AMBIVALENCE TO OUR CONGREGATION’S FORESEEABLE MORTALITY

Finding a prime parking space went effortlessly. Selecting a round table from among about ten, some fully occupied, some unoccupied, some with vacant chairs and empty tabletop required more discernment. So began my entry to our Congregational Barbeque. Its purpose was unclear which can make it difficult to review later to assess its benefits but from a budgetary perspective, which all members get to read and vote upon at the Congregational Annual Meeting, it looked like a purposeful investment in enhancing either conceptual identification with the synagogue or perhaps a more lofty and tangible pursuit of better engaging members like me who have the capacity to do more than we do on the synagogue’s behalf but have not yet been invited, and for a few of us, perhaps me, intentionally shunned. Synagogues have a mortality with warning symptoms, usually running out of money or running out of people.

Having contracted with an established Kosher caterer, the food of traditional burgers and hot dogs were set out in their chafing dishes with buns to the left and sides to the right. One hot dog, one beefburger, no veggie burger, a scoop of potato salad, one of cole slaw and Heinz squeeze packets of sweet relish, mustard, and ketchup all atop a cardboard plate with a couple of napkins and plastic utensils provided the needed calories for an early Sunday afternoon supper. I selected a mostly empty table with one person already seated, a fellow like me not particularly engaged or happy with our experiences, followed by myself, and later another fellow, a physician like myself, who comes enough to be familiar though either not invited to be a more frequent participant, or invited but declined. If the purpose was to delay demise by enhancing engagement, we were the table for the honchos to visit. None did. Not the Rabbi. Not the President. Zero VPs. Just our self-assembling collection of nobodies partaking of an early fleishig dinner.

One VP at the next table responded to a person at my table, a fellow who had been dealt a challenging congenital hand, who thought he and a household member had been mistreated. Rather than empathy she explained why the other fellow was excluded from the picnic and as designated driver for his disabled brother had to stay in the hot car in the parking lot while he and the rest of us ate. Personally, I would have been a sport, gone over to the car, offered the fellow assigned to Cherem a plate from the buffet that the rest of us were enjoying, and not been vindictive in any way in this setting. People have reasons to be dissatisfied. No better way to run out of people, one of those synagogue death knells, than to irritate them enough to depart. Telling them they are wrong just seemed unbecoming of a VP as it would be to me as a doctor taught to acknowledge the validity of unhappy patients. On the other hand, that Torah from which we read regularly has its periodic vindictive mandates. But other than that, there was no conversation about the synagogue, how we assessed our relationships to it, let alone how they could be enhanced with prolongation of its life. If that was the purpose of this budgetary investment, it didn’t materialize. If it was to throw a lifeline to a contracting congregation, it could have but didn’t.

There is a publicly available literature houses of worship approaching their final years. For some their best course may be death with dignity, allocating assets to congregations of comparable mission whose future is more secure or at least would be more reversible with those assets. Other congregations, mine among them, dwindled in membership. There is a Governance that for years equated membership with financial resources but is first being forced to grapple with a reality that averting institutional death also requires more than a few increasingly inbred congregational champions or a Rabbi who means well. By cashing in those white elephants like buildings, the clergy can have paychecks that don’t bounce. Depending on the proceeds, sometimes a race emerges to determine whether the funds or the people deplete first. As long as there are people, though, the Governance has to explore its most basic core values. Too often, those still present form cliques that tell each other what a laudable effort they make while those who watch from the peanut gallery, if still present at all, roll their eyes perhaps. It is not just that these congregations, likely mine too, approach their actuarial ends, but dismiss out of hand anything that can be interpreted as imposition.

So it went that afternoon. I learned that the caterer, one who had performed so ably for my son’s Bar Mitzvah 22 years earlier and had become a regional resource, opted to close after this gig. Might my congregation have the energy to rev up our kitchen as partial compensation? After all, with an aging membership we have a large but unknown number of people who dine alone most nights, including Shabbos. The cater took orders weekly, but these people will now need other arrangements. We have a kitchen; we have people who are retired but fully functional. Do we have a responsibility to serve people in their late life Judaism? When I posed this to a former President as I made a few rounds to other tables, my suggestion was dismissed out of hand, too much trouble to even consider, as were many of my suggestions to move beyond the familiar in the past.

If the purpose were to enhance engagement, I would have expected a table in a conspicuous area of the barbeque field with a sign-up sheet for people not currently engaged to look at the committees and activities that would welcome them. I’m not even sure that the officers really have a list of groups or the last time any chairman of any committee extended an invitation to solicit the talent or energy of somebody not already present. My best guess is never, my more accurate guess may be almost never.

What we had among the BBQ attendance is not exactly the finality of death but not the vibrance that once was either. Senescence predictably overtakes individuals. It should not overtake collections of people who one of our Sages remarked, never look alike, sound alike, or think alike. But sometimes we seem to. That becomes the marker of death, not yet final but of easily recognizable appearance.

Judaism depends upon key figures, people of stature in Torah times, Prophets later, then Rabbis, and now a more diverse collection of what our organizations nurture as leaders or at least people of title. Amid many historical cruelties, we have not died, but we also often didn’t give it our best shot either. Gathering a congregation to be a congregation could have been our best shot to enhance longevity. It wasn’t.