What if you had a chance to change the world? One of the great questions in my favorite literary genre of science fiction is what if you could travel in time and manipulate some small thing, so that history would play out towards some new outcome. What if I told you I had a chance to do that? True story.
Ok, well, I didn’t have chance to manipulate the past. But I did have a chance to manipulate the present.
For two years now my school, Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School (BT) has had a partnership Scheiber Szandor Gymnazium (SSG) in Budapest, Hungary. This partnership was coordinated through SOS International and last week we entered the 3rd phase of our program when we brought a dozen of our students with us to Hungary.
When we began this program our school was attracted to the alignment between the goals of SOS International – supporting Jewish Communities in Central and Eastern Europe – and our schools values, especially the value of Klal Yisrael – of each Jew, no matter who and no matter where being connected to all of the other Jewish people. This was a chance to expand what Klal Yisrael means for our community. Klal Yisrael is not just Jews of different economic status and different levels of religious engagement. And it’s not just about American and Israeli Jews. It can mean so much more than that.
The first phase of the project was in February of 2017 when I and 6 colleagues spent a week teaching with our counterparts in a variety of disciplines. We also spent time touring Budapest, learning about the rich Jewish heritage of Hungary and the deep scars that the Holocaust and Communism has left there. We did community service, met with the American embassy’s chargé d’affaires, and members of the Jewish community’s leadership. During that first trip we realized the greatness of the task in front of us. The school was so different than our own, community lived tangibly still in the dark shadow of the Holocaust, and the political and economic climate had sucked so much hope and optimism away, that it was hard to imagine how a few teachers, working for a few days, in just a few classes could make any appreciable difference. And then in the depth of that wonder we thought about the kids we had met. What we really wanted to do was help them.
So how could we do that? How do we help these Jewish teen in Hungary feel proud to be Jewish? How do we help them know they can be cool and Jewish? The answer of course, is that we (curmudgeony old men and women that we are) can’t. But their peers can. And that is when we started drafting what became one of the most meaningful weeks of our lives.
From the almost 50 BT students that applied 12 students of the class of ’19 and ’20, mixed for gender, extra-curricular interest and religiously diverse, were selected to travel with us to Budapest. They learned in formal and informal settings. They taught younger students. And they helped to lead a Shabbaton. But that hardly describes what they experienced. They helped change the world.
SSG selected 24 students, with excellent English and a desire to “do more Jewish”, to be part of this experience. Every student came to this program primed to meet others so when the students first met each other there was no awkward shyness. They looked like teens greeting their old friends! It was astounding to us how quickly they started getting along. And that continued to grow and deepen through the 4 days they were together.
The week culminated in a Shabbat that was filled with eating and prayer and Torah study, certainly. But critically, it was filled with games, Deep Meaningful Conversations, laughter, singing, dancing, and more laughter. At the end of Shabbos I realized that I had stopped referring to the teens as SSG kids and BT kids; I just called them all talmidim, my students. I wish I could describe the magic of Shabbat for you. The kids, the talmidim, taught each other and celebrated each other. So many kids experiencing Shabbat for the first time and learning to love it through articulate, fun, cool, peers. Just before we lit candles to start Shabbos I had all the teens gather in the spiffy Shabbos best and I told them all to bring their cell phones so we could take pictures. And after our group photos and selfies I collected all the phones. I had prepped the teens for this telling them that I wanted them to be “all in” and “just here” for Shabbos and that the phones work against that, pulling their attention elsewhere. (And it was no secret that I had halachik reasons for the phone collection as well.) At the end of Shabbat we experienced a beautiful, havdallah service together and I soon gave back their phones but much to my surprise, they didn’t want them. They didn’t want the magic of the moment to dissipate. They didn’t want to walk away from Shabbos and into the week.
I had a chance to help 24 of the best Jewish teens in Budapest fall in love with Shabbos and fall in love with being Jewish. I can’t think of a more effective way to change the world than that.
