Resumo de Temple Politics - Being Had- The Story

TEMPLE POLITICS

We had our first tentative snowfall today. It may not be right to call it a snowfall, I doubt if you could even count it in inches, maybe millimeters. But it stayed on the ground all day in the zero degree weather and lay prettily on top of benches and on the shoulders of statues and things like that. Winter is coming and it gets dark here in the four o?clock neighborhood. We have a long winter here, maybe not as bad as Sweden or other high latitudes, but it is bad enough and long enough to complain about. But along with this first snowfall I guess came along our first seasonal illnesses. We felt this today at the temple when we found ourselves a man or two short after two of our minion went home ill during the morning prayers. These absences along with what is turning out to be a nightmare as far as my friend Simon Shapiro is concerned had everybody?s tongue wagging. And it is an obvious argument: Our attendance is really poor. Certainly when the boy?s school also came regularly to the temple, it was not so obvious that this was a problem; the temple was full and noisy and had all of the energy that comes along with jamming forty or fifty teenaged boys into the synagogue thrice weekly. But the boy?s school has moved out to a local village and rather than make the drive, they simply have services for them out there. And consequently, we immediately lost 85% of our attendance.So this was the conversation at the table today amongst our minion of pensioners: What to do about this? I remember bringing up the conversation with Moishe Fhima, our energetic and quixotic head Rabbi a couple of months ago. I asked him how many Jews reside these days in Pinsk and he said that there were probably perhaps seven or eight hundred. Then why don?t we draw more people? The question did not garner a very solid answer nor did the question seem to bother the rabbi much either, so I let it rest. But as I say, we now have the issue staring us in the face and with basically the entirety of our congregation (but for myself) well into their seventies and eighties the specter of catastrophe looms large. Anatoli is one of our workers. He is Jewish but has never attended a service even during the high holy days. I don?t want to. Is how he usually describes his lack of attendance I work here, this is enough for me. Do you think that this is the common attitude amongst all of the Jews of Pinsk? I cannot say for sure. A lot of them work on Saturdays and so they cannot make it. But mostly they just don?t want to come. They do not feel the need; they do not want to make the effort

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