Three thousand years of longing...

An amazing story about the
importance of our stories

I have been a lifelong devotee of story telling. At the old CAJE Conference I could sit for hours and listen to so many amazing story tellers - people like Peninnah Schram, Gerald Fierst and Cherie Karo Schwartz  - to name only a few of the many. When I watch a movie or TV show, I am drawn in by good writing - by the story. Even the best actor can fall short when the writing is not up to their level.

In graduate school, my teacher Isa Aron assigned us Kieren Egen's Teaching as Story Telling. Many of my classmates found it a difficult work - I was spellbound. And when my friend, mentor and then boss Joel Grishaver wanted us to create a Torah text for elementary students, we used Egen's work (and Jim Trelease's Read-Aloud Handbook) to guide us. The result was I Can Learn Torah. We were only able to publish the introduction and the first two volumes of what would have been a three volume set. It is still one of my proudest accomplishments in terms of creating curriculum materials. 

It is based on the idea that humans naturally learn through story telling. Sure our experience teaches us most of what we know about our world. Story telling is designed to help us learn to make meaning of our experiences, and those of others. While we often think of the Torah as the source of Jewish law, it is also the primary source of Jewish understanding. It is not for nothing that the first two books are almost entirely narrative!

I attended a session at a CAJE conference (nearly 30 years ago!) taught by the amazing Rafi Zarum. It was called "The Story of Stories." He handed every participant a different edition of the Passover Hagadah. Ron Wolfson once taught me that there were over 3,000 different Haggadot that have been documented.

Now Rafi taught at Mach .8 ~ just under the speed of sound! He told us he was going to walk us through the various parts of the Hagadah and we were to follow along in whatever edition we had, and call out when we found something interesting or different. He also asked us to keep a close watch for the actual text of the Exodus from Egypt as it appears in the Torah.

We learned two things I did not know until that day in Palo Alto.

1. The actual text of the Exodus from Egypt as it appears in the Torah does not typically appear in a Hagadah.
   
   
2. Each part of the seder is either a teaching tool to help the adults better connect themselves and the children present to the story (which the adults are expected to know well enough to tell) or is the story of another seder in history. 

Cave at Beit Guvrin,
from the same era as
the story at B'nai Brak

My favorite example is of the rabbis in B'nai Brak who are so immersed in the discussion of the Exodus that they miss the sunrise. Why tell us this? Because they lived during the Hadrianic persecutions and still held a seder, even though it could lead to their deaths! They missed the sunrise because they were in a secret cave under a courtyard which admitted no light. 

Our stories are how we know who we are and how we got here.

Last week a new film was posted on Amazon Prime - Three Thousand Years of Longing. Go watch it now. I will wait.

I was amazed. This is a story about storytelling. Tilda Swinton narrates and stars as Alithea Binnie. "Her business was story, She was a narratologist, who sought to find the truths common to all the stories of humankind."

She of course is herself apart from her own story. She encounters Idris Elba, a Djinn who loves stories - both telling them and hearing them. "My Djinn told me, when they come together in the realm of the Djinn - they tell each other stories. Stories are like breath to them. They make meaning.

So too with our stories. They teach us to make meaning.

Chai, Chai, Pizza Pie!

It was the end of a wonderful and weird adventure in Italy this past July. (Lost luggage, stolen passport, dishonest cabbies mixed with beautiful sights, delicious flavors and lovely people.) We had a long drive in from Florence to the Rome airport where we would return our rental car and stay one night in Fiumicino before flying home. My wife Audrey found an old Conde Nast Traveler article which described six places you MUST stop on the way from Florence to Rome. The town of Orte was just the right distance for a lunch break, if a bit late in the day. The article recommended Trattoria Saviglia so after some delicate negotiating of mountaintop streets designed for pack animals, we parked and found the restaurant.  

It was a hot day, like the the entire summer had been, and there was one diner on the patio, just getting ready to leave. And it was late in the afternoon. But the teenager waiting tables shouted inside and was told to seat us. By the time we were served, other tables had filled. A family of five sat near us. We could hear them well enough to tell they were from our part of the world, but close enough to hear their conversation. The mother and daughter left the table, and after a few minutes the two boys - both seemed to be pre-teens - began singing loudly "Da-vid melekh Yis-ra-el.." To which Audrey and I reflexively joined in with "chai, chai, pizza pie!"

The patio at Trattoria Saviglia

The father slapped his hand on the table and shouted "I knew it! My Jew-dar is never wrong!"

I don't know what cause the dad's "Jewdar" to ping. I imagine the way we look had a lot do with it. Perhaps we said something to one another about the synagogue we had visited in Florence, speculated that if we had lived near Orte 500 years ago, we would have been serfs, as we often were in Europe. Ping it did.

The boys were day school students in their hometown of Vancouver. The family was on a six week driving vacation through Italy. Orte is roughly the size of a large neighborhood on a hilltop overlooking the highway and the Tiber River. (We learned it is pronounced tee-bear in Italian - who knew?) How two carloads of North American Jews, one from the west coast and one from the east, managed to find themselves on the patio of a restaurant in Orte on a hot Friday afternoon is... what we should have expected.

My Eisner camp bunkmate, Larry Milder, famously wrote the song "Wherever you go, there's always someone Jewish." So many campers, youth groupers and adults have enjoyed this cute tune. I think we like it because it is cute and engaging. The real magic of this song is that it speaks a truth.

The view from Orte

We will never hear from this family again - unless they reach out in response to someone telling them about this post. We did not exchange numbers or email addresses. I don't recall if we even shared our last names. What we share was a moment and a little conversation. We shared a sense of connection and peoplehood. We talked briefly about day school and summer camp and about each our trips so far. Ours was ending and theirs still had weeks to go. We were heading south and they were heading north.

In that moment of shared recognition and song, we shared something special. After 10 days of churches, medieval and renaissance art, museums and synagogues that told the Jewish story of Italy, we found our people. We had met Jews. These were North American Jews, who shared so many characteristics with us - language, local references, Jewish summer camp - that we felt a deeper connection.

There is something deeper here. I am not sure I can put a finger on it. It felt good though, and left us with bigger smiles on our faces than we had before lunch. And yes, it was a delicious lunch. If you find yourself near Orte, do stop in.

Why "Welcome to the Next Level?"

This post may seem a bit self-indulgent. Please forgive me. As I prepare to transition to a new congregation and community after 27 years, I am finding it helpful to look a bit inward.

Full disclosure. I began this blog when I was applying for a Jim Joseph Fellowship at the Lookstein Center for Jewish Education at Bar-Ilan University. They were looking for educators who wer tech and social media savvy to engage in a two-year journey into creating online Communities of Practice. It was clear from the application that they expected applicants to be bloggers. So I became a blogger. And it has been - off and on - a process I have found meaningful. It has led to some great conversations and helped me focus my thoughts and communicate them to others.

The title started out kind of cute. One of the gaming system companies (Sega?) had an ad campaign in the 90s that used it as the tag line for their commercials. It stuck with me. When I decided to create this blog, I decided that the focus had to be on where we go next in Jewish Education. 

In 1971, Joel Grishaver's original Shema is For Real and Debbie Friedman's Sing Unto God were the cutting edge. SiFR was a one color print book bound with staples. And Debbie's album was an long playing vinyl record. We have come a long way baby.

I began this blog three days after Barack Obama was first inaugurated as president. Jewish educators had been adapting devices, web sites, apps and social media platforms to find ways to keep the learning process relevant in 2009.

I was and am not a huge gamer (I do the Wordle and play a few puzzle games). We did have a Space Invaders arcade game in my fraternity though. And just like the Sega ad, every time you completed a level, another one comes and brings new challenges.

So welcome to the next level of Jewish Education. Please join me in conversation (send me something you have written and I will post it) as we all work to create the new cutting edge. Our students deserve it!