Steamships and Start-ups

Tomorrow afternoon, t-ball, soccer practice, and other parenting responsibilities permitting, I hope to stop by a one-day conference being hosted at Central Synagogue. I encourage you to attend. If you’re interested, speak to Cantor Elana Rozenfeld, who will be going with a group of our congregants. The conference is entitled “Empowered Judaism: How to Build Vibrant Jewish Communities.” The sessions are being run by an organization called Mechon Hadar, perhaps the most well-known of a movement of grassroots communities that has flourished across North America. In a time when Jews are full of complaints about the crisis of Jewish continuity, when synagogues are shuttering, UJA’s tightening their belts, and movements contracting, these innovative prayer communities, often called independent minyanim, have sprung up nationwide, in church basements, co-op party rooms, and even the libraries of long established synagogues. On any given Shabbat, you can walk into the Hadar minyan on the West Side, or, for that matter, any number of minyanim in Manhattan filled with 20- to 30-somethings – Orthodox, Reform, Conservative or without a label – engaged in vibrant, dynamic, and soulful prayer. They are do-it-yourself communities, a delightful spark of energy for Jewish communal life.

The rub is that as these scrappy minyanim are breathing life into our people, many steamships of North American Jewry are gasping for air, searching for answers of how to build vibrant communities. There are those who see the pluck and success of these independent minyanim and believe that they somehow detract from the main show, taking away from the institutions that got us this far. Jews, the thinking goes, are cutting off our noses to spite our face, working at odds from within, missing the bigger picture. The intrigue of tomorrow’s conference is that it is hosted at one such steamship of New York City Jewish life – Central Synagogue – and, at least on paper, brings these two social forces into the same room: the steamship and the start-up.

The issue is complex and sensitive, and it represents a much bigger question, a question not about prayer, but about community. The same dynamic that I just described regarding prayer could also be described regarding philanthropy. The argument for giving to a centralized agency like UJA or JTS gets harder and harder to make every year, especially as you speak to younger generations. People want to give to their private causes, set up their private foundations. Why give to a faceless place that will then decide how to allocate my dollar when I can be a philanthropic start-up? Or education. If I had a dime for every secular Jew I know who meets with a Chabad rabbi in his office, but would never sign up for an adult education class in a synagogue, I would have a lot of dimes. How many women find the time to meet with a private study group with a rebbetzin in their living room, but would never be seen at a class in the 92nd Street Y or the JCC? While I am hitting nerves, let me hit the big one, how many resource-rich families in NYC are choosing to privately tutor their children rather than throw their yarmulke in the ring, register their children in a congregational school, and, yes, insist that the program adapts and improves, but not by opting out, but by opting in and making changes from within.

You see, the issue is not an issue of prayer, philanthropy, or education, or at least not entirely. The problem is one of community and meaning. There is an allure to the one-on-one experience, the individualization, the engaged interactive relationship, the boutique experience, the personal trainer feeling, whatever that rabbi-in-my-living-room feeling is that we all love. It makes us feel good, it makes us feel wanted, it makes us feel invested, it makes us feel needed. It makes us feel, well, human. However much we may enjoy the big communal experiences, the baseball and football games, the drama of a full synagogue with a cantor with a beautiful voice chanting Kol Nidre, those experiences run the risk of being cavernous and cold. After all, we are anonymous, nobody would know if we are missing, would they? Will they even notice if I don’t send my check in? So you know what – we don’t and often times they, whoever the they is, don’t notice.

If I had to put this discussion into philosophic terms, I would say it is somewhat, but not precisely, a conversation about individualism and communitarianism, a debate between social and political philosophers like John Rawls, Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, and Amitai Etzion. One side makes a hero of personal choice, of autonomy, of prizing the individual. The other side emphasizes the needs of the community, that while we may value the right to choose our interests and desires, there is a greater good, a greater community of greater value than individual needs. There are centrifugal forces pushing outward towards autonomy and centripetal forces pushing to the center.

One need not look further than today’s Torah reading to see these forces play off one another in the most famous ritual of all, the Yom Kippur ceremony led by the high priest Aaron, purgation rites atoning not only for his sins and the sins of his household, but for the sins of all of Israel. It is fascinating to think about. What could be more personal, more private, more sensitive than one’s sins, transgressions, and shortcomings? Yet they are expiated in a public and communal fashion. The individual and the communal strike a balance or, more precisely, they are interdependent. Individual values are constructed by way of communal association, in this case the value of acknowledging the common fact of human shortcoming, and the communal need to turn a new page. It may be a powerful experience to confess sin privately, but the Jewish ethic from the Bible to our contemporary Yom Kippur seems to be that we engage in these rituals as a community. There is a reason, the rabbis explain, why our Torah reading devoted to personal ethics, Kedoshim, begins in the plural – Kedoshim t’hiyu, “You (plural) shall be holy.” While values can only be held by individuals, they are shaped, inculcated, reinforced, and passed on by communities. We need both, the individual and the community, the centripetal and centrifugal, the start-up and the steamship. Too much of one leads to inertia and anonymity, whereas too much of the other leads to fragmentation and isolation. It is a balancing act.

I can think of no more compelling conversation than this to lead here at Park Avenue Synagogue. If there was ever a congregation that is perceived as a “steamship” of North American Jewry, we are it. We have cantors with big voices, schools with big enrollments, rabbis who like to give long sermons, a Sisterhood, a Men’s Club, all the bells and whistles of large congregational life. Even our name, “Park Avenue Synagogue,” evinces a certain something. That claim is more than superficial. We have a responsibility to be a flagship for Jewish music, Jewish thought, Jewish philanthropy, and Torah. But what would be even more interesting to me would be for this synagogue to lead a cultural conversation, or more importantly, to exemplify a congregational model that encourages a conversation about the interplay between the individual and the community, a congregation that practices innovation and that brings a scrappy, gumption-filled “let’s try something new” attitude to these hallowed halls.

I can imagine a world where a rabbi teaches a class to lay educators, who are then empowered to lead havurot in people’s homes. A place where Hebrew school teachers teach children in the classroom one day and on another day meet with a group of parents in their homes, because what we really want are parents who are able to talk to their children about Jewish content. Where some Shabbat dinner programs involve bringing in big speakers, and others involve a different sort of scholar-in-residence. That scholar is you – a mother or father in his or her own home – given the tools to celebrate Shabbat by the synagogue. I can imagine a community with a congregational choir that doesn’t perform only on holidays, but is strategically placed in this sanctuary, working closely with the cantor, infusing this space with confident song as a new melody is introduced on any given Shabbat. I can imagine a sort of synergy whereby a havurah service is viewed not so much as an alternative to the main service, but rather as a welcome opportunity to impact the synagogue as a whole.

Some things in this world are given. There will be a rabbi and a cantor here, the architecture of the sanctuary will not change, and there will be a Kol Nidrei appeal. There are limits, of budget and of staff. We cannot, nor should we, strive to be all things to all people. There must be a center, a coherent vision, a brand, a torah of Park Avenue Synagogue, as I like to say. At the same time, our imaginations must be supple and elastic. If this community were able to find a way to harness and leverage the creative tension of autonomy and community, of start-up and steamship, not only would we be far more than the sum of our parts, but we would actually be providing a working solution to one of the big, elephant-in-the-room questions facing American Jewry.

The debate between individualism and community is ongoing and recurrent. As with the debate over cuffs on men’s slacks or skirt length for women, I can promise you that what is fashionable today may be out tomorrow. For every mega-church there is an independent minyan, for every turn inward, there is a reflex to be part of something bigger. It is not a debate that will ever be won, which is, of course, the very point. The successful communities, and I hope ours will be counted as such, will be the ones that recognize this fact early on, and rather than debating the relative merits of one side or the other, commit to using the energy of both towards enhancing our community, enhancing ourselves as individuals, and enhancing the relationships with each other and with our common God that make us each Holy.