As the point person for our local PJ Library, I am proud to foster Jewish community everywhere. Playgrounds, pools, splashpads, coffee shops, community centers and the occasional escape room or movie theater: Jewish life happens wherever there are Jews.
PJ Library hopes to empower you to teach your kids that, yes, you can bring in Shabbat beside the pool and yes, learning Judaism can be as easy as reading in the park. Being Jewish doesn’t have to be hard, and it doesn’t have to happen around a set table or in front of the ark.
I feel like I can hear our rabbis bristling at that last part. But I stand by it: if God is everywhere, let’s celebrate accordingly.
But this I stand by, too: nowhere can our children better see themselves in the flow of Jewish history than when standing within the four walls of our synagogues. Certainly, that sense of history is found in the scrolls of the Torah, in pages of our prayer books and even in the palpable energy created by generations of communal prayer. But nothing captures my kids’ attention quite as much as the walls of beautifully framed and utterly cringe-inducing confirmation photos.
Anyone who has stepped foot in a synagogue knows what I’m talking about: row upon row of sepia-toned teens dressed in their finest, frozen forever on the cusp of Jewish adulthood, ready and eager to fulfill the commandments, to join the board and to make the brisket. You – Harold of 1954: did you ever grow into your glasses? Betty of 1972, was your beauty underappreciated in your time? How cruel to immortalize a 15-year-old on the walls of our congregation, on display for haircut and tie choice critiques for the rest of time! (Except for Stephanie of 1998: you’re perfect, never change.)
My older son and his friends laugh at the styles of generations past during kiddush luncheon, but I’d like to think that, also, they see themselves there. They see that only a few years down the road, their own pictures will hang beside those who came before them and may live beside them still. He can see himself as part of a living lineage that dates back to the start of these vital and storied institutions, our communal Jewish homes.
Confirmation photos of the past pay homage to the recent history of our people, and they’re far more relatable than the desert wanderings of our ancestors. The people on the walls are like any of us — they are handsome or awkward or hiding a gap in their teeth, they have braces and a smile that shines, carefully-coiffed hair, and some of them even look familiar. These people (we!) are the Jewish story.
And that sense of history isn’t one our kids feel so much in the active practice of Jewish community. Being together and being Jewish anywhere is a joy and duty we should teach our children and can do so easily (hurray for PJ Library!). But that we are on the same path as Moses, Maimonides, Meir and Morty of 1940? That is something only our synagogues are so very ready to do.
I struggle with synagogues as much as any membership-averse millennial out there: I like my personal spiritual practice, and I can light candles at home; money is tight, time is limited, and if I don’t like every policy and practice, then I think maybe none of it is worth it. But when I see those photos – mine included (oy vey) – I remember that my sons and I are only the most recent of a countless many, including Morty of 1940. And I’m happy to be in a place that remembers that history.
