What would you tell Max to do?
CAJE organizers ruffled a few feathers when they announced that their annual conference would start on Tisha B'Av, the day of infamy on which both Holy Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed, the Jews were expelled from Spain, and the Nazis' deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka death camp began.
It is a day, traditionally, that is for fasting and mourning, not for conferences.
But CAJE officials told the Fundermentalist last month that the conference's first day would be heavy with Tisha B'Av-related programming.
They enlisted Storahtelling, the progressive theatrical troupe started by Amichai Lau Lavie that gives modern interpretations of biblical themes, to produce that programming.
Toward dusk, just before the end of the fast – which was optional for CAJE participants – Storahtelling divided the 1,500 participants into seven groups. Each group was given one discussion scenario based on a personal tale from one of seven calamities that happened on Tisha B'Av, from the time of the Jews' wandering in the desert until, most recently, the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I sat in with the group led by Lau Lavie.
He told the story of Max, an older Jewish man from Poland that Lau Lavie says he actually met. Max told him that he had given up his Judaism several years before the war started. He was tired of the religion and angry at it and felt that he was more likely to become a victim if he was a Jew.
But in 1942, on Tisha B'Av, he was walking near a shul in Warsaw. He heard a song being sung at the synagogue that he remembered from his youth. He stopped outside the shul and debated whether he should enter or keep his distance from his Jewish heritage.
What would you tell Max to do and why, Lau Lavie asked.
I'll tell you what Max actually did later. But what would you suggest?
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No Ross, but parables aplenty at CAJE’s opening plenary
Joel Hoffman filled in for Dennis Ross as the CAJE conference's keynote speaker.
Dennis Ross was supposed to be the keynote speaker for CAJE's opening plenary Sunday night. But he called in sick at the last minute, informing conference organizers Saturday night that he would not attend.
Nevertheless, CAJE-ians made out pretty well with Ross' stand-in, Joel Hoffman.
Hoffman, an expert Hebrew translator and a professor in New York at Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, was probably the more appropriate choice anyway. Ross essentially was going to give a sales pitch for his new book and to talk about his recent trip to Israel. Nice, but I don't really think that jibes with a conference on how to teach Jewish kids.
Hoffman framed his talk – which he gave as a violent thunderstorm ripped through Burlington – with a parable.
Two people fell asleep while on a journey and both had the same dream. God came to them and told them to gather up as much sand as they could and carry it back to their town. They would be home in three days. When they got home, God told them, they would be both happy and sad.
Hoffman then condensed all of Jewish history into a half-hour snapshot and talked about how that history has been defined throughout the ages by debate between the Diaspora and Jews living in Israel. That debate almost always has been won by the Diaspora, he said.
For instance, Hoffman pointed out, there are two Talmuds – one written in Jerusalem and one written in exile in Babylonia. The one written in Babylonia is the one universally accepted and studied as the definitive Talmud.
It is important, he said, that the Jewish educators at CAJE view themselves as people who truly can and need to pass on Judaism to the next generation.
Hoffman ended his history of the Jews with the second half of his parable:
The two travelers gathered up as much sand as they could carry and continued on their journey home. When they arrived three days later, the found that the sand had turned to gold, which made them happy. But they were both saddened because they wished they had carried more.
Hoffman suggested that the CAJE-ians take home as much gold as they can.
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CAJE conf. launches, bans Agri meat and gets the Fundermentalist to meditate
Burlington in summer. Not such a bad setting for the CAJE conference.
I'll be blogging all week from the annual conference of the Coalition for Advancement of Jewish Education, which this year has drawn some 1,500 Jewish educators from around the world to the University of Vermont at Burlington to talk about best practices and trends in Jewish education.
While CAJE is primarily geared toward professional development for supplementary school and early childhood education professionals, the conference also draws a sizable contingent from the Jewish day school world, primarily because it is the largest conference of its kind.
I've been here since late morning on Sunday, and I will have more in a bit about CAJE's opening plenary and Tisha B'Av programming a little later, but I'm getting a late start because of some technical difficulties. I flew up here yesterday because Dennis Ross was supposed to be the conference's keynote speaker, but he canceled at the last minute due to illness.
The conference features a heavy dose of environmentalism and Jewish ecology – an effort to figure out how to capture kids' Jewish imagination by tapping into a common secular interest. Or perhaps vice versa. It's a fitting setting as UVM is surrounded by a gorgeous landscape of lush green mountains on one side and Lake Chaplain on the other, and almost every restaurant you enter uses eco-friendly corn-made-plasticware, as does the school itself.
Conference organizers even made sure that no meat for the five-day affair came from Agriprocessors, the kosher meat plant in Postville that is under intense scrutiny for alleged immigration and worker-abuse violations. Using meat from a plant that may not be up to ethical par "was just not in the spirit of CAJE," the organization's executive director, Jeffrey Lasday told me Sunday afternoon. He said he made the decision not to use Agri shortly after the plant was raided in a large-scale immigration bust in May.
CAJE has enlisted some 20 experts in Jewish ecology and environmentalism to teach 60 classes in the subject between now and the conference end the afternoon of Aug. 14. Each night will feature an eco-friendly dinner discussion.
I'm actually sitting on the floor in a lecture hall listening to Nigel Savage of the eco-friendly Jewish organization Hazon explain why it is we are all here under the Judeo-green mantle (Full disclosure: I had signed on to listen to Jack Wertheimer present his latest findings about supplementary school education, but he pulled a Dennis Ross and canceled on CAJE. So I schlepped all the way across campus to get to the environmental program.)
"We want to shift the axis of what it means to be Jewish in the 21st century so that it necessarily means to be involved in the larger issues that concern us. It necessarily means that we are working to create a healthier and more sustainable Jewish community," Nigel said. "We are part of an ecosystem and we need to be interacting with one another."
While early Judaism was gregarious in nature and was based on agriculture and shepherding, and its 40 formative years were spent communing with God in the desert after escaping Egypt, mainstream Judaism largely has lost its connection to the earth, according to Nigel.
"The Jewish people did not arise in a synagogue or a JCC or a day school," Nigel said, "We arose with a deep connection to the outdoors."
Despite the schlep to hear Nigel, I am in a pretty good mood. I started the day at 7 A.M. with some Jewish meditation, in lieu of shacharit – or, rather, in lieu of sleeping an extra hour.
The only thing I am concerned about is that I got a little stuck during my morning meditation session with about 30 CAJE-ians.
I relaxed my temples, my jaw, my stomach, readjusting my sit bones and concentrating on my breath, as suggested by our supremely mellow instructor, Karen Frank, a congregational nurse and meditation practitioner from New Jersey.
Then I imagined my spine as a stack of Legos and aligned my vertebrae as she asked. But when she suggested calmly that I picture my head as a ball sitting on top of that stack and I should try to balance that ball, I couldn't get my head on straight.
See my yogi below.
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Sex at CAJE: God didn’t ban homosexuality, the rabbis did
Richard Fruend talks about the Jewish ethics of sex. Sort of.
I am sitting in a class ostensibly about teaching Jewish sexual ethics to high school, college and seminary students, given by Richard Freund, a professor of Jewish ethics at Hartford University. It's halfway through the session, and still no talk of sex.
But Freund is suggesting an interesting pedagogical tactic. He doesn't assign his students – who are of all faiths – tests or term papers. Instead he asks each student to write a two-page position paper on each of the topics he covers. The papers are neither right nor wrong. They are just about discussion and thought. And Freund keeps every one of the papers because he is writing a book about thoughts on Jewish ethics.
One position paper, he said, had reverberations well beyond grade point average. A couple of years ago, a parent of a former student called him. The student, who was a 19-year-old junior in 2003, was put on a respirator, and his parents were trying to figure out what to do. The last session of Freund's class talks about the ethics of death. The student had written two position papers on end-of-life matters, which Freund read to the parents over the phone. He gets choked up as he tells the story, which ends with the boy's father saying, "Thank you. We know what to do."
The story is foreplay for the sexual discussion. I think.
Freund says that parents simply don't talk to their kids about a whole array of complicated topics – including sex. And Jewish ethics class is a place where young people can express their thoughts.
** update**
Class started at 10:15 and is over at 11:30. It is 11:05 and still no sex.
** update**
11:15 and no sex. I'm starting to think this was a tease (just like the headline on that post).
** update**
11:20. Still no sex, but I think we're getting there.
** update** 11:25: SEX!
"I have no doubt the Bible is viewed as our source on all of our tsures on sexual ethics," says Freund. "But I have no doubt that it is not true."
Most people cite Leviticus, where the Bible says that male-with-male sex is an abomination, as the source for the forbidding of homosexual activity.
But, Freund says, the Bible has hundreds of abominations. Most of them regarding food.
The trick is to look at the context in which the Bible was written -– during a time when male priests in other religions would copulate with each other publicly to ensure a year of fertility. The Bible, he says, is forbidding ritual homosexuality between men, not social homosexuality.
The rabbis later forbade social homosexuality, he said, because during Greek and Roman times, homosexuality was a normative practice for younger adults.
So, you can think whatever you want about homosexuality, says Freund, "Just don't blame the Bible. Blame the rabbis!"
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