Dear CHL community,

I trust that all of you are staying dry and warm as we have finally entered into a wet season for California! I planted new grapevines and garlic in January, hoping that Mother Nature would pull through and help out. And again, I am reaffirmed that I can always count on Mom. My garden is soaking up the precious rain and I am so relieved, knowing that my new plantings might now make it. I can imagine all those little roots stretching out their toes, taking a long drink and being able to envision for themselves what they will grow up to be.

Just as my grapes are working their roots deep to stretch their toes, and my garlic is drinking up so that soon, little green shoots will rise up from the lovely earth, CHL, too, is beginning to stretch its metaphoric toes, lifting its head and heart, and feeling the liberty to look at who we are and what we would like to be. We are in an enviable position right now. Not many organizations are settled enough to have structure, yet young enough to be able to sit back and stock of what is going on – programming, events, collaborations – to say "Is all of this meeting the needs of our members and community?" 

True, we are struggling mighty hard financially. Even in the best of times, it is a dicey proposition to keep our heads above the red ink. But setting that aside, or maybe looking at it differently, the question becomes "to be economically viable, what do we all want from CHL to keep us coming and what can CHL offer that is meaningful in our lives?"

We are in such a time of great activity! Thanks to the hard work of Melanie Grubman, we have a number of chavurot communities building together – families, over-30, San Francisco, Lake Merritt, and more. These groups are meeting, building connection and finding kinship with each other. 

Also, thanks to Melanie, we are in the process of evaluating a new CHL Education Program for families and B’nai Mitzvah. A group of dedicated parents have been meeting to give input in support of a parent-cooperative-based children's education program. As this is still its infancy stage (no pun intended), I hope to be able to give more details of this soon. Brian Schachter-Brooks and Rabbi SaraLeya are working on a B'nai Mitzvah program as well, starting with the 10-year-olds and guiding them into young adults to that shining moment on the bimah. What is so important and precious about this work is that the curriculum will be guided and defined by the character and core elements of what makes CHL CHL. I don't think that anyone can doubt that we love the "Chochmat way" and it will be a mitzvah to instill that beauty, love and inspiration in our children.

In addition to bringing you up to date on these new developments, I am also using this letter as an invitation to all of you to join me on April 19 for a community meeting. The agenda is not yet finalized, but the purpose will be to follow up on a comment that was made at the annual meeting in mid-January. At that meeting, a member suggested that we ask our members to come and participate in answering questions that are important to CHL's viability – membership responsibilities, financial worries, encouraging members to volunteer, sharing the discussion of shaping and making CHL. And we have been promising to begin community meetings to get input from all of you on these topics, or others, so we are finally getting it on the calendar. As the date approaches, we will have more information for you about the agenda and time. But for now, please save the date.

On a last note for today, I know that many of you are still keenly awaiting information about the status of discussions with Rabbi Avram Davis. I am pleased to be able to share that those discussions have proven fruitful, though they are still in need of finalization. I hope that, within a month, we will have closure to that work and will be able to share more of those details, as permitted by Avram. Also, once that work has reached closure, I will work with Laura Goldman to set a community healing meeting on the calendar for anyone and everyone who so desires to participate. I will do my best to have it scheduled as promptly as possible, yet with enough notice that your calendars will be able to accommodate the date.

I hope to see many of you on April 19.

B'shalom,

Lifecycles

Our sympathies and prayers go to Aliza and Abro Sutker for the passing of Aliza's mother, Janet Kohn.

We give thanks that Morton Felix is recovering well from his surgery.

Special thanks to:

Rick Zarlow for all of the very important and not very visible work on the building: The structural work that is giving this place a longer life and making it safer for our community. Stephen Weitz and the Building Committee for bringing the garden back to life and caring for it. Devorah Levy and Merav Doan for being amazing kitchen fairies and cleaning the kitchen as it hadn't been cleaned in years.

How is your life journey affected by someone else's? That’s how CHL member Grace Schoninger describes the plot of her new novel in a nutshell. Called If you Miss the Train I'm On, it's published by Stone Garden, and is now available on Amazon. It's written under her pen name, Grace Willetts. Schoninger uses a pen name because of her career with the federal government.

"It's about how the choices we make end up affecting the paths of everyone who touches ours, not only ourselves," she said.

Schoninger has been writing short stories and poetry for years and has published some, but this is her first published longer work.

The fact that it's coming out now is fortuitous, Schoninger feels. She started working on the book on March 1, 1999, exactly ten years ago. "I had some interruptions along the way, like my father died, and I had two children," she said. When her children were small, she sometimes hired a babysitter for an hour or two at a time so she could write. "I had dreams about it," she said. "The characters were so vivid. I felt compelled to get the book out there."

While there is nothing Jewish about the book, one character is a spiritual leader, and it has spiritual themes. "I wanted it to be a crazy American story," she said. "One half of Americans are swinging from the chandeliers and one half are going to church, which is kind of how America is today," she said.

Schoninger has been a member of CHL for five years, has served on the board and the rabbi search committee. Her family is also part of the elementary school chavurah.

I find myself in my eighth month of serving as your rabbi, wanting to move forward with you, and our other leaders, to envision how we want to be as a community. What are our values? What should our presence be in the larger world? What is our unique mission among the other Bay Area spiritual communities? Our beloved director of music and meditation, Brian Yosef Schachter-Brooks, is working toward bringing this visioning process to actuality and we will invite you to participate.

The world is going through a difficult time. Although it is my tendency to be optimistic, I know that there are those who fear that times of darkness may be coming. Many of us are feeling less secure in our daily lives. And so, how can we, as spiritual community, make a difference?

As I introspect, I am fascinated that, although I have not considered myself "political" since college days, as your rabbi, I find myself drawn toward social justice work and toward prayer activism. I seek prayer that will bring us closer to each other and create the space for healing in our larger world. I am also inspired, after our successful event (with the Progressive Jewish Alliance) for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's yahrzeit, to connect with other faith communities in our neighborhood: What if our small area in Berkeley could become a haven of interfaith dialogue and prayer?

This may be my current inspiration, but what about yours?  We depend on each other, as holy community, to make change possible.

As we recently read in Parashat T'ruma, Torah asks us to give the extra, the most precious gift from the bounteousness of our hearts. In so doing we build the mikdash, the dwelling place for the Divine among us and within each of us. From this place we experience hash'ra-at Shekhina, the Divine inspiration that can infuse our lives with meaning and motivation.

Those with hokhmat-lev, wisdom of heart, will design the sanctuary, but those with nedivat-lev, generosity of heart, will make its existence possible.

In moving forward, we must be wise and discerning (using our hokhma and bina), seeing with our open hearts, to manifest the vision we each have of what spiritual community can be at its best.

With blessing that our missions be fulfilled,

Let's admit it: from the time your path led you to Chochmat HaLev, you have been asked to give of yourself; to make a donation, to sign up for membership, to clean up after oneg. While quite possibly you heeded the call, who or what asked you?

What I'd like to discuss is not giving, but something more oblique, something for which I don't have a name but which as Executive Director and as a community member I encounter in many different ways. What I'd like to know is...what is Chochmat, and how do I relate to it? When I am asked to contribute, who or what is asking me? When I am communicating something about Chochmat, on behalf of whom and to whom am I communicating? In what relationship do I stand to each individual? Does it change when these individuals are grouped together? Is there an "us" and "them" — an organization versus the people? Is there a Chochmat separate from the people who comprise it?

I am sure these questions can be answered in different ways and that we may hold different views, but I do have a clear preference of what I'd like the answer to be. For me, I don't want there to be any separation or boundaries. I'd like for Chochmat to be an experiment that we are constantly creating and reinventing. To sound entirely esoteric, I think the "there" is only there when there's no there there.

In Judaism, we don’t have a single name for G-d, or we don't use it. I think one reason for this may be that if you name or package G-d, then you form a static image, a preconceived notion of the divine. You limit it and your experience of it. You no longer have to "get your bearings" every time you conjure the divine, the very activity which may be divine. By naming, you also create an "other," in opposition to the experience of oneness. Once you name it, e.g. George, then it becomes reflexive to think of oneself as separate from George. Naming absolves you from bringing consciousness to George’s essence and how you experience George. What is George, anyway?

The same with Chochmat HaLev. We've named Chochmat, but what is it that we've named? What is our relationship to Chochmat? How do we experience it? Does it exist separately from our experience of it? Legally, there is something called Chochmat because some government file houses a piece of paper saying that CHL exists. But like G-d, is Chochmat anything other than our conscious experience of one another? Is it anything else than the way we experience and relate to each person who has walked through these doors?

Some days, as beautiful as our name – Wisdom of the Heart — is, I wish we didn't have a name. So that there would be only "us," nothing behind a curtain, real or imagined. When we said "we are thriving or growing," then this would be understood to refer to the individuals and our relationships and connections that are multiplying. When we said "we are struggling financially," then we would all know that we are having difficulty supporting the relationships and dreams we are building here. And we could all collectively evaluate what it is we want to support, where our energy is going, where we want to put our resources. Maybe we don't need this community after all; or maybe, for us, it is exciting and important to explore this path, this way of relating to others, to nature, to community, to all, and to unearth and resuscitate an ancient and mystical tradition like Judaism because it’s the ultimate headlamp to illuminate the dark caves of existence.

On April 19, we are having a community meeting, the first of many regular ones that we'll be planning. The focus of this meeting will be our fiscal sustainability. I hope that we can come together on April 19, in that spirit of no "ism", only of us, and see what light collectively we can shine on our future.

To paraphrase Charles Dickens, it's the best of times and the worst of times for Chochmat HaLev. The good news is that our staff, board and a cadre of volunteers continue to create a more sophisticated, functional, vibrant synagogue operation. We're building a community — and an organization — built to last. But the bad news is, CHL's financial condition remains critical, and despite our improving infrastructure, we may not last long enough to enjoy it.

The problem is not our spiritual model, which is exciting and vital and thriving. It's our business model, specifically, our revenue model.

A recent financial survey of Bay Area synagogues revealed that among all responding congregations CHL has the smallest revenue from membership — just $134,000 annually. One synagogue with fewer members than we have collects $196,000 a year, and one congregation that has just one member more than us collects more than $300,000. More importantly, membership contributes 60 to 80 percent of most synagogues' revenue, while at Chochmat, member dues comprise only 37 percent.

The problem starts with our membership dues structure. CHL's average member pays just $620—much less than half the $1,400 average that most synagogue members pay.  Interestingly, while our membership number has increased this year compared with last year, our membership revenue has gone down, because most of our new members are paying low, first-year introductory rates.

Ironically, CHL has some of the best attended Kabbalat Shabbat services of any congregation in the Bay Area. Yet most participants on any given Friday night are not members and do not make a financial contribution to our survival.

According to the synagogue survey, Chochmat's personnel expenses are by far the lowest of any other synagogue; we spend less than even the smallest congregations. Since more than two-thirds of our total expenses are in personnel, you can see that we're not living extravagantly. To the contrary: We create amazing things with a creative, energetic staff on a tiny, tiny budget.

But still, we currently spend more, much more, than we bring in. Despite our most successful fundraising drive ever — and thanks to all who contributed more than $44,000 during our Chanukah campaign — we are still not able to make ends meet. To solve this problem, we are urgently looking at ways to cut our expenses dramatically, and these will of necessity be mostly personnel expenses. This will undoubtedly lead to reduced services to members. 

We will continue to seek member donations, and we will depend on you to dig deep again during our upcoming Passover fundraising drive. More importantly, our membership committee and board are currently reviewing our membership dues structure. While we have strived to keep membership dues low, so all community members can afford to join, this strategy has not necessarily worked. If we had three times the number of members, it might work, but we don't. We may also find raising membership dues to a level more in line with the Bay Area average doesn't work either, if our community simply doesn't have the income levels to afford them.

One thing we know is that CHL's current revenue model doesn't work. At current revenue and expense levels, we have enough cash to last us just six months. We'll need to find a solution before that. The clock is ticking. 

When I first walked into Chochmat HaLev, the potential and soul of the place was overpowering; I was moved by the yearning and joy that was so authentically sketched into the faces of the community during song, meditation and conversation. After the long bike journey, at that time, from Marin, I would nap under the vines in the garden and appreciate the afternoon light and peacefulness of the empty sanctuary on a Sunday afternoon.

Since the beginning of my part-time work at CHL, I have been seduced and encouraged by the glimpse of that potential, of the possibility that the songs could run deeper than just our voices, that our prayers could bring upon real lasting inner peace and most importantly that the Wisdom of the Heart could be embraced through the actions and structures of our congregation, through which we looked after each other and the world.

Before each new day of work, I first always return to that sweet potential and then ask "What actually creates and sustains a community where people feel seen, taken care of and safe? What types of seeds and what types of soil are needed to grow a community where we understand our place and find increasing meaning through our participation in this community and in the lives of others?" 

In answer to this question, I have set up programs that create a container for the practical creation of a community where we can all belong. Some of these programs include: our new family education and school committee working to start up a school in September, a Chavurah program that provides opportunities for people to create Jewish life together, and a volunteer outreach plan designed to establish better ways to include more people in the creation and vibrancy of our congregation. I am proud to say that these programs have successfully launched. But still, in their newness, they exist more in their potentiality. The Chavurah program presently supports nine groups and has served at least 80 people through its dinners. The school committee has developed mission statements, fundraising plans and timelines to move the possibility of a school into a reality. And we've found volunteers to finally organize and clean the kitchen. These are all great starts, all fertile seeds, all just a beginning...

Through these programs, and through increased efforts to contact visitors and new members, I have tried to give Chochmat a hand that can reach out to you with a more nourishing touch of inquiry and compassionate listening. However, the potential of Chochmat will only blossom when we touch each other. In this igniting touch, the potential of what Chochmat could be is transformed to what it will be. The chavurot, our Heart-to-Heart program which serves congregants in need, our small Torah study and meditation programs, and the opportunities to volunteer are the avenues for you to touch others. I am sure that we have everything we need at Chochmat to nourish our yearnings to belong, and to create a place that truly feels like a home. May our prayers and faith bring us the courage to leap and henceforth be caught by our community.

To find your handhold, please contact Melanie@chochmat.org, or call 510 704-9687 ext 12.

On Sunday March 29, there will be chavurah workshop for those participating in chavurot and for those interested in creating intimate space amongst friends: This workshop is free, though nonmembers are requested to make a $20 donation. CHL staff including Cyrise Beaty will teach about organizing intentional Jewish community through events, song and rituals from 3 to 5:30 pm.  This will be a practical, hands-on workshop for those looking for tools and inspiration.

RSVP is required. Melanie@chochmat.org

Currently we have nine chavurot and are open to starting more. These chavurot are Generation X, over 50, three family chavurot for differing age groups, Lake Merritt, LGBTQ, and a contemplative chavurah.  The San Francisco chavurah will have its first gathering in April. There is interest in a social action chavurah, a book club and a musical chavurah that celebrate each holiday with a sharing of music and song. You can find out more about these groups at http://www.chochmat.org/1_community_groups.html

Grace Schoeninger has just published a new novel.