I apologize in advance for
the length of this post. You are under
no obligation to read it. But if you do,
feel free to share your thoughts.
On Monday I took off from gan
to attend the Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly here in
Jerusalem. For under an hour of
volunteer work (I got really lucky with my job assignment), I was able to
attend the rest of the day’s events for free.
My main reason for doing this was that I simply needed a change of
pace. Life has felt incredibly
monotonous lately. My gan is a short ten
minute walk from my apartment. The
supermarket is also ten minutes away, shul on Shabbat is five minutes away, and
friends’ apartments when I get invited out for meals are not much further. It was time for a change of scenery.
My second thought was that I
would run into all these people from my past.
I was actually disappointed in this regard. I saw one friend from high school (who I
possibly hadn’t seen since then) but I knew he was living in Israel and was not
surprised to meet him at the conference.
But no one else! I didn’t even
really see so many familiar faces from Boston besides Jerry Silverman, who used
to live around the corner from me, and Boston CJP President Barry Shrage who
goes to my shul. How boring. What kind of Jewish event was this (for me at
least)?
I knew that by moving to
Israel I was putting myself in a bubble.
And by moving to Jerusalem and interacting almost entirely with
English-speakers, I put myself in a yet smaller bubble. I think that my educational experiences at
UMD made me that much aware of the big world out there. Since graduating I find myself reading all
sorts of non-fiction and paying more attention to the news. I suppose some of that has to do with growing
up, but the lectures I attended as a History major and the discussions I had
with classmates had me piecing together where we all came from and how we got
here. In that way I feel I can keep
myself connected to “everyone else” while living in this tiny Jewish country in
the Middle East. It’s how I remind
myself to look out from the bubble sometimes.
Attending the GA, or really
learning more about the GA by being there in person, reminded me of something
else. I grew up in a community that was
very much dedicated to volunteerism and sponsoring programs to help the less
fortunate. No task was too small. Everyone could help in some way, big or
small. I was also always inspired by my
shul’s history. It started a year before
I was born in another family’s library and then moved to my living room for a
few weeks. It was started by a few young
families who wanted to create something new in the community. We were the first Orthodox shul in the area
to have Women’s tefilah groups, female shul presidents, and it is also a shul
where any member can become a teacher and everyone else is ready and eager to
learn and ask questions. I would
frequently hear about work being done by the Jewish Federation in Boston (aka
the CJP) and other Federations around the country because I knew people working
on the projects and about the fundraising going on in the community. At the GA I met someone who works at Yemin
Orde, an immigrant youth village in the North (that would be so cool to work at
one day). When I said I was from Boston
and that my shul’s members were active supporters of Yemin Orde, she knew
exactly what I was talking about.
I frequently have these
moments where I am grateful to have grown up in the greater Boston Jewish
Community. But when I have these
thoughts, I am thinking very specifically about my personal experience in the
community. There were a LOT of Jews in
suits at the GA. There were a lot of
people who work for organizations all over North America, in hundreds of
communities, on thousands of programs addressing social, economic, and
political causes I haven’t given any real thought to in years. It isn’t that I’m apathetic or
uninformed. It just isn’t right in front
of me. I have plenty of friends who work
for Jewish organizations in the US and I read their posts on facebook, but it
had simply been awhile since I paid much attention to the inner workings of
Jews in America. I will get back to this
in a couple of paragraphs.
I am really curious to look
up what the session topics are when the GA is hosted in North America, which
happens 4/5 of the time. I don’t know
how the numbers compare in terms of participants overall, but there were a lot
of Israelis at this conference (like real ones – not like me), and there was a
lot of talk about Israel. I understand
that the Federation allocates millions of dollars every year to programs in
Israel and that those programs would very much like this to keep
happening. So they send cute teenagers
and young adults (and I mean real young adults, the lower half of the 18-45 years
old range that JFNA people kept talking about) to talk about how these
organizations have changed their lives so that Federations will want to keep
giving to them.
As much as I started getting
excited to be caught up on everything going on in America, I very much enjoyed
this opportunity to hear about what’s going on outside the four block radius I
spend 99% of my time in. I met two high
school students sent by the Society for Advancement of Education, an
organization that helps teens from disadvantaged homes and communities get a
solid education and grow in capable and confident young adults. This one girl had a year where she missed 300
hours of school, and proudly told me that this year she has missed only 20. The Society also runs a program for boys in
yeshivas that skimp on (read: skip entirely) general studies (math, science,
etc.) so that they can attend yeshiva and still learn the necessary material
for completing the bagrut tests and, you know, knowing something that can
actually get them a job one day. I heard
a lot about periphery cities like Ramle and Ashdod where organizations like
Keshatot not only work to break the cycle of poverty, they cater to both Arab
and Jewish citizens under one roof.
There was the conversation about Yemin Orde I mentioned before, and I
heard Daniel Birnbaum, CEO of SodaStream, talk about the experience of running
a company that successfully employs Jewish and Arab workers together and what
it means for the workers and the workers’ families.
Back to the North America
side of things. I joked that I was going
to carry around a flask and take a drink whenever I heard the Pew Study
mentioned. Maybe I went to all the wrong
sessions, but I only heard it mentioned once, at the end of the day during
Jerry Silverman’s closing remarks. I’m
not really disappointed about this, but I am surprised. I was under the impression that this would be
the focus of the conference. After all,
the JFNA is all about tackling the American Jewish Community’s biggest
problems. I have a lot of mixed feelings
about the Pew Study. I don’t know how
accurate it is, I don’t know if it really tells us anything new, and since many
streams of Judaism in the US were created and strongly affected by the events
of the past century, I don’t know if we can really call the current state of
things a major crisis. Sure there are
things that can be addressed. I do feel
strongly in the continuity of the Jewish religion, Jewish life, Jewish
traditions, and Jewish identity.
I know from my own
experiences what community resources can contribute to those things. I also don’t think “crisis” or “worry” are
the right words. I am confident,
especially after getting a sense of how many people are working for these
things, that the Federations will keep doing what they’ve always been doing, in
innovative ways, and the narrative will continue. If anything, maybe the Pew Study was a
distraction, but maybe the fact I hardly heard it mentioned at the conference means
that people there also felt that way. On
the other hand, I am a bit confused by how much the conference was focused on
Israel and American Jews’ relationship with Israel. I think the focus should have been flipped
and have been more about Israeli Jews’ relationship with the community in the
US. I guess Israel does need its turn in
the spotlight, and this is why the conference is here only once every five
years. However if there really is so
much to do to ensure the continuity of the Jewish people in North America, I
don’t know why there was so much about Women of the Wall, Iran, and the
Arab-Israeli conflict.
Isn’t the point of these
conferences to get all these people brainstorming together about how to better
help their individual communities and contribute to the American Jewish
community as a whole? There sessions
were full of inspirational Israeli leaders (not all of them Jewish) who do
fantastic work to better their communities.
Were their presentations given to attract the big bucks as much as they
were to inspire American leaders to go back and find ways they can be just as
creative, imaginative, and innovative?
Maybe they were. I can’t even
fake being a Jewish professional, so I have a limited sense of what was really
going on that day. Lets face it - I
could never handle wearing a suit every day.
The most exciting thing I
learned at the conference was that at least somebody will consider me to be a
young adult for another 16 years and one week.
Sounds good to me. But here are
some other summed up thoughts.
Jerry Silverman talked about
how 80% of Birthright participants volunteer somewhere, but only a small
fraction of them do it in a Jewish framework, and why can’t the Federations
create Jewish frameworks for these young adults (should have made a drinking
game for that phrase) to have the same volunteer experiences? I know Jews like me, “success stories” of
Jewish schools and camps, are not who Jerry was referring to, but it is obvious
to me why college students would embrace opportunities to do things with more
diverse groups of people. Isn’t that
what college is all about? Even the most
secular Jewish student is likely to graduate college and find themselves in a
bubble of some sort, whether it be a socio-economical one or more culturally
defined bubble. Maybe there can be Jewish
programs to supplement these other ones, but they can’t replace them. I can spew my own Zionist propaganda about why
I live here (okay, in my defense it would not all be considered spewing nor is
all of it propaganda) but as anyone who knows me knows, the biggest things I
feel I gave up (after Autumn and closer proximity to Fenway Park) are the more
diverse informal education opportunities for myself and my future
children. But I will note here that I am
not about to be one of those weirdos who comments on the Times of Israel blog
posts by Israelis who were at the conference and like arguing that if everyone
just gave up and left North America for Israel, all the risks plaguing Jewish
continuity would just go away (for the people who move here, but who cares
about what is left behind?). If you are
passionate about your community outside of Israel and can be an active player
in making it better, I give you my permission to stay there and keep doing what
you’re doing. Just check in on us here
in Israel once in awhile (maybe more than once every five years with the GA).
My final thought, or at least
the beginning of it: I went to a session
about creating a shared civil society.
The focus was mainly on a shared civil society between Jews and Arabs,
but also about a shared one among Jews.
Sharing is not so simple. Just
ask my kids at gan. I can only hope that
the “sharing values” we instill in the kids at gan play into how they live
their lives twenty years from now. The
hardest part about sharing is possibly choosing whom to share your life with (or
piece of Lego). I mean that in every
sense. Sharing it with someone (or a
community, depending what exactly we’re talking about) that is exactly like me
is full proof in some ways, but goes completely against my ideals in others. Can we have many conflicting opinions, get
along great, and come to a compromise that doesn’t threaten our ideals and can
be smoothly transmitted to our children?
In theory I think this sounds like a fabulous idea, but as much as I
think about the different possible permutations the less promising the
possibility seems to me.
I went to a session with
three speakers, one of whom is the mother of a kid who was in my gan at Kol
HaNeshama. She talked about when she was
younger and thought about the future, on her own and then with her husband, and
thought about what school her future kids would go to. In Israel things are very tracked. There are the more pluralistic Tali schools
that may allow more critical thinking, but they also might not teach skills for
learning Jewish texts as strongly as the religious schools. And the Arabs are completely separate, and
shouldn’t Jewish kids get to interact with them too? How else can there be a shared society (yes,
there are possibly things that cannot and should not be shared, but I am
talking about everything else). What do
I need to rely more on schools to teach and what knowledge can I confidently
share at home? Maybe Israel can’t have
communities like Boston. Once the entire
educational system is involved, it’s hard to bring different kinds of Jews
together the way I felt it was done in Boston.
Then again, hard does not mean impossible. What are the chances Israel can on its own
put together something like the GA to brainstorm about these issues? That could
be the problem I had with mixing issues about Israel and issues about Jews in
America. I feel that the GA is to bring
American leaders together to talk about shared issues so that they can go back
and improve their own communities, but in Israel I think the problem is that
people need to stop thinking only about themselves and look outwards to see
about how we can all be helped together.
This mother told us that even
before her children were born, she imagined a conversation she would have with
them in twenty years. It was unclear to
her what the situation in Israel was going to be, whether there was one state
or two, and what was going on with the Arab population. But in this conversation her children ask her
what she was doing twenty years ago when the country was in the state it is in
now. I can imagine this conversation
perfectly. Her eldest son was extremely
articulate and inquisitive, even as a three year old. She told us that she wanted to make sure she
had a response for them. This was her
motivation to get involved in the Hand in Hand school, and school in Jerusalem
(with four others around the country) where Jewish and Arab children learn side
by side.
Okay Jewish Federations of
North America General Assembly, I guess you have me right where you want me: thinking
about the future and my part in it. When
I got to Israel I really wanted to slave away at a non-profit to get my foot in
the door and be a part of some cool project that was going to change Israel and
the world. But the phone numbers I found
led to dead lines and the emails on their websites all bounced. So I went to grad school, met some fabulous
people (both Jews and Arabs) who are doing cool stuff around the country to
make it a better place. Then I opened a
gan and spend every day imparting the values that are important to me to a
bunch of toddlers, hoping that maybe just maybe that learning how to share
space and Legos in gan will make them better members of society in twenty
years. And now on Monday I spent a day
hearing about all the other ways people are working to make my country a better
place, some of which I can maybe get involved in.
And I'm asking myself, what now?
