Your Home, Your Friends, Your Community - Congregation Ezra Habonim

Neil Posner

Out Of The Darkness

My family and I have been members of NCEH since 1996 or so. It was a bigger place then but never was it as big as some of the "mega shuls" in and around the North Shore. We did not join because it was smaller than the other synagogues. Rather, we joined because it was the first synagogue we had been to in a long time that was both warm and relevant. (Our former shul in Pasadena, California, was very much like NCEH, but geographically inconvenient.)

I suppose that our little shul had money problems back then, but those problems were invisible to me. We paid our dues and religious-school tuition and maybe "a little something" in response to the High Holiday appeal, but I never had a sense, one way or the other, that our money made a difference. The sense we did have was that whether we joined and remained part of the NCEH "family" did make a difference. And that is what set this place apart -- then and now -- from nearly every other synagogue of which we've been a part.

Now, I'm an officer of this synagogue, and I see what it costs to run it. I now realize that every dollar of income ten years ago made a difference, just as it makes a difference now. This is especially true during the dark, winter months, when we hit our "trough"; that period of time after the dues and High Holiday surge (if you'll forgive the non-Kosher metaphor, "the pig in the python") is mostly used up and before the next wave of dues and ticket sales starts to come in for the next year. It is a dreary time to be a synagogue officer, as anyone who's ever done it anywhere will testify. We're in our trough now. It's a dark place.

But not all is dark. We recently had Shabbat Across America, for which the turnout was excellent and the food was delicious. We had a nice sized group for the reading of the Megillah for Purim, and the Mustard Shpiel was very well attended and enormously entertaining. It is not the head count, however, that makes these events successful (although more is generally merrier) but, rather, it is the warmth and friendship that fills the place when our members, friends and families gather within. This fact -- that pretty much everyone who comes to services or an event at NCEH is happy to be there and to see one another -- seems not to have changed, except perhaps for the better, since my family first joined.

Thus, as measured in dollars and cents we are poor, but as measured in warmth and friendship we are wealthier than most. But poverty stresses us, and the bleakness of this particularly difficult winter, which, hopefully, is about to end, hasn't helped. So it is that your officers and Board of Trustees have been meeting to discuss ways to find our way out of that annual financial darkness without putting out the light that you, the members, keep burning through it all.

If you've ever had an idea for saving money or bringing in revenue or growing our membership, now is the time to share it. If you have an urge to volunteer, we have no shortage of projects that would benefit from your time and energy. If NCEH has ever been good to you in a time when you needed us and you would like to find a way to "give back," we would like to talk to you. Whatever you have -- time, cash, enthusiasm, talent, "all of the above" -- we can use.

To emerge from out of the darkness, we must want to leave it behind. More importantly, however, is that we also must want what we have, which is a warm and special place, where each of us can grow in our relationship with G-d and grow in our appreciation of each other.

Neil B. Posner, NCEH Co-President

Synagogue
Co-Presidents