Let Me Show You My Portfolio...Bazinga!

Alan Rowe is an old friend and one of the principals at Torah Aura Productions. Alan has been a tech guy in Jewish education since before the internet was available to mere mortals (those of us who were not in the military or at one of a handful of universities using PLATO). He for as long as I have known him (almost 25 years) he has been beta testing one program or another. Sometimes to see how it can help Torah Aura in their work, sometimes to see how it might help Jewish teachers. And as often as not, just to see what cool things were possible. He is that kind of guy. 

A few weeks ago he sent me a link to a blog posting about using Evernote to create student portfolios. He wanted to know if I thought there might be an application for synagogue or "complementary" education.

SHAZAM! 

BAZINGA!

[GEEKY EXPRESSION OF AMAZEMENT OF YOUR CHOICE]!

GREAT CAESAR'S GHOST! [O.K. Not that one.]

As soon as you finish this reading posting - or sooner, you may not care about what I have to say - check out Rob Van Nood's blog posting "How to Create a Portfolio with Evernote."

Educational Portfolios

Dr. Helen C. Barrett maintains that one of the many purposes of the educational portfolio is "to support reflection that can help students understand their own learning and to provide a richer picture of student work that documents growth over time." We in complementary schools have many frustrations - not enough time or enough days for learning, the supply of teachers, parents who bring their children to us for many different reasons, and not always the ones we think they should have - just to name a few. I think that getting students to reflect more deeply on the learning and meaningful evaluation are two that we don't often even get to when we are bemoaning the things we wish we could do. Barrett continues:

"Artists have maintained portfolios for years, often using their collection for seeking further work, or for simply demonstrating their art; an artist's portfolio usually includes only their best work. Financial portfolios contain a comprehensive record of fiscal transactions and investment holdings that represent a person's monetary worth. By contrast, an educational portfolio contains work that a learner has selected and collected to show growth and change over time; a critical component of an educational portfolio is the learner's reflection on the individual pieces of work (often called "artifacts") as well as an overall reflection on the story that the portfolio tells. There are many purposes for portfolios in education: learning, assessment, employment, marketing, showcase, best works."

I first learned about portfolios as a graduate student in Jewish Education a long time ago. They sound wonderful don't they? Imagine if we could collect the creative output of each of our students over the course of the year. Every once in a while a teacher could ask each student to share what they think their best work was so far, or to discuss an idea they have been developing. 

Parents could be invited to review the portfolio in a conference with the teacher and student and get a real sense of what their child has been doing at temple each week instead of a progress report with letter grades and a brief paragraph that might include the phrase "I really enjoyed having Ploni in my class this year." And items from the portfolios could be displayed, celebrating each child in the eyes of the congregation!

Ah well. That sounds awesome for a day school or general education school. They have enough hours in the day and enough days in the week. They have professionally trained and licensed teachers who have more time to give. Our teachers are awesome, but they have so little time and we pay them so little. We all know that song. We sing it every time we come upon an educational innovation. Poor us. We are too small, too poor and have too little time. We could never do it.

Nonsense.
(Those of you who can remember the comedian David Steinberg know what that really means.) 

I am tired of those excuses. Saying "Yes We Can" is more than political slogan. I have spent a fair amount of time evangelizing for using Web 2.0 technologies to leverage the things we might be lacking like time, money and staff. 
We can and we should be using portfolios. They hold so much promise for making meaning. And Evernote just might be the way to do it with all of the limitations we believe we are our burden.
 
Evernote
Evernote's logo is the head of an elephant. When you got to www.evernote.com the headline is "Remember Everything."


It is actually "a suite of software and services designed for notetaking and archiving. A "note" can be a piece of formatted text, a wb page or exerpt, a photo, an audio recording or even a handwritten ink note. They can be sorted into folders, tagged, annotated, edited, given comments and searched. They can even be exported as part of a ntoebook."

What's so Shazam about it?

This is where Rob Van Nood's posting comes in. He begins: "I started teaching 15 years ago and that is when I first came across this concept of a ‘portfolio.’ A portfolio is a storehouse for projects, writing pieces, art, and performances. It can be used by students, teachers, and parents to document what they’re doing (either day-to-day things or through their best work or improvements they’ve made). I see portfolios as a way to hold onto and think about what you’re doing." He is on the same page as Dr. Barrett. Here are some the things he does:

• When our school first decided to use Evernote, we set up demos with the students to show them how to use Evernote. At their age, students familiarize themselves with technology really quickly and naturally. A few picked it up immediately and started teaching their fellow classmates. Getting everyone up to speed didn’t take a lot of time.
• Before setting students up with Evernote accounts, I created a set of guidelines for the students so they knew what kind of things to put into Evernote. We also discussed the kinds of tags that they should be using, so we’d all be on the same page.
• Students started asking, ‘How can I put this into Evernote?’  I set my classroom up with a Lexmark Pro scanner so students are able to immediately capture their work and send it to their Evernote portfolio. They can also capture using any number of mobile devices where they have Evernote installed. They’re even able to access their work on their iPod Touch in class.
• When a student comes up with an interesting strategy on a whiteboard, I have them write down their name next to it and take a picture of it, or record them explaining what they came up with. Great ideas are saved to Evernote to show progress over the course of the school year.
• I’ve actually started emailing parents with these progress notes immediately after I capture them. I’m able to show the parents that their kid had a great growth moment or did something they’ve never done before. The real-time sharing was appreciated not only by the parents, but also excited the students.
• The final ‘piece’ of the portfolio work is, of course, sharing. For our Spring conference, we asked students to have one example of work from each area (math, writing, art, kinesthetic) to share with their parents. The students actually taught the parents how to use Evernote at our conference by familiarizing them with their portfolios.

He also uses it for parent teacher conferences.


I will be spending some time with our Religious School Vision Team and some members of our faculty exploring using Evernote Portfolios. I am hoping to introduce them in one or two grades next year. In our school, our students in Kitot Alef - Vav (1 - 6) have two teachers. One is for general Jewish studies and the other focuses on Hebrew. I think that the portfolios will give the two teachers a powerful tool for connecting the learning between their classes. 

And I am incredibly excited about curating these portfolios in a way that will allow us to share students' work with the entire congregation (with their permission of course). And the opportunity for kids to share their work with grandparents will open opportunities for intergenerational learning. 

Are you using Evernote Portfolios? Please share. And contact me if you are interested in exploring the possibilities with me. And also check out Van Nood's Evernote Portfolio Blog.

How Do We Talk to Our Children About Israel?

File under Peoplehood
It has been too long since I posted. And it will be a little bit longer. In the meantime, two of my favorite sources came together today as eJewish Philanthopy posted the latest from Robbie Gringras. Robbie is - as always - pushing us us to think deeply about how we teach and explore the relationship between being Jewish and the state of Israel.

Andi Arnovitz, Dress of the Unfaithful Wife (left), 2009,
Japanese rice paper, hair, dirt and film, 110x46x13, collection of the artist;
Coat of the chained woman (detail, right)

My wonderful daughter had her Bat Mitzvah recently. She sang beautifully from the Torah, built an amazing model of her “Personal Tabernacle” inspired by the portion, and took part in a lovely service she had helped to shape. I am overjoyed that my daughter’s experience of Judaism has been of a wise and deep tradition, fantastic stories, warm Friday nights, and inclusivity for both genders.

It wasn’t until we went with her to an exhibition on Jewish Feminist art at Ein Harod Museum that we came across a different aspect of Judaism. We walked around an exhibition created by furious female artists. Laws of niddah, modesty, and exclusion were beautifully screamed at, ridiculed, and mourned through video, photography, installation, sculpture and embroidery. From the wedding dress decorated with the hair shorn from the bride, to the photo of the disembodied hand holding a JNF box thrust through the curtain of the women’s section, there was some strong and strikingly painful work there. Yet although my daughter must be the most Jewishly knowledgeable of all her friends, I needed to explain every single reference to her.

She had had literally no idea of how aspects of Jewish tradition can be cruel to or disdainful of women.
This is because we had never taught her about them, and she’d never come across them until this exhibition. We knew instinctively that if we had exposed her to the anti-feminist narrative of Judaism at an early age she would have emerged knowledgeable about yet emotionally distant from Judaism. We didn’t want that for our kid.

I’m left reflecting on these ideological choices when thinking about Israel education for our kids. Because you see the thing is that my wife and I have absolutely no regrets at constructing “rose-tinted spectacles” for our child’s experience of Judaism. Our choice to induct our daughter into Judaism was not related to the moral rights or wrongs of the entirety of the tradition. We wanted for Judaism to be a part of who she is.
I believe we need to take the same choices with our young children with regards Israel. Prior to and irrespective of our attitudes to Israeli policies and politics, we need to make an ideological choice. Is Israel important to a Jew, or not?

As any thoughtful Israel-engaged Jew can attest, growing up with a deep connection to Israel does not have to lead one to love everything about Israel. The fact that my kid was not just surprised but also deeply concerned by much of what she learned at the Jewish Feminist exhibition shows that one can be brought up to identify with a tradition, a people, a place, and still continue to develop a moral stance that might be at odds with elements of that tradition.

Bringing up our children to “love Israel” should not mean we are brainwashing them or serving evil reactionary interests. Sometimes I fear that too much superficial education has given love and commitment a bad name. A knee-jerk rejection of “teaching to love Israel” is – I would suggest – mainly a response to the extent to which such a concept has been shorn of its depth. Love is crucial, but it’s not simple.

We need our children to be knowledgeable and wise enough to be able to question what they have received, and at the same time we need them connected enough to care. Their commitment will be inherited from that of their parents – hence the necessity for us as parents and future parents to make that first ideological decision that Israel is important to us and to our children.

What would an education look like that seeks to establish a commitment that is strong and passionate but not blind or paralyzed? How might we cultivate the roots of critical loyalty in our young?

We at Makom would advocate for two approaches. We would take care to give pre-teens what we might call the “philosophical training” for them to embrace complexity, “and we would give them a framework of “spiraling questions.

Embracing Complexity
Rather than simplifying issues for a little kid to grasp, we should encourage them to grapple with the complexities of simple situations. For example, at the age of five, issues of “Hugging and Wrestling with Israel” are tough! But questions such as “has your best friend ever done something you thought was the wrong thing to do?” fit right in to their lives. Follow up questions can go further: Did you tell your friend they had done wrong? Did you tell them in private or in public? Are you still friends despite the wrong-doing? Rather offering a simplistic explanation of Israel’s Separation Barrier, we might ask where there are fences in our children’s lives? (House? School?) What are the advantages and disadvantages of fences? Do good fences make good neighbors or deepen divides? Who decides where to put a fence, and (why?). Our “Car Pool Conversations” about Israel are freely downloadable here.

These are the kinds of conversations that can help our kids develop a familiarity with complex moral issues, and build a suitable vocabulary to begin to address them when they arise. In this way our children learn that complexity and “messiness” (Israeli characteristics if ever there were!) can be fascinating and not frightening.

Spiraling questions
At Makom we would suggest that the moral and political issues of Israel emerge from four key values expressed in the Hatikvah anthem: To Be A Free (Jewish) People In Our Land. What does it mean and what does it take to survive (To Be)? What does it mean and what does it take to be free? What does it mean and what does it take to be connected to the Jewish People? And what does it mean and what does it take to be In Our Land?

These four questions underlie every headline we ever read about Israel, and they are four questions that we can ask and explore at every age. As little kids our questions about being Jewish and connected to other Jews will yield different answers from those we may reach today. Likewise the expansion of our understanding of freedom – its limitations and responsibilities – will grow with the years. But the more we empower our children to engage with these four “pillars of Zionism”, the more we enable them to connect to, critique, and affirm Israel at every stage of their lives.

All the above opinions have been developed and inspired by my work with Makom, and consultations with Dr. Jen Glaser who first introduced me to the teachings of Vygotsky.

Robbie Gringras is Artist-in-Residence at Makom, a partnership of Jewish communities around the world and the Jewish Agency.

(Purim) Power Suits

This is from today's magazine online.A really interesting and current take on Purim. If you do not know the Hunger Games, you are not where 12-14 year-olds are. The books are a horribly bleak and nasty, but wonderfully written dystopian vision that involves children fighting to the death.Power Suits

Dressing up is a crucial element of the Purim celebration—as well as a powerful piece of the Hunger Games trilogy of young-adult novels

By Abigail Miller|March 6, 2012 7:00 AM

Once upon a time, a young girl from an oppressed minority was summoned to the capital. The nation watched as she competed against her peers, and won. She could have done the thing that was expected of her and lived happily ever after. But instead she risked everything—not just her newly won riches and standing, but her life—to stand up for her people. And these people, with her as their heroine and figurehead, rose up violently. We would like to say that then they all lived happily ever after, but the text doesn’t quite permit us that luxury. Still, the war was epic, and the story became beloved, the bitterness of the ending often skipped over. Its legend is considered myth, fairy tale, or fantasy, even though the supernatural is notably absent.

Sound familiar? This is the story of the Book of Esther—and of the Hunger Games, a trilogy of young-adult novels by Suzanne Collins with an eagerly anticipated movie adaptation ^[1] coming out March 23. The Hunger Games and its sequels Catching Fire and Mockingjay are set in the future totalitarian nation of Panem, in what used to be America, where America’s reality-television obsession and the growing gap between rich and poor have been taken to their dystopian extreme. Every year a boy and a girl from each of Panem’s 12 districts are sent to compete in the Hunger Games, a broadcast reality TV show in which 24 children fight to the death until only one survives. The annual show is both entertainment and commemoration of the crushing defeat by the Capitol ^[2]—a city for the nation’s rich and powerful—of an uprising of the districts, decades before.

The trilogy’s heroine, Katniss Everdeen, comes from District 12, a poor coal-mining district, and her background—half-orphaned and impoverished—is both asset and defect in the competition; on the one hand, she lacks the physical size and training of children from the wealthier districts, and on the other, she is tough and resourceful.

In the Book of Esther, the Jews of Persia are to be put to death, a plan devised by the evil Haman, a minister to the king. But Queen Esther foils Haman’s plan, revealing to the king that she is Jewish. The Jews triumph, and the gallows, built by Haman to hang the Jews, are instead used to hang Haman and his sons, among others. Every year on the 14th of Adar, the holiday of Purim celebrates this victory. The Book of Esther is read aloud twice, in a spoof of the king’s proclamations, on which the story hinges, and of the reverence of the usual Torah and Haftorah reading, and the story is reenacted with drunken celebration, masks, costumes, and pageants. Purim isn’t the only holiday in which we remember a story by reenacting—on Passover, we are taught that each of us has been taken out of Egypt—but it is the only one in which costume and disguise are central to the observance.

And at the heart of the story is Esther becoming Queen Esther. She is introduced as a beautiful young woman, but her edge over the other maidens seems to come after she enters the harem “… to the custody of Hegai, keeper of the women. And the maiden pleased him, and she obtained kindness of him; and he speedily gave her her ointments.” It’s no small thing; the cosmetic regimen lasts “twelve months—for so were the days of their anointing accomplished, to wit, six months with oil of myrrh, and six months with sweet odors, and with other ointments of the women,” before Esther is presented to the king. She wins the king’s favor with her beauty, and she does not reveal that she and her family are Jewish.

I’ve found myself drawn to this part of the story for a while. For the past several years, I’ve been part of making an elaborate annual Purim show in New York, and part of what interests me is the glimpse of spectacle and artifice in the story itself; that the Esther who is sent before the king is a character whom Hegai has been working on for months and months, just as I might work on a costume for the Esther in our show.

But the Hunger Games trilogy has helped me think more about the place of the makeover as a cultural archetype, and especially about the sort of transformation Esther undergoes as part of a power play. The makeover is a staple of entertainment, most obviously today in reality TV shows like What Not To Wear, but with a long and broad history including everything from My Fair Lady to Cinderella. Putting on an outfit and some makeup at home might be private, slow, and subtle, but the makeover of TV and film is visually striking, dramatic, and fun to watch. The showmanship is made visible, and we get to see the power of costume and spectacle at work. The TV-driven world of the Hunger Games features a series of makeovers for Katniss, masterminded by a designer named Cinna—we might think of him as Panem’s Hegai—and a “prep team” of stylists.^[3]

The stylists are recurring characters in the televised Games, and the opening ceremonies, which include a parade, televised training, and finally beauty pageant-esque interviews with these children who are about to have to kill each other, are part of the cruel entertainment. So, our first instinct, shared with Katniss, about Cinna and the makeover, is that it’s a vapid sugarcoating of the violence of the Games. Yet Cinna quickly emerges as a rare character: a loving, caring, respectful, competent adult in a dystopic YA novel ^[4]. The costumes he devises are startling in their beauty and innovation—they often feature fire in one form or another—and are carefully designed to elicit certain strategic reactions from the audience. In the second and third books, these costumes become overtly political, but even in the first book, we are starting to see that these costumes are not just a sort of disguise or passing, in which a poor girl looks like a princess, but the seeds of opposition. At these moments in which the Capitol seems to be in total control of the images it broadcasts and the lives it cuts short, Cinna’s costumes actually give Katniss a measure of power, turning her fear into confidence and transforming her in the eyes of the nation into a dignified figure to be reckoned with.

When fashion blogger Michael von Braithwaite writes ^[5], “You probably won’t want to dress like a dystopian hero every day, but if you’re feeling down and out, slip on your Katniss look and stare down every person you pass on the sidewalk,” he is being cheeky, but also at some level recapitulating what seems to me to be Cinna’s lesson: that clothes can work on us from the outside in, giving us confidence and letting us feel what it is like to be the character we’re dressed up as. And the series of extraordinary costumes in the Hunger Games trilogy seems to me to give the lie to two assumptions about femininity and power. The first is that the power of feminine beauty is predicated on male attention and desirability. The second is that a girl’s political power is as a symbol of vulnerability and innocence.

That is, when girls lie down in front of tanks in the West Bank ^[6], or when this country is galvanized watching the NYPD pepper-spray girls at Occupy Wall Street ^[7], we see the barbarism of the state in stark contrast. These assumptions that the Hunger Games books upend are the very ones that underpin the story of Esther: Esther is powerful only insofar as she finds favor in the king’s sight (“If I have found favor in thy sight, O king,” she beseeches him, “let my life be given me at my petition”). And, to make her plea to stop the massacre of Persia’s Jews, she does present herself as a personal, feminine symbol of her people’s victimization (“we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed”). Thankfully, some 2,400 years later, and given an additional 1,100 pages or so, a somewhat more nuanced heroine is possible. The Hunger Games books suggest that beauty can, in itself, be a form of resistance and self-possession, and, especially as the trilogy’s ideology becomes more complex in the third book, Katniss is a heroic public figure not because she is blameless, but because she is tough, brave, and well-dressed.

Regardless of the exact nature of the roles of their respective heroines, though, what Purim and the Hunger Games share is an understanding of the value of dressing up. If the Hunger Games trilogy teaches us about the power of costume, Purim teaches us to push at the lines between utopia, dystopia, and reality. When we listen to this story of Esther becoming queen, of the fate of the Jews catapulting from demise and triumph, and when we dress up as kings and queens, we are tracing out the extremes of power in a society, mocking authority, and, for a moment, feeling what it might be like to be the kings and queens we’ll never be. Purim makes me want to believe that our fantasy lives and our outfits matter, that inner transformation is both part of and preparation for larger struggles, that political work can start with the heart and the sewing machine.

Find this story online: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/93160/power-suits/

Tablet Magazine is a project of Nextbook Inc. Copyright © 2012 Nextbook Inc. All rights reserved.

Mifgash Means Encounter, Part 1

Six months ago, some of us thought holding a day long conference with the Fellows and Mentors of the Leadership Institute and a group of Israel public school principals was not a good idea. We are bringing people thousands of miles for a mere 9 days of traveling and learning in the land. How could we devote more than 10% of that time in classrooms? We were certain there would be a revolt.

Still, the plans progressed. Evie Rotstein - our fearless leader - along with Roberta Bell-Kligler and David Mittelberg and the rest of their staff at Oranim framed the conference around the idea of Jewish Peoplehood.  Mittelberg described the idea of Jewish Peoplehood as emerging from a dialogic discourse. It describes both process and content. He invited the combined American/Israeli group of educators to explore and model what Jewish People can emerge to be. 

Doctor David Mittelberg

He cited two studies (NJPS 2000 and Avi Chai/Guttman 2012) that indicate that both American and Israeli Jews have between an 80 - 93% sense of connection to the Jewish people. So what is the problem with that? Why a conference and a whole department of Jewish Peoplehood at Oranim? Mittelberg says that both Israeli and Diaspora Jewries are partial and incomplete. Neither can do it on their own. Both communities see imparting a sense of connectedness to our children as real challenge.

In Israel, he said, being Jewish is a matter of fact. In the United States, it is a matter of choice. The problem is both in variety of degree and in type. In Israel being Jewish is taken for granted. In the U.S. being Jewish cannot be taken for granted. And being born Jewish in either place is no guarantee anymore that you will stay Jewish. He suggested that only in our mifgash (encounter) with each other can we make up for each of our deficiencies.

He said quite a bit more, and I refer you to the resources at the bottom of this posting for more detail. It was an amazing mifgash. So much so that this is coming in three posts, as I sit at Ben Gurion waiting to go home a week later. I was skeptical about having this conference. It was the highlight of an amazing trip with a wonderful group of educators. Evie, I was wrong. You, Roberta and David were right. Now we need to have more of these mifgashim between American and Israeli educators or it will just have been a great day. It needs to be the beginning of a long and truly essential conversation.


Resources on Peoplehood:
Convergent and Divergent Dimensions of Jewish Peoplehood - David Mittelberg (pdf)
Jewish Peoplehood Education: Framing the Field - Shlomi Ravid & Varda Rafaeli
Towards Jewish Peoplehood - David Mittelberg (pdf)
Jewish Educational Leadership - A Guide to Jewish Peoplehood
ewish Peoplehood

Crossposted to Leadership Insitute: The Blog!

The Culinary Queens of Yerucham put Sallah Shabbati to bed!

Topol as Sallah Shabbati

Many of us of a certain age (50ish and older) were shown the Israeli movie Sallah Shbbati - in youth group, or in religious school, or - as in my case - on a rainy day at camp, cooped up in a M*A*S*H style tent we called the Beit Am. It was a black and white, and was made in 1964. It was for a long time the most successful film in Israeli history. It starred two actors who were then unknown outside of Israel, Gila Almagor and Topol - before he starred as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof or as Hans Zarkov in Flash Gordon.
Danny Yarhi, writing in iMDB describes the film:

A Yemenite Jewish family that was flown to Israel during "Operation Magic Carpet" - a clandestine operation that flew 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel the year after the state was formed - is forced to move to a government settlement camp. The patriarch of the family tries to make money and get better housing, in a country that can barely provide for its own and is in the midst absorbing hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Humor, sensitivity, politics and music highlight this capsule of history.

It was an hysterically funny comedy. Seeing it years later with a much deeper knowledge of Israeli history, that comedy turns out to be an incredibly biting dark satire and social commentary on Israeli society in the 50's. It brings out the best and worst of Israel - the wondrous rescue of nearly forgotten Jews and the far less than ideal treatment of non-Ashkenazi Jews by the European born or descended elites of Israel.

I recall one scene where Sallah is given a job planting trees by the Jewish National Fund. An official plants a sign next to the saplings with the name of a couple from the Diaspora. As a driver brings them up to the forest, the official tells them that thanks to their generosity, this was "their" forest. As soon as they left, the official took down the sign and replaced it with one with another name, just as another official drove up with another donor from abroad. Sallah accuses the official of dishonesty. When the next donors come to see "their" forest, Sallah starts plucking the new trees out of the ground!

As a member of the Leadership Institute, I had the pleasure for the second time to visit with one of the Culinary Queens of Yerucham. It was created by Atid Bamidbar (The Future is in the Desert) to "create opportunities for local women with no or low incomes, from diverse ethnic groups in town, to host visiting groups from Israel and abroad in their homes for an enriching multicultural culinary and human experience. The encounter gives visitors a great meal, warm hospitality, and insight into the lives of local residents and Jewish ethnic traditions; it provides the hostesses with added income, a boost to self-esteem and a widening of horizons."

It was all of that and more.

Mazal and her husband Jojo were wonderful and 20 of us had a wonderful meal. And the best part was Jojo's storytelling. He was animated, expressive and funny. He told of coming from Tunisia at the age of five with his parents. They wanted to go to Jerusalem. They were loaded on a truck at the port and driven through the night. They were told they were in Jerusalem and dumped in the desert. He has been in Yerucham ever since. He also told the story of their courtship. Rather than explain it, here are three videos!

Enjoy.

Part I

Mazal and the other Queens have taken the dark satire of Sallah Shabbati and set it aside. They are part of several projects from Atid Bamidbar and other agencies like Nativ that are changing the face of Yerucham and other development towns in the Negev. Sallah seemed to have little hope. Not so any more.

And think about how the culinary queens are one of many projects that is helping this community that has spent so long in the economic trough climb out. And make it a point to visit them for lunch! It is worth it!

Part II 

  Part III




Crossposted to Leadership Institute: The Blog!

Can extremism ever be Kosher?

Rabbi Marc Rosenstein writes the Galilee Diary in the Union for Reform Judaism's 10 Minutes of Torah e-mail and blog. Today's struck me as particularly worthy of sharing and inviting your commentary. He references a bill put before the Knesset by MK Anastassia Michaeli of the Yisrael Beiteinu party. This bill seeks to make illegal the sound of the Muezzin's call to worship for Muslims. Again, I am concerned about the extremes to which some people believe we can go in our intolerance. I will not be blogging on the Haredi riots over the arrest of some in their community for collecting tzedakah money for fraudulent causes. We need to be a light to the nations, not another example of extremists perverting their own belief system. But read what Marc has to say. And weigh in.


Ira

GALILEE DIARY
Call to prayer
by Marc J. Rosenstein

...With the realization that our brothers are capable, in their moral qualities, of relating in this way to the members of another people and of crudely desecrating their holy places, I am forced to wonder, if the situation is like this now, what will be our relationship to others when we finally do achieve ruling power in the land of Israel. If this is the Messiah, then "let him come but let me not see him."
         -Ahad Ha'am, in a letter on news from Palestine, 1913.

Typically, a village mosque has two religious functionaries, an imam, who leads prayer, preaches, teaches, and provides pastoral care and communal leadership - and the muezzin, a sort of combination of cantor and shammes, who deals with the day-to-day administration and upkeep of the mosque.  The major function of the muezzin is to call the public to prayer, five times a day, from the tower of the mosque (and to relay other important communications as they come up, most commonly death announcements).

In Israel, both of these functionaries are government employees, like [Orthodox] rabbis.  In many villages, one or both are part-time positions, and I know imams who also work as gym teachers, auto mechanics, etc.  I think that most muezzins are autodidacts; most imams receive some kind of professional training - at seminaries in Jerusalem or Jordan or Egypt; some, as in the Orthodox community, are privately ordained by a local teacher.  The division of religious affairs in the ministry of the interior, which is responsible for non-Jewish religious services, provides in-service courses and occasional seminars and enrichment programs for imams and muezzins.

The reason that mosques have minarets is to provide a high platform for the muezzin to chant the call to prayer so that it will be heard far and wide; indeed, traditionally, the municipal boundaries of a village were considered to be defined by the area in which the muezzin could be heard.  Today there are loudspeakers mounted on the minarets, and the muezzin chants from downstairs - and can be heard over a much wider radius than in former, unplugged, times (in answer to one FAQ, by the way, the chanting is still live, not recorded).

The advent of electronic amplification has led, it seems to me, to a diminution in quality of life for village residents.  Often I have been visiting near a mosque - in a school, on the street, in a living room - when it was time for the call to prayer, and been frustrated and annoyed by the blast of sound that makes conversation impossible for several minutes (think of a low-flying jet).  And for the locals, this happens every day, five times.  I wonder if this nuisance is seen as a result of incompetence, a manifestation of religious assertiveness, or simply a fact of nature/culture that is taken for granted.

Our home in Shorashim is on a hillside overlooking the Hilazon valley; it is about a mile across the valley as the crow flies, from our bedroom window to the minaret of the mosque in the village of Shaab.  When we first arrived, we were very conscious of the muezzin's call, especially the one that comes between 4:00 and 5:00 am.  However, it didn't take long for us to tune it out; if I happen to be awake at the time of the morning call, I notice it, but I don't think it has actually awakened me in many years.  Indeed, I find the plaintive chant pleasing.  And while my Arabic is rudimentary, I can identify a funeral announcement and generally even make out the name of the deceased.

Not all our neighbors are as laid-back about this as we are, and one hears complaints about "noise pollution" and the disturbance to sleep caused by the muezzin's call.  Now, a number of them are enthusiastic about a bill proposed by a member of Knesset to enforce decibel limits on the loudspeakers of houses of prayer.  Needless to say the bill was not submitted by Arab parliamentarians concerned about quality of life in their villages, but by Jewish lawmakers seeking to protect Jews from Muslim noise pollution.

All those centuries we had to suffer from the wailing of the muezzin - or the cacophony of the church bells every hour; finally we have our own state so we can shut them up.  Somehow I don't think that this is what Herzl (or Achad Ha'am) had in mind.

Teaching Israel, Warts and All

Peter Eckstein

Friend and colleague Peter Eckstein posted this in the Jewish Educational Change Network before new year's. I think it tells an important story. I invite your thoughts on how we can do a better job bringing Israel to our students and our students to Israel.

I have the good fortune to be working with a nationally based group of educators and teens associated with the iCenter’s MZ Teen Israel Internship. The purpose of this program is to follow up on teens’ Israel summer experiences, through a framework consisting of a series of yearlong educational and social activities. The young people meet with mentors and educators to collaborate on Israel oriented projects, and to study. As “the teacher”, I meet with a small group of high school students, usually in a coffee shop, and together we learn about the reality of modern Israel. We’ve focused on how being a Jew in America relates to being a Jew in Israel. We have explored the diversity that makes up Israeli society, comparing it to the multi-faceted nature of North American Judaism. We’ve thought about Israel being characterized by the people, not just the stones or the conflict. In the future, we will be discussing the role of religion in Israel, as well as the dynamic that exists between Israeli Jews and Arabs. We are trying to make real connections with the Jewish State, drawing from the teens’ experiences in the context of a more in-depth exploration of Israeli society. All of these elements are meant to get these teens to think seriously about how Israel relates to their lives, and how they can educate their peers about the real Israel, by getting past the headlines and beyond the myths.


This is all about education, not advocacy. Back in September, I attended an inaugural conference that kicked off this program. It was attended by almost 40 teens and about a dozen educators. In conversations I had with teens and my colleagues, I was struck by how important it was to the teens to have the “right answers” to defend Israel. Many of them had difficulty understanding the difference between knowing about Israel - being educated about the land and the people; and defending it against its detractors. As we educators in the program develop the curriculum, we struggle with how the tensions that exist in Israel can in fact be tools to foster deeper engagement with Israel and the Zionist enterprise.


In the past week, as we collaborated on developing future sessions for the teens, we have been working on how to teach the significance of the recent “price-tag” attacks that have occurred in Israel and in The Territories. Can the phenomenon of the “Hilltop Youth” provide a nuanced view of the intersection between the role of politics and religion in the life of The State? How can the extremes reflected by current events help us gain a better understanding of what Israel is all about, and what its promise and potential can be? I am not talking about whitewashing a situation. I am talking about understanding it so that it can become a tool for engagement.


In my mind, at least, the political, cultural, economic and ethnic tensions that characterize life in Israel are a mere reflection of Jewish history, both in Israel and in Exile. We have always been one people, but with many voices. This idea of Jewish diversity can be used as a tool to help our young people understand that being Israel is all about struggle. We should provide the tools to our teens, to empower them to joyfully enter into the fray that is the Jewish conversation about Israel. When we teach Israel, we mustn’t ignore the warts.

The Torah and all Judaism are being threatened...by an 8 year old girl. Really?

I hope that you were as outraged as I was at the story of  Naama Margolese, aged 8. She and her family are olim to Israel. They are modern Orthodox, but apparently her attire was not modest enough for the Haredim in their hometown of Bet Shemesh. At the URJ Biennial two weeks ago, I heard Ehud Barak, Barack Obama and Eric Yoffie all talk about the importance of Israel being a Democratic Jewish state. That is a hard enough concept. Now introduce haredim acting like drunks at a ball game (baseball, college football, British soccer - choose your favorite hooligan) toward a little girl who just wants to go to school and you have a recipe for disaster. BTW - she is covered from wrists to ankles! And she is just a little girl.

I read about her story in the New York Times and almost choked on my breakfast this morning. Dan Brown - who many of us know as eJewish Philanthropy posted two videos which we all need to see. I have posted them below.

When the last secular Jew "left" the old city - a good friend of my family - there was no outcry. Jerusalem - the most beautiful city in the world - is rapidly becoming Haredi. That isn't enough. Witness the orthodox soldiers who walked out of a military ceremony because women soldiers were singing. Their rabbi suggested a firing squad was preferable to listening! (Forward Sisterhood blog).

It is time for Jews everywhere to demand that Israel be a place for all Jews - women and men, straight and gay, Dati, Haredi, Progressive, Masorti and secular - not just for those who see the world a certain way. How can we be a light to the nations if we can't even see each other in broad daylight without blowing a gasket?

One of the people in the first video below talks about how this little girl is a shanda (shame). There is a yididsh expression: A shanda fur die goyim. It refers to a shame that makes Jews look bad to non-Jews. How long before the media starts comparing Halakhah (Jewish law) with Sharia law? How long after that does Judaism get stereotyped as just another extremist, fundamentalist whacked out cult? Really people? Worry about your tzniut (modesty) and let others take care of theirs!

The Continuing Haredization of Israel

December 28, 2011 by eJP 

“We have to act now before Beit Shemesh becomes the next Iran.” (from JPost ).
Israel’s Channel 2 documentary on intimidation of schoolgirls in Beit Shemesh is causing a media fury in Israel, and from what we hear in the U.S. too.


Last night, thousands attended a rally to protest the actions of this vocal minority and to force the authorities to act.

Following, is a speech delivered last night by Hadassa Margolese, the mother of 7 year old Naama Margolese, portrayed in the above video.

Thou shalt help those with special needs find their best place among us!

Paul Kipnes is the rabbi at Congregation Or Ami in Calabasas, CA and my classmate at the Rhea Hirsch School of Education at HUC-JIR (Class of '91). He has a terrific Blog called Or Am I? Below is his post from yesterday. It sends a very strong message of inclusion which I echo. And he asks an important question: Who else makes it a point to meet the learners with special needs where they are? And I am asking not only about Bar/Bat Mitzvah, but also about other points of connections. 

For congregational schools: Is your school willing to include any child in your established classes if they are included in their weekday school? Are you willing and able to provide paraprofessionals or madrikhim to shadow them if that is how they best learn? Is your school willing to create stand alone learning for those students for whom inclusion is not the best answer? What about physical needs? Is there a ramp or lift on the bima? Large print siddurim and a hearing assist system? Do you have an elevator if the synagogue has upper floors? There are more things we could be doing.

In the Torah, Amalek is considered the ultimate in evil. He was no the only king to attack the Israelites, but he gets the biggest black hat because he ordered his troops to attack the rear of the Israelite column. that is where Moses had positioned the non-combatants, which surely included those whose physical and other abilities prevented them from being effective fighters. We can assume that if they had people with special needs (it is possible that such people didn't survive long as slaves in the ancient near East) they were among those to suffer first at Amaleck's hands. The message is clear to me: that it is a compelling positive mitzvah: Thou shalt help those with special needs find their best place among us!

I am proud of Paul, Doug and their congregation for what they do and what Paul told that parent. I am equally proud that my congregation can answer yes to all of the questions I listed above. I am proud that two of our madrikhim (one is my son) work closely with two young men with autism in a stand alone classroom and that we we have a special needs coordinator who monitors all of our learners, helping avocational teachers learn how best to respond to those learners' needs. 

Please comment to this post by sharing the ways in which your school/congregation/institution works to meet the needs of learners (children and adults) who encounter the world differently from the statistical mean. And now for Paul's post: 

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Of Course Your Child with Special Needs Can Become a Bar Mitzvah

I received a message recently about a parent of a child with special needs. It seems that this parent was unsure that the special needs child could ever become a Bar Mitzvah. Here's my response to the parent:

Recently, Cantor Doug Cotler and I officiated at two different B'nai Mitzvah services of children with special needs. In each case, the parents were sure that their child would never read from Torah, lead the service or become a Bar Mitzvah. Like the few dozen other such families who thought the same, they were overwhelmed and blown away when their child led the service, read from Torah and gave a speech. There wasn't a dry eye in the house!

At Congregation Or Ami, we are committed to the idea that any child of a member who works to the best of his or her ability, has the privilege and right to a Jewish learning experience and to becoming a Bar/Bat Mitzvah. The children participate in a real service, just one that is subtly tailored to each child's unique abilities (which, by the way, is basically what we do for EVERY child). 

What does that mean?

• Maybe he will read Torah but not Haftarah.
• Maybe he will sing the prayers he knows and explain others.
  
  
• Maybe his service will be before only 15-20 of the closest and then there will be a bigger party.
• Maybe he will only chant one verse of Torah per aliyah.
• Maybe his Torah portion will be the V'ahavta prayer, which he will already know by heart (the V'ahavta in the prayerbook, comes from the Torah).
• Maybe... maybe... maybe...

The keys to it all are three interlocking elements:

1. The commitment of the Temple to say "YES, this CAN and WILL happen."
   
2. The creativity of our B'nai Mitzvah tutor Diane Townsend to figure out ways to get each child to do his/her best. Diane works with me to tailor the service in a way that outsiders would not realize is tailored, but makes your child shine brightly.
   
3. The willingness of the parents to let go of their sense that it cannot happen, but instead to believe that yes, my son - just like every other Jewish boy - can become a Bar Mitzvah.

By the way, I have NEVER encountered a child with special needs (at Congregation Or Ami or at my previous synagogues) who could not and did not become a Bar/Bat Mitzvah.

I so look forward to celebrating as your son becomes a Bar Mitzvah. So don't worry. Just say to yourself, "Yes, this will happen." Then breathe...

We can talk more if you want.

Gosh, I wish we could better publicize this message. I wish that all synagogues would realize that there should be NO barriers to children with special needs, especially with regard to Jewish ritual.

Alas, we can only work in our little corner of the world...

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What is happening in your corner of the world? Please post a comment and share! - Ira

Five Things That Marketing And Business Can Teach Jewish Teachers

I wrote this for one of Carol Starin's FIVE THINGS EXTRAVAGANZA'S at the 2005 CAJE conference in Seattle. I am happy to find that I still think it is relevant. I do think that in the last six years I have found at least five more things, but let me share these first and invite you to share some of your own! Shavuah Tov!

Ira

1. Create Purple Cows – In his book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business By Being Remarkable, Seth Godin discusses the need for businesses to distinguish their products and services by making them stand out. To prove his point, he gave away copies for the book to people who e-mailed Fast Company Magazine. My copy arrived in a purple and white, ½ gallon milk carton.
   
   What can we learn? We need to use and create materials, projects and activities that WOW our students. Our 5th graders prepare a presentation on their Jewish heroes. We let them determine the medium, so long as they are not merely reading from a paper. So now we get web pages, power point presentations, videos…
   
2. Watch for the Tipping Point– In The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell describes “a new way of understanding why change so often happens as quickly and as unexpectedly as it does. For example, why did crime drop so dramatically in New York City in the mid-1990's? How does a novel written by an unknown author end up as national bestseller? Why do teens smoke in greater and greater numbers, when every single person in the country knows that cigarettes kill? Why is word-of-mouth so powerful? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read? I think the answer to all those questions is the same. It's that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. They are social epidemics.”
   
   What can we learn? We need to be students of the culture in our classrooms and schools. Do behaviors by both students and teachers correspond to the values you are teaching? Are we teaching “Thou Shalt Not Steal” using pages photocopied from a textbook or music from a cd that was burned from someone else’s copy of an album? Do we reward tardiness be recapping what latecomers missed (and punish timeliness by making those students sit through it again)? Do we schmooze with colleagues at the back while students are singing or praying or dancing with a “specialist, or are we singing, praying and dancing with our kids, modeling the behavior?
   
3. Design Matters – Go to Fast Company and read about why design matters. The articles range over a variety of businesses, from the cap on a detergent bottle to cell phones to Old Navy Pajama Bottoms to OXO Easy Grip kitchen tools to architecture and beyond. In each case, they discuss how the design of the product or its packaging influences how much people like the product.
   
   What can we learn? How much attention have we paid to design in our classrooms? The walls, the layout of the furniture, the materials we distribute and our lesson plans all send messages to our students. What message do you want to send: “I’ve been doing this so long that I don’t need to plan anymore” or “I want this to be as fresh and interesting for me as it swill be for you!” “Yeah, we’re all stuck in a nursery school room, just grin and bear it?” or “You know, if we paint the ceiling tiles as a class project or create bulletin board that will be hung over the nursery posters when we are in session, we can really create our space among the toys!” Oh, and spelling and grammar do count for teachers, both in the classroom and in progress reports.
   
4. Spread Idea Viruses –Seth Godin’s The Idea Virus takes The Tipping Point a step further, suggesting that ideas can be spread like viruses. “At the core of any ideavirus are sneezers – the folks who tell 10, 20, or 100 people about some new thing, and whom people believe. There are two basic kinds of sneezers: promiscuous sneezers and powerful sneezers. Promiscuous sneezers are folks like your dear Uncle Fred, the insurance salesman. You can always count on Fred to try to "sell" his favorite ideavirus to almost anyone, almost anytime. You know what Fred's up to when he starts to pitch whatever it is that he's onto now…
   
   Compare that with the influence of powerful sneezers. Go back to the early 1980s. The hat business is near the end of a decades-long downward spiral to total irrelevance. Each year has brought worse news, with one manufacturer after another going out of business, and most towns left with one haberdasher – if they're lucky. All of a sudden, in the midst of all of this dismal news, from out of nowhere, a hero bursts onto the scene: Harrison Ford. Carrying a bullwhip. Wearing a hat. Like the Marlboro Man, Indiana Jones had an enormously positive impact on sales of Stetson hats. Why? Because Harrison Ford is cool, because he has the influence to set style, and because his appearance in a movie in which he wore a fedora coaxed millions of men who wanted to be like him into buying one for themselves.”
   
   What can we learn? Who are the “vectors” – the students who tend to spread the word? Which are promiscuous and which are powerful? The ones who spread everything will keep your idea (say for a special class project, or a tzedakah recipient) out there in front of everyone, and you can enlist their aid. The powerful ones need to be won over, but when they pronounce their support for your idea, it will become reality. We began our retreat program as an idea virus, using one kid to infect another, until most of the kids were going. Then we used those kids to convince the next group to go using younger siblings. Of course, your idea needs to be a good one! Go Fast Company (again) for a two-part article by Godin on the idea virus.
   
5. Bring the Curriculum to the Student – In his seminal work My Pedagogic Creed," John Dewey said "I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself...The child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity, which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without... If it chances to coincide with the child's activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature." (First published in The School Journal, Volume LIV, Number 3, January 16, 1897.)
   
   What can we learn? Okay, Dewey was a teacher not a marketer, but he understood how to draw lessons from the students’ perspective, which is the trick that all good marketers have mastered. So what are kids interested in? If you teach 3rd – 5th grade, check out a show called “The Fairly Odd Parents.” It is the hottest show on cable and your students watch it (or it was in 2005. What do you think is hot right now?). And Sponge Bob Squarepants. And some of them like magic cards and Lindsay Lohan (clearly the mojo has moved to the likes of Justin Bieber, the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, etc). If we know where they are spending their time, we can make better connections. The movie Mean Girls is full of opportunities to teach Derekh Eretz!(Still true, but there are other newer aawesome films!)

When Tweeting Depletes: How Social Media Can Disconnect Us

The conversation continues courtesy of eJewishPhilanthropy (What? You still don;t subscribe? Shame!). Here I am, Mr. Digital Oleh, agreeing that digital is not the only solution. Maybe not even the best solution. Like a knife or a drill, it is a tool. We need to learn how to use it well and when to put it back in the virtual tool box and use other tools. Discuss...

When Tweeting Depletes:
How Social Media Can Disconnect Us

November 11, 2011

by Ami Hersh and Leor Shtull Leber

As people who barely remember a time before the Internet and who use Facebook (too) often to stay in touch with friends from around the world, we are not ignorant of the power of social media and technology in connecting people and ideas. However, we question the direction we are taking when we rely too heavily on technology and we fear the authenticity of our relationships when they are based on “@s” and “#s”

We admit we are guilty too. Once we were sitting around a table with friends, each of us on our own laptop. Somebody walked in and asked if he could join and do homework with us, and we awkwardly apologized that we were actually in a meeting – it just so happened that our meeting involved us all sitting in a circle in silence working collaboratively on the same Google doc.

Still, we use the word “guilty” because of the value of personal relationships with which we were raised. We both recently attended the JFNA General Assembly in Denver and were shocked to see the technology culture present and the (over)use of smartphones during sessions. We were encouraged to play with our phones instead of focusing on the speakers. People barely looked up – a great success according to the “Tweet! Tweet! Tweet!” message of the conference. What happened to turning off your phone for a lecture? Further, one of the winning innovative ideas at the Jewish Futures Conference called for the elimination of meetings: young people don’t want to waste their time meeting in person when smart phones can do the job.

Well, we are young people who have smart phones. We still cherish the face to face time of meetings in person – and look forward to disconnecting by turning off our phones during those meeting. Email and social media are important and effective tools, but we must be conscious of overuse and of replacing genuine in-person relationships, both when we are distant and even when we are together in the same room, by tweeting instead of talking.

As it says in Mishlei 27:19, “As water reflects face to face, so the heart of man to man.” The beauty of interpersonal relationships is the ability to look into the eyes of another human being and connect deeply with them through conversation and expression. As you stare into the eyes of another human being created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, you are able to let their souls reflect and interact with your own. The whole world can open up before your eyes. Social media is spectacular, important, and quite useful when utilized in its proper time and place. Let us not however allow the over-presence of social media to dilute our in-person enduring relationships.

Ami Hersh is a senior rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary and the assistant director of Camp Ramah in Nyack. He can be reached at Ami@campramah.org

Leor Shtull Leber is a senior at Brown University concentrating in Cognitive Science and a Student Representative on the Brown RISD Hillel Board of Trustees. She can be reached at leor.shtull.leber@gmail.com

Back to the (Jewish) Future (From eJewish Philanthropy)

My Shabbat afternoon reading today. VERY intriguing. Thinking of ways to use his principles within the synagogue. Not his point, I know, but it is my milieu. Good learning here. Discuss... Thanks to eJewishPhilanthropy for posting it! - Ira

November 11, 2011 by eJP

Back to the (Jewish) Future:
The Six Demands of the Next Generation of Lay Leadership

by Ben Wiener

[Earlier this month, I was named one of the two winners of the 2011 Jewish Futures Competition, sponsored by the Jewish Education Project and JESNA's Lippman Kanfer Institute. As part of the competition, my winning video was shown at the Jewish Futures Conference held at the GA in Denver this past week, and I also presented my venture (tenpartners.org) and my view of the Jewish Future. Here are my remarks.]

I’ve been asked to give my view of the Jewish Future. Now I’m not a prophet but it seems to me that at least with regard to young lay leadership the Jewish Future does not look good.

You know as well as I do that the numbers are headed in the wrong direction. The Federation had a donor base in North America of 1 million people a few decades ago and it’s less than half that today. This summer, while I was a PresenTense Global Fellow we heard first-hand from Natan Sharansky, that over 500 more young Jews per day no longer consider themselves affiliated with Judaism.

Young lay leadership in the Jewish Future is broken and headed for disaster.

Now, lots of people are talking about “engaging” the next generation. People in Federations are signing up to learn how to speak Twitter. But seriously – how do you do this engagement thing, practically?

We need something revolutionary. And like every good revolution, our revolution begins with a list of demands. That’s right, my generation and those younger than me have a list of demands. If you, the organized Jewish Communities want us to get involved, you need to meet our needs and demands.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Demands? Who the heck do you think you are? Well, look in the mirror. Jewish communities aren’t getting any younger. At some point in the Jewish Future you will need to bring us, the next generation, into the family business. You will need us to be engaged, and involved as the next generation of leadership minding the store. And to do that you’ll need to get us into the store. So here are our six demands:

1. We actually want to work with you. We come in peace. Hey, we’re a great revolution because we’re nonviolent. We’re not trying to overthrow anyone. We want to work with existing communal institutions – just find a way to get us involved, and nobody gets hurt.
2. No Meetings: We cannot do meetings. Our schedules are too crazy. We are a generation of sound bytes. We communicate in 140 characters for G-d’s sake, not in agendas. We don’t meet, we tweet.
3. Non-denomination. Plurality. We need to have our own voice and make an impact our way. We want to be invested in our own creative ideas, not advance someone else’s mandates or agenda.
4. We’re going to need to be able to make an impact regardless of the amount of money we individually contribute. We modern-day Montefiore’s are high on creativity, but sometimes low on capital.
5. We need to be involved in things that are financially sustainable. Our generation embraces sustainability as a philosophy, as a core value, not just as some kind of marketing gimmick. And finally …
6. Our involvement depends on technology. You need to weave Jewish communal service into our technology, not wrestle our technology into your Jewish communal service.

So how do we fix the lay leadership problem in the Jewish Future before it happens? As one of my colleagues, Ana Fuchs said this summer at PresenTense, “it’s time for an upgrade.” We need to upgrade to Jewish Communal Service 2.0.

What is Jewish Communal Service 2.0? Well, like any program, there are different versions. I’ll give you a quick example of the tenpartners version of Jewish Communal Service 2.0.

Let’s say Matt, Pat and Jane get together to form a tenpartnership in their local Jewish community. They reach out through their friends and get others to join, hopefully representing a cross-denominational group. When they get ten people to commit, each of them seeds a local bank account that they control, with an equal and reasonable amount of money, for example $1,000 each. (Ten is based on the concept of a minyan, and also on the Hebrew word “ten,” to give.)

Then the ten partners start to evaluate and discuss programs for their local Jewish community using tenpartners’ custom-designed technology platform. Projects or events must do two things: 1) educate through experience, promoting Jewish experiences and values via events like lectures, concerts, Jewish internet cafe? night, etc., and 2) each project must have a revenue model. The participants from the community must pay to participate. Communal programs don’t have to be free. So in our model, the partnership’s money underwrites a program, and then comes back to the partnership through the revenue collected, and then cycles back in to the community via another program, and back, and so on, and so on.

What’s awesome is that this model meets all of our demands.

1. Partnerships – the ten partners need to reach out and work with existing communal institutions to run successful programs.
2. No meetings. All tenpartners activity runs off your iPhone or email. No meetings. You can be a tenpartner from the comfort of your couch at 2 am.
3. It’s nondenominational and fosters creative ideas. Anyone, including other partners, me, you, other people in the community can suggest programs or events to a tenpartnership, but the ten partners ultimately decide what to do. Nobody else tells them what programs to run; they do what they think is best for their local community.
4. It offers an equal voice at the virtual table. Each tenpartner has the same “say” and the same ability to have an impact.
5. It’s sustainable. The partners seed the account once and then it can stay evergreen, creating new programs for years, without any new money. No need to put in more money, nobody asking for further donations, ever. Isn’t that refreshing? And …
6. It’s based on technology. Our simple, custom-built collaboration platform fits in to the way we manage our information in real life.

Our model doesn’t recreate the wheel – it adds a new one. We’re not suggesting that we throw out the Federation model – rather, we’re creating a new layer that extends the reach of current institutions.

It engages young Jews where they are, out on the periphery, and brings them into the family business on their terms. It creates an easy-entry, entry-level layer of lay leadership engagement that gets them into Jewish communal service. Hopefully some of them will “graduate” from tenpartnerships into other types of institutional lay leadership afterwards.

The Jewish Futures Conference is primarily about education. We believe that education is experiential. If we are successful in rolling out our tenpartners Jewish Communal Service 2.0 model across the country and around the word, we will engage and empower hundreds of new lay leaders, who will create thousands of new educational experiences, that will touch tens or hundreds of thousands of people in their communities, all with a financially sustainable business model. It’s remarkable, yet amazingly practical and simple.

So what do we need from you? We need you to download the upgrade to Jewish Communal Service 2.0. It’s not as easy as clicking a button, but its close. You just need to work with us, support us. Open your doors and let us in to the family business. You have a lot of experience, wisdom and resources to offer us, and we have tons of young, dynamic and energetic people we can bring to the table as the next generation of young Jewish lay leaders.

That’s practical “engagement”. That’s Jewish Communal Service 2.0. And that’s how we can work together to create the next generation of Jewish lay leadership, and start fixing the Jewish Future – today. Ben Wiener is President of Portofino Equity Advisors, a private equity company. He is also the founder of tenpartners, an innovative Jewish nonprofit start-up. A former corporate lawyer, Ben also clerked on Israel’s Supreme Court before leaving legal practice for a business career. Ben earned a B.A. from Yeshiva University, and a J.D. from Columbia Law School. He lives with his wife and children in Jerusalem.

Connecting the Affiliated

My friend and colleague Arnie Samlan posted about a conversation he had with Beth Finger, who is working on a project called Jewish Without Walls. They suggest we "Forget about Jewish Affiliation, Think about Jewish Connectedness:"

"During our conversation this morning, we both challenged the relevance of "Jewish affiliation", which has been used in every Jewish demographic study as a measure of community success in modern America. The problem is, and has always been, that the operational definition of "affiliation" is often "pays dues to a synagogue". Even those who expand the definition someone, rarely get beyond handing money to an organization (JCC, Federation, Hillel) as the operational definition."

He explores several problems with using affiliation as a metric, including leaving our serious Jews who are "not religious," those for whom membership is of little if any value, and that it does not include significant numbers of Jews who relate to their Jewishness independently, including growing numbers who use social media to express their Jewishness.

He (with a nod to Beth Finger) suggests changing the metric to  "Jewish Connectedness." He would like Jewish sociologists to take into account the many ways of relating meaningfully to being Jewish. He wants to find a way to include serious Jewish paths that may not lead through a synagogue, federation or JCC. He includes summer camping and independent minyanim as well as those "who are doing Jewish in non-institutional spaces or in secular spaces, Jews connecting online in meaningful ways folks and who participate in Beth's Jewish Without Walls, in havurot and in other groupings that are not (yet) dues-based groups."

I think Arnie has the beginnings of an interesting framing of the conversation that we have all been having for a while. And while those who would overturn existing institutional frameworks might see this as invitation Occupy Organized Judaism, I see it as a refreshing way to begin talk about the apples and oranges in the same conversation. After all, Apple Jews and Orange Jews are still all Jews!

I would press the idea a bit further:

How can we in the synagogue world change the way we operate to increase the CI - Connectedness Index - for each member family and individual? While we in this world often do a lot to attract affiliation, we don't always (or even often) do a good enough job of connecting them to other adults in our congregations. We get them when they feel they need us (religious school, nursery school, Bar/Bat Mitzvah) but we don't always connect the adults in the family. So when the kids are ready to move on, the adults do as well.

Using the CI as a way to measure and improve what we do is as important as using it to find a meaningful category for non-Congregational connecting. I still like the word "affiliate" though. It makes me feel like we can use it to affirm that we obeying Hillel's dictum not to separate ourselves from the community.

Like Arnie, I am not the statistician to figure out how to count these things in the larger picture. I do know that in our synagogue and religious school, we have begun to focus on connecting parents. Our room parents now focus on getting parents together rather than doing the shopping or helping with the seder. (See article on page 6 Torah at the Center). I challenge you to share more ways of connecting the people who ARE affiliated! Because we need to raise the CI of all of our people!