Why Healthy Congregations Don’t Just Design Leaders

One of the most enigmatic roles in synagogue life is Past President.

Sometimes it appears in the bylaws. Sometimes it appears on the organizational chart. It almost always earns a warm round of applause at the annual meeting, followed by a plaque, a heartfelt speech, and perhaps a gift that will spend the next decade wondering whether it’s decorative art or a paperweight. After that, things become... considerably less clear.

Ask ten congregations what a Past President actually does and you’ll hear an impressive variety of answers, many delivered with great confidence. Some remain active on the board. Some become unofficial historians. Some chair an occasional committee. Some become trusted advisors to the new president. Others gradually fade into the congregation like a character in the background of a movie whom everyone assumes has a backstory but nobody ever quite learns.

Lately I’ve found myself thinking about The Backrooms, that wonderfully unsettling internet phenomenon that became one of this year’s biggest horror films. The premise is deceptively simple: you find yourself wandering through spaces that look strangely familiar, except reality has shifted just enough that nothing quite works the way you expect. The hallways are recognizable. The doors are recognizable. But every turn seems to reveal a distorted version of something you thought you understood.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that some congregations unintentionally create a version of the Backrooms for former leaders.

The building is the same. The people are the same. The coffee is still... synagogue coffee. But the relationships have subtly changed. Yesterday everyone wanted your opinion before making a decision. Today you’re trying to discern whether offering that same opinion would be helpful, intrusive, or simply make the new leadership wonder if you’ve mistaken “former president” for “still president.”

We’ve somehow designed a role that’s half honorific, half witness protection program.

The funny thing is that nobody means for this to happen. In fact, most congregations care deeply about their leaders. We work hard to recruit them, encourage them, support them, thank them, and, if we’re lucky, convince them not to resign after budget season. We celebrate the beginning of their term with intention and the end of their term with gratitude.

What we rarely do is spend much time imagining what comes next.

That realization hit me during a consulting project a few months ago. I was talking with a former synagogue president reflecting on the end of his term when he said something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

“One day I was at the center of almost every important conversation,” he told me. “The next day, I felt irrelevant.”

It wasn’t bitterness. It was disorientation.

The Work We Forget to Design

The more I thought about that conversation, the more I realized the former president wasn’t describing a personal disappointment. He was describing an organizational blind spot.

Most congregations invest enormous energy preparing people for leadership. We recruit presidents, orient them, pray over them, hand them binders, budgets, passwords, and, if they’re especially lucky, the key to at least three mysterious closets whose contents have apparently been passed down since the Eisenhower administration. We think carefully about succession because we understand that leadership matters.

What we spend far less time thinking about is what comes after.

That’s where William Bridges’ work on transitions gave me language for something I’d been noticing for years. Bridges, whose work has appeared frequently in Harvard Business Review, argues that organizations often confuse change with transition. The difference sounds subtle, but it changes everything. Change happens on the calendar: elections end, gavels are passed, rabbis become emeritus, new names appear on the organizational chart. Transition is slower. It’s the deeply human work of letting go of one identity while gradually discovering another.

That resonated with me in a way I hadn’t expected. When I stepped down after twenty-three years as Senior Rabbi, I asked to become Rabbi Emeritus. I wasn’t retiring, and I wasn’t looking for an honorary title to soften the landing. I simply understood that healthy transitions rarely happen all at once. Intellectually, I knew not to confuse my role with my identity. Living that truth has been far more complicated, and in unexpected ways, more beautiful, than I imagined.

Leadership has a way of gradually weaving itself into our sense of self. We begin by saying, “I’m serving as president,” or “I’m serving as rabbi.” After enough years, enough meetings, enough crises, and enough people depending on us, it’s surprisingly easy to wake up one morning and realize we’ve stopped serving the role and started inhabiting it. We all like to believe we’re immune to that. Most of us aren’t.

That’s why I don’t think this article is really about former presidents. It’s about what happens after any meaningful season of leadership ends. It’s about presidents and rabbis, certainly, but it’s also about board chairs, committee leaders, founders, longtime volunteers, and anyone whose contribution became woven into the fabric of a community. The question isn’t simply how we thank them for what they’ve done. It’s whether we’ve designed a way for them to discover who they can become next.

The Season Between

One reason I think so many congregations unintentionally get this wrong is surprisingly practical.

During a president’s term, that person often becomes the hub through which an extraordinary amount of congregational life flows. Meetings get scheduled. Relationships get nurtured. Decisions get made. Information gets shared. In some congregations, presidents lead collaboratively. In others, they carry far more of the operational and emotional weight than anyone realizes. Either way, the president becomes one of the central organizing forces in the system.

Then the term ends, and the incoming president is understandably focused on learning a new role. The outgoing president can’t really steward their own departure. The board assumes someone else is handling it. The rabbi? The executive director? The governance chair? (Do we even have one?) Everyone cares.

Nobody owns it. That’s the vacuum.

I think that’s one of the hidden reasons leadership transitions gradually fail. It isn’t because congregations lack gratitude. It isn’t because former presidents aren’t resilient. It’s because the transition itself has no steward. We spend years preparing someone to become president, but almost no time deciding who is responsible for helping them become something afterward.

That observation has led me to a simple framework that I think almost any congregation could adapt. It isn’t complicated. It isn’t another committee or another policy manual. It’s simply a way of remembering that leadership is seasonal, and every meaningful season deserves an intentional ending before it can give way to a meaningful new beginning. It just needs to be owned.

Ritualize. Rest. Reconnect. Return.

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Ritualize

Every meaningful season of leadership deserves a ritual.

Not an exit interview. That language belongs somewhere between collecting your laptop and explaining COBRA benefits. Congregations can do better than that.

Before a president, board chair, committee leader, or anyone who has carried significant responsibility steps into their next season, create space for a real conversation. Capture the wisdom they’ve gained. Preserve the institutional memory they’ve accumulated. Ask what relationships need to be handed off, what unfinished work still matters, what brought them joy, what depleted them, and what they wish someone had told them before they stepped into leadership.

Then mark that ending publicly. Offer a blessing from the bimah. Tell stories. Let people express their gratitude. We already know how to do this. Jews have never been shy about ritualizing life’s important transitions. Leadership should be no different. Plaques are lovely, but someday they’ll be sitting in a closet wondering why nobody ever dusts them. Stories become congregational memory.

Rest

Then honor the Sabbath you’ve just encouraged. Leadership doesn’t simply change a person’s schedule. It changes their relationship with a congregation. It asks people to carry budgets, conflicts, crises, expectations, and more opinions about the thermostat than any human being should ever have to absorb. Before we invite someone into another role, we should give them permission to rediscover the joy of simply belonging.

Now Past Presidents, I’m talking to you: Host a Shabbat dinner because you want friends around your table, not because you’re recruiting volunteers. Accept an invitation instead of extending one. Linger after services without mentally composing tomorrow night’s agenda. Sit with your spouse. Pray. Laugh. Become a congregant again.

Before the ritual conversation ends, however, do one practical thing. While the Past President becomes a congregant once again, leadership should put a reminder in the CRM for six or nine months from now. Not because you want to recruit them back into leadership, but because healthy communities remember while people rest.

Reconnect

When that reminder appears, the instinct will be to lead with need. We have a committee that could really use your help. Resist it. Get curious instead. How are you? What’s surprised you in the last six months? What have you noticed about the congregation now that you’re not inside the machinery of it? What delighted you? What did you miss? What do you actually want to do with your time?

This conversation isn’t recruitment. It’s remembering that a person’s worth to a congregation doesn’t reset when their title does. Healthy communities don’t reach out only when they need someone. They reach out because the person who carried so much weight deserves to be asked what they’re hungry for now.

Return

Only after ritual, Sabbath, and reconnection is it time for the second intentional conversation. Not, “Would you like another leadership position?” Instead: “What season are you entering now?”

Leadership scholar Herminia Ibarra has observed that people rarely discover a new identity simply by thinking about it. More often, they discover it by trying on new roles. Congregations can help make that possible, not by recreating the old role, but by helping someone try on a new season.

For one person, that may mean mentoring emerging leaders. For another, preserving institutional memory as a culture keeper or storyteller. Others may find joy serving on a strategic task force, teaching an occasional class, advising behind the scenes, or becoming the trusted voice a new president calls when they’re trying to think something through. And for some, the next season may simply be rediscovering the satisfaction of being an engaged congregant again.

I find it helpful to think about those possibilities in four broad categories:

• Wisdom: mentor, advisor, coach, sounding board.

• Culture: storykeeper, historian, keeper of values and traditions.

• Projects: strategic initiatives, task forces, one-time leadership opportunities.

• Presence: teacher, greeter, learner, host, faithful congregant, steady friend.

The goal isn’t to make sure every former leader stays busy. It’s to make sure they never lose their place in the story.

Beyond the Presidency

I’ve focused on synagogue presidents because their transition is often the most visible and, to me, one of the most puzzling. These are people who have poured years of their lives into a congregation. They know the history, the relationships, the unwritten rules, and the stories behind the stories. When they lose their place in the life of the community, everyone loses something.

Presidents are simply the clearest example.

This can be adapted for anyone who has carried a significant season of leadership or service. Board chairs. Committee leaders. Founders. Longtime volunteers. Religious school teachers. Choir directors. Rabbis. Executive directors. Anyone whose fingerprints are all over the life of a congregation, even if their name is no longer on the agenda.

The framework becomes lighter as the role becomes lighter. Not every season of service calls for the same degree of intentionality. But the underlying principle remains the same. Ritualize meaningful endings. Honor a season of rest. Reconnect with curiosity. Help people discover their next season of belonging.

If your congregation has someone whose primary responsibility is engagement, wonderful. This responsibility belongs with them. If not, then someone else needs to own it. The rabbi. The executive director. The governance committee. A leadership development team. The title matters far less than the commitment because one of the hidden lessons of this article is surprisingly simple:

Somebody has to own the transition.

Over the course of this series, I’ve argued that healthy congregations don’t simply recruit volunteers, fill committees, or develop leaders. They notice gifts. They remember people. They build systems that help belonging deepen over time instead of depending on good intentions alone. Leadership deserves that same intentionality.

After all, the real measure of a congregation isn’t simply how well it welcomes new people or raises up new leaders. It’s whether people can move through different seasons of contribution without ever wondering whether they still have a place. If we design communities where people can enter, grow, lead, step back, and continue to belong, we won’t simply retain more institutional memory. We’ll become the kind of congregation where every season of life has dignity, every season has purpose, and every person knows there is another chapter waiting to be written.

A well-designed congregation doesn’t just create leaders.

It creates a lifetime of belonging.

If this article resonates, I hope you'll go back and read the first four essays in this series. Each explores a different way congregations can move beyond simply recruiting volunteers to intentionally designing communities of deeper belonging.

A Practical Guide to Designing Belonging

The Best B’tzalel I Ever Knew

I once served with a synagogue president who changed the way I think about leadership.

She was a former labor lawyer for one of the major baseball leagues. She was unmistakably New York, which meant she occasionally landed in our Southern congregation with all the subtlety of a subway train. She was outspoken, funny, direct, deeply caring, and completely herself. She had very little interest in pretending to be anyone else.

People loved her. They also knew that if her name appeared on their caller ID, there was a decent chance she was about to invite them to coffee.

She drank an astonishing amount of coffee, not because she needed the caffeine, but because she was endlessly curious about people.

Week after week, month after month, she sat down with congregants. New members. Longtime members. The person who had just retired. The young parent trying to survive two toddlers and a sleep deficit. The generous donor. The original member who stopped coming as often. She asked questions, listened, laughed, remembered, and she started connecting people.

She introduced people who needed to know one another. She invited someone to help shape a Shabbat program because she remembered how much they loved gathering people. She encouraged another person to consider board service because she saw wisdom they didn’t yet recognize in themselves. She asked for financial gifts with exactly the same warmth she used when asking someone to greet at the door or help organize a social action project.

None of it felt transactional because none of it was.

People didn’t feel recruited. They felt known.

At the time, I thought I was watching an exceptional synagogue president.

Looking back, I think I was watching someone practice a form of leadership our tradition already has a name for.

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Leon showed up to the potluck carrying a casserole dish and a quiet fear that everyone else knew something he didn’t.

The casserole dish was easier to talk about.

He got through half his questions before he managed to set it down.

Was this an okay thing to bring? Why did some people have their heads covered and others didn’t? And, dropping his voice for this one, was it a problem that he knew almost nothing about being Jewish?

Leon (not his real name) had found out he was Jewish as a teenager. His relationship to Judaism was sincere and unsteady at the same time. He was curious. He was a little embarrassed. He had no idea where he fit.

So he did the only thing that ever actually works.

He kept showing up.

He came to classes. He became a regular at services. He said yes to Shabbat dinners. He hosted an oneg. He asked his questions and stayed for the answers, and somewhere along the way the questions changed from “what do you people do?” to “what are we doing this year?” First he was learning about the congregation. Then, without anyone announcing it, he was part of it.

It would be easy to tell Leon’s story as a leadership story. Newcomer arrives, joins a committee, ends up on the board. That happened. But it isn’t the interesting part.

The interesting part is everything that came first. The classes. The meals. The bad jokes at kiddush. The oneg. The slow, unglamorous accumulation of trust. We tend to treat all of that as the waiting room before belonging.

It isn’t the waiting room. It is the belonging.

Membership Is Not a Destination

This is where a lot of congregations get quietly confused. We talk about membership as though it were a finish line. Someone joins. Someone pays dues. Someone gets added to the directory and starts receiving the monthly email they may or may not open.

But the stretch between a person’s first visit and their first real act of ownership isn’t dead time. It’s an apprenticeship. People are learning the culture, quietly sizing up whether they can trust us and whether we can trust them, figuring out not only what we do but why any of it matters.

I’ve been circling this idea for a few articles now, usually with B’tzalel in mind. When the Torah introduces him as the master builder of the Mishkan, it says he is filled with chochmah, tevunah, and da’at: wisdom, understanding, and knowledge (Exodus 31:3). Tradition reads these as three different muscles rather than three words for “smart”: seeing what’s possible, grasping how the pieces fit, and knowing how to bring the thing into the world.

Which means B’tzalel’s real genius probably wasn’t the gold work. Gold sitting in a box is not a sanctuary. Skilled artisans working alone are not a sanctuary. His genius was noticing what other people had to give and helping them notice it too.

That’s the part of the Mishkan story we tend to skip. It would have been easy for the Torah to make it a tale of a few extraordinary people: Moses with the vision, B’tzalel with the hands. Instead, the sanctuary gets built because an entire people figures out how to contribute. Some bring materials. Some bring skill. Some bring labor, or organization, or simply the willingness to show up. The miracle isn’t that B’tzalel is gifted. The miracle is that he gets everyone else to discover they are too.

I have a suspicion that most congregations already contain enough talent, generosity, creativity, wisdom, and energy to become the communities they hope to be. The challenge isn’t finding those gifts. The challenge is noticing them before people decide nobody needs them.

The Mishkan isn’t built by heroes, or by martyrs. It’s built by contributors. And contributors are exactly what most congregations don’t quite know how to grow.

What Actually Builds Ownership

We spend enormous energy asking how to recruit volunteers and almost none asking how people grow into ownership. We fill positions before we build pathways. The result is predictable: a small, tired group carries most of the weight while everyone else watches from the pews, unsure how you ever get from attendee to owner.

It turns out psychologists have spent decades on this exact question. Jon Pierce, Tatiana Kostova, and Kurt Dirks, who built the modern theory of psychological ownership, found that we come to feel ownership over something through three doors: investing ourselves in it, coming to know it intimately, and having some real influence over what happens next. Notice that none of those doors is “got the welcome packet and a parking decal.”

More recent work pushes this from mine to ours. Researchers studying collective psychological ownership, the sense that a place belongs to us, have found it runs on two tracks at once: the same feeling produces responsibility and exclusion. The “ours” that makes people arrive early, stack the chairs, and treat the building as theirs to care for is the same “ours” that decides who really counts as “us.” Ownership is what turns members into stewards. It is also what makes a longtime member cool toward the newcomer sitting in what has somehow become their seat.

This is the part we don’t like to say out loud. The belonging we work so hard to grow is the same force that can wall the next Leon out. A congregation that has gotten very good at “ours” can become very hard to enter. So the goal was never simply to deepen ownership. It’s to keep widening the circle of who gets to say it, which is harder, because the people who already feel ownership have to keep making room for the people who don’t yet.

How people get into that circle is its own field of study. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, watching how everyone from midwives to tailors learned their trades, gave it an unfortunately academic name (legitimate peripheral participation) for a very simple idea. People don’t start at the center. They start at the edge. They watch, ask, try a small thing, build a relationship, and drift inward. Apprentices learn from craftspeople; new volunteers learn from old ones. It happens nearly everywhere humans make something together, which is what makes it so strange that congregations keep forgetting it.

Mostly we forget it because we’re impatient. We want belonging to happen on a schedule. We want commitment before relationship, ownership before investment, and leadership before apprenticeship. Then we wonder why the same six people are exhausted.

A capable newcomer turns up, joins one committee, and we immediately start picturing them as a future board member, officer, committee chair, and the person who will finally fix the sound system. We treat saying yes to one thing as proof that someone secretly wants four more. It’s a little like handing someone a sample at Costco and asking whether they’d like to buy the warehouse.

What’s Your Teahouse?

Once I started noticing this, I went looking to see whether other volunteer-run communities had cracked it. The most useful answer came from an unlikely place: Wikipedia has a Teahouse.

We think of Wikipedia as a website. It’s actually one of the largest volunteer communities in human history. At some point its organizers noticed a problem any synagogue would recognize. Talented, eager newcomers kept arriving and kept leaving, because they couldn’t find their way into a community that already had its own language, customs, and unwritten rules. So they built the Teahouse: a space, named to feel like an invitation rather than a help desk, where newcomers can ask questions and meet people who’ve been around a while. A front door, basically. A place where belonging is allowed to begin.

That stopped me, because we used to have one. At a congregation I served, we ran a new-member brunch. By the end it had the charm of a hotel continental breakfast, and nobody would have called it a Teahouse, but it did the same work: newer people sat next to older people, questions got asked without shame, relationships started, and a person could learn how decisions got made and where they might fit. Then the congregation grew, and the brunch disappeared. Which is exactly the sort of thing congregations do. We abandon practices because they no longer seem necessary, only to discover later that they had quietly become essential.

Small congregations can get away with informal pathways. Everyone knows everyone; newcomers are visible; questions find answers in the parking lot. Growth breaks all of that. The bigger you get, the more deliberately you have to help people find their way in.

This is what Priya Parker means when she writes, in The Art of Gathering, that a gathering should be judged not by whether people showed up but by what happened to them while they were there. The point of our brunch was never the bagels, though a good bagel has launched more Jewish journeys than most strategic plans. The point was helping a person answer one question: Can I see myself here?

Being welcomed and being oriented are not the same thing. You can greet someone warmly and still leave them with no idea how to take a next step. So every congregation should be able to answer plainly: Where is our front door? Who helps a newcomer read the culture? Where do relationships start? Who shows them the next step? If those questions are hard to answer, the problem usually isn’t that your people won’t participate. It’s that no one designed a way in.

Nobody Gets the Truck on Day One

Finding the front door is only half of it. The other half is what happens after someone walks through it: how they move from newcomer to contributor to builder to leader.

Here my favorite unlikely teacher is the volunteer fire department. On paper it has nothing in common with a synagogue. One runs toward the building everyone else is running out of. The other can table a decision about folding chairs until the chairs themselves wear out. But both have to solve the same problem: how do you turn interested people into trusted ones?

Volunteer fire departments fascinate me because they face a challenge remarkably similar to congregations. They are community institutions sustained largely by volunteers. They depend on commitment, relationships, training, trust, and the gradual transfer of responsibility from one generation to the next. They cannot afford to assume that people will simply figure things out on their own.

A volunteer fire department has no choice but to think about formation. Nobody wants the person responding to a house fire to be figuring things out as they go. New recruits train, shadow experienced firefighters, learn the culture, practice the skills, and gradually earn greater responsibility. The process is not designed merely to teach competence. It is designed to build trust.

Volunteer departments understand something congregations keep forgetting. Nobody gets the truck on day one. New volunteers train, shadow, learn the procedures, and earn trust before anyone hands them anything heavy. The pathway is clear. Responsibility grows as investment and trust grows.

Congregations often run that sequence backwards. A capable newcomer arrives, organized and smart and eager, and before long someone has asked them to join a committee, then to chair it, then to run for the board and solve the problem nobody else wants. These invitations come from a good place: we see a gift, we need help, we want people to feel included. The problem isn’t the invitation. It’s the pacing.

Leon helped me see this. His path in was healthy. He learned, connected, contributed, hosted, built relationships. What I’m less sure we got right was the timing of the governance conversations. Not because he lacked talent, but because capability and readiness aren’t the same thing. Readiness includes relationships, context, and a feel for which tensions in a community are ancient and which are genuinely new. Most of all it includes ownership, which can’t be assigned, only grown.

Which is why I’ve gone sour on the phrase “leadership pipeline.” Pipelines move a substance from one end to the other as fast as possible. Human beings are not oil. Communities are not refineries. Most of the important things in congregational life happen too slowly for a pipeline anyway. What we need isn’t a pipeline but a pathway: something with room for mentorship, experiment, a few wrong turns, and the slow formation that makes leadership last. Move people too fast and you rob them of the very experiences that would have made them stay.

So leadership was never really the goal. Ownership is. Leadership is just what ownership looks like once it grows up.

The Participation Ladder

People rarely go from stranger to steward in a single leap. They climb. The rungs vary by community, but the shape is familiar:

What changes at each rung isn’t only the role. It’s the question the person is asking:

• The curious person asks, Is this place for me?

• The connected person asks, Do I know anyone here?

• The contributor asks, Can I make a difference?

• The builder asks, Can I help shape what we do?

• The leader asks, How do I steward this well?

• The elder asks, How do I help others carry it?

The goal is not to march people up the ladder as fast as possible. Confusing speed with growth is one of the most common mistakes congregations make. Nobody looks at an apprentice carpenter and says, “Great work. You’re the master craftsman on Tuesday.” Nobody hands a firefighter the truck after two trainings. Yet we’ll meet someone competent at kiddush and start measuring them for three committees and a board seat before dessert.

Competence matters. Ownership matters more. Competence gets people invited. Ownership is what makes them stay. And ownership is the thing each rung is slowly building: more to invest in, more to understand, more to shape.

This is why I’ve stopped thinking of membership as a status and started thinking of it as a stage of formation. The years between a first visit and real leadership aren’t a holding pattern; they’re where belonging turns into ownership. So here’s the test I’d put to any congregation: if a newcomer walked in tomorrow, could they see the path from first visit to genuinely owning a piece of this place?

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More Builders, Fewer Spectators

For most of this series I’ve argued that congregations don’t need more martyrs. I’ve come to think they don’t need more heroes either. They need more builders, which is, in the end, B’tzalel’s whole lesson. He wasn’t great because he was the most gifted person in the camp. He was great because he helped everyone else find out what they had to give.

Healthy congregations do the same. They move people from consuming community to making it. Not in the guilt-soaked sense of “we need someone to cover the shift,” but in the deeper sense of knowing that what you bring actually matters here. That’s the line between participating and owning. The person who sets up the chairs is participating. The person who notices nobody has arranged chairs for next week and begins worrying about it during lunch on Tuesday is developing ownership. Ownership begins the moment a community’s future starts taking up space in your imagination. We care about what we help build.

The healthiest congregations I know are full of people like that. A few sit on the board. Most never will. Some chair committees; others just host dinners, mentor newcomers, teach a class, run the social-action project, make the introduction nobody else thought to make. Different roles, one thing in common: each has found a piece of the work to carry.

That might be a truer measure of a congregation’s health than the ones we usually count: not how many committee seats are filled, or how many names are on the org chart, or even how many people turn up on a Friday night, but whether people can see a path from showing up to owning a piece of the place, and whether they can imagine themselves as builders rather than spectators.

Leon never made it to the top of that ladder. Before the governance conversations turned into anything, he moved away. By the logic of the pipeline, that is a loss: years of investment, no seat filled, nothing to show on the org chart. But Leon left knowing what belonging feels like from the inside, and he walked into his next community already knowing how to begin. We didn’t keep him. We apprenticed him into belonging, and it turns out belonging travels. I still don’t know how to count that on any chart I’ve ever been handed.

Which leaves one more question, and it’s the one we’re worst at. If we get good at walking people up this ladder (from curious to contributor to builder to leader), what happens at the top? What becomes of all the wisdom, memory, and hard-won perspective when a president’s term ends and the applause dies down? We spend enormous energy thinking about how people enter leadership and almost none on what comes after it.

That’s where we’ll go next: what happens after the term ends, after the gavel is passed, and after the applause fades. Because the goal was never simply to create leaders. The goal was always to create a community where more people discover they have a corner of the Mishkan to carry. And where, eventually, they learn how to help someone else carry.

To read part 2:

Stop Begging. Start Building

Part Two: Who Owns Participation?

Every congregation has had some version of this meeting.

The agenda item may be called volunteer engagement, leadership development, membership involvement, community building, or “other business,” which is often where the most important conversations hide. The title changes. The conversation r…

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Getting Away With Something

I left Whitefish before dawn, which made the departure feel more dramatic than it actually was.

There was no secret mission. No witness protection program. No note left on the pillow explaining that by the time anyone read this I would already be somewhere south of Kalispell with a new identity and questionable facial hair.

Leaving in the dark has always felt a little like getting away with something.

The fantasy isn’t that nobody will notice I’m gone. The fantasy is that my life won’t. That for a few hours, before the world fully wakes up, I might slip free from the various roles, responsibilities, questions, and uncertainties waiting for me back home.

It never works, of course.

My anxieties are surprisingly committed traveling companions, and my personality has proven stubbornly portable.

Still, there is something about an empty road at dawn that encourages irrational hope. As Whitefish disappeared behind me and the first light began gathering over the mountains, I found myself briefly entertaining the possibility that the day might have plans for me that were entirely different from my own.

The strange thing is that I hadn’t really looked at the route. This would have horrified younger versions of me.

I came of age in the era of AAA TripTiks, those spiral-bound road atlases prepared by cheerful cartographic professionals who believed, with touching optimism, that it was possible to know exactly where you would be three states from now. They would highlight your route page by page and hand it to you with the confidence of people who had never watched me attempt to navigate an unfamiliar suburb.

Maps and I have always had a complicated relationship. By complicated, I mean maps generally knew where things were and I generally had other gifts.

Road trips required preparation. I studied exits. I counted miles between turns. I carried backup maps in case the first maps betrayed me. I liked knowing where I was going. Or perhaps more truthfully, I liked the feeling that knowing where I was going meant I was in control.

This time I typed Livingston into my phone, noticed that Missoula would conveniently appear somewhere along the way, and surrendered the rest to GPS. That felt uncharacteristically mature.

The retreat was still moving through me. The conversations, the tensions, the moments of honesty, the questions that had surfaced over two intense days. But for the first time in a while, no one needed anything from me.

Perhaps that’s why Montana chose that morning to finally introduce itself.

Montana Introduces Itself

The lake appeared almost accidentally.

At first there was only a widening of light through the trees. Then a flash of silver. Then the road curved and Flathead Lake opened beside me with the calm extravagance of something that had no interest in whether I was prepared.

I wasn’t.

Nobody had adequately warned me about this lake. Or perhaps they had and I wasn’t listening. Both possibilities seem equally likely.

The road followed the shoreline for mile after mile. Water stretched outward beneath a sky so expansive that “overhead” no longer seemed like the right word. Mountains gathered in the distance. Light shifted constantly across the surface of the water.

A bend in the road would reveal one version of the lake, quiet and pewter-colored beneath the morning clouds. Another turn would open onto something entirely different, blue water catching sunlight with the mountains rising behind it.

I found myself slowing down, then slowing down again.

At one point a heron crossed directly through my sightline, moving low above the water with the deliberate rhythm of something that understood exactly where it was. There was nothing dramatic about it. No performance. No display. Just a bird moving through the morning.

I watched until it disappeared.

Then I kept driving.

Eventually I pulled into a small state park along the shoreline. Calling it a state park felt generous. There were a few picnic tables, a narrow stretch of beach, a port-a-potty and a view capable of making a person forget whatever urgent thing they had been thinking about five minutes earlier.

I walked down toward the water.

The air was cool. The lake moved quietly against the shore. Birds crossed the sky. Somewhere behind me a car pulled into the parking lot and then left again.

I stood there longer than I intended.

I realized that at some point I had put down the TripTik of my own life. The route I imagined wasn’t the route I received. Standing beside Flathead Lake, I found myself less interested in where I was headed than in the strange beauty of not knowing.

The retreat was still inside me. So were the headlines, the questions waiting for me back home, and the assorted worries that seem to accumulate with age and responsibility. But standing beside that lake, they occupied less territory.

After a while I walked back to the Jeep and continued south.

Somewhere along the route I stopped at a bakery to use the restroom and acquire what seemed like the obligatory Montana huckleberry scone. The scone was perfectly respectable. The atmosphere was unexpectedly evangelical. Scripture verses appeared on walls, menu boards, and what felt like several of the baked goods. The whole place carried the distinct energy of a bakery where Jesus was not merely welcome but potentially part owner.

As I sat there eating my huckleberry scone, I became mildly concerned that I might be participating in some regional form of communion without fully understanding the rules.

South of Polson the landscape changed again.

Wetlands appeared where I wasn’t expecting them. Water stretched out on both sides of the highway. Ducks and geese lifted from the reeds. Clouds rolled in. A light rain softened the mountains and blurred the horizon.

I had expected a drive. Instead, Montana wasn’t done introducing itself.

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Wonder Beneath Wonder

One of my closest friends likes to tell people that I’m the least impressed person he knows.

It’s not entirely fair, though I understand how he arrived at the conclusion.

I’ve spent enough time traveling and enough time around remarkable people and places to develop a slightly elevated threshold for astonishment. And I practice an equanimity that can look flat from the outside while a great deal is happening underneath.

Montana wasn’t done yet. The lake. The sky. The heron. The rain. The wetlands.

Every time I thought I had absorbed what was in front of me, the landscape seemed to respond:

Actually, there’s one more thing.

And then came the bison.

At first they looked like brushstrokes.

Dark marks scattered across hillsides washed in green and yellow. From a distance the entire scene resembled an enormous impressionist painting. Yellow wildflowers spread across rolling hills. Green spring grass climbed the slopes. Brown shapes dotted the landscape like someone had flicked a paintbrush across the canvas and walked away.

As I approached, the brushstrokes became animals. The yellow became flowers, the green became grass, and the painting became alive. The hills were covered with bison. Adults grazing. Calves moving alongside their mothers. Entire families spread across the landscape.

I stood there for a long while watching them.

Everywhere I looked there was life. Not naïve life. Not uncomplicated life. Life that had endured.

The calves caught my attention most.

Perhaps because I am incapable of seeing anything without eventually turning it into a metaphor. By this point in my life, I have accepted that I am always one scenic overlook away from discovering a symbolic truth. It is an occupational hazard.

Some people see a lake and think, “That’s a beautiful lake.”

I see a lake and immediately begin wondering what it might reveal about grief, resilience, impermanence, or my relationship with carbohydrates. Years of rabbinical training have only made the condition worse.

Looking back, Montana and I were engaged in a quiet struggle. Montana kept presenting itself as a landscape. I kept trying to turn it into a metaphor.

Neither of us was entirely wrong.

Now I was musing on bison calves. There they were, moving through a landscape where their ancestors had nearly disappeared. A species brought terrifyingly close to extinction now accompanied by new generations wandering through fields of yellow wildflowers.

The country feels dangerous these days. The future often feels like something we war about more than something we build. And yet there were the calves. Unconcerned with my analysis. Unaware that they had wandered into a metaphor.

Simply alive.

Each time I thought my heart had opened as far as it could, something else widened it. This would become another recurring theme of the day. Montana kept presenting something astonishing and I kept requiring a second look.

Wonder in Human Form

Eventually Missoula was in reach.

I pulled into the parking lot of the Good Food Store, a beloved local institution recommended by my friend Elke.

Arriving there felt oddly disorienting. I had spent the morning moving through lakes and wetlands and bison ranges only to find myself standing in a boutique grocery store building a stir-fry bowl.

Life is funny that way. One moment you’re contemplating vastness. The next you’re comparing stir-fry bowls.

Before I tell you about Elke, I should probably explain Hatch. Or perhaps explain why Hatch matters to me.

For years, Hatch founder Yarrow Kraner has been gathering an unlikely collection of artists, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, activists, scientists, storytellers, and other beautifully uncategorizable humans who share a desire to make a meaningful contribution to the world.

Most people know the story of how they were invited to their first Hatch.

I don’t.

An invitation simply appeared in my inbox one day. There is apparently no record of how I got there. No notes. No paper trail. No explanation. Trust me, I asked, seeing that I am possibly the only clergy person in the alumni network. As someone who occasionally enjoys solving mysteries, I find this both delightful and mildly irritating.

One of my least strategic networking habits is that I rarely read people’s biographies before meeting them. This is not necessarily a best practice.

There are entire categories of important people I have accidentally treated like normal human beings. Still, I find myself far more interested in how people show up than in what they’ve accomplished. Because of that, Hatch has given me something I value far more than professional connections.

It has given me friendships.

Two of the people I treasure most from that community happen to live in Montana: Elke and Raymond. Even writing their names brings a little emotion to the surface. They are the kind of people I want more of in my life.

As I pulled into the parking lot and spotted Elke waiting for me, I realized that Montana had one more introduction to make. The morning had opened me through lakes and mountains and birds and bison. Now it was offering me one of its people.

We picked up lunch and headed back to her house. I was envious of her pizza as I cradled my very healthy bowl of protein, grains, and vegetables.

Before I tell you more about the afternoon, I should probably say that Elke is a beautiful woman. Full stop.

The funny thing is that her kindness distracts from it.

With her aqua eyes, blond hair, and easy smile, she possesses the kind of beauty that would be immediately obvious if she were less busy being herself. But her earth-mama presence softens the arresting nature of her appearance. She is so grounded, so genuinely interested in other people, that it takes stepping back, or seeing her in a photograph, to fully register it.

Her warmth arrives first. Then, later, you realize how striking she is.

We sat across from one another at her kitchen table eating lunch. Elke lounged comfortably in her chair, happily and somewhat undelicately devouring a slice of pizza. Any intimidation her beauty might have inspired disappeared immediately. There was no performance to her, no curated image, no effort to seem interesting. She was simply herself.

Within minutes I felt completely at home. It occurred to me that this might be her superpower.

As we talked, my attention kept drifting to the photographs that dominated the room. They felt somehow connected to the woman sitting across from me: exuberant, untamed, and deeply alive.

One was summer. The other was winter.

In one, children seemed to be flying through the frame, bodies suspended in impossible positions, color and movement everywhere. In the other, many of the same figures appeared older, surrounded by snow and accompanied by dogs that looked less like pets and more like creatures who occasionally negotiated with wolves. The images felt exuberant and serene at the same time, like seasons speaking to one another.

We talked for hours about Hatch, family, recovery, voice, and the strange transitions that arrive in midlife without asking permission.

I had been with Elke during the period when her voice was struggling and watched her navigate that challenge with a mixture of grace, vulnerability, stubbornness, and humor. Sitting in her kitchen hearing the strength that had returned felt unexpectedly moving.

We both knew it might not last forever.

Oddly, that didn’t make the afternoon feel fragile. It made it feel vivid.

At one point she told me about the Alaska trips her family runs and the plans to bring the Hatch board together there. I pictured them on a boat surrounded by glaciers and wildlife and impossible scenery.

Then I looked around her kitchen and thought: the scenery isn’t the whole story.

If the experience felt anything like this conversation, those folks were very lucky indeed.

I was beginning to suspect that Elke herself was part of the attraction.

Like the lake that morning, Elke created space. Space for stories, uncertainty, joy, and grief. I felt deeply held in her presence.

It was another kind of luxury.

Eventually she invited me to stay the night. I was tempted, deeply tempted. But something in me knew I needed to keep moving.

Raymond was waiting farther down the road.

The Last Light

The drive to Livingston felt different, more highway than revelation, more destination than discovery.

I stopped for an energy drink and continued my fascination with one of Montana’s stranger cultural features: the fact that seemingly every gas station had a casino attached to it. Not a grand casino. Just a gas station and a gambling establishment existing side by side with complete confidence that this arrangement made perfect sense. Most were named Lucky Lil’s, which seemed exactly the right amount of lurid.

Montana, I was learning, did not feel obligated to explain itself.

Just as dusk was beginning, where the road curved away from the tracks, I glanced toward them and saw something standing in the distance.

A grizzly.

Far away. Standing upright beside the railroad tracks.

Even now the image feels slightly surreal. Perhaps because most of the bears I had encountered up to that point in my life had been stuffed, mounted, carved, painted, or otherwise converted into rustic décor.

This one was inconveniently alive, but fortunately at a safe distance. Still, I glanced at my bear spray in the passenger seat.

I considered turning around to make sure this was not an ursine mirage. The bison had already taught me the value of a second look. But Livingston was calling. The bear disappeared into memory.

By the time I reached Livingston, evening had settled over the valley. Raymond’s place sat another twenty minutes beyond town, tucked into the foothills among a scattering of homes and cabins. The road climbed into a landscape of trees and open sky, carrying me farther and farther from anything that resembled a schedule.

Raymond and his wife, Amber, have created a small cluster of cabins on the property, each one carrying its own personality. Before showing me to Granny’s Cabin, Raymond invited me into the home he shares with Amber.

The place immediately struck me as what might best be described as Montana trapper chic: small but entirely complete, every detail intentional without feeling designed. Antiques. Wood. Textures. Objects with histories. The kind of place interior designers spend enormous amounts of money trying to make look effortless.

This actually was effortless.

The house felt deeply lived in. Beautiful, but not precious. Thoughtful, but not performative. The kind of place that reveals its owners before they ever tell you a thing about themselves.

A few minutes later Raymond walked me up to Granny’s Cabin, where I would be staying. The cabin was rustic and charming, filled with antiques and thoughtful details accumulated over time rather than assembled for effect. There was no electricity. Amber’s art studio, where I could shower and charge my phone, sat a short walk away down the hill.

It was a far cry from the lodge in Whitefish. And that was precisely the point.

Surrounded by trees, perched on a hillside, disconnected from most of the noise of the world, I had the distinct feeling that I was about to shed a few more layers. The retreat had asked me to be present. The road had asked me to pay attention. This place seemed to be asking something simpler.

Rest.

Amber was returning from a trip the next day, so for that first evening it was just Raymond and me. As I unloaded my bags, he casually mentioned that he had made dinner.

This was not what I expected.

Somewhere in my imagination, Montana hospitality involved grilled meat, cast iron, and perhaps a story about surviving winter. Instead, Raymond handed me a bowl of coconut curry.

And it was delicious.

We sat together and ate while the last light faded from the hillside. I was grateful for the road, grateful for the lake, grateful for the birds and the bison and the improbable bakery communion. Most of all, I was grateful to be reconnecting with a friend whose company I deeply enjoy and to know that the next few days would offer space to share our lives.

Later that evening, I made the short walk back up the hill to Granny’s Cabin. Raymond had suggested I carry bear spray, which felt simultaneously prudent and faintly ridiculous. There I was, walking through the darkness with an ancient Jewish prayer in one pocket and industrial-strength anti-bear technology in the other.

Montana contains multitudes.

Before climbing into bed, I recited the bedtime Shema, the ancient Jewish prayer that accompanies us into sleep. It is a prayer of release, of forgiveness, of placing ourselves beneath a shelter of peace for the night. After a day spent paying attention, it felt like the right way to end.

Sometime after midnight, a storm rolled in. The rain hit the tin roof hard enough to wake me. Thunder rolled through the valley. Wind moved through the trees. I lay there listening until the noise became rhythm: the rain against the tin, the distant thunder, the mountain carrying on its conversation with the sky.

Sheltered from the storm, I drifted back to sleep.

Editor’s Note: Last week, I wrote an article called Your Synagogue Does Not Need More Martyrs about a phenomenon I see in many congregations: a small group of dedicated people carrying too much while wondering why others aren’t stepping up.

The response was larger than I expected.

Many readers reached out to say some version of the same thing: “Okay, I see the problem. Now what do we do about it?”

This four-part Boardwalk series is my attempt to answer that question.

Drawing on congregational consulting, organizational psychology, volunteer engagement research, and years of watching communities flourish (and occasionally trip over their own tzitzit), we’ll explore how people actually become invested in a community, why healthy volunteer cultures rarely happen by accident, and what congregations can do to create pathways from attendance to participation, participation to belonging, and belonging to shared ownership.

Because I have become convinced that the future of congregational life will depend less on finding more heroes and more on helping more people become builders.

Part One begins with a BBQ, a sparkler, and a question about how belonging actually happens.

A BBQ, a Sparkler, and the Beginning of Belonging

The debate that sparked this article began with a flyer, but the story really started months earlier on a beach.

The sun was settling toward the horizon, casting everything in that golden glow that arrives just before dusk. Waves rolled steadily onto the shore. Children darted between beach chairs carrying sparklers, drawing temporary constellations in the air. Adults stood in small circles balancing paper plates loaded with hamburgers and hot dogs, introducing spouses, swapping stories, and discovering mutual friends they somehow hadn’t realized they shared.

What I remember most was the feeling of possibility.

People who had lived within a few miles of one another were meeting for the first time. New friendships were beginning. Children were finding playmates. There is something wonderfully Jewish about discovering that the person you’ve been nodding to at the coffee shop for months has strong opinions about kugel, a favorite Passover recipe, and a rabbi story they’ve been waiting years for an excuse to tell.

Brooke and her family had come as guests of a friend.

At the time, there was nothing particularly remarkable about it. They were simply another family showing up, meeting people, and exploring whether this emerging Jewish community might have a place in their lives.

Looking back, what strikes me is how ordinary it all seemed. Nobody was talking about engagement strategies. Nobody was discussing leadership pipelines. Nobody was debating membership categories. People were watching the sun disappear into the water, keeping one eye on their children, and beginning the slow and beautiful process of becoming less like strangers.

A few months later, as I was preparing for the High Holy Days, someone mentioned that Brooke was a talented artist and face painter. Rather than simply asking her to entertain children, I began wondering how her gift might become part of the service itself. I chose a story that invited children to imagine themselves as different creatures within creation, and Brooke helped bring that vision to life.

By the time the children gathered, lions sat next to butterflies. Birds flapped imaginary wings beside bears and foxes. What might otherwise have remained an abstract story became something the children could inhabit with their whole bodies. They weren’t simply hearing about creation. They were stepping inside it.

What stays with me all these months later is not the face painting itself. It is Brooke’s face as she watched.

She watched children laughing, playing, and engaging joyfully with Jewish life, especially her own. For many of us who grew up Jewish, delight was not always the first thing people associated with religious education. We learned important things. Meaningful things. History, ethics, responsibility. Joy sometimes felt like a happy byproduct rather than part of the curriculum.

Brooke was watching something different. She was watching Judaism become imaginative, playful, and alive for her children. She was watching them connect with other Jewish kids. She was watching them experience a kind of belonging that cannot be taught in a classroom. More than that, she was watching them enjoy something she had helped create.

One of the things congregational leaders sometimes miss is that participation is not simply a gift people offer to the community. The community gives something back as well. Brooke wasn’t just painting faces. She was helping create an experience she wanted her own family to have. She was seeing her gifts matter. She was building relationships. She was discovering a place where her creativity had value.

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Last year, I was invited to help a synagogue plan its first-ever annual meeting.
Cue the collective groan.

Annual meetings are where joy goes to die. The phrase alone conjures fluorescent lights, stale cookies, and a PowerPoint slide titled Treasurer’s Report. It’s the nonprofit version of watching C-SPAN in folding chairs.

Or worse: one person passionately asking why the synagogue is paying for the rabbi’s cell phone bill while half the congregation quietly checks sports scores under the table.

I have sat through debates about copier toner, electric plans, and line-item minutiae delivered with the emotional intensity of someone unveiling the cure for diabetes while everyone else slowly dissociated into the carpet.

And honestly? I understand why it happens.

The people giving those reports usually care deeply. Board members have worked hard. Committee chairs are trying to communicate something meaningful and responsible. Congregants genuinely want to help. They finally focus on the budget during the one meeting where everyone is listening, even though there were eleven other months and twenty-nine other days to raise these questions.

But somewhere along the way, many annual meetings begin confusing the communication of data with the cultivation of community.

Instead of creating closeness, they create distance.

The Unsolved Puzzle

Dan Hotchkiss, the longtime Alban Institute congregational consultant whose work has guided me over the years, once suggested that the annual congregational meeting remains an unsolved puzzle. After nearly three decades in the rabbinate, I think he’s right.

I’ve attended congregational meetings where actual fighting broke out. Not disagreement. Fighting. Voices raised. Trust fractured. Emotional residue lingering long after the folding chairs were stacked away.

Nobody leaves those meetings more connected to the mission.

There were seasons when I stopped believing these meetings could feel alive at all.

I remember serving alongside a synagogue president who was very clear that the annual meeting was her meeting. The executive director and I supported the process, but over time I began to dread it. The board was deeply attached to communicating the importance of its work, yet rarely paused to consider the experience of the congregants actually sitting in the room. Or, to use the terrible business-school phrase, the “end user.”

Eventually, I stepped back emotionally. I was participating, but no longer really holding the container.

That’s not just a leadership failure on one person’s part. It’s a systems breakdown. Once enough people surrender to the assumption that annual meetings are destined to be tedious, the meeting slowly becomes exactly that.

Many congregations unintentionally train people to disengage from institutional life through meetings that feel emotionally dehydrated.

Leadership Is Not Facilitation

Part of the challenge, I’ve come to believe, is that congregations often confuse two very different roles: leadership and facilitation.

Because the president understandably believes this is their meeting, they often end up trying to lead and facilitate simultaneously. But those are fundamentally different energies.

A leader is emotionally attached to the data, decisions, strategy, budget, and institutional direction. A facilitator is attached to the health of the process.

The facilitator’s role is not to defend every line item or absorb every anxious comment personally. The facilitator creates flow. They notice when energy gets stuck, repetitive, or reactive and gently redirect the room before the meeting disappears into a twenty-three-minute conversation about utility providers.

They also protect dignity. A good facilitator helps people feel heard without allowing one person’s anxiety, hobbyhorse, or sudden passion for copier toner procurement to hijack the communal experience.

When those roles blur, the meeting becomes emotionally confusing. Questions feel personal. Leaders grow defensive. The room tightens instead of opens.

But when facilitation is held well, something different becomes possible.

Not every congregation can hire a trained facilitator, and honestly, they may not need to. Sometimes the facilitator can be the rabbi, the executive director, a wise elder, or a particularly grounded congregant who understands group dynamics and is trusted by the community. What matters is clarity of role. Someone needs to hold the process while others hold the content.

What If the Meeting Felt Alive?

Lately I’ve been wondering:
What if the annual meeting could become one of the most energizing moments in congregational life?

When I’m thinking about gatherings, I often return to Priya Parker’s insight that the way we gather shapes the world we live in. Her book The Art of Gathering should probably be required reading for anyone who hosts a meeting, leads a nonprofit, or has ever wondered why some rooms feel alive while others slowly drain the human spirit.

Parker asks a deceptively simple question:
What is the gathering actually for?

Not just what needs to be covered, but what do we want people to feel, understand, and remember when they leave?

That shift changes everything.

Because an annual meeting isn’t just an administrative necessity. It’s a cultural moment. One of the few times an entire community gathers to ask:
Who are we becoming together?

Parker writes about the importance of “threshold moments” in gatherings: the subtle cues that tell people what kind of experience they are entering before a single word is spoken.

Most annual meetings unintentionally communicate:
Prepare for administrative endurance.

The emotional tone often feels somewhere between an SAT testing center and a wait at the DMV.

But what if people walked into something that actually felt human?

Music changes nervous systems. Lighting changes mood. Food changes conversation. Even the way chairs are arranged signals whether people are expected to participate or simply comply.

A meaningful annual meeting should feel less like entering a bureaucratic checkpoint and more like crossing a threshold into communal life itself.

Imagine beginning not with a gavel, but with a ritual of arrival. Music playing as people walk in. Photos and videos from the year projected on the walls. Different voices from across the congregation sharing moments of meaning, challenge, humor, grief, or hope.

Less “call to order.”
More call to belonging.

What if people were invited into conversation instead of passive consumption? What if there were moments for reflection at tables or breakout groups? What if the annual meeting engaged more than the intellect?

I keep imagining a gathering that buzzes with energy like a beehive. People leaving not merely informed, but actively imagining how their gifts, creativity, relationships, and resources could help the community become even more alive.

At moments, I almost wonder if the goal should feel a little Willy Wonka-esque. Not literally, obviously. Nobody needs an edible sanctuary wall. But perhaps the gathering itself should feel immersive enough that people can metaphorically taste the congregation.

Taste its values.
Touch its mission.
Smell the flowers and the challah and the humanity of it all.

I have this absurd image of people metaphorically licking the walls because they are so engaged in the experience of the community itself.

Because if we only distribute information, people may leave informed.

But if people can experience the mission on a cellular level, they leave energized.

When I Saw It Actually Work

And recently, I got to watch some of these ideas come alive in real time.

A congregation I was supporting in an adjacent way had to pivot its annual meeting online because of weather. Under normal circumstances, that might have guaranteed a sleepy evening of frozen Zoom faces and people quietly disappearing after the budget presentation.

Instead, something unexpected happened.

The leadership team leaned into the gathering itself. They created short videos instead of endless reports. Different voices from across the community spoke, not just the usual leaders. There were moments for storytelling, reflection, humor, and participation woven throughout the afternoon.

And you could feel the difference.

The meeting ran nearly thirty minutes longer than expected, yet most people stayed until the very end. Not because they were trapped, but because they were engaged.

Afterward, people said they actually enjoyed the meeting. More importantly, they left feeling informed, connected, and energized about the future of the congregation.

My role was as the closer. I had helped shape some of the framing beforehand with the congregation’s spiritual leader, and at the end of the meeting I offered a kind of live integration, weaving together the themes, energy, and moments that had emerged throughout the gathering.

What struck me most was how hungry people were for coherence.

This congregation is navigating a significant season of transition, yet people left not depleted, but empowered. The meeting still covered governance, finances, bylaws, and all the necessary business.

But it also created meaning.

A Few Grounded Ideas

For congregations heading into annual meeting season, a few small shifts can completely change the emotional experience of the room:

• Send the dense reports beforehand. Nobody needs the spreadsheet read aloud like Torah at Sinai. Use the gathering itself for what only a gathering can do: storytelling, reflection, meaning-making, and shared imagination.

• Treat the meeting like an experience, not a download. Ask yourself: what emotional arc are people traveling through tonight? Curiosity? Pride? Belonging? Hope?

• Design for participation, not passive endurance. If people sit silently absorbing information for ninety straight minutes, their souls quietly leave their bodies around minute thirty-two.

• Use multiple senses whenever possible. Photos. Music. Food. Short videos. Stories. A gathering becomes memorable when people can feel the culture of the congregation rather than simply hear reports about it.

• If the same three people talk all night, it’s not a congregational gathering. It’s a hostage situation. Bring in teenagers, elders, volunteers, staff, newer members, and longtime pillars of the community.

• Clarify who is facilitating and who is leading before the meeting begins. These are different jobs. The facilitator protects flow, tone, pacing, and participation so the leaders do not have to carry every emotional reaction personally.

• Redirect lovingly but firmly when conversations become overly granular or repetitive. The annual meeting is probably not the ideal setting for an impassioned twelve-minute inquiry into alternate copier toner vendors.

• Create at least one moment of emotional coherence: a blessing, a story of impact, a moment of gratitude, a shared vision for the coming year. People are hungry to feel part of something larger than administrative process.

• End with forward motion. Gratitude. Vision. Possibility. People should leave understanding not only how the congregation spent money, but why the mission matters and where the community is headed next.

Five Questions for Congregational Leaders to Consider

Before your next annual meeting, it may be worth asking:

1. What emotional experience are people actually walking into?
   Does the room communicate belonging, curiosity, and participation, or does it feel like a bureaucratic endurance test with stale brownies?

2. What could be sent in an email instead of performed live?
   If a report only transfers information, consider sending it beforehand. Save the gathering itself for what only human beings can do together.

3. Who is holding the process, not just the content?
   Is someone actively tending the emotional flow of the meeting, or are leaders simultaneously trying to present, defend, facilitate, and emotionally regulate the room?

4. Where are people being invited to participate instead of spectate?
   A congregation is not an audience. Where are people being asked to reflect, imagine, respond, dream, or connect?

5. What do you want people saying in the parking lot afterward?
   “Thank God that’s over”?
   Or: “I actually feel hopeful about where we’re headed.”

The Boardwalk

Institutional life has a strange way of revealing who we are when nobody thinks they’re being watched closely.

Not during the big gala.
Not during the High Holy Days.
Not during the strategic visioning retreat with the catered wraps and the flip charts.

Sometimes the truth reveals itself during the annual meeting, somewhere between the bylaws update and the discussion about copier toner.

That’s where communities quietly communicate whether they still know how to gather as human beings instead of merely functioning as organizations.

And maybe that’s the deeper invitation beneath all of this.

Not perfection.
Not performance.
Not turning every synagogue meeting into immersive Jewish theater camp.

Just remembering that institutions are made of nervous systems, stories, rituals, relationships, disappointments, hopes, and people longing to matter.

After the meeting, the president called me almost giddy.

“Did you see?” she said. “We tried some of your ideas, and people stayed.”

Not because they were trapped. Because they wanted to.

Honestly, that felt like the real victory.

Not the smooth technology.
Not the revised agenda.
Not even the engagement itself.

The president sounded energized instead of depleted.

After years of watching annual meetings drain communities and their leders, watching one actually generate energy felt strangely moving.

Maybe not quite Olam HaBah, the World to Come. But at least a small taste of it.

One of the unexpected gifts of stepping down from my role as senior rabbi and continuing as emeritus while consulting with synagogues has been the chance to see congregational life from a different vantage point. A little more distance. Fewer meetings where everyone is pretending not to notice the passive-aggressive energy radiating off the budget spreadsheet. More opportunities to watch patterns emerge across communities instead of assuming the chaos in front of me was uniquely ours.

And with that distance, I began noticing something uncomfortable.

I had spent years overfunctioning.

Not theatrically. Not resentfully. Often quite lovingly. I folded tables, stacked chairs, solved problems, filled gaps before anyone noticed they existed. Part of this came from conviction. I never believed spiritual leadership should place anyone above the ordinary work of community life. Judaism has never struck me as a tradition particularly interested in protecting clergy from practical labor. There is holiness in setup. Holiness in cleanup. Holiness in bringing donuts for Torah study and feeding a room full of hungry brit mitzvah students who look at you as though you personally invented Hebrew.

And if I am being especially honest, there were times I looked up from carrying folding tables while congregants stood three feet away deep in conversation about the state of the world, entirely unaware that the room was somehow setting itself up by magic.

We even preserve stories of the Kohanim, the Temple priests, competing for the honor of clearing ashes from the altar. Not the glamorous work. Ashes.

Jewish tradition has long understood something we sometimes forget: participation in sacred community matters.

But over time I noticed something else too. Too often, congregants watched while staff and a small circle of board members carried the weight of communal life for them. Not because people were selfish or uncaring. Most synagogue people are, in fact, astonishingly generous.

Many synagogues drift into systems where participation slowly gets replaced by consumption and overfunctioning becomes normalized as leadership.

As Harvard Business Review has noted in broader organizational life, burnout is often less a personal failure than a design failure. Synagogues need to take that seriously.

Because most modestly resourced congregations depend heavily on volunteers, overcommitted staff, and board members. Staff absorb more and more labor. Board members overfunction to keep things afloat. A small circle of reliable congregants becomes responsible for governance, logistics, fundraising, event setup, emotional containment, and remembering the Wi-Fi password.

Many synagogue systems run on panic, goodwill, and one person who knows where the extension cords are.

I know this because, at various points in my rabbinate, I embodied at least two of those things.

Meanwhile everyone wonders why fewer people are stepping forward.

The problem is not that synagogues ask people to participate. The problem is that too many congregations unintentionally create cultures of participation that are chaotic, guilt-driven, structurally unsupported, or overly dependent on a shrinking circle of overcommitted people. And when communal involvement feels that way, people understandably retreat into consumer relationships with synagogue life: “I pay dues. The staff handles it.”

To be fair, I understand the impulse. Synagogues should provide meaningful value: pastoral care, education, lifecycle officiation and ritual creation, justice work, learning, music, support during illness and grief, opportunities for connection, and experiences that help people make meaning out of their lives.

But participation is not merely unpaid labor that helps institutions survive.

At its best, it is one of the primary ways human beings experience belonging. It is how relationships deepen, how ownership develops, how trust forms, how people move from being consumers of Jewish life to co-creators of it.

Parker Palmer once wrote, “We are all in this together.” Meaning and connection are rarely built in isolation. They emerge when people experience themselves as contributors to something larger than themselves.

Brené Brown has spent years reminding us that true belonging is not passive. It requires vulnerability, participation, and mutual investment. Communities become durable when people feel not merely welcomed, but needed.

Adrienne Maree Brown writes, “What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.”

Synagogues should take that seriously.

If congregations consistently practice shared ownership, relational leadership, healthy boundaries, gratitude, and meaningful participation at the small scale, those values begin shaping the larger culture as well.

Not everyone will volunteer in the same way or at the same intensity. Nor should they. Some congregants are caring for aging parents, navigating illness, raising children, struggling financially, overwhelmed, grieving, or simply trying to survive a difficult season of life. Jewish community should make room for that reality too. There are many ways to belong to a synagogue, and healthy congregations understand that people move through different seasons of capacity.

But communities become fragile when too few people experience themselves as responsible for helping shape communal life.

And communities weaken not only when too few people do the work, but when too few people experience themselves as capable of meaningful contribution.

The Leadership Problem Beneath the Participation Problem

Boards become operational volunteers while simultaneously supervising staff. Staff become reluctant managers of volunteers they do not fully oversee. The same handful of highly competent people become the institutional safety net for everything. Because these systems are usually fueled by love and devotion, the dysfunction can masquerade as commitment for a very long time.

Until exhaustion sets in.
Or resentment.
Or territoriality.
Or staff-board conflict rooted less in personality than in unclear organizational lanes.

Sometimes we excuse chaotic, guilt-driven, structurally unsupported systems as simply part of Jewish communal life. We joke about boundary collapse, emotional overinvolvement, disorganization, and last-minute scrambling as though they are inevitable features of synagogue culture.

Jews have survived a lot through humor. We can turn almost anything into a coping mechanism, including committee structure.

But there is a difference between warmth and chaos. A difference between passion and dysfunction. A difference between interdependence and unhealthy overreliance on exhausted people.

Sophisticated, spiritually grounded Jewish community should not confuse dysfunction with authenticity.

A synagogue board should not function primarily as an exhausted substitute staff. Its job is governance, stewardship, leadership development, fundraising, long-term vision, and cultivating the next layer of communal leadership.

That does not mean board members cannot volunteer operationally. Of course they can. But they must understand that they are operating in two distinct roles. A board member helping set up an event is functioning as a volunteer, not exercising governance authority.

One of the most corrosive synagogue dynamics occurs when operational volunteering bleeds into informal staff supervision or decision-making. Staff members can end up feeling managed simultaneously by their direct supervisor, by the board collectively, and by individual board members acting with unofficial authority. That ambiguity creates anxiety, resentment, triangulation, and institutional confusion very quickly.

Healthy congregations clarify these lanes explicitly and revisit them often.

If your synagogue depends on the same 12 people, has no written volunteer roles, and recruits by panic email, you do not have a culture of participation.

You have an emergency response system.

And eventually emergency systems exhaust even the most devoted people.

There is also some tender territory here for all of us.

Many of us derive identity, belonging, usefulness, or emotional safety from being indispensable. Rabbis. Presidents. Founders. Executive directors. Veteran volunteers. Committee chairs. Donors. Consultants who secretly enjoy being the only person who can untangle the governance problem everyone ignored six years ago.

It can feel good to be needed.

Until the system begins depending on exhaustion as a leadership strategy.

I have watched board members answer logistical texts during Kol Nidre, rabbis troubleshoot printer problems minutes before funerals, and exhausted staff members stay behind alone after a “community event” quietly stacking chairs while everyone else heads home feeling spiritually nourished.

None of those people are the problem.

The system is.

Synagogues often invest enormous energy creating meaningful experiences for attendees while investing surprisingly little energy designing meaningful pathways into participation.

That needs to change.

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So How Do We Actually Build a Healthier Culture of Participation?

Healthy cultures of participation do not emerge accidentally. They are built intentionally.

And this matters especially now.

At a moment when many people feel isolated, distrustful of institutions, spiritually untethered, and unsure where they matter, synagogues have a profound opportunity. Younger Jews especially are often looking less for passive affiliation and more for meaning, contribution, connection, and agency. They do not simply want to join communities. They want to help shape them.

The first shift is clarifying lanes.

Boards govern. Staff manage. Volunteers animate and expand communal life. Those roles should collaborate closely without collapsing into one another.

One of the least discussed but most common synagogue dysfunctions occurs when board members become informal staff supervisors while simultaneously evaluating staff performance. That ambiguity breeds resentment, triangulation, and confusion for everyone involved, especially rabbis and executive directors trying to lead systems where authority has become blurry.

Healthy congregations resist this drift intentionally. They clarify who supervises staff, who owns operations, who coordinates volunteers, and how accountability flows. Not because hierarchy is sacred, but because clarity creates trust.

The second shift is understanding that someone must own participation and engagement.

In larger congregations, this may be a Director of Engagement, volunteer coordinator, or Director of Community Life. In smaller congregations, it may begin as a hybrid model: an executive director partnering with a lay Volunteer Engagement Chair or engagement team specifically tasked with recruitment, onboarding, appreciation, and leadership cultivation.

But it cannot simply live in the cracks between crises.

Someone needs to think intentionally about recruitment, onboarding, matching people’s gifts with opportunities, leadership development, appreciation, follow-up, and succession planning. Otherwise congregational life becomes reactive and personality-driven.

The third shift is stopping the glorification of overfunctioning.

Healthy synagogues do not build themselves around heroic people, though many of us secretly admire the hero model because it feels efficient, noble, and strangely comforting. One exhausted person who knows how everything works can temporarily hold a community together. Until they burn out, move away, get sick, resign, or finally decide they would like to attend one High Holy Day service without also managing a small logistical air traffic control system in the background.

Healthier congregations build differently. They create written volunteer roles, realistic expectations, rotating leadership, mentorship, training, documentation, and healthy handoffs. They distribute responsibility before crisis forces them to.

The goal is not finding more exhausted saints.

The goal is creating pathways where more people can contribute meaningfully and sustainably.

The fourth shift is making participation easier, more relational, and more accessible.

Too many synagogue volunteer roles are vague, overwhelming, or structured like lifelong emotional hostage situations. People deepen involvement gradually. Healthy congregations create multiple entry points: teaching classes, helping lead services, chanting Torah, hosting holiday gatherings, mentoring bar and bat mitzvah students, organizing meal trains, leading social justice projects, singing in community music ensembles, coordinating shiva support, serving as greeters, supporting elder care initiatives, setup crews with rotating captains, and short-term task teams with clear beginning and end dates.

And contrary to synagogue folklore, mass emails begging for help are usually not the most effective recruitment strategy.

Personal invitations work far better.

People are more likely to participate when they are personally asked, when the role is clear, when the commitment feels manageable, when the work connects to their gifts, and when someone follows up afterward like their contribution mattered.

Because it did.

Participation should not feel like punishment for caring.

People return when they make friends, laugh, feel useful, feel competent, feel appreciated, and experience genuine connection and meaning through the work itself.

That is not soft sociology.

That is durable community design.

Rabbi Ron Wolfson and Rabbi Sid Schwarz, among many others across the Jewish communal world, have argued for years that relationships and shared ownership, not programs alone, are what sustain Jewish life.

They are right.

People stay connected to communities where they feel useful, trusted, and woven into something meaningful. Most people are not looking for more guilt.

They are looking for more meaning.

The Sacred Work of Shared Ownership

The good news is that healthier synagogue culture does not require a megasynagogue budget or a complete institutional reinvention. Most congregations already have the raw materials: caring people, deep values, a desire for connection, and members who genuinely want their lives to matter.

The challenge is building systems worthy of that generosity.

Because the future of synagogue life probably does not depend on finding one more exhausted person willing to drag the community over the finish line fueled by burnt coffee, obligation, and the strange adrenaline produced by emergency committee emails.

It depends on whether we are willing to build communities where more people know they belong because more people know they matter.

Not just as attendees.
Not just as donors.
Not just as the same five reliable volunteers whose names appear on every SignUpGenius like a small Jewish witness protection program.

But as co-creators of Jewish life itself.

What I have come to believe, both as a rabbi and now as a consultant, is that this is never really only about volunteering. It is about whether people experience themselves as participants in communal life or merely consumers of institutional services. It is about whether leadership develops new leaders or unconsciously rewards exhaustion. It is about whether belonging is treated as something we receive passively or something we help create together.

People stay where they discover they matter.
Where their gifts are used wisely.
Where contribution deepens relationship instead of depleting it.

And maybe that is part of the deeper spiritual task before us now: not simply keeping synagogues alive through force of will, but building communities where participation feels meaningful enough, human enough, and joyful enough that people actually want to help carry the sacred weight together.

People stay where they help carry what they love.

For Reflection:

5 Questions Worth Asking

• Who currently carries the invisible labor of our congregation?

• Where are we confusing overfunctioning with commitment?

• If a new member wanted to contribute meaningfully, would they know how?

• Do our systems create belonging, or merely extract labor from the most dependable people?

• What would change if we treated engagement and participation as sacred community infrastructure rather than emergency staffing?

Driving back from a hike in Glacier National Park, still a little dusty and a little quiet from the trail, I found myself listening to a Radiolab episode called “Trees on Trees,” the kind of listening that seems to land differently when you’ve just been walking among what it’s describing.

I had arrived in Montana a few days early to facilitate a gathering, wanting some time alone in the woods. I’ve been hiking, slowing myself down enough to really look at the trees.

These forests are not what I expected.

The trees are connected below, their roots entangled in ways I can’t see, sharing what they need to survive. But above ground, there is very little canopy. They grow tall and narrow, spaced just far enough apart that their branches don’t quite meet. The light comes through easily. Nothing is held for very long.

They look, to me at least, a little exposed. A little fragile. Connected, but not quite held.

It’s hard not to notice the difference once you see it. The difference between being linked to something and being part of something that can actually shelter you.

That image has been staying with me.

As I kept listening, the episode opened up another layer of understanding about forests. Scientists have been studying what happens beneath the surface for years now, mapping the intricate systems that allow trees to share nutrients, communicate distress, even support one another across species.

But what they are also discovering is just as surprising, and it asks something different of our attention.

We need to look up.

There is nutrient-rich soil in the canopy, branches holding entire ecosystems, plants growing on plants. In some forests, a remarkable share of life is happening above the ground, in layers we didn’t even think to look for.

Life, it turns out, doesn’t only connect below.

It gathers. It builds. It grows again in the places we once assumed were empty.

And once you begin to see that, it becomes harder to believe that our communities are meant to be flat, or linear, or held up by a single structure doing all the work.

For a long time, we built our institutions like machines. They were designed to be efficient, predictable, organized in ways that made sense on paper. Leadership sat at the top, responsibility flowed downward, and if everything worked as planned, the system held.

That model carried us for a while.

But more and more, it shows its limits. It struggles to hold complexity, to respond to change, to sustain the people who are asked to keep it running.

Because people are not machines, and communities are not systems that run on clean lines. They are made of relationships, of shifting roles, of moments that matter in ways that can’t always be tracked or measured.

If you look to living systems instead of mechanical ones, a different pattern emerges. Forests are not organized around a single center. They are layered, adaptive, full of exchange. What sustains them is not control, but circulation.

We still tend to organize spiritual life around what we can see.

A rabbi. A cantor. A board. A set of programs. A calendar that gives the impression that everything is covered, even when we know that the same few people are holding more than their share.

These structures matter. They provide shape and continuity. But they are only one layer of what makes a community live.

The deeper life of a community is carried in quieter ways. In the person who notices who has not been there in a while and reaches out. In the conversation that continues long after the official learning has ended. In the meal that appears when someone is in need. In the question that shifts the room because someone was willing to ask it.

These things rarely make it into reports or budgets, but without them, very little else holds.

We have built communities that reward what can be seen, and then we are surprised when people burn out doing what cannot.

I was reminded of this recently by someone I meet with in spiritual direction. She had been studying biblical Hebrew and, for the first time, translated the Song of the Sea on her own. When she spoke about it, she was in tears, not from frustration but from recognition, as if something in her had opened to meet something that had been waiting.

It wasn’t just that she understood the words.

It was that she felt herself inside them, connected to a current that had been moving long before her and would continue long after. When she described Miriam lifting the timbrel, it did not feel like a story she was analyzing. It felt like something alive, something her body could almost remember how to do.

That kind of moment doesn’t come from information alone. It comes from being nourished by something that is still living.

And like anything that is truly alive, it does not stay contained. It moves outward. It asks to be expressed, to be shared, to take shape in the world.

If the underground life of a forest is about connection, the canopy reveals something else entirely. It shows us that growth does not end where we think it does. Life builds on life. It creates new ground where there was none before.

I have watched something like this unfold over the years in my own community.

People who once showed up simply to participate have gone on to become rabbis, cantors, teachers, each in their own time and in their own way. Today, I sit with people in their 40s, their 60s, even their 70s who are stepping into forms of leadership while still learning, still questioning, still very much in process.

It does not look like a ladder.

It looks more like a canopy, where fully lived lives become the ground for new growth, and where learning and leading happen alongside one another, sometimes in the same breath.

When you begin to see community this way, something softens.

People are no longer confined to a single role. The one who teaches today may be the one who needs support tomorrow. The person who seems quiet may be holding more of the system than anyone realizes.

Nourishment begins to move in more than one direction.

And perhaps most importantly, not everything that we receive has to be turned immediately into something we offer. There is room to be fed without feeling the need to produce.

Growth, in this kind of system, is less about getting bigger and more about becoming more connected, more responsive, more alive to what is already present.

There is, however, another layer to all of this.

Many of us have been shaped by a deeply American story about what it means to be strong. We are taught, often without realizing it, that strength comes from independence, that meaning is something we build for ourselves, that if we work hard enough we can carry what we need on our own.

That story has shaped our Jewish lives and our communities.

We gather, but often as individuals, each responsible for our own engagement, our own learning, our own sense of belonging. We admire the one who can figure it out, who can make meaning on their own.

But that is not how Jewish life developed.

It was interdependent. Learning happened in relationship. Care was shared. Identity was formed through ongoing exchange, not solitary effort.

We have inherited a tradition built on interdependence and placed it inside a culture that rewards independence. The tension between those two realities is shaping more of our communal life than we often acknowledge.

There is an older wisdom that speaks to this, quietly and directly. Kohelet reminds us that “two are better than one… and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Strength, in that telling, is never singular. It is something that is formed through relationship, through being bound up with others in ways that hold when one strand alone would fray.

The Maharal of Prague takes this a step further, suggesting that a community is not simply a collection of individuals, but a unified whole, where each part depends on the others in order to fully exist. He was writing in a time that was anything but stable, and understood this kind of interdependence not as an ideal, but as a source of resilience in tenuous times.

It is a very different way of understanding what it means to belong.

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There is also a structural shift happening that we are only beginning to understand.

For a long time, Jewish communal life relied on shared hubs. Institutions that gathered people and resources in one place, that made connection easier simply by existing.

They were not perfect, but they functioned as nodes in a larger system.

Many of those hubs are thinner now, more strained, sometimes more isolated from one another. And as our movements struggle under the weight of competition, something else becomes clear.

We have always been shaped by one another.

Even when resources flowed through institutions, the real life of the system was relational. It lived in the connections between people, between communities, between ideas that did not stay in one place for very long.

Now that resources are no longer flowing from the usual places, we feel the absence more acutely.

We are trying to sustain communal life with fewer shared containers, while living in a culture that pulls us toward separation. The question is not whether that is difficult. The question is whether we are willing to rethink how we connect.

I saw a glimpse of another way during Covid.

At a moment when so much of what we relied on was disrupted, new spaces began to form. Dreaming Up was one. Spiritual Response to Covid-19 was another. These were not institutions in the traditional sense. They were gatherings, created quickly, shaped by need, open to anyone who found their way in.

Spiritual Response was interfaith. In the early days, because different communities met at different times, we helped hold one another’s online spaces, stepping in when someone else could not, making sure something remained open when it was needed.

It was simple. It was practical. And it revealed something essential.

People came not because they belonged to a single place, but because they needed connection. What emerged was not just a series of events, but a kind of circulation. Ideas moved. Practices traveled. People carried what they experienced back into their own communities and reshaped it there.

It felt less like attending something and more like being part of something that was still taking form.

And still, something gets in the way.

We hold tightly to what is ours. To the communities we have built, to the structures we have maintained, to the boundaries that give us a sense of stability.

It is understandable. It is also limiting.

Because living systems do not survive by guarding territory. They survive through exchange.

If the forest offers any guidance, it is this.

When conditions change, life does not disappear. It reorganizes.

Perhaps what we are being asked to do now is not simply to preserve what has been, but to notice where new forms of connection are already emerging, and to participate in them with a little more trust.

To imagine communities that function less like isolated entities and more like interconnected hubs, where resources are shared, where leadership is layered, where no single place is expected to hold everything.

Not as a replacement for what came before, but as an expansion of where life can take root.

Burnout, in this light, begins to look different.

It is not only about doing too much. It is about being held in one role for too long, about giving without receiving, about carrying without being carried.

People do not burn out because they care too much. They burn out because care is not allowed to move.

And in any living system, what does not move begins to break down.

After crossing the sea, Miriam does not explain what has happened. She takes a timbrel in her hand, and the women follow her in rhythm.

It is not a plan or a conclusion. It is a response, something embodied, shared, alive in the moment.

I find myself wondering what it would mean to build communities that make room for that kind of response. Communities where the roots run deep enough to nourish, where the canopy grows thick enough to hold, and where people are free to move between receiving and expressing, between holding and being held.

Something like that would feel less like an institution and more like stepping into a forest, where life is constantly being passed, reshaped, and renewed, even when we cannot fully see how.

Some board meetings feel less like leadership and more like a cold war with Tam Tams.

Board service is one of the most important roles in communal life.
It is also one of the fastest ways to drain the life out of a room.

“My arm was twisted.”
“I said yes for a year.”
“Someone had to do it.”

Not exactly the language of purpose.

Agendas are followed.
Decisions get made.
And still, something essential never quite enters the room.

The Allergy

In most nonprofit spaces, even a light touch of spirituality raises concern. It can feel like it might taint the work, so we default to neutrality, professionalism, and efficiency.

And if we are honest, synagogue boards can be just as allergic.

We tell ourselves it keeps things serious. Focused. Productive.

We choose the version of the meeting where we stay polite instead of honest.
Where we move things along instead of sitting in what is actually happening.

Because if we let more in, something shifts.

We might have to say what we actually think.
We might have to hear something we do not like.
We might even find meaning in the work, and then it is no longer something to get through.

And that is riskier than we admit. We often prefer to reserve our thoughts for a chosen few in the parking lot after the meeting.

The Built-In Advantage

Synagogues are one of the few places where spirituality is not just allowed, but expected.
And yet, in board work, we often act as if we need permission to use it.

Spirituality is not just something we believe.

It makes a demand.

Show up and be accountable for how you speak.
Stay when the conversation gets uncomfortable.
Let go of getting your way and care about how the group arrives at an answer.

Instead, this is what happens in too many rooms:

A decision stalls because no one wants to name the real concern. Someone softens what they mean so it lands well. The group moves on, a little relieved, a little unresolved.

Spirituality interrupts that pattern.

It asks us to stay in the moment a little longer. To risk saying the thing that might refine the conversation. To trust that conflict, held well, leads to better outcomes.

It gives us permission to be a bit messy before we arrive at an answer. And it asks us to take responsibility for that mess.

It is a tool we use, a goal we aim for, and a frame that shapes how we understand our work.

Synagogue boards have a built-in advantage most organizations do not. We inherit a tradition filled with practices designed to cultivate attention, ethical behavior, real human connection, and to organize community.

And then we run our meetings like a mid-level nonprofit with better nosh.

Add-On vs Design

The instinct, when we do try to bring it in, is to add a small moment. A reflection. A reading. A quick check-in. Then we move on to the “real work.”

That approach rarely works. It feels like something just layered on. Easy to skip when time gets tight. Especially when there are fourteen agenda items and someone still needs to approve the copier lease.

When something is layered on it sounds like this: “Let’s start with a quick reflection before we get to the real work.”

A design sounds like this: “The way we begin is part of the work.”

The invitation is deeper than that. Spirituality is not something we layer onto a board meeting. It is how the meeting is designed in the first place.

It shapes how we begin. How we listen. How we handle disagreement.
How we make decisions. How people leave the room.

When it is designed in from the start, it does not slow the work down.
It makes the work more honest.
More connected.
More effective.

A Board Meeting Is a Gathering

If we treated board meetings less like transactions and more like gatherings, we might design them differently.

As Priya Parker reminds us, a gathering is shaped long before people sit down. A board meeting is a gathering. For a synagogue, the difference between a meeting and a gathering is spirituality.

Here are five tools from our tradition that can change that. Not as add-ons, but as part of the design.

Five Tools in Practice

1. Kavana. Intention.

Most board meetings begin mid-sentence.
People arrive from different days, different moods, different private frustrations.
And we expect instant alignment.

Kavana interrupts that.

Before the most charged agenda item, the facilitator pauses.
“Tonight’s primary agenda decision is important and challenging. Let’s be thoughtful about how we speak and how we listen.”

Tie it to the agenda. Name the stakes. Shape the container.

Thirty seconds. Maybe a minute.

The room remembers itself. Which is already a minor miracle.1. Kavana. Intention.

Most board meetings begin mid-sentence.
People arrive from different days, different moods, different private frustrations.
And we expect instant alignment.

Kavana interrupts that.

Before the most charged agenda item, the facilitator pauses: “Tonight’s primary agenda decision is important and challenging.Let’s take a moment to be clear about how we want to show up for this.

Our tradition in Pirkei Avot teaches: hevu metunim ba-din, be deliberate in judgment.

Just take a breath and notice your intention. Are you trying to move this forward, or are you trying to understand it?”

Offer a sacred text, a piece of liturgy, or a Jewish concept and tie it to the agenda. Name the stakes. Shape the container.

Thirty seconds. Maybe a minute.

The room remembers itself. Which is already a minor miracle.

2. Midot. Character practice.

At the start of the meeting, the board names a midah. Patience. Humility. Generosity.

Not as an aspiration. Frameit as a shared practice.

And in the middle of the meeting, use inquiry. “What would patience look like right now?” “What are we missing because we are rushing?”

It gives the room a language for who they are trying to be with each other.

3. Covenant. Brit.

A covenant is not just rules of order.

A living agreement about how we treat each other and how we make decisions. Especially when it is hard.

A covenant asks something of us. Responsibility for our own behavior. Responsibility for the integrity of the whole.

Keep it alive. Name a single line from the covenant at the start of each meeting.

“We speak directly and with respect.”

Let that guide the meeting. Return to it when things slip. Not in a punitive way, but in a manner that realigns the members.

Otherwise, it becomes a document everyone feels good about and no one uses.

4. Ethical communication.

A board member or a chair names what is happening in the room.

“I am noticing we are talking around something.”
“Can we slow down?”
“I think there is more here than we are saying.”

It can be tempting to assume this is the rabbi’s role. To step in. Smooth things over. Referee the moment.

But when that happens, we hand off responsibility for the quality of our communication.

A healthy board shares that responsibility.

Most boards do not have communication problems.
They have well-practiced avoidance rituals.

To be frank, sometimes we prefer them.
They keep things polite.
They keep things moving.
They keep us from saying the thing we actually need to say.

Let’s not allow the avoidance of conflict reign; instead, spiritual practices can help us manage the difference of opinions.

5. Ritualized connection.

The meeting begins with a check-in that serves the meeting.
Not a long detour. Something that sets the tone.

“What is one word you are bringing into this conversation?”

And it ends with a check-out that helps the group integrate what just happened.

Where did we live our values tonight? What are you taking with you from this conversation?

These moments are not extra. They are what allow the work to land.

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When It Gets Hard

And when conflict escalates, as it inevitably does, a skilled facilitator does not just push through the agenda.

They stop the room.
Invite people to breathe.
Help the group reconnect.

Not to erase difference. To remember there is something shared underneath it.

What This Is and Is Not

This does not mean every board meeting needs to become overtly religious. For some, God language will be present. For others, it will not.

What it does mean is this. We are orienting ourselves toward something larger than any one person.The common good. A shared sense of purpose. The kind of community we say we want to build.

The Real Work

The leadership team owns the room. Modeled by the president, the rabbi, and the executive director. And shared, by design, with others who step in and hold it with them.

If the board does not embody the community’s values, the community will not either.

Not in the sanctuary.
Not in the hallways.
Not in the ways people speak to one another when things get hard.

We keep trying to strengthen synagogue life through better strategy. Clearer agendas. Stronger metrics. More efficient meetings.

And those things matter. But they are not enough.

What shapes a community is not just what gets decided, but how it gets decided.

The boardroom is not separate from the life of the community.
It is where the culture is practiced, reinforced, and quietly transmitted. Which means that a board meeting is doing more than approving budgets and debating policy.

It is teaching people how to be with one another.

No pressure.

We might try something both older and more demanding.
Becoming, in the boardroom, the community we hope to be.

I am curious what this looks like in your context.
What are the spiritual or relational practices, formal or informal, that have actually changed how your board works?
Not the ones that sound good on paper, but the ones that people feel in the room.

Every synagogue board I’ve worked with says some version of:

“We just need our members to trust us.”

And every congregation says some version of:

“We would… if we knew what you were doing.”

Welcome to the stalemate. It’s been running so long that it’s basically part of the liturgy.

Trust isn’t declared. It’s inferred.

Most members are not studying your governance. They’re running a simpler test:

• Do you know what you’re doing?

• Can I count on you?

• Are you actually for us?

Boards love the first question. Members live in the other two.

You can make thoughtful, responsible decisions. If people experience you as inconsistent or opaque, your competence is basically a private hobby.

So what actually builds trust?

Not more effort. Better signals.

Reliability looks like consistency.
Not just sending information, but delivering it in ways a normal human can read or hear without rereading the same sentence three times and briefly wondering if they’re the problem.

If your communication sounds like it was written to survive a lawsuit, people will treat it like one.

Write like a person.
Shorter. Clearer. Earlier. More often.

And design for reality.

In a recent piece I wrote about what would happen if Priya Parker designed our congregational meetings, the core idea was simple: people engage when the experience is built for them. Not for tradition. Not for habit. For them. [If Priya Parker Ran Your Congregational Meeting]

A congregation took that seriously. They designed a meeting to be relevant and engaging. It even moved to Zoom at the last minute, which usually translates to “we’ll see who’s still here once someone says, ‘Can you hear me?’ for the fourth time.”

The meeting ran long.

Almost no one left.

That’s the metric. Not attendance. Retention.

When something is designed well with members in mind, people stay. When it isn’t, they disappear politely and later say, “Great meeting,” which is synagogue code for “I suffered quietly.”

Benevolence looks like visible care for the whole.
This is where things either build or break.

People can live with decisions they don’t like. They cannot live with decisions that feel arbitrary or closed.

“This is what we decided” is an announcement.
“Here’s how we got there, what we weighed, and who we were trying to serve” is leadership.

I’ve seen a community navigate a deeply polarizing ritual decision about who could be called to the Torah.

Instead of rushing, there was learning. Conversation. Space for disagreement.

So when the board finally voted on the ritual committee’s recommendation, something unusual happened.

Very little pushback.

Not because everyone agreed. They didn’t.

But because people understood.

Even those who disagreed said, “I wouldn’t have made that choice—but I can explain it, and I can see how it makes sense here.”

That’s trust.

Not agreement. Not consensus. Coherence.

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Competence still matters, but if you don’t translate it, no one experiences it.

And then there’s the part that belongs to everyone.

Know your members.
Not the version you wish you had. The version you actually have.

They don’t read everything.
They skim.
They miss things.
They care deeply… but intermittently.

Build for that.

And at the same time:

Members, do your part.

You cannot demand transparency and then ignore every attempt at communication until you’re upset and suddenly become a constitutional scholar of synagogue bylaws.

You cannot want a voice and only use it at peak frustration.

Community is not a spectator sport. Especially in synagogue.

So here’s the shift, and let’s be clear who it’s for:

Boards: stop trying to prove you are trustworthy. Start making trust easy to experience.

Say what you’re doing and why.
Repeat it more than you think is necessary.
Design communication people will actually engage with.

And expect feedback.

Not as an attack. As evidence that people still believe this place belongs to them.

Because when no one is talking, that’s not trust.

That’s checkout.

Reader’s Note:
This is the second piece in a series on trust in synagogue life. I’ll link the first here. Trust Reimagined

If this is useful to you, I’d love your support in subscribing, paid if that’s within reach.

If not, truly no guilt. But if something here resonates, consider restacking or sharing it with someone who has ever sat through a meeting and thought, “There has to be a better way,” or quietly checked the clock.

Congregations don’t change at the speed of strategy.
They change at the speed of trust.

And yet, if you’ve spent any time around boards, you’ve probably noticed something:

Everyone says they want better communication.
What they usually need is trust. And occasionally, fewer heavy sighs and less interpretive eye contact across the table. (I have an honorary PhD in interpretive eye contact after nearly three decades of serving on boards.)

I’ve been working with a trust framework through my work with Strelo, a human-centered consulting firm focused on leadership, culture, and organizational systems.¹ What I appreciate about this approach is that it refuses to let trust stay abstract.

Because most of us talk about trust like it’s a value. Something we claim. Something we assume. Something we list right after “collaboration” and right before “innovation.”

Or, if we’re being honest, something we talk about like it’s a legendary time and place we once visited.

Trust as Brigadoon. It appears briefly, everyone is moved, and then it disappears again once someone says, “Can we just go back to the agenda?”

This model does something more useful.

It breaks trust into three observable, actionable behaviors:

• Benevolence — I believe you have my best interests at heart

• Competence — I believe you can do what you say

• Reliability — I believe you will follow through

Now we’re not talking about trust as a feeling.
We’re talking about trust as something you can actually practice.

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And that matters. Because trust always involves risk.

Every time I trust you, something is on the line. My time. My credibility. My standing in the room. My sense of safety.

And here’s the part we don’t name enough:

We all have very different relationships to risk.

Some people will walk into the jungle with no insect repellent and call it leadership.
Others need GPS, a backup plan, and emotional support just to say, “I’m not sure that’s the right direction.”

Some people extend trust easily and reassess later.
Some people trust slowly and remember everything forever, including what you said in March of 2017. (Yes, Mom, I’m talking about you.)

None of that is wrong. But it means that in every boardroom, people are operating with completely different internal calculations about what feels safe.

Which is why trust doesn’t grow through good intentions.
It grows through small, repeated interactions over time.

The Part We Miss: Trustworthiness

As helpful as this model is, I found myself wanting to push it one step further.

Because trust is only half the story.

Trust is what I extend.
Trustworthiness is what I embody.

Trust is a posture.
Trustworthiness is a practice.

And if we are honest, most of us walk into a meeting holding two beliefs at the same time:

“I’m trustworthy.”

And:

“I’m not totally sure about them.”

No one says this out loud.
But you can feel it in how quickly people defend their ideas.

This is the gap where things quietly fall apart.

Not in dramatic conflict.
In hesitation. In politeness. In the sentence that starts with, “I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, but…” and then steps very carefully around the truth.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

Most boards do not have a strategy problem.
They have a trust problem they keep trying to solve with strategy.

So they form a subcommittee.
They create a survey.
They revisit the mission statement for the fourth time.

And still, the meeting after the meeting is where the real conversation happens.

Because no amount of competence can repair a lack of perceived benevolence. And no amount of vision can compensate for unreliable behavior.

In my consulting work, I began expanding this model through a Jewish lens, asking not only how we build trust, but how we become people others can trust.

A Jewish Lens: Two Ways of Trusting

Jewish tradition holds this distinction clearly.

Bitachon is the capacity to trust.
Emunah is steadiness, reliability, the quality of being trustworthy.

One asks: can I trust you?
The other asks: can you rely on me?

Healthy communities need both.

Pirkei Avot teaches that the world stands on three things: Torah, Avodah (Prayer Life), and Gemilut Hasadim (Deeds of Lovingkindness).

We might say, with a bit of honesty, that congregational leadership stands on three parallel pillars:

Competence. Reliability. Benevolence.

Not as aspirations people nod at.
As behaviors people track, consciously or not, in every interaction.

When Trust Breaks (and Builds)

I’ve lived this, not just taught it.

There was a time when I worked with a board president where trust was thin. Conversations were tense. There wasn’t a strong sense that we had each other’s backs.

We were both competent. We were both committed.
And still, it felt like entering meetings slightly braced for impact.

What changed was not a better plan.

It was how we showed up.

We got clearer. We followed through more consistently. We made it visible, in small ways, that we were for each other and not just for our own positions.

Today, she’s a past president and I serve as emeritus. We work closely together, offering thoughtful strategy for the congregation. There’s candor. There’s trust. There’s real collaboration.

And here’s the part that matters:

Not only do we benefit.
The congregation benefits from our partnership.

Trust doesn’t just make relationships feel better.
It makes leadership actually work.

Why This Matters More in Congregations

Let’s name this plainly.

In communities of belonging, trust is not optional. It is structural.

In a corporation, low trust slows things down.
In a congregation, low trust changes what people are willing to say out loud.

People edit themselves.
They choose safety over honesty.
They say, “That’s fine,” when it’s not fine.

And then the board wonders why decisions feel thin and energy feels low.

Congregations ask more of people than most organizations. Not just time or expertise, but identity, meaning, and care.

Which means the conditions for trust have to be stronger.

That includes something many boards quietly resist:

Clear agreements. Shared expectations. Naming how we want to treat each other when things get hard.

Because when those are missing, people do not default to generosity.

They default to suspicion. Or silence. Or the person who says, “Can I just be direct?” which is rarely a good sign.

The Work Ahead

If relationships shape change, and they do, then those relationships only deepen at the speed of trust.

And trust is not built through mission statements.

It is built through behavior.

Small. Repeated. Visible behavior.

In the pieces that follow, I’ll break this down further:

• What benevolence actually looks like under pressure

• How competence builds trust and how it quietly erodes it

• Why reliability is often the simplest and most neglected dimension

For now, I’ll leave you with one question:

If trust were higher on your board, what would people do differently?

Not what they would say.

What would actually change in how they show up?

Because without trust, people will nod in the room and disappear outside of it.

Reader Note

This is the first in a series exploring trust, trustworthiness, and the three dimensions of trust in congregational leadership. Future pieces will offer deeper dives and practical applications.

¹ Strelo is a human-centered consulting firm focused on leadership, culture, and organizational systems. I work with Strelo and have contributed to advancing and applying this trust framework in practice. Learn more at: Strelo

After decades of sitting in synagogue board meetings, I can tell you something with absolute confidence:

No synagogue board believes it is like other synagogue boards.

Every board is convinced its challenges are uniquely complex, historically unprecedented, and possibly caused by the finance committee spreadsheet that no one fully understands but everyone pretends to.

And yet.

Sit in enough boardrooms and the same patterns appear everywhere.

Reform congregations. Reconstructionist communities. Independent minyanim meeting in someone’s living room with folding chairs and heroic trays of rugelach that no one admits they brought from Costco.

Different personalities. Same governance movie.

I know this because I have sat through many screenings.

Sometimes the meeting even improves once the wine is opened. Not because wine solves governance problems. It just reminds people they actually like each other.

The good news is that these patterns are predictable.

Which means they’re fixable.

Let’s start with the most common one.

1. The Board Wanders Into Operations

It begins with kindness.

A trustee notices something that could be improved and thinks, I can help with that.

They offer suggestions about the newsletter.
They troubleshoot the High Holiday seating chart.
They send the education director a quick idea.

Soon staff are receiving direction from five different people and no one is entirely sure who is actually in charge.

No one intended this. It grows from care and history. Many congregations spent years operating almost entirely with volunteers. When staff capacity grows, the habits don’t immediately change. But when boards move into management, two things happen:

Staff leadership weakens.
Trustees slowly exhaust themselves trying to run an organization they were never meant to operate.

The Pivot

Healthy governance rests on a simple distinction:

Boards govern. Staff manage.

Trustees absolutely should raise ideas and concerns. But direction to staff flows through senior leadership, not through side conversations and helpful midnight emails.

Otherwise leadership drifts into a group project.

And we all remember how those went.

2. The Meeting Becomes an Operations Report

Look at the typical synagogue board agenda and you will often see something like this:

Program update.
Membership update.
Building update.
Budget update.
Purim carnival update.
HVAC update.

Ninety minutes later someone says,

“Oh right, we should probably talk about the future of the congregation.”

Usually when there are six minutes left and someone has already put on their coat. Operational issues feel urgent and concrete. Strategy requires slower thinking. So unless boards are intentional, the urgent crowds out the important. The board slowly becomes a committee for reviewing updates.

The Pivot

Strong boards flip the agenda.

They spend real time on questions like:

Where is membership actually heading?
What kind of community are we becoming?
What will sustain this congregation five years from now?
How do we deepen engagement instead of simply maintaining programs?

Operations matter. But they should inform governance, not dominate it.

If your entire board meeting could have been replaced by a detailed email, you are probably talking about the wrong things.

3. Decisions Start Happening in the Hallway

Synagogues run on relationships.

People talk before meetings. After meetings. During Kiddush. In the hallway while stacking chairs.

Eventually a familiar pattern emerges.

Two influential members compare notes. Someone floats an idea to staff. A direction starts forming before the board ever discusses the issue. By the time the board formally votes, everyone already knows the outcome. And then something interesting happens.

The real conversation continues in the parking lot. Not the official meeting. The other meeting.

The one where people finally say what they actually think. Often while putting on their coats.

The Pivot

Healthy boards try to bring the real conversation into the room.

That means clarifying three things:

Who makes which decisions.
Where decisions are made.
How concerns and ideas move through the system.

Clear structures do not stifle community.

They protect it.

Without them, leadership slowly turns into improvisational theater.

And synagogue boards already have enough drama.

4. Staff End Up With Multiple Bosses

This one is particularly hard on synagogue staff.

A trustee offers advice to the education director.
Another suggests a change to communications.
A third has feedback about programming.

Every interaction is friendly.

But the staff member now has six bosses and a growing sense of dread every time their email pings.

No one can succeed under that structure.

The Pivot

Healthy congregations create a clear leadership chain:

Board
→ supervises the Rabbi and/or Executive Director

Senior leadership
→ supervises staff

Trustees can absolutely share ideas. But supervision lives in one place.

Otherwise staff leadership becomes a spiritual exercise in mind reading.

5. The Board Avoids the Conversations That Actually Matter

Boards often spend enormous time on small operational issues and very little time examining how leadership itself is functioning.

Questions like:

Are trustee roles clear?
Are committees working well?
Are we developing future leaders?
Are we governing effectively?

These conversations can feel uncomfortable.

So the board talks about easier things.

Like printer toner.

Which has ended more board meetings than theology.

The Pivot

Healthy boards occasionally step back and ask one simple question:

How are we doing as leaders of this community?

When boards are willing to examine their own functioning, everything else improves.

Strategy becomes clearer.
Staff leadership strengthens.
Trust grows.

One Final Observation from the Boardwalk

If you see these patterns in your own boardroom, it does not mean something has gone wrong. In fact, it often means the opposite.

Most of these dynamics appear when a congregation is moving from a volunteer culture toward a more professional leadership structure.

That transition is rarely smooth. But when roles become clear, something shifts.

Volunteers focus on vision.
Staff focus on execution.
Meetings become strategic.
Trust deepens.

And sometimes the most important conversation still happens in the parking lot.

But now it is about the future of the congregation.

Not the copier. Which, for the record, is still broken.

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Reader’s Note

If this article felt uncomfortably familiar, you might enjoy subscribing to The Deep End.

Paid subscriptions support this work and help keep thoughtful conversation about synagogue life, leadership, and community going.

If subscribing yourself feels like too much of a time commitment, you can always gift a subscription to someone on your board.

Particularly the person who says, “This should only take five minutes.”

We all know how that goes.

When Leadership Systems Stop Working

Recently I had the privilege of offering Torah during morning davening at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association conference.

Offering Torah to a room full of rabbis is always humbling. It also requires a certain amount of chutzpah. Rabbis are not widely known for their quiet acceptance of someone else’s interpretation of Torah.

But the teaching that morning named something many rabbis across the Jewish world are quietly experiencing.

The calling of the rabbinate remains deeply meaningful.
The structure of the work increasingly is not.

A Friday Night Scene Many Rabbis Know

At one point in my congregational rabbinate, a typical Friday night Shabbat service could look something like this.

I might be greeting people as they came in, trying to make sure newcomers felt welcomed. At the same time I would be reviewing my d’var Torah in my head, making sure the teaching felt thoughtful and grounded. I would also be identifying lay leaders who could lead different parts of the service.

Somewhere in the middle of that choreography someone might approach quietly with a pastoral crisis.

Sometimes I would literally be holding chairs in my hands while someone began sharing something deeply personal.

And just as that conversation unfolded, another congregant might lean over and ask, very sincerely,

“Rabbi, where should I put the food I brought for the oneg?”

As another called across the room, “Rabbi, could you adjust the thermostat?”

None of these moments are unreasonable on their own. Communities need hospitality. Services need to run smoothly. People need care.

But taken together they illustrate something important.

The modern rabbi is often expected to function simultaneously as spiritual guide, teacher, therapist, program coordinator, facilities manager, and community greeter.

Occasionally all within the same five minutes.

When the System Reveals Its Limits

Sometimes another piece of that moment stood out as well.

There were many Friday nights when I looked around the room and realized there were no board members present.

Not because they did not care. In many cases it was the opposite. They had spent hours that week dealing with budgets, committee meetings, building repairs, and fundraising calls. By the time Shabbat arrived, they were simply exhausted.

In other words, the very people responsible for sustaining the institution were often too depleted to experience the spiritual life the institution existed to create.

That is not a criticism of boards.

It is a signal that something about the model itself may be off.

When the rabbi is greeting people, holding pastoral conversations, running the service, and making sure the thermostat is set correctly, while the board is simultaneously working themselves to exhaustion behind the scenes, the system begins to reveal its limits.

This is not a problem of commitment.
It is a problem of design.

When both clergy and lay leadership are stretched this thin, it is worth asking whether the leadership structure itself needs to evolve.

What the Research Is Telling Us

A major 2025 study commissioned by Atra surveyed nearly two thousand rabbis, rabbinical students, and people who seriously considered becoming rabbis.

The findings were striking.

Ninety seven percent of rabbis say their work is meaningful and rewarding.

In most professions that number would be astonishing.

And yet the same research documents widespread burnout, rising departures from congregational roles, shrinking rabbinical school cohorts, and an aging rabbinic workforce.

Only about six percent of working rabbis today are under the age of thirty five. More than a quarter are already sixty five or older.

The generation of rabbis currently serving Jewish communities is significantly larger than the generation coming behind them.

Congregations, Hillels, and Jewish nonprofits across the country are increasingly struggling to fill rabbinic roles.

People often describe this as a rabbi shortage.

But the data suggest something slightly different.

This is not primarily a recruitment problem.
It is a sustainability problem.

Talented people are still drawn to Jewish leadership. But increasing numbers look at the structure of the job and quietly decide the career itself may not be livable.

Boardwalk Diagnostic

Is Your Rabbi Carrying Too Much?

Before considering structural change, boards might begin with five honest questions.

• Does the rabbi serve as the default problem solver whenever something goes wrong in the community?

• Do operational questions, program ideas, and conflict mediation regularly flow to the rabbi first rather than through shared leadership structures?

• Is the rabbi carrying responsibilities that belong to staff, committees, or volunteer leaders?

• Do board members sometimes feel so consumed by governance work that they rarely participate in the spiritual life of the community themselves?

• If the rabbi were unavailable for two months, would the institution struggle to function?

If several of these questions feel familiar, your institution may be relying on a heroic leadership model that is no longer sustainable.

When the Torah Changes Leadership Models

This week’s Torah portion, Vayakhel–Pekudei, appears just after one of the most dramatic leadership crises in the Torah.

The Golden Calf.

After the chaos, the Torah does something surprising.

It does not double down on the heroic leader model.

Instead it introduces a different kind of leader.

Betzalel.

The Torah describes Betzalel as filled with three qualities:

Chochmah
Tevunah
Da’at

Over time I have come to think about these as three layers of leadership awareness.

This is what I call The Betzalel Leadership Framework.

Chochmah — Self awareness
Understanding one’s own strengths, limits, and motivations.

Tevunah — Relational awareness
Recognizing the gifts, fears, and potential of others.

Da’at — Systemic awareness
Seeing how the parts of a community fit together so collective work becomes possible.

Self
Other
System

Betzalel’s genius is that he operates at all three levels.

Modern leadership theory describes something similar.

Ronald Heifetz writes that leadership is not about providing answers.

Leadership is about mobilizing people to tackle difficult challenges together.

Betzalel would have understood that immediately.

A Leadership Reframe

The future of Jewish leadership will not depend on finding stronger heroic rabbis.

It will depend on designing healthier leadership systems.

The communities that thrive in the coming decades will not simply be the ones with the most charismatic clergy.

They will be the ones that know how to mobilize the wisdom, generosity, and leadership capacity of the people already sitting in their pews, classrooms, and board meetings.

Torah offers a powerful image for this shift.

When the Israelites build the Mishkan, the sanctuary in the wilderness, the project does not depend on a single heroic leader. It unfolds because people bring their gifts. Craftspeople. Artists. Builders. Organizers. Donors. Volunteers.

The Torah describes them with a beautiful phrase: nediv lev, people whose hearts moved them to contribute.

That is the leadership architecture Betzalel helps create.

And it raises a question for Jewish institutions today.

What would it look like if our communities were structured less around heroic leadership and more around shared sacred work?

For synagogue boards, Hillel leaders, and nonprofit trustees, that question is not theoretical.

It is practical.

It shapes how responsibilities are distributed, how leaders are supported, and whether the rabbinate remains a sustainable calling for the next generation.

Here are five shifts that can help boards begin moving in that direction.

Five Shifts Jewish Boards Need to Make

These shifts apply not only to synagogues but also to Hillels and Jewish nonprofits that rely on rabbinic leadership. The core question beneath them is simple:

Are we designing leadership structures that can sustain both the mission and the people carrying it?

1. From Heroic Rabbi to Shared Leadership

Many Jewish institutions still operate with an unspoken assumption: the rabbi carries the center of the community.

When something breaks, the rabbi fixes it. When people are upset, the rabbi absorbs it. When the institution feels uncertain, the rabbi is expected to restore clarity and meaning.

This model can feel noble. But over time it becomes fragile.

The stronger the rabbi, the more responsibility quietly flows toward them. Committees stall until the rabbi weighs in. Conflicts linger until the rabbi mediates. Initiatives remain abstract until the rabbi blesses or leads them.

This is not leadership strength. It is role inflation.

Healthy communities distribute leadership intentionally. Clergy, professional staff, board leaders, committee chairs, and volunteers all carry meaningful responsibility.

The rabbi’s role shifts from carrying the system to activating leadership within it.

Betzalel models this kind of leadership. He does not disappear. He organizes the gifts of others into sacred work.

Practical step
Create a leadership map. List twenty recurring leadership responsibilities in the institution, both visible and invisible. Then identify who carries each one. Most boards are surprised how many responsibilities quietly accumulate around the rabbi.

Resource
Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line

Where in our institution have we unintentionally trained people to believe the rabbi must carry what could be shared?

2. From Clergy-Centered Institutions to Leadership Ecosystems

Many boards say they want to “support the rabbi.” That instinct is good, but it is incomplete.

The healthier question is: are we building a leadership ecosystem?

A clergy-centered institution revolves around one highly visible leader. Decisions, meaning, and bottlenecks all flow through that person.

This can work temporarily. But it creates structural vulnerability.

A leadership ecosystem spreads responsibility across clergy, staff, volunteers, and board leadership. Operational questions do not default to clergy. Volunteer leadership is real rather than symbolic. Staff roles are clear. Board members see themselves as leaders, not only fiduciaries.

In ecosystems, the rabbi is still essential. But the system does not require every current to run through one wire.

Practical step
Conduct an annual leadership ecosystem review with the rabbi, board chair, and senior staff. Identify key domains of institutional life: governance, spiritual leadership, pastoral care, administration, fundraising, volunteer engagement, and education. Clarify who owns each area.

Resource
Atra, From Calling to Career: Mapping the Current State and Future of Rabbinic Leadership

Where have responsibilities quietly accumulated around the rabbi because the ecosystem around them is too thin?

3. From Crisis Reaction to Adaptive Leadership

Most boards are good at addressing technical problems: a roof leak, a budget gap, a staffing vacancy.

But many of the challenges Jewish communities face today are adaptive challenges.

They involve identity, belonging, values, and change. They cannot be solved by a single decision or leader.

Questions about Israel, generational engagement, institutional purpose, and community cohesion fall into this category.

Boards often respond to adaptive challenges by turning instinctively to clergy. “Rabbi, what should we say?” “Rabbi, what should we do?”

Those questions are natural. But when every adaptive challenge is handed to clergy, leadership becomes answer-giving instead of capacity-building.

Ronald Heifetz describes leadership differently.

Leadership is the work of mobilizing people to face difficult realities together.

In adaptive moments, the rabbi’s role is not to resolve the tension alone. It is to help the community remain in the conversation long enough to grow.

Practical step
When facing a complex communal issue, begin with three questions: What kind of challenge is this? Who needs to be involved in discerning it? And what process will help the community learn together rather than outsourcing resolution to clergy?

Resource
Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

Where might our board be asking clergy to resolve adaptive challenges that actually require communal learning?

4. From Role Confusion to Role Clarity

Burnout grows not only from too much work but from unclear work.

Role confusion appears in familiar moments. A board member emails the rabbi about a facilities issue. A staffing tension becomes a rabbinic problem. A governance question turns into a pastoral conversation.

None of this happens maliciously. It happens because rabbis sit at the intersection of meaning, authority, and trust.

But that does not mean every issue belongs to them.

Healthy institutions clarify responsibility.

Boards govern.
Clergy lead spiritually.
Staff manage operations.

When those boundaries blur, everyone becomes less effective. Clergy drift into management. Boards drift into operations. Staff lose clarity. Decision-making slows.

Role clarity is not bureaucratic. It is protective.

It protects energy, accountability, and trust.

Practical step
Review committee structures, governance documents, and reporting lines. Ask: What decisions belong clearly to the board? Which responsibilities belong clearly to clergy? Which belong to staff or volunteers?

Resource
Dan Hotchkiss, Governance and Ministry

Where do our current practices blur the boundaries between governance, management, and spiritual leadership?

5. From Preservation Anxiety to Creative Building

Many Jewish institutions operate under quiet anxiety. Membership shifts. Financial pressure. Cultural change. Political tension.

These pressures are real. But anxiety narrows imagination.

When boards lead primarily from preservation, the work shifts from building to protecting. Leaders begin defending inherited structures rather than asking whether those structures still serve the mission.

Torah offers another image.

The Mishkan in the wilderness is not built through nostalgia or panic. It is built because people bring their gifts.

The Torah calls them nediv lev or generous of heart.

The sanctuary emerges because leadership invites participation rather than protecting control.

This is one of the deepest invitations for Jewish boards today. Not only to preserve institutions, but to ask what sacred life this moment is calling them to build.

Creative building does not discard tradition. It refuses to confuse faithfulness with repetition.

Practical step
Once a year, dedicate a board meeting to a generative question rather than a maintenance question. For example: If we were founding this community today, what leadership structure would we design?

Resource
Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

Where is our board spending more energy protecting inherited forms than imagining what this moment now requires us to build?

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The Essential Question Jewish Boards Need to Ask

TThe most important question Jewish boards can ask right now is not simply how to support their rabbi through another exhausting year.

The deeper question is this.

What leadership structure allows our community to thrive without requiring any one person to carry the entire weight?

That is the Betzalel question.

The Mishkan was not built by one heroic figure.
It was built because people brought what they had and trusted that their gifts mattered.

The Torah calls them nediv lev, generous of heart.

Those people are still sitting in our communities.

The work of leadership now is helping them discover their gold and inviting them to use it.

The heroic rabbi model is breaking.

What comes next is up to us.

Thanks for reading Boardwalk! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

I recently consulted with the top leaders of an HR and DEI department. They were sharp, committed, and exhausted. Over and over, they told me the same story: “We are asked for recommendations. We do the research, we weigh equity and organizational health, we hand over solid solutions. And then…nothing. Decisions get made without context, our proposals are ignored, and later we’re asked to clean up the mess.”

What they named was not a lack of expertise but a lack of power. What they needed, though, was not power at all. It was influence.

In congregations and nonprofits, we love to imagine that power lies in position. The board votes. The rabbi preaches. The director signs the check. That kind of power can certainly enforce decisions, but it rarely creates alignment. What the HR leaders felt was a classic mismatch: they had positional authority without cultural influence, so their good work stalled at the door of adoption.

Influence, by contrast, is built on relationships, trust, and credibility. It is the patient work of shaping culture without coercion. Influence cannot be demanded; it has to be cultivated. Power is positional. Influence is relational.

As a rabbi, I felt this distinction acutely. Congregations technically give rabbis power: you can sign contracts, oversee services, even decide when to close the doors in a snowstorm. But that kind of power is shallow. The real authority I earned came when people trusted me to guide the community for the common good. When they believed I was listening, educating, and framing choices honestly, even if they disagreed with my recommendations. That trust gave me influence. And influence is what actually changes culture.

I once wanted to reallocate synagogue resources. Too much money was going into services with sparse attendance while our communal programs struggled. I could have pulled rank. Instead, I gathered data, asked stakeholders for input, and posed hard questions publicly. By the time the decision came to the board, it was no longer “my idea.” It was our idea. Buy-in beats bulldozing.

This is what adrienne maree brown calls emergent power: strength that comes not from hierarchy but from the network of connections in the system. Decentralized, interdependent leadership may be slower, but it outlasts the brittle edicts of top-down rule. Emergent power is resilient.

Jewish tradition backs this up. Pirkei Avot cautions: “Do not seek to be known as one who holds authority.” Rabbi Sid Schwartz argues that synagogues thrive when boards act as stewards, not owners. And Rabbi Rachel Cowan described leadership as a practice of presence: paying attention to what is happening in the room and responding wisely. Boards are stewards, not owners. Presence is leadership.

That is the piece the HR leaders I met with had not yet claimed. Their frustration at lacking power was real. But their path forward will come from cultivating influence: building trust, widening their coalition, and practicing presence until their ideas are too credible, too grounded, and too relationally owned to be ignored.

I admit, there were days when I secretly wished for power. Imagine how easy it would have been: no three-hour board meetings, no endless debates about the color of the tablecloths, no carefully facilitated listening sessions. Just me, a microphone, and compliance. But if that fantasy had come true, we might have had shorter meetings, but we also would have had a much smaller, weaker, and crankier community. Power may get you quick wins, but influence builds something that lasts.

The work of leadership is not to amass power. Power gets you compliance. Influence builds a community.

Key Takeaways

Power is positional, influence is relational. One enforces rules, the other builds culture.

Buy-in beats bulldozing. A good idea without trust will wither.

Emergent power is resilient. Connection and decentralization outlast hierarchy.

Boards are stewards, not owners. Leadership is about holding responsibility, not claiming possession.

Presence is leadership. Real influence grows out of listening, curiosity, and trust.

Reflection Questions

We can talk theory all day, but influence is only real if you practice it. Reflection is one way to hold up the mirror. These questions are not abstract—they are meant to help you notice where power shows up in your leadership, and where influence could do more of the heavy lifting. Think of them as prompts to test whether you are building compliance or cultivating community.

1. Where in your leadership do you rely on positional power rather than earned influence?
   

2. Who are the voices in your community whose influence shapes decisions, even if they lack formal power?
   

3. What practices could you use this year to strengthen trust and credibility, so your influence grows?
   

4. If you are on a board, are you acting like an owner or a steward?
   

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Closer:
This is the difference that changes everything. Power can push through an idea. Influence makes it stick. And in congregations, nonprofits, and any community trying to thrive in scarcity and complexity, the work of leadership is not about pulling rank. It is about building trust.

So if you are on a board, leading a team, or carrying influence without realizing it: pause and take stock. What are you building? Compliance or community?

Because the future belongs to those who can cultivate influence.

Let’s just say it out loud: synagogue membership dues are often a slow-motion act of self-sabotage. Leaders cling to them out of habit, but the model is outdated, spiritually tone-deaf, and increasingly embarrassing.

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A Club Model in a Streaming World

Dues worked when Jews were buying houses in the suburbs, joining institutions for life, and showing off laminated membership cards like status symbols. Synagogues acted like country clubs with Torah instead of tennis courts. But now? Younger Jews live in gig economies, with shifting jobs, partners, and addresses. A $4,000 invoice for “annual dues” lands like junk mail, filed straight in the recycling bin.

As Jonah Zinn observed, synagogues have been financially structured like 20th-century clubs, but Jewish life today flows in networked, on-demand ways (Zinn, 2014). If community is Netflix, dues are Blockbuster.

The Fee-for-Service Mindset

The model teaches people to think like customers, not covenantal partners. You pay your dues, you get a rabbi for your wedding, a seat on Yom Kippur, and a bagel on Sunday. Don’t like the sermon? Suddenly your “annual fee” feels overpriced. Rabbis whisper about congregants who, after decades of membership, announce they’re “canceling” because they “didn’t get their money’s worth.”

This isn’t spiritual life, it’s Yelp reviews for Judaism.

Who Gets Left Out

Then there’s the shame factor. Every year, a handful of families are forced to confess their finances to an anonymous committee just to stay connected. Some synagogues and Jewish institutions even require people to submit their tax forms to “prove” they’re in need. How humiliating is that? Imagine having to disclose your W-2 just to pray with your community.

Sliding scales were meant to fix this, but in practice they create chaos. Members try to guess what they “should” pay, some lowball, others overextend, and treasurers end up refereeing what feels like a bad yard sale negotiation.

The result? The very people who most need a spiritual home, young adults, single parents, and those recovering from financial setbacks, get the clearest message that they don’t belong.

Treasurers: Resentment as a Job Description

If you want to see the emotional carnage of the dues system, talk to a synagogue treasurer. They’re often the ones on the front lines, fielding angry calls, making awkward collection reminders, and hearing whispered suspicions about who might be lying about their need. The weight of this responsibility breeds resentment and burnout. One treasurer told me, “It feels like my spiritual life has been reduced to chasing people for checks.”

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Endless Administrative Headaches

Beyond treasurer trauma, the dues model creates an annual cycle of spreadsheets, awkward calls, and tense budget meetings. Entire board agendas are consumed by hand-wringing over dues levels. A treasurer once described it as “running a shakedown racket for God.”

This isn’t covenant. It’s Kafka with challah.

The Pandemic Pulled the Curtain Back

When COVID hit, members stopped showing up physically, and suddenly asked themselves: Why am I paying thousands for a livestream link? Many voted with their feet and wallets, leaving synagogues scrambling. As Libel-Hass and Ferziger point out, the pandemic accelerated disengagement and exposed the brittleness of dues (Libel-Hass & Ferziger, 2022).

The Out Loud Part

The dues model didn’t fail because synagogue boards are lazy or rabbis lack charisma. It failed because it was designed for a world that no longer exists. It is rigid where life is fluid, exclusive where Judaism teaches openness, and financially unsustainable in an age of subscriptions and side hustles.

To cling to it now is to tie Judaism’s future to a fax machine. It may once have been the best option, but it is now strangling the very communities it was built to sustain.

The takedown is complete. The only honest question left is: what’s next?

Here’s the catch: the companion article, “Eight Ways Synagogues Are Funding the Future,” will only come out when Boardwalk reaches 150 followers. If you want to know what the most creative and financially innovative communities are doing, recommend Boardwalk to your friends and colleagues and help spread the word. Let’s grow healthy communities together.

Reader’s Note:

Boardwalk is my corner for board governance, organizational leadership, and the messy, meaningful work of leading communities. I’ve consolidated all my writing into one newsletter,: The Deep End and Boardwalk now lives here as one of its sections.

If you care about how institutions function — or malfunction — welcome.

Congregational leadership is a little like tending a garden. Everyone wants it to flourish. Everyone has strong ideas about what should grow, how often to water, and which weeds to pull. But in most synagogues there is never enough water, fertilizer, or daylight. Scarcity makes people grip the watering can a little tighter, and suddenly the garden looks less like a shared enterprise and more like a turf war.

A synagogue thrives when its gardeners, the board and the staff, understand their roles and respect one another’s contributions. When they forget, the weeds of mistrust grow fast.

Two Roles, Two Identities

Board members are not just trustees; they are also congregants. They cast votes on Tuesday nights and then show up on Shabbat mornings to pray with the very staff they supervise. Their children attend Hebrew school, they serve on committees, and they worry about dues.
It’s like voting on your rabbi’s contract Tuesday night and then asking them to bless your challah Friday evening. Awkward, but that’s congregational life.

Staff live with overlapping roles as well. Rabbis preach, teach, and care for members, while also raising families in the same community. Executive directors carry the burden of operations, finance, and HR, yet are drawn into the swirl of pastoral expectations and congregational politics. They often sit right at the nexus of governance and ministry, absorbing pressure from both sides.
They’re expected to balance the budget, soothe hurt feelings, and still make sure the kiddush lunch shows up. That’s not a job description, that’s a magic trick.

Dan Hotchkiss captured this reality in Governance and Ministry: “Congregations blur the lines of relationship more than any other nonprofit. That blur is both the source of vitality and the root of conflict.”

Passion and Expertise

Passion is what sustains synagogue life, but passion is not the same as expertise. Volunteer board members bring devotion and energy. Yet that does not make them instant experts on education, pastoral care, or facilities management.

Staff fall into the same trap. Rabbis, educators, and executive directors may know their areas intimately, but they can bristle at oversight, convinced their professional training entitles them to govern as well as manage. Both sides confuse care with competence, and the result is predictable: frustration and mistrust.

John Carver, a leading governance thinker, offered a useful distinction: “Boards must govern, not manage.” Governance is choosing what to plant, setting boundaries, and stewarding the long-term design. Management is the work of tending, watering, and weeding. When boards manage or staff govern, clarity disappears.

Governance and Ministry

Congregations carry a dual identity: they are both nonprofit organizations and sacred communities. Governance ensures sustainability, legal accountability, and financial clarity. Ministry nurtures people, meaning, and belonging.

Executive directors often live at this crossroads. They are asked to balance budgets and oversee staff while also navigating the relational dynamics of a spiritual community. They are like gardeners asked to design the irrigation system and soothe the plants at the same time.

Trouble begins when governance is treated as a bureaucratic distraction or when ministry is dismissed as “soft.” The congregation cannot afford to ignore either. Roy Oswald of the Alban Institute put it well: “Congregations flourish when leaders find their role, respect the role of others, and remember that no role is greater than the mission itself.”

The Temptation of Ownership

Here is the hardest truth. Both staff and board sometimes behave as if the synagogue belongs to them. Staff can mistake their passion for ownership, shaping the community in their own image. Boards, wielding fiduciary authority, may push their own preferences or the interests of a few donors.

It is human to get attached, but it is dangerous. A congregation is not a personal project. It belongs to the people and the mission they serve together.

Leadership theorist Ronald Heifetz reminds us that “the work of leadership is to mobilize people to face reality and do the adaptive work required to thrive.” The reality for congregations is that neither staff nor board owns the garden. Both are stewards.

Scarcity and Anxiety

Most synagogues operate with limited resources. That scarcity generates anxiety, and anxiety drives the urge to control. Staff press harder for their programs. Board members second-guess decisions. Executive directors get caught in the middle, expected to stretch finite resources until they snap.

Scarcity cannot be eliminated, but it can be managed. Healthy congregations name it, plan for it, and prioritize together. Sometimes programs must be pruned. Sometimes expectations need to be tempered. Pruning is not failure. It is a way of channeling energy toward what most sustains life.
Of course, Jews have known this forever. We literally wrote a holiday about rationing oil and calling it a miracle.

Returning to the Common Good

The core question is not “what do I want” but “what does the congregation need.” Both staff and board must ask themselves: am I tending my own preferences, or am I serving the common good?

The answer is rarely simple. Leadership is not neat. There will always be weeds, and sometimes plants will fail despite everyone’s best efforts. But congregations endure when leaders bring humility, clarity, and mutual respect to their roles.

Rabbi Jill Hammer writes, “A community is not built on the image of any one person, but on the weaving together of many lives.” A garden thrives in the same way. Growth does not come from one gardener insisting on their design. It comes from many hands, working the same soil, paying attention to the mission that holds them together.

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A Closing Word

Board members and staff are partners, not rivals. Their relationship is inherently messy, because the synagogue is not just an institution but a living community. The goal is not to eliminate tension but to steward it wisely, cultivating healthy boundaries that keep role creep to a minimum.

Yes, congregational leadership can feel like a battle over the watering can. But it can also be the holy work of growing a place where people find meaning, resilience, and belonging. That is worth every ounce of care, and every honest conversation about who waters what.

Because when leaders choose stewardship over ownership, clarity over turf wars, and the common good over personal preference, the garden doesn’t just survive, it blooms.

It now lives as a section within my unified newsletter: The Deep End, alongside my other writing.

Serving on a synagogue board is more than sitting through monthly meetings. It is the sacred work of holding both the future of Jewish community and the practical business of the institution. Done poorly, it can feel like wading through quicksand: reports, motions, and minutiae that sap energy. Done well, it is deeply energizing, reminding us why we serve in the first place.

So what makes a board thrive?

1. Know and Live the Community’s Mission
   Jewish tradition reminds us to “write the vision and make it plain” (Habakkuk 2:2). A mission is exactly that, our guiding Torah. The mission keeps us aligned when choices are hard and tempers short. It should be short, clear, and compelling enough that it can be repeated without notes. If it takes three paragraphs to explain, it is not a mission, it is a novel.
   

2. Delegate Like a Pro
   Even Moses had Jethro tell him to stop micromanaging. Wise boards trust others with responsibility. When approving an item, ask: “Could this be delegated next time?” Then set boundaries and accountability. Once delegated, step back unless there is cause for intervention. Delegation empowers staff, board members, and volunteers alike. And remember: delegating is not the same thing as disappearing.
   

3. Own the Agenda
   A good board controls its own conversation. Routine reports should not hijack time meant for vision and discernment. Review materials in advance, reserve meetings for generative conversation, and plan agendas months ahead. Time is precious; spend it on strategy, not status updates. If you are arguing about the font on the newsletter at minute 87, something has gone wrong.
   

4. Understand Roles vs. Responsibilities
   The board’s role is covenantal: to safeguard vision, ensure legal and ethical standards, and create policies for success. Responsibilities are the practical steps: decision-making, communication, evaluation—that bring that role to life. When roles blur, conflict and confusion multiply. When they are clear, collaboration flourishes. Think of it like a potluck: everyone is invited, but not everyone should bring dessert.
   

5. Partner with Staff and Rabbi
   Pirkei Avot teaches: “Find yourself a teacher, acquire a friend, and judge everyone favorably.” The board’s partnership with staff and rabbi is exactly this, a relationship of mutual accountability, friendship, and respect. Agree on priorities, establish an annual vision for congregational life, and communicate openly. Disagreement will come, but the board and rabbi must present unity in direction. No board ever thrived by debating the rabbi’s sermon footnotes.
   

6. Host Future-Focused Conversations
   The Jewish call is always l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation. Strong boards invite the congregation into conversations about the future through forums, small groups, or parlor gatherings. The goal is not immediate consensus but gathering insight to shape strategy. Messy conversations are not a danger sign; they are a sign the board is doing its job. With a clear mission and vision as guideposts, the “mess” becomes the place where creativity, alignment, and deeper clarity emerge.
   

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The Charge
A synagogue board is not just a group of volunteers, it is the steward of a sacred inheritance. Budgets, bylaws, and policies matter, but only as tools for a larger calling. The community looks to its board not only to manage but to lead with courage, humility, and faith. Tend it with courage and compassion, and it will thrive for generations, and maybe, just maybe, you will even look forward to the next meeting.

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Reader’s Note:

Boardwalk is where I write about board governance, organizational leadership, and the human dynamics that shape our institutions. It now lives as a section within my main newsletter, where all my writing is now gathered in one place.

If you’re interested in how leadership really works — and sometimes doesn’t — you’re in the right spot.

Let’s be honest: most people don’t dream about joining a board. They stumble into it. Someone nudges them at coffee hour, corners them after a meeting, or says that magical phrase, “We just need you for a year.” Suddenly they are knee-deep in bylaws, budget debates, and that one person who always wants to revisit last month’s decision.

And yet, boards matter. They are the backbone of nonprofits and synagogues, the place where vision, accountability, and community intersect. When they are clear and connected, a board can turn a struggling organization into a thriving one. When they are stuck, everyone feels it, from the rabbi to the receptionist to the congregant in the back row.

That is why I started Boardwalk.

The name carries more than a pun. I have taken a lot of “board walks” myself. I helped found three nonprofits. I have served on numerous boards. And in my role as rabbi, mentor, and now consultant, I have sat with countless leaders trying to figure out how to steer their communities. Along the way, my work was honored when I became the Georgia Center for Nonprofits’ first Revolutionary Nonprofit Leader, which sounds like I should have my own action figure, but really it means I know the highs and lows of leadership from the inside out.

So what is Boardwalk? It is a space to think about the work of boards differently. Governance is not just paperwork, procedure, or Robert’s Rules of Order. It is a path, sometimes sturdy, sometimes wobbly, that we walk together. On the other side of the bylaws and budgets is the promise of belonging, connection, and vision.

I will be writing here with synagogue boards in mind because that is where I cut my teeth and where Jewish life intersects with governance in wonderfully messy ways. A synagogue board meeting can veer from the sublime to the ridiculous in under ten minutes: discussing the meaning of covenant, then nearly coming to blows over thermostat settings. But the truth is, these lessons apply well beyond the synagogue walls. Every nonprofit board I have worked with wrestles with the same questions:

• How do we balance accountability with compassion?

• How do we make space for diverse voices without getting lost in the noise?

• How do we stay tethered to our mission when the world feels like it is spinning sideways?

Boards that do this well are not just effective. They are magnetic. People want to be part of communities where leaders are aligned, transparent, and courageous. And boards that miss the mark, well, let’s just say those stories are less inspiring and more like cautionary tales.

I believe bylaws should be scaffolding, not straitjackets. I believe clarity is kindness. And I believe that leadership should not just be about managing an organization, but about cultivating trust, belonging, and resilience.

That is the heart of Boardwalk. To make the case that boards are not just a bureaucratic necessity but a spiritual and relational opportunity. To remind us that when boards function with integrity and vision, the ripple effects strengthen every part of a community.

So whether you are on a synagogue board, a nonprofit committee, or simply wondering why your organization’s meetings feel more like root canals than catalysts, Boardwalk is for you. We will laugh a little, groan in recognition, and most importantly, learn how to walk this path together with clarity, courage, and maybe even joy.

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I once sat in a synagogue board meeting where nearly forty-five minutes were spent debating the color palette of a memorial wall.

Not the theology of memory.
Not how names would be gathered or honored.
The colors.

As the discussion dragged on, the emotional temperature rose. Voices tightened. People stopped listening. What should have been a contained decision began carrying far more weight than it deserved. The board president, usually thoughtful and composed, looked frazzled. Not because the choice was difficult, but because of how much feeling had entered the room.

Later she said, “I don’t know why that got so intense.”

I did. The memorial wall was never the conversation.

When details become emotional containers

Boards rarely fixate on minutiae because they lack vision. More often, details become containers for anxiety when there is no shared, steady picture of the future.

Approving a haggadah feels safer than deciding what kind of community you are becoming. Redesigning a website feels safer than naming who you are actually trying to reach. Small decisions offer a sense of agency at moments when larger questions feel unresolved.

Details feel finite. Direction does not.
Details feel fixable. Direction feels consequential.

And consequential decisions introduce risk.

Strategy’s uncomfortable truth

Strategic choices rarely come with certainty, and they almost always involve miscalculation.

You will invest in programs that stall. You will misread a moment. You will disappoint people you hoped would stay. For institutions already operating with thin margins, the possibility of being wrong can feel intolerable.

When fear enters the system, it looks for relief.

Sometimes that relief takes the form of paralysis: extended discussion, deferred decisions, a quiet hope that clarity will arrive without exposure.

Sometimes it tightens into control: oversight sliding into operations, with board members weighing in on emails, ritual language, layouts, or logistics.

And sometimes, it seeks a culprit.

The blame reflex

When grief and fear remain unprocessed, blame offers structure.

The younger generation is not committed enough.
People do not value the synagogue like they used to.
Board members are disengaged.
Dues are late again.
Staff should have handled this better.

Blame simplifies a complex reality. It suggests that stability could be restored if one variable were corrected. It also protects people from confronting a harder truth: this moment is not the result of individual failure. It reflects broader cultural and institutional shifts that no one fully controls.

Blame creates motion without progress.

Loss, and the fear of more loss

What many boards are carrying is not only grief for what has already changed, but apprehension about what may be next.

There is loss behind them, and loss they are bracing for ahead. Familiar faces disappearing. Programs thinning. The sense that some things may not return.

This layered grief rarely presents as sadness. More often it appears as intensity, vigilance, and overinvestment in decisions that feel symbolic because, in important ways, they are.

When staffing is minimal and lines blur

These dynamics intensify in communities with limited staff. Capable, committed lay leaders step in out of necessity and care. They bring energy and talent, and they also step into ambiguous territory.

Influence expands faster than clarity. Responsibility spreads unevenly. Staff can feel scrutinized rather than supported, while boards feel compelled to intervene because there is no obvious alternative.

This is not a failure of goodwill. It is what happens when systems stretch beyond their original design.

Why “be more strategic” misses the point

Telling boards they need to think more strategically misunderstands the problem. The issue is rarely intelligence or commitment. It is emotional load.

Strategic thinking requires steadiness, tolerance for ambiguity, and confidence that imperfect outcomes are survivable. When anxiety is high, control feels safer than imagination.

Progress begins when leaders reduce pressure before asking the system to think more expansively.

Delegation without fantasy

Delegation is not merely a management technique. It is a psychological threshold.

Delegating means accepting that things will not be done exactly as you would do them. It also means accepting that mistakes will occur and that the institution will continue anyway.

Boards that try to hold everything constrict the system. Boards that clarify what they are responsible for and release the rest create room for learning, movement, and adaptation.

This is not abdication. It is discernment.

Fear versus generativity

Near the end of one long board process, a chair once confided in me that his primary goal was to make sure the board did not get “slammed” for doing something wrong.

He was not talking about legal exposure. He meant backlash, donor anger, second-guessing, the long echo of hindsight. He was working hard to protect the board from shame.

I told him, gently, that governing from a posture of preemptive defense was draining the life out of the work. The board was spending more energy trying not to be wrong than trying to be generative. Vigilance was replacing curiosity. Caution was flattening joy.

No one joins synagogue leadership because they aspire to be flawless. They join because they want to build something that matters.

Fear-based governance is diligent. It is also sterile. It narrows the field of possibility until leadership becomes about avoiding criticism rather than cultivating meaning.

Generative leadership accepts exposure. It understands that living institutions learn in real time, that judgment will come regardless, and that vitality requires risk.

The shift from “How do we avoid getting this wrong?” to “What are we here to make possible?” changes how meetings feel, how decisions land, and whether people leave the room depleted or engaged.

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Sidebar: For Boards of Small Synagogues

When staffing is minimal, governance and operations will blur. That does not make clarity impossible.

Name roles even when one person holds several. Be explicit about where decisions live. Reduce how much must come to the full board. Pair influence with responsibility, not just enthusiasm.

Small systems learn in public. Errors will be visible. Visibility is not a verdict. It is part of how adaptation happens.

Small synagogues do not need tighter control. They need steadier agreements and fewer mixed signals.