When I told Moji Pourmoradi that I would be happy to come along with 44 teenagers on a 10 day trip to Israel, what I meant to say was, I’ll give it a shot and see what happens. What happened is that it exceeded my expectations. More exciting, more crazy, more wonderful than I expected.
With the expert leadership of Avi Siegel, Moji, Tziona Kamel and our Israeli staff, we had quite a trip. We climbed a few mountains in the Negev, slept in a kibbutz down south that I will describe as rustic, stayed at a less rustic kibbutz north of Tel Aviv, created our own graffiti in Tel Aviv, spent several uplifting days in Jerusalem. We had fun, made noise, ate all kinds of food, made some new friends and had many more experiences that would take days to talk about. I’ll get back to the trip in a few minutes.
The ancient rabbis encouraged us to tell story of Passover as fully and deeply as we can. וכל המרבה לספר ביציאת מצרים הרי זה משובח The more one tells of the Exodus from Egypt, the better. Moreover, between the recognition of diversity implicit in the drama of the four children and the acknowledgement of the morally problematic aspects of the Ten Plagues, the rabbis provided a template for confronting the complexity inherent in our story and our tradition.
Given our tradition's propensity for acknowledging complexity here and elsewhere, why is it that in many respects we overprotect the next generation, treating them like they are fragile, like they might break or short-circuit if we make things too hard or expose them to too much controversy or risk?
I’m reading a book called The Coddling of the American Mind, co-authored by Jonathan Haidt and Fred Lukianoff.
The authors argue that, albeit it with good intentions, we are overprotecting a whole generation in ways that are ultimately weakening them.
The most problematic overprotection we do of the next generation is protecting them from controversy, as students on college campuses occasionally ask for safe spaces to shield them from difficult conversations and professors occasionally offer trigger warnings so students can leave before a discussion gets too painful or controversial.
In the Jewish community we are so afraid that a new generation will be turned off from Israel, or turned off from Judaism, that we sometimes present Israel as a righteous kind of Disney World and we reduce Judaism to bitesize pieces so it’s not overwhelming and we simplify every story into "us versus them" so the next generation can know who the good guys are.
This is bad strategy. Research has shown that the more we dilute and protect, the more we raise a generation that cannot take part substantially in Jewish practice or discussion, that doesn’t know why or how to be Jewish in a powerful way, that sings am yisra’el hai until they meet their first Palestinian or Israeli Arab and then wonders, why wasn’t I told that it’s not so simple?
Now back to our trip.
10 days is a very short amount of time, but we wanted our students to get as full a taste of Israel as possible, and that includes some of the beauty and the accomplishments, but also some of the conflicts and the challenges. We decided that if we were going to go through all of the effort of bringing a large group of teens to Israel, we weren’t just going to show them a Disney World version of Israel. We decided that because we want our students to feel that Israel is home, and home is real.
After our first few days in Eilat and the Negev, we drove north, past Tel Aviv, to Givat Haviva, a college where students of different faiths and backgrounds learn together and engage in intense, and at times controversial, conversation. We met with a handful of Israeli Arab students who talked to us about some of the challenges they face living in Israel.
We broke into groups and one of the Arab students asked us if we had any questions. One of our teens asked her about her political views, what did she think of Israel’s current leadership. She said that though she wasn’t a fan overall, there were certain things she understood and admired, and then she spoke about the protests at the border in Gaza a year ago and how she felt the Israeli army overreacted.
Sitting in our group was the medic who accompanied us throughout our trip. His name is Tomer, he is pretty reserved, a really nice guy who helped our teens in all kinds of ways. He said to the Arab student, it’s not true what you said, and she defended herself, and he responded and their conversation went on for a few minutes and Tomer said quite a bit in that conversation.
2 things worth noting about their conversation - one, that while they disagreed strongly, they didn’t disrespect each other or question each other's decency or loyalty and two, that our teens watched the whole thing. They watched two people a few years older than they, different backgrounds, different perspectives, have a passionate disagreement without disrespecting each other.
After the conversation we spoke further to our teens about the situation at the Gaza border, giving them a deeper understanding of what went on last spring. We didn’t protect them, we informed them.
Every day we prayed together, boys and girls sitting together, boys and girls leading, according to our Temple Israel practice. On Shabbat morning we gave our teens the option of praying in a variety of different synagogues. Some very similar to Temple Israel, some very different - different melodies, different customs, some were not gender egalitarian. We didn’t judge the services, we just described the different options clearly in advance, gave them the choice, gave them the experience and afterward asked them for their reactions.
They are not fragile. The same way that we took them on hikes that were challenging at times, the same way that they naturally were exposed to social situations with their peers that were challenging at times, we exposed them to political issues and religious experiences that were challenging at times.
On Monday night I went to the Tilles Center to see a program in which two of our teens, Joey Harounian and Jared Ohebshalom, participated. The program enabled a large group of teens from all over Nassau County to meet with over a dozen Holocaust survivors over a period of several months to learn their stories and to convey their stories through art and drama. Along with other TIGN leaders, including Rabbi Schweber, Avi Siegel, Lori Oppenheimer (chair of our Shoah Committee) and the families of our participants, I saw moving artwork and watched a powerful dramatic presentation of the stories of these survivors.
The stories were powerful, deeply disturbing at times. The teens heard, and conveyed, painful details that included violence and the resulting physical and emotional trauma.
It doesn't seem like the survivors held back. Somehow they trusted the teens to hear the real stories. And, not surprisingly, the teens repaid the sacred, precious trust of these survivors by bearing witness to their stories and sharing them respectfully and tenderly.
Of course we have to be aware of the age and the capacity of each child, but we do a disservice when we overprotect.
The Torah contains beauty and ugliness, wisdom that withstands the test of time and ideas whose time has passed.
Israel is an impressive country that brings light to the world and a flawed country that messes up and still needs to find its way.
The Jewish people have experienced agony and ecstasy and everything in between.
Above all, we want the next generation to experience our tradition, not as a fragile heirloom to be passed down gingerly, but a complex roadmap for teaching us how best to live and how best to improve the lives of others.
When they are in college, if they should see and hear things that are disturbing - including eviction notices that were placed on the doors of Jewish students at Emory recently as instances of harassment and intimidation - they will hopefully have the resources to understand the issues involved, to fight for their rights as necessary, and to be proud, well-informed Jews and human beings.
Coddling, overprotecting, oversimplifying, while they are in Great Neck is not the way to achieve these goals.
On the front page of the book I referred to, the authors quote a long-standing proverb with which I'd like to conclude:
Do not prepare the road for the child. Prepare the child for the road.
That’s very Jewish. At every age, at every stage, leaving Egypt, entering Israel, wherever we find ourselves, we must prepare one another for the road. The road from Egypt to the promised land has many twists and turns. It contains glory and tragedy, junctures we are ashamed of and milestones that fill us with pride.
At our best we travel together. And we must prepare one another for the road.
Originally shared with the Temple Israel of Great Neck community on the First Day of Passover, 2019
Conversation at Givat Haviva, February 2019
With the expert leadership of Avi Siegel, Moji, Tziona Kamel and our Israeli staff, we had quite a trip. We climbed a few mountains in the Negev, slept in a kibbutz down south that I will describe as rustic, stayed at a less rustic kibbutz north of Tel Aviv, created our own graffiti in Tel Aviv, spent several uplifting days in Jerusalem. We had fun, made noise, ate all kinds of food, made some new friends and had many more experiences that would take days to talk about. I’ll get back to the trip in a few minutes.
The ancient rabbis encouraged us to tell story of Passover as fully and deeply as we can. וכל המרבה לספר ביציאת מצרים הרי זה משובח The more one tells of the Exodus from Egypt, the better. Moreover, between the recognition of diversity implicit in the drama of the four children and the acknowledgement of the morally problematic aspects of the Ten Plagues, the rabbis provided a template for confronting the complexity inherent in our story and our tradition.
Given our tradition's propensity for acknowledging complexity here and elsewhere, why is it that in many respects we overprotect the next generation, treating them like they are fragile, like they might break or short-circuit if we make things too hard or expose them to too much controversy or risk?
I’m reading a book called The Coddling of the American Mind, co-authored by Jonathan Haidt and Fred Lukianoff.
The authors argue that, albeit it with good intentions, we are overprotecting a whole generation in ways that are ultimately weakening them.
The most problematic overprotection we do of the next generation is protecting them from controversy, as students on college campuses occasionally ask for safe spaces to shield them from difficult conversations and professors occasionally offer trigger warnings so students can leave before a discussion gets too painful or controversial.
In the Jewish community we are so afraid that a new generation will be turned off from Israel, or turned off from Judaism, that we sometimes present Israel as a righteous kind of Disney World and we reduce Judaism to bitesize pieces so it’s not overwhelming and we simplify every story into "us versus them" so the next generation can know who the good guys are.
This is bad strategy. Research has shown that the more we dilute and protect, the more we raise a generation that cannot take part substantially in Jewish practice or discussion, that doesn’t know why or how to be Jewish in a powerful way, that sings am yisra’el hai until they meet their first Palestinian or Israeli Arab and then wonders, why wasn’t I told that it’s not so simple?
Now back to our trip.
10 days is a very short amount of time, but we wanted our students to get as full a taste of Israel as possible, and that includes some of the beauty and the accomplishments, but also some of the conflicts and the challenges. We decided that if we were going to go through all of the effort of bringing a large group of teens to Israel, we weren’t just going to show them a Disney World version of Israel. We decided that because we want our students to feel that Israel is home, and home is real.
After our first few days in Eilat and the Negev, we drove north, past Tel Aviv, to Givat Haviva, a college where students of different faiths and backgrounds learn together and engage in intense, and at times controversial, conversation. We met with a handful of Israeli Arab students who talked to us about some of the challenges they face living in Israel.
We broke into groups and one of the Arab students asked us if we had any questions. One of our teens asked her about her political views, what did she think of Israel’s current leadership. She said that though she wasn’t a fan overall, there were certain things she understood and admired, and then she spoke about the protests at the border in Gaza a year ago and how she felt the Israeli army overreacted.
Sitting in our group was the medic who accompanied us throughout our trip. His name is Tomer, he is pretty reserved, a really nice guy who helped our teens in all kinds of ways. He said to the Arab student, it’s not true what you said, and she defended herself, and he responded and their conversation went on for a few minutes and Tomer said quite a bit in that conversation.
2 things worth noting about their conversation - one, that while they disagreed strongly, they didn’t disrespect each other or question each other's decency or loyalty and two, that our teens watched the whole thing. They watched two people a few years older than they, different backgrounds, different perspectives, have a passionate disagreement without disrespecting each other.
After the conversation we spoke further to our teens about the situation at the Gaza border, giving them a deeper understanding of what went on last spring. We didn’t protect them, we informed them.
Every day we prayed together, boys and girls sitting together, boys and girls leading, according to our Temple Israel practice. On Shabbat morning we gave our teens the option of praying in a variety of different synagogues. Some very similar to Temple Israel, some very different - different melodies, different customs, some were not gender egalitarian. We didn’t judge the services, we just described the different options clearly in advance, gave them the choice, gave them the experience and afterward asked them for their reactions.
They are not fragile. The same way that we took them on hikes that were challenging at times, the same way that they naturally were exposed to social situations with their peers that were challenging at times, we exposed them to political issues and religious experiences that were challenging at times.
On Monday night I went to the Tilles Center to see a program in which two of our teens, Joey Harounian and Jared Ohebshalom, participated. The program enabled a large group of teens from all over Nassau County to meet with over a dozen Holocaust survivors over a period of several months to learn their stories and to convey their stories through art and drama. Along with other TIGN leaders, including Rabbi Schweber, Avi Siegel, Lori Oppenheimer (chair of our Shoah Committee) and the families of our participants, I saw moving artwork and watched a powerful dramatic presentation of the stories of these survivors.
The stories were powerful, deeply disturbing at times. The teens heard, and conveyed, painful details that included violence and the resulting physical and emotional trauma.
It doesn't seem like the survivors held back. Somehow they trusted the teens to hear the real stories. And, not surprisingly, the teens repaid the sacred, precious trust of these survivors by bearing witness to their stories and sharing them respectfully and tenderly.
Of course we have to be aware of the age and the capacity of each child, but we do a disservice when we overprotect.
The Torah contains beauty and ugliness, wisdom that withstands the test of time and ideas whose time has passed.
Israel is an impressive country that brings light to the world and a flawed country that messes up and still needs to find its way.
The Jewish people have experienced agony and ecstasy and everything in between.
Above all, we want the next generation to experience our tradition, not as a fragile heirloom to be passed down gingerly, but a complex roadmap for teaching us how best to live and how best to improve the lives of others.
When they are in college, if they should see and hear things that are disturbing - including eviction notices that were placed on the doors of Jewish students at Emory recently as instances of harassment and intimidation - they will hopefully have the resources to understand the issues involved, to fight for their rights as necessary, and to be proud, well-informed Jews and human beings.
Coddling, overprotecting, oversimplifying, while they are in Great Neck is not the way to achieve these goals.
On the front page of the book I referred to, the authors quote a long-standing proverb with which I'd like to conclude:
Do not prepare the road for the child. Prepare the child for the road.
That’s very Jewish. At every age, at every stage, leaving Egypt, entering Israel, wherever we find ourselves, we must prepare one another for the road. The road from Egypt to the promised land has many twists and turns. It contains glory and tragedy, junctures we are ashamed of and milestones that fill us with pride.
At our best we travel together. And we must prepare one another for the road.
Originally shared with the Temple Israel of Great Neck community on the First Day of Passover, 2019
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