The Tony Awards made me think...

When I started out in Jewbiz back in ’93, I was hired to run a Reform-Conservative supplementary school, serving the needs of two neighboring synagogues separated only by three city blocks and one religious movement. The experiment was born out of financial need, and died for the some reason. The powers-that-be decided after 6 years that the combined school was no longer financially beneficial (the idea of creating community be damned) so the time had come to create separate schools.

What this teaches us is that in the current reality many think it is easier to make our own Shabbat. And you know what? Sometimes that works. Sometimes collaborating with another synagogue doesn’t work. Is that intrinsically bad? Torah Aura recently tweeted a link to a piece on cooperative schooling – which I guess is another way of saying community school. The referenced article waxed prosaic on sharing resources. Great, if it...works. But one size doesn’t fit all. Which means that making my own Shabbat doesn’t negate your Shabbat, and in fact may help you light the candles.

That being said, on the Tony awards one of the winners talked about the concept of Fine Arts – how that means that the craft of acting is constantly being tweaked and modified. That’s sort of like what we, as Jewish educators and passers-on-of-traditions, are doing, or should be doing. Looking at what we are transmitting and making sure it makes sense to those receiving our message.

Which brings me back to the question: how do we create meaningful opportunities for Jewish engagement in each of our communities? And what does the concept of engagement mean? What is Jewish Fine Arts?