No less important is that we have transitioned from a congregation with an oral history to a congregation with a written history. (I might add that anyone who wants to help record our oral history while it can still be remembered should contact Marty Cohn, who has volunteered to be the BAJC archivist.) We have started to take on a sense of permanence. We are an organization that has a past to respect, a present to live, and a future to plan. We have created structure, rules, policies and procedures to
guide our current practices and to provide a degree of consistency as we move into the future.
Jim Levinson and I are both aware of the strengths
and potential pitfalls of this process in which we find
ourselves. The gains of being more formalized and
more organized are clear, giving us the ability to
move forward in a planned and consistent way and
making us better able to anticipate needs and work
out solutions. It allows us to present a stable and
comprehensible entity to those who would visit and
join.
Yet, in becoming more formalized and organized,
we must be ever-vigilant to preserve what makes
BAJC what it is: the commitment to make our
community a home for people of different spiritual
needs and different spiritual history who wish to join
together for worship and celebration, learning and
sharing. We must dedicate ourselves to support
both the needs of individuals and the needs of
the congregation as a whole. As Jim suggests in
his column this month, we want to continue being a
congregation in which kindness, consideration,
mutual understanding, user-friendliness, and a
genuine desire to reach win-win conclusions outweigh differences in perspective.
My belief is that a strong, stable, unified foundation
will allow this Congregation to initiate and expand
activities and programs and to build for the future. A
strongly-rooted tree can more easily support wide
branches. Truly a win-win process.
The foremost problem we face, as I see it, is the need
to expand our space. Our spiritual, educational, and
communal needs cannot fully breathe in the space we
have. Working together, I have every confidence that
we will be successful in our expansion and we will
continue to grow chayil l’chayil--from strength to
strength...
L'shalom,
Paul
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