Sunday, February 16, 2014

When "Size" Means "Bigger Than Yourself"

Last Sunday and Monday, before Atlanta shut down, (again), from ice and snow, leaders from half of the largest Conservative congregations on the continent came together for a conversation at Ahavath Achim Synagogue. This was the third Large Congregations Conference sponsored by United Synagogue, and was, by all measures, the most productive and forward-thinking.

Here's why: It didn't allow large congregations to focus only on themselves.

The conference program, designed by USCJ staff in partnership with the attendees, allowed time to learn and share with each other about synagogue leadership, governance and operational issues. But presentations pushed the envelope from self-help to helping others.
  • Rabbi Steven Wernick began with an in-depth explanation of the implications of the Pew Study on Conservative Judaism.
  • Rabbi Noah Farkas described using community organizing as a tool for creating relationships outside the walls of the synagogue.
  • Jeff Goodell, vice president of government affairs for Jet Blue, compared a large congregation to an airline.
  • An interdenominational panel, featuring Rabbi Neil Sandler, senior rabbi at Ahavath Achim, Rabbi Peter Berg, senior rabbi of Atlanta's Reform congregation, The Temple, and Reverend Pam Driesell, senior pastor at Trinity Presbyterian, discussed the opportunities and gifts of large congregations.  
And, in an inspiring closing presentation, Rabbi Michael Siegel, senior rabbi of Anshe Emet in Chicago, brought the program elements together by challenging the leaders of large congregations to understand their responsibilities for building the Jewish community of the future.  He described Anshe Emet's ground-breaking steps to collaborate and build community, like once-a-month hosting of the independent minyan, Mishkan Chicago, and outlined four obligations that large congregations have because of their capacities and influence: Experimentation, Cooperation, Coordination and Creation.

See more of the story below.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Conservative Judaism's New Trim Tab Leaders

(Cross-posted in eJewish Philanthropy.)

Next month, about 60 incoming and current synagogue presidents will go on retreat with United Synagogue staff in our Sulam for Presidents program. (Sulam means “ladder” in Hebrew.) Coming from all over the continent, their congregations will differ in size and pressing issues, but as individuals, the presidents will be very similar. They'll be excited, honored to be taking on this sacred responsibility, and not quite sure how to prioritize the changes that need to happen in their synagogue communities.

One former Sulam president summed it up this way: "My congregation has given me a conflicting message. They're saying, 'Please change everything, but don't change anything.'"

Where would you begin?

Franklin Covey
took on that question in 2009 with the sailing metaphor of a trim tab. (Buckminster Fuller also famously has “Call Me Trimtab” inscribed on his headstone.) For those of us who know nothing more about a ship than that the captain goes down with it, here's all you need to understand for now: A rudder turns the ship. With a very large ship, picture a rudder the height of your house, and try to imagine the energy that needs to be exerted on it in order to change direction. A trim tab is a tiny rudder attached to the big main one. Maneuvering the trim tab will turn the large rudder, and the whole ship, with more ease and less resistance than trying to turn it directly.

Covey encouraged each of us to become organizational trim tabs, making small but strategic changes in the areas in which we are most able. “Your small actions, your work in your circle of influence can create, over time, a big impact on your organization.” If aligned with an overall vision, the changes from a few trim tab leaders can affect the whole system.

But here's the challenge in synagogues: Presidents aren't likely to be trim tab leaders. Even with the best intentions and carefully crafted short term goals, once they take their place, synagogue presidents are barraged with the three B's of operations: Buildings, Budgets, and Business-As-Usual. For that reason, we teach presidents how to set the structure and process that would allow small, strategic changes to be made by others, and to keep the ship going in the right direction.

Then the question becomes, where do presidents find the people who will be their trim tab leaders? It’s fair to say that a new generation of leaders is not eagerly lining up for their turn at the helm of our shuls. For the last three years we at United Synagogue have been working on this challenge with a group of 50 synagogues looking for a way to bring potential leaders forward.  The results are more than encouraging. In fact, I believe we are watching a new generation of trim tab leaders emerge from the nearly 1,000 participants we expect to go through the program by the end of the year. 

The approach we’re using to engage this new cohort is called Sulam for Emerging Leaders. The essential element of the program is that synagogue leaders actively identify and recruit people they think have leadership potential, not once these folks are on the leadership ladder but before they’ve even stepped on the first rung.

To participate in SEL, synagogues must have a rabbi or cantor and a lay leader who commit to leading the program for a year, as well as a cohort of about a dozen potential leaders who agree to participate. (The target age range for participants is 35-45.)  United Synagogue then trains the clergy and lay leader teams to use our six-session curriculum with their groups. SEL takes place in their home communities, and focuses on building relationships through Jewish learning, personal reflection, and shared experiences.  Hosting Shabbat dinner, for instance, is a simple and powerful requirement of the program. The SEL curriculum is designed to help participants face head-on the forces that compete for time in their lives, especially "sacred time." Then the lens progressively moves from the personal to the communal.

Drs. Steven Cohen and Ezra Kopelowicz are independent evaluators who have studied Sulam for Emerging Leaders and its impact from its inception. The results have been remarkable. The first report in 2012 showed that the program reached the target age group and positively affected the participants’ feelings of connection with their clergy and one another. T
he second year evaluation, just completed, tracked the engagement of the participants immediately after the program. Here is what surprised even those of us with high hopes for the concept: 80% of participants increased their engagement with the synagogue, but 52% stepped right into leadership roles.

What kind of leaders will these emerging leaders be? How can we know they'll ask the right questions and focus on more than just the three B's of synagogue business as usual?

We're getting clues that they will. This year, the training teams in SEL synagogues are asking their groups a simple, yet critical, question at the end of every session, and sharing the answers with us. Participants are being asked, "What questions emerge from our discussion today that you'd like to know more about?" Here are the types of things this year's emerging leaders are curious about, after only one or two sessions:
  • How can we be most inclusive?
  • How do we fulfill the needs of the community when needs are so disparate?
  • What are the ramifications of our decisions?
  • What compromises do we make?
  • Where does Judaism fit in?
  • How can we set a good example?
  • What if setting a good example is not enough?
These questions reflect a shared language that comes straight from the curriculum. The idea of gatekeepers, for instance, is from the first session’s text study, and I can already see that these emerging leaders are not only looking at community through the lens of openness and inclusion, but also questioning how their own actions can make a difference. This is the essence of a trim tab leader, as described by Covey: “Simply by focusing on what you can do even if it’s outside of your job description and make small adjustments and improvements along the way.”

Our Sulam team's goal of continuous improvement of the program led us to add a seventh session this year to the SEL curriculum. It will give each group that chooses to continue to learn together a chance to explore answers to their questions and understand more about the dynamics of their home communities. How each group approaches this learning will shape the shared values and vision that will prepare them for every rung of their Sulam leadership ladder.

Here’s the question I’ll be asking during the next five years:  As the number of emerging leaders in Conservative kehillot moves into the thousands, how will they turn not only the ship of Conservative Judaism, but the Jewish Community as a whole?


Monday, February 3, 2014

Interfaith Marriage G-3

This is going to be a very personal post.

Our son just gave us the wonderful news that he and his beautiful girlfriend are getting married. (Date TBD.) We are almost as thrilled as the day of his birth, (and I am much less tired). I couldn't have picked a more perfect soul mate for my son than his beloved. And, believe me, before she came into his life, I tried. And tried.

In the ten minutes it took for me to put a dozen proverbial wedding carriages before the horse, I imagined going with my future daughter-in-law to pick out her dress, handing over my invitation list for our side of the family with 200 names, (just like my mother-in-law did for my wedding) and being summarily denied, (just like my mother-in-law was not). Then as my mind wandered to my husband and I walking our son down the aisle, I was startled by a realization: I don't know what that aisle will look like. My son is marrying a woman who is not Jewish.

Please don't jump to any conclusions about my saying that, and stay with me. I was not Jewish when my husband and I met. I went through conversion before we got married, and went later with my children to the mikvah when we joined a Conservative synagogue. (This is a long story that I won't detail in this blog post, except to say that I will always be grateful to Rabbi Neil Cooper for his guidance and support of our family's Jewish identity.)

My husband grew up in a Conservative home, and AFTER we announced to our parents that we were getting married, he realized that it was important to him to have Jewish children. However, in 1982, all he knew was that children were only considered Jewish if their mothers were Jewish. The Reform movement rabbis would announce their acceptance of patrilineal descent one year later, in 1983. And my husband had no idea that Reconstructionist rabbis had accepted it in 1968. So he asked me if I would be willing to convert to Judaism. My personal affiliation at that time was a Buddhist/Humanist combo, having moved away from the Christianity of my family of origin years before. I knew nothing about Judaism and I loved this guy. So I said, "Sure, why not?"

Our wedding was beautiful and inclusive. We got married on Halloween, with a woman rabbi officiating, and it made both our non-Jewish and Jewish family members equally uncomfortable and confused.

Our decisions about how to raise our children came easily because we continued to agree on one basic value: Our kids would be Jewish. We could think of no other way to approach this than the way we chose, which was to begin with a two-parent Jewish household. My husband and I had no idea what it meant in practice. We had to learn, build and create our Jewish home with intention (and negotiation) every day. Years later, I would find out that we weren't much different than parents who were both born Jewish.

My rabbi asked me about 20 years ago if I would be hurt if any of my sons married a non-Jewish woman. I recall saying, "Of course, I would. I didn't go through all of this, and work so hard at creating a Jewish home, for them to put it all aside."

I think about who I was when I said that. I was in the middle of my own identity formation. I was learning about Judaism while at the same time teaching not only my children but my husband, whose identity was formed less by Jewish practice and more by immersion in Jewish ethnicity.

A lot has changed in 32 years.

In the world of 1982, the value neutral language of Spouse Jewish and Spouse Not-Jewish used in the recent Pew Study didn't exist, but the word shiksa did, and wasn't hip or used tongue-in-cheek. "Non-Jewish parents raising Jewish children," were not talked about, and they were certainly not an ordinary sight in congregations. Today, non-Jews are so active in our shuls that one of the most lively discussions last month on United Synagogue's presidents' list serve was about recognition of non-Jews as members of our kehillot, and questioning to what extent by-laws should reflect the roles of non-Jews in the governance of our synagogues.

In our family, our children and their cousins call themselves G-3, (Generation 3), counting the generations from their grandparents, to my husband and his siblings, to themselves. Their collective Jewish identification, as I have written before, falls on the continuum from ultra-Orthodox to "none." In 1982, we never imagined this diverse Jewish world and the variety of ways our family would experience Judaism.

I am not going to ask my son (yet) about his thoughts about raising Jewish children. He needs to do some other things that are also on the list for bringing naches to Jewish mothers and fathers - like getting a Ph.D. in neurobiology in June.

The road to raising children with Jewish identity is different from the one onto which his father and I stepped 32 years ago. It will be his and his wife's decision about their shared values and the path they take. I will love my grandchildren if we are blessed with them....period. My husband and I will do what we have always done - create a proud Jewish home of learning, experience, memories and identity for a new generation, wherever their starting point may be.

Here's all I know right now: My wearing a purple dress and red shoes to the wedding is non-negotiable. I can whittle down my invitation list to 100. And I want to be called Saftaif and when the time comes.