The Nice People in Tulsa

Congregation B'nai Emunah in Tulsa, OK, welcomed Pastor Corey Brooks on his Walk Across America to End Gun Violence. 

Pastor Brooks taught and shared a meal with the enthusiastic students in third through sixth grades. 

Congregation B'nai Emunah - a kehilla with the email address "thenicepeople@tulsagogue.com" - opened their doors as part of Operation Tent of Abraham and Sarah, United Synagogue's initiative to encourage Conservative Jews to support and join Pastor Brooks on his walk across the country. 

Kehilla at the Beach

About 400 people gathered on the beach in Ventnor, NJ, on Friday night, pairing the sounds of crashing waves and screeching sea gulls with the music of Rick Recht and local cantors. Devotion by the Ocean, sponsored  by Congregation Beth Judah in cooperation with many other area synagogues, is a monthly summertime gift. Here's how it works: put on your sunglasses and flip flops, bring a folding chair or a beach towel to the Newport Avenue beach, and welcome Shabbat in a place where, as Hazzan Jeffrey Myers says, "It's easy to find east. Turn towards the ocean."

The Philadelphia area Jewish community fills the shore towns in South Jersey, particularly on Absecon Island, below Atlantic City, in the summer. It's possible to walk on the boardwalk in the morning and run into two or three Philly neighbors, shul friends or coworkers in a mile stretch. We joined the ranks of Ventnor vacation home owners in June 2010.

I found my way to Beth Judah when my mother died two months after buying our house. My happiest memories of my mom were from family vacations at the beach, so my siblings and I preferred to go there to remember her following her funeral. Rabbi Neil Cooper of my home congregation, Temple Beth Hillel/Beth El, contacted Rabbi Aaron Gaber at Beth Judah and let him know that I would be sitting shiva at the shore rather than in my community in Pennsylvania. I walked into the morning minyan at Beth Judah and was warmly welcomed, acknowledged, invited to lead a prayer, asked about my mother. People remembered my name whenever I went back. My husband and I became associate members the following summer.

Maybe there's something special about shore shuls. The ebb and flow of Jewish community, with new faces appearing in the summer months and disappearing in the fall, might make their members keenly aware of newcomers. Maybe the year-round residents get accustomed to communally sharing physical and psychic space with strangers. That translates to a different sense of who is inside the circle and who is outside.

What I found this weekend at Beth Judah was a pleasantly mysterious dose of being brought inside.

This week will mark the anniversary of the death of my brother, Richard, who passed away suddenly in 1998 at the age of 52. As I stood up to say kaddish at Devotion by the Ocean, I was grateful for the chance to remember him, bring him into my happy present moment, imagining him here with our brother and sister, the four of us enjoying the shore with our spouses, children and grandchildren together.

The next morning at services, Bruce, Beth Judah's vice president who was arranging for honors, came up to me and asked, "Since you're observing a yahrzeit today, would you like to take the fourth aliya?"

How did he know? I'm going to assume he had a list of the members who would be saying kaddish, and, as an associate member, I would be on that list. If so, he had to keep an eye out for us, even if we are not there every week or even every month.

It's one way to answer the question I posed in a previous post about how communities might show that they save a place for someone who isn't there. Like Shirley in my story, who moved away from her Iowa community and was given her old phone number when she moved back, this was an important moment for me. Bruce was prepared to bring me into the circle of the community, even if he couldn't be sure I would be there. Shirley thought the phone company saved her phone number, but maybe it was coincidence that it was still available. Maybe my experience was coincidence, too, and Bruce saw me stand up the night before to say kaddish at Devotion by the Ocean. Really, though, I don't have to know how it happened that Bruce approached me. I felt it as welcoming, embracing and an acknowledgment of my loss. Even though I'm a summer resident, they save my place even when I'm not there.

Does it matter if it was a formal policy or an attentive vice president? I don't think so. Bruce's action shows me that Beth Judah's leaders understand the importance of looking for opportunities to create connections. I think it's the intentionality of it that makes kehilla (sacred community) come alive.

Critical Friends Listen

I was on retreat again this week, this time with United Synagogue's CEO, Rabbi Steven Wernick, and six other senior staff members. We made time for the "balcony space" that Bob Leventhal writes about in the Sulam for Current Leaders module, The Leadership Plan:

Ronald Heifetz describes the requirement for leaders to occupy the “balcony space” and thus to gain perspective by viewing events from a more removed vantage point. High above the organizational stage, a group of people can get out of “reactive space,” (the constraining mindset of responding to immediate issues), and move onto the balcony to see the pattern.

For 28 hours, we moved to two balconies  - a front porch and a second floor deck of a house in New Jersey - to get away from our routine progress reports and next-step planning. We brought our goals for the year, and by the end of the two days together, we found the pattern that links all of our work.

Being able to see patterns, though, requires more than getting physically away from routine. It means learning a different way of interacting with each other. Regular meetings, (and our team meets twice a week), are no guarantee that all of the members deeply understand what other people are working on or how it intersects with what they're doing. If anything, regular meetings can reinforce behaviors of selective attention. (Think of a synagogue board meeting when the rabbi gives the d'var Torah, and how many people immediately pull out their cell phones to check their email.)

Listening requires putting aside a few irresistible things. First is outside distraction. Most of us have become addicted multi-taskers; our cell phones call us even when no one is calling. A retreat experience allows us to impose rules, like putting away our devices, that aren't present at other times. How did we ever have dinner with a friend before we could also check on how our other friends are doing? Maybe that's an objective behind a restaurant in Beverly Hills that's giving 5% discounts to patrons who give up their cell phones at the door before their dinner experience.

The second is the ego-centric intrusion of thoughts about ourselves as we listen to someone else's stories. Brain science is giving us insight into the complex process that's involved. I wonder, though, if we also learn that the shortcut to understanding someone else's story is to associate it with our own. The impact of that is not hearing or understanding someone else's. Active listening involves short-circuiting our inclination to inject our own story into what we're hearing.

So for 28 hours, the United Synagogue senior staff imposed upon ourselves a listening technique called a "Critical Friends Protocol,"  first developed by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. It requires something that we all find difficult: listening for extended periods of time, without interruption, before being allowed to ask questions or offer suggestions.

The process works something like this: A presenter has 30 minutes to talk about his/her topic. The group listens without interrupting. The group then has 15 minutes to ask clarifying questions, and the presenter answers their questions. Then the group has 15 minutes to give their feedback, suggestions, insights, and recommendations while the presenter listens without interrupting or answering. In our retreat, presenters had a final 5 minutes to give a summary to the group of what they heard or appreciated about the comments.

We teach a condensed version of this to presidents, again in retreat, at Sulam for Presidents. Called the "Art of Asking," it requires people to listen intently to a partner without interruption. We process with the group how it feels to speak uninterrupted, (strange at first), and to listen without interrupting, (strange at first). But throughout the retreat, as we practice the technique, it changes relationships and opens everyone up to learning.

Listening is a crucial skill for presidents, but it should not begin when a person becomes a high level leader. For that reason, the Art of Asking is incorporated into our Sulam for Emerging Leaders program. What would happen if people become experts at listening years before they sit at our board tables? How will board interactions change? How will interactions change in our communities?

At this point, though, I also know that the skill of listening isn't something that you learn in retreat or at a workshop and then consistently do afterwards. We'll see if our team members can even retain it at our next regularly scheduled meeting on Monday. But we have active listening as a shared experience that we can refer back to. We have a language for it now, and can remember how we do it when we need it in the future.

As in the kehillot we work with, we expect that small changes in each individual, and the group's ability to call upon what we learned together, will have impacts in our relationships throughout our system.

Setting the Table for New Leaders

20 board members from Germantown Jewish Centre in Philadelphia took time out on a Thursday evening in the middle of the summer to think about who will take their places in the future. 

It's not new for boards of directors to ask the question, "Who will join us at the board table?" What is refreshing is that boards like GJC's are coming to the realization that there is a question that comes before it: How do we set the table for new leaders? 

Regeneration is core to GJC's story. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, when the number of Jews in Philadelphia's Mt. Airy neighborhood decreased, a hearty group of well educated, Jewishly active and knowledgable young adults - we called them "hippies" then -  created a chavurah. They were welcomed into Germantown Jewish Centre and given meeting space by Rabbi Elias Charry, GJC's rabbi from 1942 until 1973. His board didn't like it. They argued that these young people weren't paying dues, so why should they be given space of their own? And they weren't even davenning with the rest of the congregation!

30 years later, Minyan Masorti continues as GJC's Conservative minyan, and, in addition to a sanctuary service, a Reconstructionist minyan, Dorshe Derech, lives comfortably under the GJC roof. Their independent young chavurah leaders of the 1970's eventually became GJC members, board members and presidents, and shaped the next 40 years of Germantown Jewish Centre.  

Today, with two dynamic rabbis, Rabbi Adam Zeff and Rabbi Annie Lewis, a stable Jewish population in the neighborhood, an excellent preschool program and a large cadre of active new members under 45 years old, GJC is at another turning point.  

They will be one of about 35 kehillot that will launch Sulam for Emerging Leaders (SEL) in the fall. SEL is United Synagogue's leadership development resource to strengthen the relationships and engagement of new members and those who have not stepped into leadership yet. The pillars of the program are Jewish study, reflection and action centered on celebrating Shabbat. "Setting the table" becomes the metaphorical thread through the entire experience, as participants enjoy Shabbat dinner together and then reach out to others in the community.

The dozen rabbis and their training partners who tested the curriculum last year gave it rave reviews. It seems to be doing what we hoped - bringing people closer together, and helping them look at how they prioritize their spare time, especially time for the sacred. (A first year report will be released by our evaluators, Dr. Steven Cohen and Dr. Ezra Kopelowicz, in December 2012.)

We expect that deeper relationships will generate a sense of responsibility towards the community, and that SEL graduates will step forward into leadership as they're ready. But it's clear that no matter how close new members become to each other, they won't move towards leadership unless service to the community is meaningful and relevant. And what we know is that the governance and operational structures, the committee meetings, reports and wheel spinning that baby boomers and the generation before them created is not what the younger folks will tolerate.

Germantown Jewish Centre's president, Mitch Marcus, recognized the opportunity for his board to face this generational dynamic as they recruit emerging leaders for Sulam.  I had the privilege and fun of facilitating the discussion. Board members, ranging in age from 39 to about 75, compared the life experiences of the four generations that are in our synagogue communities and how that would affect what we called the "Four R's" of engagement - relationship, recruitment, relevance and recognition. 

We uncovered potential conflicts among the generations in some of the most innocent places. One under-40 board member pointed out, for example, that our workshop time - a Thursday night at 7:30 - was inconvenient for people who have to put children to bed. I could see the people over 55 remembering when their kids were young, rushing through dinner, bath time and story time so they could get to Thursday night meetings at the shul. The expectation that leaders would prioritize their time in that way doesn't hold up for the generations we wish to bring forward in the future.

GJC's board came up with a number of ideas for how they will support the Sulam for Emerging Leaders program. First is that they will give the participants time and space to create relationships among themselves. Most important, as board members they will continue their own work to re-think how they operate so that the the next generation will join them at the leadership table.

Entering our Tents

  

Three stories came to my attention this week. What do they have in common?

• Pastor Corey Brooks continued on his Walk Across America to end gun violence, and was welcomed last Shabbat at Congregation B'nai Amoona in St. Louis. According to Mueriel Carp, United Synagogue's Central District Chair, "The congregants of B’nai Amoona were proud to offer hospitality to Pastor Brooks and his group during their stay in St. Louis.  After his talk, Pastor Brooks met individually with members of the kehilla, and many of those pledged their financial support for Project HOOD."

• Marsha Davis, President of Beth El Temple in Harrisburg, PA, went on a listening tour of her kehilla as she began her term in June. She has been holding "Community Conversations" in people's homes, and was pleasantly surprised by how many people volunteered to host them. She said, "I'm getting to know congregants, what they need, and they get to be able to write their positive suggestions about what they would wish for from our community. I provide them with questionnaires and I'm compiling the sugggestions because I dont't want to take back my interpretation of what I heard. I want it to be their words."

• My friend, Shirley, left Jefferson, IA, and moved in with her son's family in California after her husband died. She jumped right in to helping care for his two young children. Five years later, she has developed macular degeneration, leaving her partially blind. She moved back to Iowa to be closer to her daughters as she finds she needs help now. When she called the phone company for a new phone, the customer service representative said, "How about if we give you your old number, Shirley? We saved it for you in case you came back so you wouldn't have to learn a new one."

These are three stories of relationships that range from how we open our communities to strangers, to how we re-connect with the people we think we know, to the unbelievable, yet somewhat true, story of knowing someone so well that organizational obstacles are overcome to help her, even if we lose track of her for awhile.

I watched Pastor Brooks' progress across the country because United Synagogue supports his efforts in what we're calling Operation Tent of Abraham and Sarah, a reference to Abraham's welcoming of strangers in Genesis 18. He started in New York, was greeted in Newark, NJ, but his path from New Jersey to Chicago didn't have much formal engagement with Conservative synagogues. 

As United Synagogue staff and volunteers contacted people along the way, we learned that it takes more than just positive, supportive intentions to bring people to action. It takes a sense of urgency. Advance notice, tv coverage and twitter haven't made it easier for communities to send people out to hear the message of a passing pastor. Encouraging whole communities to respond to an external event asks them to move aside their regular planning cycle and activate a communications and mobilization network that may or may not exist. Most of our kehillot along the way expressed support, but not necessarily with action that was visible. As he heads west, and our kehillot have had more time to prepare, we're seeing more activation. 

Congregational conversations or parlor meetings also get organized when there is an external push or urgency, like strategic planning or a rabbinic search. Marsha's listening tour comes from her motivation to align goals with action, something she and other presidents dug into at United Synagogue's Sulam for Presidents, and to make sure that she is clear about what her community wants. Marsha is building relationships while she accomplishes what she says is, "More joy...less oy."

What are we to make of the phone company in Jefferson, IA, though? Regardless of whether or not I believe Shirley that the phone company kept her phone number for her, that's how Shirley experienced it. Her move from the little Iowa community where she raised her children, to the big city in California, and back created no sense of urgency for anyone. But to Shirley, even the phone company was trying to help her through what is a monumental change in her life, equal to the death of her husband.

I see all three stories in terms of how we continually build relationships so that it doesn't take an external threat or sense of urgency before we can live kehilla as a verb. 

How can we be like the phone company that Shirley imagines, so aware of her life that our entire community plans for and saves her a place even when she's not there?