Youth
By Each month the journal Sh’ma posts a couple of essays from the print publication. To read all of the essays—which create a “conversation-in-print” —click on “Subscription” above. This month, we focus on stories — from the Bible through midrash, how we create stories with words and images (see Peter Pizele’s “hand-made midrash in our artistic NiSh’ma centerfold). When I first began thinking about this Sh’ma issue, I thought of it as an exercise in amplifying and exploring our great historical narrative, the Pesach story. I wanted our readers to explore how Jews continue to build on that story as a cultural and religious cornerstone. What emerged as I spoke with potential writers and began putting together what I consider an intricate jigsaw puzzle of voices into a coherent if loose conversation, is a collection of essays that reflect our wide diasporic existence: our creative riff on Bible, our deep and powerful culture of storytelling, and our broad interpretation of Jewish narrative. Barry Shrage writes about Exodus and identity construction; Ken Gordon and Amichai Lau-Lavie think about the impact of iPhoning on the seder; Josh Lambert rethinks the work of Robert Coles on stories, imagination, moral values and children; Tali Zelkowicz, Stephen Hazan Arnoff, and Matt Bar all write about the power of storytelling in education; and several story collectors take us around the globe while mapping our history and memory. For the full issue—or for bulk copies of the issue for your board or organization—contact MARKETING.
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Barry Shrage The ultimate impact of the leader depends most significantly on the particular story that he or she relates or embodies… Leaders tell stories about themselves and their groups, about where they are coming from and where they are headed, about what is to be feared, struggled against, and dreamed about… The most basic story has to do with issues of identity. And so it is the leader who succeeds in conveying a new version of a given group’s story, who is likely to be effective. —Howard Gardner, Leading Minds This year, Passover arrives at a time of great hope and frightening dreams, of pessimism and renewed optimism, of darkness and vision — on the surface, assimilation and decline; beneath the surface, renaissance and renewal. For a moment, a brief moment perhaps, the American Jewish community has the power to define itself, to tell a new story. My teacher, the late Dr. Michael Osband, taught in the name of Rav Soloveitchik that two different kinds of storytelling take place as part of Jewish holidays — zachor and sipur. While the memory of other holidays is transmitted through the zachor (remembering) process, Passover requires the more active process of sipur — active, personal, storytelling. Through the sipur process, we tell a story that actually happened to us. For the Rav, the seder is literally a time warp. We are slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt. We are fellow revolutionaries with Rabbi Akiva in B’nei Brak, waiting for the final battle between good and evil; we are present at countless sedarim with generations of great rabbinic figures; we are reading the four questions and new unimaginable, horrible questions with Mordechai Anielewicz in the Warsaw Ghetto, and we are celebrating in Jerusalem, in Israel reborn with Ben-Gurion in 1949. We embody all these stories because we are actually present — right now — in all of them simultaneously. Sipur, the process of active storytelling, is itself an act of leadership, transformation, and liberation. Particularly in a time when the very structure of our Jewish community life appears to be changing, when the old stories don’t appear to be working anymore, when we shift from an old worldview to an uncertain future, the leader as storyteller becomes critical to the process of connecting with the past and creating a vision of a transcendent future. The leader, then, uses the turmoil of the sea and the wilderness to create a vision of a new future and a renewed community. When we create our own seder, we become the architect of our own redemption. As we lead our seder and tell the story to our children, we are also defining ourselves rather than letting our oppressors or our oppression define us; we are liberating ourselves, and ensuring our future. How will this year’s seder be different from all others? Who will sit at our seder? What questions will they ask and what stories will we tell? As we gather our families and friends around the table, many of us will be sitting with children raised in interfaith households and young adults who have returned from Taglit-Birthright Israel trips to Israel. Those children and grandchildren may be asking surprisingly spiritual questions. (A recent study found that the next generation of Jews is actually more spiritual than the last and that the children of intermarriage are the most spiritual of all.) And Birthright, like the seder itself, is a sipur experience — a personal journey during which individuals begin to experience Jewish history by traveling the land and meeting their peers. So our Birthright returnees may well ask questions about their history and what ties them to the Jewish people. What story will we tell them at our seder in 5770, when they ask: What is this service, this story, to you?
Our capacity to tell this new story will test our strength as leaders and storytellers, mothers and fathers, grandparents and teachers. Much, though, depends on how we elicit and respond to questions — to the stories of our children and grandchildren. Ken Gordon Passover is about storytelling (“Haggadah,” of course, means “the telling”) and order is the meaning of the word “seder.” The tension between the freedom to create one’s own Passover script and the set form of the seder — the 15 steps, from kadesh through nirtzah — makes Pesach something like a jazz performance. 1. The Jews have no single Haggadah, and thank God for that. The lack of a centralized text, and Passover’s dining-room setting, means that Pesach is, in many respects, a homemade chag. 2. While some sedarim emanate directly from, say, the rabbis of Maxwell House, some people dare to create a story specifically for the people around their table. 3. For me, a great seder is highly interactive; it’s a chance for our own family or Jewish community to perform together the story of Jewish liberation. 4. The big question: How to get a table full of Jews to engage proficiently with the Haggadah? One would need all the children — the wise, wicked, simple, and the question-free children — along with their parents, to listen carefully and respond with ample intelligence and feeling. A place at the table can be earned with one’s ears, brain, mouth, and vocal chords. Technology can help. 5. Someday soon, sedarim will be conducted from iPhones. No more Manischewitz 6. Here’s a Passover tweet of the future: “Manischewitz = the wine of affliction.” 7. Yes, iPhones. For those of you for whom the term “People of the Book” isn’t just a bitter 21st-century joke — for whom Jewish culture remains the ne plus ultra of bookishness — hear me out. Many serious readers own and use iPhones. Their lives are seriously bound up with email and texting, and they understand that using social media (that is, the sort of communally written content one gets on YouTube, FaceBook, and Twitter) is not merely a rebarbative habit of the computer-drugged young. These people will one day put their smartphones to a real Jewish use. 8. Imagine a table of family and friends, heads bent over illuminated little screens. Emails and tweets and digital pictures of Hillel sandwiches shooting across the table and to the outside world, and then back again around the table. Imagine how empowering this will be to the young and shy — wicked and wise children writing wicked and wise things with a few expert taps. Imagine having the ability to fact check any and all points raised at the seder table. 9. The iPhone Passover can be chaotic, with any number of pishers virtually heckling the seder. With a premium on responding quickly in the world of social media, one writes back with comments. You like. You share. If you fear and hate interruption, this innovation isn’t for you. 10. But the truth is, even at a good, nondigital seder, there is a lot of disruption. It might be useful to have those blurted-out questions and comments put into writing. It might force the blurters to be more thoughtful, to formulate better blurts. 11. If your seder is one where all the guests are intent on strictly following the order — the words and paragraphs and pages — of the Haggadah, or following the halakhot on iPhones, this seder is not for you. 12. If the print-based Haggadah is a game of follow-the-leader, the iPhone seder is choose-your-own adventure volume. 13. A caveat: If your guests aren’t curious or courteous or interested in the Pesach story in the first place, the iPhone will probably make things worse, because the iPhone can easily lead the uninterested to check their email, stocks, and sports scores. 14. Is it feasible? There are millions of iPhone users right now, and you can download a Haggadah app from a company called Hada Porat for $2.99 and the Union Haggadah goes for $.99. Neither of these apps is ideal, but they are a start. My wife looked at both and said, “They’re cheat sheets.” Perhaps they are, but I prefer to think of them as lead sheets. Love that Passover jazz. 15. The truth is, the iPhone is a tool — as is a Haggadah. It’s only as useful, or as dangerous, as the people touching it. Tali Zelkowicz Since the major Jewish immigration wave to America in the 1880s, Jewish educators and communal leaders have argued over the proper ways to socialize the next Jewish generations into American society. The integration story is fraught with the tension of multiple and competing values: shifts from outsider to insider and back again and from material scarcity to abundance, the ongoing dialectics between universalism and particularism and between faith and peoplehood, content and relevance, survival and transformation. These have been the main characters in an ongoing story whose tensions can be managed, periodically even embraced, but not resolved. This is the case I make to my Jewish education graduate students each fall, in a course called the Sociology of Jewish Education. I explain to an initially unnerved classroom that there are no guarantees for Jewish continuity, only experiments. Together, we explore how, by relinquishing belief that we can control the future, we become bold and powerful in the present, especially if we use knowledge of the past. For example, we investigate the evolution of the American bar/bat mitzvah — how it became tied to those infamous “minimum relgious school requirements” over which parents and administrators engage in power struggles daily, who determines what a “real” bar/bat mitzvah entails, and how such copyrights become established. And through stories and narrative we uncover the fluid nature of the field — how it changes and how all the stakeholders in the field of Jewish education — educators, students, parents, institutional leaders, and philanthropists — are responsible to author or reinterpret our story. Most of us have inherited an overarching and often unconscious master narrative, which I refer to as the “Humpty Dumpty Narrative.” With uncanny precision, Humpty’s tragic tale echoes contemporary American Jewish communal anxieties about qualitative and quantitative survival: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Was there ever a high, holy place — a “wall” from which we fell? And are American Jews expecting just the right educational antidotes and formulae that will (ideally, once and for all) heal and fix the wounds from our “fall”? Though besieged with news about the woes of contemporary Jewish life, today’s students are rejecting Humpty’s story of loss. They are experimenting with a new way of interrogating the narrative of change and loss and, under the surface, the politics of authenticity surrounding Jewish identity formation — a key to Jewish education. In class, we’re learning to ask: How can we as Jewish educators navigate multiple and competing definitions of authenticity? How do we relate and respond to the boundary pushing?” In other words, how do we make explicit and transparent some of the stories Jews tell about themselves to each other about the authentic and authoritative, and ultimately generative, versions of Jewish identity formation? Here’s one way we’re experimenting: Students identify one artifact of contested authenticity — something that pushes Jewish boundaries in a controversial, threatening, or problematic way — and then analyze and examine their own personal and professional strategies about how it might be addressed. I suggest to the student that examples of such artifacts3 could include: photos of Halloween books featured in a religious school or Jewish day school, a “Miriam’s breast pump” as a Jewish ritual object, the canine ritual of “bark mitzvah,” an article in New Voices magazine that extols the virtues of intermarried clergy, the text of a blessing offered to all the non-Jewish spouses in a congregation during High Holiday services by the senior rabbi, or a YouTube excerpt of Rabbi Funnye Capers leading his African-American congregation in Shabbat services in Chicago. Along with a tangible version of the chosen artifact, the students should bring to class responses to these questions:
After examining the artifacts, we invite a Jewish historian and a feminist theologian to offer critical responses to the students’ treatments of the artifacts. The discussion — among students, respondents, and other faculty guests — is charged and stimulating. One of our respondents probed the difference between “inauthentic” and “kitsch,” and all present became the main characters in an ongoing dramatic story. Indeed, reflecting on the session the next day, one student reported feeling “both frustrated and appreciative of the lack of definitive answers.” Rather than resolve, each generation’s leaders must accept their authorial power and write new culture responsibly — that is connected to our rich and varied past. Another student imagines bringing this method of inquiry to the classroom, where Liberal Jews want their boundaries to be porous, but not too porous. An orienting metaphor of porosity emerged that day, which, not surprisingly, also applies well to the social-scientific study of Jewish identity formation as a whole: the metaphor of a living cell, with a semipermeable membrane. A cell has a way to let things in from the outside and to let things out from the inside, without being inundated or losing its integrity. Words, metaphors, and narratives all shape our understanding of the past and the present, and our vision for the future. Write on. 1 In 1900, Jacob David Wilowsky, rabbi of Slutsk, Russia, told an audience in New York that any Jew who came to the United States was a sinner. In his view, Judaism had no chance to survival on American soil. “It was not only home that the Jews left behind in Europe,” he said. “It was their Torah [biblical text and learning], their Talmud [rabbinic texts and learning], their yeshivot [Jewish academies of learning] — in a word, their Yiddishkeit, their entire Jewish way of life.” 2 See Jonathan Woocher’s full argument about all eight types of brokenness is his (1995) “Toward a ‘Unified Field Theory’ of Jewish Continuity” in A Congregation of Learners: Transforming the Synagogue into a Learning Community; Isa Aron, Sara Lee, and Seymour Rossel, eds. (UAHC Press, New York) 3 One can find the list of the artifacts that students selected and analyzed at www.shma.com. 4 Charmé, Stuart. “Varieties of Authenticity in Contemporary Jewish Identity.” Jewish Social Studies. Pp. 133-155. 5 Kelner, Shaul. “Birthright and Creating of Ritual.” pp. 1-3. And, Kelner, Shaul. (2001) “Authentic Sights and Authentic Narratives on Taglit.” Paper presented at the 33rd annual meeting of the Association for Jewish Studies in Washington, D.C. on December 16, 2001. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh It has been almost five years since my father last spoke to me. He is no doubt hurt and disappointed by what I’ve written about my childhood spent in a small Trotskyist organization known as “the party.” “It is an attack on the working class,” he would probably say. He is still a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party, after all, living in Brooklyn — just a subway ride away from me — and participating in that never-ending procession of meetings, conferences, and sales of the Militant newspaper, whose masthead reads: “A socialist newsweekly published in the interests of working people.” Notwithstanding my father’s charm and wit and generosity in picking up the check at dinner, his disappearance from my life has not been such a great loss. I’m happily married and residing in Manhattan in a beautiful apartment that I own, despite having been taught as a child to loathe private property. No, the real loss occurred when my father abandoned my mother and me when I was nine months old. “Mahmoud went off to fight for a world socialist revolution,” she would often say by way of explanation. And because this world socialist revolution was imminent, indeed was about to occur at any moment, my mother sacrificed almost everything for the party — of which she also was a member — including lots of her time, some of her money, and all of her passion. Most importantly, she maintained a chronic and debilitating worship of my father, which prevented her from ever being able to move on and find someone else. I was doomed, therefore, to a life of fatherlessness. I was also doomed to a home in which my father’s absence was as great as his presence. One summer afternoon when I was four years old, my mother took me to a performance of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” I was so affected by what I saw that for many weeks afterward I would greet my mother upon her return home from her unhappy job as a secretary and demand that we go at once to my bedroom so we could reenact the story. Reclining with exhaustion on my bed, my mother would gamely take on every role in the drama, including the cow, the harp, the giant, and, of course, the widow, which is to say, herself. I was only Jack, pulsating with a spectrum of emotions, each one of them in the extreme, as I scampered around the bedroom enduring poverty, banishment, terror, and that final glorious moment when I would descend the beanstalk just steps ahead of the giant and scream for my mother to hand me the axe, which she did without a second to lose, managing to be both giant and mother at once, crying out “Fee, fi, fo, fum!” and “Hurry, Jack! Hurry!” And in my mind, I would swing that imaginary axe and down would come the beanstalk with the giant landing dead in the grass and the harp and goose in my mother’s arms, meaning that my mother and I would now live happily ever after. That is, until the next day, when I would accost her once more at the front door of our apartment and lead her by the hand into my bedroom. While the story of “Jack and the Beanstalk” was obviously a version of the socialist revolution that we dreamed about — eliminating the wealthy oppressor — it was more an indication of my own private desire to triumph over my father and rid him from our home once and for all. Alas, that never quite happened. But when I was sixteen, my mother resigned from the Socialist Workers Party and began to shape a new life for herself. And in my adult years, I would occasionally meet my father for dinner as we tried to get to know one another. But then I started to write and publish pieces about my childhood, and my father stopped speaking to me altogether. His presence remains, though. Even now, when I read the newspaper, I will find myself wondering as a matter of reflex what his opinion would be. This is how I am able to keep my father close at hand, as my mother did when I was young. And then, with great difficulty, I do what I can to think independently, which, I suppose, is one of the lessons of that timeless tale of the boy who swung the axe. Devora Kimelman-Block A year ago, I found myself in inner-city Baltimore, shoveling manure into a garbage bag in a gas station parking lot. The gas station attendants were none too pleased when my farmer’s trailer, with live cattle in the back, pulled in and, accidentally, deposited a pile of dung that had slid out under the door. Not okay to put it in their garbage cans, they said. We had to take it with us. Welcome to my world. I never thought this would be part of my Jewish journey. How, you may ask, did I find myself shoveling manure in a gas station parking lot? I am the founder of KOL Foods, which makes available and promotes sustainable food systems. Specifically, I provide kosher beef, lamb, and now poultry. Less than ten USDA certified slaughterhouses remain in the United States that kill their animals according to the laws of kashrut. I work with one of those slaughterhouses in downtown Baltimore, which has been family owned and operated since the 1800s. Sustainable agriculture is a way of producing food in which animals are treated humanely and the environment, farm, and factory are healthy for workers and consumers. Before industrialization, animals were raised in organic pastures, and the meat, which was expensive, was considered a treat. Today, the focus at industrial animal farms is on gaining short-term profit — with minimal concern for the environment, workers, animals, or the consumer’s health. Such farm production raises several environmental issues, including the pollution of U.S. waterways. Public health issues, listed below, are staggering:
In addition to the health issues are animal and worker welfare concerns. For example, animals are crammed together in confined areas without access to sunlight and fresh air; their feet don’t even touch the ground. Workers experience dangerous conditions, including exposure to dust and gases, as well as workplace injuries. Factory farms produce lots of really cheap meat. While the low cost can be advantageous to consumers, it does not reveal the actual costs to our society, our environment, or our Jewish values. The standing definition of kosher meat is that it comes from a kosher animal that is slaughtered according to the laws of kashrut and passes a kosher inspection. How the farm or factory that supplies the meat treats its workers and animals are all nonfactors. So when the nonkosher meat industry adopted industrial practices, the kosher meat industry followed suit. To be designated “organic” means that animals eat organic feed and do not receive hormones or antibiotics; it says nothing about how the animals or factory workers are treated. In fact, these “industrial organic” systems have many of the same issues as conventional plants. A more important distinction is between meat that is industrially produced and meat that has been produced sustainably from family farms that do not use feedlots. At KOL Foods, I hope to put ethics — the moral code of how animals are raised for slaughter — and kashrut back on the same plate. We should eat in a way that honors the Earth and the life that was taken in order for us to eat. We can all help do this by pressuring the kosher meat industry to raise its standards; eat consciously — that is, bless the food and reflect on how it came to the table; eat sparingly — eating meat will feel more special if it’s eaten only on holidays and Shabbat; don’t swallow your ethics — consume only sustainable, non-industrial meat. Matt Bar
Lauren Bahary Wilner, Adam Eilath, & Jason Guberman-Pfeffer The Jewish narrative, as any other, has an evolving story line, composed of the interplay between history and memory. Twenty-first-century digital mapping technology affords a unique opportunity to enhance our understanding of this narrative by making thousands of Jewish heritage sites not just visible, but “visitible.” Diarna, “Our Homes” in Judeo-Arabic, is a project that harnesses technology, particularly Google Earth, to provide virtual access to the sites of our endangered Jewish heritage across the Middle East and North Africa. In the case of writer Lamaan Herdoon, who left Iraq in the 1970s, and dreamt of returning to Baghdad, Diarna enables the realization (if only virtually) of a dream long deferred:
I wish that I could fly like a bird with my daughters and show them the home where I grew up, my school, Frank Iny, the college I attended, Baghdad University, Abu Nawas Street, the Tigris River, and our synagogue….
For thousands of years, Jews lived in communities from the edge of the Sahara in Southern Morocco to the Iranian-Afghani border. In the past few decades, and vividly illustrated recently with the flight of many members of Yemen’s dwindling Jewish community, most of these ancient communities have ceased to exist in essence or in fact. But while community members have left, their former structures and sites remain behind. Digitally mapping these places provides insight into the lives and stories of past and current inhabitants, as well as a tangible mechanism for preserving and exploring memories and history. Documenting sites in this manner also creates an image of one’s heritage not wholly available through text, photos, or stories alone. For Lauren, Diarna enlivens her mother’s roots in a country she couldn’t imagine visiting now, the Islamic Republic in Iran. “I have studied Farsi; I have attempted Persian cooking; and I wear my great-grandmother’s jewelry to try to connect with my identity. But when will it be safe for me to visit the neighborhood where my grandparents met? Now I have a virtual passport to experience the sweep of 2,700 years of Jewish life in Iran.” Until recently, there existed very limited geographic documentation, in either scholarly or popular works, on the physical parameters of Mizrahi communities. However, today, Google Earth makes available a freely downloadable program that supplies interactive satellite imagery of the entire globe to an audience in excess of 500 million users. On our Web site, we weave and synthesize satellite imagery (complete with terrain, zoomable perspectives, tiltable views, and 360-degree rotation), archival and contemporary photos and videos, audio- and video-oral histories, panoramas, and even three-dimensional models, to create compelling entry points to these once vibrant, yet largely forgotten communities. Anyone with an Internet connection can travel across the region as if on eagles’ wings, unaffected by the political and interreligious strife on the ground, which often thwarts physically preserving, and even (in too many cases) simply visiting these sites. Over time, these sites are physically disappearing. And they are at risk of being forever lost both to history and memory as the last generation with personal memories passes on. This reality, as well as the dearth of information on, and accessibility to, Mizrahi heritage sites has left us (in a sense) as orphans, disconnected from an essential aspect of our identity. The story of who we are, individually and as a people, is rooted in the Middle East’s soil. One of our researchers, Adam, whose mother’s family is from the rural village of Nabeul, Tunisia, yearned to discover what Jewish life in Nabeul had been like, only to find that “hardly anyone in my family could give me a good sense of that and, even if they did, the line between myth and history was blurred. It was not until I realized that I could see the places where my family had lived for centuries that this almost mythical place became real.” Diarna marks a beginning toward preserving and reconstructing a more comprehensive, interactive, and “living” exploration of the heartland of Jewish heritage. In the process, we are, moreover, creating a prototype for digital preservation that can be replicated for Jewish sites in Europe (where thousands of sites are similarly endangered), as well as the cultural heritage sites of other ethnic groups and civilizations around the world. Contrary to the age-old reality, memory may no longer be a place where only those who have been before can go; now, we can all return home.
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