Month: February 2019

A Shul Dinner Primer

A Shul Dinner is a wonderful event. The members get together for a wonderful evening together; the Shul is celebrated and strengthened; the service of the honorees is recognized. However it takes a lot of work, and if not for its primary fundraising role, it would probably not be undertaken.

As we’ve discussed previously in the “Back of the Napkin Cost to Run a Shul”, even a small 50 member family Shul in a rented space and a part-time Rabbi, can easily cost $75,000 a year or about $1,500 per family. You can’t charge $1,500 per family for membership in a small Shul, so you charge a few hundred for membership, a few hundred for Yomim Noraim seats, hope to raise a few hundred per family at a dinner, and sweat to make up the rest of the budget. The dinner is the key event around which fundraising can take place. Let’s look at four major processes: getting an honoree, picking a venue, encouraging member participation, making the event run smoothly.

Getting members to agree to be honored is not simple. For a small shul of 100 or less active members, getting one couple (or individual) to be honored is fine. In our Shul’s earlier years we would honor 2 couples, but as the years passed we ran short of willing participants, so we usually honor 1 couple now. If we would have had the foresight, we would have honored 1 couple from the beginning.
Some primary reasons people refuse to be honored are:
1) they don’t want to make the financial commitment it implies
2) they don’t want to bother their friends and families
3) they don’t want of feel they deserve the honor
If you set reasonable fundraising goals, you can often overcome objections 1) and 2) by insisting that a big donation or invite list is not expected. Objection 3) sometimes requires the Rabbi to pay a special visit to teach the members about the merit received for accepting the honor for the benefit of the Shul.

After the honorees, comes the venue. Find a few dates that work for the honorees and that don’t present any obvious community conflicts. Call the local halls first, because the less travelling required the better, and it’s always good to do business in your local community where possible. In Queens and Long Island, you can expect to spend between $40 and $60 per person for the caterer and the hall. If you’re a good negotiator, and are willing to tone down the menu, you might bring it home between $30 and $40 per person. Make sure it’s respectable, since you’re asking you members to shell out a few hundred per person, and it’s a let down if they’re served a tired piece of chicken, with some overcooked greasy vegetables.

Next is to decide the participation levels for your journal. Set the dinner attendance cost within the reach of most members, and set the other levels from there. Get a local printer to print your invitations. When putting together your invite list, remember people generally don’t attend or contribute to other Shul’s dinners, so save yourself some postage and printing cost and invite those likely to contribute. Don’t skip the journal, as it’s a nice touch for the honorees, and it helps you to raise more money with the different journal page rates.

After the invitations go out, comes the ad deadline game. It’s no secret that Jews run a little late when it comes to deadlines, so a liberal amount of Shul announcements and email reminders are usually necessary. Calling members who have not responded is a very wise idea, since people are more likely to respond to a call then to other forms of solicitation. In our Shul we encourage all new members to come, sometimes by reducing their contribution to just cover the catering costs.

Lastly comes the event itself. The goal is to make it respectable for the honorees, enjoyable for the members, build connection to the Shul, all within a reasonable elapsed time. Reasonable timings are 60 minutes for the shmorg or hors d’oeuvres, 60 minutes for the main meal and program, 20 minutes for desert. Throw in a mincha and/or a maariv and some transition time, and your talking 3 hours total. Although in a certain sense, the speeches are the most important part of the dinner, people today seem to have trouble sitting through them. Generally the dinner chairman, the Rabbi, the president, an introduction for the honorees, and the honorees themselves should speak. Inform all parties of the target time for their speech.

You can see there’s a lot of steps, so you need a competent dinner committee, consisting of a dinner chair, a journal chair, and a few other people helping with the planning and execution. It’s helpful if you can get some the same people from year to year, because there’s a lot of knowledge that is gained each time a dinner is run. It’s a great event and with some proper planning it can be even better!

Shul Communications – Avoid Becoming a Shul Spammer

Beyond the Schedule
If your Shul is just a place to daven, then you don’t need much communications, perhaps an updated davening times schedule every now and then. However, as we’ve discussed your Shul can be much more: it can be a place of connection, growth and community. To reach those higher goals you need to communicate and connect with your members.

In the Beginning
Before the Internet, Shuls communicated with their members with announcements during davening and with newsletters often published and snail mailed on a monthly basis. The announcements are still there, but the snail mail has been replaced in many Shuls with email. The email can be delivered via a service like Constant Contact, a free alternative like Mail Chimp, via Gmail or from your Shul’s software program.

Beware of Shul Spam
Because it’s so easy to send emails to the membership it may be tempting to send them often. The problem with a freewheeling email strategy is that your messages can become Shul Spam. Shul Spam is not the spam that ends up in the Spam folder, but rather they’re emails that are ignored. The myriads of parsha and daily and weekly emails that are subscribed to often fall into this category.

Tread Cautiously
If your members perceive your emails as Shul Spam, then they will not achieve your goals of communication and connection. Of course timely information, such as funerals need to be emailed immediately, but for other information a weekly email is filling the bill for many Shuls. A Shul should try to have some policy about when to send out separate emails for shiurim and other special events.

The Weekly Newsletter
The ease and low cost of sending email, combined with a sensible weekly mailing policy has created a situation where many Shuls are now producing a weekly newsletter. The weekly newsletter is not the same animal as the old monthly newsletter and it creates new issues to confront, which we’ll discuss in a future post.

Mishkan, Mikdash, Shul

In the Strive for Truth essay named “Mishkan and Mikdash” Rabbi Dessler points out that the Tabernacle is sometimes called Sanctuary (Mikdash) and sometimes called Dwelling Place (Mishkan). A Mikdash is a place of holiness where we recognize Hashem’s awesomeness and try to transcend our lower level to reach out to Hashem. A Mishkan is a place where Hashem rests His presence amongst us despite our relative lowliness because He knows we can lift ourselves up.

Our Shuls contain elements of both. When we start to pray Shemoneh Esrai, we strive to make Hashem’s presence so real, as if we were talking to a person. We need to feel the Mishkan. In the prayer itself we reach up to connect to Hashem in our minds and in our hearts. We can see the interplay between the two: the more we feel Hashem’s presence, the easier we can connect, and the more we connect, the more we feel Hashem’s presence.

From a practical point of view, we all need to work on our davening. Feeling Hashem’s presence is a challenge which needs real efforts to improve. Focusing on our prayers is another challenge. If we take a few seconds before starting Shomoneh Esrai to mentally acknowledge that we are standing before Hashem, we can at least start the first brocha with some of the required focus.

Our Sages instituted praying with a minyan to help us connect to Hashem. When we each work on trying to connect to Hashem through prayer our collective efforts make the Shul more of a place where Hashem’s presence can be felt. May we all merit success in our individual prayer efforts so we can turn our Shuls into the best Mishkans and Mikdashes they can be.

How Shul Members Are More Inspiring Than the Rabbi

Sometimes members decide that they would be better served by davening in a Yeshiva. I spoke to my Rabbi about this and he pointed out that these members are missing an important ingredient of serving Hashem, and that is the influence they have on others. In many ways the Shul Members Are More Inspiring Than the Rabbi.

When the Rabbi exhibits dedication to chesed, learning, or davening, the thought which goes through many minds is “Of course that’s what the Rabbi does, after all he is the Rabbi, but I’m just an average working person”. But when a fellow member exhibits dedication to spiritual pursuits, the thought turns to “If he is working on his learning, chesed or davening, perhaps so should I”.

Over the years I have been inspired by many fellow members. One member was a master of chesed. I remember that he would always lend his car, especially to older Rabbis who were in America collecting for various needs. It really inspired me and over the years and I asked myself, “Shouldn’t I at least try to follow his lead?”.

Another member spends hours and hours learning Torah, even though he commutes to work daily, like the rest of his. He does read secular information, but he limits his time on the Internet and uses it more constructively in learning. If the Shul is open, there is a good chance you’ll find him inside learning. I was once sitting in the lobby before the Chuppah at a wedding. He walked in and I asked him why he was checking out various rooms. He said he wanted to see if the hall had a Beis Medrash. After greeting the Father of the Kallah, he left the hall to look for a Williamsburg Beis Medrash to learn for the hour and a half until the beginning of the first dance. I had to ask myself “What efforts am I making to increase my learning time?”.

Then there’s the weekday minyan member who is always working on his davening. He’s constantly reading and sharing Torah ideas about davening. He works on a daily basis to increase his concentration and his love and fear of Hashem, which is expressed in the davening. He freely admits davening is difficult and that is why he works at it. The question that leaves me is “Am I working hard enough to improve in this area?”.

There are many more inspiring examples of Communal Chesed, Shalom Bayis, being a good friend, giving Tzedakah,… Look around, pay attention, get inspired and remember that you’re positive behaviors can be an inspiration for others.