Sparkle

Our congregation finally addressed its albatross last shabbos, the classification of our shul's women as dhimi's, a protected but subordinate class of people.  Orthodox and other non-egal places like ours sometimes get a bad rap about how we treat our women, banning them from leading our worship based on assessments of Rabbis of yore whose world had a very different form than ours.  Whether you adhere to tradition or schect the Sacred Cow of these sages' ruling, the proper treatment of women is really a moral issue of our generation that cannot be simply dismissed or even undermined by a few guys in our minyanim whose Y-chromosome may be their principal asset.  Despite the subordinate religious standing of our women and those of any Orthodox congregation, it is also hard to escape the reality that the talent within our cohort far exceeds the talent within the movements that have brought women to ritual equality.  It is a matter of showcasing that talent, enabling those women to acquire those 15 minutes of fame that should be the destiny of all human beings.

To do that, AKSE arranged a suitable forum, not quite egalitarian but recognizable as parity if not equality.  A mechitza of balloons was placed, some Tircha d'Tzibburah imposed by the Rabbi by having two services each at inconvenient times to run consecutively when they could have just as well run simultaneously, and the service that people actually attended conducted half by women and half by men.  Pseudkei D'Zimrah, Torah Service, half the Aliyot, and Haftarah all performed expertly by some very outstanding women, all far more capable than those Ritual Committee denizens who impede them.  Rabbi stayed in the background, no Aliyah Sound Bites, only the briefest of remarks on his part.  Some of these women can and have given pretty decent Divrei Torah at a collegiate level far in excess of the more typical fare that has become our norm, but with the time shift making a late morning, that opportunity had to be set aside.  And the women prepare an ever outstanding Kiddush each shabbos, duplicated for this shabbos as well.  What differed at this kiddush were the sincere congratulations bestowed upon the participants and a little more camaraderie than has been our norm, but something that should be aspired to.

With a little tweaking, this reflects AKSE at its best, a sanctuary that comes alive, that makes shabbos morning the sparkling centerpiece of a synagogue's existence, something it can really use as the favorable product differentiation that has been so difficult to achieve.

shtick

Next shabbat the Rabbi devoted his sermon time to a discussion of the Shabboton guest's suggestions for making the shabbat service experience more of a personal connection to the worshippers.  He offered a number of suggestions regarding new tunes or discussions or acting out portions of the service by turning the Bimah into a stage.  True, the AKSE services too often come across as perfunctory with little of interest.  Their purpose is ostensibly to fulfill a religious obligation for the men, which they do.  This may be why the attendance has been lopsidedly men for my entire tenure there.  There are shabbat morning experiences that I seek out from time to time or remember fondly as destinations on a Saturday morning. Creating desire out of obligation remains a challenge since you need one or the other to assure attendance.

Beth Tfiloh gets two visits a year.  My loyalty to Hillel on Shabbat morning endures and I would leave Wilmington earlier than I needed to on a weekend to be able to make it to Shabbat morning services at the JCC of Spring Valley and its subsequent incarnations.  If there might be a common link to the places I prefer to daven it may be fulfillment of the unexpected within the familiar as one element, impeccable execution as another, and an enhanced aura of common purpose among the attendees that AKSE has never been able to achieve.  I do not recall anything approaching shtick at any of them.  Moreover, I think in many ways the decline of the USCJ experience can trace its roots to either Rabbi-generated or officer-generated surrogates to replace a diminishing capacity to deliver the formal components of the traditional service experience with the proper level of expertise.  AKSE has an audience, as does Beth Tfiloh to a large extent.  Hillel and the JCC of Spring Valley had participants.

So how might one get the unexpected amid the expected?  As a casual visit to Baltimore or Spring Valley or anyplace else, this becomes fairly straightforward.  Tunes are endemic to a congregation but differ from what I am used to each week.  Rabbi Wohlberg of Beth Tfilah and Rabbi Palavin, the final Rabbi at the JCC, had a good deal of experience crafting their messages each week.  But were it not for the preparation of Hillel, I doubt I would be able to appreciate any congregational experience, let alone most congregational experiences. Universities have a way of gathering its participants from varied places and backgrounds.  Tunes differ.  At each assembly you can expect to greet people that you did not greet the week before, either because they were not there or you were immersed in a different crowd at kiddush.  The people there were part of the same community all week long, eating dinner together in the Kosher cafeteria, fretting over common exams, checking out the girls.   While there were no sermons, conversations among college students often have substance beyond the formality of a handshake with a goot shabbos appended.  It is harder to judge Beth Tfiloh or JCC where I am a visitor but the other people are not.  At the JCC there was often a curiosity about me by those there before as drop-ins were few and I had a past there to which those remaining could connect.  My presence automatically made me a center of attention.  Not so at Beth Tfiloh where Bar Mitzvah rituals with out of town guests were the norm and attendance always huge by AKSE or Hillel standards.  In many ways I function there as a spectator, doing my best to function as a participant as well as circumstances permit.   The women's section there was always well attended, one of the few ways to assess who shows up to fulfill obligation and who takes time from other possible shabbos activities to attain what can only be attained in shul.

So where might this fit with the AKSE experience?  Balancing obligation with attractiveness does not always go well.  First, I think it would be a mistake to go down the road of the Conservatives, assuming that the people in attendance are ignorant roobs who would have no Jewish connection or knowledge were it not for their Rabbi.  I never dumb down my presentations to residents or medical students to accommodate their limited capacity.  There purpose is to elevate people to standard, whether medical trainees or Jews in transition, rather than to diminish the standard to adapt to the people.  Gimmicks have a way of doing that unless flawlessly executed and appropriate to circumstance.  That is not to say special events have no place. The Senator's visit engaged the teens present like no experience they ever had at AKSE.  It is just that they need to be done very selectively and implemented in a way that nobody would assess as amateurish or tircha d'tzibbura.  Other guests given appropriate bimah time or guests at Shabbos dinners which have been well attended could fulfill this niche.  I think having women really do the parts of the service that the Rabbi deemed acceptable would be another, something that has remained dormant for some time.  At Beth Tfiloh, Rabbi Wohlberg has decided what women are permitted to do on his Bimah and in his sanctuary.  Every time I have been there, women do those things set aside for them.

The shabbat experience does not have to take place at AKSE in its sanctuary.  My most critical comments of the Rabbis and the lay ritual leadership has been that they do not insist that the Women's Tefiloh Group make a concerted effort to attain parity in performance with the main sanctuary to the extent that their permitted content allows.  You can claim respect for female congregants but never sell that as reality outside AKSE, or even within, if excellence is not the standard in any of its subgroups.  The shabbat dinners by their attendance and flexibility offer enormous opportunities for innovation that would be tircha if done in the sanctuary during services.

Should AKSE appoint a Cruise Director?  Is the role of Rabbi one of Cruise Director?  It is one thing to have a plethora of activities to offer people, quite another to goad them into taking advantage of what is there.  In many ways the congregation's stability depends to a large extent on its inertia.  Schedules need to get filled, and they do.  Officers are selected from the Recycling Pool.  Growth and development of the people does not seem a particularly self-driven process the way it would be at a Hillel Foundation.  One very simple way to shake up services and bring people along would be to establish a rule that no individual may recycle a Torah or Haftarah reading more than two consecutive years so that everyone would be forced to prepare something that is new to them.

While congregational discussion has been set aside for this with enough heads-up notice to make it thoughtful, these type of analysis tend to be seat of the pants expression of druthers rather than careful teasing out of expected outcomes of things that might get implemented.  There is a ritual committee, now relatively diversely populated without the ideological dominance and manipulation of years past.  Not that AKSE committees of any type excel at analytical thought but ultimately this seems the best forum for alteration to a shabbos morning experience that may need only minimal tweaking so that it may proceed while keeping the process transparent and the consequences accountable.

Shabbos Services

Uncertain what I want to do tomorrow morning.  I am haftarah reader for Chanukah next week and one of the Torah readers for New Years weekend.  Some of AKSE's talent has departed, not an extraordinary or disabling amount but enough to notice, making my participation more essential than it had been.  Yet if you think of Shabbat as Rabbi Heshcel's Island of Time, some weeks it is better not to have an AKSE Ferry.

The services on Saturday morning, my Jewish centerpiece since grade school, have morphed from an Orthodox experience with full content and fluency to the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism model, with its rabbinic or lay leader contrivances that so many of us, including AKSE's core talent, escaped from.  The concluding time the last several months on Shabbat morning had extended a half hour.  Kids from the Hebrew School now do Ashrei , replacing a quick silent reading with brief Chatima with a small parade and old Hebrew school flashback.  I support learning and acquisition of experience as much as anyone else but this is tircha.  Instead of a central message from the Rabbi, which has improved immensely in content over the past year, we now have an interruption between each Aliyah in addition to an introduction to both Torah and Haftarah portions.  The Rabbinical Assembly has long taken the erroneous and destructive position that their congregants are Jewish ignoramuses who depend on them exclusively for every snippet of knowledge that they can impart.  That is unfortunately in the process of being transplanted to the AKSE shabbat morning experience as well.  Moreover, this is occurring at a time when the local Bulshitzer Rebbe has been siphoning off a measure of previous attendance.  His product differentiation started with a more pure form of gender separation.  He may be more successful with our help as we move to something more akin to a Beth Shalom experience while he starts later, moves through with minimal interruption and ends earlier.

It is possible to maintain a shabbat morning experience that has parity with what one might expect with a visit to any observant sanctuary around the world amid several formats.  Penn Hillel has both a conservative and an orthodox minyan conducting shabbat services simultaneously.  I have been to both and the content of worship is almost identical, the only difference being gender equality at one and a brief drash on Jewish Law at the end of the orthodox service.  At Beth Hillel-Beth El where my wedding took place, the Havurah minyan conducts the AKSE service with very minor variation based on the Siddur they use.  The only difference seems to be multiple Torah readers rather than a single hired reader and very capable female participation.  There is no schtick from singing of Hatikvah to showcasing Hebrew school kids, to moving lecterns.  The experience that their service conveys is judged my the fluency of the participants, a volunteer sermon that recognizes the audience as college graduates rather than Hebrew school graduates, and a concluding time that  does not infringe on other elements of Shabbat's break from the other six days of work.

There was an interesting podcast  http://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/760703/Rabbi_Josh_Strulowitz/A_Panel_Discussion_with_an_Orthodox,_Conservative_and_Reform_Rabbi  which presented a forum sponsored by either a JCC or Federation in San Francisco where three rabbis from Orthodox, Conservative and Reform congregations in the area discussed their ideologies and how they adapt it to their congregational realities.  The moderator tried to bait the Orthodox Rabbi in a friendly way by asking about the divergence between public values of gender equality and practices at his synagogue.  He did not bite with the expected defense as their practice being divine will.  Instead, he made a couple of insightful observations of life at his congregation.  First, the women at his shul were the best educated, most Jewishly involved women in the San Francisco Jewish community.  More importantly, for people really committed to Judaism, the formality of worship and legal restrictions needed to fulfill the requirements are really a very small part of what happens in his shul.  Almost no service other than shabbat morning takes more than an hour yet activities that make his congregation interactive to their members occur continuously.  There are no restrictions for women outside of formal worship.  They rise to the opportunity by making the educational and social programming attractive.  There is a quest for excellence on all things.

It is that quest for excellence that challenges AKSE.  The relative exile of its Talibans to the shteible of the Bulshitzer Rebbe should be an extraordinary opportunity for the mainstream that remain.  The Ritual Committee, having divested itself of its Taliban impediments and securing a top-notch chairman, should be discussing ways to elevate the people to excellence in worship, not diminishing the experience of worship to adapt to the limited capacity of its people.  I think it has been a shonda for my entire tenure there that the Women's Tefillah Group has been permitted by two Rabbis to continue to function as a form of Junior Congregation under AKSE's roof when their service should strive to be one that approaches parity with the main service with minor halachic adaptations in content.  One Rabbi who probably couldn't care less about what happens to female worship has been replaced by one who sincerely does, yet finds it expedient to diminish all worship in some way.  Making the AKSE sanctuary experience more like the Beth Shalom sanctuary experiences from contrivance to blue pencil editing of the sages' recommended content to enable more Rabbi commentary jeopardizes the very substance that has made AKSE unique in the community and attractive to its loyal participants.