The Hidden Heroes of the High Holy Days

September 28, 2023 | By Ben Vorspan

On Monday night, as shofar blasts around the world brought Yom Kippur 5784 to a close, they also marked the conclusion of the most nerve wracking bingo game you never knew existed.  There are no numbers and no letters in this game of chance.  Rather, squares of the imaginary bingo cards are filled with phrases like “mail truck carrying all our neighborhood’s tickets was robbed,” or “Erev Rosh Hashanah system-wide outage of new e-ticketing software.”  And rather than a designated bingo caller, the cringe-worthy situations that synagogue staff members wish were only fiction are called in real time, as they happen, by hundreds of executive directors, office managers, and communications coordinators around the country on an assortment of social media channels normally used by synagogue professionals to brainstorm together and provide support to one another.

For many synagogue staffers who, on Monday night, reached the end of the challenging 3-week stretch that started with the first “I haven’t received my tickets” emails a week prior to Rosh Hashanah, this Murphy’s Law-based game of High Holy Day Bingo was a way to maintain their sanity.  You can’t help but laugh when Jews around the world get to sit down to a lovely Erev Rosh Hashanah dinner with family and friends, while you desperately try to find an electrician to fix the restroom’s new light sensors that aren’t turning on the lights.  You have no choice but to appreciate the irony when congregants who normally complain about security, now frustrated with the time it takes to walk through security, prop open the brand new gates so that they, and everyone behind them, can bypass the metal detectors. And you just need to take a few deep breaths and vent to the people who share your frustration when you are awoken before 8am on Rosh Hashanah morning because a congregant used the emergency after hours phone number to find out whether it’s too late to sign up for childcare. 

Each year this group of synagogue superheroes work sixty-hour weeks and sacrifice their own High Holy Day spiritual experience for the benefit of the community. Hidden in plain sight, they welcome you, hand you tickets at will call because you forgot to renew your membership in time, painstakingly plan and execute a meaningful and intentional program that is often referred to simply as “childcare”, check on the livestream chat to make sure no one is commenting that there is no sound, and track down a screwdriver and pliers to help extricate the black Manolo Blahnik that got wedged into the floor drain in the front entryway. 

Why do these jacks of all trades give up their evenings to proofread the yizkor book and the new year’s greetings book to make sure the names weren’t accidentally switched? (yes, that was a bingo square this year)  Why do they patiently field negative comments from members who can’t find the information they need on the website? (also a bingo square… The answer being, “because you went to .com rather than .org and weren’t actually on our site”) And why do they politely answer the same question dozens of times, even though it was also answered in the email that was sent the day prior? (that’s basically a free square – you won’t get through the High Holy Days without it happening daily)

Some do it for the little moments of spiritual rejuvenation – the looks on the faces of the returning preschool children as the rabbi blows the shofar on the front steps; the cathartic changing of the torahs from their everyday blues to their High Holy Day whites; the calm before the storm when the room dividers have been opened and a thousand chairs sit perfectly aligned in the still and silent hall; or the faces of college and post-college children returning home to the same sanctuary seats they have occupied their entire lives.

But it’s also possible that deep down, they selflessly endure the physical and emotional exhaustion because they know that they play an important role in something that is far bigger than we realize. For a few weeks each year, the cycles of despair, hugs, and ice cream are what it takes to ensure that synagogues and Jewish life as we know it will still be around twenty years from now.  As support for synagogues wanes, and Jewish leaders everywhere blue sky dream about the drastic revisioning that must be done to keep today’s Jewish youth interested and active, it is the synagogue staff that work behind the scenes to simply keep the ship afloat long enough for the dreams to become reality. 

Right now, in a post-pandemic moment when synagogues struggle to balance high tech with high touch as they engage their congregants, these unsung heroes are on the front lines. Although few realize it, they are the reason why you feel connected to your synagogue.  They send email invitations, reach out when you are ill, call on your birthday, and share pictures of simchas and celebrations on social media that make you smile. And on the High Holy Days, they are the ones literally holding up their phones to stream services when a power surge knocks out the internet and livestream equipment moments before Kol Nidre (also on this year’s bingo card).

But here’s the thing you might have missed on Yom Kippur: Feeling so exhausted they could barely stand, our synagogue superstars welcomed you with smiles on their faces as you entered, and then stood off to the side of the lobby as you headed home, watching you thank the Rabbi and Cantor for their sermons, solos, and for providing such a wonderful High Holy Day experience (which they very much deserved), without even a glance in their direction.  

Unfortunately, much like the Rams offensive linemen, if they did their job well, you didn’t even notice the role they played.  It was generally only when something went wrong that they heard from you, leading many synagogue staffers to head home to break their fast feeling worn out and defeated. And that’s a shame, because the number of praise-worthy tasks each of these team members performed to prepare and run your High Holy Day experience, not to mention the last-minute flurry of problem solving and triage that flew under your radar, is enough to… well… fill a bingo card.

So, let’s do something about that now!  Let’s raise a glass to our synagogue superheroes!

In addition to making a donation to the Rabbi’s or Cantor’s discretionary funds, thanking them for the thoughtful sermon and beautiful Hineni, make a donation to the general operating fund in recognition of a job well done by the entire team.

And while you’re at it, send an email to the staff members you noticed, and to those you didn’t even realize were there, thanking them for the countless hours that they put into making your Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur perfect.  You never know… you might just help them check off the last box on their bingo sheet – the one labeled “Received the most heartwarming thank you message. Made it all worth it.”

This article was previous posted as “Here’s to our Synagogue Superheroes”