Facing our Frogs: Temple Beth El Annual Meeting 2026

Tomorrow evening, as the sun sets, we will cross the threshold into Shavuot — z'man matan Torateinu, the season of the giving of our Torah. 

I find something serendipitous about gathering for our annual congregational meeting at this precise moment in the Jewish calendar. Annual meetings are their own kind of accounting, and to do this on the eve of our arrival at Sinai, on the night before we prepare to receive the Torah anew, is a beautiful confluence of events.

Our journey this year has been extraordinary. We've been working together to build a true community of belonging — what I called during my first Rosh Hashanah here a "caring with" community. We launched TBE Together, our small groups initiative, creating informal, low-stakes pathways to connection. Our Chesed Committee, brimming with varied initiatives, cared for countless people in need inside and outside of our congregation. Our TeeBees young families program was literally buzzing with vibrant, joyful activity – facilitating meaningful connections among participants of all ages and stages, as well as between them and TBE and Judaism writ large. Our Social Club has also been a big part of this effort: Taste of TBE brought sixty-eight congregants into eight different homes for an evening of food and genuine community; Sipping Under the Stars filled the sukkah; a second annual Karaoke Night reminded us, if we needed reminding, that this community knows how to have a good time. Adira and I hosted Shabbat dinners at our home throughout the year, and every single week, our growing Kiddush and Oneg sponsorship program ensures that Shabbat at TBE is the place to be.

We continued to advance our vision of building an empowered community — one in which Jewish life is owned by each and every person, not just led by clergy and staff but by the congregation itself. Congregants delivered divrei Torah and led davening. We offered different worship styles and formats, providing people with varying backgrounds and spiritual dispositions ways to access and take ownership of Jewish prayer. Religious school students leined Megillah on Purim and participated in services throughout the year. Our teens studied social justice and Jewish activism and then took a journey together to New York City, connecting Jewish memory to living moral responsibility. Our adult education offerings – including but not limited to our Essentials of Judaism class – brought prospective, newer, and more established members alike into a deeper relationship with serious Jewish learning.

And we pursued our vision of becoming what I call a prophetic community, a congregation committed to social justice. Our Tzedek Committee hosted Refugee Shabbat, Repro Shabbat, and a panel discussion about censorship and first amendment freedoms. Nearly forty congregants joined me on a Civil Rights journey through Georgia and Alabama, bearing witness to our history and exploring its enduring lessons for us today. I have been working hard with fellow clergy of many faiths in our area to rebuild the Interfaith Council of Southwestern Connecticut, deepening relationships across communal divides and partnering together to pursue a more just and loving society. And in partnership with Temple Sinai, we presented a multi-week spring Israel series — anchored by an afternoon with Roots/Judur/Shorashim, a bridge-building initiative between Israelis and Palestinians; a Scholar-in-Residence weekend with my dear friend Rabbi Arie Hasit; a congregational book read with Rabbi Arthur Green coming up in just a few weeks, and tomorrow evening, a Tikkun Leil Shavuot giving our community sustained, serious, honest space to wrestle with the hardest questions facing the Jewish people right now. 

None of this could be possible without the extraordinary and dedicated team of clergy, staff, and lay leaders with whom I am blessed to partner. And I want to specifically lift up our rabbinic intern, Abby Allen, who has been quietly building our TBE Together initiative from the ground up. She also launched and has been nurturing our growing 20s and 30s community, taught in our Essentials of Judaism class, supported our Tzedek Committee, trained our lay leaders in the craft of community organizing, and preached and taught and showed up with a generosity and seriousness of purpose that has made this congregation genuinely richer. I am so pleased to share with you tonight that Abby will be returning to TBE next year as part of the Resnick Fellowship at JTS, with a deepened and expanded role. In the year ahead, she will take on greater responsibility for our relational programming, our emerging families community, our High Holy Day experiences, and our justice organizing. I could not be more grateful for that partnership, or more excited about what we will build together.

There is of course always room to grow, new directions to explore, heights yet to climb. But this year has given me and us so many reasons to be proud, so much cause for celebration, such fertile ground to continue growing our sacred community.

All of that work flows from a vision of who we are and who we are called to be as a congregation. TBE has always been — and must always remain — what my predecessor Rabbi Hammerman once called “a synagogue with windows, and not walls.” It is precisely that vision — the vision of a community that is genuinely, courageously open inside and out, a congregation invested in deeds of lovingkindness and direct service, advocacy and systemic change, honoring the Divine image in every person we encounter, inside these walls as well as beyond them — that makes the challenges ahead not merely institutional problems to manage, but a sacred call to answer.

Indeed, moving forward, we face our share of challenges. And the temptation — the human temptation, and especially the organizational temptation — is to respond to hard problems the way we respond to most problems: with more initiatives. More campaigns. More committees. More effort. A tighter grip.

As some of you know, this spring, I have been participating in a program called Flourish, offered by the Institute for Jewish Spirituality — a semester-long curriculum in contemplative practice and mindful Jewish leadership.

I’ve been reflecting a lot on one practice I've been learning. It's called DROPS — an acronym for “Don't Resist Or Push, Soften.” The idea is simple, and for someone like me, counterintuitive. Even the notion of softening in the face of challenge probably strikes many of us as off, or wrong. Isn’t that passivity? Isn’t that just accepting the problem, rather than working to fix it? When we encounter difficulty, our instinct often is to work harder, grasp tighter, dig in more firmly. But acting on that instinct actually tends to make things worse. Imagine for a moment that you’re on the beach.You scoop up a handful of sand. The tighter you hold it, the more sand slips through your fingers. Similarly with so many of our challenges. What actually opens a path forward isn't force. Rather, it is abiding rather than acting; softening, loosening our grip, and opening ourselves up to possibility that enables us to notice what we may have missed.

The practice of softening calls to mind a famous midrash about the plague of frogs. When the Torah describes the frogs descending on Egypt, it uses an unexpected word: not tzfarde'im, the plural, but tzfarde'a — singular. One frog. The rabbis in the Talmud notice this and ask the obvious question: if there was only one frog, where did all the others come from? Their answer is astonishing. There was, they say, only one frog at first. But when a strange, giant frog emerged from the Nile, the Egyptians were startled and started striking at it. And every time they struck it, it multiplied. They hit one frog, which became two. They hit two frogs, which became four. Four, which became eight. And on and on until all of Egypt was teeming with warty amphibians. Striking the frogs created the plague.

What could the Egyptians have done instead? They could have been thoughtful and deliberate rather than reactive, and asked not just "how do we get rid of this frog" but "why is there a frog at all?" Because the answer to that question was available to them the entire time: there were enslaved people in their midst. Letting the Israelites go would have solved the frog problem — would have solved all of the plague problems — on a far deeper level and with far fewer consequences. But they were so busy striking at the symptom that they never saw the cause. 

Here at Temple Beth El, we know what our frogs are: Membership numbers that are stubbornly not where we’d like them to be. A financial model that is showing signs of real strain. A leadership pipeline that appears to be drying up.

But I want to invite us to resist the temptation to start whacking at those frogs, and instead ask ourselves where the frogs came from in the first place – to soften rather than strike, seek rather than smite, discern rather than destroy. 

Take membership, for example. Here, the natural response is to push harder — more programming, more outreach, a better website, a more compelling marketing campaign. Those efforts are important. But if we allow ourselves to soften rather than push, we might find that the challenge is not primarily about marketing – but rather, perhaps, that we have pathways into our building, but we don't always have clear pathways into our community; that we have existing networks and established friendships, but newcomers sometimes encounter those networks as walls rather than doors; that we have a dues structure that can communicate, however unintentionally, that membership is a transaction rather than a relationship. And so the hard question underneath the membership question is not: how do we get more people to sign on the dotted line? Rather, it's what kind of community we are asking people to join. Do we communicate that this is a place where they genuinely belong?

Our financial model is also under serious strain. And here, too, the reactive response is to strike: cut expenses, raise dues, run more fundraising campaigns. But underneath the financial challenge are deeper questions about what we are actually asking people to invest in, how and what and why we ask them to invest. People give generously to things they believe in and feel ownership over. If our financial model is experienced primarily as a transaction, we should not be surprised when people opt out of it the moment the transaction no longer seems worth it. The hard question underneath the financial question is: are we building a community that people feel genuine ownership over? Are we cultivating a culture of shared covenantal responsibility, or a culture of fee for service transaction?

And our leadership pipeline also calls for a less reactive approach. Instead of pushing to get more people to take part in governance, we might be better served by asking whether we are building an institution that develops people, or one that inadvertently exhausts them? Are we creating pathways for new voices to rise or are we, however unconsciously, reproducing the patterns that have brought us to this moment?

None of these are comfortable questions. But I am convinced that asking them — really sitting with them, being willing to hear what they reveal — is the only path to genuine renewal. Because the Egyptians' problem was never really the frogs. It was that they could not bring themselves to ask the question that would have led them to the real answer.

So what does softening actually look like for a congregation facing these kinds of challenges?

It means approaching our problems with curiosity before we reach for strategies. It means listening carefully to the people on the edges of this community, not just those already at its center. It means being willing to look honestly at our own culture and ask what we communicate to people who are not yet here. It means having the courage to let go of what is no longer serving us — programs, structures, habits, assumptions — and taking the risks necessary to move in different, untested, directions.

And most fundamentally: it means understanding that we cannot hold on to the institution we want to become by tightening our grip on what we have been. We cannot solve these problems by grasping too hard. We will only solve them through softening.

In just a few hours, we will gather right here for our Tikkun Leil Shavuot — staying up late in study, preparing ourselves to receive the Torah anew. The Hebrew word for receiving, kabbalah, is not a passive word. It implies active readiness. Deliberate openness. The Israelites could not have received the Torah at Sinai with folded arms, closed fists, or hardened hearts. They had to open their hands and hearts. They had to soften.

That is my prayer for us this evening, and my hope for the year ahead. That we approach what is hard with softness, with open hands and hearts. That we have the wisdom to ask the deeper questions and then honesty to sit with the uncomfortable answers. That we resist the reflex to strike — and trust, instead, in the extraordinary community that opens up when we soften.

On the evidence of everything we have built together this year, I know we can.

Chazak chazak v'nitchazek. My dear friends, yishar koach and mazal tov on a truly remarkable year. May we go from strength to strength, together.