Our first guest blogger this year is Ken Hillman. Ken is a New Yorker where he attended Hebrew School at Bnai Jeshuran. A graduate of Williams College, he has done a lot of thinking about community in terms of theater, friendship, social media, networking. Currently he serves on the Education Committee at Congregation Kneseth Israel where his son became Bar Mitzvah. He also enjoys singing in the choir.

The idea of a synagogue as community is as old as the concept of the synagogue itself. In Jewish communities around the world the place of worship was the one place where all Jews could go for not only the religious aspects but also as a sense of community and gathering. The problem with this model is that it has not translated well into the modern Diaspora, particularly in those areas where the Jewish community is spread out.

It is more than just the over-busy lives of the members of the Jewish community (practices and activities during the week and games on the weekend) and the distance needed to drive to the synagogue but it is more the modern model of the Jewish community that has not kept up.

Modern Jews do not automatically look to their synagogue as an epicenter of community and identify primarily as Jews or even as Jews at all. One could say as an institution, the synagogue has not kept up with modern times as well as others. Perhaps we should look to institutions that have done a better job of modernizing to help us.

One institution that has done a phenomenal job keeping up with the times is the bank. The bank used to be the financial center of a community, you would need to travel to a branch to deposit or withdraw money and with every transaction you would be forced to interact personally with a teller or banker. In today’s society with credit cards, ATM machines and Internet payment it would’ve been easy for the bank to lose its place as the epicenter of the community. Instead, the bank has taught us how to use it without ever going in the building or seeing a teller.

An analogy bridging these two institutions came to me early in my life from one of my Hebrew School teachers. In referring to doing our homework she would remind us constantly that it was like a bank: if you needed to make a withdrawal (skip an assignment occasionally) you needed to make sure that you had made enough deposits (a track record of handing in your assignments on time).

This concept of making enough deposits and keeping up with modernity could be a key to helping the synagogue reestablish itself as a center of community in the modern Diaspora. We may want to start to move away from the traditional metrics of attendance and towards a new metric of involvement. If we can help our congregations understand how they can make deposits both spiritually and in terms of Tikkun Olam, we will be more likely to turn to the synagogue when we need to make a withdrawal. This dynamic of give and take in modern society could help the synagogue learn from the bank in terms of the value of what we can put in as well as the value of what we can expect to take out. In doing so we may reestablish the synagogue as an epicenter of our modern Jewish community.

Ken Hillman