As I prepare to face the enormity of Auschwitz for the first time, it occurs to me that since the Shoah, rabbis have become like Toyota salesmen. What, after all, are we selling, but a product once revered, but now proven to be a grand farce? The myth has been summarily detonated, the brand exposed. Just as “Made in Japan” now has reverted to its original derogatory, postwar meaning (cheap, fake, laughable), “Made at Sinai” now feels like its “Made in Japan.”

Oh, we rabbis have been trained well. We’ve developed numerous diversionary strategies to refocus the question (“Where was God? Well, where was man?”) or simply to foster a perpetual state of denial (“We can’t know God’s ways”). Some have chosen to relinquish some of God’s omnipotence, others go much farther. But for the most part, we focus on beating home the message that Judaism still has an important function to serve, even if there’s a gaping hole under the chassis. Some deny that the hole exists, clinging naively to pre-Auschwitz fantasies. It is astonishing how many otherwise intelligent, modern, skeptical Jews buy this theological nonsense, slickly packaged by various ultra-Orthodox groups. But most rabbis, while not denying the seriousness of the challenge, prefer to set the questions aside, suggesting that maybe the next generation will solve the problem.

Over the decades, there have been brilliant attempts to deal with this dilemma. Some, like Richard Rubenstein’s existentialist “After Auschwitz,” have been powerfully honest. Such radical theologies proliferated in the ’60s, during the so-called “Death of God” era. Since then, God has survived quite nicely, thank you, but those bold theologies have yellowed with age. The question of Auschwitz remains as vivid as ever, but after 65 years, we seem to be tiring of asking it.
It makes me wonder: If Toyotas never get fixed, but for 65 years company propagandists spew forth the message that the cars are really safe, will we start believing in them again? Will the producers just wear us down until we tire of asking the questions? That strategy seems to have worked with other products. Some people actually think that cable news is really news. Some Jews believe that the same God who was silent in Auschwitz actually caused Iraqi Scuds to miss their targets in Tel Aviv. The madness has worn us down.

Perhaps the antidote to such madness is a different kind of madness.

The day after we march on Auschwitz, my group will stop off on the way to Warsaw in a quaint town called Chelm, for Jews the eternal capital of absurdity. Chelmites are mythical Jews from a real town, known for their propensity to take logic to its bizarre extreme.

Two men of Chelm went out for a walk, when suddenly it began to rain.

“Quick,” said one. “Open your umbrella.”

“It won’t help,” said his friend. “My umbrella is full of holes.”

“Then why did you bring it?”

“I didn’t think it would rain!”

A New York-based klezmer group named Golem wrote a song recently about a Chelmite who leaves on a journey to Warsaw, gets lost and ends up back in Chelm. “He’s so stupid that he thinks he’s actually in Warsaw,” bandleader Annette Ezekiel told SPIN.com. “The moral is any place can be any place else — it doesn’t matter where you are.”

But for me, it will matter a lot. I’ll be coming from Auschwitz, the darkest place in Jewish history, and then I’ll be staying over in Chelm, the funniest. Chelm will be the place where I wash my hands after visiting this countrywide cemetery, a way station before I head to Jerusalem for the second part of the March.

Two points about Chelm. First, laughter provided a great outlet for those suffering from hunger, poverty and hatred, as the Jews of Poland did for so long. But rather than laugh at real people, the Jewish genius invented a mythical community to laugh at. Not only is that practical (as opposed to laughing at Poles, who might respond by killing you), it is far more ethical to make fun of fake people than real people.

Second, Chelm might hold the key to our getting beyond the theological quandaries of our age. If the commanding voice of Auschwitz has muffled the God of Sinai for the time being, maybe we need to pay more attention to the God of Chelm. The Yiddish aphorism, “Man plans, God laughs,” just might be the most apt theological response to an age of absurdity. It’s not that God is laughing at us; it’s simply that God has taught us that laughter is the only way one can respond to a world of unfathomable evil and unspeakable tragedy, while clinging to life and dignity. Maintaining some semblance of sanity requires a modicum of insanity, an art we’ve been perfecting for centuries, ever since we figured out how a poor peasant living in rags could be transformed into royalty through the simple act of lighting candles, drinking wine and blessing hallah. The first Jewish kid, whose life was replete with tragedy, was nonetheless named laughter (Isaac). We’ve been re-living Isaac’s story ever since.

Would you buy a used Toyota from this God? Perhaps not. But at least the divine gift of laughter gives us the courage to stare directly into that gaping hole in the chassis and laugh at the absurdity of it all, while gasping in amazement that, despite everything, we are alive.

Congregational leaders who embark upon change efforts develop contrasting images of the qualities they seek in their congregation and of the characteristics they hope to shed, transcend, or avoid. They aspire to become what we call visionary congregations, those that most effectively develop, nurture, and apply powerful, widely shared, and widely understood visions of the sacred community. In contrast, they distinguish their communities from what we call functional congregations, those that may excel at performing discrete functions that satisfy their consumer-members but tend to fall short of genuinely achieving an integrated sense of sacred community.

The composite images we draw here emerged clearly from interviews with the lay and professional leaders of eight transformed congregations. Not only can these leaders point to their currently held view of their congregation’s ideal features, some can also point to the time when their dreams began to take shape and when their dissatisfactions came into sharper focus. All engaged congregational leaders had to face their congregations’ shortcomings and envision the ideal state to which they could realistically aspire. Dissatisfaction with the seemingly adequate, functional present was a necessary prelude to envisioning the extraordinary congregation they wanted to become. We found that functional congregations had six characteristics in common.

Consumerism: the fee-for-service arrangements provide consumers with discrete services, in particular, education of children for ceremonial celebration of bar or bat mitzvah and clergy officiation at life-cycle ceremonies.

Segmentation: programs stand on their own, with little integration of worship, learning, caring, social action, or community building.

Passivity: professionals exercise firm control over congregational functioning; worshipers sit passively; parents drop off children for religious schooling; boards deal with marginalia.

Meaninglessness: rote performance of scripted interactions, with little genuine significance or feelings of transcendent connection with Jews and Judaism.

Resistance to change: the routine is supreme, preventing diversification and serious consideration of alternative modes and structures.

Nonreflective leadership: focuses on program and institutional arrangements rather than purpose and vision.

The synagogues we studied successfully challenged their congregants to be life-long, year-round, thoroughly committed and practicing Jews. We call these synagogues “visionary.” Through the course of our interviews, our key informants provided contrasts between “the congregation we once were” and the “congregation we have now become.” Some spoke of them (other, more typical congregations) versus us (a very special congregation), distinguishing the ordinary and mediocre congregation from the extraordinary and vital congregation. Visionary synagogues have six characteristics in common.

Sacred purpose: a pervasive and shared vision infuses all aspects of the synagogue.

Holistic ethos: the parts are related to each other, such that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Torah, avodah, and g’milut chasadim are intertwined throughout synagogue life.

Participatory culture: on all levels—congregants, lay leaders, professionals, and family members of all ages—engage in the work of creating sacred community.

Meaningful engagement is achieved through repeated inspirational experiences that infuse people’s lives with meaning.

Innovation disposition is marked by a search for diversity and alternatives and a high tolerance for possible failure.

Reflective leadership and governance are marked by careful examination of alternatives, a commitment to overarching purpose, attention to relationships, mastery of both big picture and detail, and a planful approach to change.

At the heart of the visionary congregation is an overarching commitment to sacred purpose, a commitment that suffuses all aspects of the community. Where the functional congregation delivers specified services to consumer-clients, its visionary counterpart provides sacred experiences to members of a holy community.
Visionary communities maintain a holistic ethos where the parts are integrally related to the whole. This ethos attempts to minimize boundaries between people, programs, institutions, groups, and space and to promote cooperation between and among the various domains of the congregation. It rejects dualisms such as education versus entertainment and study versus action. It rejects the segmentation of functions common in most congregations, such as compartmentalizing worship, learning, caring, and social action. It also rejects an atomistic view of the congregation as separate from everyday life, the larger Jewish community, and the larger society.

For leaders, clerical or otherwise, of visionary congregations, a highly participatory culture signifies not loss of control but success in leadership. Congregants’ participation, initiative, and leadership are not seen as impinging upon the prerogatives of leadership; they are signs of its effectiveness and success in making engagement with the congregation truly inspiring and meaningful.

A major theme in American religion over the last twenty years or more has been the rise of meaning seeking on the part of Americans of all faiths. In Robert Wuthnow’s terms, religious adherents have increasingly shifted from the mode of “dwellers,” where extant religious structures are sufficient, to that of “seekers,” where the journey is an end in itself. Current and potential congregants choose to affiliate and to become more or less involved in congregational life based in part upon the extent to which such involvement provides them with genuine meaning. Congregations are challenged now more than ever to provide environments and experiences where meaning making can happen. As people and culture continue to diversify and evolve, the objective requires ongoing innovation. As Alan Wolfe observes, “All of America’s religions face the same imperative: Personalize or die.”

The leaders of the visionary congregations with whom we spoke cast themselves as change agents who promote innovation but carefully pace and monitor change. Given the complexity of instituting and monitoring innovation, a visionary congregation requires a leadership and an organizational culture not merely predisposed to innovate but also committed and capable of engaging in genuine reflection.
For years social scientists have been tracking the ever-quickening pace of change in technology, culture, and society. Management experts have been nearly unanimous in proclaiming that corporations and the people who lead them need to develop the tools to make sense of the changing world around them, to recognize emerging obstacles and opportunities, to manage adaptation and innovation, to assess their successes and failures, and to adjust their responses in light of these assessments. Innovation demands ongoing reflection and attention.

No congregation performs perfectly as a visionary congregation in all aspects. Rather, we envision the six characteristics shared by visionary congregations as continual, in which the core distinction of a congregation is that it is always in pursuit of sacredness over consumerism, holism over segmentation, participation over passivity, innovation over routine, meaning over rote interactions, and reflection over inattention.

Behind these characteristics lies the larger story, the story of how the synagogues themselves were transformed, from “limited liability” institutions to sacred communities; from shuls with schools to congregations of learners; from having clergy who made hospital visits to having congregants who visit one another; from having a small and somewhat beleaguered social action committee (or no social action committee at all) to joining a citywide social justice coalition that engages a broad range of congregants.
By making such changes, these synagogues have joined a national trend in churches, too. The news is filled with stories featuring evangelical megachurches transforming the face of American religious consciousness. But quietly and with much less fanfare, mainline churches too are starting to move into the twenty-first century with a new sense of intellectual, spiritual, and prophetic excitement, reaching far beyond the small band of regulars and into the very heart of the church’s membership rolls. If religion in America has a future beyond just its conservative right wing, it will depend on this kind of transformation of church—and synagogue—culture.

Comment on this article on the Alban Roundtable blog

No Handshake: Don’t Take it Personally

Q: Hey Rabbi– I have a quick question. I met the Rabbi at the Chabad at our school. Anyways, I had a long conversation with him and when I went to leave I put out my hand to shake his hand and he politely declined. Does my hand have a disease? What’s going on here?

A: No you don’t have a disease! (Find out why here)

Some say I’m the Top Banana at Temple Beth El. Others claim that we are a Banana Republic. Well, this past Saturday night, for Purim I was literally a Banana (that’s Rabanana to you!). I explained that we are going Green, and I was green just a few days ago. It was a great Purim. Here I am above, with some seventh graders and Mara, all decked out in their M and M finest. Check out more pictures here  and at this website (which also has a terrific video montage) – and thank you to Steve Labkoff for taking them. Click on the photos to enlarge.

 1) Visiting Israel takes you higher. It heightens your senses. It heightens your awareness. It heightens your sense of self. It heightens your faith. And it heightens your sense of identification with a land, thousands of miles away, a land that is so very dear to us all.  Experience Jerusalem, visit Tel Aviv, float in the Dead Sea, tour the Negev, visit Safed, the highest town in Israel, one of the four holy cities of Judaism. Drive into the Galilee hills and ascend up to the Golan.

2) Meet the Family.  Israel is filled with unforgettable places, but ultimately what will make this trip so special will be the people that we’ll meet – the ones in the country and the ones in the group.  I can think of no group with whom I would rather share these precious days than all of you.

(3) Feeling the serenity of Shabbat in Jerusalem. 

(4) The sense of community that exists everywhere, from people annoyingly telling you not to cross the street on the red light (would they bother to do that here?), to the calls you get after every terror attack — to inform you, to console you, to include you.

(5) To show unity and support.

(6) Because it’s our home.

(8) To get back to our “roots,” smell the air and feel the dirt of our ancestors. You can feel the history come up through the soles of your feet.

(9) When I walk anywhere in the country, I always feel that I’m “home.” When I’ve traveled anywhere else in the world, and even where I live, I’m still part of a minority. In Israel, I’m part of something much more — I belong to a vibrant, dynamic, friendly society that has made its own modern history of success.

(10) Seeing the accomplishments of the Israelis . The desert has become alive with bustling cities, and a thriving economy. Visiting Israel now becomes an important statement of support for Israel, and a denial of the philosophy that “fear” will make the Israelis leave.

(11) Everything is better in Israel. Personal relationships are very real and very caring, the air smells better, the food tastes better, the sky is clearer, the birds are happier.

(12) The shwarma at Maoz on King George Street, the shwarma at Masov Burger near the central bus station, to talk to the people who make shwarma, and to see the lambs that become shwarma.

(13) The feeling I experience at the Western Wall. All of life’s idiosyncrasies become smaller when you are engulfed by what’s most important and special.

(14) Eating falafel and chumous in Machaneh Yehudah on Friday.

(15) Because I haven’t been there yet!

 (16) To raise the spirits of the Israeli people.

(17) The Bible just comes alive.

(18) To see that Jewish people come in all colors, shapes and sizes and can hold all kinds of jobs……from doctors and lawyers, to police and street cleaners.

(19) To  feel connected in the present to past and future at the same time.

(20) The scenery is unparalleled when standing at the Dead Sea (lowest point on earth) and then directly above it at the top of Masada. The unplanned tears that come down your face as you experience the pain of what was lost, but yet the hope of what will come promised through the prophets long ago. It is so awesome beyond words, that when you depart, you cannot say goodbye, only that you will be back. There is an unseen force that draws you in and assures you that you will be back again, it’s where you belong, it’s home.

(21) The incredible sense of unity. Being in Israel makes you feel connected to everything and every person on earth.

(22) To see true permanence. As Mark Twain said, “All things are mortal but the Jew.” In Israel, you can see buildings that were around thousands of years ago, and what could easily be around thousands of years from now. In America, nothing goes back more than a few hundred years (except for a few Native American sites), but those don’t compare to places that are all over Israel.

(23) Miracles occur daily.  

(24) Two words: Kosher McDonalds

(25) Because WE’RE GOING! Our group is growing and waiting for YOU!   Click here for the full itinerary for next summer’s TBE Israel Adventure.

I close with this poem, by Rabbi Sidney Greenberg:

For the Jew, Israel is a state of mind

It is not only a piece of geography

It is history

It is theology

It is Jewish tears and Jewish triumphs

It is Jewish anguish and Jewish ecstacy

It is childhood legends and biblical verses

It is the direction that we pray and the subject of our prayers

It is exile and homecoming

It is a burning Temple and a new flag at the United Nations

It is the 9^th of Av and the 5^th of Iyar

It is a people restored and hope reborn

*(including this from Aish and from another blog,  Sixty things I love about Israel) :