A Floor, But Not a Ceiling

One quick note before I dive into weightier comments…

…I was equal parts delighted and mortified when my last blog post became fodder for a Seventh Grade Language Arts lesson in my own school.  On the one hand, I am glad that my topic was interesting enough that it was worth our seventh graders’ time (that’s a tough audience!).  On the other hand, I was not expecting them to come back with notes!

Not only did I have have spelling errors (since corrected and re-posted) but I may (or may not) have mistakenly used an image I did not have permission to use (research continues).  It is now part of a fascinating ongoing conversation in the Middle School, integrated between many topics, about fair use of copyrighted images on blogs and web pages.  [Hopefully it will not lead to any legal action!]  It serves as yet another powerful reminder of what happens when you marry technology, collaboration, and student interest.  All of this serves as preamble to this blog post…not that I hope this blog post is full of spelling errors to be corrected, I’ll surely do a better spell-check this time, but I hope that my own students (CAN YOU HEAR ME EIGHTH GRADERS?) might take a peek at this one as well.

I have three very different opportunities to teach in our school on a weekly basis.  One that I have described before, but have not done due justice yet on the blog, is my weekly “Parent University” course for parents in the Day School.  A lot of what happens in that class informs my blog and vice versa, and I will (promise!) soon dedicate some blog space to articulating more clearly, with more detail, and with lots of links what happens during the class so that parents, supporters and any interested party who is unable to be with us physically can be part of the experience.  Additionally, I also have the pleasure of teaching tefillah (prayer) once a week to our First Grade.  Finally, each Wednesday I have an opportunity to teach our Middle School (as part of a rotation of teachers) about tefillah.

I love teenagers.  Really.  I love their honesty, their searching, their shyness, their cynicism, their brashness, their posturing, their rebelliousness, their humor – the whole package.  I really do.  So you can imagine how much fun it must be talking to teenagers about prayer first thing in the morning!  What topic do teenagers enjoy more than prayer?  Exactly.

In my sessions with them this year we have been exploring the idea of God.  We have been debunking childish theologies and trying out more adult vocabulary.  They share what they believe and what they don’t believe.  We talk about how what we believe about God does or does not impact how we live and practice as Jews.  And I work really hard to keep them awake…not always with great success, but I do my best.

I realized this week that in my attempts to give them space for communication, privacy for reflection, and safety for exploration, I never force myself to take a position.  I know a lot more about what my students believe about God than they do of me.  That doesn’t seem fair.  If my teachers have to blog, I should have to blog.  If my 8th Graders have to talk about God…well so should I.

So without further ado, I offer my own modest statement about God…this is one blog post I would be thrilled to receive notes from my students about (hint, hint):

Jon’s Personal Theology

When I think of Heschel’s term “radical amazement”, the first image that pops into my head is that of a havdalah circle under the stars.  A cliché to be sure, but for many (I would even venture to say most) Jewish professionals and leaders of my generation, our first feelings of radical amazement were nurtured in the enclosed bubble of the Jewish summer camp.  There we were free to experience the transcendence of Jewish irrational behavior – kashrut & Shabbat – safe from the cynicism and doubt of our day-to-day, secular lives.  I also believe that the farther away one dwells from the world of ritual observance, the more radical one’s amazement by it can be.  I know that for me, as a young Reform Jew growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, as dedicated to tikkun olam (social action) Judaism as we were, nothing could have been more radical than having been moved by the experience of Jewish ritual.  But there I was, me and a hundred of my equally nonobservant friends, arms around each other under the stars in the redwoods, singing the havdalah blessings with as much profound joy as any mystic in Safed ever did.  My experiences of the divine through the vehicle of mitzvot (although not exclusively so), shapes the direction of my personal theology.

I start with revelation, rather than with a personal image of God, because my understanding of revelation drives my image and not the reverse.  I start with Heschel’s view of revelation because it speaks to me as a (now observant) Jew living and working in Conservative Judaism.  He expresses my contradictions more eloquently than I can.  As a mystic, Heschel wants to hold onto transcendent experience.  He appeals to my desire to believe in a personal, supernatural God who participates in human history.  He appeals to my intellect when he posits that any God worth believing in can hardly be described in human language.  As a Jewish educator I share Heschel’s encouragement of Jews to engage in Jewish ritual behavior.  I too feel the need to actualize my beliefs through a halakha (literally “the way”, Jewish Law) that is divine in nature, if not content.  Finally, if as great a thinker as Heschel is ultimately unable to put it all together in a coherent package, then I feel no compunction in making my own messy attempt.  However, enough said about Heschel.  Time to pony up.

I believe in a personal, supernatural God.  God cannot be adequately described, but can be experienced.  I believe this despite all the evidence to the contrary – herein lays my existentialism.  I understand literal, anthropomorphic descriptions of God to be elaborate metaphors.  God revealed at Sinai, but it is our experience of that revelation which forms the Bible.  Revelation included content – specifically God’s “will for Israel”.  The Torah, therefore, describes what it is that God wants from us.  Even if we cannot state what it was that God commanded of us in the original revelation, something was revealed.  That “something” over thousands of years now resides in Rabbinic Judaism, specifically in its halakha.  Halakha is enacted in behaviors and deeds – mitzvot. The existentialist in me wants people to perform mitzvot as a response of their “radical amazement” to God’s world, not out of a sense of legal obligation, but how does one legislate transcendence?

As an observant Conservative Jew and as a Conservative Jewish educator I believe in the power of mitzvot.  One of my leaps of faith is my belief that the mitzvot, however filtered they may be, not only reflect what God wants us to do, but that they can be vehicles of transcendence.  The problem is that existentialism by nature cannot be universal.  Havdalah may provoke “radical amazement” in me, but boredom in another.  This is not a problem for my theology, but presents a great challenge to my profession.   The simple truth is that divine authority no longer speaks to most people in a way it might have in earlier times.  They will likely only adopt mitzvot if they have a positive experience in their performance.

It has been my experiences in Jewish education, which provided me with a path from non-observance to observance.  I was encouraged to experience Shabbat in order to know its power.  I experimented with kashrut to learn its significance.  These, and other experiences, led to my belief that the path to God is experience as mediated through mitzvot.  In working with others, you can only enable people to embrace religious ritual and feel its transcendent power.  My challenge, professionally, is to create an environment where others may experience mitzvot as I do.   The religious part of my job, in essence, is to persuade children and families to buy into the idea that the performance of mitzvot can be transcendent.  That they will, given the right circumstances, I take on faith.

So there you go…have it Eighth Graders!

I’m off to Philadelphia this Sunday to participate and present at the Jewish Educators Assembly Conference!  Philly in January…and who says there’s an “East Coast Bias”?!  As with most conferences, you (the select few following me at Twitter) can look forward to a spike in tweets.  I’ll be presenting about “21st Century Schools” and I am sure I’ll share that experience as part of my next post.

“My people were brought to America in chains,” Martin Luther King Jr. told the American Jewish Congress’ Biennial in 1958.  “Your people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe.  Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselvs of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility.”

This passage is from a 1999 book entitled Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. & the Jewish Community written by Rabbi Marc Schneier from the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding.  As the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School prepares to honor the legacy of Dr. King with special programming and content this month, I am reminded of how important it is that we prepare our students to live in the world outside the Jewish community.

It is not that diversity is absent in the Jewish Day School.  One typically finds a range of national origins, ethnicities and social classes within the walls of the school and students have ample opporunity to learn how to get along in a diverse community.  However, when it comes to racial diversity, I feel the Jewish Day School has a special responsibility in light of the historic relationship between the Jewish community and the civil rights movement.  Although we make an effort to expose our students to the larger world around them, the simple fact is that they do spend most of their days in a wholly Jewish environment.  However, the Jewish values of kehillah (community) and tikkun olam (repairing the world) extend beyond the Jewish community.  Our educational responsibility is prepare our students to be citizens of the city, state, nation, and world in which they live.

You’ll find this reflected in our choice of library books and posters in which we do our best to present a range of cultures.  You will see it expressed in the “hidden curriculum” by how we devote school time in both general and Jewish studies to learn about, experience, and commemorate the wonderful holidays of our shared cultures.  As we study the life of Dr. King and his continued impact on our society, we are reminded of the words of the prophet Isaiah (42:6-7), “I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have appointed you as a covenant to the people, as a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, and from the prison those who sit in darkness.”  May this holiday be a reminder that we live in a world still in need of healing and an opporunity to do our small part in its repair.

Chanukah in Jacksonville gives “Festival of Lights” a whole new meaning for me!  This is the time of year when many rabbis and Jewish educators dust off their “Christmas Dilemma” sermons or lessons.  It isn’t difficult to understand why.  Advertising for Christmas begins before Thanksgiving these days and in Jacksonville, where the Jewish presence is (relatively) small, Chanukah rates barely a mention.  This is not the time to lament that Chanukah, a minor rabbinic holiday, has been elevated into a major holiday in order to protect the North American Jewish psyche against the annual Christmas bombardment.  It is appropriate, however – especially for a Solomon Schechter Day School – to take a moment to see what light this so-called “dilemma” sheds on how one deals with the dissonance between our shared cultural heritages.  Because like it or not, Christmas, is not (only) a religious holiday, but an American holiday, and as such it helps us refine our understanding of what it means to have an “integrated” curriculum.

Integration in the Jewish day school has been and continues to be a topic of which there is much discussion, but little consensus.  I agree with the late, renowned Jewish educator Joseph Lukinsky when he stated that “the opposition is not between Jewish and general studies, and that the first task is not how to find some way to integrate or synthesize them”.  His description of the status quo in 1978 remains apropos in that there remains two prevailing attitudes towards general studies in the day school curriculum: rejectionist (most applicable to the non-liberal day schools) and “Judaizing” – the felt need to apply a Jewish view to every general studies topic otherwise risk students will view general studies as the more relevant.  [A third attitude, not prevalent during the beginnings of the day school movement, one could call assimilationist—where Jewish studies as defined in the school’s mission clearly takes a backseat to the general and any clash between values is left unmentioned and unexplored.]

Christmas is almost an unfair example to take because regardless of which attitude a Jewish day school takes, it surely isn’t going to integrate the ideas and values of Christmas into its curriculum.  However, if you take one aspect of Christmas in America—consumerism—you can see how complicated integration can be.  Consumerism with its focus on individual material attainment is not consonant with Jewish values.  So what is a Jewish day school to do with Chanukah in today’s America?

Being “Jewish” and being “American” is not the same thing.  However proud we legitimately ought to be of both our identities, we are not being intellectually honest if we claim they are identical and never in conflict.  Please keep in mind that the choice not to choose between is itself a choice.   Celebrating the consumerist aspects of Chanukah without acknowledging their conflict with Jewish values is to claim that such a conflict does not exist.  Here at the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School, a proud Solomon Schechter school, we are neither rejectionist nor assimilationist.  Nor do we feel so threatened by general society that we have to make everything Jewish.  We strive to be interactionist—our philosophy which can be seen in everything from our curriculum to our bulletin boards—seeks to allow the Jewish and the general to interact naturally as it does in the real world.

So please, celebrate the historical and religious significance of  Chanukah with joy, festivity, and yes, presents.  But this Chanukah, let’s not forget our Jewish values of tzedakah (charity) and kehillah (community).   Along with your normal gift-giving, consider donating a night or two of your family’s celebration to those less fortunate than ourselves.  By doing so we send a powerful message that there are times when our Jewish values command us to reject the values of secular culture and that not only is that okay, but sometimes it is both necessary and appropriate.

Happy Turkey Day & Chanukah from my family to yours!

I was proud to spend today (and yesterday) at the FCIS (Florida Council of Independent Schools) Conference, here in Jacksonville, having a chance to kvell at having the most teacher presenters of any other school and to do some good old-fashioned networking. Then during my last session, during a moment of smalltalk,  someone asked me what I thought is the greatest challenge facing Jewish education today?  And I said to myself, “Guess who wrote himself this week’s blogpost!”

Here’s my answer:

As an opening caveat, I must limit my discussion about issues facing Jewish education and the Jewish people to that of North American Diaspora Non-Orthodox Judaism.  That is the milieu of which I am both product and practitioner and is the only setting that I feel somewhat capable of speaking about with any measure of authority or credibility.  And even that limitation leaves a field too large for one person to see clearly, but having had an opportunity to work in a variety of positions and geographies, I am convinced that the single greatest challenge in Jewish education is identifying the vehicles of transferability from powerful experiences to meaningful Jewish choices.  Although I am partial to Jewish camping and Jewish day school as the two most likely candidates to produce said experiences, I have participated in amazing supplemental school classes, transformative youth group retreats and excellent adult education seminars.  There are opportunities abundant in Jewish education for creating connections – connections between people, connections to history and ideas, and connections to God.  What I consider to be the missing link, so to speak, is linking those experiences to an ongoing engagement with Judaism between and after the power of those peak experiences fade.

Havdalah seems to be a transcendent highlight for kids attending Jewish summer camps (I know it was for me).  It is amongst the most powerful events that take place at camp…and for many Jewish children takes place exclusively during the summer.  Same is true for daily/weekly prayer, Shabbat observance, kashrut (of some form or another) observance, etc. – for many Jewish children these rituals only exist during the summer months when they are not only viewed as normative, but as ultimate.    Similarly for (non-Orthodox) day school kids, kashrut, blessings, prayer, speaking in Hebrew, study of Jewish text, etc. – these activities are imbued with meaning and purpose within the confines of the school walls, but for many end with the closing school bell.  The power in these experiences and others lie in their ability to make normative, or even better “cool,” Jewish rituals and practices that are anything but in children’s regular lives of family, synagogue and Jewish communal life.

Havdalah with your parents at home on a Saturday night with your friends waiting for you to meet them at the movies cannot hold a candle (even a braided one) to havdalah under the twinkling stars in a redwood retreat, arm-in-arm with your newfound closest friends, and guitar strumming away.  Needless to say, the day school student who cannot use his/her Hebrew outside of school with friends and family will only find it so meaningful for the long term.  Not mention the difficulty of replicating a magical sukkah experience at a home lacking one.  The dissonance between what is preached and lived in Jewish educational settings and the family is well-known and is as difficult to breach now as it has been for the last half-century or more.

As the Head of a Jewish Day School, I consider myself to be on the front lines of this conversation.  Although there is a percentage (typical in a non-Orthodox school) of families whose primary concerns are Jewish Studies, many of our families are enrolled in our school because they are looking for a topnotch secular academic program.  The fact that it also comes with a high-quality Jewish Studies program and is housed in a Jewish setting emphasizing Jewish values is anything from “also important” to “nice” depending on the family.  So even in the Jewish educational setting where families are arguably the most invested, we still struggle to find the motivation and vehicle for transference.

For me it begins with admissions and carries through to graduation.  During initial family interviews, I am candid with parents about our school’s agenda for the inculcation of Jewish ritual and practice.  It is really no different than the agenda we have for the inculcation of any other facet of our program.  I want our children to go home from school excited about everything they are learning and seeking to find meaningful ways of incorporating lessons learned into lives lived.  Unlike math or reading, however, we need to reach into families’ lives to provide encouragement and education to bring the Jewish Studies curriculum to life.  Nurturing the relationships that allow that process to occur is, perhaps, the most important, fulfilling, and sacred aspect of my work.  Finding the way to sow the seeds for Jewish journeys is my work’s greatest challenge.