By Jonathan Marx
When building a Jewish experience, you can’t have it all. This was the important, albeit difficult, lesson that we learned in our session learning with Rabbi Ethan Tucker of Mechon Hadar. Rabbi Tucker walked us through a fascinating theory that explained the thoughtful creation of religious practice and ideology. Essentially, he led us to understand his message that in designing any religious experience, one can choose two of the following three principles: pluralism, integrity, and/or community.
In having this discussion, Rabbi Tucker encouraged and inspired us to examine the religious institutions in our lives - prayer and learning at camp, rituals and traditions at home, and many other forms of Jewish expression. In the past, I had taken most of these experiences for granted. I accepted the services at my synagogue and camp as “standard” without thinking about the conscious decision-making behind every prayer, melody, and reading.
Beyond considering the institutions in my life, though, Rabbi Tucker reminded me of the riches of wisdom and insight that even the most mundane bits of ancient Jewish text can provide us in our modern lives. As he admitted at the beginning of the session, the Talmudic case we examined is one that can now be considered archaic and altogether irrelevant. Just by reading this handful of lines from many centuries ago, we could extract pages and pages of notes and thoughts about the meaning and purpose of Jewish life today in the 21st century. As I go back to America and look to engage students as a Jewish educator, I hope to learn to mitigate my fear of introducing Talmud and other “difficult” Jewish texts to young children by remembering the rich lessons we were able to extract in our short session with Rabbi Tucker. After all, the best community is one where the most participants buy into the mission and process - with campers and students who feel empowered to challenge their assumptions and practices, we will create a stronger and more meaningful future for the Jewish religion and the Jewish people.
