Wednesday, October 23, 2013

They Will Take us to the Next Level
Ch. 1: Getting to Know Our Students - Really.

I received an interesting e-mail this morning from my friend, colleague and teacher, Evie Rotstein. Evie is the Director of the New York School of Education at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religious in New York. She wanted to invite her students to participate in a national conversation around Jewish education. So she asked a few of the professors to assign reflection papers and asked me to post a few of them here. I will try to post a few each week and we will also post the link to JEDLAB on Facebook and to #jedlab and #jed21 on Twitter. PLEASE COMMENT!! These are some of the people who will be figuring out what's next and what;s vital about Jewish living and Learning in the coming decades. Please join in their education, and more importantly let them see how they are adding to ours.

Remember, from our students we learn most of all!

Our first posting is from Sarah Marion.

Ira


Getting to Know Our Students - Really.

By Sarah Marion

Last week, I prepared and delivered a presentation for my Human Development class on systems theory and its role in educational contexts. I wanted to engage the class in a concrete discussion regarding the various systems our learners belong to, and the ways these systems might manifest in the classroom environment. 

I decided to facilitate an activity in which my classmates would receive a series of learner “profiles” and using the profiles, be asked to consider (a) which system(s) their learners belonged to, (b) how such systems might manifest in the religious school environment, and (c) the ways in which we might respond or react to such manifestations. For example, if student x’s family system includes a live-in grandparent, student x might connect especially well to lessons and values on honoring/caring for the elderly, and thus, a teacher might ask student x to deliver a presentation on that same topic.

In preparing for this presentation, my initial intention was to re-construct “real life” profiles of students I have encountered over the years as a religious school teacher in order to make the activity as realistic and relevant as possible. I wanted my profiles to be comprehensive, and thus include information such as family origin, current family characteristics and dynamics, student and family interests and activities, and more. 


But as I thought of different students from various religious school classes I have taught, I realized how little I actually knew about my learners. I couldn’t fill in all of this information, because I had never learned it. I had known who my students were inside the classroom, but I realized I had little or no idea who they were outside the classroom. Accordingly, I ended up constructing “fictional” profiles for my presentation. For example:
Ryan, who is in 8th grade, was adopted from Russia when he was three. He lives with his two moms, and his younger sister, Lucy, who was adopted from South Korea. Recently, Lucy was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. Ryan enjoys swimming, and competes on the swim team at the JCC. Ryan’s mom, Kathy, runs a small after school day-care program in their house, and Ryan sometimes helps out with his mom’s business. Ryan’s other mom, Nancy, was raised Protestant and is involved in both her synagogue and church communities.
While writing these fictional profiles accomplished my goals for the presentation, I began contemplating the larger issue of how and why I didn’t fully know the systemic attributes of my students. I wondered if my experience was unique – and realized it probably wasn’t. I wondered - do part-time religious school teachers truly have the time and resources to get to know their students in the fullest sense? What is missed – and what are the consequences - when teachers are not aware of the various systems their learners belong to? 

Perhaps we miss opportunities to better engage and integrate our students into the learning process, perhaps we miss opportunities to connect the material to our students’ lives, perhaps we miss opportunities to inspire students to take ownership of their own learning, perhaps we make incorrect assumptions and hypotheses about who our students are. (For example, the teacher who is aware of student x’s family system will not miss the opportunity to integrate and connect this student’s experience of living with an aging grandparent into a class lesson on honoring the elderly). Therefore, the critical question becomes: how can we, as Jewish leaders and professional educators, inspire and assist our teachers in becoming fully aware of all the systems that impact our learners when they enter our classrooms?

As community-based and value-driven structures and institutions, synagogues are perhaps better equipped for and have more investment in promoting a holistic understanding of learners, in comparison to secular schools. I have been pondering some concrete, realistic ways in which synagogues and Jewish leaders can help religious school teachers become aware of the various systems their students belong to, in order to better understand their learners’ diverse needs and identities.

One idea I have stems from an Education Team meeting I attended a few years ago while working as a full-time youth educator at Temple Beth Elohim in Wellesley, MA. At this meeting, the team discussed the idea of a synagogue-based “Jewish Journey Project” in order to better “track” our students and connect them to the synagogue in meaningful ways. 


I’m not sure if this project ever fully came to fruition (as I left for rabbinical school when the project was in its first stages) but I remember the basic premise. Each student who entered the religious school would receive a Jewish journey advisor who would interview the student and his or her family in order to gather as much information about the student as possible. Interview questions would include family history, demographics, student interests and aspirations, past and current student and family involvement in temple life, etc. This information would then be entered into a database accessible to clergy, synagogue professionals, and other advisors. 

Student profiles would be updated regularly as students matured and became more or less involved in synagogue or other activities, as family dynamics shifted and changed, etc. Ideally, students would meet with their advisor every year to ensure that database information is current and up to date. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, synagogue professionals (i.e. clergy, education director) would share pertinent and relevant database information with religious school teachers.

Of course, this model is quite aspirational and might have some problems in terms of confidentiality. But it prompts us to consider how synagogues can best embody “whole person” learning communities, in which students and teachers are compelled to consider, integrate, connect, and explore the various facets of life that affect learning.






Sarah Marion is a rabbinic/education student at HUC-JIR's New York campus. She grew up in Westchester, NY and graduated from Brandeis University with bachelor's degrees in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies and Women's and Gender Studies. Prior to entering rabbinical school Sarah worked as a  youth educator in Boston, and has spent several summers at the URJ's Eisner and Crane Lake Camps, as a counselor and unit head. She is currently interning at Larchmont Temple in Larchmont, NY.    


Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Marjorie Ingall: Ethical Parenting is Essential

So another reprint. A vital reprint. From Tablet Magazine - one of the best Jewish places on the web. Get their regular e-mail updates. Now. -- Ira


Ethical Parenting Is More Than Possible. It’s Essential, for Parents and Children Alike.

Don’t break the rules just to help your kids get ahead. Teach them to be mensches by setting an example with your own behavior.

By Marjorie Ingall

New York magazine ran an article by Lisa Miller last week called “Ethical Parenting.” At first I thought it was going to be a serious piece about the tough choices we parents have to make to raise mensches. Instead, it was a self-justifying piece of entitled crap wrapped up in fake hand-wringing. The central question: Can you be a decent human being and a parent at the same time? Miller’s answer—spoiler alert—is no. Let me quote some of Miller’s assertions so you can see why I’m drooling in fury on my keyboard right now.

“Parenthood, like war, is a state in which it’s impossible to be moral.”

“Always be kind and considerate of others, except in those cases where consideration impedes your own self-interest or convenience. Then, take care of yourself.”

“Parenthood means you cannot possibly behave as though society’s rules and norms apply equally to all.”

Shut up.

Now, New York magazine frequently makes me want to move into a Unabomber cabin in the woods. (Ditto the New York Times’s T Magazine, which I’m pretty sure did a feature on artisanal bespoke Unabomber cabins made by Bushwickians with luxuriant civet-conditioned beards.) But there’s always been just enough of a nudge-nudge, wink-wink element to the publication’s portrayals of wilding teens, entitled hedge-funders, and the next hot neighborhood you already couldn’t afford. We were supposed to be horrified by these caricatures of human beings; we normal people were actually all in it together, gaping at those who were destroying society. This piece seems to start in a homologous us-vs.-them vein, pretending to offer up “the corrupt child-rearing customs … of the aggressively rising class: the mother who, according to Urban Baby legend, slept with the admissions officer (with her husband’s consent!) to get her child into the Ivy League, or the one who sued an Upper East Side preschool for insufficiently preparing her 4-year-old for a private-school test,” but then it goes on to argue that the rest of us are pretty similar. “Schadenfreude elides a more difficult existential truth, which is that ever since Noah installed his own three sons upon the ark and left the rest of the world to drown, protecting and privileging one’s own kids at the expense of other people has been the name of the game. It’s what parents do.”

No, it’s not. And you did not just compare giving a fake address to get into a better public school district, or sending a kid to school with lice so that she won’t miss a state standardized test, to the Noah story. Let’s review: God ordered Noah to build an ark because the earth was full of wicked people. The people who deliberately lie and cheat so their kids can get ahead are the wicked people. Noah’s ark-building impulse did not come from a realization that there’d be less competition for Harvard if all the other teenagers drowned.

Please go to the original article on Tablet to read the rest of the article! It is worth it. 
(Fair usage issues prevent me from reproducing the entire article!)


Marjorie Ingall, a Life & Religion columnist for Tablet Magazine, is the author of The Field Guide to North American Males and the co-author of Hungry.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Pew 2.0: Moneyball Judaism

At this rate, I am not sure I will have new wisdom to add to the blogosphere about the Pew Report. Today I read two responses that I think are critical going forward. I will paraphrase the first from the Forward. They recognize the negatives in the report, but are emphasizing the datum that 94% responded that they are proud to be Jewish and are looking for stories about people in that demographic and their Jewish pride. Well done.

The second arrived via eJewishPhilanthropy.com (are any of you still not reading that?) and I reprint it in its entirety below. As always, I urge you to make comments on the eJP site to be part of the larger conversation!


Moneyball Judaism: We’re Not Selling Jeans Here
If an organization wants to argue that it is effective, it must demonstrate that participating with their organization results in an increase of measurable Jewish behaviors that build positive momentum towards a lifetime of Jewish living once the participant is no longer involved with their organization.
by Rabbi Joshua Rabin

My favorite summer pastime is baseball. Every day, I watch baseball, read about baseball, and pray that my beloved Baltimore Orioles will eventually win the World Series (hey, a guy can dream). However, while it has been years since I gave up my dream of ever playing in the major leagues, I still try, every day, to find ways to follow baseball more intelligently so that I might better understand what it takes for a player or a team to be successful. Without question, the single thing that allows me to better understand pathways to baseball success is sabermetrics, unofficially known as Moneyball.”

Moneyball, written by Michael Lewis, tells the story of the Oakland Athletics and their General Manager, Billy Beane, and the strategies Beane employs to position the A’s, with a relatively low payroll, to routinely make the playoffs over other teams with far deeper cash reserves. Beane’s strategies were taken from the sabermetric playbook, where objective data is used to measure baseball performance as a means of helping baseball professionals make their decisions based on evidence, rather than gut instincts. Sabermetrics currently impacts all major sports, Hollywood, and even politics, where Peter Orszag and John Bridgeland recently wrote an article in the The Atlantic Monthly asking, “Can the government play Moneyball?.”

I thought a great deal about Moneyball when I read the results and subsequent reactions to the Pew Forum’s recent report, A Portrait of Jewish Americans. On the one hand, I was not surprised to see so many bemoan the overall negative picture the survey paints about the current state of Judaism in America, articularly amongst liberal Judaism. At the same time, I find it ironic that, as a community, we pay far less attention to the data that helps tell us what works than we do the data that tells us what we are doing wrong.

Over the past several months, I read debates about the relative merits of day school versus congregational schools, in-reach versus outreach, whether denominations have a future in Judaism, and a myriad of other big questions that can affect our community’s strategy for taking ownership of our future. However, in most cases, when I read these debates, or even share my own opinion on a question, I see the opinions of myself and others justified by an over-abundance of personal perspective, and a dearth of objective data.

The consequence of this is that the majority of conventional wisdom and conversations in the Jewish community are driven by what we believe to be true, rather than what concrete evidence we can offer to support our claims, in spite of the fact that we do have data that paints a picture of what works in creating meaningful, lasting Jewish experiences. As a result, as I watched the baseball playoffs, and thought about the implications of the Pew Forum’s survey, I wondered what it would take for the Jewish Community to play “Moneyball Judaism.”

Of course, we have organizations in the Jewish Community promoting data-driven decision-making, such as Measuring Success and J-Data, and researchers who use qualitative and quantitative data to measure emerging trends, such as Professors Steven M. Cohen and Leonard Saxe. However, producing data is the easy piece of the puzzle; the hard part is listening to what the data tells us. The Jewish Community lacks a culture that collectively promotes the essential principle behind Moneyball, namely that it matters, “less how much money you have than how well you spend it.”

When you have limited money, finite resources, and a competitive marketplace, you will succeed only through a shrewd understanding of how the marketplace based on objective data, which, if used properly, will challenge conventional wisdom and results in leaner, meaner pathways to success.
By extension, if the Jewish Community is to transform our vicious cycles into virtuous cycles, we must understand how to judge the relative value of organizations and strategies, and recognize our own fallibility as human beings who always bring our assumptions to the big Jewish questions of the day. While I am not a statistician, nor a sabermatician, I would like to suggest three principles as a starting point of enacting a strategy of Moneyball Judaism, each of which apply a major principle of sabermetrics to our Jewish Community:
  1. What matters most is getting on-base: One of the statistics deemed critical by sabermetrics in baseball is On-Base Percentage, otherwise known as OBP. The basic assumption behind the OBP is that getting on-base is more valuable than making an out, one of the reasons why Billy Beane hates when baseball players are asked to bunt, as bunting generally involves a team voluntarily relinquishing one of three precious outs to the other team. In contrast, even if a player draws a walk instead of getting a base hit, each of these acts are of similar value, since drawing a walk also gets the player on base (as an aside, this is the reason why Jonah Hill’s character in the movie Moneyball states several times that current New York Yankee, Kevin Youkilis, is the “Greek god of walks”). Ultimately, moving a player across the diamond is a skill of paramount importance when judging a player’s effectiveness.

    The value of OBP translates into the first principle of Moneyball Judaism, which is that an effective organization increases overall Jewish involvement. If an organization wants to argue that it is effective, it must demonstrate that participating with their organization results in an increase of measurable Jewish behaviors that build positive momentum towards a lifetime of Jewish living once the participant is no longer involved with their organization. If an organization brings participants together for an intensive experience, yet those participants do not or cannot independently engage in Jewish life once the program concludes, it would be difficult to argue that the organization’s program was effective at advancing that individual person’s Jewish involvement. By extension, if we want to compare organizations with one another, we should be able to compare how each succeeds, or fails, at getting Jewish people “on base.” We may not be able to judge the relative value of each act of Jewish living, but we can agree the more active your Jewish life, the more likely you are to be active your entire life.
  2. Measure Best and Worst-Case Scenarios: Before he became famous for predicting the results of political elections, Nate Silver was a baseball writer for Baseball Prospectus, a publication that uses sabermetric analysis to create statistical models to measure all aspects of a baseball player’s performance. Silver’s main contribution to this publication was a statistic called PECOTA, which stands for Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test and was named for former journeyman infielder Bill Pecota. Essentially, PECOTA allows us to measure the best-case, worst-case, and most-likely scenarios of a player’s performance. While you cannot know how a player will perform before choosing to draft him or sign him to a multi-million dollar contract, you can measure the probability of a player being a tremendous success, or have a sense of that player’s value even if they never fulfill their maximum potential.

    The principle behind PECOTA provides a model for thinking about how to judge one Jewish decision versus another. Every Jewish organization showers us with their success stories, individuals for whom participating in their program changed the entire trajectory of their Jewish life. However, we need to ask whether or not those success stories are a typical result, or a statistical aberration. Many organizations provide data about the portrait of their program’s alumni, and how much those alumni engage in Jewish life years after their participation in the program. Based on the data, we can create composite pictures of the best-case, worst-case, and most likely scenarios for how a person’s Jewish life will be impacted by that organization. If a program or organization claims substantial impact, yet the most likely scenario is a mediocre impact, it would be reasonable to conclude that this organization is not a worthy investment.
  3. We’re not selling jeans here” (Or- Value impact over image): Famously, Michael Lewis writes in Moneyball that when scouts at the Oakland Athletics would ignore statistical performance and state that a prospect “has a great body,” Billy Beane would respond “We’re not selling jeans here,” implying that the goal of a successful baseball team is to find players who produce the needed impact, not project a desired image. We might want a certain conclusion to be true, but if the data does not back it up, we need to consider a change in strategy.

    Not surprisingly, this final principle is key for own understanding of what a “Moneyball Judaism” should mean. When we comment upon and promote individual organizations and modes of Jewish engagement, we need to ask ourselves whether or not we are searching for impact, or whether we are “selling jeans,” valuing image over impact. On paper, if one organization closes, and another one receives a $10 million donation, our typical reaction is to assume that the former organization is a failure, while the latter is a success. However, at the moment, we have limited knowledge as to whether or not the organization flush with cash is successful because they have the right members on their Advisory Board, the right marketing strategy, or simply the right aura.

    While Moneyball may be about the numbers, ultimately we reap the benefits of Moneyball when we use data to recognize what works, what doesn’t, and where our own biases hold us back from seeing the difference between the two. Sometimes, the data might confirm what our collective wisdom suggests, and while other items it might challenge a well-established belief. In either case, the more willing we are to use data to identify effective strategies, the more likely we are to pursue the strategies that lead to maximum success.
In his introduction to The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver writes that, “we must think differently about our ideas – and how to test them. We must think more carefully about the assumptions and beliefs that we bring to a problem.” At the present time, the Jewish Community faces a variety of challenges on a number of fronts, yet we cannot stem the tide of declines in almost every measure of Jewish participation unless we are willing to challenge the way we make decisions, analyze the assumptions behind our current strategies, and learn how to ask the right questions about judging talent, value, and performance. Moneyball sparked a movement of thinkers in sports, politics, and business who saw the importance of being smarter about how we determine what assets are valuable in a market with limited resources and fierce competition. If the Jewish Community wants to succeed in stemming the tide of declining involvement, then we must have the courage to embrace “Moneyball Judaism,” and do the same.

Rabbi Joshua Rabin is the Rabbi-in-Residence of the Schechter School of Long Island. You can read more of his writings at joshuarabin.com

Friday, October 4, 2013

The Pew Data And Us

Welcome back to the Next Level. I am afraid that a month of chagim and opening school make blogging in Tishrei a real challenge. This week has been dominated (outside the cocoons of my school and family) by the government shutdown and the Pew Report. I expect to have something to say about the report later this month (about the shutdown I can only hope someone we have elected will be adults and solve the impasse). This post from eJewishPhilanthropy crossed my desk and struck me as one of the best early pieces on the report. (BTW, the full 212 page report is here.)

Shall we discuss it?

Shabbat shalom,

Ira




The Pew Data And Us
by Daniel S. Horwitz

For the early classical Reform Jews who settled in this country, the broad assimilation (71% intermarriage rate amongst non-Orthodox Jews) reflected in the recently released Pew survey data would be seen as amazing. “You mean the non-Jews are marrying us willingly, and people are referring to Judeo-Christian values? What a success! We’ve finally made it!”

The Pew data is truly fascinating. While it should come as no surprise that due to historically high rates of intermarriage there are now more individuals who identify as Jewish in some way (think about it – there are now that many more households containing a Jewish person), the more telling data makes it clear that “identity” doesn’t inherently link to practice or active involvement as part of the Jewish community (the fact that over 30% of those surveyed indicated they felt that being Jewish and believing in Jesus are not mutually exclusive in their minds is particularly indicative of this point).

The big issue in my mind is that outside of a construct of commandedness (an area where the overwhelming majority of American Jews reside), we in the liberal Jewish community have failed to meaningfully express an appropriate answer to that most fundamental of questions: “Why be Jewish?”

When we say that we want people to be Jewish, what do we really mean?

Why is it so important to us to continue existing as a nation / faith / culture?

In liberal Judaism today, one of the favorite answers is “Tikkun Olam” – “repairing the world.” But the answer can’t simply be Tikkun Olam. Many faiths hold “repairing the world” – often viewed through a social justice and charitable lens – as a value. Frankly, many Americans who do not identify with a faith group share this value and view it as a secular humanistic one.

So how do we respond to the question “Why be Jewish?”

“Because it’s tradition” as an answer will fail.

“Because of the Holocaust” as an answer will fail.

“Because we have a Jewish State” as an answer will fail.

“Because who are you to break the chain” and other guilt-ridden answers will fail.

Not only do we often struggle to find the right words to answer what theoretically should be a very simple question, but what the Pew survey (and many of the already drafted responses from interested parties) also makes clear is that ultimately, we have a complete inability in the liberal Jewish world to define what “success” looks like.

Here is where our Orthodox brethren arguably have it easier. Living within the context of commandedness implies that producing offspring who lead mitzvah-observant lives is the ultimate measure of a parent’s success in transmitting Jewish identity, literacy and practice to their children. In the liberal Jewish community, each person often measures success differently, as we (arguably, overly) value the experience of the individual, and encourage people to learn, explore, and take on practices that are meaningful to them. Thus, as a “community” (and whether or not there really exists, or can exist, a centralized, idealized, “Jewish community” is another question in and of itself), it’s near impossible to determine whether or not our collective efforts have been successful, due to a lack of definition as to what success itself looks like.

What constitutes “success”?

Let’s look at a hypothetical that helps elucidate this issue.

There is an independent Jewish prayer community that exists in Manhattan, made up largely of young Jewish adults in their 20s. Its members are both well educated and very insular. They celebrate Shabbat and holidays together, in many ways function as a chavurah, give charitably (but only to the minyan itself), and have a general disdain for the Federation system, Synagogues, Day Schools, Jewish Summer Camps and any other mainstream Jewish institution (despite often being products of some or all of these institutions themselves), due to rejecting what they perceive as “pay to pray” and “pay to play” models.

Is the prayer community itself, and the members who comprise it, a Jewish communal success? Why or why not?

What if it existed in a small mid-western town as opposed to a major city? What if its members’ average age was 65? Would such factors make a difference in determining whether or not it was deemed a “success”?

Would the “organized” Jewish community even know that they exist?

It’s time to stop worrying and start rejoicing.

Rabbi Brad Artson is quoted in the Forward (10/1/13) as saying that for the Conservative movement, while affiliation numbers may be down, his focus is on enhancing quality. His message should be universally accepted amongst liberal Jews of all (or no) denominations.

Being Jewish can add meaning to life. Being Jewish can add joy to life. Being Jewish can provide you with the chance to be part of a community of shared purpose, support, and annual rhythm. And, there are other faith (and secular) groups that can do that too. Truly. Being Jewish isn’t for everyone – even if you were born Jewish. If Judaism doesn’t add meaning to your life, and the Jewish community is one that you aren’t particularly keen on being a part of, guess what?

It’s okay.

We should strive to make the liberal Jewish community one that is full of substance, meaning, learning, warmth and above all, joy. Rather than trying to retain Jews using our strong history of tradition and (unfortunately) guilt, we should strive to live our lives as individuals and as communities in such a way that exemplifies how being Jewish is something so wonderful and joyous that if you were raised in a Jewish home that was actively part of a Jewish community, you couldn’t imagine raising your children any other way; and if you were raised in a Jewish home that was not actively part of a Jewish community, that you wish you had been, and seek to create one for your own family.

There is no universal definition of success. There is no one-size-fits-all answer to “Why be Jewish?” – the answer will be different, and intensely personal, for each individual. All we can do is live our lives authentically, with purpose and with joy, and make sure that the word is out – and that our actions reflect our deeply held value – that all are welcome to join us.


Daniel S. Horwitz is the Rabbi and Director of Immersive Learning at Moishe House.

Monday, September 16, 2013

For the sin we have committed...

Like most  of my colleagues, the past month has been way to busy with getting ready for the new school year and High Holy Days to indulge in things like blogging. Then Michael Felberbaum, one of my former students (who also was a wonderful madrikh and later a teacher in our school for several years) came up to me on Yom Kippur afternoon to tell me he enjoys my blog but there has not been much to read lately. It gave me a lift in the midst of a long day of prayer, teaching and fasting. Still busy, but not too busy to Share Daniel Gordis' latest blog post from the Jerusalem post. A link to the original and his comments page are at the end. As usual, he nails it! 

See you in the sukkah!

Ira



For the sin we have committed by imagining that Jewish life as we know it could survive without a Jewish state, and for the sin we have committed by being certain that it could not.

For the sin we have committed in believing that every problem has a solution, and for the sin we have committed in failing to try harder to find solutions no matter how elusive.

For the sin we have committed in not loving the Jewish state with sufficient passion, and for the sin we have committed in not being sufficiently ashamed of its shortcomings.

For the sin we have committed in electing consecutive leaders who fail to communicate even a semblance of a vision of how Israel should be both Jewish and democratic, and for the sin we have committed in silencing or ignoring the few brave souls who have sought to share with us their own visions of what a Jewish state can and should be.

For the sin we have committed in believing that only an Israel at peace is worthy of our pride, and for the sin we have committed in failing to engender any semblance of a national conversation about what sort of peace has any genuine chance of taking root.

For the sin we have committed by failing to acknowledge the horrid costs that keeping ourselves safe often exacts from those living under us, and for the sin we have committed by failing to see the costs it exacts from our own children, no less.

For the sin we have committed in failing to recognize our own obligation to speak out in Israel's defense, and for the sin we have committed in allowing that defense to become mean-spirited and hurtful.

For the sin we have committed by forgetting that it is mostly thanks to secular Jews that we built and still have a state, and for the sin we have committed by ignoring the fact that, too often, those same Jews are struggling to pass on to their children a passionate commitment to Israel's future.

For the sin we committed in taking pride in Israel's social and economic equality protests without actually joining them on the streets, and for the sin we have committed by failing to honestly admit there was little Jewish content to those protests and that many of its leaders now live abroad.

For the sin we have committed by failing to work harder to stop Jewish violence against non-Jews in our midst, and for the sin we have committed by failing to remember that among the Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria are some of the most decent human beings and passionate Zionists anywhere.

For the sin we have committed by pretending that there's anything innately Jewish about semiconductors, and for the sin we have all committed, wherever we live, by creating one of the most Jewishly illiterate generations of young people that our people has ever known.

For the sin we have committed by teaching our young people that a life lived in conversation with only Jewish sources is sufficient, and for the sin we have committed by teaching others that they could fashion meaningful Jewish lives without that conversation.

For the sin we have committed in electing as Israel's religious leaders men who are not Zionists, who have virtually no secular education and whose vision of Judaism speaks to almost no one in the Jewish state, and for the sin we have committed in picking precisely the wrong places to try to break that monopoly.

For the sin we have committed in creating a state out of the ashes of the Holocaust while allowing its survivors to languish in abject poverty, and for the sin we have committed in letting our state, a haven for those with nowhere else to go, become a haven for those who traffic in powerless women.

For the sin we have committed by the folly of far too porous borders, and for the sin we have committed in our treatment of those to whom we've allowed entry.

For the sin we have committed in refusing to hear the most powerful Jewish critiques of what Israel has become, and for the sin we have committed in denying that it is our enemies' self-destructive and hate-driven choices that consign them to the lives they live.

For the sin we have committed in belittling the Jewish or moral seriousness of those who have crafted Jewish lives different from our own, and for the sin we have committed in pretending that Jewish life without profound Jewish knowledge and a deep-seated sense of obligation pulsing through its core can prevail.

For the sin we have committed by not bewailing the moral corruption too prevalent in our society, and for the sin we have committed by not taking sufficient pride in Israel's deep-seated and abiding decency.

For the sin we have committed in not seeing the redemption of the Jewish people that is unfolding in the Jewish state, and for the sin we have committed by forgetting that we've only just begun.

For these, and for many more, may we find forgiveness, and may we grant forgiveness.

Grant us the capacity for unbounded pride coupled with the embrace of self-critique, satisfaction in what we've wrought coupled with a drive to do even better. And this year, in this time of uncertainty, in this region newly ablaze, enable us to keep what was always the primary promise that Zionism made to the Jewish people: Help us keep ourselves, and especially our children, safe.

Gmar chatima tovah.


The original Jerusalem post column can be read here.

Comments and reactions can be posted here



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Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Waiting for Superman: New CAJE, Old Battle

Another great piece from eJewishPhilantrhopy! Sadly NewCAJE comes when I serve at Eisner Camp, so I was not able to be there. Sounds like it was excellent. I truly appreciate and agree with David Steiner's conclusion, and would have loved to have been in the room! Thoughts?


--Ira


by David Steiner

Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates invention. It shocks us out of sheep-like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving … conflict is a sine qua non of reflection and ingenuity.
John Dewey


The highlight of NewCAJE #4 held at Nichols College, just west of Boston, was not the exemplary learning or rich celebrations of Jewish culture. It was the “Rumble in the Jungle,” the debate about the nature of Jewish education for the 21st century, which was set up like the famous heavyweight championship fight between Mohammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire and played out like the battle of the Mitnagdim and the Hassidim.

Dr. David Bryfman
In one corner, there was Dr. David Bryfman, Director of the New Center for Collaborative Leadership at the Jewish Education Project in New York, and, in the other was Rabbi Danny Lehmann, President of Hebrew College of Boston. The room was packed, the stakes were high and, in place of a referee, Rabbi Cherie Koller-Fox moderated. There were no KO’s, but the crowd, passing judgment with the SMS app on their smart phones, gave a lean victory to Dr. Bryfman with the cellular poll asking which speaker would be most accepted by the audience member’s congregation or school board.

Rabbi Danny Lehmann
What were the stakes? The debate was set up to address the future of Jewish education. How important is Jewish literacy to the 21st century learner? What is the importance of Judaic text-based education in experiential learning? What is the importance of recreation (a sense of fun and belonging) in a Jewish education context? These were the questions, and if you removed references to the 21st century and experiential education, you might just think you were transported back to the era of apostasy following the false messiahs of the 17th and 18th centuries.

Standing in for the Hasidim was Dr. Bryfman, a new Baal Shem Tov, hoping to convince the crowd that the individual experience of a child, at the center of Jewish education, is best served with “positive Jewish experiences,” while his opponent, the Mitnaged, standing in for the Gra, Rabbi Danny Lehmann took the position that positive experiences are not a substitute for engagement with Jewish texts, which is at the center of Judaism.

To help decide whose vision of Jewish education is more appropriate for the 21st century, this writer turns back to the first century of the Common Era when a similar battle was being waged. In preparation for the Jewish people’s departure from their home turf in Roman occupied Palestine, Rabbi Tarfon and Rabbi Akiva argued the question: “Which is greater, education or action?” Tarfon insisted on experience, while Akiva defended learning. In the end, the rest of the rabbis settled the dispute by saying: “Education is greater because it leads to [proper] action.” Notice that education comes first, and, more importantly, not all action is proper.

In making his case, Dr. Bryfman delivered a body blow with an anecdote. He told the story of a woman who remembered the food she ate to break her fast on Tisha B’Av over two decades earlier at a Jewish summer camp. His point, we remember and identify with the world we experience. But Rabbi Lehmann, the southpaw, came back with an upper cut by lamenting the lack of substance and asking what is the benefit of an identity which is hallow? He asked why should we remain Jewish if it doesn’t stand for anything. Essentially, he was saying that there are many identities out there, and educators help to define Jewishness so young Jews will choose our identity.

Experiential education, John Dewey’s brainchild, was the centerpiece of the New CAJE debate, but there was a distinctly non-Dewey feeling in the air. Experience was being touted by Dr. Bryfman as a panacea for the ills of a religious school system that was failing our youth, while Rabbi Lehmann sounded like the naysayers of Progressive education. Both thought their educational philosophy is a natural outgrowth of Dewey, who would respond to them,
“[A]ny movement that thinks and acts in terms of an ‘ism becomes so involved in reaction against other ‘isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them. For it then forms its principles by reaction against them instead of by a comprehensive, constructive survey of actual needs, problems, and possibilities.” 
It reminds me of the joke about the two scholars fighting over the true meaning of the Rambam.

“My Monides is right.”

“No, My Monides.”

Remaining loyal to Dewey, we can say that, “There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract.” Kal v’chomer, if this is so, then how can there be a panacea.

In my session, Exposing the Gorilla’s in the Complimentary School Classroom (and thinking about what to feed them), a group of religious school directors introduced themselves by telling each other where they are from and the particular challenges of their schools. We looked at this question through the lens’s of geography, demography and finance. What we discovered was just how complicated our situation is.

The problems of Jewish education are numerous but not uniform. (Repeat 3x) Like the seventy faces of Torah, each educator faces different challenges. Some of us are in big cities with large Jewish populations. In these cities, day school becomes an option, most often, when the public school system is failing. The consequence tends to be two forms of day schools; Jewish day schools and private schools for Jews. In all densely populated Jewish communities, the synagogue doesn’t need to be the center of Jewish life and bagels at the local deli may satisfy families’ needs for Jewish community and ritual.

In small towns, isolation from highly trained teachers can be a major obstacle. One participant in my session told me about the positive role the Institute for Southern Jewish Life has in supporting these schools. Many are limited by finance. They can’t afford professional development for their teachers, and some even need to draft unpaid teacher volunteers. ISJL supports these schools through conferences, teacher mentorships and ongoing support.

I could go on about the challenges of the various religious schools, but my goal is not to make lists. I want to direct the reader’s attention to the fact that discussions about the nature of religious pedagogy, whether it is experiential or more like a traditional beit midrash, mislead us into believing that we can find uber remedies. In American public education, this is called “Waiting for Superman.” It doesn’t work.

For millennia, Jewish communities have been led by the mara d’atra, usually rabbis, but essentially the “teacher of the place” whose charge it is to serve as a facilitator of Jewish knowledge and practice. Left to it’s own devices, this system wouldn’t work because the communities would eventually become so disparate in there beliefs that they would not find a common core.

This is why they chose a big Jewish library of content to stand at the center of the curriculum. Each mara d’atra would have his favorite books and ways of teaching and expertise, but they would all emanate from a common set of constantly developing knowledge, an oral Torah. Left alone, this wouldn’t work either because some communities allowed their Torah to include false messiahs and unaccepted revelations.

This is when the librarians came in and said, as I learned from my teacher Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman, there need to be some borders for Judaism. This is where our system of checks and balances comes to play. We are pluralistic because we want the entire family at the table. It also teaches us to be humble and not assume that we have the monopoly on what’s right. We are tolerant because we stand for something, which means that not everything goes, i.e. we cannot have people at our table that will not sit with everyone at the table.

And we allow some deviance because the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go askew, and we have to address issues that we never thought would come up, like we do in conducting wars against terror or finding ways to accept the sexuality of all our family members.

Rabbi Lehmann is right that we have to look to our own library and grind our teeth in pursuit of these answers, and Dr. Bryfman is right in our need to create laboratories, a term I borrow from Dewey, where Jewish students can have Jewish experiences that make them want to be members of the tribe, and both of them are wrong if they think that theirs should be the dominant paradigm of our religious schools.

In Hebrew, we have three letter roots for our words, and often they become the source of a system of binary thinking that can be wonderful and terrible in the same moment. The root, shin, chet, reish, can create the word shachar, dawn, the beginning of light, and shachor, black, the absence of light. This gives us a spectrum on which to find ourselves. The same can be said for pey, shin, tet, which can create pshat, the simple or literary meaning, or moofshat, abstraction. Again, a binary. It’s the same idea that Bialik wanted us to learn in his brilliant essay, Aggadah and Halacha, Legend and Law. Each is the side of a coin. They cannot exist without the other. Think heaven and Earth, water and land, the workweek and Shabbat.

There are, however, other paradigms in Judaism. Seventy faces of Torah is a three dimensional paradigm. It recognizes the limitations of spectrums of thought. Seventy faces of Torah is why we need more organizations like New CAJE because Jewish educators need to come together and discuss our challenges and constantly brainstorm their solutions and share what works and what doesn’t. This is why I went to New CAJE, not for the heavyweights and their rumbles, not to make choices between mitnagdim and Hassidim, but to be in the company of my peers and colleagues and to face the challenges of the 21st century without waiting for Superman.

David J. Steiner, Ed.D. is working to complete his rabbinic ordination. He has been a congregational director of education for both the Reform and Conservative synagogues, and he recently returned to America from a fellowship at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

Monday, July 15, 2013

What is this thing we call fear?

My friend Richard
One of my dearest friends is Richard Walden. Rich is a member of our congregation and has served on the board for several years. Before that he and his wife both taught Hebrew on Sunday mornings (Susan is coming back to the faculty this year!) He studied the classics and ended up becoming a banker. But every Friday, he boards an early afternoon train from New York to be back in time for our 6:00 p.m. Shabbat service. He is back in the morning for our 8:00 a.m. service. He is generous and an all around mensch. I am biased, but I dare you to find someone to disagree! 

Several times a year, he volunteers to read Torah at our service when there is not a 14 year old reprising their Bar or Bat Mitzvah parshah. And when he reads, Rich also likes to give the D'var Torah. This past Shabbat was one of those days. Rich nailed the chanting - he is not a musician but he has a deep resonant voice that brings the emotion of the text right off the page and into your kishkes. And here is his D'var Torah. I felt the need to share. Yasher koach Richard!


What is this thing we call fear? It is an incredibly complex emotion that is woven into Torah in many ways and has been with us from Eden right on through our 40 years of wandering. So what is fear? Is it lack of courage? Is it all about rational or irrational phobias?


This week is parashat Devarim, the opening of Deuteronomy, the book in which Moses retells our journey. In this section Moses recalls the spies who are sent to check out the land promised to us by God. As luck would have it, I met them just a few weeks ago when I stood in as Rabbi for the Friday night service at parashat Shlach. Well, I am with the spies once more and we are getting ready to cross the Jordan. Once again we go out and once again we learn that the land is indeed flowing with milk and honey. Oh but we silly, silly spies. We never learn, and we return, still filled with fear about the giants who live there.

Once again God is angry with us, and sure enough, God punishes us for not trusting—40 years of wandering in the desert AND no one but Joshua will enter the promised land.

So, what is FEAR in Torah? After eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve hide their nakedness from God in fear (Gen 3:10). God tells Abraham to “fear not” when he is sent on his journey in Lech Lecha (Gen: 15:1). At the shores of the Red Sea we are told not to fear Pharaoh’s army (Ex 14:13) and endlessly elsewhere it seems we are told to have no fear.

Does God want us to have the ability to look physical or emotional stress in the eye and say, ‘no big deal, I can take it’? We are tough, we don’t fear anything? We are told in this week’s portion that the spies Moses sent to reconnoiter the promised land “have taken the heart out of us, saying ‘we saw there a people stronger and taller…large cities with walls sky-high.” (Deut. 1:28). Is that what fear is, lack of courage in the physical world?

Well wait one minute. That can’t quite be it. Throughout Torah we are absolutely told to fear God. Later on in Deuteronomy we get the classic turn of the Ve’ahavta to love God “with all your heart and with all your soul and all your might”—but FEAR “lest the anger of the Lord your God blaze forth” (Deut. 6:4). We were told directly in Leviticus “you shall fear your God: I am the Lord” (Lev 19:14). It would seem that just as many times as we are told to have no fear, we are told also to be very, very afraid.

Maybe fear is more about a lack of trust. Is that what Torah is getting at? We should have complete confidence in God without any need for evidence or support other than ‘God said so’. If we learn to truly trust God, we will have no fear. We do see this theme regularly in Torah. Think about when Moses is told to talk to the rock to bring forth water, but instead, hits it twice. He is punished for this and we are never told why, but it would seem to be because Moses did not trust in the words and needed that physical manifestation of power.

Torah gives us some interesting juxtapositions about fear, courage and trust. Should we have blind faith in God and complete trust only in the divine? Or, is there some level of human free will that plays a role in any enterprise? Where do the physical and divine worlds of trust and fear meet? We still need to drive our cars, we can’t trust in God to steer a car. It would be unheard of in Judaism to substitute prayer for medical assistance—work to save a life is expressly permitted on Shabbat—even if we believe in prayers of healing. Torah recognizes human action and free will, even while demanding trust in God.

Ok, so let’s recap. We need to stand in awe of God and fear God, but we need to trust completely and have no fear, because if God is on our side we shouldn’t fear. But we need to be responsible for our own actions in the world and can’t rely on God to fix things even if we have complete trust and no fear of God. Got that? Simultaneously we need to be fearful, trusting and courageous and take action into our own hands but leave everything to God. Is that it?

For me, the epitome of this amalgam of emotions and actions is the image of Abraham with his knife raised over Isaac, that moment in the Akedah when he is prepared to sacrifice his son at God’s request. He knew very well that to swing down would end his son’s life, yet he has complete trust in God. That agonizing moment just before any movement of the knife he must have been living all those emotions of fear and courage and trust in that same crazed mix that Torah demands of us. The razor’s edge that is the balance between all those values and commandments…and after all, God did send an angel to Abraham at the last moment.

Ok, if that is what Torah says and means, what do we think of it? How can we possibly have this quantum mechanic ability to maintain completely opposite positions at the same time? What is this idealized state of trust and fear balancing against one another?

In that characterization it doesn’t feel much different than all the other themes in Torah. We are always balancing darkness and light; male and female; kashrut and treyf; Shabbat and work; one God versus idols; destiny and free will; Egypt versus the promised land. All of our stories and lessons from Torah are about that cutting edge where all these things exist and don’t exist, all those places and moments where we are all and none.

The archetypal moment is of course Shabbat. The pause after and before everything. That space between that bridges us from trust to courage or from this world to the realm of the divine. Remember, God is not in the noise and rush of the storm on the mountain, but in that pause just after.

Do I really fear God? Do I really trust God? I am sure that at moments I have had both emotions held in limbo simultaneously, but the sad truth is that most of the time I am just working my way through the world and can neither fear nor love, neither trust nor think of God. Clearly Shabbat is important to me, I keep coming back erev and boker looking for some divine connection. What I find is respite from work, the pleasure of a Jewish community, a little learning and every now and then something divine. Maybe the moments in which we are simultaneously fearful and courageous, trusting and doubtful are meant to be few and fleeting. Perhaps instead, we are meant to keep working at it. The balance is found on the journey not at the destination.

The spies only got one chance and they focused on the wrong aspect—they only thought of the destination and forgot that God was on the journey with them. Unlike the spies, we get endless chances to reach out and find those magic, fleeting moments when we can be one with the divine, or even just one with a fellow traveler. This Shabbat, let’s not be spies feeling like grasshoppers with giants ready to crush us. Instead, let’s see if we can take one moment of trust, or one moment of courage and turn it into something divine, our own personal promised land without fear. 


Shabbat Shalom.

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