Synagogue Governance

Do I really care about how AKSE or any other synagogue is run?  Should I?  Having been to a place where I'd classify some of the activity of the baalebatim as bordering on evil, I think there is a reason to not only remain in the game, if possible, but to give up and depart under certain circumstances.  It seems that trends in membership data may support this view.  Fortunately there is nothing evil about AKSE.  Dumb, inept, insufficiently thoughtful for sure but not evil.

We have a Board Meeting tonight with the usual subjects up for discussion, mostly money either directly through a budget presentation or indirectly through a membership discussion or fundraising efforts that probably would do better if run by newcomers who did not carry the legacy of previously marginal efforts.  But directly or indirectly the agenda is money.  At least these things are measurable.

The real essence of how a congregation serves the people who attend, or who pay dues but don't attend, can be more elusive in its assessment.

Semi-productive

Quiet shabbos, intent to do chores on Sunday partly successful.  I made progress with making the bedroom tidy, washed the dishes, did grocery shopping, worked on my Torah portion, opened some unopened mail since last spring, listened to a yutorah.org shiur, took Alan to the bus stop and replaced my fleishig skillet that had served me well since my wedding but has acquired a significant part that fails to heat adequately.  Not bad. 

Shabbos Prep

Each Friday morning I arise at the appointed time, even when I wish to sleep longer and probably could sleep longer with no adverse work consequences.  My task: have a suitable shabbat dinner assembled before leaving for work.  Usually I make something simple, most typically chicken breasts seasoned, though sometimes cut-up chicken.  The best buy is actually whole frozen chicken but that has to be thawed earlier in the week and roasted the night before, as does turkey breast with bone in, as turkey cutlets are not freqently in the Shop-Rite case.  From time to time I will place beef cubes or chicken parts in the crock pot along with things to eat with it, a one pot meal that lasts several meals.  I usually make a starch serving, typically a box of couscous that cooks in minutes or rice variant that can cook while the chicken is in the oven.  Mini-challot are obtained that morning or defrosted the night before.  A vegetable or salad is made when Irene gets home, or in the winter a vegetable is made that morning and reheated on arrival home.  I rarely make dessert or buy dessert in advance.  Soda and beer are put in the refrigerator that morning. 

While I rarely spend money on shabbos other than a weekly cup of coffee early Saturday mornings at Sweeney's around the corner, more to support them than real need for outside coffee, I will also make sure that I have $50 available to me in cash and at least a half-tank of gas if I want to visit someplace that I might not be able to do on days when I have chores.  Half of each type of coin is placed in my Pushka when I get to the office, with the other half going to the Pushkas at AKSE during the repetition of the Amidah at Sunday morning minyan.  I read a commentary on the weekly parsha, usually one from the Rabbi I've chosen to follow each year.  This year it is Rabbi Wein.

Time has its own sanctity, as do the core concepts of Judaism including shabbat, synagogue and community.  None of them performs optimally.  All have their compromises.  All need tweaking, despite ongoing resistance to being tweaked.

Filling in the Calendar

Last night I returned home from AKSE's Education Committee very disheartened.  My cohorts at the meeting had no interest in anything innovative, provocative, stimulating.  They had slots on the calendar to fill in and they did it.  Most AKSE activities strike me that way, from Shabbat services to Board Meetings.  I tried to make Minyanaires different with random discussions that people could not get anyplace else but for the most part the mentality is one of let's reconstruct last year's programs, get the same Torah readers to do what they did before, never risk negative feedback, and get a different result than the last time we did the same thing.  There are very few really stimulating analytical people there.  People don't like to move the furniture around and see if the next configuration comes out better than the last.  I suspect that the 125th Anniversary fundraiser will mimic the 120th with the same result, or perhaps a small profit though not one to impact materially on finances.  Board Members taking out $100 ads while the business that they work for that have $300 as chump change will be left to languish.  We populate our membership rolls with decent folk who go to work, do what they are told, have their periodic salary deposited but never have accountability for innovation, adaptation or risk.  We populate our committees, Board and pews the same way.  The slots on the calendar get filled in so that events happen at the appointed time.  Better events?  More inspiring events?Not yet.

Physicians of Despair

The Annals of Internal Medicine released a summary by Zeke Emanuel et. al. of how the upcoming health care law will impact individual physicians.  First, I had the privilege of attending an invited talk by Zeke at the Leonard Davis Institute last November and the added treat of having him answer my question.  All stereotypes that his public statements have created of him, he is a very astute, articulate thinker with real medical experience.  The bottom line seems to be that for service to patients to become maximally effective and efficient, medical care will need to achieve electronic computerized parity with the banks, hotels, airlines and pretty much any other industry.  I've had my billing system computerized via a service since the late 1990's, as have most of my colleagues.  I do not even know if traditional One-Write Billing stationery is still available for purchase.  Patient care, however, still depends on written charts, though the large hospitals seem to be making progress in transforming to electronic record keeping which enables access to specific information more readily, as long as the doctor knows what needs to be retrieved.  To do this requires a large capital infusion with little financial return, since payment currently depends on how many patients you see or procedures you do, which will remain the same.  To address this newly mandated overhead, economy of scale will predictably be required, with a fairly safe prediction that physicians who practice alone or with a partner or two will need to seek employment, as I have already done.

For many of us, we value our autonomy above all else and found medical careers one of the few remaining outlets for continuing that.  Self-employment as we think of it will soon disappear and with it the freedom to hire who we want, set our vacation schedule, keep a share of our profits for extra work, and maybe even give us a means of product differentiation of why patients should come to our office rather than a colleague's.  Sermo, a physicians web site, printed the article and invited members to comment, which they did.  People post with considerable frequency that they are fed up and often professionally threatened.  The folks in their 30's and 40's will have little choice but to adapt and maybe withhold tuition from their kids if they express an interest in studying medicine.  The people my age are more likely to have their financial advisers total up their assets and if financially feasible call it a career.  There is clearly a sense of loss, an early expression of mourning for loss of what we once had.

New Job Upcoming

We settled on a start date for Mercy Philadelphia Diabetes Program, the Monday after Rosh Hashana.  Not having patients for the last month has made me a little stir crazy but it is also an opportunity to do stuff that I've neglected due to work obligations and fatigue.  Unfortunately, I've been less than diligent about my writing and finances and housekeeping but much better than before about studying parts of endocrinology that I have neglected.  I've tried hard, though with less success than I had hoped, at creating a schedule for myself to keep while my time resembles a blank canvas.  It's easy to create time slots, harder to self-impose deadlines.

AKSE Academy

AKSE Academy began last year, recommended and inspired and partly purloined by me as a way for AKSE's Education Committee to avoid having a Shabbat Scholar in Residence.  I had found most of them disruptive to our usual non-mechitza style, an invitation for Rabbi Dresin to cast disparaging comments toward us for resisting accommodating our guest and generally not worth the $2K or so and the aggravation of arranging dinner and the like.  Thinking that nobody is better than our Shabbaton visitor, we opted for nobody, or in this case a series of nobodies to assemble about eight classes on a variety of subjects.  I modeled it partly on nights of learning that other places do and partly on a medical conference that typically has a menu of several simultaneous presentations that those in attendance can select.  It went well enough, with an attendance of about fifty and a small financial profit, that there is a consensus to develop this into a unique event in the community.

I've become very possessive of my creation, not wanting anybody to interfere with the content and almost impervious to feedback as I try to push the envelope that will be necessary to make it a signature event for the synagogue.  I'm also the most inquisitive person on the committee, which has its pluses and minuses.  It is very tempting to create 5 of 8 classes from negative transference reactions from AKSE's Bimah.  There's no shortage of them, and some pretty good topics such as the role of self, titles and entitlement, physicians destined for Gehennom, Genevah, misconduct in the name of frum, et. al.  I'm also probably the principal laytz in the congregation.  There need to be a couple of benign topics, things with little emotional content, like travel or Draft Dodging Tzahal or Sacred Space or money or Talmud study.  Maybe the emerging hi-tech industries of Israel.  Speakers come later.  Imprint comes now.