Empowering synagogue leaders to build strong Sacred Communities
Thanksgiving is in just 9 days. We take a break from the typical hustle bustle of life and experience enjoyable times with family and friends and of course good food – and lots of it. And then on Friday morning, …
If you needed to raise the dues level for next year’s budget, what do you think? Jane, the president of a synagogue in a Midwestern university town called me recently. Besides Hillel, Jane’s synagogue is the only game in town. …
Facebook posts tell a sad story of synagogue life. On Friday, Rabbi Barry Lutz posted his Facebook page that he can be reached at his Gmail address. That spurred my curiosity that something was wrong. Barry had been at Temple …
There are advantages for synagogues in being classified as a religious organization. Regular not-for-profit organizations have to file a 990 annually with the Internal Revenue Service. Like our own individual tax filings. If the organization’s revenue is more than $1 …
Somehow my family always sits towards the back on the High Holy Days. And we usually arrive a few minutes before the start of Worship. We sit on the least comfortable of the 3 types of chairs. This year, I …
A vacation, of course! At least the immediate Past President, anyway. After two or three years of countless questions via email and telephone calls, board meetings, staff meetings, and basically worrying about everything pertaining to the synagogue, what comes next …
Charlottesville. North Korea. Afghanistan. The Eclipse. The past couple of weeks have been kind of crazy. Perhaps it is fortuitous that the Eclipse and its path of totality across a swath of the United States happened at the time it …
The last day of summer camp always was the marking point for the end of summer. Of course, there was that 10 days between the end of camp and Labor Day. This was taken up by camp reunions at Red …
A longtime congregant passes away and leaves your synagogue $500,000. Death is always sad. But the bequest is a good thing, right? But what if there were stipulations in the legal documents that specified how the funds were to be …
Measurement is a big part of our lives. How tall are you? How much do you weigh? What were your grades in school or your GPA in college? Or even your SAT scores? As adults, measuring continues. The number of …