Reflections at 35,000 Feet

On the airplane heading home from San Francisco...

So many wonderful blog posts below this one, people commenting on what they learned and saw during the convention. I can't add much more, except to say that sharing this experience with my colleagues and friends was truly wonderful.

So looking ahead, what do I wish for a future CCAR Convention?

I wish for more time to spend merely interacting with colleagues, meeting them in new ways. I attended as many sessions as I could, and felt that the time spent chatting might have been somewhat more valuable. Can we create a way to do this so that we don't feel a need to skip out on sessions to hold these conversations?

I had a remarkable accidental inter-generational lunch - sharing a meal with colleagues who've been rabbis far longer than I have. It's not often that we interact in that way. I appreciated it and found it to be such a nice way to move outside my own friend-circle. Can we find a way to connect us through personal interactions that we might never have made?

Many of my blogging colleagues here have noted that they attended the sessions on digital media. I think it's time for us to move the conversation  beyond how-to and really start to talk about the community/engagement ideas that the online world affords us, and also the ethical and personal dilemmas that arise through use of this media. I think it's time to take it to the next level, I think it's time to open the discussion on what it really means to connect in this way that might seem new to us as rabbis but isn't so new any more to those that we serve. How can we continue this conversation and how can our future conventions offer us a way to engage ourselves in these tools while also allowing us to grow within them?

Just a few thoughts as I wend my way back home....