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Not happening, I tell Brian Zimmerman three or four times, as I draft and redraft the e-mail.
Because he is a rabbi, I cannot use the language I use around the office.
But it's a prickly issue, this business of time. Give us your time. Don't just give us your money. Give us 18 hours a year.
Eighteen hours? When you drive four car pools and schedule vacation days to vacuum, it might as well be 1,800.
Yet that's the plan they are floating in our synagogue. Service hours, either inside or outside the temple, as a condition of membership.
Time. Dearer than money, as dear as blood.
The room bustles with friendly people, young and old, a cross-section of our Carrollwood congregation. The evening began with a potluck dinner. I don't cook, so I show up just for the business meeting.
I learn I am part of a pilot group that will test-market this service program. We'll get the bugs out, then take it to the full Congregation Beth Am next year. It will be controversial, yet its backers deem it heroic.
"Our goal is not to make more work, but to use our time more effectively and efficiently," says member Rosemary Brehm, who runs the meeting.
The plan seeks to strengthen us as a community while spreading the work around more evenly. I'm sure it's this way at most churches as well. The same-old faces fill the committees, set up the folding chairs, tend to the sick and work the phones.
People get burned out. The atmosphere grows stale.
Like airplane air.
Anger. It was my initial reaction and I struggle to understand its source. After all, these aren't bad people. Zimmerman is endlessly likable, going by the moniker "Rabbi Z." He does his job 24-7, despite the demands of a growing family.
Yet he is a rabbi and I am not. He heard a calling.
I'm a civilian.
I spend the days before and after Saturday's meeting listening - hard - to people in my life.
With or without religion, they are pulled and torn.
A co-worker who serves on his church board wakes up at 5 a.m. to get it all done. The Bucs are his one indulgence, and he missed a meeting when they went into overtime against New Orleans. It's clear to me that he was wracked with guilt.
A single mother goes to night school, and catches flak because she's not home enough with her son. Actually, I know two single mothers in that situation.
I have another friend with four kids and no paid job. Other mothers leave their kids at her house, assuming she has all the time in the world to care for them.
And on, and on.
Read the homeowner association newsletter. If you're not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Part of the problem! Despite paying my dues and taking in my trash cans.
Try to avoid helping out at your child's school. Or working the concession stand at Little League. Or joining the company-sponsored Paint Your Heart Out.
Everybody wants a piece of you.
I listen to Rabbi Z explain his thinking:
People say the synagogue is after your money. Well, here's our answer. We don't just want your money.
"It's about ownership," he says. "It's like the difference between renting an apartment and owning a home."
This is very much a committee effort, although Rabbi Z has given it a human face.
He's seeking, not just to get the work done, but to establish human connections among people who treat this place like spiritual fast food.
People should know each other, he says. When they are in the hospital, they should have visitors from the synagogue - not just the rabbi and cantor, who are paid to be there.
This is a season when Jews everywhere are asked to re-examine their priorities.
But the rabbi insists, "This is not about guilt. It's about what do communities do for each other, what do Jews do for each other."
When the meeting is over, and I've signed up for my 18 hours (after asking niggling questions about what counts and who keeps track), I try to explain my reservations.
The problem, I tell him, is that I already do as much as I choose to do. Any more is, by definition, compulsory. Taking my time is worse than taking my money. I can get money off a credit card. Time is finite.
And it's not as if I never volunteer. I often do, although not in the synagogue. I enjoy it because it is voluntary. I am there by choice, and I like how that feels.
Perhaps, I tell Rabbi Z, people stay away from church and synagogue because they are ambivalent about religion. They joined for their children, or to appease their parents. They exist on the margins because that's where they want to be.
Maybe the real problem is a fundamental lack of faith. This last notion both intrigues the rabbi and saddens him.
We do and we do. Much of what we do is noble and necessary. We fall to our beds exhausted from so much doing.
But it's an empty sleep, because we know no peace.