We’ve reached, in many ways, our summer season, featuring a different pace. We catch our breaths a bit from the year that has been, while also taking advantage of this slower pace to lay the groundwork for the year to come.
This spirit informed my remarks at the Society Hill Synagogue Annual Meeting, which took place on Wednesday, May 24. I offered the following:
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Each year is different than the last. I’ve been at this synagogue for nine years now: four as rabbinic intern, two as associate rabbi, and now three as senior rabbi, and each year has been different than the last. Even just taking the last three as senior rabbi, each year has been dramatically different. First, a year essentially fully on Zoom, then a year slaloming back and forth, outdoor to indoor, mask mandates on and off. Now, this past year was the first year of some level of stability, and this community continues to forge ahead, responding to the challenges and opportunities that come our way.
Each year, for the annual meeting I feel called to do a little bit of looking back and looking forward. Last year at this time, we named that it was time to reflect on how we could continue to grow SHS, a community that has served as a source of strength, inspiration, holiness and connection to so many.
We laid out a few priorities. I want to remind us what those were, say a little bit about the progress we’ve made on each of those, and say more about where we go from here.
Shabbat at SHS
The first priority we laid out was to invest in the Shabbat experience here at SHS. We acknowledged that not everyone seeks Jewish community and synagogue life for overtly religious reasons, and yet we also recognized that the heartbeat of a synagogue, week in and week out, is Shabbat. It’s the watering hole, and the time, when we don’t know when and where else to gather, we show up. It’s the time prospective members—people looking for religious or Jewish community—show up to try us on for size and see if they might find a home here.
So we said we wanted the Shabbat experience, each and every time we open up our doors, to be a vibrant one. To be a place, a moment, where if you drop in you say, wow—there is something pretty special here: whether it’s the Torah or music shared from the bimah, the congregants with hands shooting up during Torah discussion or the member singing their hearts out or having a contemplative moment in silent prayer or the person, remembering a loved one, or schmoozing around the dinner or lunch table after services— when you see all this when dropping in, you might say, hmm, maybe contemporary Jewish religious life isn’t dying after all—maybe it might even be growing.
There is still work to do; we’re not done yet, and I’ll say more about what else we need to do in a moment. But for now I want to celebrate some successes.
First on Friday nights. This year we inaugurated TGIShabbat not once a month, but every week from September to May, from the unofficial end of Summer, Labor Day, to its unofficial beginning, Memorial Day, this weekend.
The growth of the synagogue and the Playschool, made possible in part by the successful capital campaign and the expanded classroom space of the Paula Kline learning center, coupled with increased attention to fundraising and this congregation’s generosity—your generosity—has enabled us to have the resources to invest in meals as a part of every service, and musicians from within and beyond our community. In the span of a year, we went from trying to scratch together a minyan every week—and sometimes not succeeding—to bringing together 30-40 people on a typical Friday night, that anyone can drop into. I can promise you, anyone who hears that an average Friday night service yields 30-40 people at a non-Orthodox, non-significantly-larger-Reform shul, is wildly impressed.
Still, I think we can do better, and so in a few moments, I want to talk about some of the ways we’re going to build on these successes.
Next, Shabbat mornings, Saturday mornings. This is one of the highlights of my week, every week. In addition to a continuously vibrant prayer space, where people are singing along, or following along at the own pace, or just letting their hearts wander in our beautiful sanctuary, we come together for an intergenerational, half-hour Torah discussion every week, featuring our Hebrew School students and members of the congregation from across the generations. Each week I leave with new insights about life and love and being Jewish, thanks to the questions and answers of our oldest and youngest members. If you haven’t joined us yet for one of these shabbatot, please do—it’s one of the highlights of our experience, and we typically have 70-80 people joining us for lunch after services on Saturdays during the school year.
Messaging and Outreach at SHS
Another priority we identified, related to our desire to share who we are at SHS with the broader Philadelphia Jewish community, and have more people avail themselves of the nurturing, nourishing experience of the community we’ve built here, is to better articulate who we are to that broader community, and to avail ourselves of the full range of opportunities we have to communicate who we are. In other words, to invest more in thinking about how we talk about who we are and how we promote ourselves to the outside world. We brought together a number of volunteers—Mindy Hauptman, Murray Dubin, Anna Weiner, Mark Jansen, Robin Feinberg, Jared Susco—to hone our messaging, landing for now, on the following description: “Society Hill Synagogue is an independent congregation, rooted in tradition, flourishing with life. Our services are based on Conservative liturgy while incorporating influences from the Reconstructionist, Renewal, and Reform movements, and beyond. We emphasize lifelong learning, social action, soulful music and prayer, and sacred community. We pride ourselves on being warm, welcoming, and intergenerational. We embrace our diverse membership, including interfaith couples and families, LGBTQ+ individuals and families, people of color, and people of all abilities.” (I’ll come back to this latter statement in a moment.)
This reflects our Conservative Jewish roots, as well as the growing number of influences we incorporate, while recognizing four core pillars of programming that we offer: learning, action, music and prayer, and community, also incorporating our emphasis on inclusion.
To help us promote who we are, the Board of Directors also approved a groundbreaking, for us, investment in support from a digital marketing agency called Greater Good Strategy, who has previously helped such clients as Hillel International, Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger, the famous Sixth and I synagogue in Washington DC and more—helped them to determine how best to communicate with their relevant audiences through social media, the web, email, and texts. We know we have a lot to offer people in search of Jewish community, and so we want to make sure they find us, and so we’re investing in making sure all the hard work we’ve put in to honing our services and programs gets shared with the broader community.
Inclusion at SHS
I mentioned inclusion through our inclusion statement. Times change, and we recognize in the Jewish community, like we do in contemporary society, that a lot of people have been left out, whether intentional or not, of public gathering spaces. Whether it be people with disabilities encountering subtle and not so subtle barriers to participating in religious life, or Jews of color, LGBT people, and people from interfaith families feeling subtly and not so subtly discriminated against, we have insights now of how to better ease the pathway in for people who have encountered these barriers. We want them—we want you—to feel embraced by, and to become a core part of, this community at SHS. So we invited our interfaith inclusion committee to expand their mandate, and thanks to their leadership, too many to name, those pathways into SHS continue to be eased. Whether it’s through signage letting people know the best entryway for those needing accessible entry points, or working to update language in our Shabbat announcements to welcome the entire gender spectrum, or directing people with sight disabilities to large print prayerbooks, this committee is helping us send signals to whoever steps into this building that you can have a Jewish home here at SHS. That you are welcome. Thank you to the inclusion committee for this important work.
Culture and Community at SHS
Finally, in terms of the priorities we identified going into this year, we recognized that people look to a synagogue for so much more than an overtly religious experience—they look for community. And so another priority we identified was to find more points of gathering, of connecting, socially and beyond, outside of the sanctuary experience. We formed a committee currently trying out the name Kulanu: Community and Culture at SHS, Kulanu meaning all of us, led by Elliot Landes and Lesli Reich, who joined forces with our arts and culture and triple chai committees to lay out a series of programs—everything from Phillies games and eagles watch parties to ice skating and classical concerts. Carmen will say a little more about this at the end of the agenda, but we’re thrilled by the additional points of connection these volunteers and many more have brought to our community.
So Shabbat, Messaging and Promotion, Inclusion, and Community and Culture at SHS were four areas of emphasis this past year, and we think their efforts contributed mightily to us finally breaking the 300 household membership barrier, something that I understand is historic for this community, at least in recent memory—this coming on the heels of a pandemic that stopped in person gathering in its tracks and led to an at least temporary decrease in Philadelphia’s population. In the face of it we grew, and broke that, for a while, seemingly unbreakable for us 300 barrier.
So, what’s next? Where else are we turning our focus to, to continue growing our community.
Young Families at SHS
First I want to give a shoutout to Micah and Joanna Hart for helping build, truly, one of the sterling young family shabbat experiences in the city. Once a month on Friday nights, if you poke your head in our social hall or courtyard weather-dependent, you’ll see 50-100 people, beautifully and chaotically, marching to the beat of a drum—sometimes Micah’s sometimes their own—celebrating shabbat. Oftentimes in our culture children are the re-entry into Jewish community for many adults who might have drifted during their teens and 20s and 30s. When we have kids we often say, you know what—I want my kid to have the jewish experience that I had as a kid, or, dare I say it, maybe even a better one, and so they start looking for Jewish community. So many of them have started coming to SHS thanks to Micah and Joanna as well as Sahar’s efforts at marketing and membership development. And we want to continue to build on their progress, expanding from once a month on Fridays to include once a month on Saturday mornings. This is many people’s first experience with Jewish communal life in years, they’re finally looking for a Jewish home and thanks to Micah, Joanna, and Sahar they are finding one at SHS.
Hebrew School Foundations at SHS
Speaking of wanting children to have an even better Hebrew School experience than we did growing up, in a few moments we’re going to turn things over to our Hebrew School Director Mike Roe, but briefly I want to say we’re going to continue to invest in our Hebrew School. The Immersive Shabbat Experience that I alluded to before, with Hebrew School students a part of our Shabbat torah discussion is amazing, and we want to make sure that the rest of the Hebrew School mission, curriculum, and pedagogy, works hand in hand with this experience, each part complementing the other, the learning complementing one another, the modalities complementing one another, and so this year we’re going to take some time reviewing the fundamental building blocks of our amazing Hebrew School to ensure it remains strong for years to come.
Friday Nights – TGIShabbat – at SHS
One additional part of this is that we’re going to ask that each Hebrew School class as a whole, in pairs, attend one TGIShabbat service each semester with their families. We mentioned earlier that we want to keep building on our Friday night successes. One way of doing that is making sure different parts of this community have reason to be there so they can see one another, connect with one another, and feel the specialness of being in Jewish community under one roof at the same time, experiencing the magic of our Friday night services.
Guest Teachers and Lecturers at SHS
Another way to do this, and another priority for the year ahead, is to explore the possibility of having more guest speakers and teachers come be a part of our community on Friday nights and beyond. This is an intellectually and socially vibrant congregation in an intellectually and socially vibrant city, and we want to make sure we populate our calendar with speakers and teachers—whether speaking to spiritual, artistic, political, our cultural questions relevant to our lives—who will help nourish our minds and our hearts. Thanks to the Rabbi Winokur Legacy Fund and other funding sources, we’re going to work to populate our calendar—Friday nights and beyond—with some of the riches this community and this city have to offer.
So those are some new areas of focus—building on the strength of our Young Families Shabbats, our Hebrew School, Friday nights/TGIShabbat, and guest speakers and teachers that we have in our city.
Ongoing Strengths: Social Action, Young Friends and Adult Education
I should briefly say before closing, that there are so many other features of our community that remain strong and remain draws to become a part of this community that are part of the heartbeat of who we are. Just to name a few where we want to continue our momentum:
Social action, led by Bob Kaufman and Laurie Krivo and our food security initiative, Steve and Wendy Greenspan through our involvement with POWER, and Diane Harrison, Flora Wolf and Phyllis Denbo at Vare Washington Elementary School.
Young Friends of SHS, folks in their 20s and 30s getting together for community, led by Anna Weiner.
And Adult education: this year I taught yearlong courses on the Jewish Life Cycle, the Zohar and Jewish mysticism, and Nuts and Bolts: a (re)introduction to Judaism; alongside Marc Schwartz continuing to teach multiple Hebrew class, Rabbi Winokur teaching on God as metaphor, Hazzan Jessi teaching song, and more. With Rabbi Marjorie Berman rejoining our roster next year after a year-long sabbatical, stay tuned for an exciting roster of courses for the year to come.
This is such a vibrant special community with so much to offer. I feel confident that when people find their way to us, they feel embraced, uplifted and nourished.
In Closing
I want to close by saying how gratifying it was to participate in the retirement celebration for my friend Rabbi Avi Winokur. To see his career celebrated like that, to see the way he helped lift up the lives of so many while serving here was an inspiration, and I want to commend the Society Hill Synagogue community for the honor it did him with that celebration, and the honor he’s done us through his years of service and friendship.
I have said many times before that serving the Society Hill Synagogue community is the honor of my professional life. Caroline, Lila, Nina and I have found our Jewish home here at Society Hill Synagogue for the foreseeable future—so much so that we moved all of one block away from here to begin the next chapter of our lives. We are deeply committed to this community and so grateful to have found you. Thank you for welcoming us into your lives. L’chayim, to life.
