Sinai Circles: Engaging Synagogue Members

Rabbi Jay TelRav 0 Comments

We are not a gym Like many rabbis and congregational lay leaders, I am watching the trends of synagogue member involvement very closely.  It is no surprise to any reader that what used to work is no longer working. But is it even fair to say that it “used to work”?  We built buildings that were pragmatic and honest – a reasonably-sized sanctuary that could expand for a couple of days a year to accommodate attendance on the High Holydays. Is that what high-functioning looks like? At Temple Sinai in Stamford, CT, we have about 1200 individuals on our membership roster and we see about 50 regular attendees to prayer services, with many others dropping by as their heart needs it.  Our religious education program […]

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The Wellfont of Overflowing Love

Rabbi Andrew Hahn 0 Comments

Note: This essay was originally crafted in preparation for a national gathering of Kenissa: Communities of Meaning Network that took place in March of 2020. It was a response to Rabbi Sid Schwarz’ opening chapter in his book, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future. I found the last of the four propositions Rabbi Sid offered there, namely, the need we have in the 21st century to foster “Lives of Sacred Purpose/Kedushah” most in alignment with my work as the “Kirtan Rabbi.” I began my response—my petichta, if you will—with an experiential vignette drawn from my practice of tai chi. I then went on to use a story of the “conversion” of one of the major students of the Vilna Gaon to […]

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The Blessings and Opportunities of Working With Interfaith Couples

Rabbi Shira Stutman 0 Comments

Working with interfaith couples is one of the great joys of my rabbinate. Each conversation with an interfaith couple–and at this point, I’ve probably worked with well over a thousand–reminds me that Judaism should be a proactive, spiritually growthful, human-oriented practice, and not just the flotsam and jetsam of family history and communal memory. Even as interfaith couples can be a blessing to the Jewish people, however, there often are religious and/or cultural conflicts. The longer I have worked with these couples, the more I noticed some patterns emerging from their specific concerns. “On the surface, this conflict seems to be about X,” I’d find myself saying, year after year, “but I think what you’re really talking about is Y.” Over time, I’ve come to […]

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A Conspiracy of Hope in San Francisco

Rabbi Michael Lezak 3 Comments

“There is no moral distance … between the facts of life in San Francisco and the facts of life in Birmingham.         -James Baldwin, Take This Hammer (1965) ‘…After that, you shall be called City of Righteousness, Faithful City…’ -Isaiah 1:26 Every Friday morning, a group of volunteers from The Kitchen (a congregation founded by my wife, Rabbi Noa Kushner) bakes 100+ challahs in the GLIDE basement. Before we distribute this hot Jewish-sabbath bread to a largely non-Jewish staff and hungry clientele, volunteers and staff gather in a circle in a small storage room. Before we recite the motzi in Hebrew and English (and occasionally Arabic), I invite all gathered (Jews and non-Jews) to reflect on the week that is ending and to share […]

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Synagogue Dues are Dead

Rabbi Paul Kipnes and David Weisz 0 Comments

What’s the price point at which quitting the temple becomes unnecessary or nearly impossible?”  So asked a business leader in our synagogue. “Figure out that price point and our synagogue will grow organically instead of continuing to shrink. During a fascinating lunchtime conversation with this trusted congregant, the search for answers to challenging questions about our dues structure came to an end and we began to envision a new way forward. Like most synagogues, Congregation Or Ami (Calabasas, California) understood that dues represented the largest portion of our budgeted income. Our membership, once climbing, had been slowly declining. After years of a 14% resignation rate, our 2011-2014 data showed that 22-24% of our households were leaving each year. While we had robust levels of new […]

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How our pandemic experience might help faith communities engage “nones” and “dones”

Rev. Alexis Lillie 0 Comments

Editor’s Note: While this article is fully rooted in a Christian context, the analysis of the “nones” and “dones” aptly describes a phenomenon widespread in the next Gen Jewish world. And the prescriptions for how to draw such disaffected people back into spiritual community is completely relevant to synagogues that hope to be relevant today. For the third time in as many weeks, I opened my email today to find a message from someone questioning their faith and the validity of church. Typically, these questioners desire a religious practice that encompasses more than believing the “right” things and are not sure there’s a place for them at the table of American Christianity. I have lost count of the emails I’ve received and conversations I’ve had […]

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Nothing that is Not Sacred

Dr. Lori Wynters 0 Comments

Pesach was the holiday that I think most informed and continues to inform why I’m still Jewish and why I chose to go to rabbinical school. “Care for the stranger”, zecher l’tziat mitzrayim, the commandment to remember that the very reason that we were taken out of the narrows of Egypt was so that we could know that our liberations are tied to each other.  It was the anchoring element of the Judaism I was raised with in New York City in the 1970’s-1980’s. It was an unspoken principle and practice in our living rooms, seder tables and kitchens…this cellular knowing that our freedoms are interwoven with each other. As a kid I marched with my mom at Racial Equity in Education marches, actions by […]

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How one Synagogue’s Social Justice Engagement Led the Way to Renewal and Revitalization

Rabbi Mike Rothbaum 0 Comments

In the late fall of 2016, I was making plans for the next phase of my rabbinical career.  As fate would have it, the morning after Election Night, as Donald Trump crossed the 270-vote threshold in the electoral college, I was preparing to board a plane from my then-home in Oakland, California to the East Coast.  I had a weekend visit to a synagogue in New Jersey, and a Skype interview with a synagogue in Massachusetts. The weekend was lovely, but it would be that Skype session that led to my current role.  I sat in the basement of a friend’s house in Rockland County, 20 miles north of Manhattan.  The smiling faces on my screen exuded warmth, but it was flecked with distress — and […]

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How a Mr. Rogers Ministry Guided My Pandemic Rabbinate*

Rabbi Ilana Schachter 0 Comments

“I’m not that interested in ‘mass’ communications. I’m much more interested in what happens between this person and the one person watching. The space between the television set and that person who’s watching is very holy ground.” -Fred Rogers[1] When I was a child growing up in a largely secular Jewish home, I took tremendous comfort in watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers was an educator and a pastor, who used television as a vehicle to communicate his torah, which was that each person is unique and special, worth seeing and celebrating. Through the camera, he saw us. Through a screen, Mr. Rogers would invite us into his living room and would share things that were precious to him. He would share stories about his […]

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A Rabbi on High on the High Holy Days

Rabbi Alex Lazarus-Klein 0 Comments

Editor’s Note: A version of this article first appeared in eJewishPhilanthropy last fall. Given how many congregations are needing to pivot to deal with the upsurge in the Covid/Delta variant, many planning a mix of on-line and in-person services for the coming holidays, we thought the spirit of innovation represented by this article was worth re-publishing. Packing the drive-in-movie-theater with over two-hundred cars on Yom Kippur, the Cantor and I conducted services from, of all places, the rooftop of a snack shack.  Far from ideal, we had to battle the elements, with winds of over thirty-miles an hour whipping by us, and navigate a sound system where people could hear much better in their cars, than those of us actually leading the service. And, this […]

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