What A Long, Strange Trip It Could Be!

You would think that with the pandemic and quarantine I would have posted often. As I look at the past six months or so, I realize two thing about my time. I am not sure if this is universal, or just my mishigas (craziness).

1. I have been busier than ever before. Working with lay leaders and colleagues, we spent an enormous amount of time figuring out what learning should look like at our congregation. We spoke to nearly every family of returning students. Teachers and I spent a great deal of time online together and individually developing skills for both lesson planning and teaching in a digital space as well as figuring out out how to adapt to teaching outdoors with masks and distancing.
   
   
2. At the same time, so many items that had been part of the regular flow have work has been laid aside. I have a lot of folders in the standing rack on my desk that I have not touched in months. I plan on scheduling an hour every few days to triage some of those files. If I am not touching them, I probably don't need them. 

Today is the first Monday after the end of the fall festivals. As I reflect on the Cheshbon hanefesh - the accounting of the soul - that I, like many of you engaged in during the High Holy Days, I gave some thought to this blog.

On the one hand, my most recent post was six months ago. I have treated this blog like those files on my desk. One thought was to say goodbye today.

On the other hand, when I have been more active in this space. I have found the act of writing as well as the occasional conversation it has engendered - on Facebook, via email or even the occasional live or digital face to face - has been valuable to me. And I hope occasionally to someone who has read it.

So I am back. Whether this more of a digital diary for myself or the beginning of conversations with you, whoever you may be, is not up to me. If you are reading this, I hope you will see this as an invitation to engage. In my happiest dreams, I would write regularly and so would you. I am happy to post your thoughts and give full credit. I will also include the occasional article I come across that I think worth sharing and/or reacting to - kind of like when I was curating JeducationWorld.com (of blessed memory). 

The title of this blog comes from a television ad for a video game system from the early 1990's. Welcome to the Next Level in the ad was a play on how when you defeat the obstacles on the screen of a video game, you move to another, harder level. The ad suggested that buying their gaming system was taking you to a higher level of gaming. I adopted the name for this blog because of belief that in Jewish education, we have to do the same thing. We are always working for the win - a successful lesson or experience that engages the learners. And we are always trying to level up. 

Social, emotional and spiritual learning (SESL) were not part of the vocabulary in 1991 (when I began to use the term "Welcome to the Next Level" in my work, but long before I started this blog). And Experiential Learning is light years beyond the informal education or even the confluent education some of us studied with Bill Cutter 29 years ago. And the way learners perceive their world and we perceive them has changed in significant ways, and not just in terms of their digital acuity. Their life both in school and afterward are very different.

The day I stop trying to innovate and learn from my learners is the day I apply to be a Disney cast member so I can operate the roller coaster or log ride. And I want to learn from and with all of you.

I would love it if you were along for the ride.

L'shalom,

Ira

The Socially Distanced Full-Contact Seder ™

Before our children were even conceived (the youngest turns 22 on Sunday) my wife Audrey and I developed what we called the Full-Contact Seder. The idea was to create a Seder that was so engaging that the children we would someday have would be an experience that filled them with wonder. Thanks to being at the seder at Kibbutz Lotan in 1989 - where we saw five little ones mesmerized by the shadow-maggid their parents performed - we were determined. And with the help of family and friends, I believe we succeeded for many years. 

We continue to make our seder with many of those same friends and when COVID-19 decided on a Zoom seder for us, we dusted it off. Here is the introduction of the planning document. I happily share the planning document which are welcome to copy or download. The comments are live on the document, and I invite your thoughts, suggestions and ideas. You can find it at this link:

Socially Distanced Full-Contact Seder ™

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Welcome to the Family Virtual Seder Planning Page!

Also known as the Socially Distanced Full-Contact Seder ™

So it took a few (thousand) years, but we finally have a seder that is fully a product of experiential learning. I was opposed to having an actual plague this year, but you all know how THOSE guys get when they start getting silly.

My understanding of the plan is that we are going to a modified digital version of the Full Contact Seder we did when all of our kids lived at home and were too young to tell us to cut it out.

Below is an outline of the 15 parts of the seder (and some of them are subdivided into more parts). Each has at least one link to a site that will explain what it is about or other relevant information. We agreed that each participating family will take responsibility for at least two of the items. That may include dealing one of them off to a child(ren) or even the one communal grandchild. If you can deal more than one off (keeping at least one for yourselves, of course) awesome! We can skip or just talk about the ones no one took!

The task for each part or sub part is to creatively express, teach or engage us in the meaning of that part of the Seder.

We are using Zoom on a professional account, so the only time limit is the patience of everyone attending (so no filibusters!). You can share your screen with the group, so if you have something prepared on your computer or on another website (e.g. a YouTube Video, Prezy or the like) there is no problem.

As soon as you decide which TWO parts (or sub-parts) you want to own, please put your name on the chart below so we don’t have two families or individuals planning the same part.

I will post prayer sheets, etc. as pdfs for all to download. If you would like to post anything, go ahead or send it to me and I can convert it and post if you prefer.

Ira

Here is the link again.
Socially Distanced Full-Contact Seder ™

It's All About The Journey

This was a D'var Torah I wrote for WATE (the Westchester/Fairfield Association of Temple Edcators - the F is silent) for a meeting this morning.

The view from Mt. Nebo today.

Parshat Chol Hamoed raises some interesting questions for us as educators. The obvious one is the focus on the calendar. We live and die by them it seems. Of course as educators, we are working on Chanukah or even Tu Bishvat (for the Type A personalities, not me) while still in the midst of the Fall festivals. As educators, I think we are sometimes living anachronisms – not outdated, but living out of sync with real time as we work to create programs, lessons and experiences that will be implemented months down the road.

But let’s step beyond the calendar. We have three holidays in the rear view mirror and one to go before the Blessed month of Cheshvan (nutty rabbis of the Talmud called it "bitter" Cheshvan because there were no festivals in it – maybe they didn’t want to have to actually come up with other topics to talk about?) and a full return to our regularly scheduled curriculum.

I was learning over Zoom with Rabbi Mark Borovitz two days ago and he asked me an interesting question—especially with Simchat Torah looming. 

“What happens at the end of the Torah?”

[I paused here and invited my colleagues to suggest answers.]

All of those are there. I had said "Moses dies."

Then he asked: “What happens to the Israelites at the end of the Torah?”

I answered that they are at the foot of Mt. Nebo waiting to enter the land.

Now he was almost yelling: “Why does the Torah leave them there? Why don’t they get to enter the land while still in the Torah?”

Then it hit me. It is not about getting there. It is about the journey. It is about getting through each day, moving closer to the goal. 

Rabbi Borovitz works with addicts at Beit T'shuvah in Los Angeles. Addicts do not talk about being cured or being finished with their recovery. Recovery is something that happens every day for the rest of their lives – if they are successful. It ends when they die or when they return to their addiction. 

They don’t get to the Promised Land. Or if they do, they do not get to lie under their vine and fig tree. Their – and our – struggle continues every day.

The Torah doesn’t end with the death of Moses and the people waiting for the Book of Joshua to begin - as if it was just a book in a series like Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings. The Torah ends by us going back to the beginning and chanting Bereishit: "When God began to create the heavens and the earth."

This is a metaphor made for educators. We get relatively few kudos compared to clergy who are with our members during their happiest and saddest moments. We count our moments of victory over a longer period of time. We don't get or provide a lot of immediate gratification, like people experience with a Bar or Bat Mitzvah, a Wedding or even a funeral. 

WE have to wait half a generation to learn if our learners take up the cause of the Jewish people and raise Jewish children themselves. We keep going back to the beginning, like the weekly Torah reading. 

May we all find joy and radical amazement as we finish and restart the Torah this Sunday night. 

The year of exhaling (a bit) - תש''פ

The new Hebrew year, 5780, will be written תש''פ. 

That can be translated to mean: to exhale, to blow out, to hiss, to sting or even to blow fiercely. (Isn’t language wonderful?)

Let’s look at the first translation. Rabbi Isaac Luria, often called the ARI, was a mystic who lived in Tz’fat in the 16th century. He told the story of how God had to contract Godself (the Divine Essence) in order to make room to create the universe. He called that act of contraction Tzimtzum – God removed a bit of Godself to make room.

My friend and teacher Joel Grishaver (who may be a descendant of Rabbi Luria) described Tzimtzum as if you had just exhaled after quickly inhaling, making your chest and stomach contract.

Sometimes, when we withdraw a bit of ourselves, we make room for others to step up and take ownership of what is happening around us. That can be particularly useful in experiential learning.

We as teachers have to step back sometimes – just a little – in order to invite the learners to take ownership of their own learning. My wish for the new year – the year of exhaling (a bit) – for us, the teachers, is that we all develop our capacity and the skills needed to draw our learners in deeper and make space for them to step up. Let’s all put a little Tzimtzum into our lesson plans!

(Incidentally, the story goes on that God put the Divine Essence that was removed into vessels made from earthen clay. They cannot hold the Godstuff and shatter. He said our job was to remove the worthless shards of the vessels - sin, bad behavior, evil, etc – from the world and seek out the sparks of Divine Essense – good loving, kind deeds,Mitzvot, etc. This process is called Tikkun Olam – World Repair).

Letters from Camp: How Monday Night Limmud Changed my Jewish Outlook

I have had many reasons to be proud. Today is a new one. One of our former students came to me last winter. She was interested in a career as a Jewish educator. I told her that she must spend at least one summer as a counselor at a Jewish summer camp. While I promoted Crane Lake, Eisner and Olin Sang Ruby - all part of my past or present and development as a Jewish educator, for a variety of reasons, I ended up steering her toward Ramah Nyack. Imagine my delight when I came across the following post in eJewishPhilanthropy.com today!


Clearly there is a difference between a day school and religious school education. Time on task can change things exponentially. Nonetheless, Gabby thrived and grew and I am grateful to her and all of the teachers she had in our program. I look forward to the day I call her colleague.

Letters from Camp: 
How Monday Night Limmud Changed my Jewish Outlook

By Gabby Tropp

This summer I experienced what it feels like to walk into a Jewish community different from my own when I spent my first summer at Jewish camp. Camp Ramah in Nyack, NY, is a unique Jewish camp model. It’s a day camp for our chanichim (young campers) and a sleepaway camp for our tzevet (staff). This means that as much as we have fun with our kids while we teach and learn with them, celebrating their successes and assuaging their fears, after the camp day we have fun with each other, teaching and learning, celebrating and growing.

As a traditional egalitarian community closely linked with the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Conservative Movement, Ramah Nyack strives for, and in my opinion achieves, excellence in Jewish education for kids and staff alike. Twice a week, the members of the Ramah Nyack staff community have the opportunity to hear from and engage with some of the best and brightest thinkers in modern Judaism, among their ranks senior camp staff, counselors, JTS professors, local rabbis, and community leaders.

For me, these limmud (learning) sessions were an outlook-altering opportunity. I was an outsider to the community in some ways, coming from a Reform background and a public school. Through limmud, I was introduced to new perspectives, was challenged in my own opinions, and learned constantly. Perhaps the most eye-opening session for me came on a Monday evening near the end of our kayitz in the form of a program entitled “Standards for Jewish Education.”

For some background on me, this summer marked the first time in my life that my religious observance regularly went beyond attending Kabbalat Shabbat services. I followed the laws of kashrut (keeping kosher), attended Shacharit (morning prayers) three days a week, led my chanichim in t’filah (prayer) every morning, commemorated and fasted for Tisha B’Av, and bensched (said blessings) after meals. Or at least those are all things I was doing by the end of Kayitz 2019. During Week 1, not only were these things foreign to me, but they were rituals and traditions that proved very hard for me to learn. As the days of the summer flew by, my comfort in the Ramah religious community increased.

Then came a huge moment of self doubt during limmud. The Standards for Jewish Education, which outlined “Jewish fluency” benchmarks for day school-educated eighth graders, expected more from those 13-year-old students than I could do. I was still in the process of learning Birkat HaMazon (grace after meals) when I attended this limmud session.

After this initial gut reaction of embarrassment, I asked whether or not it was reasonable to adjust these standards in Jewish fluency taking into account my education, which had significantly less time to prepare me for Jewish adulthood. And the answer was, of course, yes. At the end of the day, my Reform Jewish education had instilled in me a sense of Jewish pride and a passion for Jewish life and learning, which, along with my Ramah experience this summer, has put me on a path to continue developing my fluency in Judaism for the rest of my life.

I may not be as Jewishly literate as the typical day school eighth grader, but it still felt good as a 20-year-old to say Sh’hecheyanu (a milestone-marking prayer) after leading Birkat HaMazon for the first time. Ramah Nyack gave me the confidence, the courage, and the environment to learn and grow. I didn’t expect one summer at camp to change the way I think about Jewish learning or belonging in Jewish spaces, yet the most important lesson I learned this summer is that, while inclusion doesn’t happen overnight, any Jewish community is accessible if you’re willing to ask questions and put effort into finding answers and understanding traditions.

Gabby Tropp is a senior at Lafayette College, studying History, Spanish, and Jewish Studies. An aspiring Jewish Educator, she tries to bring Jewish learning into daily life. She was a student, madrikhah and substitute teacher at Congregation B'nai Israel in Bridgeport, CT.

Flag Raising as a Jewish Act

“At Camp Interlaken (the Milwaukee JCC camp) we had flag raising and lowering every morning and every evening. The whole camp would assemble on the flag rectangle, with the youngest kids closest to the flag. Each unit would do some schtick for the whole camp, twice a day.”

It isn’t relevant why my wife and I were talking about this on the shuttle bus from the parking lot to the terminal at Newark Airport. She reminded me of a time when I was a counselor at Olin Sang Ruby Union Institute (OSRUI) long ago.

The Limud (educational) theme was Kedushah/holiness and my staff team was planning a session on rituals and their meaning. I forget which one of us keyed on morning flag raising (which we also had, but only in the morning), but I do recall that I and I think Deb Schreibman stopped the morning schtick, claiming that the whole thing was an empty meaningless ritual. We Pretty much accused our fellow counselors and the campers of using the flag that represented freedom and sacrifice for a useless and banal (we certainly did not use that word) activity. Then we lowered the flag, folded it properly into a triangle while everyone looked on, mouths open like trout, and said “let’s go to breakfast” as we stomped to the chadar ochel (dining hall).

The campers went bananas. Breakfast was followed by Nikayon (clean up in the bunks) and then I think Limud. Before it began, counselors came up to us and reported that their campers were irate and very upset with Deb and I for essentially profaning the morning ritual. We unpacked it with the campers and they learned that it was just a way to introduce the topic. We realized going in that talking about the relative importance of a ritual is not very interesting unless the learner has some skin in the game.

In our camps, the ritual of flag raising became essential to our camper’s day. It was Modeh Ani and the evening Shema. It was a profound moment of realizing and declaring that we are part of a community. And because the context of these camps were (and remain) completely Jewish, flag raising is a Jewish act.

In our congregation we are moving rapidly to change the way education happens for our students. We are examining pedagogy and focusing much more on the experiences they have while they are with us (and paying attention to the ones they have when they are not with us). We are adjusting the curriculum content to meet the needs of the families in our program now (a regular act, every 12-15 years or so). And we are changing our branding and the story we tell about who we are, what we do and how we do it. We hope this will renew interest by those who have chosen “none of the above” for their children.

Thinking about flag raising, I see it is clear that we also have to create, adapt or adopt new rituals in our program. We are testing the name Kehillah (Community) instead of “Religious School.” The tag line is “Find. Connect. Belong.” I think that will lead us to some interesting (and I hope humorous) rituals. I am open to ideas, so please share your ideas in the comments or send me an email (iwise@cbibpt.org).

What Parents CANNOT Do

From the Resiliency Files
Today's post was originally posted by URJ Eisner Camp - one of my two camp homes. I am sharing because of the quote from Michael Thompson. The eight things parents cannot do should be embroidered on blankets sent home with babies from the hospital. More on this in the coming weeks.

Overnight Camp Is Jewish Education

When you think of providing a Jewish education for your child, you may think of teaching them about their heritage, building a relationship with Israel, and giving them a familiarity with Hebrew. You may think about conveying our core values and celebrating Shabbat. Or perhaps you think of cultivating their spiritual side and providing them with a robust Jewish community. Jewish summer camp can help you give your child a Jewish education in all of these ways. But Jewish overnight camp can also help you give your child a Jewish education by giving them the tools to grow into the best version of themselves and to live independently. 

Dr. Michael Thompson in his book Homesick and Happy: How Time Away from Parents Can Help a Child Grow names eight things we cannot do for our children: 

1. Make them happy
2. Give them high self-esteem
3. Make friends for them or micromanage their friendships
4. Successfully double as our child’s agent, manager, and coach
5. Create the “second family” for which our children yearn in order to facilitate their own growth
6. Compete with or limit children’s immersion in the digital and social media realms
7. Keep them perfectly safe (although we can make them crazy trying!)
8. Make them independent

Overnight camp, according to Dr. Thompson’s research, can give our children the freedom and environment to do many of these things for themselves. 

Maybe learning to become an independent adult does not seem to fall into the realm of goals of Jewish education, but in fact, it does. The word Torah and the word for teacher (moreh/ah) and parent (horeh/ah) all come from the same Hebrew root for the word “instruct”. As parents, the Torah, or instruction, which we must give our children goes well beyond the world of Jewish ritual or even values. The Talmud teaches in Kiddushin 29a: 

Our Rabbis taught: A parent is obligated to do the following for their child*: enter the child into the covenant of the Jewish people, redeem the firstborn [from service in the Temple], teach them Torah, find them a spouse, and teach them a trade. And there are some who also say that a parent must also teach their child to swim. 

Some of these tasks seem obvious–we are obligated to help our children fulfill mitzvot as infants which they could not do for themselves. We want to help them step into adulthood by giving them a marketable skill and the ability to start their own families. But why should we teach them to swim? Perhaps because this is a skill that could save their lives. 

I like to consider this reference to swimming more metaphorically. The ocean is a vast unknown. Its depths are mysterious, ever-changing, and unexplored. If we prepare our children to swim, we acknowledge that the world into which we will send them is unfamiliar to us; we cannot give them the exact tools they will need, nor can we protect them from every uncertainty, but we can prepare them by making them resilient and up to the task of facing the challenges the surely will encounter. This is our charge as Jewish parents, and this is what Jewish summer camp can help us do. 

*This is an updated, gender-inclusive translation.

For more on this topic, listen to this podcast with psychologist Dr. Wendy Mogel, “Teaching to Swim Without a Pool.”