Should Adat Shalom require members to do more than just serve on 2 oneg crews? If so, what should the requirement be? The Long Range Planning survey mailed to you last week asks your opinion on several different schemes. We need your input!
Frustrated committee chairs trying to recruit volunteers can't help envying the power of the draft that creates workers for the Oneg system. Rather than begging for ushers, why not just require members to usher once every 5 years? Before we just enact such a rule, we need to consider whether Adat Shalom would truly be best served by having a continual parade of inexperienced, reluctant ushers. Besides, why stop with Onegs and ushering? Shouldn’t our members be participating in tikkun olam projects? Serving on committees? Helping in the Torah School? All of these ideas have been proposed as a way of increasing participation and making our community work better.
If we are going to expand our participation requirements, there are many difficult choices to be made. What counts and what doesn't? Does the treasurer, who puts in dozens of hours a week, need to work in the Torah School? Does the member who is Executive Director of Yachad (the organization that sponsors “Sukkot in April”) need to come nail drywall in the Adat Shalom Sukkot in April house to fulfill at tikkun olam requirement? Who is going to judge what jobs qualify for “tikkun olam requirement” exemptions? Imposing requirements creates a host of issues that take careful thinking and discussion to resolve.
Requirements raises the issue of non-compliance. When I was the “oneg queen” from 1998-2000, I simply reassigned “no-shows” to new dates. This worked very well until I came to a member who absolutely refused to do Oneg duty as a matter of principle. In the end, then-president Stan Newman and I felt we had to enforce the bylaw oneg duty requirement even though it caused this person to leave the congregation. This person may have been the only member ever to resign mid year to protest the oneg requirement, but we have several households cite the oneg requirement as a major factor in their decision to leave Adat Shalom. This doesn’t mean that we should rescind the oneg requirement, but we should be cognizant that participation requirements have the potential to discourage affiliation.
The high level of participation in the “early days” of Adat Shalom is often depicted as an Eden to which we should strive to return. I wasn’t a member in the earliest days so I don’t know first-hand what this Eden was like. Steve and I joined in the fall of 1993 when, as parents of a toddler, a preschooler, and a 2nd grader, getting to services twice a month (which was as often as they were held) was a major accomplishment for our family. Steve and I couldn’t both work productively on an oneg crew unless we hired a babysitter and we didn’t attend committee meetings during our first few years in the community either. When more senior members talked about the need for “quality growth” of “involved members”, I knew that they definitely were not referring to us! I would like to think that by being president, I’ve made up our initial household participation deficit. But my experience is not unique. Participation requirements need to allow members’ level of involvement to wax and wane as family obligations, health and job commitments change.
All the hours I spend on Adat Shalom means that my husband’s main form of “participation” is supervising homework and bath time several nights a week. Since membership is by household, should we count participation by household too or do we need every individual to participate, no matter what a spouse is doing?
Having a substantial participation requirement has been tried elsewhere. One congregation in our movement required 18 hours of participation in committee work each year. A participation committee oversaw and monitored the system. In practice, I understand, this requirement served more as a goal for minimum participation by members rather than as a strict requirement. If so, how did it differ from our Avodah Guidelines, which strongly urge the participation by every member in a committee or other subgroup? Maybe what we need is a renewal of the commitment embodied in the Avodah Guidelines, last revised in 1992.
Our Avodah Guidelines conclude:
"If we can make the group and volunteer opportunities variable and inspirational enough, then it would be reasonable to expect that everyone should be involved in at least one area of congregational life that interests or inspires them. Thus, we would augment our current expectations of membership to include not only financial contributions and preparation of our oneg luncheons a few times a year but also to include some contribution of effort and involvement. Such avodah both strengthens the congregation as well as enhances each member’s sense of belonging to the community. Our hope is that everybody should, in some way, have an identity as an active member of a smaller group within the larger community context. Such identity would ideally have the combined effect of perpetuating our tradition of volunteerism and high levels of participation within the Adat Shalom community and enhancing our ability to maintain our sense of intimacy even as we grow in numbers."
The question before the Long Range Planning Committee is whether we can continue to lure our members to participate by providing varied and inspiring opportunities or whether we are now large enough that we need a more formal participation requirement to maintain our culture of participation. Fill out the survey and tell us what you think!
Shalom uv’ racha (Peace and Blessing),
Judy Gelman, President