Archive for the ‘Retooling Leadership’ Category

 

And the Results Are…Your Suggestions for High Holy Day Sermon Topics

Posted on: August 26th, 2009 by Hayim Herring

I promised that I would report back on the recommended sermon topics for this Rosh ha-Shanah and Yom Kippur. In no special order and with a little editing, here they are:

Additionally, here are a few other ideas I’ve seen floating around various list serves:

And, Rabbi Kerry Olitzky suggests that rabbis should avoid speaking about:

I hope that the words you hear (or speak) will have the power to help close the gap between our current actions and our aspirations for the new year.

L’shanah Tovah,

Rabbi Hayim Herring

How Much is a Good Question Worth? Everything for Your Organization!

Posted on: August 2nd, 2009 by Hayim Herring

This week, I’ve invited my good friend and colleague, Rabbi David Teutsch, to share his knowledge about leadership.Rabbi Teutsch, an expert in many areas, has spent much of his life on helping leaders of synagogues and other organizations understand and fulfill their roles effectively. His most recent book, which grew from a leadership development program which Rabbi Teutsch designed and co-taught, is entitled Making a Difference. A Guide to Jewish Leadership and Not-for-Profit Management.

In his chapter on leadership, Rabbi Teutsch writes:

Perhaps most important, when organizations are out of kilter, genuine leaders ask the questions that need to be answered in order to find out why. You will not be an effective leader unless you’ve learned to ask questions. If you don’t know what is going on in your organization and why it’s happening, you must first find out in order to lead effectively. New leaders must be willing to ask questions about projects and how they work, and about how people in an organization work together, and about almost everything else… Empowering others means consciously involving them in discussion of the questions at hand (p.11).

So I’ve asked Rabbi Teutsch to suggest the kinds of questions that professional and volunteer leaders should be asking in today’s environment. In creating that “preferable future” that I wrote about in my last post, if one of the most important functions of leaders is to ask questions, what are the three most important questions lay leaders should be asking about their congregations? What are the three that clergy should be asking? Are these questions the same, overlapping or different? Answers matter, but I happen to agree that questions matter more. I’m looking forward to hearing from Rabbi Teutsch and seeing if all of us can agree about the big questions that we need to be asking!

Rabbi Hayim Herring

The Jewish Future: Probable, Possible, Preferable – A Response to Dr. Steven Windmueller

Posted on: July 24th, 2009 by Hayim Herring

Dr. Steven Windmueller, a highly-respected scholar of Jewish communal life, published a paper this past Monday entitled, “The Unfolding Economic Crisis: Its Devastating Implications for American Jewry.” He writes, “The full impact of the current economic crisis may not be felt for years….The long-term outcome of the transformation is likely to be a far weaker, less cohesive American Jewish community… In turn, a communal system weakened by scandal and economic dislocation will inevitably be less powerful.”  For Windmueller, the future is dark.

But as sociologists like to say, we have to distinguish between the probable, the possible and the preferable.  Absent fundamental change, Windmueller is probably correct.  But the future he portrays is not inevitable. Our ability to create the kind of future we prefer is an issue of collective leadership and collaborative action.

Far before the economic crisis, 5 significant transitions, that spanned several decades, have occurred in American culture. We have transitioned from or are currently transitioning from the age of:

These overlapping transitions have also impacted upon the American Jewish community and its historical and emerging organizations.

Without minimizing the irreparable economic pain of the moment, none of these transitions are related to the economic crisis nor are our responses to them dependent upon large sums of money. Rather, they’re about values, new thinking and capabilities. Because now, if we’re really serious, we can:

Of course, anyone who loves the Jewish people and community would loudly proclaim “Yes we should!” But here’s the rub: we can now say, “Yes we can!” and that obligates us to get to work in new ways.

As Windmueller notes, we’re going to see continued downsizing of organizations. But that means we have to upsize our ideas and creativity. What we’ve lost economically, we can compensate for in large measure with ideas, technologies and vision. We can create the preferable future of a proud and flourishing Jewish community. If we let the current data drive us to darkness, the fault will be ours.

Please—respond with one creative idea you’ve seen or are thinking about that offers hope for the Jewish future. If I receive enough responses, I’ll be sure to post them.

Thanks, Rabbi Hayim Herring

Personal Confessions: Spirituality Lost and Found

Posted on: May 4th, 2009 by Hayim Herring

Before we leave the topic of spirituality, we’re going to take a look at a critical factor in creating spiritual communities: the Rabbi. I’ve tried not to be blatantly biographical, but I’m making an exception in talking about spirituality. Why? I can generalize about congregations, but I can’t generalize about “rabbis and spirituality,” because each rabbi has a unique path and story.

I wonder, is spirituality a generational issue?  I don’t remember my rabbi, of blessed memory, using that word when I was growing up in the ‘70’s. Nor do I remember him often mentioning God (I could be wrong on that last score but don’t believe so.)  I attended The Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS) from 1976 to 1985 (undergrad and reb school), and again don’t remember the words spirituality or God mentioned all that much.

I loved my education at JTS and remain grateful for it to this very day. But the approach to Jewish living in those years generally excluded discussions about God, faith and spirituality from the curriculum, except in the most abstract academic manner, although some of us frequently discussed those issues well into the night as students, especially over Shabbat evening meals. We had no or few role models to raise these issues with and we really felt that not too many of our faculty members concerned themselves with the exploration of their own life of faith, or if they did, they didn’t seem very willing to share these issues with us. In fact, I would even say that our education undermined the cultivation of spiritual feelings.  Pretty sad, considering that many of us entered school with a serious belief in God, even if it wasn’t the most sophisticated theological understanding of the Divine.
 
I can’t detail my encounters with spirituality during 10 years of Congregational life, seven years of Federation life and seven years of Foundation life. And of course, a lot in life has happened during these years outside of work.  While I periodically experienced spiritual moments in all of these iterations, I felt that I was undergoing a slow, spiritual death.  In retrospect, I don’t fault my work environments much, although none of them were conducive to intentionally cultivating spirituality. 

What I realized is that I had allowed myself to drift from my own spiritual moorings to the point of cynicism. As spirituality became more of a buzzword, I felt that spirituality was another form of narcissism clothed in religious vocabulary.

For whatever the reasons, I am grateful to say that I have felt the resurgence of spiritual feelings.  For me, that means paying greater awareness to those around me, to what I do and how I do it, to learning from those who have spent more time on doing their own spiritual work and reading more about spiritual masters.  Prayer feels richer, relationships feel deeper, the meaning of everyday moments is greater, and my questions about existential meaning are more insistent.  So that has been my path of spiritual enchantment, disenchantment, and re-enchantment.

What’s your story?

Rabbi Hayim Herring

image from Flickr.com, Image Zen

Rabbi – Where’s the Spirit in Spirituality?

Posted on: April 21st, 2009 by Hayim Herring

A rabbi’s spiritual leanings (or lack thereof) ultimately determine whether or not a congregation achieves some dimension of spirituality. (Please refer to the last post for a rich variety of understandings of “spirituality.”) The congregational context in which the rabbi works will either contribute toward the creation of a spiritual community or help to undermine it.  In other words, while the rabbi must lead in the creation of a spiritual community, ultimately it is the partnership of a core group of congregants and rabbi who help to develop and sustain this kind of community.

Most congregations are structured to sap the spiritual energy of rabbis (and cantors for that matter). Think about it: when was the last time you remember a congregant saying to a rabbi, “Rabbi, your SQ (spirituality quotient) could use a little more zip. Have you taken your spiritual temperature lately?”

What are some of the structural barriers in congregations which conspire against the creation of a spiritual community?

The conversation on the prior post on dimensions of spirituality was incredibly rich, and thanks for your insights. So please respond to the following questions (in addition to any other comments):

The next time, we’ll focus on the barriers that clergy erect in fostering spirituality, so stay tuned!

Rabbi Hayim Herring

Photo from Flickr.com  Orbital Joe

Spirituality and Pornography: Hard to Define

Posted on: April 13th, 2009 by Hayim Herring

One of the primary goals of the synagogue or minyan (prayer quorum), is to create a spiritual community. Pardon the comparison, but in thinking about how to define the term spiritual, I remember the words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who said of pornography, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced [by it] but I know it when I see it.” Words like spiritual and spirituality are vague words as well, but while challenging to define, you know them when you feel them.

However, I think that we have to hold ourselves accountable to some precision in defining these words. Otherwise, spirituality risks becoming a trite term – the opposite of what it’s supposed to be. So here is my attempt to simplify a complex subject. Spirituality has two components.  The first one is separation and the second is elevation. Or to understand the term as a mathematical equation: spirituality = awareness (or separating out one moment from another) + positive action (or elevating our choices). 

Although not all choices are equally consequential, every moment of our lives presents us with choices. Living life spiritually means having a constant awareness of the mundane and the extraordinary; that is, we separate ourselves from animals, which act by instinct, because of the awareness we bring to our choices and then intentionally choosing the more elevated path for each choice before us. We use this ability to discipline our baser instincts so that the phrase, “I’m only human,” isn’t an excuse for mediocre behavior but a stimulus for us to strive to do that which is good, beautiful, wise, compassionate, just and caring.

Living spiritually is not something that comes naturally to most people, and needs cultivation and practice from the time of childhood.  And, living a spiritual life requires the reinforcement of a community of people who share similar aspirations. In the ideal world, over time, rabbis should become experts at cultivating a community of spiritual individuals.  That takes a tremendous amount of personal practice and periodic time away from the congregation.  It requires the ability to discern what is ultimately important and to keep in perspective what feels critical at the moment.  It also takes a congregation which values the rabbi’s ability to cultivate spirituality.

In this post, all I want to do is try to simply define what I mean by spirituality.  In the next post, I’ll comment on some of the challenges in developing a spiritual community. But please comment on this definition and help bring clarity to a vague but essential issue for rabbis and congregations.

Thank you!

Rabbi Hayim Herring

Image from Flickr.com  alicepopkorn

A Rabbi’s Great Privilege: Being a Talent Scout

Posted on: April 3rd, 2009 by Hayim Herring

I’ll write about some of the strategies which I’ve learned for getting congregants involved in synagogue life in future posts.  But now, I want to look specifically at the big picture opportunity rabbis have in identifying and cultivating talent within and outside of their synagogue communities.

The American Jewish community is highly educated, accomplished in the arts, education, business, and professions like medicine, law and accounting.  While college is certainly not the right track for every young person, Jews have an exceptional level of undergraduate and post-graduate education. The aspirations of our ancestors in Europe, who left their countries of origin for a better life in “the new world,” have by and large been fulfilled.

Yet, rabbis often allow great talent to slip through their fingers.  (While lay leaders also have to be involved, rabbis have a unique opportunity to be talent scouts, because members are often disinclined to refuse their requests.) The limited research that we have on whether congregants feel valued for their talent is discouraging. I’ve often felt that members are the most underutilized yet potent force in the congregation.  So especially in these trying times, rabbis have to “step up to the plate” and act more enthusiastically in this role.

In order to do so, we’re going to have to debunk a couple of unconscious biases we have.  The first is that if someone doesn’t have a certain level of ritual practice or halakhic (legal) knowledge, they don’t have much to contribute.  My experience has been quite the opposite. For example, if you know of someone who has expertise in communications, if you or someone else knowledgeable in these other areas is willing to work with this communications expert, then collaboratively you can do some outstanding work.  More important than the work itself, you may find this volunteer will become curious about the “Jewish” piece, want to learn more, and become more involved in the synagogue community.

The second myth is that it’s easier to go it alone then to ask for help.  Okay, maybe it is easier to accomplish a task alone, and not every task needs volunteer help.  However, for more significant and complex work, the process or work product that you create will not have the same excellence that it could if you partnered with a volunteer.

The third myth is that once you’ve gotten the commitment of a new volunteer for a project, your job is over. As a talent scout, it’s important to help create a climate in which a volunteer’s abilities can flourish. That means that it’s important to check in with them as they start, give them a clear role, thank them for their help, and be available for questions which they may have.

So I’d like to hear from you about:

Shabbat shalom and a chag kasher v’sameach!

Rabbi Hayim Herring

Image from flickr.com, photographer’s home page here

The Rabbi as C.E.O.: Yes or No?

Posted on: March 30th, 2009 by Hayim Herring

 

 

Rabbis often express ambivalence about their executive leadership roles.  By executive leadership roles, I’m referring to supporting the board, supervising staff, delegating work appropriately to volunteer and professional staff, playing a role in budgeting and staffing decisions at all levels, and undertaking tasks which are typically referred to as “administrative.” This ambivalence flows from several sources:

rabbi as ceo

Given these many variables, there is no one ideal, clear definition about how rabbis should assume executive leadership roles. However, one thing is certain: the rabbi should not be absent from what we typically called the administrative aspects of synagogue life.  Why?

When the synagogue has a skilled executive director, the rabbi can work with that staff person to ensure that decisions which the executive director makes come from a place of Jewish wisdom.  When a synagogue does not have an executive director or one that functions at a low level, the rabbi will have to be more involved in what he or she considers are the “mundane” aspects of synagogue life.  In either scenario, we need to abandon the distinction between the secular and religious aspects of synagogue life, or what others call the spiritual and administrative aspects of synagogue life.  These are false distinctions because ideally every aspect of congregation life should express and be shape by Jewish teachings.

Like it or not, rabbis must master the fundamentals of basic executive leadership skills.  While other members of the staff and membership may have greater expertise in these areas, the rabbi must at least have a working knowledge of how organizations function, what the role of boards and committees are and how budgets work.  Only that way does the synagogue have a chance to become a holy and holistically Jewish venue.

Most rabbis would much rather be teaching, providing pastoral counseling or studying Torah – things that the rabbi would rather do and is better trained to do.  However, I believe that neglecting the “business” aspects of the synagogue creates the likelihood of ultimate unhappiness for the rabbi because when problems result, he or she will be called in to clean them up.  So it’s better to thoughtfully and proactively define the rabbi’s role in this area than to constantly be putting out fires which could’ve been avoided in the first place.

So rabbis and synagogue leaders-you’ve had these discussions before.  What do you think?  Have your views changed over the years?  Thanks for sharing your insights.

Rabbi Hayim Herring

 

 

Wanted: More Spiritual Dreamers!

Posted on: March 23rd, 2009 by Hayim Herring

Before the current economic crash, we were in the middle of a tremendous generational transfer of wealth. The majority of that wealth circumvented the synagogue community. Why was that the case? One of the reasons was that major funders considered synagogues to be too parochial and uninspiring for their tastes.

Imagine the challenges which synagogues now face. Synagogue list serves have been abuzz with stories about staff cuts, salary freezes, and impending synagogue closings. Rabbis are really going to have to work harder to articulate inspirational dreams even to maintain the support of their current community, let alone funders with greater financial means, who could offer budget relief.

I have no hard data on this, but it often feels that rabbis don’t dream expansively enough. Perhaps our training doesn’t sufficiently encourage us to create compelling narratives about Jewish life, or maybe it’s that synagogues tend to be risk adverse and push back against big dreams, or maybe it’s just the times in which we live — but where are the spiritual visionaries of today who will cultivate the most noble aspirations that we have as a people?

Let me cite a couple of examples of what I mean by big dreams:

The synagogue will become a microcosm of a just and perfected world. All people who walk through its door, regardless of status and ability, will be treated with the dignity to which they’re entitled because they’re created in the image of God. All synagogue staff members will respect one another and the members of the community they serve. Instead of looking for people’s flaws, members of this community seek to shine the light on the unique contributions that each individual has the potential to offer.

Another example:

The synagogue will become a model of a diverse, multi-generational community. While few places in society today enable individuals from different generations to meaningfully and regularly interact, all aspects of synagogue life will truly embody the phrase, “from one generation to another,” l’dor va-dor. By doing so, the community will be an evolving repository of Jewish wisdom and help all people enrich the passages of life.

Clearly, each congregation must envision its ideal picture of its community’s future. A significant part of the rabbi’s work is to lay out the possibilities of a big dream and then empower the congregation and staff to work together on achieving it. While I’m fully supportive of getting every member of the congregation to light Shabbat candles and study Torah daily, those are not big dreams—they are discrete Jewish practices that don’t point to larger meaning and purpose in life.

As a people, we have a history of knowing how to dream with great imagination. Reclaiming that capacity is going to be one of the most important roles for contemporary rabbis if we want vital institutions. So rabbis—please share your big dreams for the Jewish community or your congregation (or other institution) here. And others—let me know what you wish your rabbi would dream!

Rabbi Hayim Herring

image from flickr.com muha…

Is Your Rabbi an Excellent Teacher?

Posted on: March 16th, 2009 by Hayim Herring

Did you know that most rabbis have little formal training in education?  One of the most pervasive aspects of the rabbi’s job is teaching, but aside from a required course in education, most rabbis learn how to teach on-the-job. Imagine teaching a group of preschoolers in the morning, seniors at lunchtime and middle-school aged children in the late afternoon and teens in the evening. That’s not an unusual schedule for a congregational rabbi.

I’ve personally witnessed rabbis inflict painful learning experiences on congregants (and I admit, I did in my younger days!)  One morning, I watched a rabbi interact with preschool age children using words and concepts that were appropriate for older teens. Later that evening, I heard another rabbi speak to adults as if they were children.

In a book of Jewish ethics (Pirkei Avot 1:4), rabbinical students are instructed to sit at the feet of their teachers and “drink their words” up. The image is hierarchical, with students sitting on the ground and their teachers sitting or standing above them, in a privileged position because of their learning. And after 5-6 years of most rabbinical schools experience, I wonder if that’s the image that some rabbis carry around in their heads when they are teaching: I (rabbi) am up over you because I’ve got the knowledge; you (congregant) are beneath me because you don’t.

Some rabbis intuitively begin to understand that different strategies and approaches are needed depending upon the developmental stages of their audience. But, even when rabbis become good educators, many have the potential to become outstanding ones with just a little training and mentoring.

Rabbis: what “aha” moments made you realize that there were better ways to teach and what did you do about them? Others who aren’t rabbis—what suggestions do you have to help rabbis become more impactful teachers?

Thanks in advance for your responses!

Rabbi Hayim Herring

Image from Flickr: .:Axle:.