In Defense of Big "Boring" Midwestern Shuls

As a committed havurah jew i often consider how the other half live (or other 96.4% or whatever).
Generally we look across the aesthetic divide and thank our lucky stars that our communities have a vibrancy, egalitarianism, and intensity that we cherish. Every so often though I get excited about some aspect of mainstream, old skool, big synagogues. Reading A Ben Ross post on Jspot.org gave me one of those moments. He said:

More than once, even within Jewish Funds for Justice, I have been questioned about this so-called model of congregation-based organizing. Sure it can happen in pockets of Boston, maybe even in San Francisco and little glimmers in NY and LA, but what about the rest of America?

Well fire up the ovens and load the justice knishes, because we are going to have a lot of justice hungry congregants ready to chow down on this. On Monday night I witnessed 1500 hundred congregants from 40+ faith institutions, members of BREAD, a congregation-based community organizing organization, raise their voices, spirits, and red flags - releasing a holy call for justice.

One of the cool things about congregations is that if they are structured well they have lots and lots of social capital. The big shuls can have hundreds of congregants, even thousands. Sure they aren't all involved on any given day, but there are a lot of people who get involved in specific niches. If you have 1500 people in a shul and that shul commits to progressive values, they sure can make a difference in a town like columbus, a town like omaha, or a town like Augusta. I would love to see our leaders be leaders in local progressive movements. Our havurot to great work and are very involved in holy and progressive (hopefully redundant) work. But we have never built the engines and frameworks that the synagogues have and when they commit to justice the resources and systems can make a big difference awful quick.
Take Darfur, my brothers and sisters in the Reconstructionist movement realized there was a major need to bear witness. Pretty soon the main office developed resources for local congregations and they went out to over a hundred congregations and pretty soon a lot of people who didn't know janjaweed from gingerbread (like me) had called the president. At their best that's what congregations can do. I think its a useful thing to step back and appreciate how they are organized every so often. Sometimes I wish we were organized to make those sorts of asks and learn that quickly in our organizations.