CO-STAR Blog

What motivates you?  Some interesting thoughts this week in Rabbi Hayim Herring’s Tools for Shuls blog.   Read the comments and add your own.  If Rabbi Herring uses your idea in his upcoming book Tools for Shuls: A Guide to Make Over Your Synagogue, you will, of course, be credited.

The motivations that move people to volunteer are varied but here are a few personal observations:

• They want to give back to the synagogue because the synagogue helped them out during a difficult time (for example, with the illness of a family member).
• They enjoy the company of other Jewish people because they lack it at work or in their neighborhood.
• They are on a spiritual search.  Read more and comment.

I was recently involved in a discussion about the word “outreach” and its many uses and meanings in Jewish communal settings. To some, outreach means reaching out to the unaffiliated letting them know why they should become involved – to learn what’s in it for them if they participate. To others, outreach means reaching out to help interfaith couples and families hopefully feel more welcomed in the Jewish community, and to still others it means reaching out to those who may feel marginalized for other reasons (e.g., LGBT, single parent families, immigrant families,) to let them know we want their involvement. No matter the target audience, the word outreach is being used to convey or create an attempt at connection, to reach out and involve someone in a meaningful way, but it feels like a sales pitch to some.

In our work with Synaplex™ congregations, we have used the word “engagement” much more often than outreach. It’s a word I like better because it conjures up a give and take, a back and forth – a more active experience for all involved. Engagement implies there is a relationship being nurtured. After reading a blog post by Hildy Gottlieb, I’m sure we’ve made the right call. Hildy states,

Whether you are meeting people on Twitter or Facebook, at a blog or in real life… None of us likes to be with someone who is always trying to convince us to do what they want us to do.… But if you engage me as a person who cares passionately about my community and my world, I will do whatever I can, both for you and with you. Because I care.

Through Synaplex, our congregations are engaging more and more people in Shabbat experiences and congregational life. There are relationships, new and old, being nurtured and communities being made stronger as a result.

Marsha Katz Rothpan
STAR Senior Program Officer

There is an interesting and passionate discussion taking place this week on Synagogue 3000’s Synablog.  Initiated by a post by Rabbi Gerald Skolnik entitled Synagogue 3000: A Concurring Dissent; Or, Of Babies and Bathwater,  Rabbi Skolnik describes his Orthodox childhood and education and his journey to becoming a Conservative Rabbi. 

Rabbi Skolnik writes:

It is from this vantage point that I approach the work of Synagogue 3000, STAR, and similar organizations dedicated to the re-creation and re-vitalization of the American synagogue. I understand the challenge at hand. I work with those “Jews in the pews” (or not in the pews!) every day, and know the deep sense of alienation that so many of them feel from traditional synagogue worship and ritual. They are profoundly disconnected from that world of Jewish practice that I live, breathe, and so value. But I have a nagging feeling that, though I understand the goals of organizations like Synagogue 3000 and appreciate what they are trying to accomplish, re-creating the synagogue and its worship is, at its core, a flawed enterprise. That’s why I’ve called this piece a “concurring dissent:” an oxymoron if ever there was one. I agree with the problem, but I’m uncomfortable with the solution. We are changing the davening to suit the daveners, and in so doing, we are losing something precious and irretrievable….

STAR is mentioned specifically in the post and I’ve responded fully to Rabbi Skolnik’s comments. Here’s an excerpt:

“I’ve offered to meet with Rabbi Skolnik in Minneapolis or New York to explore the rich, independent data we’ve gathered over the years which tell a story of positive impact that our initiatives have had on congregations of all denominations across North America.  We have a good grasp on what has been successful and what has not, and we think that it’s important to have conversations with others who share our passion for Jewish life and the synagogue which are informed both by feeling and fact. 

We are inspired by the rabbis and synagogues with whom we work – their willingness to hold on to two goals simultaneously: 

• Maintain and value Shabbat services which authentically reflect congregational, denominational and ideological history.
• Experiment on Shabbat and during the week with spiritual, educational, cultural and social alternatives which expand possibilities for involvement and Jewish growth.

These goals can be compatible.”

We encourage you to take a few minutes to weigh in on these issues.  Read the Synablog post and comments.

-Rabbi Hayim Herring

Check out guest blogger Elana Centor on the Tools for Shuls blog today.  Here’s an excerpt:

With a tag line of Get the real scoop on doctors, clinics and hospitals, TheHealthcareScoop.com is a place for consumers to share their personal experiences. While the majority of comments are positive, about one-third are negative. Piloted in Minnesota, and now a nationwide community, HealthcareScoop.com is part of Blue Cross Blue Shield. That’s right: an insurance company is sponsoring a blog where its group members can weigh-in on doctors. Isn’t that an “interesting” way to influence doctors?!

Now substitute rabbis, synagogues and religious school in that tag line and you have a peek into the very near future. Get the real scoop on rabbis, synagogues and religious schools….

Since the question is not if, but when members, former members and visitors will share stories about your congregation in an online community, what will be your strategy? How will you respond if someone writes a negative comment? How will you even know if someone has written about you?  Read more and comment.

Elana Centor is Chief Strategist For Digitalwagontrain a training, coaching, consulting firm helping individuals and organizations achieve their goals faster, smarter, easier by using social media tools.  Elana posts regularly on her blog Funny Business.

Above is the title of Rabbi Hayim Herring’s latest post on his Tools for Shuls blog.  Here’s an excerpt:

As I write this entry, I am sitting on an airplane, using a laptop. One person is watching a movie on his handheld device, another is listening to songs, and although it’s dark, the cabin is aglow with other laptops or net books. All of these small, portable devices are exponentially more powerful than my first electronically tethered desktop, which didn’t move more than a few inches because it was plugged into a wall outlet.
 
My point? As much as we may sometimes wish it, technology is not going away and is literally embedded in most aspects of life already.  Read more, and post your Comments

Comments will be used to shape Rabbi Herring’s upcoming book Tools for Shuls: A Guide to Make Over Your Synagogue. If your idea is used, you will be credited in the book, of course!

Another thought-provoking post: Personal Confessions: Spirituality Lost and Found. 

I wonder, is spirituality a generational issue?  I don’t remember my rabbi, of blessed memory, using that word when I was growing up in the ‘70’s. Nor do I remember him often mentioning God (I could be wrong on that last score but don’t believe so.)  I attended The Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) from 1976 to 1985 (undergrad and reb school), and again don’t remember the words spirituality or God mentioned all that much.  Read more and post your Comments.

Does the current economic downturn have a potential silver lining for non-profits, including synagogues and other Jewish organizations?  According to The New York Times, non-profits have been flooded with the newly unemployed, who are looking for productive ways to spend their time until they find a new position.   Notes the Times:

“[The unemployed] have searched for tasks on volunteernyc.org – which last month had 30 percent more visitors than in February 2008 – and forced New York Cares, an umbrella organization, to add extra new-volunteer orientations at a Whole Foods Market downtown that quickly booked solid an unheard-of three weeks in advance. In Philadelphia, Big Brothers Big Sisters has seen a 25 percent increase in inquiries from potential mentors over this time last year. And the Taproot Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that places skilled professionals in volunteer positions, had more people sign up on one day earlier this year than in an entire month a year ago.”

Although many of these volunteers are happy fulfilling “typical” volunteer tasks that require little skill, some are looking for meatier assignments – as a way to bolster their sense of self, their confidence, as well as their resume.  And given the high expertise level of many of the newly jobless, it would seem that this economic downturn would be the perfect time for synagogues and other Jewish organizations to ask these potential volunteers to take on more substantial projects. (After, of course, providing them with moral support and assurances that they are valued members even if they cannot make traditional dues payments….) Could a graphic artist redesign a brochure or website?  Could a management consultant rethink the organization of a shul office, making it more cost effective?  Or develop a new volunteer recruitment plan?  Could an unemployed IT specialist provide advice about the best way to maintain a member database?  Could we ask the unemployed to take on new roles on temple committees, adding new life to groups that tend to be dominated by the same old hands?   It seems that the options are endless—but a synagogue’s leadership (lay and professional) may need to take the initiative and be more creative in their requests.

In what ways has your synagogue maximized the volunteer potential of the unemployed?

B’shalom,
Rabbi Ellen Flax
Project Consultant
Schusterman Rabbinical Fellowship Program

By guest blogger Rabbi Elyse Wechterman

An odd question, you might think, coming from a synagogue rabbi.  But one with which I and my colleagues wrestle on a daily basis, especially as we find ourselves competing for attention with reality television, downloadable music, the constant twitter of online communication, sports (both professional and intramural), and now, the ever-present worry about jobs, financial security and our futures.

It’s a question I often ask in the negative – what are we doing here when so many people would clearly rather be somewhere else?  (After a particularly bad day at Hebrew School or a poorly attended Shabbat service.)

This past weekend, I found myself contemplating the question from a completely different point of view – from the place of hope and inspiration I found reading two very different, but compelling takes on spirituality in newspapers this weekend.  The first was by columnist and author Jay Michaelson in the April 24th issue of the Jewish Daily Forward on the meaning and purpose of Jewish ritual.  The second was by Bono, lead singer of U2, in the New York Times Week in Review of April 19 on the “state of your soul.”

Michaelson asks different questions in his article: “What does spirituality do?” and “What purpose do [the rituals and practices of religion] serve?”  And Bono’s commentary is simply titled: “It’s 2009. Do you know where your soul is?”  

Both go on to share beautiful moments of transcendence and transformation they each experienced while engaged in the tasks of performing religious acts. 

It is important to note that neither Michaelson nor Bono are traditionalists when it comes to their respective religions:  Michaelson is most definitely not an Orthodox Jew and tends to travel in some of the same Jewish spiritual circles that I do and Bono is by no means an orthodox Catholic.

Michaelson described blowing a shofar while alone in the woods one Rosh Hashana day and finding that the “ancient sound of the ram’s horn instantly stripped away layers of ego, rationale, doubt and even the notion of time itself. I felt transported to some primordial moment of religious awe, at once pre-rational and trans-rational, nonsensical and deeply true.”

From this experience, Michaelson understands Jewish ritual as a technology, a tool for transformation of the self “in ways that ideology, philosophy, nationalism and ethnicity do not.”  And, he claims, “it works.”

He is not an advocate of any form of literalism in the mythology of the Jewish people: “it doesn’t matter whether God is a benevolent father looking down on us all, or a delusion of the mind. It doesn’t matter whether the Exodus story happened or not.  What matters is that we possess technology that can transform the self, open the mind, unite a community, motivate ethical behavior and bring forth tears when your heart is broken. Before you light candles [on Friday night] you’re thinking of your mortgage; afterward, you’re thinking of your kids, or the meaning of life, or something else that actually matters.  That’s what counts.”   The stories of the bible, the specifics of the rituals are tools to Michaelson: “It’s the transformation, not the myth, that matters.”

Similarly, Bono writes about the transcendent rebirth he experiences at Easter. “a rebirth I always seem to need,” he says. “Never more so than a few years ago when my father died. I recall the embarrassment and relief of hot tears as I knelt in a chapel in a village in France and repented my prodigal nature – repented for fighting my father for so many years and wasting so many opportunities to know him better…. I remember the feeling of ‘a peace that passes understanding.’” 

Bono is a worshiper at many different alters on his global journeys.  “I come to lowly churches and lofty cathedrals for what purpose?  I search Scriptures to what end?  To check my head? My heart? No, my soul.  For me, these meditations are like a plumb line dropped by a master builder – to see if the walls are straight or crooked.  I check my emotional life with music, my intellectual life with writing, but religion is where I soul-search.” 

Bono concludes his piece by suggesting that now, more then ever, as the “carnival” of “overheated markets and climates” crashes down into recession, regression and ecological and economical disaster, we need access to the tools and technology of soul-searching available to all of us.

So I return to my original question.  What is a synagogue for? 

Part of me wants to answer with the communitarian values I believe we excel at here at Congregation Agudas Achim:  creating mutual support systems, educating ourselves and our children, bringing people together for celebrations of life, remembering our past, creating community. 

But another part of me wants to look beyond those lofty goals (which can also be accomplished at JCCs, Jewish social service agencies and other educational institutions in the Jewish community).  Synagogues, congregations, houses of worship are uniquely positioned to be the cataloguers, experimenters, store houses, creators and disseminators  – laboratories, if you will – for the tools and technologies of transcendence; for creating the opportunities and methods by which Jews and fellow travelers experience moments of connection, the presence of the divine, a touch of the holy in our otherwise ordinary lives. 

As Michaelson concludes his article: “Jewish religious practice is a technology for waking up to life.”  The synagogue is the storehouse: You are invited to come in and use it.

Elyse Wechterman is the Rabbi at Congregation Agudas Achim in Attleboro, MA, a Synaplex congregation, and also an alumna of STAR’s PEER program.

Most congregations are structured to sap the spiritual energy of rabbis (and cantors for that matter). Think about it: when was the last time you remember a congregant saying to a rabbi, “Rabbi, your SQ (spirituality quotient) could use a little more zip. Have you taken your spiritual temperature lately?”

So writes Rabbi Hayim Herring in his latest Tools for Shuls blog post.  Please read more, and post your Comments.  They will be used to shape his upcoming book Tools for Shuls: A Guide to Make Over Your Synagogue. If your idea is used, you will be credited in the book, of course!

Photo from Flickr.com Orbital Joe

Many Americans see recent political developments against the back-drop of our country’s less-than-exemplary racial history.  In this bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth we have reached a new mountain top of equality for people of color – and all minorities – in this “home of the free.”  For Jews, it is always important to remember that as much as “we have arrived” by achieving lofty places and stellar achievements in virtually every realm of society, we nonetheless remain a minority in America. It is unjust and unwise for us to think that we can disassociate ourselves from “the other.”  We owe much to the United States, none of which ought to be taken for granted.

That’s one of the reasons I’m happy that Exodus and Emancipation: Biblical and African-American Slavery has been published by Urim Publications (Jerusalem and New York: 2009).  Rabbi Dr. Kenneth Chelst of Wayne State University in Detroit has conducted an original and thorough study and produced a compelling account of these two linked experiences.  Although separated by 3,000 years and half a world, the parallels and convergences are historically illuminating as well as useful in grasping the truth that Dr. King spoke: “We must learn to live together as brothers or we will perish together as fools.”

As a companion for depth-study of the Torah’s passages describing the bondage of Egypt; as a springboard for dialogue with African-American churches; as a source-book for re-introducing content to American civic holidays beyond barbeques, baseball and outings to the shopping mall; and even as a theme for next year’s Synaplex Shabbat coinciding with MLK, Jr.’s Birthday, I heartily commend Exodus and Emancipation to you.

Richard Wagner
Brownstone Brooklyn Plus Synaplex Coordinator

STAR Executive Director Rabbi Hayim Herring’s Tools for Shuls blog gives you a chance to comment on weekly posts, which will be used to shape his upcoming book Tools for Shuls: A Guide to Make Over Your Synagogue. If your idea is used, you will be credited in the book.

This week’s post reflects upon and asks for your thoughts on how to define spirituality.

One of the primary goals of the synagogue or minyan (prayer quorum), is to create a spiritual community. Pardon the comparison, but in thinking about how to define the term spiritual, I remember the words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who said of pornography, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced [by it] but I know it when I see it.” Words like spiritual and spirituality are vague words as well, but while challenging to define, you know them when you feel them.  Read more.

Image from Flickr.com  alicepopkorn