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How to Draw in Generation Y

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http://reformjudaismmag.org/Articles/index.cfm?id=1632

“My grown children are homeless,” says Dr. Ron Wolfson.

“Oh,” he adds, “they have apartments, but they are spiritually homeless…completely unconnected to a spiritual community even though they are day school graduates, summer campers who had trips to Israel, a warm Jewish family…and Daddy in ‘the business.’”

Reform Judaism Magazine features S3K in their article How to Draw in Generation Y

It’s A New World, Golda…

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Jessica Professor Steven Cohen wrote a very intriguing article explaining what he's learning about my generation of Jews: the 30-something post-Boomer up and coming leaders of the Jewish community. What makes this generation so different from the one ahead of us? What's new and different these days?

Cohen explains that there are four major trends he sees in today's Jewish young adults:

Many engaged Jews under the age of forty emphasize, more than their elders and predecessors, Jewish purpose. They have... expanded social justice activities, engaged in various cultural endeavors, undertaken Judaic learning singly and in groups, and established a powerful and significant presence on the Internet and other new media.
They express much-diminished sensitivity to matters of external threats to Jews, Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish people. Intermarriage, anti-Semitism, Israel's security, and campaigns to delegitimize Israel may strongly motivate older engaged American Jews. But such issues excite relatively little resonance among their younger counterparts.
Affiliation with a particular movement - denominational, ideological, or otherwise - is less prevalent for the younger generation of engaged American Jews. Conventional belonging to anything, not just things Jewish, is neither automatic nor self-justifying.
Engaged young Jewish adults resist what they see as coercive expectations. They see once widely accepted normative standards - such as in-marriage and support of Israel - as optional, tentative, and, at best, a means to expressing higher Jewish purpose.

As Tevye said to his wife in Fiddler on the Roof, "it's a new world, Golda." And that was a long time ago... Imagine how surprised they'd be to see what Judaism looks like today.

Rabbi Jessica Zimmerman

Find the full article, Highly Engaged Young American Jews: Contrasts in Generational Ethos, Interview with Steven M. Cohen

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BJPA adds new site functionality

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Link:

http://www.bjpa.org/

The Berman Jewish Policy Archive @ NYU Wagner (www.BJPA.org) now has a collection of over 5,000 documents freely available online with more than 80 articles on synagogues.

In the last few weeks, they have added several “functionalities” – the ability for registered users to construct their own “bookshelves” (articles they select for their repeated reference) and “bibliographies” (formatted lists of references for use in preparing papers).

Jewels of Elul 5771

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The Jewels of Elul is back with this year's theme,
The Art of Beginning...Again.Twenty Nine inspired contributors will share a personal story, about how deal with change. It will include pieces by Noah Alper founder of Noah’s Bagels, African-American Rabbi, actress Noa Tishby, Rabbi’s David Wolpe and Rabbi Naomi Levy, Imam Jihad Turk, Jeremy Ben Ami, Eli Broad, a prisoner in a penitentiary, a Lost Boy of Sudan and medical student Nofrat Frenkel, arrested for wearing a Tallit at the wall. Additionally, Natan Sharansky, Author Alan Lightman, Boxer Yurie Foreman, producer Mia Goldman and Rabbi’s Billy Dreskin, Abraham Twerski and Shlomo Riskin will be writing Jewels this year!

The Jewels will be available online free of charge at www.jewelsofelul.com beginning the first day of Elul, August 11, Jewels of Elul books will also be available in print for Temples and organizations to share with their communities in time for the High Holy days. To receive copies of the book, we request a donation to Beit T’Shuvah, a residential addiction treatment center.

To order Jewels of Elul booklets, please make your tax-deductible check out to Beit T'Shuvah of Los Angeles, and send by July 1, 2010 (while supplies last)

Jewels of Elul
P.O. Box 6061-115
Sherman Oaks, CA 91423

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For The Sake of Zion

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http://www.forthesakeofzion.org/

Encouraged by the recent European “Call For Reason,” signed by more than 5200 Jewish citizens of European countries, we, American Jews passionately devoted to the safety and welfare of the State of Israel, now add our voices to those of our European kinsfolk. They recognize, as do we, that Israel faces existential threats, both from without and from within. Add your name to this important statement!

New book explains how the Bible turned courtship into a felony

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcH31y1VgFI

A Passover Question That Keeps Us Up All Night

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Parashat Tzav

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

We can chart the last half century by the kinds of seder we have had. Fifty years ago, we celebrated an old-country model brought here by grandparents who davened it through in Hebrew from the Maxwell House Haggadah. Some of us remember it nostalgically, but in fact, we rarely got through it all. Attention lagged half way through. Color it in warm pastels of memory.

The next generation inherited the Seder without the old-country davening know-how. Unable to replicate the seder of their youth, and looking for something modern, the second-generation hosts bought new Haggadahs with up-to-date translations and explanations below the lines. They would go around the table inviting a different participant to read each paragraph of the English. This was even harder to sustain all the way through. After an hour, people quit and ate. Color it staid - and eventually, boring.

The most recent seder comes with fun and games: paper frogs and insects that get hurled around the table to elucidate the plagues, kiddy-style songs that confuse Passover for Purim, whatever it takes to appeal to the kids. Color it pediatric.

Baseball maivins this time of year will remember "Tinker to Evers to Chance," the infielder combination for the Chicago Cubs who are credited with inventing the double play -- guaranteed to end the opposing side's chances for winning the game. The parallel double play in Jewish life is "nostalgia to boring to pediatric." It will end our own chances for winning a game more important than baseball: the game of meaningful Judaism in America. Nostalgia, boredom and pediatrics have no staying power.

I am intrigued, therefore, by the seder that the Haggadah itself describes: rabbis so engrossed in the story of the Exodus that their students must interrupt them to say that morning has arrived. By the 1950s, so "ho-hum" had the seder become, that no one believed the account. Scholars suggested, therefore, that what kept them awake until dawn was clandestine planning for the Bar Kokhba revolt against Rome. The idea appealed to a post-war generation that had successfully fought Arab armies to produce the State of Israel.

But the theory is sheer nonsense; not a shred of evidence supports it; and elsewhere in rabbinic literature, we have a parallel story of other rabbis, long before the revolt, staying awake all night to discuss matters relevant to Passover. Once upon a time, then, the seder was a time that mattered. Kol hamarbeh bi'tsiyat mitsrayim harei zeh m'shubach. "Discussing the Exodus from Egypt extensively is praiseworthy," goes the Rabbis' sage advice - not because of a rebellion in the making, but because there has to be something better than nostalgia, boredom and pediatric Judaism.

Is there still anything relevant to Passover that might keep us up all night in animated conversation? Obvious candidates are things like world poverty and health care for the poor, but I have in mind a prior stage of conversation: just the elementary question of whether there is a question! And there I go back to the four questions that have been similarly watered down from the seder's original intent. Originally, there were no set questions that children memorized and parroted back. Instead, someone, not necessarily a child, would offer a single meritorious question that would fascinate enough to galvanize discussion. It would be invented on the spot, created out of the existential and historical moment. My question is, Why is there no such question any more?

In part, the problem is that our questions have grown too large to tackle. What more can we say about world poverty? Never mind health care, which even Congress cannot discuss without incivility setting in. No one wants to dedicate the seder to perennial quandaries that have no solution, especially when they come with political land mines planted underfoot.

But Passover is not for solving problems, so much as raising ideas. Whatever the Exodus was historically, it later became an idea, the idea that God wants freedom in politics, history, society, and our own internal psyches. Surely everyone around the table has something worth saying about that.

This week's portion, tzav, falls on Shabbat Hagadol, just before the seder. It instructs us about the tamid, the regular daily sacrifice, which was necessary, says the commentator Matnot Or, to atone for the sin of d'varim batelim, "wasteful conversation."

This year, let's move beyond wasteful seder conversation dedicated solely to nostalgia, boredom and pediatrics. Let's go around the table and ask, "What question might keep us up in productive conversation all night long, if necessary?" We'd better have one; we no longer have a tamid to atone for us, if we don't.

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Three Ways Synagogues Can Learn From Churches

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/benyamin-cohen/three-ways-synagogues-can_b_507525.html

Benyamin Cohen, the son of a rabbi and author of My Jesus Year mentions S3K in this recent Huffington Post article.

Synagogue Life Should Be Like Handwashing (not hand wringing!)

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Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

Parashat Ki Tissa, 2010

Nature and culture are the twin poles of human existence. Nature is how the world greets us in raw beauty, promise and power. Culture is how we partner with it, riding its sound waves with music, converting wood and stone into homes, and carving ski slopes out of mountain snow. Other animals too sing, build and play. But we do it through what anthropologists call culture: political parties, religious denominations, and shopping malls. We have no say over nature. But the culture we produce can make life worth living or crush us altogether.

Nature runs wild. Culture is nature set aside, contained, and controlled by human design. Judaism addresses them both, with, among other things, the commandment to wash.

The Jewish interface with nature is the mikveh, water that is retained in its natural flowing condition. It is regenerative. It prepares us for Shabbat, propels a woman beyond her menstrual period, and confirms converts as newly Jewish.

The Jewish interface with culture is ritual handwashing. Just the opposite of mikveh, it requires water extracted from nature and reserved in a basin. It is, as it were, "culturalized" water, a perfect example of "nature set aside, contained, and controlled by human design." Mikveh (water in its natural state) is to nature as handwashing (water culturally reserved) is to culture. We treat handwashing as merely hygienic, but it too is supposed to be regenerative.

To be sure, Jewish handwashing is hygienic in part. Fifteen hundred years ago, the Talmud grasped the connection between hands and sickness. It knew nothing of bacteria, of course, and thought sickness from unwashed hands was due to an evil spirit that dwelt there. But it correctly knew that touching the mouth, nose, or open sores (the Talmud's own examples) without washing is dangerous.

In addition, however, Jewish handwashing symbolizes spiritual regeneration. Mishnah B'rurah puts it succinctly, giving us "two views" as to why we wash in the morning. "The Rosh [Asher ben Yechiel , 1250-1327] wrote that hands are askaniyot ["active"]; they cannot help but touch filthy body parts at night.... The Rashba [Solomon ibn Adret, 1235-1310] held that it is because we awaken from sleep as if created anew." Neither authority is referring to disease here. Their concern is that we pray in an appropriate state: cleansed of bodily filth, for the Rosh; as if reborn, to the Rashba. Either way, we wash not just to stay healthy. And for the Rashba, the handwashing that represents culture is regenerative.

Humans culturalize nature with institutions. The tabernacle is the Jewish institution par excellence, the model for the way human culture should recreate us, not destroy, us. Appropriately, the mandate for handwashing from culturally reserved water that is poured from a vessel is modeled on the priests' basin that the tabernacle contained. The priests wash there, says our sedra "so that they do not die." Our institutions should follow that example. Even without the actual water to remind us, they should be enlivening not deadening, to those who, like the priest, work in them.

That is not what boards of Jewish institutions report. Meetings are often desultory at best, litigious at worst - even downright nasty. They can be life-depleting, not life-enhancing. Committee assignments are like life sentences. Volunteers are hard to find.

But that is not the Jewish way. Jewish organizational life should be like the handwashing that characterized the original Jewish institution, the Temple. Working there should make those who serve it feel reborn. This is especially true of synagogues, the successor institution to the desert tabernacle and to the Temple that succeeded it. If our synagogue committee or board meetings run us down or wear us out, something is wrong. We should return home from meetings charged by the good we have done, moved by the devotion of fellow board members, and elated by seeing human initiative at its best solving problems at their worst.

Nachmanides finds kabbalistic meaning in ritual handwashing. Our ten fingers represent the ten sefirot, the ten divine emanations through which blessing reaches us from on high. When we finish washing, we hold our fingers upwards as if reaching for blessing which flows through ritually purified hands into our lives.

Mikveh too brings kabbalistic blessing, but through nature - the place we usually associate with divine presence. God created nature, after all, not institutions. But we are God's continuing agents of creation, and we create the institutions where blessing continues even after God's own work is done. What a concept! Boards, task forces and committees are our own God-like work. They should wash our souls, purify our spirits, and bring us blessing.

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Asking for Sacred Community

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The following is the installation speech of Steve Croft, incoming President of Congregation Beth Yeshurun in Houston, Texas, the largest synagogue in the Conservative movement.

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I want to start by telling you a story---

A long time ago there was a young man, in his early 30's, very shy, who was ASKED to join the new Beth Yeshurun Young Leadership Group.