have to address that Sacred Cow element, which in some way AKSE has, though indirectly.  At the congregational web site there is a page of congregational history. http://akse.org/history/ What is striking to anyone who reads it, after the retirement of our revered Rabbi Emeritus, the person whose imprint defined who we have remained, his successors do not seem to be important enough to even be named in our narrative chronology.  Were we really Rabbi focused, their legacies would have been promoted as well.  It wasn't.  And one of my childhood congregations also functioned grass roots with learned volunteers.  They had a Mara DAtra, a Rabbi of international stature who was on the Yeshiva University Biology faculty, but no person designated to show up, give sermons, teach classes.  AKSE at its best is really member focused, much like our Hillel experiences of decades past.  We have done admirably without a Rabbi and can continue indifinitely, contracting for High Holy Days or have a resource when halachic questions need both discernment and finality, for which we would be expected to compensate the selected individual.

While it's better to explore ideas than people, we are ultimately choosing from a list, even if expanded to None of the Above.  While my own assessment makes a distinction between what I prefer for myself and my medical imprint of recommending what is better for somebody other than me, both need to be justified.  Don't know if there are right decisions.  There are likely wrong ones.  As a group, all three men can capably deliver a sermon, conduct liturgy, keep track of what page we are on and share that info with people present who cannot, and read an aliyah or more from the scroll, none of which really require a salaried Rabbi.  Not a good source of product differentiation.  I don't know how well any of them would do at conducting a funeral, selling Chametz, or speaking candidly to congregational Officers who challenge or irk them.  We probably all want our Chametz sold hassle free.  But as we learned from the recent Georgia run-off, sometimes we vote for the candidate who will be obedient without resistance when the big boys tell him to do something, sometimes we value independence more.  I'm for independence, though I would guess there are Congregational Influencers who place a higher value on obedience, which is part of the Scout Law, while candor is not.  And the Scouts begin with Trustworthy.

So if picking for myself, Aseh L'Cha Rav as Pirke Avot advises, the young man from Toronto is really the only one I connected to personally.  He has a nimble mind. I'm a sucker for a nimble mind.  Who else would take the name of our congregation and create a source sheet from it? When I listen to lectures by his mentor Rabbi Torczyner of Toronto, a prolific presenter on yutorah.org, he refers to source sheets which those in attendance can read.  My own presentations to AKSE Academy had source sheets.  Everything we try to convey needs a basis.  And finding that underpinning takes some exploration, even if it is our own congregational name.  His instinct to do this and the elegance in which he created this left me impressed, knowing how difficult and time consuming this can be.  He regarded us as important enough to give us something we would not think to do on our own.  So he's my first choice after make a go of it without a Rabbi.  And he himself has a long audio and visual presentation trail for anyone to access.

Now as an agent of the congregation I would have some reservations.  His background could be judged quirky.  His appearance too, with payos accentuated by crew cut largely covered up by his Frik Kippah.  I was perhaps taken aback by the reticence of those at mincha to interact with him as he presented, though his implicit invitation to do this is easily recognizable to all physicians whose learning is largely interactive.  He has no congregation that he has led before.  And his public trail offers no hint as to whether he will be willing to schect an AKSE Sacred Cow, or how he might either use the authority that the Rabbi has or abdicate it.  But I think he is the only one who really has the capacity to make AKSE sparkle, both internally and as a unique interface with the larger community.  But it's a roll of the dice.

The largest separation between what I would choose for myself and what I would select serving as a consultant or agent of the congregation involved the gentleman from Long Island.  He presented himself on shabbos morning professionally.  He read from the scroll capably, davened with proficiency that I would expect from his simultaneous cantorial education, gave a fine summary of Ki Tetze as a parsha that is dense in mitzvot, and chatted amiably at kiddush.  That's my read of the congregation, that safe scoop of vanilla.  A person who can complete the relentless pursuit of mediocrity, or at least get all the boxes in the formal contractual Job Description checked off,.  I doubt he will ever challenge what the baalebatim order him to do.  Not the real me, but most like my perception of the membership, thus the gradient in what I would choose for myself and what I would choose for the congregation if AKSE were my patient.

The documentary evidence, though, has a lot of red flags.   Comfort comes at a price, sometimes a very big price, if the congregational aspiration is to have a larger membership that is financially self-sustaining.

There is a web site for where the Rabbi currently serves.  The site is more notable for what is not there than what is.  The Rabbi's bio is a list of what degrees he has, not much more than a LinkedIn profile would offer.  What is not there is what he thinks about anything or aspires to for his community.  The site itself pretty much ends in 2016 in any description of what happens there.  Adult Ed, something to the core of what our Rabbi will need to do is "Under Construction".  My expectation of any congregation is that the rabbi be the focus of its mission.  There is a Mission Statement, one that looks outward to the community, participating in relatively perfunctory events like legal holidays and Hanukkah, but little in the way of internal Jewish development of its people.  My expectation is that a Rabbi who has that little presence in his own congregation would be super malleable with us, which I think is too malleable. And not having his presence on his congregation's central internal forum seems neglectful.  On the plus side, his congregational role for women exceeds what we offer.  If we seek to grow, he will not be an impediment to that, though probably not a great contributor either.

There is also an instagram link to a concert he attended as a representative of his congregation in 2021, but again makes no note of his comments to the gathering in his professional capacity.  He received an award for chaplaincy work on behalf of the Orthodox community.  No date, and interestingly, the link was on MapQuest.  And he sponsored a kiddush at a large O congregation in Manhattan for his son's Bar Mitzvah, bulletin dated 2015.

To perhaps put this in some perspective, if AKSE were to ask its VP Membership or Membership Committee to pick 20 members at random and perform Google and YouTube searches on all 20, they would likely learn quite a lot about those twenty people, what they do, what they like, where they affiliate Jewishly and communally.  Our candidate, while he made a favorable impression, never generated much in the way of achievement over an extended period of time.  Can he make AKSE grow?  Doubt it, but I don't think he will offend anyone already here either.  As a result I put him as the default choice if we really need to hire a Rabbi, though a reasonably predictable letdown for me personally.

The Rabbi from Staten Island takes 4th Place of 3, whether selecting for myself or selecting for AKSE's future.  His personal presence, which I experienced at Mincha, fell above threshold.  At his class he seemed less interactive than I would have expected, as the classic Jewish teaching is where one comments and somebody else, teacher or chevruta partner, challenges the comment.  That interaction did not occur in the mincha class or in some brief small talk.  To be fair, that is better assessed at an interview and I could see a candidate who may see himself as being on display wanting not to challenge anyone.  

Cyberspace documentation seems scanty, though not absent.  Much of it comes from his present congregation's web site.  Apparently they have 80 members, which may explain why their Rabbi has another source of income.

Now, with over 80 families in our congregation with new needs and new aspirations for the future, the leadership is once again dreaming and planning for new growth and new directions.

Their congregation also provides a history.  Been around since 1935, homeless for a while.  Their history description stops in the late 1960s.  Apparently their fashion of worship stagnated from there as well.  I do not know whether their membership ever peaked significantly, though the description of the multipurpose building constructed in that era suggests that it's fortunes once included more than 80 families.  But now they are dreaming and planning.

To his credit, the Rabbi makes a statement, reading in part:

What purpose does a traditional Conservative congregation like ours serve? It allows people who, for whatever reason, are not comfortable within the framework of an Orthodox synagogue to still observe in a traditional manner. It provides a setting for the teaching of Torah and traditional Jewish observance that a significant segment of the Jewish community is comfortable with and can accept. Our synagogue is not a compromise. It is an alternative that allows those who choose it to grow and live as Jews, in a way that other variations of congregational life do not.

I would challenge the size of that siginificant segment.  Their demographics and ours suggest that we may need to count more accurately.  Geez, at our own YK services right here, the Women's Section, labelled as such in block letters and set aside to maintain our own tradition was disrespected by our own choir who sat there during the breaks, but would not let the women sing with them. We seem to respect the gender separation as a default, and as the YK episode suggests, not always in the most consistent or respectful way.  https://richardplotzker.medium.com/you-shouldnt-sit-there-9ac90f98352e  This model of worship has been put to the test, and basically it failed demographically, something that reflects in his congregation and in ours, behaviorally if not ideologically.  That's pretty close to a disqualification in my mind, however capably he may personally perform from the bimah or classroom.  It's not where our future lies if the ability to expand beyond people not already here is authentically what the baalebatim aspire to.

There is some other documentation.  In his younger years 1987-1993 he served as Rav at a congregation in Upper Manhattan near the Cloisters, where a lot of people from Columbia P&S live.  That congregation has a few statements of their history, the decline they experienced and the turnaround that they achieved and that we aspire to;

Membership and finances both declined steeply during the 1980s and 1990s, as the generation following the one that founded and built FTJC moved away from the neighborhood. Then, in April 2007, the congregation voted to establish gender egalitarianism.

Our commitment to spirited Hebrew prayer and social inclusion has brought remarkable growth in the past few years. A large portion of the membership now consists of young, growing families whose important lifecycle events, from bris to bnai mitzvot, bring excitement to the whole congregation.

My read:  our candidate presided over the decline and impeded the reversal.  And did the same for the next thirty years.  Probably not a good direction for AKSE to accept.

On my whiteboard, placed within my line of sight to the left of my desk, I keep two lists on the right half.  The upper comes from a graduation speech given to my son's class by Mayor Bloomberg.  Hizzoner asked the graduates to seek Independence-Honesty-Accountability-Innovation.  My asseessment scored three out of four, having been excluded from any meaningful position of accountability by many a Nominating Committee, but the other three elements seem fulfilled.  Below that in Hebrew are the initiatives recommended by Rabbi Sid Schwarz of Clal, editor of Jewish Megatrends.  He advised seeking Wisdom, Righteousness, Community, Sanctity.  I score my comments 4/4

Visiting Rabbi

He drove all the way from Toronto to interview with us, leaving his wife at home while she recuperated from Covid.  I had a recuperating spouse too, but tested negative on the home antigen test that morning, as did a chair of the search committee, while the other co-chair also had partial isolation from a covid exposure.  I attended Minchah/ Havdalah, an assembly of nine men and four women, which gave us the abridged version, but left more time for teaching, which he did very well.  I also found him astute when challenged by interaction, but I was by far most vigorous on imposing questions and responses.

He seemed personable enough but the best selection for our waning congregation may be a little harder to tell.  Being more of an observer than an influencer, indeed I think largely marginalized in some ways in a place where insight or analytical skills seem devalued, I still have some impressions.

The fellow has a big beard, discreetly placed payot, and a large white crocheted kippah that covered much of his crew cut.  White shirt, dark pants, long tzitzit with p'til t'chalet dangling to about mid-thigh.  Part swami perhaps, part remnant from The Jewish Catalog series of the 1970s that both personalized Judaism but also created a largely ephemeral Chavurah fad.  Definitely a descendant of that background, not at all a carryover from Hebrew school.  I think his presence would have a uniqueness in our local Jewish community, maybe a less insular variant of Chabad.

Less certain perhaps, would be the prediction on his role as congregational rabbi on our particular agenda.  I think Saturday morning worship might become more of a targeted destination.  Sermons and side comments would have more of a sparkle, more reflective of a college graduate than Hebrew school graduate audience.  We would still struggle for a minyan.  Our liturgy would not change.  Unlikely that he would generate any new bimah participants.  And we would still have our gender disparity albatross and the reputation that it creates.

Classes would be series, or even individual presentations that he creates de novo.  We could learn rabbinics because he both knows and has an interest in rabbinics.  That may give our congregation uniqueness.  

The visiting Rabbi made an interesting observation in the parking lot.  He was asked whether he would find housing within walking distance of the synagogue, where some very attractive houses exist, or would he take the view of his predecessor that he has an obligation to his family to have them in a solidly Jewish area with ample institutions, commuting to fulfill his contractual obligations?  He responded that he needed to be part of the community as we have it.  In order for him to function not only as mara d'atra but as pastor, he needs to be among us.  Being familiar with the Jewish community of his native Toronto, I asked him about it.  It clusters geographically by denomination.  Ours had school districts with a lot of Jews when we arrived in 1980, but geographic distribution for reasons of prosperity enabling luxury housing or shifts in major employers has changed considerably.  But he seems to have an interest in being part of us, not just serving us.

Our Board's primary agenda for decades has been growing membership, or at least growing finances, amid a steady decline easily traceable through archived records.  I don't have confidence that he can make a difference in the aspect of our survival that the Board values most highly.  He perhaps can make us a more desirable place for the women who are here, but really cannot attract anyone who eliminates us from consideration on this element of our public presence.

In summary, I think those of us who like poking around Judaism's culture, heritage, and intellectual development will feel upgraded.  Those of us attracted to creativity will feel upgraded.  Our internal structures though, will not be upgraded.

Regretting My Vote

My congregation's obit has not yet been written but last evening's congregational meeting exposed the reality that end of life planning is upon us.  In extending our Rabbi's contract by a wide majority of the vote, including mine, we not only kicked our rusty can down the road but silver-plated it before we did.  Had we not done this, come summer our congregation would be without a Rabbi or saddled with the immense expense of recruiting and investing in a replacement.  And we might be actually homeless.  Eighteen months until can invoke our no fault escape clause will not ruin us.  Having more of the same downward trajectory will.  So we have stability, or the illusion of stability, unless he invokes his escape clause which does not have a waiting period.  In exchange for predictability we gave up the more difficult choices.  We are a losing team.  Losing teams trudge along until a new coach with a new vision takes the helm.  There are no shortcuts for that.  What I saw at the meeting are people being risk averse, avoiding a roll of the dice that could be revival or could be rapid implosion for the certainty of long term depletion.  It was not a good long term choice. 

Shabbos Prep

A lazy summer Friday with a few things to tidy up around the office as I take my final lap or two as a Delaware physician.  I am more inclined to think about shabbos today than to engage in useful work, though not ignore my closing tasks.  I read Rabbi Wein's weekly D'var Torah on the Project Genesis site earlier in the week.  Normally I make supper before I go to work but this week I delegated the task to my wife.  There are few bottles of craft beer worthy of shabbos in the fridge.  Of the local clergy, the one who gives the most consistently erudite and thoughtful weekly message presides over the Reform congregation.   He has not spoken this summer, delegating the task to congregants who have done quite well, though they do not have the core knowledge to link their message to a parallel message of Torah.  Some of the Rabbis in my community also lack that skill but the Rabbi Robinson of Beth Emeth stands out in that regard.   And they always get ten Jewish men there to enable me to say Kaddish.