In Hebrew, the word is קהילה. It means community. In the more than hundred years this congregation has existed, much has changed. We have gone from Orthodox to Conservative to God-knows-what. Our method of Shabbat observance is totally altered. Our standards of kashrut are looser and our attitude toward interfaith marriage has undergone a complete reversal. I view all of these changes as good. And I view them that way because they have preserved Beth Israel’s most important function: as a קהילה - a community.
Last year on this day, we unveiled plans to rebuild this synagogue of ours. My cousin Jay’s model - now on display in our lobby - inspires our members to work toward its realization, and speaks to potential members of our hopes and dreams. What remains is to instill in all of us not merely the beauty of our vision, but its importance as well. That importance rests in our being a community.
Each of us needs a community: a place where we can stand face-to-face, arm-in-arm, and hand-to-hand with others who share our journey. Beth Israel is such a community. And to watch it work - as I am privileged to do - is an inspiration. I see how the groups that make up our community - our children, our parents, our empty-nesters and our elders - each play a different yet vital role in the lives of all the others. Growing through these roles becomes an ongoing source of purpose and fulfillment that graces our days with meaning.
For those of us who did not grow up among the proliferating forms of social media - Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and the rest - the idea of a virtual community is a contradiction in terms. To us, physical presence is what makes a community a community. We know how hard it is to be physically present in someone’s life - especially when that someone is sick or scared or grieving. Yet knowing how important that presence is in precisely in those moments, we face our own fears and show up anyway. In doing so, we comfort others, and strengthen ourselves.
I worry that our younger generation, for whom the virtual world is native ground, are not being pushed to learn how to be present in the lives of others. And this is where I think that the importance of what we do here rises to the beauty of the physical space to which we aspire.
This past Spring, I met with some of our parents to brainstorm ways in which I could broaden the exposure of the school and the shul to the unaffiliated Jewish community in Wallingford and beyond. One of our parents, Lauren Esposito, told me that she and her daughter Galina spend a lot of time in the public library and suggested that I look into doing some kind of programming there. Perhaps something on parenting, and she recommended a book that I might want to look at.
The book is entitled The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings To Raise Self-Reliant Children by Dr. Wendy Mogel. For fifteen year Dr. Mogel was a practicing child psychologist dealing with troubled children and, to a large extent, their equally troubled parents. Then she had two kids of her own and, between parenthood, marriage and career, she found herself frenzied and exhausted. A chance invitation to join a friend for Rosh Hashanah services at a nearby shul turned her life around. Convinced from childhood that she didn’t like synagogues and didn’t like rabbis, she couldn’t believe that the service moved her to tears. She returned on Yom Kippur. And then she started attending Friday night services. And then she and her family started lighting candles on Shabbat. And eating dinner in. And avoiding shell-fish. Some time later she decided to take a year off from work to explore her Judaism in depth. These studies would coalesce into a theory of child rearing drawn from Jewish practice and Jewish ethics.
The book’s title provides a beautiful understanding of the most common of childhood experiences. The skinned knee is a blessing when it teaches our children a degree of personal strength and courage. Dr. Mogel draws a parallel between this common childhood trauma and God’s call to Abraham to leave behind everything he knew to pursue his mission in life. “Unless your child ventures forth into the world,” she writes, “he won’t get a chance to learn how to master it and find his place.”
This is but one of the many lessons Dr. Mogel believes Judaism teaches us about raising children. In the Torah’s command to honor one’s father and mother she sees the need to provide our children with role models and the expectation that they will treat their elders with respect. In Judaism’s teachings on the human struggle between our good and bad inclinations, the יצר טוב and the יצר הרע, she sees the need to teach our children the difference between what we need and what we want - cultivating a sense of gratitude toward the one and blessing toward the other. In Judaism’s laws of kashrut and its many blessings over food she sees the opportunity to raise our children’s consciousness about what they eat and encourage moderation. And in Judaism’s sanctification of time she sees an opportunity for family members to slow down and be present in each other’s lives.
In relying as she does on religious teachings, Dr. Mogel rediscovers, I believe, some essential truths about parenting. Looking back at our own skinned knees - which my brother Jay and I earned together trying to jointly coast a tricycle down Saddle Ridge Road’s steep and curvy hill - I suppose we did learn something about carrying on in adversity. But while I agree with most of the lessons she draws about child rearing, I feel she has missed the larger context into which they are intended to fit. The problem is evident in her subtitle: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children. Ultimately, the purpose of Jewish teachings is not to raise self-reliant children; it is to raise Jews, and Jews have a very different take on self-reliance. As I got deeper into the book, I had the increasing feeling that something was missing. Where was the synagogue? Where was the community?
My answer came four pages from the end of the book. Here is what she writes:
(D)espite the fact that bringing Judaism into my life has yielded astonishing blessings, I have not achieved unambivalent enthusiasm for organized religion. I still carry baggage. It bears the labels “Dislikes being part of a group,” “Squirms when sincerity verges near the corny,” and “Finds getting through the day hard enough hard enough without extra restrictions or obligations.” Sometimes the goodness of the congregants at my synagogue makes me feel venal, cynical and selfish by comparison. Sometimes the idea of ritual and religious obligation annoys or exhausts me.
I am sympathetic to Dr. Mogel’s plight and to the baggage that weighs her down. But if her much desired self-reliance has left her unable to cope with others’ emotions or her own sense of ritual inadequacy, what is its point? The truth is, for Judaism, the idea of “self-reliance” makes no more sense than that of “virtual community.” Judaism emphasizes personal responsibility and moral accountability and it does so precisely because it recognizes that we all need each other. Judaism is not about living alone. The divine covenant - membership in which is what makes us Jews - is not between God and each of us, but between God and all of us. It is between God and the entire nation of Israel. The bulk of Judaism’s laws that remain operative since the destruction of the Temple deal with relationships between and among people. As it happens, these are the lessons our kids need the most today, for reasons having to do mostly with a three-by-five rectangle of glass and metal we implant in their hands right around the time they hit adolescence.
Dr. Jean Twenge has dedicated her twenty-five year career in psychology to studying the changes among the generations. Using data that have been collected on teenagers since the 1930’s, she has been able to monitor differences in such things as self-perception and social interaction. Generally, these differences have expressed themselves as gradual changes from year-to-year. Then, beginning in 2012, they became large and abrupt. Not coincidentally, 2012 was the year that smartphone ownership crossed 50% of the US population.
Some of these changes are positive. Teen birth rates last year were down 67% from their peak in 1991. Today’s teens are significantly less likely than their parents to get into car accidents, and they have less of a taste for alcohol.
This is the positive side of what has been, essentially, a drastic fall in actual face-to-face interaction between and among teens. Between 2000 and 2015, the number of kids spending time each day with their friends dropped by 40%. 12th graders in 2015 went out less often than 8th graders in 2009. High schoolers wait longer these days to get their driver’s licenses, and fewer of them take part time jobs to earn a few bucks for themselves.
Rather than date, kids “talk” which is actually a euphemism for sending text messages and Snap-chatting each other. 56% of today’s high schoolers go out on dates compared with around 85% two and three generations ago. So if kids aren’t driving and aren’t dating and aren’t seeing their friends, what are they doing? “They are,” writes Dr. Twenge, “on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.”
She reports that the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s Monitoring the Future report - which has surveyed high schoolers since 1975 - finds that all screen related activities make kids more unhappy, while all non-screen related activities make them more happy. Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook can all exacerbate feelings of isolation and being left out. The statistics are devastating. From 2012 to 2015, depressive symptoms in boys increased by 21%. In girls, they increased by 50%. And between 2007 and 2015, twice as many 12 to 14 year old boys and three times as many girls committed suicide.
My daughter Sarah, who brought Dr. Twenge’s work to my attention, explained it to me this way. “The lives of the people I know,” she says, “have become performances. They go on Facebook and their friends are all posting picture of their vacations and the parties they are going to and the food they are eating and my friends ask themselves, ‘Why am I not enjoying life like they are?’ So their own Facebook posts become a performance to convince themselves and others that they are as happy as everyone else seems to be.”
This is obviously a major challenge to parents and to our society as a whole. I am not here to tell you that church or synagogue membership is a cure to the isolation and depression that is at the heart of this problem. But I am here to tell you that this synagogue’s very existence is built on the idea of community involvement and caring; that to live a fully and meaningfully Jewish life requires that you interact personally and directly with others.
This synagogue, in the year just past, offered each of us the chance to put up our sukkah with Larry Hyatt and to put out our candles and challah with Tammy Kahn; to allow a new family observe Pesach, and to allow an old friend say Kaddish; to help Bob Gross bury old siddurim and machzorim and to help Shirley Glasner send out happy birthday or anniversary wishes; to give Jack Huber one last hug and to give Nancy Huber or Mimi Bloch one more hug; to have a slice of lox with the Torah study crowd and to have a slice of birthday cake with Saul Freilich; to explore the meaning of love on Shavuot and to explore the meaning of loss on Tisha B’Av; to plan a celebration with Phyllis Gordon and Sue Burt; to celebrate with Ethan Thomaswick and Josh Rodriguez. Each one of these actions is a mitzvah in the truest sense of that oft misunderstood word. As such, they are not incidental to this synagogue’s existence. They are the very reason for it. To bring your children up as participants in such a community is to necessarily raise their gaze beyond the glow of their smartphone screen.
Some of the things a community asks of its members bring great joy. Others are painful and scary. Each exposes us to a new person or a new experience or a new idea - and so each forces us to grow. And each implants within us a sense of meaning in our lives. That is what Beth Israel is all about. Achieving that is what makes us worthy of the noble designs standing before us.
For all the changes that have taken place in this synagogue over its long history, we have remained a קהילה קדושה - a holy community. We are present for each other and interdependent on one another. As this community has been there for each of us as we have progressed through this lifelong journey of ours, so, with God’s help and our own dedication, may it be there in the lives of our children - to instruct them in their youth, to gain strength from them in their vigor, and to honor them and draw wisdom from them in old age. This is the noble task of our community. Our ancestors’ work, and God’s blessing, have given it to us as an inheritance. For our children’s sake, may this community grow and thrive and be stronger for having been in our care.
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