Dad, for the win.

I do not why it took me so long to post this. Jeremy Taylor is a member of my congregation and he wrote this and read it on the bima when his daughter Miriam became a Bat Mitzvah 16 months ago. I asked him to share it with me for the purpose of sharing it hear.

I am not going to offer any commentary. Jeremy's words say it all. Thank you Jeremy. And thanks for volunteering your time (as Miriam does as well) with our Curriculum Working Group.

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I don’t usually cry in public, so I would like some credit for being this good at it.

I didn’t grow up in the Jewish tradition myself, and so I’ve been learning a great deal right along with my kids. One of the things I’ve learned about today that I like very much is that beginning now, Miriam literally counts as an adult.

I am a high school teacher. I have seen that we frequently do harm to our teenagers by trying too hard to protect them. By sheltering them from situations in which they could make big mistakes, we too often prevent them from taking on real responsibilities. Kids are smart, they get that message- we don’t trust you, let me handle that, it’s too important.

But today has the opposite message, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Today, this community put my kid in charge of this service because she’s ready to start being in charge. Sometimes.

And I agree with that. If you know Miriam, it’s hard to disagree. So congratulations, and let’s go learn more stuff.

“Someone should…”

Catching up on some blogging with things I have already written. This applies everywhere!

Turn on the cable news channel of your choice. Fox, CNN, MSNBC, InfoWars, it doesn’t matter. Within a few minutes – at most an hour – a commentator will likely say that “Someone should…”

Hang out at a sporting event. Could be kids playing little league, a minor league game or a showdown between the Yankees and the Red Sox, it doesn’t matter. Someone in range of your hearing – talking about almost any topic – will eventually say “Someone should…”

We hear it all the time. Many of us say it ourselves once in a while. When we see something that could be done better, or maybe something we think should be done that isn’t, we think and sometimes say “Someone should…”

You have been hearing or reading me talk about Jewish values a lot over the past twenty-six and three quarters years. We built our new curriculum around the idea that Jewish values are what make being Jewish valuable. They give meaning and structure to our Jewish identity and give us roots and wings.

Today’s Jewish value isAchrayut – responsibility. The Hebrew comes from the root letters Alef, Chet, Resh. Put them together and you get Acher – which means “other.” So one way to think about responsibility is that it can be the duty to think about and act toward people and events that are beyond your own immediate needs. Kehilah – community – happens because we all see that we have a shared achrayut or responsibility to take care of one another.

Kehilah – and now I am talking about youth education at our congregation – only works when adults actually do something, rather than saying that “someone should…” In the coming months, you will be invited to participate in ways you may not have done before. We already need more substitute teachers. (Call me!) We will likely need a few new teachers in the fall.

The Kehilah Vision Team, which works with the Director of Education to imagine the future, make policies and respond to new needs will need members. The Community Building Team, which organizes special events and the room parents (who work to build relationships between the parents in each class) will need people to fill those roles and do those tasks,

“Someone should” is easy to say. We spend a lot of time in Kehilah building up our kids and helping to feel like they are really someone. For Kehilah to be successful, we need all of our adults to demonstrate achrayut for our kids. We need you to say “I will” instead of “Someone should.”

L’shalom,

 

Ira