Sunday, January 6, 2008

Anger Management

The UJC CEO posts a weekly pre-Shabbat message -- Howard's View. Typically very personal, maybe a form of therapy, to those of us inside UJC, they are usually the occasion for an exchange of e-mail commentary about the pedestrian self-aggrandizing tone. Our e-mails regularly use words like "pitiful," "insipid" and "ich."

On the occasion of the first Shabbat of 2008 (January 4, 2008), the View focused on Howard's Rabbinic learning about the futility of anger, urging all of his readers to abandon anger in the New Year. Surely those inside and outside UJC who have experienced the "Rieger Treatment" know that those who offer a different opinion from Howard's on any matter are scorned, isolated, ignored, ostracized and treated as poison. So often Howard's decisions about professional and lay leadership advancement are made strictly based on loyalty and unquestioning support. The results of Howard's "anger" are as simplistic as one would expect of a CPO who proudly flunked out of college twice or was it three times -- the creation of a class of sycophants who advance and another class of "everybody else." Those who worked with him in Pittsburgh remember a "boss" who demanded total loyalty, stubbornly pursued policies that were often ill-founded, and based his personnel decisions on those who implemented his policies without ever questioning them. When professionals in Pittsburgh of at UJC pushed back, they were met with anger and with threats that they were "clearly not on the team" -- the threats of a bully boy."

Anger management anyone?

No comments: