Archive for the ‘Rabbis’ Category

 

Be Entrepreneurial, Not Innovative

Posted on: January 16th, 2014 by Hayim Herring

 

“Drop the quest for innovation and adopt the mentality of entrepreneurship.” That was my essential message to of a wonderful group of rabbis from the Philadelphia Metro Area a few days ago. With the support of the Philadelphia Board of Rabbis, I had the pleasure of facilitating a highly interactive workshop with about 40 colleagues on Rabbinic entrepreneurship. What’s the difference between being innovative and being entrepreneurial? In my workbook (click, complete form and download) on Tomorrow’s Synagogue Today. Creating Vibrant Centers of Jewish Life, I wrote,

 

“Innovation” is a catchphrase everywhere we look, and it is often used as a substitute for entrepreneurship, but there is a difference between them:

 

The rabbis completed a diagnostic assessment of readiness for moving to an entrepreneurial culture (p.19 in the workbook). Then, they divided into small groups to explore how to apply ten entrepreneurial practices to an idea about which they were passionate and bring to life in their communities. This group of rabbis was very diverse. But their passion for wanting to adopt a more entrepreneurial mindset was a feeling they shared—and they inspired me.

 

Rabbis are too often an unfair and handy target for undeserved criticism about the state of Jewish affairs. No doubt, we’ve earned some of the criticism. On the other hand, it’s also clear to me that many rabbis are ready to turn the dial on maintenance down and turn up the dial on entrepreneurship. The dynamic of public punishment of rabbis who take risks, and their reactive tendency to then play it safe, is one that each side should acknowledge and change. And when that happens, congregants, rabbis and the broader Jewish community will begin to enjoy both the rootedness of a community and the excitement of an incubator for fresh Jewish life.

 

If you’re interested in learning more about how your leadership can become more entrepreneurial, please contact me and let’s start the discussion! I’ve heard many of your ideas and it’s time for you to turn them into realities.

 

 

Jewish Cultural Affirmation: Great Intent, Misguided Action

Posted on: December 16th, 2013 by Hayim Herring

 

 

First, thank you to Steven M. Cohen and Kerry Olitzky once again for opening up a wide space for conversation about the future of the American Jewish community. These two prominent observers and activists of Jewish life continue to challenge us with unconventional thinking. With regard to their idea of Jewish Cultural Affirmation as a new option for formal identification with the Jewish people, great intent, but misguided action. Here’s why:

 

The Jewish people worldwide as an entity is already fractured by competing definitions of Jewish status. Why compound the confusion?

 

Seriously—how possible will it be to gain agreement by a group of scholars upon the canon of knowledge and experiences required for Jewish Culture Affirmation? A definition by one group will spawn a number of alternative and likely contradictory ones, creating disputes among self-appointed Cultural Certifiers, and casting doubts on the bona fides of graduates of these self-guided programs.

 

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From Network Judaism to Platform Judaism

Posted on: October 8th, 2013 by Hayim Herring

 

 

In 2000, I wrote a paper called Network Judaism, later published in 2001. MySpace was launched in August 2003 and Facebook in February 2004. While not long ago at all, it’s hard to recall that social media platforms didn’t exist. But if you were tracking possible significant trends carefully, you could anticipate the potential emergence of the networked organization. What no one was able to grasp was how social media sites would be enable societal changes of major magnitude.

 

Today, here are a few stats on some popular social media platforms:

Facebook-1.15 billion registered users

Flickr -87 million users, 8 billion photos

Pandora – 200 million registered users

Twitter – 500 million registered

Word Press – 66 million blogs

Angie’s list – 2 million users

Yelp – 12 million users per day

YouTube-500 million visits per day

 

The numbers tell a story of how rapidly socially media sites have been adopted and how embedded they are in our lives. Yet, synagogues, federations and other historic organizations have not shifted their structures to enable themselves to become platforms for people to connect socially, spiritually, philanthropically and educationally.

 

As we are now in the networked era, Jewish organizations need to shift their paradigms to a platform model. Otherwise, the great the work that many are doing around making Judaism more relevant, inspirational, meaning-saturated and beautiful will be inhibited or fail. Unlike many Jewish start up organizations that have blossomed over the last ten years, established Jewish organizations need Platform Judaism, or more accurately, platform Jewish structures.

 

What is an organizational platform (and I can highlight only a few dimensions in this space)? A platform is an enabling space for people to interact and act upon issues. An organization that becomes a platform enables individuals to self direct their Jewish choices and express their Jewish values within the organization’s mission. That is a radical shift from organizational leaders directing people how, when, where, why and with whom to be Jewish- in other words, the dominant paradigm of more established Jewish organizations and synagogues!

 

Becoming a platform is also a mindset. It means embracing the desire of individuals to co-create their experiences, opt in and opt out of Jewish life, do new things and old things in new ways-of course, within the organization’s mission. This mindset operates within the building, outside of the building, on the website, and anywhere else. It also requires a much more creative and intentional use of technologies to tell individual stories and organizational stories and a redefinition of professional and volunteer leaders’ roles, new governance models and even new professional and volunteer positions.

 

Most critically, restructuring as a platform requires a relentless focus on a compelling mission and purpose. When organizations can clearly define their purpose, they have the opportunity to help individuals activate their latent hunger for community, experientially educate them about the difference between a discrete cause and an enduring commitment and provide opportunities for deeper relationships that transcend Facebook-type “connections.”

 

Talking about organizational structure isn’t sexy. But the payoff for paying attention to it is potentially huge, enabling:

 

In part, I wrote my book, Tomorrow’s Synagogue Today. Creating Vibrant Centers of Jewish Life, to stimulate thinking around the urgency for organizations to move to a platform model. Within about two weeks, UJA-Federation of New York’s Synergy Department and the Alban Institute will be releasing a study and action guide to help synagogues and organizations practically apply the concepts of Platform Judaism, one of the central concept in Tomorrow’s Synagogue Today, to their real world settings. Then, several weeks later, the Alban Institute will be publishing a companion volume to Tomorrow’s Synagogue Today, with a deeper discussion of some of the core concepts of the book and even more practical resources. If you’ve registered for ongoing information, you’ll learn how you can access these new resources-one of which will be downloadable for free. If you haven’t, you can sign up here.

 

And in October, I’ll be presenting and facilitating number of sessions in Baltimore at United Synagogue’s Centennial; in Westchester, Manhattan and Long Island through UJA-Federation of New York; and the Rockland County Federation’s Rockland Jewish (Synagogue) Initiative. You can click here for more details on these presentations and if they’re in your area and open to the public, I hope that you’ll participate. Looking forward to working together with you!

 

Crossed posted on eJewishphilanthropy in a modified form.

 

 

What Life Holds in Store for Us

Posted on: September 11th, 2013 by Hayim Herring

 

Have you ever have one of those, “Something must be in the water moments” – you know, those times when independently, a group of people seem to be talking about the same thing? That’s what happened to me right before Rosh Hashanah. I went to see a good friend and colleague of mine, Rabbi Norman Cohen, to wish him a shana tova. Naturally, I asked him what he was planning to speak about on the holidays. Norman said that he was speaking about a line from the liturgy, “Do not cast us out in our old age, at the time when our strength fails us, do not abandon us.”

 

I was astonished because a few days before, I had lunch with my mentor and rabbi, Kass Abelson. He is Rabbi Emeritus of Beth El Congregation in Minneapolis, where I served with him for ten years. He still gives a sermon on Rosh Hashanah (he estimated that he has been doing so for 60 years give or take – certainly an accomplishment that should be in the Guinness Book of Records). He also was speaking on the same line! That’s when I had my first surprise, because I was in the middle of writing a blog post titled, “Don’t confuse old with obsolete,” based on that very prayer!

 

Fast-forward now to my meeting with Rabbi Cohen…That was when I had that, “There must be something in the water that we’re drinking” moment. All three of us, at different ages and stages of life, decided to write about the experience of the increasing number of elderly people in our society, and the difficulties, challenges and blessings of this reality. And that same text informed our thoughts on how we relate both to the relatively well elderly and the more frail elderly.

 

With their permission, I have included Rabbi Abelson’s and Rabbi Cohen’s sermons and my most recent post in one PDF, which is available for you to download. I know that if the three of us are have been thinking about these issues it’s likely that many more people must be as well. You can use these resources:

 

 

Make all of us be sealed in the book of life and good health in this new year.

 

The Collaboration Continuum: Re-Igniting the Conversation for Congregations

Posted on: July 3rd, 2013 by Hayim Herring

 

Cross-posted to eJewish Philanthropy

by Debra Brosan and Rabbi Hayim Herring

 

Recently, we conducted thirteen informal phone interviews with federation directors, rabbis and lay leaders from around the country to learn first hand about the landscape of synagogue collaborations and potential mergers.

 

We spoke with leaders primarily along the East Coast and in the Midwest. Some had experienced population decline by snowbirds who had permanently moved to warmer parts of the country or had lost a significant percentage of the Jewish population because of the economic recession. We also spoke with a few other community leaders in areas that we suspected were potentially ripe for collaboration because it’s just good business to partner, collaborate and consolidate.

 

We weren’t interested in conducting a rigorous scientific study, but simply wanted to gain an impressionistic view of the level of discussion and activity around collaboration. We had read several recent stories in the Jewish press about creative congregational collaborations and were also aware of consolidations happening in the broader nonprofit community. Collaboration is one of our deep interests, and we have helped shepherd a number of congregations, Jewish organizations and nonprofit organizations through fruitful partnerships. We know that there is ample room for more collaboration, but we wanted to conduct some due diligence before drawing conclusions.

 

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Resetting the Rabbinate

Posted on: May 20th, 2013 by Hayim Herring

 

 

In the past few months, I’ve read at least six articles or blogs about rabbis and the contemporary rabbinate. (Just search sites like eJewishPhilanthropy, The Jewish Week, the JTA and the Jewish Daily Forward for a sampling of results.) Any rabbi will tell you that there’s structural change occurring and the media now seems to have picked up this story. Some of the stories suggest new roles that rabbis are fulfilling, others are about gender and the rabbinate, or prognostications about the future of the rabbinate and the rabbinical seminaries’ challenge in keeping up with what they perceive as new skills that rabbis require.

 

(Disclaimer: I’ve written about the rabbinate over the years as well in publications like Tomorrow’s Synagogue Today. Creating Vibrant Centers of Jewish Life and “The Rabbi as Moreh Derekh Chayim: Reconceptualizing Today’s Rabbinate”. But why so many articles in such a short time?

 

Rabbis are experiencing significant role ambiguity and the 20th Century paradigm of what defines a rabbi is clearly inadequate for this century. A few examples will suffice:

Rabbis used to have primary or heavy involvement in the examples above but now, much less so.

 

And it isn’t just that functions are changing. Relationships are changing as well. In speaking with colleagues, they sense that they are increasingly being treated more as employees and less as individuals with a sacred profession. As one colleague wryly commented, he felt that “evaluations” had become “devaluations.”

 

This lack of role clarity is a symptom of a paradigm change. As renowned futurist, Joel Barker, says: “When a paradigm shifts, everyone goes back to zero. Your past success guarantees nothing in your future.” And all of these conversations about rabbis’ roles certainly have the feel of “going back to zero,” that is, accepting that the assumptions that undergird last centuries’ rabbinate will not support today’s rabbinate.

 

I believe that rabbis have significant roles to play. Some will be the same as the last generation of rabbis, and others haven’t even yet been imagined. But I’d like to hear your thoughts about the unique roles that rabbis can play. By unique, I mean what is it by virtue of their training that they alone can do, or that they can do with greater ability than others with Judaic knowledge and experience? All are invited to respectfully weigh in and thanks!

 

 

Yesterday’s “Better Late Than Never” is Today’s “Better Late Makes You Never”

Posted on: April 17th, 2013 by Hayim Herring

 

 

There’s a challenging teaching in the Mishnah, Judaism’s first Rabbinic systematic legal compilation. “Just as a person is required to bless God for good events, so must a person bless God for bad events! (Brachot 9:5)” Theologically, this assertion says, “Sure, it’s easy to be thankful for good things in our lives. But, can we have trust that God has our best interest in mind when we’re upended by difficulty and tragedy? We’ll leave it to theologians to help us with the God challenge (and I recommend Rabbi Harold Kusher’s recently published book, The Book of Job: When Bad Things Happened to a Good Person, for that).

 

Leaving personal theology aside, I find organizational relevance in this teaching.

 

How many times in our role as leaders have we made decisions in our lives when they appeared wise, only to discover that we had not anticipated their long-term consequences? Conversely, how many times can we recount what seemed like a poor choice that yielded positive fruits? Let’s look at another common scenario: how often have we worried about an issue, only to find that it consumed unnecessary emotional energy and organizational resources because we overestimated its likelihood? When you’re standing alone at a crossroads, it’s hard to envision the many possible twists it might take down a chosen path.

 

Wheelorg-Banner (more…)

A Call to Action: Make Jewish Learning a Global Seder

Posted on: March 21st, 2013 by Hayim Herring

One of the characteristics of free people is their ability to ask questions. The more free we feel, the bigger the questions we’re able to ask. In the spirit of Pesach, the quintessential celebration of freedom, here are a few big questions that seem appropriate for a holiday in which learning about our identity as a people is so central.

 

What would happen if we created a true revolution for adult learners who want to learn about the Jewish civilization – those who are Jewish and those who are not Jewish? What are the implications for the global Jewish community and for the world if we created universal access to Jewish learning? Theoretically, we actually have the technologies to do so. We can take the model of massive online open courses (MOOCs) to create a revolution in learning about Judaism, for anyone who is interested. Academics and qualified instructors who teach Judaics around the globe, from topics as varied as Jewish medieval history to Jewish mysticism, could be recruited into the ranks of MOOCs teachers. We know that there’s an interest in learning about things Jewish. Just look at the phenomenon of daf yomi (those who commit to studying a page of Talmud daily), or websites as diverse as MyJewishlearning.com to Jerusalem Online University. (more…)

Incomprehensible: My Reaction to Cyd Weissman’s Blog Post

Posted on: March 11th, 2013 by Hayim Herring

 

I read a blog post by a friend and very talented colleague of mine, Cyd Weissman, titled, “Surprisingly East to Quit My Synagogue” with disbelief. Perhaps I could have understood the response of her clergy if it was 2000 and not 2013. But while I try to be respectful of my fellow klei kodesh (clergy), their response to Cyd’s request is incomprehensible to me. And I say this as a former congregational rabbi who, already in the mid-1980s, was working in congregation that already had multiple happenings on Shabbat morning.

 

I’m only going to list three reasons why I find their response so baffling: (more…)

Revolution in Rabbinical School Training? Not Yet, But

Posted on: December 17th, 2012 by Hayim Herring

 

On December 3, the Jewish Daily Forward published an article about alternatives to accredited rabbinical ordination. Some alternatives are at best dubious and at worst potentially harmful to communities that these rabbis serve. While accreditation can’t guarantee the religious and ethical qualities of a rabbinical graduate, it does make a powerful statement about the quality and qualifications of rabbis. But are the accredited seminaries putting themselves at risk with their current model of education?

 

Accredited rabbinical programs typically run between five and six years. That’s already on top of an accredited four-year undergraduate degree, an entrance requirement for rabbinical seminaries. Rabbinical students carry a heavy course load while in school and have a heavy debt load when they graduate, despite working a significant number of hours as students. In a contracting job market, with downward pressure on salaries, high-quality rabbinical schools may be financially freezing excellent future rabbis out of their programs. (more…)