Micah Works to Build Community, Create Haven for Exploration

At the start of Shabbat services on Friday nights, Temple Micah's rabbis customarily offer cups of Kiddush wine to newcomers. When Micah children study for b'nai mitzvah, their parents meet regularly to prepare for and share the experience. When members are ill, others--perhaps total strangers--take them food or drive them to the doctor. Instead of dropping their children off at religious school, Micah parents join them for 45 minutes of family classes. Many hang out afterward for bagels, coffee and kibitzing.

Micah members worship, study, cook and bowl together. And it's no accident. From ski trips to name tags to liturgy classes, just about everything that goes on at and through the temple is linked to an overarching effort to build and sustain the community that is Micah.

For the past few years, Rabbi Zemel and the temple board have worked resolutely yet largely behind the scenes to build community in a methodical way. The idea is not to create a profusion of programs, though that certainly is a byproduct, but to spark and maintain a vibrancy that makes people not only want to join Micah, but to make it a central part of their lives.

"We strive so that every engagement people have with Temple Micah is a community- building event," explained President Betsy Broder. "It's just part of who we are and what we do. From our worship to community service to social events, it's all about finding our connections in a Jewish way and through this community."

Synagogues always have been places where Jews gather to pray, study and socialize. Micah is aiming for more. And while temple leaders traditionally have worked to build community, the board only recently adopted that as a core mission.

"We know what we want: a really robust, sacred community, which means it's not simply a place where people come to feel connected to one another, but also to feel connected to Judaism, and where those two things meet," said Rich Harwood, the board member leading the effort. "What we're trying to avoid is becoming a temple where people just go through the motions--just come for life-cycle events--and where we're not engaged in thinking about our Judaism and how it applies to our lives. That means that the temple has to be a space where people feel really engaged and where it's safe to explore things."

The project grew in part out of Rabbi Zemel's years-long preoccupation with creating a new paradigm for the great American synagogue. His own studies have centered on defining "sacred community," a phrase he concedes remains a bit amorphous even to him.

"I have a sense that a sacred community is a place where people come and ask big questions of life," Rabbi Zemel said. It is a place, he continued, where people can be honest and shape ethical values without fear of derision. "A sacred community is a place where you're going to be loved and welcomed no matter where you are in your life. You can take your personal journey with this group and it'll be accepting."

Defining a sacred community is difficult enough. The real challenge, especially for a congregation that more than doubled in size the past dozen years, is to fashion such a safe haven, to make it meaningful, inviting, remarkable and inclusive for people at all stages of life. Members who join to put their children through religious school need a reason to stay after they graduate. Members who know little Hebrew need to feel comfortable at services. Members who are uncertain about their Judaism need to feel free to search.

The board has decided to confront the challenge on a number of levels. Harwood, who also works on building community in his professional life, calls the first level the "Cheers aspect," after the old television sitcom that takes place in a neighborhood bar "where everybody knows your name."

To make sure newcomers feel welcome, board members and others recently began wearing name tags at services and greeting visitors and new members at the door. Rabbi Zemel and cantorial soloist Meryl Weiner conduct a class for new members, who discuss various aspects of Judaism and Temple Micah and simply get to know each other. Harwood made a special point to include new members on his roster of ushers--he dubbed them "greeters"--on the High Holidays. Education Director Debra Beland asked religious-school room parents to reach out to all new members in their children's classes.

That's step one: entry.

Next, Harwood said, is religious school, also the entry point and primary focus of many members. It's not enough for students to get to know each other in class, Beland said. To really build connections, particularly among children who attend schools that are miles and states apart, the parents must know each other as well. She has urged room parents to sponsor social gatherings away from temple. And this year, Micah created Family School, so that children and parents can learn together.

Finally, Harwood said, there is the issue of space. The temple needs to be a space that allows people to pursue and share a variety of interests--reading books, studying Torah, learning Hebrew, preparing meals, exploring secular issues from a Jewish point of view, even questioning basic tenets of Judaism.

"One of the things that the board's been wrestling with is that in an era when people don't feel highly connected to community and when people feel ambivalent about their Jewish identity and when we're highly pressed for time, how do you create a space where people can have an experience that is meaningful and deep and connected to Judaism?" said Harwood, president of The Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, which works to bring about change in communities and states. Part of the answer, he and Rabbi Zemel said, is to encourage people to start new programs to fit their own pursuits; part is to make them feel comfortable.

Community building, an element of every board meeting, also has its lighter, yet purposeful side. This month, that manifests itself in "Bowling Together."

"One thing I realize is that no matter how welcoming our services are, there's a psychological hurdle with going to services," Rabbi Zemel said. "It can be a small hurdle. Not everybody knows how to act when they walk into a room waiting for services to start. Everybody knows how to behave in a bowling alley".

"In a bowling alley, people don't feel judged if they're bad bowlers. Maybe it's even kind of fun to be on a lane where somebody gets a gutter ball because it creates a kind of laughter. I don't think that's true at services."

But if you can laugh with someone on a bowling alley, maybe you'll feel more at home when you see them in the sanctuary, he said. Even if you don't know your way around a service.

[By Jodi Enda; from February 2007 Vine