By Raya Seidman
For our Friday night pe’ulat erev during the Opening Conference some of the fellows put together a fascinating exercize: a values ranking activity. The activity required us to split up into groups of three or four, and each group received roughly fifteen slips of paper. Each slip of paper stated a value; a few examples were keeping kosher, learning Hebrew, marrying a Jew, raising your children Jewish, being a Zionist, giving to charity, etc. As a group, we had to agree on how we would rank these values from most important to least important. This was a very hard task because it required four very different people to all come to some sort of agreement on each value. It would have been difficult enough to do this exercize on my own, as each of these values is important to me and I have never thought in terms of more or less important. But to have to come up with one ranking among four people was nearly impossible.
Each member of my group had made compromises on the placements of certain values in order to come to an agreement at whole. This meant that if we had each done our own ranking, our lists would have been different than the one we came up with as a group. Knowing that was frustrating, but it was also very interesting to hear other peoples’ perspectives. Having the opportunity to discuss difference values with others gave me the chance to open up to different ideas and mindsets, and it allowed me to come up with other reasons to feel certain values may be the most or least important in my life. I really enjoyed this activity because it allowed for a great discussion and pushed me to challenge myself on my own values.
