Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts

Friday, November 4, 2016

The Morning After

My friend Mark Borovitz, rabbi of Beit T'Shuvah in Los Angeles is a lifelong fan of the Cleveland Indians. We fantasized about attending one of the World Series games together. And he actually made it to game 1 in Cleveland along with his brother and sister. I made it to games 3 and 4 in Chicago, attending with my uncle Stanley, 3 of my first cousins and my college roommate and his wife. Mark and I spoke as I walked to the train for game 4 and talked about how the family connections are what brought a spiritual connection to the series and our appreciation. He posted this on Facebook on Thursday morning, following game 7. Thank you Mark. You are right - as usual.

The Neshama of Baseball (Bonus Edition)

The Morning After

Mark (center), his Brother Neil and sister Sheri
on their way to Game 1
I am sad and elated today. After watching my Indians give everything they had and losing by 1 run, I am elated that they never gave up! The Cubs played a Great Game! We Indians Fans have nothing to be ashamed of... Our team played it's heart out and this was as exciting a 7th games as ever played in my lifetime!

I have watched the ways that all of the fans, Cubbies and Indians, have come together as One Family. I know that we can build on this energy to bring all of us Americans, humans together to BE ONE FAMILY.

Families have differences AND we come together to help each other. Families can fight with each other and be there in good times and bad. I believe that we, Americans, need to come back together in love, Justice, Truth, Kindness and Compassion rather than the bifurcation and hatred that has been rampant over the past decades. We have the technology- Team Spirit; we have the path- what our country was founded on; and the only question left- do we have the will to surrender to God's Will of finding ways to live together, fight together, argue together and love together?

I am sad that my Indians lost this game and so elated and proud of all they accomplished with the odds against them! I am elated that the Cubs Fans are celebrating their victory. Lets join each other in both commiserating and celebrating for both teams and use this as the model for how we deal with victory and defeat! Doing this makes us all winners.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Please pass the Torah!

Are you a member of the Jewish Education Change Network? If you are not you should be. Stop. Click on Jewish Education Change Network. Join. Come right back her and finish this post! JECN is the brainchild of Jonathan Woocher and the folks at the Lippman-Kanfer Institute at JESNA. It is a Ning network that serves as a platform for Jewish educators to get together and learn from one another.


On March 2, Erica Korman started a discussion forum about Independent Jewish Sunday Schools. I commented and we have gone back and forth a few times and Sara Shapiro Plevan weighed in as well. I thought it was a valuable conversation and I am hoping you will join it http://www.jedchange.net/forum/topics/independent-jewish-sunday and/or here. 

Erica Korman is working on her Masters in Education and Jewish Studies Department at NYU:Steinhardt. Sara Shapiro-Plevan is lead consultant for Rimonim consulting.


Posted by Erica Korman on March 2, 2011 at 2:23 pm

I invite you to take a look at the Boston-area Jewish Education Program. This is an independent, 4-hour weekly program for 2nd-7th grade that is unaffiliated with any synagogue or denomination and is held (although independent of) at Brandeis University. The BJEP, and others like it, accommodate families that want a Jewish education without the attachment to a synagogue. Many of the children of such families would not receive a Jewish education at all without a program of this type.

My question is this: Is an education discrete from a synagogue a viable option? I think it is great that families that would otherwise not enroll at a supplementary educational program at a synagogue are finding a suitable alternative. However, is Jewish education without clergical (sic) attachment sufficient?

Pros:
Because there are no synagogue dues, the cost is kept low
The teachers are all undergraduate Brandeis students, which offers an energy and vitality not usually found among the traditional Jewish supplementary school
It is a place where families who shied away from denominations and synagogue pressures can find refuge

Cons:
While they advocate learning beyond B'nei Mitzvah, they do not offer post-B'nei Mitzvah education.

Without any denomination, religious praxis may be unclear and potentially confusing. Family guidance from a Rabbi is unavailable because, well, there is no Rabbi.

Perhaps this is too liberal of an option. Is this too deviant from tradition?


reply by Ira Wise on March 15, 2011 at 11:21 pm 

My concern is only tangentially with the lack of clergy. My bigger concern is the lack of community. While I applaud providing for those who cannot or do not wish to find a synagogue home, I fear that this serves to commoditize the Bar Mitzvah in the most cynical way clothed in the guise of serving the disaffected. 

Becoming a Bar/Bat Mitzvah should be about a young man or woman beginning to take their place in the adult community. As described, this program seems to be a way to tag the B'nei Mitzvah base without scoring the run. It is another activity ending in a trophy that is not necessarily earned, since there is no stated intention to complete the act - entering the community. This makes Jewish education an activity on par with soccer, the school play or dance class. You enroll, pay, drop your kid off the prescribed number of days per week. At the end the parents attend the recital and celebrate the accomplishment as a family. And when you age out, you move on to another endeavor. 

I don't see the advantage of accommodating the "need" to claim connection without actually being connected. The only difference between this and a "faux mitzvah" (covered a few years ago in the NY Times, there seems to be some evidence of non-Jews having a celebration that directly and deliberately mirrors the Bar Mitzvah party) is that the child is actually Jewish. I am open to alternative models. I embrace them. This is not an alternative model. It is Dollar Store imitation of Jewish practice.

  Reply by Erica Korman on March 22, 2011 at 11:37 am

Thank you for your input, Ira. I was initially disturbed by this program. I think any Jewish educational program must have strong, non-compromising boundaries forming it.

Taking a communal rite-of-passage outside of a structured community is a dangerous step. I agree it further commoditizes the Bar Mitzvah, which has long been practiced as a spectacle landmark event in many communities. On the other hand, supporters of this type of program could argue that there is a defined community. It consists of the support from those that are also involved with the school. The other students and families are the kehilla and the principal, or whomever is at the highest leadership position, is the "Rabbi," in this case the adviser and head educator. 

It would be great if someone who has experience with this type of organization could provide their input. 

Reply by Ira Wise on March 22, 2011 at 12:32 pm

My one issue with the idea that this type of school is a community is its transitory nature. It has an expiration date: the end of formal education of the youngest child in a family. 

It also lacks a parent modeling component. It has only minimal opportunities - as I see it - for parents to model the behaviors of being part of an adult Jewish community. It makes the focus of Judaism pediatrics. 

Metaphor 1: I grew up playing with my grandfather's tzitzit during services. My son grew up playing with mine. Whose will these kids play with? 

Metaphor 2: When my parents joined the temple for me to go to Sunday school, they were asked to help out with the lox box fundraiser. They sold a few, but most importantly, on the Sunday in November when they were to be delivered, my father was sitting at a long table behind a scale, weighing lox. He passed the foam plate full of fish to Howie Lipshultz who used a Ronco Seal-a-meal to encase it in airtight plastic. Howie gave it to Sandee Schor who put it in a box with bagels she had bagged, and then passed the box to my mom, who added the onion and tomatoes. 

Jump 40 years. We threw my mom a 75th birthday party last summer. Sandee, Howie's wife and a whole bunch of other people who were at that table or others like it over the years were in attendance. My parents modeled community for me and me sister. Many of their most important relationships were and are through the synagogue. No surprise I became an educator. My sister is married to a rabbi. We have very Jewish homes. 

You don't need to be a professional to raise Jewish kids. But you have to demonstrate that being Jewish is not kid stuff. It is for adults living and doing adult things in the context of participating in a Jewish community. 

One of the biggest challenges in the non-orthodox day school world is enculturating students in the life of a synagogue - essentially being part of a community that doesn;t expire on graduation day. I am part of a group that is planning on bringing together synagogue school and day school directors to try and crack this issue. 

Thanks for posting this. I am enjoying the conversation.

Reply by Sara Shapiro-Plevan on March 23

Erica, thanks for posting this. My first paid teaching job was at BJEP, too long ago to date without embarrassing myself. My concern today, as it was then, was that because of the way that the program is built, there is no web of support for families, no larger community (in whatever dimension, style, etc.) for them to "join," and therefore, no reason to continue their engagement after their child(ren) have aged out of the community. 

Sure, families who shy away from synagogue affiliation can find refuge, but they are not finding refuge *with* other families, just refuge *from* others. In this model, parents are minimally engaged, and little or nothing is offered to them or asked of them (see Ira's pediatric Judaism comments above). 

We have much evidence that this pediatric approach doesn't work, and that in fact, parents are at a unique moment in their own lives when they choose ANY Jewish education for their children. A window of opportunity opens, and programs like BJEP are not structured to take advantage of this opportunity. 

Jewish learning needs to engage the entire family in meaningful, rich experiences through which they can feel a part of something larger, be it a community or the whole of the Jewish people. Until programs like BJEP can provide that, they aren't working to their fullest capacity.

Friday, October 8, 2010

Will Social Networks Change the World,
or Do You and I
Still Have to do the Heavy Lifting?


My friend and colleague Josh Mason-Barkin sent a few of us an e-mail his question and my reply follow. I hope you will add your thoughts.
"Malcolm Gladwell (in the New Yorker) says online social networks are not capable of empowering real and meaningful change. If he's right, what does that mean for attempts to make real and meaningful change in Jewish education?"
Josh - thanks for tossing this football out.

I think you reduce Gladwell's point to the level at which it might be paralyzing, or at least unhelpful. On one level, I think he is absolutely correct. The internet is changing the world. Not the way the men at Woolworth’s in Greensboro did. 

The social network is not a movement, at least not in terms that lead people to sing “We Shall Overcome” in a way that suggests the way things are done must change and change now. It is more a change in the way we perceive and make meaning. Not as dramatic as making a stand on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in March of 1965, nor did I think we are praying with our fingers on the keyboard as Heschel praying with his feet in Selma. 

What we can do is profound, but not as dramaticly or even as profound as what Gladwell describes.

I think Gladwell has used the civil rights movement as a straw man of sorts, but one that knocks you down instead of being bowled over itself. That doesn’t mean social networking is trivial. It just isn’t going to change the world the same way as actual civil disobedience and real time advocacy will. 

At the same time, let’s look at “Yes We Can” and the Obama online juggernaut of 2008. The campaign relied heavily on social networking to mobilize money, awareness, bodies at campaign rallies and votes. They didn’t give up traditional RT campaign methodology in favor of the digital campaign. Plouffe and company’s genius was integrating the two.

One of the things I find myself saying often is that the technology is awesome. But it is not the only thing! It is a tool, not a revolution. Our success will come from integrating. Nothing will replace the value of students and a teacher sitting around a table or under a tree with texts and ideas. As Grishaver  suggests, we need technology PLUS analog/Face to Face/RT experiences, not INSTEAD of them. If the revolution means all digital all the time, it will fail as soon as the kids master the next level of the video game. He says: 
“The real point is that real life still offers some unique opportunities: classroom community, love-interests, caring faculty and a speed and spontaneity that you don’t get pounding away a keyboard with your thumbs. Virtual community makes it possible to participate with less exposure. It often feels safer. Yet Solomon and Flexner bring a whole bunch of research sources that suggest participation is higher in blended circumstances. A friend is part of a heavily funded online dialogue. The story I got from this friend was that at first, before they ever met, their online dialogue was full of posturing and pontificating. Once the online group shared a retreat together, the dialogue shifted. It became real people talking to real people.”
What social media and other Web 2.0 technologies offer is access to learners and teachers in new and exciting ways. It offers that access because they are using the technology. When we were kids (and you guys sort of still are ;-}) we went home and played with our friends, did our homework, read books and watched TV. There was not much access to us for our Hebrew school teachers when we were not in the temple. 

My sons, aged 12 and 17, now multi-task. While doing homework, they access their text messages on the phones, chat and post items on Facebook, surf the web, watch YouTube videos, etc. 

If my teachers are social media savvy, 

AND the kids let them, they can initiate or invite contacts that were unimaginable. 

AND we can entice them into other Jewish learning modes through third web sites and applications like the Embassy of Israel, the work David and others are doing in Second Life, and even blogs like Jew School and David Wilensky’s stuff. 

I am actually putting together a class called “Judaism, there’s an App for that” for our community high school. 

I am hoping to explore how we can get students to focus both their digital and analog eyes on Judaism.

So Gladwell is right. But his point doesn’t change the need for us to engage in digital forms of building learners, learning and learning communities.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Lessons from J. Crew


Another fantastic piece brought to us by eJewish Philanthropy. I especially love it when someone brings a lesson from the world and figures out how to use it as a lens for what we do - without telling us just to be more like business. That would be overly simplistic and fit as well as I would in jeggings. Not a pretty picture! Enjoy. 

October 4, 2010 by Gail Hyman  

I read with great interest this past Sunday, October 3, 2010, The New York Times article, “Buy My Stuff – and Theirs, Too” by Joshua Brustein, that we in the Jewish community need to consider. The gist of the article is how J. Crew, one of the most successful online and in-store space clothing retailers, has determined that “friending” other purveyors’ goods makes great business sense for them and their customers. This is befriending – no, it’s actually community-building – taken to the max. J. Crew determined that surrounding its products with those of other fashion-related businesses, would create a more potent marketing picture for its consumers to consider and ultimately purchase that if they simply went the traditional route of merchandising their own goods.
If J. Crew has determined that offering its customers a fashion statement built on their clothing as well as related items from other retailers (think J. Crew sweater, slacks, scarf with someone else’s umbrella, hat, sports gear, healthy transportation and flavored vitamin water), you can see the potential opportunity J. Crew is leveraging to connect with consumers in a much more holistic way.
If you are a JCC, a federation, a synagogue, think about how you position yourselves to be a friendly source to those you wish to engage. In this new world of social media, where word of mouth and relationships trump any outright marketing ploy, take a lesson from J. Crew and start linking your efforts to relevant community partners … a federation appeal linked to the needs of the local synagogue education program, or the home for the elderly, or how the interests of the local JCC align with those of young families who choose to purchase “green products”, participate in organic food coops, give to the needy at their local food bank …
Successful marketing today is more and more about building both a full picture of the consumer’s life as they envision it and creating a network of authentic advocates who, without prompting or artifice, will tweet or “friend” you and offer their friends a trusted reason to buy into it. What peers say to each other about the total life experience and any given commodity that supports it, be it day school education or synagogue membership, trumps any paid advertisement or direct mail pitch. If you want to be valued for your service or product to the Jewish community, you have to ask yourself, “What are you are doing to build and nurture that community and its belief in you and your product?”
Marketing is quickly moving from traditional advertising and promotion to the more personal and trusted world of the social media world where friends honestly recommend a lifestyle and the product or service that feeds it. It is a world where individual endorsement says as much about the endorser and their commitment to a specific community as it does about the product or service they recommend.
If you want to be viewed as a contributor to that community, you have to be part of its maintenance. As Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice president for emerging media and brand strategy at 360i, a digital advertising agency said in The New York Times article, “This is a conversation, not a one-night stand. If you are in this community, make sure you are contributing to the maintenance of that community.”
For those of us in the Jewish community, the J. Crew story should suggest it is time for greater collaboration; for looking at all our “product” offerings from the more holistic perspective of how our consumers experience Jewish life. It is not about “my organization versus yours”. Rather, it is about community … where we each fit and how we all fit together to create a more powerful Jewish experience for every consumer of Jewish life … a little synagogue, a little JCC, a little social activism, a little education … put them all together for a full Jewish experience and each of us may find more buyers than if we had sold our wares separately.
Gail Hyman is a marketing and communications professional who currently focuses her practice, Gail Hyman Consulting, on assisting Jewish nonprofit organizations increase their ranks of supporters and better leverage their communications in the Web 2.0 environment. Gail is a regular contributor to eJewish Philanthropy.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Dropping the Baton in the Synagogue

This is from the July issue of FastCompany. FastCompany is a business magazine, and ever since the first issue came my way fifteen years ago I have read it cover to cover. Each month I find articles that make me think about my work as a Jewish educator and as a human being. There are more ideas than I have had a chance to implement and the list grows longer each month. It has introduced me to Seth Godin, the importance of Design and more recently Chip and Dan Heath.


This article made me think about the process of recruiting, and more importantly growing and maintaining the relationships with a member family in our congregation. They come in through so many different doors: nursery school, family education, social justice, a desire to enroll children in religious school, a worship experience, spiritual searching - you name it. And then we get them to join. 


Some time later - hopefully years - they resign. And we are shocked, I tell you. Simply shocked. (cue Sam on the piano - you must remember this...)


Why would they leave? Perhaps they have accomplished what they thought of as their purpose for joining. Maybe the kids have left the house so they see no reason to belong for themselves. Maybe the dues are too high. Maybe, maybe maybe.


This article made me wonder how many ways we drop the baton in our synagogues. With our students. With their parents. With the family as a whole. We should have been working to help them find multiple reasons for being connected to the temple, to develop relationships with other members and with the institution itself that go beyond the reason they joined. I began this line of thought on this blog in April. I am sure there is more to come. I invite your thoughts on this.

Team Coordination Is Key in Businesses

By: Dan Heath and Chip Heath July 1, 2010
At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the American men's 4x100 relay team was a strong medal contender. During the four previous Games, the American men had medaled every time. The qualifying heats in 2008 -- the first step on the road to gold -- should have been a cakewalk.

On the third leg of the race, the U.S.A.'s Darvis Patton was running neck and neck with a runner from Trinidad and Tobago. Patton rounded the final turn, approaching anchorman Tyson Gay, who was picking up speed to match Patton. Patton extended the baton, Gay reached back, and the baton hit his palm.

Then, somehow, it fell. The team was disqualified. It was a humiliating early defeat. Stranger still, about a half-hour later, the U.S.A. women's team was disqualified too -- for a baton drop at the same point in the race. (Freaked out by the trend, the U.S.A.'s rhythmic gymnasts kept an extra-tight grip on their ribbons.)
Team U.S.A.'s track coach, Bubba Thornton, told the media his runners had practiced baton passes "a million times." But not with their Olympic teammates. Some reporters noted that Patton and Gay's practice together had been minimal.

Thornton's apparent overconfidence was understandable. If you have four world-class experienced runners on your team, shouldn't that be enough? Unfortunately, no, it isn't. The baton pass cannot be taken for granted -- not on the track and not in your organization.

We tend to underestimate the amount of effort needed to coordinate with other people. In one academic experiment, a team of students was asked to build a giant Lego man as quickly as possible. To save time, the team members split up their work. One person would craft an arm, another would build the torso, and so forth. (At least one person, of course, was charged with tweeting compulsively about what the others were doing.)

Often, the parts were carefully designed, yet they didn't quite fit together properly, like a Lego Heidi Montag. The problem was that nobody was paying attention to the integration. The researchers found that the teams were consistently better at specializing than they were at coordinating.

Organizations make this mistake constantly: We prize individual brilliance over the ability to work together as a team. And unfortunately, that can lead to dropped batons, as JetBlue infamously discovered back in February 2007.

You remember the fiasco. Snowstorms had paralyzed New York airports, and rather than cancel flights en masse, JetBlue loaded up its planes, hoping for a break in the weather. The break never came, and some passengers were trapped on planes for hours. If you've ever felt the temperature rise on a plane after an hour's delay on the tarmac, imagine what it was like after 10 hours. These planes were cauldrons of rage -- one stray act of flatulence away from bloodshed.

JetBlue did its best to survive the wave of hatred -- its CEO apologized repeatedly and the company issued a Customer Bill of Rights, offering cash payments for delays and cancellations. But the executives realized that these efforts wouldn't eliminate the underlying problems, which were rather unyielding: The weather is unpredictable; New York airports are overcrowded; passengers expect on-time performance anyway. If JetBlue didn't fix its operations -- learning to respond to emergencies with more speed and agility -- another fiasco was likely.

JetBlue's executives knew that a top-down solution by a team of executives would fail. "The challenges are on the front line," says Bonny Simi, JetBlue's director of customer experience and analysis. In October 2008, Simi and her colleagues gathered a cross-section of players -- crew schedulers, system operators, dispatchers, reservation agents, and others -- to determine how the company handled "irregular operations," such as severe weather.

Individual members of the group knew the issues in their departments, and "if we brought enough of them together," Simi says, "we would have the whole puzzle there, and they could help us solve it."
Where do you start? If you ask individuals what's wrong with their jobs, you'll get pet peeves, but those gripes may not address the big integration issues. But if you ask people directly how to fix a big problem like irregular operations, it's like asking people how to fix federal bureaucracy. The topic is too complex and maddeningly interrelated; it fuzzes the brain.

Rather than talk abstractly, Simi decided to simulate an emergency. As the centerpiece of the first irregular operations retreat, Simi announced to the group: "Tomorrow, there's going to be a thunderstorm at JFK such that we're going to have to cancel 40 flights." The group then had to map out their response to the crisis.

As they rehearsed what they would do, step by step, they began to spot problems in their current process. For instance, in severe-weather situations, protocol dictates that the manager on duty, the Captain Kirk of JetBlue operations, should distribute to the staff what's known as a "precancel list," which identifies the flights that have been targeted for cancellation. There were five different people who rotated through the Kirk role, and they each sent out the precancel list in a different format. This variability created a small but real risk. It was similar to slight differences among five runners' extension of the baton.

In total, the group identified more than 1,000 process flaws, small and large. Over the next few weeks, the group successively filtered and prioritized the list down to a core set of 85 problems to address. Most of them were small individually, but together, they dramatically increased the risk of a dropped baton. JetBlue's irregular-operations strike force spent nine months in intense and sometimes emotional sessions, working together to stamp out the problems.

The effort paid off. In the summer of 2009, JetBlue had its best-ever on-time summer. Year over year, JetBlue's refunds decreased by $9 million. Best of all, the efforts dramatically improved JetBlue's "recovery time" from major events such as storms. (JetBlue considers itself recovered from an irregular-operations event when 98.5% of scheduled flights are a go.) The group shaved recovery time by 40% -- from two-and-a-half days to one-and-a-half days.

Ironically, JetBlue's can-do culture contributed to its original problem. "The can-do spirit meant we would power through irregular operations and 'get 'er done,' " says Jenny Dervin, the airline's corporate communications director, "but we didn't value processes as being heroic." The company's heroes had been individuals -- but now they share the medal stand with processes. (Here's hoping that the next American relay team, too, extends some glory from the runner to the handoff.)

The relay team with the fastest sprinters doesn't always win, and the business with the most talented employees doesn't either. Coordination is the unsung hero of successful teams, and it's time to start singing.

Dan Heath and Chip Heath are the authors of the No. 1 New York Times best seller Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, as well as Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

All Together Now!


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!

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Al tifrosh min hatzibur - Do Not Separate Yourself From The Community

This article was just published in the latest issue of the New York Jewish Week. I think the questions Jo Kay is struggling with cut to the core of one of the biggest challenges we face. BTW, I think Jo is one of the outstanding educators in our world.

How do we help people internalize Hillel's injunction - Al tifrosh min hatzibur - do not separate yourself from the community - in a world that is all about personalized service, and tending to individual needs?

I am less interested in how we think Jo should respond to the requests for private tutoring than I am in the question of how do better learn about people's needs, how do we meet them AND help them to be a part of our synagogue communities? I want my cake and I want to eat it! Thoughts?

Tutoring Trend Tests
Jewish Values

by Julie Wiener, Associate Editor

Several times a year, Jo Kay, the director of the New York campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s education school, finds herself in a tricky position.

She has to decide how best to respond to unaffiliated families who — seeking an alternative to synagogue Hebrew schools — ask her if she can help them find a private tutor.

Kay ran Congregation Rodeph Sholom’s religious school on the Upper West Side immediately before assuming her current role, and her graduate school, a division of the Reform seminary, trains educators to work primarily in synagogues and day schools. A strong believer in Judaism as a communal, rather than do-it-yourself endeavor, she is not a big fan of home tutoring, even though she recognizes that many families have “extenuating circumstances” that make it necessary.

Nonetheless, due to her relationship with graduate students — many eager for extra part-time income — she’s seen as a source for tutor referrals. And, while she wishes the families who call her would instead find a place for themselves in a synagogue, she is reluctant to turn away anyone seeking a Jewish experience.

“The more families are turned away the less likely they are to connect ever,” she notes. “When I get a call from a family, I want to extend a hand, I don’t want to be just another person that they can say wasn’t interested in them.”

Kay, who hopes her tutoring students will inspire the families to get involved in congregational life, is hardly alone in her ambivalence about tutoring.

As seemingly growing numbers of families in New York and other major metropolitan areas eschew Hebrew schools for the convenience and intimacy of private tutors, many in the organized Jewish world — particularly those active in synagogues — worry that tutoring’s individualized approach, part of a larger trend in modern American culture, poses a threat not just to synagogues, but to the very ideals of Jewish community.

“There’s such a notion of privatization in the city,” observes Rabbi Felicia Sol of the Upper West Side’s Congregation B’nai Jeshurun. “We want to combat the notion that Judaism is all about hiring someone to meet my needs, on my schedule and not necessarily being as interested in the community at large. ... Jewish life has always been centered around the community.”

Yet at the same time, those who criticize tutoring recognize that part of the reason it remains attractive is because a number — though far from all — of Hebrew schools leave much to be desired.

And, like Kay, they understand that for many families the choice is not between Hebrew school and a tutor, but between a tutor and no Jewish education at all.

The most frequently leveled criticism against privatized Jewish education — whether with a one-on-one tutor or in a small group environment — is that it fails to teach about, or expose children to, the broader Jewish community.

Rabbi Laurie Phillips, director of education at Congregation Habonim, on the Upper West Side, likens Jewish studies tutoring to private sports lessons.

“You can learn to play soccer with a tutor, but it’s a different experience if you’re learning one-on-one versus being part of a soccer team. You’ll know how to play, but won’t know how to be part of a team.”

Jack Wertheimer, a Jewish history professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary and editor of “Learning and Community: Jewish Supplementary Schools in the Twenty-first Century” (Brandeis University Press, 2009) wonders “how well” private programs “can socialize young Jews to feel part of a congregation.

“One of the great advantages of Jewish children being educated in schools is that they are exposed to different types of Jewish role models,” he says. “They see the rabbi, they see their teachers, they see other adults engaged in Jewish living. The private route limits the exposure of young people.”

In addition to exposing children to congregational life and, ideally, instilling in them a sense of belonging to a community, Hebrew schools, unlike tutoring, offer students a chance to socialize with other Jewish children — including ones who come from different backgrounds.

While one-on-one tutoring, by definition, cannot expose students to Jewish diversity, even small groups of kids learning together with a private tutor — such as the model Rabbi Reuben Modek offers in his Rockland-based Hebrew Learning Circles program — tend to “end up with very homogenous groupings,” notes Saul Kaiserman, director of lifelong learning at the Upper East Side’s Temple Emanuel.

“When synagogues are doing their best work, you have public and private school kids from all over the city that are having to deal with their different backgrounds and different levels of observance,” he says.

Says Rabbi Sol: “We really believe that having relationships and experiences together, and growing up with the same group of kids, instills something in our children that ‘it’s not just all about me.’”

At B’nai Jeshurun even the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony — and, while an exception is made for special-needs children, privately tutored children cannot have a BJ rabbi officiate, nor can they have the ceremony on Shabbat morning or a community mincha —teaches about community, Rabbi Sol says.

“B’nai mitzvah don’t lead the whole service, because it’s not only about them. The ultimate expression of bar mitzvah is actually becoming a functioning participant in the community at large — not that everyone suspends their own spiritual needs to have a concert or performance by a 13-year-old kid.”

Even if Hebrew schools do a better job than tutoring when it comes to fostering community, some leaders believe that synagogues would do well to adapt some of the practices of private tutoring — such as offering students more flexibility, more options and one-on-one attention.

“The organized Jewish community should adapt this model within its institutions so people don’t have to seek it outside,” says Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, executive director of the Jewish Outreach Institute, which often gets calls from people seeking recommendations for a private tutor.

“If the goal is to provide Jewish education, then we should provide as many opportunities to get there as possible,” he says.

Some Hebrew schools offer some of these features, particularly opportunities for one-on-one attention.

Central Synagogue, one of the few Hebrew schools to employ full-time teachers, has a homework room, where children can go after class to receive extra help.

Scott Shay, who co-founded and helps run the Jewish Youth Connection, a Sunday school that is now sponsored by Kehillath Jeshurun, on the Upper East Side, says his program is a “hybrid” that provides the best of what Hebrew school and private tutoring have to offer.

All the JYC students spend part of Sunday morning working on Hebrew one-on-one with college students, called “big brothers and big sisters,” Shay says. The college students often check in on their charges during the week in order to see how they are managing their homework.

But the program also features regular classes, as well as parties and other group activities.

Where private tutoring wins hands-down, however, is convenience. With a teacher who comes to your home at a mutually convenient time, there is no commuting, no need to carve out one, two or even three afternoons a week — and for busy families struggling to balance an array of competing demands and activities, this is no small thing.

Nonetheless, argues Kaiserman, convenience isn’t everything.

“I suspect those parents wouldn’t have their kids study karate or ballet in their living room, but somehow manage to get them to class because they want a quality program, and value it.”

Hebrew schools, he says, need to offer high quality — to compete not only with tutors, but with “the marketplace of after-school activities.”

“We’re down the street from the [Metropolitan Museum of Art], so we have to offer something as good as an art class at the Met,” he adds.

And while “we try to make it not impossible or unbearable,” Kaiserman says, “I don’t think inconvenience is necessarily a negative. Jewish values, yeah, they’re inconvenient. That’s the whole point. If they weren’t we wouldn’t need to be learning about them.”

JYC’s Shay agrees that requiring a bit of effort from parents is not necessarily a bad thing.

“While for some tutoring is a good option, I think there’s tremendous value in the parent having to get up and bring the child to a place with other Jews and other parents and say ‘This is something we Jews do,’” Shay says. “As opposed to saying ‘Here’s Rabbi X who’s coming, and your piano teacher is coming an hour later.’”

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Being Visionary

My rabbi shared an article from the CCAR Journal (published by the Reform Rabbinate) by my teacher Isa Aron, Steven M. Cohen, Lawrence Hoffman and Ari Y. Kelman called Functional and Visionary Congregations. It is a precis of a book coming out later this year from Jewish Lights, and it explores different approaches to what a congregation is and does.

In very simplistic terms, a functional congregation is one that focuses on servicing specific needs of members. The appraoch might seem consumerist (although that is a reduction). It is kind of like a synagogue as Wal-Mart. Jewish Education for children in aisle 15, Shabbat worship in aisle 22, senior programming in aisle 3, etc. It leads, they indicate, to a passivity among the members and a heavy reliance on staff to cater to their needs. It is very easy to leave a functional congregation. Just put your Bar/Bat Mitzvah certificate in the car and drive away.

A visionary congregation is different. Sure, it meets the specific needs of its members. It's focus however is on providing more than discrete products to meet the needs of the moment. It strives to make the members embrace theri own role in a Kehillah Kedoshah, a sacred community. It makes demands of the members beyond the financial. It sets up expectations for individuals and families, young and old, to engage in the life of the congregation and to advance in their own spiritual journeys.

I am being overly simplistic. I recommend the article and I expect to like the book as well.

My rabbi shared the article first with the senior staff and then with the Board of Trustees of our congregation so that we could use it as a lens for self-examination. The study is ongoing. My initial sense is that on the spectrum from functionary to visionary, we are more visionary than functional, but we have a lot of room for expanding the vision, both in terms of how we do what we do and in whom reach and how deeply.

I am fascinated by the metaphor and my teachers and I are going to use this lens as well. A version of the article is at http://www.ujafedny.org/atf/cf/%7Bad848866-09c4-482c-9277-51a5d9cd6246%7D/SYNERGY%20NL%20FALL%2008.PDF, in a publication of the UJA Federation of New York. I would love to hear from anyone reading this blog what you think of the concept, and more importantly, how a synagogue school might use it.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Be a Traveler, Not a Tourist

I love the shows on the Travel Channel. When Anthony Bourdain or Samantha Brown take us exploring the world, it feels like we are there. We meet people and get to know a little bit about them. It feels like Tony and Samantha have made new friends wherever they go. The Travel channel’s slogan is “Be a Traveler, Not a Tourist.” Educator Daniel J. Boorstin said that the traveler is active; going strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; expecting interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing.”

Fern Chertok, Theodore Sasson and Leonard Saxe - three Brandeis University researchers - have published a study about the Jewish engagement of young people returning from Birthright: Israel trips called Tourists, Travelers, and Citizens: Jewish Engagement of Young Adults in Four Centers of North American Jewish Life. They use the Traveler/Tourist idea and add one more: citizen. Although they were focused on young adults, I think the point extends to our setting. Some of us are adult citizens of B’nai Israel. You see them regularly at services, serving on committees or the board, helping in their children’s classrooms or participating in family education or adult Jewish learning. They have become locals, and they would love it if more of us took up residence.

Others are tourists—occasional visitors hoping to see the sights. They tend to drop off their children or drop in for a celebration or service when they receive an invitation from a friend. The authors of the Brandeis study suggest that for too long the model of Jewish communal life has focused on the dichotomy of Tourist vs. Citizen. They submit, and I am convinced, that we need to find ways to help our tourists become travelers before we can even think about citizenship. We need to help each other empower ourselves to deepen our connections with each other and with the synagogue. And it is happening.

Last month I attended the Religious School Parent Social at my synagogue. Over fifty people came for a purely social evening. No praying, no teaching, no fund-raising. The U Conn semi-final NCAA game was projected on a screen. Music played from the speakers in the pavilion from someone’s I-pod. There were competitive tastings of appetizers and desserts brought by those who were there. And a lot of people whose children are in religious school with each other got to meet one another and hang out. It was awesome! There were some citizens in the room and some tourists as well. By the end of the night, though, I think most were thinking like travelers – at least for that one night.

Our Religious School Committee and our faculty are exploring how we can expand this idea of developing communities of travelers to our classrooms as well. Look for some exciting developments for Kitot Daled – Vav (4th – 6th grades) that we hope will establish or deepen connections the students have to one another.

We have invited the adults in our congregation to help us, to join the journey.
Be a traveler. Drop in, call or e-mail another traveler.

ShareThis