Super Sunday Call

My call came unexpectedly. My wife answered our landline, then transferred it to me, though she could have very well handled it herself. While we’ve known the caller for decades, a most personable sincere fellow of about our age, the agency he represented, our local Jewish Federation chapter, carried considerable baggage of adverse past experience that I thought we had long since left behind. My wife did not want the call, particularly since the donation to that agency got authorized in recent Octobers by me. And for an amount that probably has one zero less at the end and a different digit at the beginning than their Campaign Chairman trained their callers to ask for. I picked up the phone.

It had been decades since they called me on Super Sunday, the day designated for fundraising by our region’s Jewish umbrella agency to support communal projects. Nothing particularly objectionable about the description and intent of any single funded project. I’ve not been cheap, not at all. Since going on the Do Not Call List in the 1990s, I created my own Tzedakah process which distributes far more money than any caller would have asked of me, or that I actually gave to the Annual Campaign for many years before opting out. Just not to their pool for their machers to distribute to places where my personal Jewish experience bottomed out. Or to paraphrase what the Buddha advised his followers, if what you are told, no matter how esteemed the messenger, differs from your experience, act on what you personally encountered. Contemptible Jewish experiences probably stand out by their rarity, but even Isaiah recognized that people of title and prestige were sometimes the ones who carry Judaism’s banner in the worst way. So important did our Sages find this observation that it became the Haftarah for Yom Kippur, our Holiest Day.

So what did my old friend, not seen in several years, and I chat about for ten minutes? My wife had taken care of the small talk. How’s the wife? How’s the kids? Go Iggles later that day. The business part got delegated to me. We are both parts of our communities, similar ages. Him attached to his synagogue and communal agencies, me a defector from his synagogue and the agency he represented that day, though migrating to a different synagogue and different communal agencies. Same reason, he accepted the reality of leadership and his place in the Jewish strata, me unwilling to watch those same machers swoop down to wrangle obedience from those of lesser professional and economic circumstances. Departure for cause is not abandonment, though it can be interpreted that way. It is that interpretation that we talked about. And we spoke about true abandonment, which has become distressingly prevalent in each of our Jewish worlds over our adult lifetimes.

His call to me had a purpose, to get me to pledge money in an amount greater than what they had received a few months before. If he had a script given to him by campaign directors to shake down the most possible from those answering the phone, my old friend did not read it to me, though he may have to my wife who originally answered the call. The financial part was straightforward. I repackaged and personalized my Tzedakah process so as to not have to deal with the movers and shakers that he represented yet remain generous to protecting the vulnerable among us and providing for some of the needs of the State of Israel. I share the amounts with the IRS, not with him. And having now done this successfully for about 25 years, I deem this one of my life’s most important successes. On October 20 each year I assign three big donations to my Visa Card, two Jewish. His has been one of them the last few years after a long absence. No challenge to the need for the community to raise and allocate funds.

We spoke about mistreatment, often callous in the form of “you owe us”. We spoke of attrition. Some of it is Leadership Generated Attrition. Each of our synagogues has gotten smaller, mine considerably so, and mine with most of its membership coming aboard in the 1980s without meaningful replacement. America has acquired Jewish Nones during that interval, a considerable fraction of them Bar Mitzvahed on the Bimah of his congregation, though still with enough Jewish identity to be generous with their time in promoting the types of social justice that our Torah brought to humanity, though without the presence in the Jewish agencies that perhaps could have been. And while this institutional depopulation occurred, there were office holders, executives, dedicated committee volunteers, rabbi’s all in place. They pursued expediency. And too often I bore witness to breaches of kindness, rationalizing it myself at times, though always with a measure of discomfort, until becoming the victim of a person of too lofty a title to be challenged.

Contraction has already threatened many a previously stable Jewish institution. A distressing number of American synagogues really have experienced forced closures, some running out of money, some running out of people. And our vital agencies also depend on both. Our Jewish educational outcomes require investments in tuition and also the presence of qualified teachers, each threatened in some communities. Israel depends on people willing to purchase Bonds on Kol Nidre when they could be investing in something else. Our museums need to pay curators and attract visitors. But as my conversation with my old friend in his volunteer capacity proceeded, it moved to failure to nurture Good Will in the best way. When a doctor or accountant sells his practice, the value of the sale depends on the loyalty that clients had. What our leadership failed to prioritize was that parallel good will, often imprinted at the earliest encounters. Our Bar Mitzvah clergy may have played favorites. Perhaps that’s where our leaders learned this. What they didn’t learn was where the Expediency Model fails. People will remember their exclusions, whether from the USY clique or later from a synagogue committee, all occurring in the presence of a youth director or a congregational VP oversighting that committee. Our news media has made us all aware of Pay to Play. Bad reputation for a Jewish agency to acquire, though many do. So we concluded our chat with the difference between being useful and being important. One is dependent on skills or other assets. The other is a more inherent attribute that leaders assign universally or withhold selectively. It was withheld from me at a time when I was most vulnerable.

Judaism also places a premium on memory. Our Shabbat Evening Kiddush focuses on memory twice. Memory takes multiple forms which have more intersections than the Venn Diagrams we encountered in school. For us individually, how we were treated. While it is tempting for baalebatim of synagogues and Jewish agencies to chalk up the aggrieved to being inferior in some ways, the reality shows many of us vibrant in our workplaces or our recreational pursuits. Whether abandonment or repackaging our Jewish destinies based on personal encounters, the contentment with something else usually emerges. From our communal perspective, our heritage gives us a dual message. First, remember when times were better. There are the glories of the Davidic Kingdom whose restoration we petition in our daily Amidah and there are times in our own lifetimes when our synagogue treasurer could approach a bank optimistically for a mortgage on a stellar edifice as our base for worship, study, and assembly. We remember both. Yet we also have a legacy of confronting the reality that we have, whether a controversial decision of a premier Sage to commit the Mishna to writing lest it fade away or the more modern transformations to assess what failed to best represent our community or express value to its participants. Perhaps the leadership so heavily invested was too inbred with recessive traits expressed or perhaps we have our share of Dunning-Krugers whose capacity is overestimated. Perhaps we were too timid to schect some Sacred Cows. But just as our ancestors had to draw on their memories of better situations, correct the correctable, and set sights ahead for a different set of Jewish SMART goals, my conversation with my old friend suggests a hesitance to reframe what has not gone well. And until they are willing to really be as inviting as the branding slogans want to convey, the number of contributors and acquiring the best vision of what might be possible will not reverse what has been a trajectory of less than what might have been possible.