USCJ Review - Spring 2006
The Presidents Listserv: How to Learn From Other People's Experiences
Not too long ago, the new president of a congregation learned how to do the job by watching his or her predecessors. Before becoming president, he or she usually would have served on the board of directors for a few years, and might have climbed up the vice presidential ladder. If the new president was lucky his or her predecessors had some skills and good ideas, and the new president replicated them.
But there was no easy way for presidents to learn from each other. Although they often had similar problems and faced similar situations, and so could have used similar answers, each one had to figure it out for him or herself.
Twelve years ago, United Synagogue's lay and staff leaders created a new tool that permitted synagogue presidents to talk to each other. Once the Presidents List was set up by United Synagogue's IT department, colleagues from approximately 800 congregations across North America could discuss challenges and solutions with each other.
The Presidents List not only provides a way for congregational presidents to talk to each other virtually, it also helps them help themselves and each other. Instead of having to learn through trial and error, presidents can find out how their counterparts address certain problems and regional officers and United Synagogue's staff could help presidents resolve issues of synagogue administration. The list is modeled at least in part on Ravnet, a widely used listserv for rabbis run by the Jewish Theological Seminary's IT staff.
As the listserv was being developed, the first questions that had to be answered were: Did United Synagogue want a wide expansion of communication between synagogue presidents? How would issues of liability be handled? Who would be eligible to participate? Should messages be screened before they were posted? What responsibility would the United Synagogue staff have?
Other early listservs often involved "flame wars" - one participant would say something negative about another person or another person's idea or message, and then each would start throwing electronic darts at each other. Often others would join in. It was sometimes nasty and often hurtful. Both laypeople and staff involved with setting up the Presidents List agreed that we had to find a mechanism to avoid lashon harah, hurtful language. At the same time, the organizers negotiating with United Synagogue staff decided there was too great a risk in monitoring proposed posts before they appeared because of the potential liability that attached to the organization. If the organization prescreened all messages and accidentally let something through, potential legal responsibility would attach to the organization.
Senior staff at United Synagogue decided that the plan's implementation was consonant with the organization's mission and objectives.
Before it was set up, people who were not familiar with the listserv concept had to be taught what a listserv is and how it works. They learned that a listserv is an electronic database. Participants are subscribed to the database, and only subscribers can post messages. When a message is posted it is sent to every person subscribed to the database. Any response can be directed either to an individual poster or to the entire list.
Jerry Gottesman z'l, a past president from the Connecticut Valley region, and I, a president-elect from Northern California, teamed up to get the listserv off the ground.
We had to decide what to call the list. The early favorite was Presnet or Preznet, but we decided against that because we didn't want to copy the rabbis listserv, Ravnet, and so we decided on the Presidents List.
As it went live Jerry and I were designated its co-moderators. Jerry agreed to develop procedures for subscribing people to the listserv, and I was assigned the responsibility of maintaining its integrity.
Any of you who subscribe to other lists have seen those lists become cluttered with repeat messages, copies of posts repeated over and over again, and posts that are off topic. Jerry and I surveyed other listservs and asked for copies of their rules. Most called their instructions guidelines, and we decided to use that term too. We also agreed that only two major topics were appropriate for posts on the Presidents List - matters related either to synagogue administration or to Conservative Judaism.
Both Jerry and I had served as congregational presidents and we recognized that congregational presidents are a busy lot, often working professionals who took on the equivalent of a second full-time job in their "spare time." If this new electronic communication medium was to be useful, it had to be streamlined to avoid chitchat. The World Wide Web then was a collection of chat rooms and electronic forums that quickly circulated the latest jokes and interesting news items. We wanted to avoid that.
We also realized that some common practices used in private email would not work in a database for busy synagogue presidents. In private email, the sender often attaches the recipient's earlier message to maintain the thread of the conversation. Jerry and I agreed that if this practice were to carry over to the Presidents List it would cause our busy, sophisticated synagogue presidents to resign from it. If the best and brightest presidents would not tolerate the practice, it would be counterproductive. And so we devised a system of informing participants when they deviated from the guidelines.
Our early attempts at enforcing the guidelines were not very sophisticated. Occasionally presidents took offense at the writeback, even though it was done in private. After a few years, we decided we would standardize the writeback messages. With the aid of professional staff the series of writebacks we use until this very day was developed.
When the listserv went live in April 1998, computer use was not as widespread as it has become in the last few years. Another barrier we had to overcome was getting out the word to those presidents who did have computers that this service was available for them. We started out with about 40 participants and grew, slowly at first, but then more rapidly in the last several years, to our current membership; we now have about 850. Every regional director subscribes new presidents in each region. The lack of a computer or computer illiteracy no longer seem to be a significant barrier to participation.
The questions synagogue presidents ask each other and answer for each other touch on all aspects of synagogue life. They have ranged from such nuts-and-bolts issues as what time to have minyan on Kabbalat Shabbat - and why - to whether musical instruments can be played during the service. Yes, the rabbi is the mara d'atra - what exactly what is a mara d'atra? How long are your Shabbat morning services? How do you deal with an obstreperous congregant? These are obvious questions that recur occur.
At other times the issues are political, and the voices of individual synagogue presidents join and are heard. When United Synagogue's public policy committee wrote a letter to the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee saying that then-Supreme Court nominee John Roberts met United Synagogue's standards, a group of presidents took issue with that process. Many synagogue presidents wrote about their surprise and discomfort with that news, and their feelings were conveyed immediately to their regional leadership, who represent them on United Synagogue's board of directors. In the end, United Synagogue's president, Judy Yudof, initiateda review of the process, and a new one was adopted at the Boston convention.
Every message posted on the listserv is saved in the list archives, and a participant can search the archives on any topic. On the other hand, the private messages sent between people who respond privately to questions posted publicly on the listserv are not archived.
Alan Rothstein is president of United Synagogue's northern California office.
