Question: Given that the life cycle of synagogue membership consists of recruitment, integration, and retention, how would you prioritize these three elements from a congregational perspective? Why?
I appreciate very much Ms. Wiener’s understanding of the life cycle of congregational membership; her appreciation for the role congregations stand to play in the lives of the men and women who populate their ranks is sensitive and deep.
I commend her for recognizing that “membership must have a purpose and meaning that transcends . . . life cycle event[s]” and that all who care about the future of the synagogue “must strive to create connections . . . [among] members that reach to the very core of how they see themselves as human beings and as Jews.”
Truly, knowing the experience of being part of a community and sharing the rhythms of Jewish life with those who are similarly engaged distinguishes those who recognize the value of participating in synagogue life from those who could not care less about what affiliation means or worse, would just as soon spurn it.
For this reason, as Ms. Wiener suggests, “essential to the synagogue’s ability to integrate its members . . . [must be a] willingness to grow and adapt to keep pace with the changing needs of the community.” Despite what we may surmise from many assumptions upon which congregational identities have been built, members and would-be members are not here to serve the (institutional) needs of the synagogue. Rather, congregations ought to be responsive to the needs of amcha (Your [God’s] people).
And yet, to my mind, if we focus on integration as the primary activity of member engagement, we risk expecting that if we only work hard enough to create value for ourselves, in time, those who have heretofore failed to appreciate the value of membership will come to their senses and join us. Admittedly, this is an attractive syllogism, but given today’s realities, it is an approach I believe is doomed to failure.
Perhaps it is the conceit of every generation to imagine the challenges faced by today’s Jewish community are different in both kind and magnitude from those experienced by an earlier generation. And yet, to paraphrase Bob Dylan’s lyric, “the times [and people] are a-changin’,” and fast! Why shouldn’t the synagogue keep up?
Founded nearly two thousand years ago, the synagogue as we know it has changed little in two millennia. What has changed, however, are the worlds within which the synagogue is found. There was a time when Jewish congregations were at the center of Jewish life; and until only recently, it was a foregone conclusion that rabbis were among the Jewish community’s best educated members and were surely most knowledgeable about matters religious. Our forebears could little have imagined the autonomy each of us today claims as our right, to say nothing of it so informing Jewish identity.
So, rather than deriding the individual who attends synagogue only sporadically or the family that allows a thirteen-year-old to make up his (or her) own mind as to whether to pursue a Jewish education beyond the seventh grade or those parents who resign from the congregation after their last child’s bar (or bat) mitzvah, to say nothing of those who never got around to joining a congregation, may I respectfully suggest it will not be enough to “turn it over and over again,” (paraphrase of Ben Bag Bag, Pirkei Avot 5:22) therein expecting to find new approaches and answers to creating a meaningful Jewish experiences.
This is not to say that due to these new realities we ought not endeavor to build a Torah-inspired community. We should do so. But so must we appreciate that what has served us so well for so long has only taken us so far and will take us no further.
Turn it over, indeed. The mandate is clear. We must at once recruit new members into our communities and encourage new (outside) ideas among our leadership. This will require real daring and will not be easy Having been entrusted with a long-cherished, much-loved tradition and a raison d’etre that involves teaching this faithfully to our children, congregations are, by definition, “small-c” conservative. And yet change and respond to the new normal we must.
So it is that welcoming the strangers within our midst and forcing ourselves to accommodate their novel expectations and needs is a new necessary. After all, our future depends upon broadening our embrace as surely as we would seek to solidify our base.
