Tinkering With Tomorrow

When I was a kid I loved tinker-toys. I would spend hours constructing skeletal looking and what I thought were futuristic buildings.  I never knew what the outcome would be, I didn’t know if what I was building would stand up to the forces of nature or my brother’s kicks, but I had fun.  I just built and then decided if what I created was worth the effort. That was then, this is now.

I bring this up as I finish watching the videos from the recently held Jewish Futures Conference that were just posted for all of our viewing pleasure and edification. Go here to watch the presentations yourself. I’m also in the midst of reading a fascinating collection of essays published by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, entitled Curriculum 21: Essential Education for a Changing World, edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs. The book and the conference videos are serendipitously providing me an opportunity to think about how we, as Jewish educators and futurists can tinker purposefully with a Jewish tomorrow.

What will we want our children, our students, to know when they emerge from their Jewish educational cocoon?  What will the Jewish curriculum look like tomorrow?  In one of the pieces in Curriculum 21, Jacobs suggests that we ask three guiding questions as we reevaluate curriculum and content in secular education. Let’s consider them within a Jewish context:

1.    Within the discipline being reviewed, what content choices are dated and nonessential?  In our world of Jewish learning, this question can be considered heretical.  Isn’t it all sacred?  What isn’t essential? How do we evaluate that? Who makes that judgment call?

2.    What choices for topics, issues, problems, themes, and case studies are timely and necessary for our learners within disciplines?   What is happening in the Jewish world NOW? How does Jewish practice and interpretation reflect life in the 21^st century? What are the roles of Israel and the Diaspora; of men and women; of interfaith families in Jewish life?

3.    Are the interdisciplinary content choices, rich, natural, and rigorous? What does it mean to engage in Jewish life, learning, and spirituality? What are the different ways of creating meaningful Jewish experiences?

Among the winners of the Jewish Futures Competition, a contest for the most “forward looking” Jewish educational thinkers and doers that was featured at the Jewish Futures Conference, we find Charles Schwartz and Russel M. Neiss, the creators of MediaMidrash.org. In their submission to the competition they posited a paradigm for future Jewish engagement resting on four guiding principles:  

1.    Jewish resources need to be open, discoverable, and accessible. The body of Jewish learning needs to be available to all who seek it - free and non-proprietary.

2.    Remixable. Jews need to be provided the tools and opportunity to transform and reinterpret Jewish tradition and life. 

3.    Jewish education needs to be meaningful and relevant, providing the learner with a context in which to construct a Jewish life that matters.

4.    Meaningful Jewish life needs to continue to incorporate a process of community building, recognizing new definitions of affiliation and belonging, both face-to-face and virtual.

The way Jewish knowledge WILL be acquired tomorrow is different than the way it WAS attained yesterday. David Bryfman once wrote about the 19^th century revolution in general education revolving around the new fangled tool called the chalk board.  We are in the midst of a similar phenomenon, this time being driven by digital and social technology.  Learning is becoming non-linear. It is more and more a social process, driven by demand and developed by a community that is linked in synchronous and a-synchronous environments, both present and remote. For better or worse, education is turning into an even messier affair than it already is.  This is what will drive us to answer the questions of what to teach. The structure will be more fluid, transparent and flexible. Stephen Wilmarth writes in Curriculum 21 how education has been a cathedral, an elegant top-down process designed by “wizards and experts”.  The future reality can be described as a bazaar, a market place that is noisy and unpredictable, a result of uncontrollable forces.  Knowledge will be open to all, redefined and remixed when appropriate so as to become personally and communally meaningful in contexts of yet unimagined social networks, creating new types of communities.

Jonathan Woocher, in his closing remarks at the Jewish Futures Conference notes that there is no one Jewish future.  It can’t be pre-determined.  There are multiple possibilities. Schwartz and Neiss retell the midrash of Moses visiting Akiva’s classroom of the future, not understanding a word, even though his teaching is the lesson being taught.   If we were to step into H.G. Wells’ Time Machine and be transported into a Jewish learning environment of the future, what would we find? Would it be alien to us?  Should it be?

Long Distance Runaround: Pondering the CyBar/CyBat Mitzvah

When I first read this past Sunday’s New York Time’s article on digital B’nai Mitzvah preparation, my first thought was that it was intriguing that this topic would be the lead story in, of all things, the Fashion and Style section. It then occurred to me that the topic’s visibility in the soft news section is a sign of how truly mainstream Judaism has become in American culture. This is what we have been fighting for – to be accepted in secular society. We have done such a good job that a central Jewish-American ritual has become a subject of pop culture. Like all the rest of American lifestyle, our traditions are now morphing into something potentially unrecognizable in this real world made virtual.

The point of the article, as I see it, can be found in this question asked in the fourth paragraph of the piece: “If dating, shopping and watching TV can be revolutionized by the Internet, why should bar and bat mitzvahs be immune?” That is it in a nutshell. Our communal striving for normalization and acceptance in the Diaspora has essentially led to the eradication of the line between the holy/kadosh and the mundane/hol. Nothing is sacred. Our coming of age ceremony, which is more of a process of becoming then merely a single event, has lost so much of its uniqueness that it can be acquired while the recipient is physically absent. Is this a tragedy? Maybe. What do we do about it? Embrace it.

Reaction to the CyBar/CyBat phenomenon seems to center on it being a reflection of a general decline in the centrality of Jewish communal life in the early 21st century. This is not news – those of us who work in synagogues struggle with this on an almost daily basis. We respond by trying to find new ways to engage our existing synagogue members and families, as well as to reach out to the unaffiliated. We are constantly exploring new models and technologies, and striving to create new visions that will enhance existing institutions. This is as it should be, and this is why we need to see the rise of the digital B’nai Mitzvah as an opportunity for us to expand our community. This requires developing a new paradigm of affiliation and membership. We need to leverage on-line participation, incorporating it into what we do in our brick and mortar facilities. This may take the form of a new synagogue membership category with its own price structure - call it “Virtual” if you will. We should contemplate creating semi-permeable walls that welcome those who are trying to find their own personal niche in the Jewish community. We must dare to think that digital experiences, if handled artfully, can be gateways to synagogue life for the unaffiliated. Face-to-face encounters no longer may be the only, or even primary, means of introduction to the Jewish community.

A Florida Rabbi I know, upon reading the Time’s article commented, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” This made me think of Sun-Tzu, the 6th century Chinese author of “The Art of War” who wrote, “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer”. We, the inheritors of the tradition passed down to us from Moses to the Great Assembly to our parents need to find the open hands waiting to receive that birthright. Could it be that those we think are the “enemies”, those we accuse of emasculating the Judaism from which we grew, are actually reshaping our heritage, leading us to the next step in a dynamic and flourishing Jewish future?

Sharing a Shabbat Argument

I came across this poem recently. It’s by Leonard Cohen and appeared in his collection entitled Book of Longing. There’s something about it that has touched my soul, and won’t leave. I thought I’d share this as my Shabbat Shalom wish to you all.

You might be a person who likes to
argue with Eternity. A good way to
begin such an Argument is:

Why do You rule against me
Why do You silence me now
When will the Truth be on my lips
and the Light be on my brow?

After some time has passed, the answer to these questions
percolating upwards from the pit of your stomach, or downwards
from the crown of your hat, or having been given, at last, the right
pill, you might begin to fall in love with the One who asked them:
and perhaps then you will cry out, as so many of our parents did:

Blessed be the One
Who has sweetened
my Argument.

Strikes, Spares and the Jewish Future

I’m a bowler. I’m in a league. Sometimes I hate it. You see, once the ball is rolled, the outcome is by no means assured. I can control how I grasp the ball, swing and release it, but that’s it. Once it’s thrown, it interacts with the oil that is spread on the lane and is impacted by the laws of physics that determine the way it hits the pins, as it ricochets, slides and rolls. I can set up the perfect shot, but the process that takes place after I release that sphere is up to forces over which I have no control. There are too many variables. It’s sort of like planning for a Jewish future (you knew this was going somewhere.)

We can plan tactics, strategies, and methods of engagement but when we talk about modern Jews, we’re not dealing with a herd (Klal Yisrael notwithstanding). The phenomenon that Cohen and Eisen defined in The Jew Within 10 years ago describes American Judaism today and probably tomorrow – Jews are making their own Shabbat and are increasingly becoming alienated from established forms of Jewish communal life. Jonathan Woocher got it right last week when he wrote that we need to adjust the paradigm of Jewish education, empowering each individual to be involved in personally constructing "a meaningful and satisfying Jewish journey." And this is how building a Jewish future is like bowling.

There are many different types of bowling bowls designed for the particular style of individual bowlers. One size cannot fit all. As we design the foundations of 21st (and 22nd) century Judaism, not only do we need to contemplate how to link the silos of Jewish institutional life; we may very well need to build new ones to replace the antiquated structures that are still standing. But we can’t tear everything down, at least not for the time being.

As long as I’ve been in my present position as a synagogue educator, I’ve communicated with my religious school families via weekly e-mails. This year I decided to take the next step - I just created a religious school Facebook page. I happily announced it and received fascinating feedback. There were those religious school parents (all in their 30s and 40s) who thought it was cool. Then there were those (same demographic) who began to tremble in their shoes…as one religious school mom put it: “I’m one of the handful of people who refuse to use Facebook. I hope you will continue with your email updates.” As I’ve written before, we need to be careful of how quickly we embrace our future. We don’t want to leave anyone behind.

Obviously it will be impossible for us to forecast the outcomes as we tinker with the Jewish future. We may be positive that we’ll get a strike, but in the end we may only knock down a few pins. The trajectory of 21st century Judaism is radically different from anything that Jewish civilization has experienced before. One center of Jewish life, concentrated in North America, is a place where state sanctioned anti-Semitism by and large never existed – at least not since Peter Stuyvesant and Ulysses S. Grant. The only Jewish ghettos in the United States were self-imposed. This communal history has left an indelibly unique mark on the character of American Judaism.

The other center is Israel – with a flavor of Judaism that is defined by an amalgam of socialism, European nationalism and religious orthodoxy, and topped off with strife, both internally born and externally imposed. The resulting concoction is a type of Jewish identity that, at times, is almost alien to the Jewish sensibilities of its brothers/sisters/cousins across the great sea. Is it possible to link these silos?

In “The Big Lebowski”, John Goodman, playing the weirdest Jew I’ve ever seen, declares that he doesn’t “roll on Shabbos”. Now that I think about it, he may not be so weird, actually. He’ll drive. He’ll drink. He’ll fight. He just won’t bowl. He’s like many of us. We all seem to be making our own “Shabbos”. As we strive to engineer the future of our people, we must not be so confident that we have all the answers. We don’t. Sometimes the exception, or the unexpected, becomes the rule. That’s the only thing we can be sure of.

L'shana Tova to One and All

Repentance.  Renewal.  Returning to our pure selves.  Looking in the mirror.  T’shuvah.

One of my favorite midrashim is about Reb Zusya – who upon his death was worried that he had been emulating Moses and Abraham too much, and not achieving his own Zusya potential - "In the world to come, they will not ask me, 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me, 'Why were you not Zusya?'" 

In Mishkan T’fillah, the Reform siddur,  you can find a text attributed to the Jewish Funds for Justice and associated with the Nisim B’chol Yom blessings:

I can stay the tears of others, if I can see myself

as diminished by their sorrows.

I can hasten time when everyone will be able

to rejoice in freedom.

And if I can see myself as the companion,

of those fighting against oppression,

I can honor the struggle of people everywhere

to gain dignity and deliverance from bondage.

When I look at myself in the mirror

who will I see?

As the year 5771 begins, may we remember that the way we connect with one another, even the stranger, is how we find God.  Let’s not forget that we have worn the sandals and shoes of the oppressed. May we not allow ourselves to wear the boots of the oppressor.

Together we can make 5771 a year of freedom and justice and peace. 

L’shana Tova u’M’tookah…May this be a year filled with goodness and sweetness.

My Dad, Repentance, and Mosques

Of late I’ve been obsessing about the controversy over the Muslim center in lower Manhattan.  Those of you who pay attention to my tweets or Facebook postings will have noticed this.  There’s a very simple reason.

B-14777

That’s the number on my father’s arm.

We children of survivors are witnesses.  Imbedded in our genes is the understanding that oppression takes many forms:  quotas, job restrictions, zoning restrictions, segregation, marriage bans, ghettos, slavery, Auschwitz. If we don’t stand up at the first signs of the evil of prejudice, Martin Niemoller’s prophecy will come true.

Call me obsessed.  I’m second generation.  I grew up with The Number.  And hearing the memories.  My aunt regaling us with tales of her stay in Plaszow and Birkenau and Feldafing.   My uncle being part of the crew cleaning up the Warsaw Ghetto while the fighting was still going on.  My mother being smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto by her mom to get bread – at the risk of her 8  year old life. My father being introduced to life in Birkenau (he was 16) when he saw the flames rising above the chimneys and being told that that is what’s left of his parents. That’s my legacy.  And my lesson.

So I am embarrassed by Jews who oppose the Park 51 project. We have been the victims of much worse.  Jonathan Sarna spelled it out here :  how we (the Jews) were victims of the same type of hatred that Glenn Beck,  Sarah Palin and  their ilk  preach today. In America:  the Goldener Madina.

Oppression starts mundanely. My mom tells the story of how in the beginning of the Fascist occupation of Hungary, Jews couldn’t own radios. When she was 6 she couldn’t buy an ice-cream cone at her favorite vendor because she was a Jew.   That led to you-know-what. 

The majority rules, but not absolutely.  Conventional wisdom can be wrong.  At one point, the majority of Americans supported the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, school segregation between African-Americans and whites, and treating Gays as second-class citizens. The majority has been wrong. 

It’s Elul.  We need to start thinking about T’shuva – Repentance.  If we stand silent, or oppose the right of another religious minority to build a community center or house of worship because it “doesn’t feel right”, we are validating The Final Solution. Because if we deny a minority their rights, we may be next.  

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out --

Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me. (Martin Niemoller)

The Victory Dance

Last week I found myself bopping to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”. Now, ordinarily, if I heard this tune pop up in Pandora or my radio I would turn it off.  It DOES NOT reside in my iPod. This time was different:  I was smiling.  I was watching the video-gone-viral:  “I Will Survive Auschwitz”. It features 3 generations: a holocaust survivor, his daughter and his grandchildren dancing their way through Auschwitz, Trezin, Lodz, Dachau and other holocaust sites. The score is Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”.  It ends with the survivor declaring how incredible and “historical” it was for him to visit the camps with his grandchildren. Their dancing prowess leaves much to be desired, but that’s not the point.  The video is about celebrating life.

When I first saw it (thanks to David Bryfman for calling my attention to it on his blog Bryfy.net) I was admittedly taken aback for the first few seconds.  When I realized what was going on, I was spellbound. I watched the family cavort in front of concentration camp gates, memorials and train tracks, and remembered…

Five years ago my dad, a survivor of Birkenau-Auschwitz (he was 15) brought my mom (who spent her 8^th and 9^th years enduring the ghetto of Budapest), my wife, our 2 daughters and me on our own “March of the Living”.  We ended up at the gates of Birkenau where my dad said “This is my victory. I beat the Nazis. And I’m with my granddaughters”. We didn’t dance.  We said kaddish for my dad’s parents and sister instead.  But it was a celebration nevertheless.

The “I Will Survive-Auschwitz” video had engendered much reaction. There seem to be 3 type of responses:  there are those who think it is a travesty and the ultimate in disrespect for the memory of those who died; there are the Neo Nazis and other anti-Semites who use the film to attack the “dancing Jews” and draw the obscene comparison between Auschwitz and Gaza; and then there are those who look at it as I do: as an affirmation of victory.

In my own very unscientific survey of reactions, I found that 2^nd generation children, like me, understood the message and liked the video.  My parents had a different take:  they understood what the video was trying convey, but their objection was that the camps are cemeteries (for their parents) and as such are not appropriate places to dance.  I wonder if this is a generational perspective. Those of us once removed from the trauma may deal with it differently. I do.

My take is that the last thing that Rudolph Hoess (the S.S. Kommandant of Auschwitz) expected or wanted was a bunch of Juden dancing in his death factory.  It is an act of laughing in the face of Nazism and racism.  When we think of the Shoah we need to remember and memorialize the lives of the individuals and the communities that were lost. But we must also celebrate the fact that we are still here and Eichmann isn’t.   I can’t believe I’m about to do this, but I’m going to quote Gloria Gaynor: “I've got all my life to live, I've got all my love to give, and I'll survive, I will survive.”