Revisiting Your Rosh Hashanah Success
Ideas to consider to lower the pressure
Read time: 4 minutes
Four years ago, this week, I wrote a piece entitled, "Your Rosh Hashanah Success" in which I expressed the following:
"Rather, our goal must be to impact a singular person. You might not know their name or where they are seated. You do know who they are in other ways... Whatever Torah you had to share, it served at least one person. And it will have impacted them. They will have gone home to think. They will be sitting today, evaluating their choices. They will be better than they were yesterday. And this is how we need to be measuring ourselves.
The thrust of the piece was that we cannot truly understand our reach and that we should focus on impacting a single person. And that is enough.
Our world has changed a lot in the past four years and the pressures of "success" are greater than they ever have been.
On top of just running a good service and giving a solid sermon we have to deal with:
Democracy's breakdown
Climate change's growing impact
The global COVID pandemic
Major financial concerns in the Jewish world
The task is larger and more challenging than ever. That also means the pressure is greater too.
Here are a few ideas to consider as we lower the heat and think about opportunities:
The ability to share our Torah online is a value-add.
We don't live in a world in which our Torah is only available to those who are sitting in the room. It also means that those who are in the room are not just there for "the rabbi's sermon" anymore, as might have been the case in previous eras.
By leveraging the tools of video, audio, recording, live-streaming, and planning, we can publish our Torah to be available for our people at any time. If your synagogue doesn't leverage these tools during a service, you can record your Torah in advance or after, to make it more available. Utilizing social media and email to accomplish this can be like a bonus to the community.
The point is that the people are in the room (digitally or physically) because they want to be. They want what you're offering. That is something to feel good about.
Yes, there are those who will complain. There are always those people who are unwilling to appreciate the labor, effort, creativity, and community-level thinking required to run a major event like the High Holidays. And while you generally can't say this to their faces: they will never be satisfied and they missed the point.
You can smile, thank them for the feedback, and remember that you did your best.
There is little patience for long sermons, we can focus on shorter and sweeter.
Our culture's desire for a forty-five-minute sermon with the life stories of six separate individuals is out of vogue. Thank goodness.
While there is a reasonable desire to tell a good story, really flesh out the ideas, and share a robust teaching that you don't normally have time for, do we really think our people want that? Is it good for us either?
I think there is an opportunity to write shorter sermons (perhaps more often in the service if you're really committed to the overall length) that might better serve our people and, honestly, our capacity.
As before, instead of thinking that we only have the few precious hours of people in the room, we can leverage our Torah and labor more than once to better serve our people after the service has ended.
The measure of a sermon's success, as I always imagined it, is the ability of an attendee to communicate it to the person who didn't come to synagogue and if the message impacted their thinking in a new way.
Consistency from Shabbat to High Holiday could be a gift.
We imagine that because we have "more people" on the High Holidays, we have to perform at a particularly higher threshold than we would on a regular Shabbat. What if instead, we treated the High Holidays more like a regular Shabbat?
If our goal is greater attendance during the year, folks might be more inclined to come if they know this is what they get.
If our goal is not on attendance, and I'd argue it shouldn't be, then we can rest easier that we are showing our consistency, our humanity, and our sanity by lowering the pressure on these holidays.
I remember a rabbi once saying to someone, "don't come on the High Holidays, come on Shabbat instead." I found this resonant and I think about it every year with all of the new faces that appear each year.
What you do will be enough.
The most important part of any of this, regardless if you think the ideas are right for you or not, is the recognition that your tremendous effort is, in fact, enough.
Running four days worth of programming for thousands of people who have a diverse set of needs, desires, and expectations is an incredible feat, even if some of it didn't go as planned.
There will be individuals who go home changed.
They heard your words.
They sang along.
They prayed deeply.
They went on the emotional journey with you.
Be proud of that.
I'm proud of you too.