To Live and Engage Jewish Tradition
September 16, 2008
The Samuel and Bernice Shapiro Religious School of Temple Emanu-El is dedicated to:
Preparing our students to live and engage Jewish tradition in an inclusive community of life-long learning.
What does a mission statement do? If it’s a good mission statement, it describes an institution’s reason for existing. It also serves as a compass, a touchstone against which decisions about everything from budget to programming to staffing to public relations might be measured. In each case a mission-driven organization should ask itself: does this project, this priority, fit our stated mission?
Last month I introduced the Religious School’s new mission statement, which was created as a labor of love and dedication by our thoughtful and committed Religious School committee. I began the task of unpacking the words and phrases, dense with meaning, that make up this expression of our mission.
We continue now:
to live…Jewish tradition. How does one “live” Jewish tradition? In the words of Devarim, the book of Deuteronomy, by “speak[ing] of [Torah] in your home and on your way, when you lie down and when you rise up” (Dt. 6:7). Torah or, understood broadly, Jewish tradition, offers us wisdom that guides us at home and abroad, in our relations with family and friends as well as with strangers, in how we conduct our affairs both personal and public. It helps us to chart our future path and to understand where we came from. It teaches us what to say and do and ultimately how to focus our thoughts upon awakening in the morning and before falling asleep at night.
In other words, Jewish tradition is not a twice-a-year experience. It is not a once-a-week project reserved for religious school students. It is a culture and a practice and a way of life that can guide our every moment, from birth until death, bestowing the potential for deep meaning and even holiness upon all of our actions, all of our choices.
to engage Jewish tradition. Why engage? Engagement implies an active, interested relationship, one that encourages openness and inquiry and challenge and personal investment. The Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism adopted at the 1999 Pittsburgh Convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis “invites all Reform Jews to engage in a dialogue with the sources of our tradition, responding out of our knowledge, our experience and our faith. Thus we hope to transform our lives through (kedushah), holiness.” Torah is not a one-way street. God expects—no, demands—that we talk back. The relationship that we want our students to have with their Judaism is very much like the one we might hope to cultivate with any life partner: one that is strong enough to handle all of their enthusiasms and their doubts, their certainties and their questions, the things that change and the things that stay the same.
Such is a precious kind of a relationship. As we embark upon a New Year, 5769, I hope that we all may find such openness and support—in the embrace of our friends, our loved ones, and our Jewish tradition.
