Friday, January 22, 2010

Children and Identity

Like any group, a minyan that reaches a certain age needs to re-evaluate itself. It needs to look at its goals and needs to ask how it is meeting them and whether it could be doing so more effectively. Part of this is making choices. As we grow, the needs of different parts of the community grow diverse and we need to ask whether to try to meet them all or focus on a narrower population. This is a matter of whether the multiple directions are compatible and whether we are comfortable with one sub-group going elsewhere.

This statement may seem so simple as to be banal, except for two things: One, it is much more difficult to redefine the identity of an existing institution than to define it as it starts out; and two, it is not necessary to day-to-day functioning and thus is often forgotten, especially by overtaxed lay leaders already giving their max just to keep things running. So it is common for a minyan at the outset to be perfectly matched to the needs of its constituency but to fail to adapt as those needs change.

The most obvious "changing need" in a young adult community is that of families with young children. A minyan started by 25-year-olds is, after 10 years, going to have 35-year-olds, many of whom have started families in the interim and now need different things from their shul. But it also has a new crop of 25-year-olds who were attracted to the minyan because of what it has been and, they expect, will continue to be. And so we face two questions: Can we effectively meet the needs of both groups? And should we? It is hard to even effectively ask the question because lay-led minyanim by definition depend on huge amounts of volunteer labor, time that parents of young children are not willing or able to commit. So for any real rethinking to happen, it is the younger lay leaders who need to make it a priority.

To be clear, I do not presume that the answer is necessarily that we should be working to meet all of these needs. There may simply be a point at which families graduate from a minyan and look for a shul that offers more resources. There is a benefit to this – it provides a conduit for bringing the energy and culture of a successful minyan into shuls which can get stuck in their own ruts. There is also a price – the more a minyan sees itself as different and unique, the harder it is to accept closing the door on families who want to be part of that, many of whom are the minyan's founders or previous leadership. Of course, what we want in theory must be balanced with the practical – is it even possible for a minyan with limited budget and in rented space to keep these families? Is it even worth trying?

There are certainly examples of minyanim that have done this successfully – I make no claims to any new discovery. But insofar as numerous places are currently struggling with this question, I want to briefly sketch out a few principles that I take to be essential to effective retention of families, and invite readers to add to the list, in the hope of encouraging minyanim to address it proactively and thoughtfully.

  1. If you don't have good childcare, you will lose every young family, no matter how unique and amazing your services are. If there's nothing for my child to do at shul, I will spend the whole service either shushing them or in the hallway, so I won't enjoy it anyway.
  2. Services need to be child-friendly. Parents who are long-time members will figure out the line between acceptable and disruptive noise. The community's priority has to be creating a culture where they are welcome.
  3. The best childcare allows the parents to spend some time in the service. Many 'tot shabbat' programs require the participation of both parents and children. This can be wonderful but it removes them from the community despite being in the same building, and thus defeats much of the purpose.
    1. For younger kids, regular babysitting with occasional programs may be the best (and cheapest) model.
    2. Location is everything. A space for quiet play at the back of or adjoining the prayer space allows a parent to be part of both or a child who needs her parent to find him. Babysitting or tot shabbat rooms should be as close as possible – when they are far removed, parents who go to drop kids off or check on them often never make it back to the service.
  4. Recruit! The biggest needs that a shul can meet for young parents are having peers for their kids to play with and other parents as a social network. In this area, critical mass is, indeed, critical. Don't assume that "if you build it, they will come." You'll end up planning a nice program, getting only the 2 kids you already had, and feeling defeated. Find the people who would love your minyan if not for their kids, and pull them in.
  5. And a final note which will eventually merit its own post. Parents need to reclaim a sense of responsibility to the minyan. We often use parenthood as an excuse for being less involved. Division of labor has to mean not that one parent is 'on' while the other reads the Times, but that one parent is free to make it to shul for shacharit. If not, the intense and participatory culture that we so prize in these minyanim will dissipate, and grown-up communities which are as spiritually fulfilling as these minyanim will remain a pipe-dream.

12 comments:

  1. Thanks! As someone without kids (yet) who is helping organize a new minyan with many kids, these suggestions are helpful.

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  2. Right on. I wonder, though, if there are neighborhoods where it is so tough to raise children (bad schools, high rent, etc.) that you are contending with families for only a couple of years at most.

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  3. BZ, my best advice is to ask the parents!

    Joshua has a really good starting list. I'd want to highlight one of the biggest things that I see is often a challenge. Space. A growing minyan that survives in people's houses or in single rooms, will never be ideal for children. There needs to be room to move without parents constantly fearing what children will break. Things can work in non-ideal situations, but it means the minyan will constantly be struggling with the space issue.

    I also don't know if it was intentional or not, but I notice Joshua is now writing about minyanim and not indy minyanim. I think this is another key for families. If you're providing every possible service for everyone, the minyan might not be able to focus on what it does well. Giving up the "indy" means engaging more with the rest of the local Jewish community and realizing they can provide resources (like structured youth education) that a minyan can't. Making a welcoming community where members can attend services with a minyan and the minyan is engaged with the local sources of youth ed breaks down the barriers and makes both the minyanim and other organizations more welcoming to all. (This also provide an option besides abandoning a minyan for a synagogue for parents)

    On the issue of parents being less involved. I suggest accepting that parents might be differently involved. Walking to shul as a family is big for us and asking us to change so one of us can get there a bit earlier is not welcoming. Finding other ways parents can help (planning programming for families or everyone, hosting visitors, ...) is more realistic.

    One more separate rant is your assumption that 25-year-olds are childless and only when people reach 35 are you dealing with multiple kids. I know more than enough people (including myself) who has kids closer to 25 than 35 and starting with the basic assumption that they don't exist isn't a good way to make a welcoming community.

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  4. Dan - Certainly I make no universal assumptions about when people start having kids. It has been my experience that more often than not my friends, even those who marry earlier, wait to have kids until ~30. Thus there has been a shift in terms of numbers as the years have passed which has, I think, forced us to deal with an issue that we ignored for a long time. But of course there are a whole range of family types.

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  5. Dan writes:
    If you're providing every possible service for everyone, the minyan might not be able to focus on what it does well. Giving up the "indy" means engaging more with the rest of the local Jewish community and realizing they can provide resources (like structured youth education) that a minyan can't.

    I don't think this requires giving up the "indy". Many (most?) independent minyanim (with or without children) never saw themselves as being in the business of "providing every possible service for everyone", but already operate in an a la carte model and "focus on what [they do] well".

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  6. I should be more specific on what I meant by "giving up on indy." They can have independent leadership from everything else, but can accept that the larger community has resources that they depend on. For example, it might be more efficient to engage and improve a synagogue school than try to build something from scratch.

    As for the age of children issue. This is a bit of a separate rant, but, even in middle/upper class non-Orthodox Jewish communities, there is a small, but far from zero population of adults in their mid to late twenties who have children. The fact that a minyan doesn't deal with families until the non-parent founders get older means that this population was being ignored and didn't connect to some of these minyanim. The minyanim can't be everything to everyone, but realizing who is being left out is a healthy intellectual exercise.

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  7. Josh -
    A great piece. Let me make two comments:
    1) It's been my observation that the dynamic works differently than you suggest. It's not that the thirty-something parents go off to more family-friendly places and leave the minyan to the next generation, it's that the minyan itself becomes more of a family place, and (along with that) more "established" in its liturgy, and eventually less attractive to the next generation of energized 20-somethings. Minyan Ma'at, and before it the NY Havurah, and Havurat Shalom, were the "Hadars" of their time.
    2) You write about the desire for "grown-up communities which are as spiritually fulfilling as these minyanim" but that's based on one-size-fits-most approach to spiritually fulfilling. I'm increasingly wondering about that. Maybe - and only maybe - the psycho-social-spiritual needs of single 27-year-olds and married 37-year-olds are sufficiently different that a minyan that is attractive to one won't be that attractive to another.

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  8. Psycho-social, sure, but why spiritual?

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  9. @BZ - Of course, I'm speaking in gross generalizations here, and I'm not saying that there's no communality at all, but a couple of things(and there may be others)...
    1) Spiritual questions are existential questions, and have to do with the individual's own condition, needs, and experience, and those are conditioned in part by where someone is in their life journey.
    2) A person's own spiritual work changes over time. Someone who needed to explore a variety of approaches and techniques at one point may not need or want that 10 years later.
    3) People's needs and expectations of spiritual work are at least in part culturally conditioned, which will be to some extent generational.

    I'm not saying that you won't ever find young singles and settled families happy in the same minyan, but I am offering the suggestion that there may be something about the intense indy minyan experience that is particularly generational.

    I could well be wrong.

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  10. I get that there are some different needs. But fundamentally, what we want out of a davening experience is not so different. And all of our creating homogenous tefila groups obscures the fact that there really is a huge value in sharing a multi-generational space. As a parent of a 2-year-old, I would love for there to be teenagers and 50-year-olds in our minyan alongside the post-college crowd.

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  11. 1) Spiritual questions are existential questions, and have to do with the individual's own condition, needs, and experience, and those are conditioned in part by where someone is in their life journey.
    2) A person's own spiritual work changes over time. Someone who needed to explore a variety of approaches and techniques at one point may not need or want that 10 years later.


    Ok, but...

    3) People's needs and expectations of spiritual work are at least in part culturally conditioned, which will be to some extent generational.

    ...I think this is very significant, but is a generational difference, not an age difference. That is, it explains differences between today's 25-year-olds and today's 45-year-olds (who have come from different cultural contexts), but doesn't explain differences between what today's 25-year-olds want now and what they will want in 20 years.

    #1 and #2 do represent age differences, but I don't see how they translate into tachlis conclusions about the style of a minyan. One thing that may happen is that some people, as they get older, place less relative value on davening (or spirituality) in general, in comparison with other considerations, and therefore may, over time, become more willing to join a community where they don't like the davening if there are other things they like about the community. But this does not equal a change in davening preferences per se.

    And I'm not sure that what Josh C describes in the original post represents a coherent set of preferences. That is, I don't think there is anyone who prefers a minyan that has less than a critical mass of people for shacharit and only gets significant numbers for the last hour, and therefore sees themselves as doing their duty by staying home for shacharit and keeping the numbers down. Rather, there are people who would prefer that the minyan have a critical mass for the whole service (especially if they're there), but also don't want to feel a responsibility for making that happen. (I count myself in that group in some cases -- that is, among the many communities that I participate in to one degree or another, there are some to which I feel a responsibility and some to which I don't. So if I'm pointing fingers, I'm pointing them at myself too.) Which is ok if and only if there is already a critical mass of other people who are taking on that responsibility. (Iff a mikvah contains 40 seah of the needed type of water, any amount of other water can be added and it's still kosher.) If there isn't, then I think that Josh is saying that this attitude is problematic, not only for moral reasons but for self-interested reasons too.

    I think most people, regardless of preferred davening style, generally prefer a service that is fully actualized (however that is understood) for its entire length (whatever length that is), and I think that many independent minyanim do a better job of achieving this than many other communities, particularly Conservative synagogues. That is, many independent minyanim have Shabbat morning services that last 2-2.5 hours, with a significant number of people who are there the entire time, or most of it. In contrast, the shuls that have >3-hour services where most people show up for the last hour don't actually optimize anyone's preferences: the people who get there late are voting with their feet and wishing the service were shorter, and the people who get there on time are wishing more people were there for shacharit.

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  12. Are you familiar with the Egalitarian Minyan of (West) Rogers Park? I don't know the whole 30-year history, but for the years I know about, it worked. People didn't chase themselves out when kids got to be a certain age, and as a result, there are a number of 20-somethings around who grew up there. I think of it as family-friendly, but never child-centric.

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