The Shul That Makes Demands

Our Shuls used to make demands on us. They expected you to come whether or not the davening suited your taste. They expected you to daven with whoever showed up, not with the people you would have chosen. That kind of Shul has been disappearing for 40 years, in three stages. The Shuls that still work this way are worth supporting and building on.

The first wave was big full service Shuls. They were the center of Jewish life. Young Israels dominated the scene, and the OU’s original name said it all: the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. The Shul was where you davened, socialized, and learned Torah.

The second wave moved away from the big Shul as central. As Torah learning increased, the yeshivos took a big bite out of the Torah centrality of the Big Shuls. Alongside that came a desire for a more customized experience. Some wanted a more serious davening. Some wanted a Rabbi who fit the needs of a subset of the Big Shul. These second wave Shuls were significantly smaller than the first wavers, but they were still communities. The group came first, and the Shul took its shape from the group.

The third wave changes who comes first. The individual replaces the community as the center of gravity, and the Shul becomes a place that serves him. A more streamlined davening. A better kiddush. Learning offerings tuned to what members actually want to learn, such as Daf Yomi. The Shul is no longer the thing the member belongs to. It is the thing the member chooses, week by week, against a menu of alternatives.

The relationship has flipped. The Shul used to make demands on its members. Now it makes offers.

The distinction matters. A Wave 2 Shul decides that davening starts at 8:30 because that is what most of the Shul wants, even though some members would prefer 9:00. The members who want 9:00 either come at 8:30 or daven elsewhere. A Wave 3 Shul runs multiple minyanim or shifts to accommodate the 9:00 preference. That process serves the members, but weakens the foundation of the Shul.

Several forces are driving the third wave. COVID legitimized the basement minyan and trained a generation that davening can happen wherever I want it to happen. Smartphones turned every alternative offering in town into something a member can hear about, evaluate, and commit to during the week. Phones and group chats make the alternatives visible and easy to coordinate with friends, in ways that did not exist a generation ago.

The Shul is competing with the hashkama minyan down the block, the partnership minyan two streets over, and the chabura in someone’s dining room. The broader consumer mindset that this generation brings to schools, to brands, and to media has arrived at the Shul door. Members evaluate, compare, and switch. The Shul has become one option among many, evaluated the way you would evaluate a coffee shop.

One sign of this is that many of the big and medium Shuls have diminished attendance as community members migrate to the yeshivos and to the more geshmak experiences for Shabbos morning davening. The weekday minyan picture is arguably starker. Daily minyanim are where Wave 1 Shuls historically anchored their community, and they are where Wave 3 fragmentation shows up most painfully.

A second consequence is the financial structure. Third wave Shuls are increasingly centered on bigger donors contributing a bigger share of the budget. The mechanism is straightforward. When broad dues paying membership becomes optional, and members come and go based on preference, the budget has to come from somewhere. Large donors are where it comes from. The largest individual donors then gain disproportionate influence almost as a matter of structure.

A Shul that once balanced a board of dues paying members now answers to a smaller group whose contributions keep the lights on. That arrangement is legitimate when members choose it. But it changes what membership means. A member of a dues-funded Shul has a stake in its direction. A member of a donor-funded Shul has a seat at a service the donors are paying for.

Something is being lost in all of this, and it is worth naming. The Shul was once a kehillah. You davened with the people you happened to find there, not the people you chose. You sat next to the man whose politics annoyed you, helped make a minyan for the family sitting shiva down the block, and learned to give kavod to a Rabbi you might not have hired yourself.

Plenty of us know how this worked. A man came into a Shul as a young man, found a Rabbi and a community he picked without a check list. Over twenty years, that Rabbi became his Rabbi and that Shul became his Shul. He asked the Rabbi shailos. He brought his children to him. His children grew up knowing the people in that room as their people. The Shul and the Rabbi shaped him and his family in ways no Shul he had chosen on the basis of fit ever could have.

Wave 3 Shuls form character too. They produce members who also daven, learn, and ask shailos. They have tremendous value. But it is not the same as the formation that came from sustained obligation to a kehillah you chose because it is a kehillah.

So the changes are probably here to stay, but the case for resisting them rests on questions the third wave has not answered.

If the individual now comes first, is what we are running still a Shul, or is it a Jewish service provider with a Shul’s name?

If the weekday minyan is where the fragmentation is sharpest, what does it mean for a kehillah when daily tefillah b’tzibbur is no longer the spine of communal life?

And if the Shul is now competing for attendance against a menu of alternatives, what does the Shul offer that the alternatives structurally cannot, and is the leadership building toward that, or just trying to be the most appealing item on the menu?

In my own Shul we are working with the Rabbi to hold a Wave 2 structure. It is a deliberate bet that a Shul organized around a community, with a Rabbi who shapes that community and a membership that takes responsibility for it, is still the form most worth sustaining.

What is at stake is not whether Shuls survive. Most of them will, in some form. What is at stake is whether the Shul remains a place that forms us, or becomes a place we use.

Let us build and support Shuls where the kehillah still comes first.