by Rabbi Dan Medwin

Last week, I was given a wonderfully challenging task as the CCAR rabbinic staff member at the NFTY Convention:  Take fifty participants from the Youth Engagement Conference and a two-hour prayer lab session, and plan multiple services for about 900 NFTY Convention participants.  While seemingly impossible, I jumped at the opportunity.   After all, we produce Visual T’filah and all the prayer books for the Reform Movement – I could do this!

Working with my colleague Rabbi Noam Katz and Jewish musician Dan Nichols (and joined by rabbis Erin Mason and Ana Bonheim), we were tempted to provide a handful of creative service examples (e.g. drumming, yoga, Visual T’filah) and to plan the services as quickly as possible.

But the conference was on youth engagement, and simply presenting options and saying “pick one and go plan a service” did not seem to be an appropriate fit – and not consistent with CCAR’s current approach toward engaging people in prayer with many different Visual T’filah options.  It was a lab, after all; we did not want to focus too much on product, but rather the service experience by the NFTYites.

We initiated the YEC prayer lab by asking the participants, “What makes for great prayer?”

This conversation was modeled upon a version of Open Space, one of the frameworks for intentional conversations guiding the CCAR convention beginning just a few weeks after NFTY Convention.

YEC participants stood up one at a time and offered to host conversations around a topic of prayer particularly interesting or exciting to them.  Topics included Hebrew in prayer, who is the service leader, using apps & cellphones in services, engaging through multiple intelligences, and more. Rather than utilizing the moment to plan a service, we spent our time talking about great prayer.  The prayer lab participants were fully engaged, far more than if we had simply given them pre-determined service options, and we provided an amazing model for them to bring back to their youth groups.

And it worked! YEC prayer lab participants exclaimed that this was one of the highlights of the conference for them.  One even said, “This is exactly what I needed.”  Even more, the prayer experiences they crafted were some of the best moments of NFTY convention for the participants.  One teenager said in reflection, “This was my first real moment of transcendent prayer.”

As the Youth Engagement professionals gathered at the end of the conference for a debrief and wrap-up, I was asked to summarize our learning and said:  “We often hear that ‘if you build it, they will come.’  If you build a great service or program, the youth with come. But we learned through this prayer experience that ‘if you build it with them, they’ll already be there!”

Rabbi Dan Medwin is the Publishing Technology Manager of the Central Conference of American Rabbis

Originally posted at RavBlog

At home, we sometimes used to struggle to feed balanced meals to our three teenagers. Imagine trying to feed 1,000 as these Jewish teens sat together to for Shabbat dinner. And that was only the beginning.

We are gathered at a hotel in Los Angeles for the NFTY Convention, perhaps the largest Jewish teen gathering around. NFTY, of which our synagogue’s kids are third-generation members, has brought together teens from all over the US and Canada (and also, I heard, teens from Israel and a half dozen other countries) for five days of fun, socializing, Jewish learning, energetic music, teen issues, social justice activism, eating, talking, laughing, singing, dancing, praying…

Oh, the praying!

This is not your grandfather’s davening (worship). Growing up in many a synagogue, most teens experience prayer as a formalized experience. Lots of responsive readings mixed in with serious music. Over time, our Ashkenazi ancestors, and their American Reformer descendants, articulated a formalized experience, with precise words and structure, and instructions of when to stand and sit, and just how to bow. Services at the NFTY convention were anything but that. I imagine some of our Jewish ancestors might be turning over in their graves if they watched these 1,000 NFTYites pray.

Why? Because our teens sang energetically, chanted meaningfully and swayed with joy and abandon. It was meaningful. It was exciting. And just so inspiring. It was more early chassidism then early reformer. The early European chassidim transformed the Jewish prayer experience from the staid to the emotional. They taught their adherents to open themselves up by singing and dancing, to lift themselves beyond the “here and now” to the hopeful and the passionate.

Prayer can be spine-tinglingly, bone-shakingly uplifting. Yes, spread out all over the ballroom floor, our teens sat and sang a beautifully melodic prayer. But as the energy built up, the inspiration ramped up, and before we knew it, kids popped up onto their feet. Singing and swaying, dancing and clapping, they became the modern definition of hitlahavut, joyous enflamed passion.

Perhaps that best describes this indescribable experience. More than prose, this teen tefilah is poetry in its wholesomeness and all encompassing nature. It is chassidic hitlahavut, combined with Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationalism, mixed in with Debbie Friedman-inspired musicality.

I turned to Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the parent body of our congregations, and the older sister to NFTY. Praising the scene we were witnessing, I shared my frustration at my inability to find the words to capture the wonderful spiritual transformation we were witnessing. He nodded knowingly, as he smiled appreciatively, clearly touched by the expansive displays of prayerfulness surrounding us. We clapped on.

Most synagogues would celebrate if a dozen teenagers showed up at Shabbat services on a regular Friday night. How would it feel when 1,000 attended? Awesome. Just awesome. Rabbi Jacobs began his story drash asking, “Is NFTY in the house?” The thunderous response assured us all that they were.

Had the question been a bit different – Is God in the house? – I feel confident, the answer would have been the same.

Thanks, NFTY. Thanks, URJ. Thanks, Rabbi Dan Medwin of the CCAR for the Visual Tefilah. And thanks to the unnamed shlichay tzibur (prayer leaders). For a spiritual, musical, inspirational tefilah. Yes, God was in the house!

Originally published at Or Am I?

by Rabbi Jeffrey Brown

Our temple, in the southern Westchester County suburbs of New York City, first began addressing the implications of the forecasted blizzard (Winter Storm Nemo) during the day on Thursday, February 7th. Our weekend schedule was to have included 8pm Erev Shabbat services on Friday night, a Shabbat morning service and b’naei mitzvah (which was to include our entire board and Communal Worship Committee, in conjunction with a lunch and study discussion we were hoping to have later on Saturday). We also had a program scheduled to take place in a congregant’s home Saturday evening, plus religious school and adult ed programming scheduled for Sunday morning.

Throughout the week, our clergy were in touch with Saturday’s b’nai mitzvah family multiple times via phone and email, mostly to provide moral and pastoral support as they navigated the obvious anxiety that comes along with a major winter storm. In this case, half of their extended family was coming from Canada, so there were the natural concerns about logistics and safety of travel, etc. Although we never seriously considered rescheduling the service, we did make a point of keeping our lines of communication open with them.

By the time Friday morning rolled around, we had effectively decided that it was not reasonable or prudent to go forward withour evening service. We did not want to run any sort of risk that our service would somehow be putting service-attendees in harm’s way in terms of either getting to our building or returning home. (We wound up cancelling the Saturday afternoon and evening programs, but by Sunday morning, we were “back to normal.”)

As that decision-making process played out, I happened to be catching up on a round of email that had been initiated by my colleague Rabbi Jonathan Blake at nearby Westchester Reform Temple. Rabbi Blake had reached out to a number of area colleagues to see what everyone was doing about holding services over the weekend. Another colleague, Rabbi Daniel Gropper of Community Synagogue in Rye, wrote in to the group to indicate that his synagogue considering doing a service by conference call. As soon as I read his email, I knew that that was a great idea for our community and hoped he would forgive me if I “borrowed” it for our purposes.

I am a big fan of freeconferencecall.com and had used their service for a variety of purposes during my previous tenure as an associate rabbi in California. I brought my knowledge of this valuable, free tool with me to Scarsdale, where I began in July, and have also used it here – though admittedly, this was the first time I had ever considered using it for worship.

After getting the idea from Rabbi Gropper, I reached out to our cantor, Chanin Becker, and we agreed we would seek to facilitate an approximately 30-minute Shabbat experience. We did not explicitly think of this as a service, both out of concern for the length of the call and because we knew that those calling in would not have access to a prayerbook. (In a subsequent email exchange with Rabbi Gropper, I learned that he and his team thoughtfully took the time to put together a PDF version of the siddur, which they emailed to congregants to follow along during their service. What a great idea!)

For us, the less formal structure of a so-called “Shabbat experience” was a fantastic success. We welcomed everyone, with Cantor Becker making a point of inviting each person to announce themselves at the start of the call and later acknowledging them by name. We sang, shared words of Torah connected to that week’s Torah portion, blessed candles and wine, and had a chance to schmooze together at the beginning and end of the call. (Callers were muted while the “service” was going on.)

Our community had no history of using technology in this way, and so we set a modest goal for ourselves. We hoped we would be have a minyan of 10 households on the call. Instead, we had 30! (Freeconferencecall.com automatically generates a summary email of the callers’ info after the call is over.) Beyond the technology and the content, we realized that what people were hungering for on Friday night (and what they hunger for perhaps every Shabbat) is the desire to feel an authentic sense of shared connection with a larger community. And though we were not together in person, I have heard from many on the call that the sense of connection for them was palpable. Even as a blizzard raged on outside, our simple conference call provided them with a sense of warmth and the presence of friends old and new.

We are already beginning conversations about how we can utilize technology more effectively so that we can create a similar sense of community (even if there isn’t a dangerous blizzard going on). One of the things I would like to study further is what the best technology platform for this kind of gathering could be, given the limited budget that we and so many other temples have for this sort of thing. With less than eight hours’ notice, we put together the conference call, as well as a chat room space that was open concurrently for those who were inclined to share their thoughts as the service progressed. It turns out that the free chat service I had chosen (but not fully “vetted!”) limited the number of participants that could be in the room. On top of that, two minutes into the “service,” my wireless Internet went down at home, which prevented me from being able to join the chat room. I had been looking forward to sharing reflections there about the music that we were singing, etc. The lesson: Technology doesn’t always cooperate!

Finally, a last reflection about what made the call run so smoothly and successfully. Mostly so that we could ensure that Cantor Becker was able to get to the synagogue the next morning for our Shabbat morning service, she decided to spend the night with me and my family at our home, and so we were able to lead the call in person together. Those that have co-led worship with someone else in the past know how important non-verbal cues are to insure that the worship runs smoothly and meaningfully. In retrospect, I think that we probably would not have been able to pull off what we did if she and I had not been in the same room together. That made all of the difference in the world, and would be something I would work to insure in the future if we decide to do this again.

Rabbi Jeffrey Brown is the spiritual leader of Scarsdale Synagogue – Temples Tremont and Emanu-El in Scarsdale, N.Y. In partnership with the Senior Staff and Lay Leadership of his previous congregation, he was the winner of three 2011 URJ Techie Prizes. You can visit his website at www.bit.ly/rabbibrown.

by Maggie Freed

Climate change is the greatest challenge our earth faces—and the longer we wait, the more difficult it will be to turn it around. Scientists agree that we are causing extreme weather by our greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from burning coal. If we don’t get serious about it, island nations will disappear, coastal cities will be inundated, hundred-year storms will occur every 10 or 20 years, droughts and fires will become more frequent and severe, and we will be leaving our children and grandchildren with an unlivable world. Physicians for Social Responsibility warns of the devastating health effects of pollution and global warming.

The Jewish value of caring for our environment calls for us to do all we can to reduce our carbon footprint, and Temple Sinai of Glendale has taken this imperative to heart. We are taking steps to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

After an energy audit by our local utility, we took a number of measures to reduce our power usage:  switching to more efficient lighting, installing automatic lighting switches, and upgrading our air conditioning, as well as something as simple as closing entrances to keep in the warm air in winter and the cool air in summer!

Then we installed a solar photovoltaic system, which came online in February 2012. Although our temple board initially was skeptical, particularly because we still were struggling with our budget, the Solar Sinai committee was able to show that we would start saving immediately once the system was installed.

The sun now produces about 47 percent of the electricity we use each month, significantly reducing our CO2 emissions.  The system also reduces our costs by about $435 each month. And when the lease is paid off, six years from now, our savings will rise to about $1100 per month.

We are financing the system with a seven-year lease that required a $25,000 down payment.  Our “Chanukah Lights Campaign,” which included donations from more than 50 percent of our congregants, raised the entire down payment amount.

A wide variety of financing options are available for solar photovoltaic systems, many of which include various rebates and credits. Here are some ways you can get started:

• Talk to congregations in your area that have already installed solar panels.  We welcome the opportunity to share our experiences with others.
• Form a solar committee within your congregation
• Join the Interfaith Power and Light group in your state.
• Look at your utility bills to see how quickly rates have been increasing.
• Get an energy audit to see all the ways you can conserve.
• Get some quotes from solar companies and see what YOU can save!

Our rabbi, Rick Schechter, tells the story of a rabbi who visited the sick during Yom Kippur instead of leading the service.  His congregation asked him, “Rabbi, why aren’t you praying,” and he replied, “Good deeds are prayers.” It is truly a wonderful feeling, shared by our members, to see our buildings and grounds “doing good deeds” that will go on for the next 30 to 40 years.

Maggie Freed, a member of Temple Sinai in Glendale, CA, chairs the social action committee and serves on the Sustainable Sinai committee.

Photo courtesy of Leonard Coutin.

by Rabbi Gary Glickstein

Rav A.I. Kook, the former Chief Rabbi of Palestine, often remarked that our role as Jews is to fulfill the vision that “The old shall be renewed, and the new shall be made holy.” (Letters vol. I, p. 214)

Last month The New York Times reported on a high-tech High Holiday service led by a young rabbi, Amy Morrison, in Miami Beach. I am proud to say that Rabbi Morrison is a relatively recent addition to our rabbinical team at Temple Beth Sholom. The service, which took place at the Jewish Museum of Florida, was one of three separate services we ran this year.

In each service, our clergy team aimed to use the communication tools preferred by our diverse group of congregants. In our weekly staff meetings, we routinely ask: How can we create a service that might connect the people in the room to each other and to Judaism? When we are talking about the 20s and 30s age group, why wouldn’t we use texting? Anyone who spends time with someone from that demographic knows that texting is the preferred mode of communication. But our decision to use texts doesn’t tell the whole story.

Thanks to a series of grants from The Woldenberg Foundation, Synagogue 3000 and a number of private donors, we have spent the past seven years cultivating a cohort of 20- and 30-somethings called The Tribe. Through polls, dyads and one-on-ones with hundreds of individuals and groups, we have come to better understand their needs. We applied the outcome of that work to our Erev Rosh Hashanah Experience. Among many concepts that emerged were the following:

The young professional Jewish community in South Florida:

• Feels isolated around holidays;
• Generally organizes into diverse, social and professional islands;
• Is transient and uninterested in lifetime memberships; and
• Seeks meaningful, high quality Jewish experiences.

Understanding what the group was looking for was a key component to creating a service to which they could connect. We focused on breaking down barriers and finding ways for them to communicate with each other.

The vision of the “Experience” was to present multiple ways for congregants to engage; texting was just one way. There was also a new machzor that offered an opportunity to write notes. The rabbi encouraged people to “call out” and say what was on their minds. To get the most out of the experience, people had to actively participate. By actively participating — instead of simply listening — they could be drawn in to the sensation of being present and more open to the experience.

In a room full of people who admitted to having little if any prior experience with traditional Jewish life, we enabled them to use the communication tools they are most comfortable with to express their feelings. Here are some of the written responses The Tribe received from people who were in the room:

• Tonight I experienced God. Yesterday I didn’t believe in God.
• I can’t believe how connected I felt tonight — to the others in the room, the rabbi and myself.
• I love how you try to include everyone and make us feel welcome.
• Texting is great. Some of us are so afraid to speak our minds.
• I felt so much more involved… more connected.
• I really felt a connection to being Jewish.
• The service was emotionally engaging and thought provoking. It really succeeded in making Judaism relevant to me right now.
• I felt really close to G-d. It was incredible.

In other words, it was not about just using technology for the sake of using technology; it was about continuing to apply our tradition of keeping Judaism relevant. The modern world will always offer up an endless array of new communication tools and if they can help congregants connect Jewishly, we should find appropriate ways to use them.

Finding our way to renew the old is but the first step in the reimagining of the Jewish community. We also must venture into the more difficult realm of making the new holy.

Rabbi Gary Glickstein is the senior rabbi of Temple Beth Sholom in Miami Beach, FL.

by Leonard Slutsky

In the story of Exodus, Moses advocated for freedom for the Israelites from Egypt. As a shepherd, his repertoire was limited to his staff and the Lord’s word. Not only was his trek treacherous, hiking through miles of desert, the first nine plagues failed to free the Jews. However, when the Israelites worked together and painted lamb’s blood on their doorposts, the Pharaoh saw their power in numbers and released the enslaved people.

Ew, lamb’s blood! Without sacrificing animals, how can we take action, advocate for civil liberties, spread awareness and build alliances? How can 21st century Reform Jews build a contemporary social action toolkit? By using the Internet to collaborate, communicate, and share resources, our potential is limitless.

I have outlined some resources from my personal toolkit you can use with your social action committee or youth group:

• Technology allows us to spread awareness at the speed of light. Recently established was the Social Action Resources Wiki. The site covers more than 35 hot topics-including economic justice, health care, and Muslim-Jewish relations-providing supplemental information and links to relevant resources for each topic. Most importantly, the “wiki” format allows anyone to contribute his or her own resources, keeping the site relevant. Another way to become more aware is by participating in free webinar training workshops. Do Something hosts annual “Social Action Boot Camps“ with grant writing, political activism, and public relations workshops. The URJ and RAC host social justice and marketing webinars, too.

• NFTY’s 2009 action theme included a motion to reach out and provide direct service in each of our own communities. Serve.gov and Volunteer Match make it easy for you to find opportunities based on location and keyword searches. Your local chapter of 2-1-1′s website has directories for the nearest food shelters, housing, literacy, and substance abuse agencies often needing man power, brain power, and donations.

• The Religious Action Center website is a goldmine for advocacy. By signing up for “action alerts,” you will receive e-mails or text messages whenever important legislation needs an extra push. At the web-based Chai Impact Legislative Action Center, you can search for your congressperson in order to quickly send them customizable letters regarding current issues. A great programming activity is to use the RAC website to send letters to local newspapers-the RAC professionally prints and mails the letters submitted through the website. Besides contacting key contenders, the website contains a comprehensive Program Bank and Holiday Guide, explaining how to integrate social justice into every holiday.

• Another creative way to take action is at Kiva. Kiva is a website that connects “micro-lenders” to the needy, with a twist. Field Partners throughout the world identify entrepreneurs in impoverished areas, translate their hopes, and post requests on the site, such as a sewing machine to start a small business. Website visitors can contribute $25 towards the projects. When enough money is raised, the Field Partner will deliver the funding then post photos and journal entries tracking the process. Slowly, the entrepreneur will repay the loan, and the money can be used again and again to support additional projects.

• In 2008, I used technology to build alliances in creating “The Soda Pop Top Project,” a campaign to save aluminum can tabs, for recycle value, for a local hospital. Individually, tabs are worth practically nothing, however when added together, they are worth books, games, and toys. I knew I could not save tabs by myself, so I used e-mail to reach out for help from other NFTY Social Action Vice President. Quickly, I was introduced to a more experienced SAVP who mentored me through the project development process. Then I setup a collection box in my temple’s lobby. When my temple Webmaster learned about the project, he offered to post information on the temple website and in the weekly e-mail newsletter. Combined with a newly created Facebook page, tabs began to overflow the tiny Tupperware container. Someone who saw the Facebook message knew a member of the Hospital’s foundation and coordinated a trip to deliver the tabs to the hospital. I was delighted to deliver more than 300 pounds of tabs from my small project, built organically from alliances.

• In building alliances for your own projects, consider Grassroots.org, providing free website hosting and domain names to non-profit organizations. The NFTY Our-Space Initiative works to keep communications online sacred. Finally, the cornerstone of NFTY alliances can be found in the Program Bank, a gargantuan database of past NFTY programs.

• Sometimes we forget about the less fortunate organizations without the luxury of technology. The National Cristina Foundation links computer donors with organizations in need, a great opportunity to breathe life into a congregation’s old computer.

This is just a small sampling of ways to use technology to advance social action. What do you recommend and how have you used them?

Leonard Slutsky of Glastonbury, CT, was the 2009 Social Action Vice President of his NFTY-Northeast temple youth group, GRSLY.

Originally published at iTorah