Showing posts with label OSRUI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OSRUI. Show all posts

Monday, August 26, 2019

Flag Raising as a Jewish Act

“At Camp Interlaken (the Milwaukee JCC camp) we had flag raising and lowering every morning and every evening. The whole camp would assemble on the flag rectangle, with the youngest kids closest to the flag. Each unit would do some schtick for the whole camp, twice a day.”

It isn’t relevant why my wife and I were talking about this on the shuttle bus from the parking lot to the terminal at Newark Airport. She reminded me of a time when I was a counselor at Olin Sang Ruby Union Institute (OSRUI) long ago.

The Limud (educational) theme was Kedushah/holiness and my staff team was planning a session on rituals and their meaning. I forget which one of us keyed on morning flag raising (which we also had, but only in the morning), but I do recall that I and I think Deb Schreibman stopped the morning schtick, claiming that the whole thing was an empty meaningless ritual. We Pretty much accused our fellow counselors and the campers of using the flag that represented freedom and sacrifice for a useless and banal (we certainly did not use that word) activity. Then we lowered the flag, folded it properly into a triangle while everyone looked on, mouths open like trout, and said “let’s go to breakfast” as we stomped to the chadar ochel (dining hall).

The campers went bananas. Breakfast was followed by Nikayon (clean up in the bunks) and then I think Limud. Before it began, counselors came up to us and reported that their campers were irate and very upset with Deb and I for essentially profaning the morning ritual. We unpacked it with the campers and they learned that it was just a way to introduce the topic. We realized going in that talking about the relative importance of a ritual is not very interesting unless the learner has some skin in the game.

In our camps, the ritual of flag raising became essential to our camper’s day. It was Modeh Ani and the evening Shema. It was a profound moment of realizing and declaring that we are part of a community. And because the context of these camps were (and remain) completely Jewish, flag raising is a Jewish act.

In our congregation we are moving rapidly to change the way education happens for our students. We are examining pedagogy and focusing much more on the experiences they have while they are with us (and paying attention to the ones they have when they are not with us). We are adjusting the curriculum content to meet the needs of the families in our program now (a regular act, every 12-15 years or so). And we are changing our branding and the story we tell about who we are, what we do and how we do it. We hope this will renew interest by those who have chosen “none of the above” for their children.

Thinking about flag raising, I see it is clear that we also have to create, adapt or adopt new rituals in our program. We are testing the name Kehillah (Community) instead of “Religious School.” The tag line is “Find. Connect. Belong.” I think that will lead us to some interesting (and I hope humorous) rituals. I am open to ideas, so please share your ideas in the comments or send me an email (iwise@cbibpt.org).


Thursday, July 26, 2012

Help a group of campers learn!

I have said before that one of the principal reasons I became a Jewish educator had to do with my experiences at Olin Sang Ruby Union Institute – a Reform Jewish summer camp in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. I was a camper, counselor, unit head and faculty member over twelve summers there. I am at Eisner Camp in Great Barrington, Massachusetts right now for my sixteenth summer as a faculty member. That means I have spent part of more than half my summers at camp.

One of the things the faculty does at Eisner is called Kesher (connection). We each create a series of small group learning experiences for the older units of camp during our time here. This week my Kesher class is called Do the Right Thing: An Eisner Joint. The overall themes were determined by surveying last summer’s campers during the winter and we (the faculty – rabbis, cantors and me) each designed our courses and created descriptions in the spring. Then they got to express their own preferences. Her is the description of my current offering:

You are faced with tons of choices every day. Some you make automatically. Others require some serious thought. Where do you look for the values you will apply to make your decisions? Your parents? Your friends? Society all around us? Judaism? We are going to look in all of those places to wrestle with some tough issues. Then we are going to take our conversation online and go viral. We will create a blog using writing and video and send it out to the universe. Then we will see what the universe says and engage in a potentially viral conversation!

Today we discussed three questions around the concept of Emet – truth. Here are the questions and some of their answers. We discussed them at length after they wrote them. Please respond here or on Facebook to the questions or to their answers. We will look at your ideas in our next session! I am using initials to protect their privacy…

1. Do you think it is ever okay to omit something when sharing something important?

Yes, not telling the whole truth to protect someone’s feelings is acceptable. When someone asks about someone else, it’s okay to highlight the good parts of their personality and stopping there. AM

Yes, to keep me from getting into copious amounts of trouble. HS

Sometimes telling the WHOLE truth can distract from what you are trying to say. TJ

Yes, when saying something would hurt someone without having any positive effect, or to keep a promise. RK

Yes, if it would endanger someone. SI

Yes, if it would help someone. For example, if they were afraid of fire but loved roller coasters, and you knew this great roller coaster had flame throwers, you might not tell them. That way they would try the roller coaster and love it. If they knew about the flame throwers they might not ride. (There was a lot of conversation about this!) MW

It might depend on the age of the person you are talking to. Some things might be too complicated or frightening for young children. HR

You might choose not to tell the whole truth in order to keep a confidence – something you promised to keep secret. GM

Yes, if the whole truth would do more harm than good. TT

Yes, if it is to protect someone’s privacy. RA

It’s okay if it doesn’t alter the entire story. JE

2. Do you think it is ever okay to sugar coat the truth?

Yes. When hate something your parent made for dinner, you might gently urge them not make it again or so often… MW

It depends on the situation and who benefits. LG

No. I is better to be honest so the person you are talking to doesn’t embarrass themselves. SI

Yes, like #1, this can spare someone’s feelings or keep a situation from going bad. JD

Ok in a teaching situation. RK

It’s OK in order to make someone feel better or more confident. My friend was nervous about coming to camp and I told her that lots of our friends were excited to see her. I exaggerated a little bit to make her feel better. AP

No, because it is only hurting yourself more and it does not do anything to help you – even though I do sugar coat it sometimes! MP

Yes, ignorance is bliss! DE

Yes. Sometimes a little sugar coating can make a hard truth easier to take. JJ

3. Do you think is ever okay to actually lie?
Yes, although it is best to avoid it if at all possible. JJ

Yes, but only if the truth is really painful and doesn’t need to be told. MP

Yes, to save a life, protect from unnecessary harm or if it is a harmless joke. NS

It is okay to lie when the answer won’t hurt anyone and it’ll make somebody feel better. To me, it’s all about making people happy and balancing that with telling the truth. RK

To shield them from harm. HS

Intentions matter. LG

Yes, if it will help people in the long run. MW
Again, please help our conversation and our learning by jumping in! More tomorrow!




Tuesday, November 30, 2010

30 Days, 30 Texts:
Shema is For Real:
A Book on Prayer and Other Tangents


"In case of fire, throw this book in…"

So begins a religious school text book that was as revolutionary as the internet and social media are today. Joel Grishaver developed this book as graduate student at the University of Chicago, as a counselor at Olin Sang Ruby Union Institute in Oconomowoc, WI and as a the youth group advisor at North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Il. 

I was a camper in Wisconsin and a junior youth grouper and religious school student at a neighboring congregation.
Shema is For Real: A Book on Prayer and Other Tangents was transformative. It said that we could have experiential learning and out of the box thinking at Sunday school. It said that Jewish learning could be fun and engaging, even if you got the next best teacher. It told us there were more interesting people than the Stickmans.

This is the book that launched (several years later) Torah Aura Productions and challenged all Jewish book publishers to raise their game. And it challenged teachers and synagogue educators to make us think about prayer, not just learn the words. It taught us that the prayers could mean something to us, and that the way they were organized in the service had a larger meaning. 

And when we got to play the Prayer Book Board Game (at camp, at temple, and at NSCI with Joel)—wow! Our opinions and ideas were connected to the prayers and became one. I still think about James Brown shouting “Let me hear you say Yeh!” when I rise for the Barchu. Thank you, Joel, for thinking this way. And thank you Jerry Kaye, director of Olin Sang Ruby for publishing it and Debbie Friedman’s Sing Unto God.


Cross posted at JESNA's site


This essay series is co-sponsored by:
resized_jbcjesnalogoforward

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