I’m done with synagogue affiliation. For awhile, anyway.

I married into the synagogue where I’ve been a member for over twenty years.

We celebrated our aufruf (wedding blessing) there shortly after I joined, and for a number of years I provided music for services, sometimes with my wife and sometimes alone. It was a sweet, welcoming community, small enough that members could come up with new ideas and try them out on the fly. (Larger decisions about the well-being and solvency of the entire community still had to be run past the Steering Committee.)

Fast forward some ten years, and things changed as the community grew. More and more decisions, even smaller ones, were referred to committees. Ad hoc decisions became discouraged. Musicians had been paid a small amount of money for doing the planning and bringing in musicians to help lead services. In the early 2010s, all that was ended in an abrupt move by the Steering Committee, which stated that going forward, all members would be expected to “participate” as volunteers, performing all the work of the services and teaching and sitting on an increasing number of committees. The rabbi at the time, unhappy at the withdrawal of funding from music leaders, continued to pay lead musicians from his discretionary until orders to stop by the Steering Committee.

At this time, the leadership attempted several times to hire musical leadership, but with a tiny budget and little empowerment or trust; most major musical changes still had to be approved in committee. We went through two different Music Coordinators and now find ourselves with almost no musical leadership other than the rabbi. I tried multiple times to engage with individual members of Steering to discuss this and other issues around music at the shul, but was shut down every time. Sometimes I encountered blatant classism, other times I was told there were other, more important issues taking priority. Finally, I was told to “stop fighting the culture and get with the program.” After that, my participation fell off sharply and quickly, though I remained a member on paper.

The last time attended services there was to say Kaddish for my mom. I was stopped at the door by a couple members of steering and asked if I’d lead a large chunk of the service, as the guy who’d signed up flaked out. I said I wasn’t in a good head space and politely declined. They pressed me a few times, and I shook my head and took a seat near the back.

When we got to Shochein Ad, four Steering members turned around in their chairs and looked expectantly at me.

I got up, gathered my things, and walked out. I said Kaddish alone in a park a few blocks away, and went home. 

I suppose I was waiting for change, in myself or in the shul, or both. It never came.

What came instead was a new discussion on whether to create a Palestinian Justice Committee under the auspices of the synagogue. This action has been pushed for by a number of shul members who are also members of the local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace, an organization that is admittedly anti-Zionist and which supports BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel.

I’m fine with the existence of JVP. We live in a country where freedom of thought and speech is enshrined in the Constitution. But I draw the line at a synagogue supporting a JVP-styled organization under its own roof. Synagogues ought to be places of absolute support and nurturing of Jewish communal life and activity, and because the State of Israel exists, they ought to be supportive of Israel’s existence to at least some extent. (Most synagogues have a much higher bar than I’ve set here, but I’m being generous.)

For a synagogue to consider hosting a Palestinian Justice Committee whose philosophy and practice runs along the lines of JVP or any other anti-Zionist group lies, in my humble opinion, outside the boundary of a Jewish religious organization, even in the Diaspora.

(UPDATE: The Steering Committee has unanimously vetoed the hosting of a Palestinian Justice Committee within the structure and auspices of the synagogue community. My guess is that this issue would drive members away in either case, and Steering chose the course that would presumably result in fewer people leaving.)

Do I think Israel should or shouldn’t exist?

Based on the history of its coming into being, and the fact that the world had just come out of a Second World War in which a third of world Jewry had been systematically murdered — and in which no other countries wanted to admit a high number of Jewish refugees — the establishment of Israel couldn’t NOT happen when and how it did. That it came at the expense of Arabs who lived and worked there is tragic, and must be addressed, but not at the price of the complete destruction of Israel. It may be unfashionable, but I think it’s a little late to dismantle the whole thing now.

I also think that a chunk of responsibility falls upon the surrounding Arab states which have used the Palestinians as pawns in their geopolitical games without offering them any meaningful Justice. 

But I am a woman and a lesbian and a Jew, living in America. And I know that those on both the hard right and the hard left harbor no love for me. I’m stuck somewhere in the middle, and that means I don’t have the luxury of jumping to either extreme without sacrificing or denying some major part of myself.

“War is the most impure, incorrect, unavoidable failure of civilization. How can people try to ascribe such purity to it that they imagine that all evil is permitted?”

— Rabbi Emily Katcher

And that is why I’ve chosen to resign my membership in the synagogue community that I’ve affiliated with for over twenty years. Cheerleading war is a symptom of that failure of civilization. And guilt-tripping people into action is a symptom of a community that doesn’t really believe what it espouses, beyond saving a buck or two.

I need to be true to myself, and I may need to be independent and unaffiliated for awhile.