Conservative changes afoot

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, founded in 1913, is currently in the process of charting a new strategic plan for itself – and the Conservative movement as a whole. USCJ executive vice-president and chief executive officer Rabbi Steven Wernick was at Congregation Har El last month to talk about the new plan, as well as the Rotem Bill, a piece of legislation before the Knesset that threatens to damage Israel-Diaspora relations.

Wernick’s Jan. 30 talk was hosted by the four B.C. Conservative congregations: Har El, Beth Israel, Beth Tikvah and Emanu-El. He began his remarks with a discussion about Adon Olam, because “one of the great challenges that we have for our synagogues in general and our movement in particular is that we’ve forgotten how to pray.”

He explained that, by the time Adon Olam is reached in the service, “we tend to choose the fastest melody we can possibly imagine” in order to get to the kiddush faster. In doing so, he said, “we’ve lost something really special, and that is the genius of the poem. Do you know why it is that you can sing Adon Olam to any melody you can possibly imagine?... The rhythm of Adon Olam is the iambic quadrametre, it’s a four-beat. It’s the same rhythm of the heart beating. It’s the same rhythm of a horse galloping. It’s the same rhythm of the water hitting the seashore.... I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the poem entitled Adon Olam, which means Master of the Universe, is written to the rhythm of the universe.”

He went on to say that the last verse of the poem is the most important, in his view. “‘Adonai li v’lo irah,’ God is with me, I’m not afraid. Now, why do we say that? We say that because we’re afraid. To be an adult is to be scared ... and today we’re afraid about all sorts things,” he said, giving as examples the poor economy, worry over our parents’ and children’s welfare, and Israel.

Wernick said that people go to shul, meditate for a few hours on prayer and, hopefully, learn a little Torah, “so that, when we leave, we can say, ‘Adonai li v’lo irah,’ God is with me, I’m not afraid.” We get this feeling, he said, for a couple of reasons: at shul, we see that we are part of a community and that “we’re part of a great people with a great tradition that goes back 4,000 years, that has seen and experienced and lived through the greatest highs and the greatest lows of all of human history.” Also, “if we’ve learned to really pray ... we connect with God and spirituality and religion in a way that personally moves us and inspires us, such that, when we walk out the door, God is with us.”

The rabbi added: “We have to take the feelings of community, of inspiration, of spirituality that we have within the synagogue and take it out into the world.” He reinforced this idea using the week’s Torah portion, which focused on God’s command for the Israelites to build the Mishkan (Tabernacle), so that God could “dwell among them,” i.e. among the people, not in the structure itself. “The purpose of the building of the Mishkan,” he explained, “is to be a vessel, a focal point to have for the communal experience of God and, through that focal point, to have the inspiration to be able to say in our daily life, ‘Adonai li v’lo irah,’ God is with me and I am comforted.

“I loath the fact, I’m disturbed, I’m worried that we’ve gotten away from that,” he continued. “And we’ve gotten away from it in such a way that we haven’t paid enough attention as to how the world around us is changing, how the next generation of the Jewish community has already changed, such that the institutions that we have built for Jewish communal expression, the synagogue chief among them, are becoming irrelevant in the lives of Jews.”

There has been a shift in Jewish identity, he said. “Identities of affiliation, upon which the North American Jewish experience was built in the last hundred years, because it’s primarily the immigrant experience ... [are] no longer relevant. The current generation, and certainly the next ... has moved completely to what are called identities of purpose. It means that people don’t join synagogues today because their parents joined synagogues. It means they don’t give to Federation because they’re Jewish and someone tells them you have an obligation to give to the Federation.... It means that people will choose to participate, to involve themselves in those activities and organizations and experiences that they find authentic and that add value and personal relevancy to their lives.”

Wernick said that most synagogue board meetings involve discussion of money and membership, and not “meaning and movement and what it means to be part of a sacred community of shared values that expresses those values in the work that they do.” Those values, he reminded people, are in the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of Our Fathers): Torah (learning and ethical values), avodah (prayer) and gemilut chasadim (acts of lovingkindness).

Conservative Judaism “is the place where our past encounters our present,” said Wernick. “We’re engaged in a dynamic tension of searching for the relevancy of our tradition within a modern context. We are the Judaism that gave the Jewish world really what has been the foundation of all serious Jewish study today; studying our sacred text within the totality of the classical tradition and overlaying it with the intellectual knowledge of modern science and understandings. And not saying that one has a veto over the other, but saying that the two are today, as they have been generations before us, in constant dialogue and tension with each other.”

As to the Conservative movement’s relevance today, he cited a recent Avi Chai study finding that, “of all Jewish leaders in North America under the age of 35, 50 percent of them grew up within the Conservative movement.... The problem is that only 23 percent of them still identify with us.” Wernick clarified that it wasn’t that they didn’t identify with Conservative Judaism, but that “our synagogues are no longer speaking to them, because we create this box where we want to put people in, rather than create a web of relationships by which we can lift people up.”

He admitted, “It’s going to require some creative financial thinking and a new business model because, if you’re going to say that membership is no longer relevant as an identity factor, then you’ve got to find a way to still get the money. Because our rabbis understood, also from Pirkei Avot, 2,000 years ago, im ein kemach, ein Torah, if you don’t have flour, and they were talking about greenback, if you don’t have flour, you don’t have Torah. But they also understood, im ein Torah, ein kemach, if you don’t have Torah, you’re not raising flour. That’s the membership and meaning conversation, the conversation that congregations need to have, where the product is the meaning and the membership and the money is the means to the end.”

About USCJ’s strategic plan, Wernick said, “When you don’t have a strategy, you pile on program after program after program,” and this has resulted in staff members at USCJ having multiple functions and, in each function, many different tasks. “No human being can do 20 things well, they just can’t,” he pointed out. “If you create a strategy, then part of the strategy is that you measure the activities you do based on the strategy you want to accomplish, and you can peel away those layers of program in order to create strategies that are going to move your organization forward.”

There are four main strategies that USCJ is going to employ, said Wernick. The first is to focus on core functions: kehilah strengthening and transformation (to make synagogues engaging places of Torah, avodah and gemilut chasadim – social justice beyond the coat or food drive); education (congregational schools are not working, he said, in part because they take place after a full day of school, and also because they don’t meld the experiential with the formal; for example, you can teach what Shabbat is, but kids won’t know what it is until they’ve celebrated a Shabbat); and outreach – “The vast majority of people who go to Chabad on campus aren’t going to become Chabadniks,” said Wernick. “What they do learn is a joy and a celebration of Jewish life [that] when they come back to our shuls, they find to be stale.”

About this last core function, he said, there is a need “to make a real place for 20- and 30-somethings to have a home and authority and responsibility within their synagogues” for programming “and trusting them that they’ll do it well, according to the values we’ve taught them.” It also means recognizing that the majority of Jews in this age group will not come to shul, he added: “They’re not abandoning their Jewish identities, they’re finding it in other ways, so we need to nurture and support that, where they are, and grow it.” And, finally, outreach means that, in areas where Jewish communities are growing, new synagogues need to be seeded. “Like any business,” he said, “if you’re not growing, if you’re not expanding, if you’re not gaining more market share and more people involved in the enterprise, you’re not living. The difference is, we’re not making widgets or flipping burgers; we’re making Jewish souls, so it’s a very different, more important enterprise.”

The other priorities of United Synagogue, said Wernick, are to reorganize its finances, as well as use funds more efficiently, in order to focus more resources on the core functions. And the fourth strategy, he said, is to reduce dues (with a consummate increase in philanthropic donations and profit centres, such as USJC’s book service). “We need to do this for the same reason why synagogues need to reduce dues: the model just doesn’t work any more ... people are going to participate for the value that they receive, not for the sense of being part of something bigger – although, don’t underestimate the importance about being part of something bigger.”

This importance becomes apparent, he explained, in situations such as the Rotem Bill, the six-month moratorium for which was gained in large measure because of the input of several Diaspora Jewish organizations.

The bill was first presented to the Knesset by Yisrael Beiteinu member David Rotem four years ago, said Wernick. “Essentially, what he wanted to do in the original bill, in response to the crisis of 350,000 Russian olim [immigrants] that have not converted to Judaism, and live in Israeli society and serve in the army and die for Israel but get buried in the non-Jewish cemeteries ... and so forth and so on, what he wanted to do was to open up the process of conversion,” he explained, noting that the conversion courts in Israel are controlled by the Charedi establishment. Rotem’s bill would have given the rabbinic courts of the municipalities the authority to do conversions. However, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel would only support the bill if the ultimate authority for conversions was granted to it, and this is a problem, said Wernick.

“If we disenfranchise North American Jewry, if we say that Conservative Judaism and pluralistic Judaism in Israel is not a viable alternative, then the Jewish homeland is no longer my homeland. For Israel to be a homeland for the Jews, it has to be a homeland for all the Jews, not just the small, rightwing minority.”

Despite the challenges, Wernick said he was hopeful. He predicted, “We’re going through the next big transformative change in the communal Jewish world. The last one was from biblical Judaism to rabbinic Judaism. Now we’re going from rabbinic Judaism ... to engagement Judaism. But, however we end up, it’s going to be different than where we are now.”

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