Numbers 24:2-5
(2) As Balaam looked up and saw Israel encamped tribe by tribe, the spirit of God came upon him. (3) Taking up his theme, he said: Word of Balaam son of Beor, Word of the man whose eye is true, (4) Word of him who hears God’s speech, Who beholds visions from the Almighty, Prostrate, but with eyes unveiled: (5) How fair are your tents, O Jacob, Your dwellings, O Israel!
ach week, we in the Religious School begin our worship services with the students by singing the words from Numbers 24:5, “How good are your tents, Jacob, your dwellings, Israel!” These are the words that traditionally begin morning daily worship, said upon first entering a synagogue. The word “dwellings” might also be translated as “sanctuaries,” and it is fitting that we begin our prayers with words of appreciation for the space in which we will offer our prayers.
In their original context, in this week’s Torah portion, these words are spoken by the prophet Balaam, who has been hired to curse the Israelites by Balak, the king of Moab. Balak has seen the victories of the Israelites against other nations as they have traveled in the desert, and he fears that this soon will be the fate of his own kingdom. But Balaam finds himself only able to offer words of blessing, and it is these words of praise, first spoken by a non-Jew, that now are part of our daily liturgy.
When we teach our students about this prayer, we ask them to offer a compelling explanation for what we could possibly mean when we say the word “Israel” in this prayer. Some say that this prayer is a wish for the well-being of the people who live in Israel today, whether Jewish or not. Others note that the prayer also mentions Jacob and argue that this is a prayer for all of those descended from him — all Jews, everywhere. Still others observe that Jacob’s name was changed to Israel after wrestling with an angel, so this prayer is a reminder that we must grapple with the Divine when we pray.
This prayer has been a sort of “theme song” for our two congregational family trips to Israel, in July 2008 and this past December 2009 – January 2010. Shortly after arriving, we sang these words while standing on a hilltop in Jaffa, looking out on the city of Tel Aviv. I tried to imagine how all of the people living in every apartment complex and villa are trying to make a good and beautiful place for themselves and their families. A few days later, while visiting a mountaintop kibbutz overlooking the Lebanese border, I looked out towards the houses on the other side of the valley separating the two countries. I thought to myself, if only the people living on each side of the border could look to the other and offer words of blessing: How good, how beautiful, is the place where you live.
On our final night in Jerusalem, just before heading to the airport, we again sang these words while looking out at the Old City, divided into four quarters like the four chambers of the human heart. It is to this spot that we turn when we pray, reminding ourselves that the heartbeat of Jerusalem has kept the Jewish people alive throughout the centuries. Yet, here too is where Jesus walked and, some say, was resurrected; where Muhammad is reported to have ascended to heaven; for Christians and for Muslims, as for us, Jerusalem is the beating heart of a people.
We teach our students that there isn’t a single correct answer as to what we mean when we say “Israel” in these words. But I know that for me, I agree with all three of these answers. I am praying for the beautiful homes of the Jews, my people, my own ancestry. I am praying for the good homes of the people living in Israel, whatever their religion may be. And I am grappling with the Divine and wondering when will the time come that enemies will turn to one another and find themselves only able to offer words of blessing.
I have spent some time trying to say something about the events off the coast of Israel. And then my inbox showed me Daniel Gordis' latest column and I realized that nothing I could say would be as succinct and to the point. I cannot agree more with what he has to say, so I defer to him and post his column below. While I certainly invite comments here as always, I incled the link to his comments page so you can engage in the larger conversations with others who have read his column on his site (which is great).
An old high school friend, who's taken great exception to a couple of my most recentJerusalem Postcolumns, has been telling me of late on myFacebook pagehow out of touch with American Jewry I am. He let loose again today. Here's what he had to say:
Hey Danny....yet again a misguided Israeli political and military mission with regard to Gaza that American Jewry will be asked to stand by and support. All over the news Israel will be referred to as "the Jewish State" as worldwide condemnation will pour in. As a Jew I will be on the defensive despite the fact that I have no vote and no say in whatever the politicians in Israel decide. Again, you will no doubt ask for solidarity by Jewish folk worldwide and we will answer for Israeli decision-making. I love Israel as my religious base, but the policies do not reflect my peace loving values. I support Israel with bonds and donations and visits, but the thriving American Jewish experience is independent of it.
OK, there's a lot there, and most of it I won't respond to now. But this is one of those moments when I don't think we have the luxury of writing a column over days, printing it out and editing it, sleeping on it and editing it again. Too much is happening, and people are too hurting and too confused for something not to be said.
To be sure, there's much more that we don't know than we do. We'll learn a lot in the days and weeks to come. But we do know that this was a tragic day and an excruciatingly painful one in Israel. At the fruit market, and at the dry cleaners, I asked people working there how they were, and all I got was a sigh. And then, "Yom kasheh. A tough day. They're going to eat us alive."
They will, indeed, eat us alive. It's taken a full day for the Israeli government to say anything coherent at all, riots are breaking out in Israeli Arab towns, Israelis in Istanbul have been warned by the Foreign Ministry not to leave their hotel rooms, and the international community is raining down condemnation.
But I jump to conclusions very different than those of my high school friend, and I responded to him in language very close to this:
David - we couldn't disagree more strongly. Israel's actions were "misguided"? Let's take that first. Were there tragic outcomes? Obviously. But "misguided"? Gaza is under the malicious and cynical rule of a terror organization sworn on Israel's destruction, that is holding an Israeli soldier captive in contravention of all international treaties, and that oppresses its own population while even Palestinian witnesses there acknowledge that there is no food shortage. Given Hamas' military objectives, Israel would be crazy not to check what's going in. But Israel had already pledged to pass on any humanitarian goods after they were inspected, and told the boats the same thing. So, no, I don't think that the idea of stopping the boats was misguided.
What we know is that on five of the ships, the commandos (among them friends of our kids, by the way) boarded the boats, and there was no resistance and no fighting.
On one boat, however, the first soldiers to land on the boat were attacked with metal rods and knives. There's video of it. It's playing all over Israeli and all over the internet. In some cases, soldiers' weapons were stolen and used against them. One was stabbed, apparently in the abdomen. Another was tossed from a desk and trampled when he landed. There were a handful of commandos there, and 600 "peace activists." On Israeli news tonight, the soldiers on helicopters taking them to the hospital were interviewed. They descended the ropes, they said, planning to talk the "activists" into going to Ashdod. Their weapons were not in their hands, but strapped to their backs. "We went into war," one in his 30's said bitterly tonight, "and all we had were toys." They were beaten, trampled, shot (yes, there were bullet injuries) but only after forty minutes of combat did they resort to live five. They were going to get lynched if they didn't fight back, they said.
Was I there? No. Do I know what really happened? No. But do I trust these kids and their officers? Yes, I do.
As for "peace activists," David, how much do you know about the IHH? It's a terror support group, supported by Turkey (among others) and it was ent to provoke. If they just wanted the goods to get to Gaza, they could have agreed to transfer them to an Israeli ship, or to unload them in Ashdod, as the Navy personnel asked them to. But they didn't want that.
They just wanted to break the blockade. Why? For food? Even a few Palestinian journalists with some guts are reporting that there's no humanitarian food crisis in Gaza. No, it wasn't about food. They want the blockade broken so that after that, non-humanitarian items (read weapons) could brought in. Why should Israel allow that? So that they can be better armed the next time we have to send our kids into Gaza?
As for "being on the defensive," you "will be on the defensive" only because you totally don't get it. For if you did get it, you wouldn't feel that way. There's only one country anywhere on the planet about which there's a conversation about whether it has a right to exist. Do you ever think about why that is? What, the fate of the Palestinians is worse than that of aborigines in Australia? Or people in the Congo, or Rwanda? Why all the attention on Israel? Do you really not get it? You think that New Zealand just coincidentally decided this week to make kosher slaughtering illegal? You think it's really about humanitarian commitments? Come on.
No, David, you really don't have to defend Israel. No one's asking you to. We know that it's too late to expect many Americans like you to assume we're right before you assume we're wrong. As we look out at Jews across the world, we're just assessing who gets Jewish history, and who's so thoroughly intellectually assimilated that they're actually embarrassed that that Jews don't have to continue to be victims. I'm horrified by what happened on the ship, and I'll be shocked if after all is in, we find that Israel made no mistakes. (This was pretty clearly an intelligence failure, at the very minimum, sending those soldiers into something for which they had not at all been prepared or armed.) But if that had been my kid on the ship, and he'd gone in to prevent the blockade from being broken, but had no intention of fighting, and had then been attacked, I'd want him to defend himself. No matter what. I'd want him to come home whole, because that's part of the new Jewish reality that this country is supposed to make possible.
The loss of life is tragic. So are the injuries to soldiers, including serious head wounds. But most tragic of all is that the world is so willing to be blinded to what's really going on here.
At the end of this excruciating day in Israel, at least given what I know at this moment, I'm saddened but not apologetic. I'm not surprised by most of the world's reactions. But I haven't lost sight of who provoked this, and why they did that. But you're a very smart guy. Why have you?
At a CAJE conference long, long ago at a campus far, far away, I gave a session about using the principles of Seth Godin's Purple Cow and Unleashing the Ideavirusbooks to re-frame our work as educators and institutional leaders. It was well-received, but I think the time has come to continue the discussion. So what I offer is a video and transcript of Seth Godin teaching about what it means to have your product stand out. As I mentioned at that conference, it took Moses from among all the other shepherds of Midian to notice not that the bush was burning, but that the branches were not being consumed by the flames. Most of us and our constituents are NOT as observant as Moses. We only see a bush on fire. Nothing remarkable about that in the wilderness.
And I have some questions I hope you will attempt to answer in the comments section below:
Whose attention do we need to attract? Children? Their parents? Adult Learners? People who are not members of the congregation or institution? The Usual Suspects?
What are their needs, in terms of what will get their attention? What are the barriers that prevent them from noticing that the bush is burning unconsumed?
What can we do with the settings and structures we have to make Jewish learning remarkable?
What can we do that goes outside or beyond those settings and structures to make Jewish learning remarkable?
From TED February 2003
In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones.
I'm going to give you four specific examples -- and I'm going to cover at the end -- about how a company called Silk tripled their sales by doing one thing. How an artist named Jeff Koons went from being a nobody to making a whole bunch of money and having a lot of impact, to how Frank Gehry redefined what it meant to be an architect. And one of my biggest failures as a marketer in the last few years, a record label I started that had a CD called "Sauce."
Before I can do that I've got to tell you about sliced bread, and a guy named Otto Rohwedder. Now, before sliced bread was invented in the 1910s I wonder what they said? Like the greatest invention since ... the telegraph or something. But this guy named Otto Rohwedder invented sliced bread, and he focused, like most inventors did, on the patent part and the making part. And the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this -- that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available no one bought it, no one knew about it. It was a complete and total failure. And the reason is that until Wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it. That the success of sliced bread, like the success of almost everything we've been talking about at this conference, is not always about what the patent is like, or what the factory is like, it's about can you get your idea to spread, or not. And I think that the way that you're going to get what you want, or cause the change that you want to change, to happen, is that you've got to figure out a way to get your ideas to spread.
And it doesn't matter to me whether you're running a coffee shop or you're an intellectual, or you're in business, or you're flying hot air balloons. I think that all this stuff applies to everybody regardless of what we do. That what we are living in is a century of idea diffusion. That people who can spread ideas, regardless of what those ideas are, win. And when I talk about it I usually pick business because they make the best pictures that you can put in your presentation, and because it's the easiest sort of way to keep score. But I want you to forgive me when I use these examples because I'm talking about anything that you decide to spend your time to do.
At the heart of spreading ideas is TV and stuff like TV. TV and mass media made it really easy to spread ideas in a certain way. I call it the TV industrial complex. The way the TV industrial complex works, is you buy some ads -- interrupt some people -- that gets you distribution. You use the distribution you get to sell more products. You take the profit from that to buy more ads. And it goes around and around and around, the same way that military and industrial complex worked a long time ago. And that model of, and we heard it yesterday, if we could only get onto the homepage of Google, if we could only figure out how to get promoted there, if we could only figure out how to grab that person by the throat, and tell them about what we want to do. If we do that then everyone would pay attention, and we would win. Well, this TV industrial complex informed my entire childhood and probably yours. I mean, all of these products succeeded because someone figured out how to touch people in a way they weren't expecting, in a way they didn't necessarily want with an ad, over and over and over again until they bought it.
And the thing that's happened is, they canceled the TV industrial complex. That just over the last few years, what anybody who markets anything has discovered is that it's not working the way that it used to. This picture is really fuzzy, I apologize, I had a bad cold when I took it. But the product in the blue box in the center is my poster child. Right. I go to the deli, I'm sick, I need to buy some medicine. The brand manager for that blue product spent 100 million dollars trying to interrupt me in one year. 100 million dollars interrupting me with TV commercials and magazine ads and spam and coupons and shelving allowances and spiff -- all so I could ignore every single message. And I ignored every message because I don't have a pain reliever problem. I buy the stuff in the yellow box because I always have. And I'm not going to invest a minute of my time to solve her problem, because I don't care.
Here's a magazine called Hydrate. It's 180 pages about water.
(Laughter)
Right. Articles about water, ads about water. Imagine what the world was like 40 years ago when it was just the Saturday Evening Post and Time and Newsweek. Now there are magazines about water. New products from Coke Japan -- water salad.
(Laughter)
OK. Coke Japan comes out with a new product every three weeks. Because they have no idea what's going to work and what's not. I couldn't have written this better myself. It came out four days ago -- I circled the important parts so you can see them here. They've came out ... Arby's is going to spend 85 million dollars promoting an oven mitt with the voice of Tom Arnold, hoping that that will get people to go to Arby's and buy a roast beef sandwich.
(Laughter)
Now, I had tried to imagine what could possibly be in an animated TV commercial featuring Tom Arnold, that would get you to get in your car, drive across town and buy a roast beef sandwich.
(Laughter)
Now, this is Copernicus, and he was right, when he was talking to anyone who needs to hear your idea. The world revolves around me. Me, me, me, me, me. My favorite person -- me. I don't want to get email from anybody, I want to get "memail."
(Laughter)
So consumers, and I don't just mean people who buy stuff at the Safeway, I mean people at the Defense Department who might buy something, or people at, you know, the New Yorker who might print your article. Consumers don't care about you at all, they just don't care. Part of the reason is -- they've got way more choices than they used to, and way less time. And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable here is you're driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving because you've seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who's going to stop and pull over and say -- oh, look, a cow. Nobody.
(Laughter)
But if the cow was purple -- isn't that a great special effect? I could do that again if you want it. If the cow was purple, you'd notice it for a while. I mean, if all cows were purple you'd get bored with those, too. The thing that's going to decide what gets talked about, what gets done, what gets changed, what gets purchased, what gets built, is -- is it remarkable? And remarkable's a really cool word because we think it just means neat, but it also means -- worth making a remark about. And that is the essence of where idea diffusion is going. That two of the hottest cars in the United States is a 55,000 dollar giant car, big enough to hold a mini in its trunk. People are paying full price for both, and the only thing they have in common is that they don't have anything in common.
(Laughter)
Every week the number one best selling DVD in America changes. It's never "The Godfather," it's never "Citizen Kane," It's always some third rate movie with some second rate star. But the reason it's number one is because that's the week it came out. Because it's new, because it's fresh. Because people saw it and said -- I didn't know that was there -- and they noticed it. Two of the big success stories of the last 20 years in retail -- one sells things that are super-expensive in a blue box, and one sells things that are as cheap as they can make them. The only thing they have in common is that they're different.
We're now in the fashion business, no matter what we do for a living, we're in the fashion business. And the thing is, people in the fashion business know what it's like to be in the fashion business, because they're used to it. The rest of us have to figure out how to think that way. How to understand that it's not about interrupting people with big full-page ads, or insisting on meetings with people. But it's a totally different sort of process that determines which ideas spread, and which ones don't. This chair -- they sold a billion dollars' worth of Aeron chairs by reinventing what it meant to sell a chair. They turned a chair from something the purchasing department bought, to something that was a status symbol about where you sat at work. This guy, Lionel Poilane, the most famous baker in the world -- he died two and a half months ago, and he was a hero of mine and a dear friend. He lived in Paris. Last year he sold 10 million dollars worth of French bread. Every loaf baked in a bakery he owned, by one baker at a time, in a wood-fired oven. And when Lionel started his bakery the French pooh-pooh-ed it. They didn't want to buy his bread. It didn't look like "French bread." It wasn't what they expected. It was neat, it was remarkable, and slowly it spread from one person to another person until finally, it became the official bread of three-star restaurants in Paris. Now he's in London, and he ships by FedEx all around the world.
What marketers used to do is make average products for average people. That's what mass marketing is. Smooth out the edges, go for the center, that's the big market. They would ignore the geeks, and God forbid, the laggards. It was all about going for the center. But in a world where the TV industrial complex is broken, I don't think that's a strategy we want to use any more. I think the strategy we want to use is to not market to these people because they're really good at ignoring you. But market to these people because they care. These are the people who are obsessed with something. And when you talk to them they'll listen because they like listening -- it's about them. And if you're lucky, they'll tell their friends on the rest of the curve, and it'll spread. It'll spread to the entire curve.
They have something I call otaku -- it's a great Japanese word. It describes the desire of someone who's obsessed to say, drive across Tokyo to try a new ramen noodle place, because that's what they do. They get obsessed with it. To make a product, to market an idea, to come up with any problem you want to solve that doesn't have a constituency with an otaku, is almost impossible. Instead, you have to find a group that really, desperately cares about what it is you have to say. Talk to them and make it easy for them to tell their friends. There's a hot sauce otaku, but there's no mustard otaku. That's why there's lots and lots and lots of kinds of hot sauces, and not so many kinds of mustard. Not because it's hard to make interesting mustard -- you can make interesting mustard -- But people don't because no one's obsessed with it, and thus no one tells their friends. Krispy Kreme has figured this whole thing out. Krispy Kreme has a strategy, and what they do is, they enter a city, they talk to the people with otaku, and then they spread through the city to the people who've just crossed the street.
This yoyo right here cost 112 dollars, but it sleeps for 12 minutes. Not everybody wants it but they don't care. They want to talk to the people who do, and maybe it'll spread.
These guys make the loudest car stereo in the world.
(Laughter)
It's as loud as a 747 jet, you can't get in the car's got bullet proof glass on the windows because they'll blow out the windshield otherwise. But the fact remains that when someone wants to put a couple of speakers in their car, if they've got the otaku or they've heard from someone who does, they go ahead and they pick this.
It's really simple -- you sell to the people who are listening, and maybe, just maybe those people tell their friends. So when Steve Jobs talks to 50,000 people at his keynote, right, who are all tuned in from 130 countries watching his two-hour commercial -- that's the only thing keeping his company in business -- is that those 50,000 people care desperately enough to watch a two-hour commercial, and then tell their friends.
Pearl Jam, 96 albums released in the last two years. Every one made a profit. How? They only sell them on their website. Those people who buy them on the website have the otaku, and then they tell their friends, and it spreads and it spreads.
This hospital crib cost 10,000 dollars, 10 times the standard. But hospitals are buying it faster than any other model. Hard Candy nail polish, doesn't appeal to everybody, but to the people who love it, they talk about it like crazy.
This paint can right here saved the Dutch Boy paint company, making them a fortune. It costs 35 percent more than regular paint because Dutch Boy made a can that people talk about, because it's remarkable. They didn't just slap a new ad on the product, they changed what it meant to build a paint product.
AmIhotornot.com -- every day 250,000 people go to this site, run by two volunteers, and I can tell you they are hard graders, and
(Laughter)
they didn't get this way by advertising a lot. They got this way by being remarkable, sometimes a little TOO remarkable.
And this picture frame has a cord going out the back, and you plug it into the wall. My father has this on his desk, and he sees his grandchildren every day, changing constantly. And every single person who walks into his office hears the whole story of how this thing ended up on his desk. And one person at a time, the idea spreads.
These are not diamonds, not really. They're made from cremains. After you're cremated you can have yourself made into a gem.
(Laughter)
Oh, you like my ring? It's my grandmother.
(Laughter)
Fastest-growing business in the whole mortuary industry. But you don't have to be Ozzie Osborne -- you don't have to be super-outrageous to do this. What you have to do is figure out what people really want and give it to them.
A couple of quick rules to wrap up. The first one is: Design is free when you get to scale. And the people who come up with stuff that's remarkable more often than not figure out how to put design to work for them.
Number two: The riskiest thing you can do now is be safe. Proctor and Gamble knows this, right? The whole model of being Proctor and Gamble is always about average products for average people. That's risky. The safe thing to do now is to be at the fringes, be remarkable.
And being very good is one of the worst things you can possibly do. Very good is boring. Very good is average. It doesn't matter whether you're making a record album, or you're an architect, or you have a tract on sociology. If it's very good, it's not going to work, because no one's going to notice it.
So my three stories. Silk. Put a product that does not need to be in the refrigerated section next to the milk in the refrigerated section. Sales tripled. Why? Milk, milk, milk, milk, milk -- not milk. For the people who were there and looking at that section, it was remarkable. They didn't triple their sales with advertising, they tripled it by doing something remarkable.
That is a remarkable piece of art. You don't have to like it, but a 40-foot tall dog made out of bushes in the middle of New York City is remarkable.
Frank Gehry didn't just change a museum, he changed an entire city's economy by designing one building that people from all over the world went to see. Now, at countless meetings at, you know, the Portland City Council, or who knows where, they said, we need an architect -- can we get Frank Gehry? Because he did something that was at the fringes.
And my big failure? I came out with an entire
(Music)
record album and hopefully a whole bunch of record albums in SACD format -- this remarkable new format -- and I marketed it straight to people with 20,000 dollar stereos. People with 20,000 dollar stereos don't like new music.
(Laughter)
So what you need to do is figure out who does care. Who is going to raise their hand and say, "I want to hear what you're doing next," and sell something to them. The last example I want to give you. This is a map of Soap Lake, Washington. As you can see, if that's nowhere, it's in the middle of it.
(Laughter)
But they do have a lake. And people used to come from miles around to swim in the lake. They don't anymore. So the founding fathers said, "We've got some money to spend. What can we build here?" And like most committees, they were going to build something pretty safe. And then an artist came to them -- this is a true artist's rendering -- he wants to build a 55-foot tall lava lamp in the center of town. That's a purple cow, that's something worth noticing. I don't know about you but if they build it, that's where I'm going to go.
Ever since Abraham and his father Terach, children have learned to overthrow the idols of their parents, to question their values, to challenge their operating assumptions and to recreate their institutions.Through this intergenerational process Judaism has evolved and devolved, it has reviewed and renewed itself and above all it has continued to live. Even though the story about Abraham destroying his father’s idol shop is legendary, it proffers a timeless truth, a truth unto which this issue of Torah at the Center attests.
Rabbi Tali Zelkowicz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Jewish Education at HUC-JIR’s Rhea Hirsch School of Education, initiated a correspondence and made a symbiotic proposal. In a course she teaches entitled “Sociology of Jewish Education” students are required to write an article for a publication to which reflective practitioners of Jewish education are invited to contribute. Each article strives to meet three criteria:
Address a dilemma, concern or problem facing Jewish education
Provide some social scientific context for the issue
Offer a creative, refreshing, compelling analysis of the issue and propose a course of action and/or vision for change
Intrigued by the prospect of providing the students with a targil ratuv, a live simulation, so to speak, editor Wendy Grinberg engaged Tali in correspondence and conversation, perhaps a contemporary Pirkei Imahot, and as collegial partners they arrived at terms of agreement. We are grateful for Tali and Wendy’s inspired partnership and for the bikurim, the first authorial fruits of aspiring Jewish educational leaders. The students’ voices are included in Torah at the Center as new members of the educational choir. Accompanying them in the same issue are experienced and insightful mentors, educational practitioners with expertise in the areas the students are seeking to influence for the better.
The result is a harmony that leaves the integrity of each voice. Out of this conversation emerges a masechet, a type of web, a web that links dor holech to dor hemshech, the current generation of Jewish educators to the next generation of Jewish educators. The web intended to catch you, the reader, in it. Indeed, if the web stops within the pages of Torah at the Center, we will have
failed to accomplish a major aim. The web of Jewish learning should include you, your teachers, your colleagues and your students. At stake are not only our livelihoods as Jewish educators but also our lives as Jews.
When Abraham proverbially overthrew his father’s idols, he “created” Judaism. When the next generation of the Jewish people follows Abraham’s lead, they too will be [re]creating Judaism in their image. The process is sometimes painful and radical. It is always predicated on a measure of faith and trust. Terach could not control Abraham and we cannot control our children or our students. Instead, we have endeavored to keep the intergenerational conversation alive, to pursue a dialogue that is as respectful of our differences as it is of our commonalities (if not more so). We are truly children of Abraham when we question the wisdom of our predecessors, when we dare to think differently from them.
When our children and students do the same to us, may we have the ability to enjoy the process and love them for it. Eventually Abraham learned to engage in respectful dialogue, even when his partner was divine. When he had his own scion, Abraham learned to love and to realize that love and sacrifice are always intertwined. May the spirit of intergenerational correspondence in this issue prove to be worthy, not only for the sake of our students but also for the sake of heaven. As we approach Sinai once again on Shavuot and celebrate our students that confirm their Jewish identity, let us affirm the hope we have that the next generation will not only succeed us, but also exceed us.
Ken y’hi ratzoneinu! Ken y’hi ratzon Eloheinu! Kayitz naim!
Have a lovely summer!
This past fall many Jewish educators encountered a newish phenomenon. Some families in our religious schools were “taking a year off” from Religious School and in some cases synagogue membership. If these were families whose youngest child recently became Bar or Bat Mitzvah, we might wring our hands and say “Ri-i-i-ight. Taking the year off. We’ll look for you next fall.”
But most of these families in my synagogue and in those of colleagues who have told me they have encountered the same conversations have children who are much younger. They tend to be in Gan (K) through Kitah Gimel (3rd). In fact, our enrollment from Kitah Chet (8th) through Kitah Yud Bet (12th) is at an all time high. If pushed, some parents will say it is a temporary economic decision. They indicated the economic realities of the fall of 2010 and a belief that their child’s Jewish identity will not be irreparably damaged by a break in their studies. And they absolutely did not want to discuss financial aid – either they were too uncomfortable with the topic or they didn’t feel things were that bad. They promised to come back. And in some of the conversations I am beginning to have with these hiatus families, they are telling me that they are absolutely coming back. From their mouths…
Linchpin: Are You Indispensible?
I am nearly finished with a book call Linchpin by Seth Godin.[1] I am a Godin Junkie. I first met Seth’s work in the pages of Fast Company, another of my addictions. Both are from the world of business, not Jewish education. Both have taught me so many things about how to make Jewish education happen. I cannot recommend them enough. I could write ten articles about this book, beginning with how it was marketed. I am reading it with a small moleskine notebook next to me so I can take notes. Yes, it is that engaging.
At the heart of the book is a redefining of the American Dream: “Be remarkable. Be generous. Create Art. Make Judgment Calls. Connect people and ideas. And we will have no choice but to reward you.” He challenges the reader, regardless of your field, to be an artist, which he defines as “someone who changes everything, who makes dreams come true…someone who can see the reality of today and describe a better tomorrow…a linchpin.”
A linchpin. The pshat or plain meaning is the piece of metal that slides through the axle that keeps the wheel from falling off the wagon, or through the arm and the hitch to keep the trailer attached. It is a simple device yet it keeps things together and makes their proper function possible. Godin suggests that in our work, each of us needs to be a linchpin, someone who is indispensible to their company. Not a line-worker or a rule-follower, but an artist – someone who stretches possibilities to allow growth and change. He gives great examples.
Al Tifrosh Min Hatzibur - Do Not Separate Yourself From the Community
So why am I bringing this up while talking about the interrupted life of our students? I believe we need to do a better job of making the school and the synagogue (and the Jewish educator) linchpins in the lives of our families. I think that twenty years ago, no one would have considered “taking a year off.” That generation might have considered the financial ramifications when joining a synagogue. Once in, though, I am convinced that like their predecessors, they would not consider leaving – at least not before the youngest child’s Bar/Bat Mitzvah. I think that we have witnessed evidence of a paradigm shift in the mind of some of our parents. And because the synagogue is no longer a linchpin for some, they are making choices we have not seen before.
Much has been written about what needs to happen to make the synagogue and formal Jewish education more relevant. And some of it may be right on target. But before we go exploding all of our existing institutions, I have a thought. We need to be linchpins. By “we” I mean the synagogue, the school, the clergy, the directors of education/lifelong learning/early childhood/family education/programming/fill-in-the-blank, the teachers and the lay leadership.
In 1989 United Airlines ran a television commercial showing a conference room. “A manager announces they have just lost a major long-time client, one too many. It's time for a "face-to-face" policy, in other words, not just call the customer, but also meet him. He starts handing out plane tickets to the other employees...” [2]
They had the idea exactly right. We need to focus our energy on each adult, one family at a time. It’s not an easy task, given the size of some of our congregations. It is not a one-person job. I intend to become an evangelist, recruiting those who already feel that being a part of a congregation – learning, praying and coming together for ma’asim tovim (good works) and for fun – is not something to be weighed against other household expenses and youth activities. We need to get them join us in reaching out, one family at a time, and helping those families come to the same conclusion. We have to lose the model whereby the educator focuses on the children and that leads to families becoming more connected.
Put Your Own Mask On First…
Finally, I want to share the teaching of Harlene Winnick Appelman, the director of the Covenant Foundation. Harlene was one of the first winners of the Covenant Award, and was one of the first people to take the idea of family education and develop it into something more comprehensive than a special program on a Sunday morning. Her sessions at CAJE conferences were a must-attend for those who wanted to be on the cutting edge.
She reminded us of the safety speech that flight attendants used to give before takeoff (now it is usually on a video). They would say that in case of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks would drop from the ceiling. After instructing us how to put it on and start the flow of oxygen, they would tell us that passengers travelling with young children should put their own mask on first and then help their children. Harlene taught us what should have been (and should still be) obvious: If you put the child’s mask on first, we might not be able to breathe well enough to take care of ourselves. And what if our children need us after getting the mask on?
We need to get the parents to put on their Jewish learning and living masks. Otherwise we will have a generation of adults with the Jewish identity and connection of at best a thirteen year old. We need to get them to understand that they need to belong to a synagogue and send their children to religious school (or day school) because that is something that is vitally important to them. And we can only do that through personal relationships. We need to be artists.
My friend Saul Kaiserman has written a spectacular response to and summary of Elizabeth Green's cover article from this week's New York Times. I cannot say it any better, so I share it here. You should check out Saul's Blog, New Jewish Education. It is really good! I have pre-ordered Lemov's books, and I hope to discuss it with you in April!
The NY Times finally tells us what we've all known all along - and does it really, really well. I can even (almost) forgive the writer, Elizabeth Green, for ending a sentence with a preposition:
"When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to."
[The photo to the right is copyright Benjamin Norman for The New York Times.] The article begins by noting that paying higher salaries does help to attract and retain the best and most qualified teachers. However, it also notes that we need to simultaneously be focused on improving pedagogy and content knowledge through professional development, because of the vast number of teachers that the education system requires to operate (and especially at a time when the baby-boomer teachers are retiring).
The main focus of the article is Doug Lemov, author of an as-yet-unpublished, 375-page long taxonomy of 49 essential teaching techniques (apparently, he distributes it at training seminars, and it will be available from this spring). Much of the piece describes effective classroom management techniques that the Times illustrates with videos narrated by Lemov. I suspect that every one of our Religious School teachers would benefit from watching these brief videos - and especially the Hebrew teachers.
The article is on-line as of this morning, and already is getting much buzz around the blogosphere (a term I use derisively, btw. Nothing better than reading a piece in which the author writes "I haven't finished reading this article yet, but I had to post...").
You'll want to read the whole article so that you can read in context little gems like these:
"All Lemov’s techniques depend on his close reading of the students’ point of view, which he is constantly imagining. In Boston, he declared himself on a personal quest to eliminate the saying of “shh” in classrooms, citing what he called “the fundamental ambiguity of ‘shh.’ Are you asking the kids not to talk, or are you asking kids to talk more quietly?” A teacher’s control, he said repeatedly, should be “an exercise in purpose, not in power.”"
"...One [student] is playing with a pair of headphones; another is slowly paging through a giant three-ring binder. Zimmerli stands at the front of the class in a neat tie. “O.K., guys, before I get started today, here’s what I need from you,” he says. “I need that piece of paper turned over and a pencil out.” Almost no one is following his directions, but he is undeterred. “So if there’s anything else on your desk right now, please put that inside your desk.” He mimics what he wants the students to do with a neat underhand pitch. A few students in the front put papers away. “Just like you’re doing, thank you very much,” Zimmerli says, pointing to one of them. Another desk emerges neat; Zimmerli targets it. “Thank you, sir.” “I appreciate it,” he says, pointing to another. By the time he points to one last student — “Nice . . . nice” — the headphones are gone, the binder has clicked shut and everyone is paying attention.
"Lemov [explains] “Imagine if his first direction had been, ‘Please get your things out for class,’ ” he said. Zimmerli got the students to pay attention not because of some inborn charisma, Lemov explained, but simply by being direct and specific. Children often fail to follow directions because they really don’t know what they are supposed to do."
The article also notes that "content can’t be completely divorced from mechanics" and that different types of knowledge - mathematics, reading, science - require not only general skills but also ones unique to the subject. The implications for Jewish education are clear: There are skill sets that make for effective teaching of, say, Hebrew, that aren't necessarily the same as teaching about holidays or transferable if you can effectively teach French. Teachers need to be able to deeply understand the material and then be able to effectively share that knowledge with a room full of students who have diverse ways of thinking and learning.
"“If I’m asking my students a question, and I call on somebody, and they get it wrong, I need to work on how to address that,” [fifth-grade math teacher Katie] Bellucci explained in February. “It’s easy to be like, ‘No,’ and move on to the next person. But the hard part is to be like: ‘O.K., well, that’s your thought. Does anybody disagree? . . . I have to work on going from the student who gets it wrong to students who get it right, then back to the student who gets it wrong and ask a follow-up question to make sure they understand why they got it wrong and understood why the right answer is right.”"
Interestingly, although Lemov's taxonomy, or a similar mathematics-content-driven approach developed by Deborah Loewenberg Ball at the University of Michigan, can be used as a metric to observe what makes for effective education, there isn't clear evidence that these skill sets can actually be taught.
"Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University ... favors policies like rewarding teachers whose students perform well and removing those who don’t but looks skeptically upon teacher training. He has an understandable reason: While study after study shows that teachers who once boosted student test scores are very likely to do so in the future, no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, “you could be throwing your money away”?"
Which brings us back to the original point: Now that we may be able to assess what skills are evidence of effective teaching, we need to offer salaries that will attract and keep the most qualified people in the classroom.
I'm encouraging all of my school faculty to read the article, and especially to watch the videos that the Times has posted. This is some good stuff.
When I was a kid, the Purim carnival was all about the Men’s Club – or so it seemed to me. They coordinated everything, food, games, moonbounce, tickets, prizes – it was their show. I was a kid, and my only concern was winning a goldfish. (Keeping it alive later was a lower priority and probability!)
Jump forward about 35 years. This afternoon was the Purim carnival at our temple. For a variety of reasons, I played a larger role that ever before, as did the members of the Religious School Committee. It was amazing!
Now its amazing-ness had nothing to do with anything I did. I tried very hard to follow the well-designed plan of our Family Educator, who has done it for years. And her foresight made everything work. What was amazing was what my changed perspective allowed me to see, and what I am certain was always there.
It’s about the numbers. A committee of 8 people planned the carnival, made the calls and made things happen. 14 people baked cakes for the cake walk. 20 people showed up early to join the maintenance staff in setting up. 12 adults and 82 kids (grades 4 – 12) came and ran the booths. The brotherhood brought a dozen to prepare and serve the food. Another dozen stayed to clean up. And during it all, they schmoozed. Some were already friendly with one another. Others were acquainted or met one another for the first time.
It was a thrill to watch! This is not the most intellectual, spiritual or educational event in our calendar. I was excited to see the connections being made, renewed and deepened. It occurred to me that with all of our wikis focusing on Hebrew, conferences on educational technology and blogs bemoaning the failure of institution X to reach goal Y, that we sometimes overlook the most important value of all – community. And that value is modeled and lived in many places, including in the kitchen as the “Pressure Cookers” of the Brotherhood get ready to feed several hundred people!
This all seems very kamuvan – obvious – but we often take it for granted. Look at the 28 Ideas, 28 Ideas blog. No, really, go there. It is really cool and interesting. More importantly for my point, most of the ideas there are creative explorations of how can better connect the Jewish people. In other words, it is about community. 21st century, hyper-connected and tech savvy, but community nonetheless. So let's keep our eye on the prize!
They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat – together!
And now on to Pesach!
This is cross-posted with Davar Acher - On The Other Hand, the blog of the Jim Joseph Foundation Fellows of the Lookstein Institute for Jewish Education in the Diaspora at Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan. Please visit!
, editor W. Gunther Plaut (NY: URJ Press, 2005). Used by permission of URJ Press, www.urjbooksandmusic.com. 
and 
books to re-frame our work as educators and institutional leaders. It was well-received, but I think the time has come to continue the discussion. So what I offer is a video and transcript of Seth Godin teaching about what it means to have your product stand out. As I mentioned at that conference, it took Moses from among all the other shepherds of Midian to notice not that the bush was burning, but that the branches were not being consumed by the flames. Most of us and our constituents are NOT as observant as Moses. We only see a bush on fire. Nothing remarkable about that in the wilderness. 
