Seventy-seven percent of American Jews spend some time in synagogue, more than in any other Jewish organization, according to Rabbi Terry Bookman, former spiritual leader of Congregation Sinai from 1984 to 1995.
Synagogues are “the most important sustaining organizations of the Jewish people,” he said in a recent telephone interview.
However, he said, “synagogues do not invest in themselves to grow as organizations. Though rabbis are our spiritual leaders, handling very important parts of our lives, they don’t ever have to take another course after they leave the seminary.”
And that is something that must change, Bookman believes. So he, with psychologist William Kahn, have written a new book, titled “This House We Build: Lessons for Healthy Synagogues and the People Who Dwell There” (The Alban Institute, soft cover $20.00).
Synagogues are unique, Bookman said, in that they are corporations but they have a huge investment in volunteers.
“And the level of involvement is quite different.” Synagogue members “live” in them in the sense that they spend their most deeply felt moments there. They celebrate happy occasions, endure sorrow and receive education in their synagogues.
Synagogues are also living, dynamic things. And, as with any other living things, “stuff will happen.” Bookman insists that it’s better to maintain your health than to just wait and deal with the inevitable crises that will happen if you don’t.
If you are just putting out fires all the time, Bookman said, the best that can happen is that “you will end up with a charred ruin.” The worst is that “everyone gets killed.”
Dearth of leadership
training
Intended as a guide for synagogue professional and lay leaders and congregants, the book “comes out of our experience of the last four years,” Bookman said referring to his and Kahn’s partnership in the Eitzah Center for Congregational Leadership.
Bookman, who has led the 1,285-household Temple Beth Am in Miami since his departure from Milwaukee, and Kahn, a professor of organizational behavior at Boston University’s School of Management, co-founded Eitzah about six years ago, initially focusing on leadership training for rabbis.
According to its Web site, “Eitzah [which means “counsel” in Hebrew] combines Jewish spiritual values with organizational and management principles to train leaders for the 21st century.”
Organized into four parts that address healthy houses, healthy congregants, healthy clergy, and healthy relationships, the book offers real life case studies that explore the kinds of problems that inevitably arise in the lives of synagogue congregations and their solutions.
“We are astounded that this is the only book on this topic,” Bookman said. “This is not rocket science.” He explained that he and Kahn spell out what a healthy organization is and how to make one. “Organizations can do this but it takes work and that work is worth it,” Bookman said.
“We both believe in synagogues as the places where Jews are nourished. We look to create and lead multi-dimensional education projects that have the opportunity for deep impact in the Jewish world.”
The inspiration for Eitzah — and then the book — emerged from a series of conversations between Bookman and Kahn, who are brothers-in-law married to sisters.
Their interests converged, Bookman said, when Kahn’s consulting work brought him in contact with non-profit organizations whose focus was caring for people. Kahn was impressed, Bookman said, with how hard the employees worked for relatively little pay compared to those in the for-profit sector.
His curiosity piqued, Kahn started asking Bookman about synagogues. How had he learned, Kahn asked Bookman, to lead such a complicated organization as a synagogue? Bookman explained that he hadn’t been taught anything about organizational leadership at the seminary.
Although synagogues are complex organizations, and the science and technology of organizations was not and, for the most part, still is not part of the seminary curriculum, Bookman said that he began to understand from early on that leadership was something he really needed to understand.
Although he said he got an excellent Torah education at Hebrew Union College in New York and Los Angeles, Bookman said it would have been helpful if the seminary had even suggested that he enroll in some leadership training courses.
Rabbis, the first takers
Kahn and Bookman were able to design a program addressing what rabbis need to know about organizational leadership and then to build a multilevel plan to include other professional staff, lay leaders and congregants.
Bookman said that he and Kahn have met with “a great deal of resistance” in all of the organizations of the Jewish community. Networking with seminaries and congregational organizations, they were disheartened with the common responses, “We are already doing this” and “Our members don’t need this,” but “because we knew that what we were offering was worthwhile, we continued working at it,” Bookman said.
Eventually they were asked by Rabbi Hayim Herring, the executive director of Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal (STAR) who wrote the forward to their book, to submit a proposal to train young rabbis with two to seven years of experience.
“[Herring] was impressed with our proposal and we launched the STAR Peer Program, which was about real-life knowledge,” Bookman said. That was just re-funded for its second three-year program after receiving the highest evaluation of any such project by JESNA, the Jewish Education Service of North America, Bookman said.
While they are mostly working with rabbis at this stage, Bookman said that their “attention has always been at a multilevel. But the rabbis are the first takers and they are in the field, and they know what they haven’t learned and what they need.”
Though they have not gotten the same response from funders and congregational leaders, Bookman said, “This is only our fourth year of doing this and the conversation is already happening. The book will bring the language and the interest to people.”
And all of the funding is coming from outside of the traditional sources, Bookman said. Rather than federations, the funding is coming from “creative and generous individuals.”
Bookman and Kahn have recently turned down requests to do workshops, Bookman said. Because change takes time, they are not interested in short-term projects or crisis intervention, but require a commitment of a year, Bookman said.
“We want to spend our time investing in rabbis and communities who want to make long-term investments in their health. Unless they invest in themselves, they don’t take it seriously,” he said.
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