Teaching Decorum or Davening?

The following was shared from a reader about their synagogue's latest attempt to change the atmosphere of the shul.  It will be interesting to see what will be the next quick fix - as discussed, Dr. Levitz does identify this as one of the less successful attempts to break the "cycle of rebuke, resistance, and resentment".  What are your thoughts?

As you know, we've been considering ways to improve decorum in the Main Minyan. One area of concern is the disruption caused by adults and children coming in and out of the sanctuary during Torah reading and the Rabbi's drasha.

To address this issue, starting this Shabbat, we are going to lock three of the four outer central doors of the sanctuary (on the main level)  during Torah reading and the drasha. The doors will be locked from the outside only. The doors to the balcony will remain unlocked at all times.

During Torah reading and the drasha, the outer door on the far right (leading to the Main Sanctuary vestibule) will remain unlocked. The inner side door will be monitored by a volunteer who will permit adults and children to enter at breaks in the Torah reading and will let adults in at appropriate points in the drasha. Children will not be allowed to enter at any time during the drasha, so if your child is able to sit quietly during the drasha, please have him or her in the sanctuary before it begins. It is important that children understand this new practice and we ask that you explain the guidelines to your children.

Members who need to step out can of course do so at any time and are asked to use the door on the right as well.

We would appreciate male volunteers to help us monitor the side door. The volunteer will sit inside the sanctuary and will therefore not miss either laining or the drasha

The Children's Siddur to Buy or Not to Buy

So I have small children and my wife and I are trying to educate them to be connected to tefilla.  We started with the basic one used in our shul:

It has its advantages and disadvantages - one disadvantage being that it doesn't have "Ashrei" - one of the most popular parts of tefilla.  Another disadvantage is that the spine is very thin and won't survive intensive prayer nor play davening. Meanwhile the graphics are good and my kids love to use it (while it lasts).

Koren Publishers came out last year with a more developed version of a children's siddur.

Seems to me like similar graphics and approach to tefilla, but with some more structure and meat to the siddur.

Today I came across what I must think is the worst siddur that I have come across yet, and that is saying much considering the two dimensional nature of Artscroll publishing.

Apparently Dudu's Fisher's siddur comes with an CD (featured above - same cover on the siddur) and lots of spirit and excitement. I am in some very weird way embrassed by this siddur and its efforts to solely teach the peformance of the prayers without much mention of a self-reflective or mediatiive dimension.  Indded my frustration may stem from my more exclusive focus on teenagers and adult tefilla experiences, but oh how I loathe that this approach is exclusivley pushed as if prayer is a team sport!

Of relevance is Daniel Rose's query in today's Lookjed in which he is reseraching about children's siddurim:

I am doing some initial research into Jewish Day School Siddur use. I am interested in understanding what a school looks for in a siddur for grades 1-4 (ages 6-10). Which siddur do use in your school in these grades? In your school is the siddur primarily used for its text (to learn the tefillot) or do you (or do you think you would like to) use a school siddur as a teaching resource for teaching tefilla? What do you/would you teach from the siddur (Reading? Tefilla skills? Hilchot tefilla? Tefilla themes and ideas?) Does the siddur you use (or would you like it to) come as part of a curriculum with a teacher's resource packet/booklet?

Any feedback you could give is gratefully received (rose.danielj@gmail.com).

I encourage you to share your expreinces of what your kids or students may be using to daven and hope that it will benefit other parents and teachers.  And if you are in the process of writing or publishing a new children's siddur, let us know!

Guest Post: Why Mommy Doesn't Pray

The following article was published in the Times of Israel by Shira Zewbner, a public relations consultant and writer living in Jerusalem.
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We’re on the countdown to Rosh Hashanah, which for me means preparing delicious menus for our lunch guests, trying to figure out how to make vegan honey cake for my youngest (and egg allergic) daughter, writing New Year greeting cards for our family and friends in the States, and making a bunch of will-you-forgive-me phone calls. It also means a trip to the dry cleaner, possibly buying a new frock for myself, and setting aside money from our budget to give to charity before the yom tov rolls in. I look at my to-do list with excitement; the High Holy Days have always been my favorite of the Jewish holidays. With one, minor exception: the prayer part.

Recently, I had an interesting conversation with my 3 1/2-year-old. We were talking about all of her favorite topics: school, friends, and fairies. And then, out of the blue, while going off on some tangent about princess dresses, and shoko, and what I’m making her for breakfast, she blurted out, “but, Mommy, you don’t daven (pray)!”

Instinctively, I looked toward the living room bookshelf, at the rows of unused Artscroll siddurim, and declared, “Of course I daven!”

She shook her tiny pigtails back and forth and insisted that I do not pray. She exclaimed, “you do not daven like Daddy does.”

And she was right. I do not pray like her Daddy does.

Funny, but when my husband and I were dating, I insisted that I wanted our children to grow up watching him daven. I told him that it was important to me, that our kids see him put on tefillin, drape himself in his tallit, and use a siddur to daven each and every morning. And, to his credit, he has done just that since the day our eldest child was born. Our children have frequently been in his arms while he davens three times a day; they have grown up playing with the tzitzit on his tallit, tugging gently on his tefillin while asking questions about his morning ritual, and sitting quietly on his lap as, together, they say the Shema.

But, as I stressed the importance of our children seeing their Daddy pray every day, I completely neglected to consider what they would think about Mommy and prayer.

Truth be told, prayer and I have a unique relationship that’s far too complicated for me to explain to our toddlers.

I don’t think I have ever connected with what I refer to as “organized” prayer. From a young age, I merely went along with the davening process. It was part of the curriculum of my yeshiva, and I dutifully did as I was told. As I got older, prayer became a burden. My parents would insist, Sunday mornings, that I daven before eating breakfast. And, dutifully, I did what I was told. But the words on the page didn’t make me feel any closer to my Maker. In fact, I didn’t feel anything!

Sure, I turned to prayer when I really wanted something. Like dance lessons (never happened), a family vacation (nope, still nothing), and a hurricane to come and cancel the final I wasn’t prepared for (you can guess the likelihood of that one panning out). I also remember davening so hard to get into the Machal program at Michlalah, for my seminary year after high school. And, when I was accepted, I realized that I had to really work on developing that connection with tefillah.

And I really worked hard. I carried my siddur and mini “Tehillim” with me everywhere. While on the bus, I would say a chapter of Tehillim. I started davening three times a day, whereas back in the States I would barely make it through morning prayers. I believed in the idea of mitoh sh’lo lishma ba lishma: that a deed, even if performed without the proper intent, may eventually still lead to a performance with the proper intent. I truly believed that, if I went through the motions, and said the words on the page, I would feel the connection.

It just never happened.

And, while at Michlalah, I took the tefillah class with Rabbi Nissel. It was an early Sunday-morning class that I was frequently late to and often missed. But what I do remember out of the class was learning thattefillah was comprised of three things: shevah (praise), bakasha (requests) and hodaya (thanks/gratitude). So, technically, if I incorporate all three of these elements when praying, then I was “doing it right.”

When seminary was over, and I was back in New York, I slowly stopped praying with a prayer book. Instead, when I wanted to have a conversation with God, I just did. In the privacy of my own room, sometimes without even saying a word out loud. I made sure to start off with praise, then put in my request, and then ended the “conversation” with my thanks and gratitude. And to this day, that’s how I pray. And it worked for me — until my daughter accused me of not praying.

As a mom, I’m responsible for educating my children and must be a role model to them. Do I want them to see me have my “conversations” with God? Or do I dust off my Artscroll siddur and, once again, go through the motions so that they see that I’m praying? I honestly don’t know what to do.

What I do know is that this Rosh Hashanah holiday, they will see me with my prayer book in hand. I will sing to them the melodies I grew up with, and teach them how to sing along.

And, during “Unetaneh Tokef” of Mussaf on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, I will close my eyes and say the only words that I have ever had a connection with in all of liturgy. And pray that, for another year, we are not a fleeting dream.

A man’s origin is from dust and his destiny is back to dust. At risk of his life he earns his bread; he is likened to a broken shard, withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shade, a dissipating cloud, a blowing wind, flying dust, and a fleeting dream.

Guest Post: What's Love Got to Do With it?

What’s Love Got to Do With it?  Sh’ma Love

By Gail F. Nalven

photo credit: alix brown c 2012

When I lead services, regardless of whether it is for kids or adults, I love to explain my take on the Sh’ma and the surrounding paragraphs.  Whether you are Reform and call it Sh’ma U’virchotecha--Sh’ma and its blessings--or traditional and call it K’riat Sh’ma--reciting of Sh’ma--the texts before and after the Sh’ma line are consistent.  The paragraph before the Sh’ma, beginning with Ahava Rabbah in the morning and Ahavat Olam in the evening, declares God’s love for the people Israel.  The paragraph after the Sh’ma is the one that follows it directly in the book of D’varim in the Torah.  (The Baruch Shem line is not from the Torah sequence.)  V’Ahavtah talks about our love for God.  So Sh’ma, our ultimate statement of our faith in God,  is surrounded with prayers about ahavah, love. 

This spring, I was leading a Shabbat morning service for third through fifth graders in a Reconstructionist Synagogue.  Before we began the Sh’ma portion, I explained these paragraphs as:  First God tells us that God loves us.  This is before we even say the Sh’ma, our ultimate statement of faith in God.  God says it first because no one wants to be the first one to say, “I love you.”  And now, knowing that God loves, us, we can say the V’Ahavatah, we tell God that we love God back.  And what’s in the middle?  The Sh’ma.  I like to call this the Sh’ma Love Sandwich!

I’m sure that I had told this story before during my many years at this congregation.  Usually the kids rolled their eyes at my goofiness.  There she goes, talking about God again!  This time was different.  As I completed my last sentence, a fifth grader jumped in with the following story:  His mom and dad liked to put him between them and hug him tight. They call this a love sandwich.  As with many students his age, he started talking before he realized that this might not be a cool thing to say.  His voice became softer as he finished.  Wanting to validate his comment, I shouted, “That’s it!  That’s the Sh’ma!  That’s just the way God loves us and we love God.”  

While I certainly hadn’t intended for my story to create some sort of assessment of learning, I used his example to show that this was indeed a valid interpretation of this text.  And while I seriously doubt that the student had connected more than the words “love sandwich” with his family ritual, now he and others may have a visible connection.  Everyone in that room could identify with being hugged by their parents.

As Jews, we don’t talk much in the vernacular about loving God and God loving us.  This seems to have become part of Christian God-language.  Clearly it is part of our liturgy and perhaps we should consider reclaiming this language.

I always learned that the paragraphs around the Sh’ma were chosen for their themes of creation, revelation, and redemption.  This idea has been taught as if it was Mt-Sinai, as if it came all of the way from the time of Moses, when it was actually devised by 19th Century German scholars.  While the ideas of creation, revelation, and redemption work for me as an adult, I doubt seriously that they will work for our students.  In education we say that we need to “meet the student where s/he is.”  Perhaps we need to remember this when we teach liturgy.  The Sh’ma line is probably the first piece of Jewish text that our students learn.  There is already a comfort level with that text.  And the idea that it is wrapped in love is something that they can get their heads around.

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Gail F. Nalven, RJE has a MA from the Davidson School of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary and she will be joining the staff of Shaaray Tefilla in NYC this fall.  She is a fellow in Leadership Institute:  Shaping Congregational Leaders and Learners, a 2 1/2 year program for synagogue educators sponsored by JTS and HUC-JIR and funded by UJA-Federation and is the co-author of the newly published The Kiddush Murder: A Shoshana Goldberg Mystery. Contact Gail at gneducator@gmail.com and check out her blog “Adventures in Tefillah” at www.tefillah.wordpress.com.

The Debate over Bringing Kids to Shul

This blog is an outlet for educators to discuss and explore approaches and resources on tefilla. As I write from an educator's perspective, a lot of what I share involves approaches of students and children to davening.  There is a sincere need to have a conversation about children in shul as they pose a tremendous educational opportunity and danger to the unique environment for daveners.

Tonight, in doing some research, I have come across a lot of websites dealing with adult approaches to children in davening.  I have shared before on this topic and just reread "In The King's Presence" Teaching for Tefillah: A Communal Responsibility by Dr. Wallace Greene and once again fascinated by the different approaches parents have to bringing kids to shul.  But this article, published last year in The Yeshiva World News site, takes the cake.

Titled, "Why I am going to let my kids run around shul", this article elicited 60 responses that run the gamut, that is the gamut for YWN readers.  My personal favorite line is "Judaism (and life) is about trying your best. If you can't do something perfectly, you do it imperfectly." Nonetheless I thought this article was worth sharing because there really is no single 'Best Practice' when it comes to what age and when to bring your kid to shul and really comes down to a subjective calculation on your child's personality and mood, the atmosphere of the synagogue, and the educational opportunity that is present.

What is your synagogue's policy on children in shul?

A Prayer to Raise Good Children

Privilege me to raise children.... so begins a small tefilla said after candle-lighting on Friday nights.  This moment, when shabbat enters, or better, when we welcome shabbat into our lives, is purposely a moment of pause and prayer.

There is a song to this tefilla that is popular in the Orthodox and yeshivish world and I wanted to share it with the readers here because, as I have written before, sometimes music transforms tefilla and makes it so much easier for us to transcend.

 וזכני לגדל בנים ובני בנים, חכמים ונבונים, אוהבי השם, יראי אלקים, אנשי אמת, זרע קודש, בשם דבקים, ומאירים את העולם בתורה ובמעשים טובים, ובכל מלאכת עבודת הבורא.

Privilege me to raise children and grandchildren who are wise and understanding, who love Hashem and fear Hashem, people of truth, offspring that are holy, who to Hashem are attached, (who) illuminate the world with Torah and with deeds that are good, and with every labor in the service of the Creator. 

Shabbat Shalom

The Desire for Jewish Authenticity

The following article titled "The Spiral of Jewish Authenticity" was published last week in Sh'ma, A Journal of Jewish Ideas by Stuart Z. Charme.  I think this is good educational food for the mind and soul, especially considering the last paragraph and the 'breaking news' out on Matisyahu.  It is just hard to be an educator!
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Around the time my daughter turned 16 years old, she cut off most of her thick, long hair for an edgier and hipper look. She began to perform slam poetry, and she announced that she no longer saw herself as Jewish. Being Jewish, she said, just didn’t figure very much in her sense of identity, and she found greater authenticity in performing poetry or doing community service than in reciting Jewish prayers to a deity that neither she nor I believe in.

I was not all that shocked by my daughter’s announcement. Having interviewed dozens of teenagers about their Jewish identities as part of a research project, I knew that teens — much like adults — respond to the fact of being Jewish with feelings ranging from intense pride to utter indifference. I also knew, from following these teens years later, when they were in college, that the meaning of being Jewish had already changed for many of them and would most likely continue to do so throughout their lives. Indeed, as socio-psychologist Bethamie Horowitz and others have pointed out, Jewishness is not a static condition but rather a journey with various twists, turns, and detours along the way. In a similar way, I have described the experience of Jewishness over the course of one’s life as a loose spiral. We circle back to revisit a variety of issues related to Judaism and Jewishness; each time, we approach the experience of Jewishness from new perspectives and with new investments and understandings that emerge in response to other changes in our lives.

For many Jews, the feeling of Jewish authenticity involves a sense of connection to a romanticized or idealized image of the past. Living in or just visiting the land of Israel, enjoying Klezmer music, assuming the lifestyle of an observant Jew, or checking one’s DNA for a “Jewish” marker may provide a sense of unbroken tradition and peoplehood. This idea of authenticity, however, has often been critiqued and deconstructed as an essentialist myth that merely serves to legitimate favored forms of identity while delegitimating others.

Much has also been written (see the March 2011 issue of Sh’ma for several essays on Jewish identity) about the postmodern freedom to “construct” or “invent” Jewish identity in a myriad of ways ranging from contemporary ultra-Orthodoxy to Torah Yoga and Jewish “mindfulness.” And even the notion of “the Jewish people” is less a fixed body with natural boundaries than a continually reimagined community with contested rules and conditions for recognition and membership. It is obvious that claims about authenticity can never really offer a scientific test of purity, a “Good Housekeeping” seal of approval, or a warranty against change. Some of what is now accepted as authentically Jewish will eventually be abandoned and some of what is now rejected will later be reclaimed. In this sense, each individual’s search for Jewish authenticity is a microcosm of the collective process of redefining Judaism at different moments of history.

The desire for Jewish authenticity, therefore, has both retrospective and prospective dimensions. On the one hand, it situates one in relationship to one’s personal and group history; it provides a sense of existential orientation and protection; and it, thereby, offers a provisional home in the world. But the goal of authenticity is simultaneously a warning to be careful of claiming too much certainty at the present moment — recognizing the permanently destabilizing power of the future to shatter and rebuild the foundations of our world in ever-new ways.

For both of these reasons, the issue of Jewish authenticity remains compelling and inescapable. In some ways, authenticity resembles other ultimate human goals like “salvation,” “enlightenment,” or “utopia.” All of these concepts are most useful as ever-receding targets that beckon people to construct identity and community, but also to resist complacent acceptance of the status quo, mechanical repetition of the past, or unquestioned conformity to the consensus of one community at a particular moment in time. There is probably some Zen-like truth to the idea that those who claim most adamantly to have found or achieved Jewish authenticity are also those who lack it in a deeper sense.

Ultimately, what I wish for my daughter is a Jewish journey that is intellectually and psychologically honest, vibrant, and creative; one that values questions more than answers, while avoiding the pitfalls of premature closure and rigidity. I trust that she will discover authentic forms of Jewish expression for herself as she redefines her past and plans for the future. I can’t predict whether slam poetry will be part of that process, but if the singer Matisyahu could use reggae to find a sense of Jewish authenticity for himself, then why not?

How to Teach Kids to Daven

As a parent, I have found the book "How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk" (1980) an amazing resource for developing new ways to communicate. Since starting to think more strategically about davening and how to evaluate success in teaching kids how to daven, I value Faber and Mazlish's insights that much more.

As adults, we presume much about the experience of prayer and how it is to be imparted to children. For those who attend a synagogue regularly, prayer behavior is modeled consistently and it is hard to judge how successful and/or uninspiring it may be for those not in tune with what is going on in people's heads and souls. If you want to teach the rules of how to move one's feet, or when to bow, then your work won't take so long. On the other hand teaching a child, old or young, to be sensitive to Gd, in touch with their inner prayers and needs, and how to maintain a perspective when good/bad things happen to good/bad people, things get VERY complicated.

I will be commenting on a few aspects of Faber and Mazlish's unintended advice to davening instructors, but will share only one for today. To listen to children you need to be sensitive to their feelings and hear their concerns. Too often parents 'know' the solution to their child's problem without giving the actual child the room or skills to prevent the situation from happening again. Especially since prayer is so ritualized and happens on a regular basis for so many students, it is incumbent on teachers to give some latitude to allow for students to address their own prayer needs. There is an obvious tension between the individual vs.community as well as traditional and more modern expressions, but isn't davening supposed to be transformational? How can you make the prayer experience in your school something that has a positive identity about it? Here's a tip, ask your students!