The Havdalah Project
Written by Edward Guttman

What we are doing
The SAJ Hebrew School is creating opportunities for kids and their families to share joyful and engaging Jewish experiences. Our goal is to extend these experiences beyond SAJ into your homes and back again, creating greater connections among our families and the congregation.

The Havdalah Project is our pilot program — our chance to try some new ideas and learn what works. We decided to start with Kitah Gimmel. Future events, activities and experiences will be extended to other classes.  Read more»

Our Purim celebration - amazing, fun-filled, and extremely well-attended romp that it was - got me thinking about community. There is a great deal of talk these days about the importance and value of community. Judaism has always been attuned to this need, but there is also a societal moment of recognition of this need as traditional structures, neighborhoods, families, workplace, have been crumbling, for decades now. There is the recognition of an acute need to find and build our own communities and so organizations talk about their abilities to do just that.  Read more»

This week there are two portions read on Shabbat Behar and Bechukotai. The second portion is the classic source for the details of the pact between Adonai and the Jewish people. In short, the Torah tells us that if we keep God’s commandments the land will be fruitful providing us with its bounty and we shall be safe and happy. On the other hand, if we do not obey God’s commandments, we will be rejected by the land and punished by God.  Read more»

Two events this past weekend prompted me to think a great deal about the notion of “crafting experiences”. On Friday Cantor Lisa Arbisser led a Jazz service. The unique combination of music and prayer drew people in and transported them to a spiritual place. The experience of the service was powerful and immediate, organic and flowing. It was not an experience that felt planned or highly structured, yet that is the irony of immersive and moving experiences. Most of them feel unplanned and improvised, but the truth is they are highly planned and structured.  Read more»

I first became aware of the blending of Jewish synagogue music with American jazz music when I purchased an album a few years ago called Hazanos. It was a musical compilation created to accompany a documentary on the famous American cantor Jacob Ben-Zion Mendelson, entitled A Cantor's Tale. I expected to hear some traditional cantorial melodies sung by Cantor Mendelson and perhaps some music composed for the movie.  Read more»

I have written previously here, and here, about earlier professional development sessions with the Hebrew School teachers. Our third session took place yesterday and we focused on the foundational elements of experiential Jewish education: recreation and socialization. To briefly recap, our ultimate goal in experiential Jewish education is “challenge,” to create educational experiences that push participants to gain new perspectives, expand their comfort zones, and ask new questions, to name a few of the desired outcomes. In order to create the possibility for the comfort and the atmosphere necessary to be open to challenge, the educational setting must first include elements of recreation and socialization. Recreation is a sense of feeling at ease and having fun. Ideally there should also be an element of choice; of participants choosing of their own volition to participate (already one can grasp one of the fundamental challenges of Hebrew School education particularly with an experiential approach. How many participants, i.e. children, actively choose Hebrew School as an option?). Recreation creates the feeling of a “safe space” for the participants and creates a sense of social connection between them as well. Socialization provides participants with those elements of Judaism and Jewish culture – knowledge, skills, and attitudes -which help them identify as Jews. It also gives participants a common “language,” (sometimes the literal language of Hebrew) which also happens to be a Jewish one.  Read more»

A few events from this past week have led me to think a great deal about community. To start, there was a new parent check-in on Tuesday where parents came to hear about programs and events for the rest of the year. More importantly, they were her because of their commitment to carve out time in their family's busy schedules for events going on at SAJ. On Friday night we had a spirited family service followed by lots of kids playing and a good community conversation amongst the adults. This was all capped off yesterday with our bake sale for Haiti and Tu Bishevat celebration.  Read more»

Back in November I wrote about the teachers’ professional development for this year. At the time I promised that I would update you as the sessions took place and yesterday we held our second session. Our focus for the year is experiential education. We are exploring a conceptual framework which helps us to better understand what elements are needed to make a successful experiential lesson.  Read more»

A seemingly minor point in the practice of Chanukah got me thinking about the place of Reconstructionism in the Jewish tradition. I was reflecting on the fact that the blessing over the Chanukah candles includes the formulation "asher kidshanu be-mitzvotav vetzivanu le-hadlik ner shel Chaukah" - who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to light the candles of Chanukah. This phrase "commanded us" is not something to be taken lightly. In the framework of Jewish law, we only use the formulation "commanded us" for rituals whose roots are in the Torah.  Read more»

Last Wednesday through Friday, I attended the RENA (Reconstructionist Educators of North America) biennial conference held, this year, in at the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Chicago. The conference was a great opportunity to share ideas with colleagues who are coming from a similar perspective on Judaism and on educational philosophy. In fact, my greatest take-aways from the conference were the ideas that emerged from engaging with such thoughtful colleagues.  Read more»