A tension: It takes money to maintain a sacred community, but gatekeeping that community behind a financial barrier risks cutting that community off from those who need it most. No one wants to say “You can’t come to Shabbat services unless you pay us $X first”, but also if nobody ever gives any money to the shul, the shul is going to cease to exist. And even if communal leaders truly believe that all should be equally welcome regardless of financial contribution, when fraught questions of communal practice and priorities inevitably arise, it’s hard to resist the gravity of the people keeping the lights on. If you alienate the people keeping things going, eventually things are going to stop.
Another tension: Sacred communities are, at their best, deep networks of interpersonal relationships, but paying for things tends to turn them into commodities [a]. I am sure I am not alone in occasionally encountering people with the attitude “I’ve paid my annual membership dues, what else do you want from me? Just do the work I paid you for and deliver a Jewish Community™ to me”. Building durable community is, definitionally, communal work. It is the work of connecting with other people and committing to them over time. It’s not work that can be outsourced; you can’t just buy a communal network off the shelf. Writing a check doesn’t mean you can write off the rest of this work.
[a] From my completely-outside-the-pertinent-academic-field perspective, the most famous study on this is probably Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini’s “A Fine Is a Price” from the January, 2000, issue (Vol 29, No 1) of The Journal of Legal Studies. Gneezy and Rustichini looked at a number of daycare centers where parents were sometimes late in picking up their kids. In some of these daycares, they introduced fines for such tardy parents, and unexpectedly found that the rates of parent tardiness increased instead of decreasing. One of their proposed explanations was that introducing these fees changed the situation from one of social norms — “If you stay late to look after my kid after hours, that’s a thing you’re doing out of human kindness, which I shouldn’t take advantage of” — to one of market exchange — “The fee is the price you think is fair to look after my kid later in the day, so everything is good as long as I pay it”.
And also: People have limited time and energy. Community doesn’t always love you back. Pouring yourself endlessly into a shul is a good way to burn out catastrophically and never recover.
G-d sets the Temple salaries in this week’s portion [b]. We get an extended discussion of the things that G-d is granting to Aharon and his sons לְמׇשְׁחָה | ləmoshḥah | “as a dedicated portion” (Bəmidbar 18:8). This dedicated portion comes from the offerings of the Israelite community — we are, in a sense, learning how the charitable contributions of the congregation should be apportioned out into various budgetary line items like priestly salaries. It’s easy to skim over this, but I think it’s important that we get this in direct speech from G-d Voidself. Finding the balance between these tensions — relying on money without gatekeeping, stratification, and exclusion; contributing financially without collapsing community into commodity — isn’t a flyover task. It’s difficult, maybe even impossible. It takes explicit intervention from G-d to develop the system presented here, and I’ve yet to attend a synagogue where G-d was a member of the board.
[b] Definitely the main attraction in these chapters; I can’t think of anything else with dramatic narrative interest...
We are going to fumble. We are going to get it wrong. We have to keep trying to come together, buildingly, anyway.
[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]