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92nd Street YI Love Teaching 7th Graders
This year I returned to the 7th grade classroom on Monday nights because I know how important it is for our students to have substantive Jewish learning and how important it is build relationships with 7th graders. The name of the course is “Tikkun Olam: World Repair Symposium”. Our educational goal is simple. We want to teach our emerging Jewish adults how it is that Jewish values can serve as the fabric of their lives as they engage in acts of justice. We are teaching them about the cycle of social action, the types of social action, how to cut a problem into a winnable issue and so much more. I am inspired in this work by Rabbi David Saperstein’s words:
“The core of our insight [as Reform Jews] is that serious Jewish study inevitably leads to the soup kitchen; that serious prayer, among other vital things, is a way of preparing to do battle with injustice, that social justice without being grounded in text, without a sense of God’s presence, is ephemeral and unsustainable. The heart of the argument is that there is no such thing as ‘Social Action Judaism,’ that the thread of social justice is so authentically and intricately woven into the many-colored fabric we call Judaism that if you seek to pull that thread out, the entire fabric unravels….”
http://urj.org/socialaction/aboutus/
Many years ago, I taught the 7th grade class on Sundays. We had a similar curriculum using Making a Difference, by Rabbi Artson. The 7th graders kept a mitzvah journal, with entries surprisingly similar to the mitzvah sheet of our year of 613 mitzvot. I was delighted to see the congregation similarly challenged. We were never, as a class, able to perform mitzvot outside of Temple Sinai. I hope that this will become a part of your class.
Carol