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Teens and Tikkun Olam
Appeared in Moment Magazine, Dec. 1999
Watch out! There is a tidal wave of Jewish teens coming in our direction. They are the children of the baby boomers. The demographics indicate that over the next decade there will be some 20-30% more teens in our communal pool than ever before.
Enrollments in youth programs are rising. Jewish summer camps are closing out earlier than ever in the year. Professionals in the field are aware that this is a unique opportunity to instill a strong sense of Jewish identity in the next generation of American Jews. With enough creativity, we can begin to reverse the trend of the past few decades during which the number of identifying Jewish households has continued to decline. The question is: ³do we know how to capture the imagination of today¹s Jewish teens?²
There is overwhelming evidence that one of the surest ways to engage Jewish teens is through social action projects, or what the Jewish tradition calls tikkun olam work. Combining the mandate to ³fix the world² with a deeper appreciation for the Jewish texts and values that inform that work is the primary mission of the work that we do through The Washington Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values. Our experience with thousands of Jewish teens over the past eleven years has yielded five critical principles that should inform all attempts to get Jewish teens to engage in tikkun olam .
1. INFORM
The great irony of this generation is that with all the access they have to information through the media and the internet, their worlds are incredibly small and narrow. The alien species that we call ³teenager² has a thick crust of self-centeredness covering a deep well of idealism. The trick is to pierce through that tough outer crust.
Brief encounters with knowledgeable experts in a variety of fields can do just that. To learn that the weathiest 1% of American control over 20% of the income in America while a single parent working full-time at minimum wage still needs food stamps to feed their children, wakes up privileged teens to the great inequities of American society. Or similarly, to learn the extent to which our generation has been responsible for the most selfish abuse of the ecosystem in the history of civilization, evokes appropriate moral outrage among teens.
Suddenly, it strikes teens as inappropriate to stay in the cocoons that they have built for themselves.
2. EMPOWER
Moral outrage is a good start but it can¹t end there. Teens must learn about how social change takes place. Americans today have a cynicism about the political process and teens share that bias. Yet despite the examples of abuses that the media so loves to expose, politics is also the process through which one can change the world for the better. Teens are amazed to discover how open the political process is at the local, state and national level. ³Carpe Diem², ³seize the day² said Robin Williams in the film, The Dead Poets Society . It is a powerful message to teens who, with a little direction, can find dozens of vehicles to channel their moral outrage into constructive engagement.
Political activism is not the only strategy to engage in tikkun olam . Community service has received tremendous attention as a result of several Clinton Administration inititatives and the launching of Colin Powell¹s America¹s Promise. Increasing numbers of high schools are requiring community service for graduation. Jewish organizations should take advantage of this environment and create contexts in which Jewish teens can engage in community service under Jewish auspices even as they reach out to help those beyond the borders of the Jewish community.
So much in our schools and society send teens the message that they are ³just kids². This is understood by them as ³we don¹t matter². No wonder they log hundreds of hours in front of the t.v. and the computer. Tell them instead that they can make a difference in society or in the life of someone less fortunate than themselves and you won¹t be able to contain their energies!
3. INSPIRE
Teens respond to passion and to role models. The adults in their lives need to speak from the heart and tell them why it is important to help alleviate some of the pain in the world. They also have to serve as role models.
A couple of years ago I took my three children, then ages 12, 10 and 8, to South Carolina to help rebuild a black church that had been burned in a string of arson fires. Living together for that week, sleeping on the floor of the half constructed church, meant more than all the parental lectures that I had logged with them in their lives.
Because adults will often do things for their kids that they would not otherwise do on their own, perhaps the expansion of such parent-teen social action projects could lead to a renaissance in the Jewish community¹s commitment to social justice. It would be a welcome development and one that would pay handsome dividends.
4. MOTIVATE
Teens need to know that they are needed. In the summer before my senior year of high school I went with USY to Eastern Europe and Russia. I remember meeting a young Soviet Jewish woman in her 20¹s who desperately wanted to emigrate to Israel. We spent the better part of the evening talking and, as we took our leave, she looked me in the eyes and said, ³don¹t forget us; we need your help². My life was never the same after that moment. I became a Soviet Jewry activist and that led me to innumerable other causes, a path that eventually came to define both my Judaism and my sense of what I must do with my life.
I have seen hundreds of teens similarly transformed as they look into the eyes of a homeless person and they learn the true meaning of tzelem elohim , that every human being is created in God¹s image. Moreover, they start trying to live out the implications of that truth.
We must create such encounters for our teens.
5. CONTEXTUALIZE
All of the above must be linked to Judaism. Teens must be helped to understand how the values of Judaism inform tikkun olam work. Furthermore, they should come to appreciate that the Jewish community has been in the forefront of most of the leading social justice causes of the last half-century.
For too many Jewish adults, doing good works became a substitute for Judaism. It became their religion. The result is that hundreds of thousands of Jews are devoting tremendous amounts of time and resources to many worthy causes and they don¹t have any tie at all to the Jewish community. This represents the most tragic ³brain drain² in Jewish history. We have lost many of our best and brightest.
We can¹t afford to make the same mistake with the current generation of teens. They must come to appreciate that Judaism is the religion of which they are part; tikkun olam work is one of the noblest expressions of that Judaism.
If we transmit that lesson well, we may just find that the next generation of American Jews will have a lot to teach us.
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Educating the Children of Prophets
Appeared in Jewish Education News, 2000
I was raised in a traditional Jewish home, went to a yeshiva for my elementary education years, spent every shabbat in shul and was active in USY. If a national organization were to set out to establish a national commission to look into the challenge facing the field of Jewish education today, my personal profile should be the last one they should invite to join in a focus group that helped to give the commission a sense of direction.
The teenagers that I would bring together in such a commission would come from homes that never saw shabbat candles lit, where one parent wasn't born as a Jew, where Bar/Bat Mitzvah represented a terminal degree (no additional Jewish education necessary). I would seek out the Jewish teens who played on sports teams and hung out in malls, who listend to rap and hip hop and shock jocks. And if we could find a way to make these Jewish kids interested in learning something about Judaism and the Jewish community, teaching the more committed constituency of Jewish kids would be a piece of cake.
I have spent most of my adult life turning these kinds of kids on to Judaism and to being Jewish. I don't underestimate the challenge of reaching the typical American Jewish teen. Nor do I offer an approach that comes with a lifetime, money back guarantee for success. But I do know several things about what won't work and what might work. Essentially it is a matter of changing our pedagogy from one that has long been "inside out" to one that becomes, "outside in".Jewish education that is "inside out" begins with an assumption that the young people sitting in front of the teacher have a predisposition to being committed Jews. If that were true, then an education that transmitted the language, history, culture, customs, values and precepts of the Jewish tradition would both be expected and have a fairly high chance of being well-received. The students (as well as the families that they came from) would want to acquire the basic knowledge and competencies necessary to be knowledgeable and committed Jews. Indeed, to the extent that most Jewish families want their children to pass through a Bar/Bat Mitzvah rite of passage, there is some nominal commitment to fulfilling that which a synagogue sets as a minimum standard to qualify for that privilege. It also explains why upwards of 80% of Jewish children receive some form of Jewish education. They are in it for the holy grail of Bar/Mitzvah.
Look at the same pool of students in the years following Bar/Bat Mitzvah and we see a very different picture. Without the incentive of Bar/Bat Mitzvah, enrollment rates plummet with each passing year of high school. Just as these students begin to achieve some intellectual maturity and begin to seriously grapple with questions of identity and individuation (who am I, apart from the indentity imprint given to me by my parents?), they receive little to no exposure to Jewish education. It is left to Jewish youth movements, summer camps, Israel trips and special retreats and seminars to make some impact on these adolescents in the hope that they positively identify as Jews when they become adults.
It is precisely at this stage of their lives that education needs to be "outside in". Begin with the interests and concerns of the students, assuming no prior commitment to Jewish identity. The Jewish educational work that we have pioneered under the auspices of The Washington Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values takes just such an approach. Because teenagers are eager to inhabit a larger and more universal world than the one that is typified by their home, synagogue and schools, our starting point are the issues that affect society and the world at large--poverty, the environment, civil liberties, human rights, religion and state, the use and abuse of power, etc. We call it Jewish civic education.What is the goal of Jewish civic education? First it is the task of telling the Jewish story. This amounts to much more than teaching Jewish history. It is the story of Jewish commitment to the well being of their fellow Jews around the world and of the Jewish commitment to social justice for all of humanity. It is the story of how a community that was powerless to help European Jews during the Holocaust became, in a relatively short period of time, the most politically sophisticated sub-community in America. It is appreciating the galaxy of Jewish organizations that form an international polity, acting on behalf of the welfare and safety of the Jewish people as well as on a commitment to create a better world for all of God's children.
Serious teaching of Jewish civics also requires an examination of how the classical texts of the Jewish tradition have served as the foundation for a values orientation that can help us think about the "Jewish way" to engage in issues of social justice. A people which understands the significance of the teaching that human beings are created b'tzelem elohim, in the image of God, cannot function in the political realm with a sole focus on group self-interest and self-preservation.We teach young Jews not only to take in this story; we charge them to live up to the legacy. Part of our success with the thousands of students who have passed through our various programs (e.g. Panim el Panim: High School in Washington, the Jewish Civics Initiative and the E Pluribus Unum Project) is the fact that we convey the message that we believe in their ability to be agents for positive social change. We tap into a deep well of altruism that is the most precious gift of youth. In a society that so quickly turns idealism into cynicism, Jewish education needs to nurture the best in us. But there is more. I am convinced that even the most disconnected young Jews are predisposed to a message that calls on them to live up to the legacy of our Biblical prophets. Maybe it is ethnic acculturation; maybe it is latent historical consciousness; maybe it is genetic coding. All I know is that any form of Jewish education must capitalize on this inclination.
One key way to do this is to cultivate in young Jews a sense of civic responsibility to the issues and institutions that occupy the American public square. While this case can be made on the basis of American citizenship, there is also a clear mandate for such civic duty from the sacred texts and historical experience of the Jewish people. An even greater challenge, however, is to combine passionate involvement with American society and politics with ongoing reverence for the Jewish tradition and commitment to the Jewish community. The goal is for a young person to walk away with an understanding that to be a Jews is tantamount to being a citizen of the Jewish people.
There are those who will say that this is all well and good but that civic engagement, commitment to the work of tikkun olam and involvement in the social and political issues of society is not the totality of Jewish education. I agree. There is Bible, Talmud and midrash. There is history, philosophy and musar (ethical writings). There is language, music and literature. There is prayer, holidays, customs and ceremonies. For the pool of young people who are open to learning about our tradition from the inside out, the question remains "what is it all for?" There is the danger, identified by many of our sages, of missing the forest for the trees. Nachmanidies spoke of the possibility of being a "navale birshut ha-torah", "a scoundrel within the parameters of Torah". In other words, a person who is punctilious about the observance of the specifics of Jewish law but who fails to be a mensch. The Rav, Joseph Soloveichik, was wary of the same pitfall when he said, "The password of the Jewish people is chesed, compassion, both toward other Jews and to all of humanity". Connecting the values and traditions of the Jewish tradition with good works in the world is the way committed Jews come to some clarity about the very purpose of living a Jewish life.
For the pool of young people who are less inclined to the Jewish tradition we must give them a reason why a three thousand year old heritage matters. Many are the Jews who are inclined to engage in a multitude of good causes in the world. Few connect those acts to Judaism. Missing in their nominal experiences with Jewish education was that which ties their instincts for justice with their Jewish identity. As a result, many of the people doing the most significant work for peace and justice in the world are Jews with little or no connection to Judaism or the Jewish community.
All of which brings us back to Jewish civic education. I would suggest three critical lessons that would help to encourage Jews to live out the legacy of the prophetic tradition and to allow them to identify such action in the world with their Jewish identity.
First is to highlight at every stage of Jewish education the threads of justice that serves as a central theme of Torah. Whether it is the admonition to "love thy neighbor as thyself" (Lev. 19:18), to leave the corners of one's field for the poor (Lev. 19:9), or to "seek peace and pursue it" (Psalms 34:15), Jews need to have their awareness raised about the fact that many of the key principles of social welfare emanate from the book to which our ancestors covenanted at Sinai.
Second is lesson of history. We read in Exodus 23:9, "you shall not oppress the stranger ...because you were strangers in the land of Egypt". The verse has resonance for almost every generation of Jews to live since the enslavement in Egypt for many are the times and places that Jews were the most vulnerable victims of society. It explains why the protection of the stranger (ahavat ger) is the most oft repeated commandment in the Bible (appearing 36 times). It also explains why it is that Jews so often ally themselves with those in society who are the most marginalized, underprivileged and oppressed.
Third and finally is the responsibility of privilege. This relates both to our personal circumstances and that of our community. As individuals, Jews are among the highest earners and most accomplished in American society. Our tradition of tzedakah reminds us of the obligation to share of our bounty with those less fortunate because the measure of our worth is based, not on what we have, but on what we give. The same is true of our community.
In the recent past the Jewish community had a very real taste of political powerlessness as we found ourselves unable to persuade nations to come to the aid of European Jewry during the Holocaust. But since the end of the war, the Jewish community has become among the most politically active and astute sub-groups that America has ever seen. The community's first priority was to insure the security and survival of Jews at home and abroad and we did this with admirable effectiveness. But to our community's credit, we have also worked for greater social and economic equality, sought to improve public education, worked for affordable health care, protected the environment, waged campaigns for human rights and civil liberties and the list goes on. The community has lived out Hillel's maxim: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me; but if I am only for myself, what am I?"
This mandate for Jewish education, which works from the outside in, is not about substituting support for People for the American Way with Jewish learning and observance. It is about seeing to it that our study leads to action, just as Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Tarfon agree that it must in a famous debate in the Talmud (Kiddushin 40b.) Yes our kids may hang out in malls, listen to hip hop and shock jocks and identify more strongly with sports heroes and movie stars than with the sages of the Jewish tradition. But they are also the children of prophets named Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos. Given the right approach, our children will show us new ways to live out the prophetic legacy of Judaism in the 21st century.
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