To the Confirmation Class Parents:
Here you have, as promised, weekly Confirmation Class Bulletin Number Two!
We had a lovely class yesterday. Before I forget, please be advised that we are collecting tzedakah each week. So, please check before your student leaves home on Sunday morning that he or she has "a pencil, your folder, and tzedakah money." At the end of the year, we will study various venues for giving and decide where the money should go.
Yesterday, we continued our discussion of teshuvah, in the sense of "turning toward" the path and the values and people that we want to more fully embrace, and in the sense of "turning away from" habits, feelings and "baggage" that we would rather not have in our lives. The students got two slips of paper. On one they wrote something to turn toward in the coming year, on the other something to turn away from. The "turn toward" slips of paper were sealed into envelopes, which I will open on the first day of Post-Confirmation Class next fall, so that they can see how they did it with their resolutions. The things "to turn away from" have been shredded and thrown away.
We also did an exercise in which we figured out, as a class, everything we could remember about the festival of Sukkot. We then talked about ushpizin, a very old but largely unknown Sukkot custom, in which symbolic guests, including the biblical patriarchs, Moses and King David are invited into the sukkah. We studied the traditional, Aramaic formula for inviting these "guests" and noted that there are no women in the group! We tried to make a list of famous Jewish women on the board, and found that, beyond female characters in the Torah (and a few contemporary entertainment celebrities) the kids could hardly name any Jewish women of note. We discussed the aphorism, "history is written by the winners," and how that helps to explain why Jewish women have, too often, been "written out of history," that has been traditionally written by men.
This led us into a study of a fascinating Jewish woman who lived in the Jewish ghetto of Venice in the 1500s, named Sarah Coppia Sullam, and her struggles to maintain her Jewish identity in the face of intense pressure from the larger Christian world to embrace Christianity. We didn't get to finish this section, but will do so, God willing, next week. We also, at the very end of class, squeezed in a roundtable discussion on other things we would like to learn about during the year. The kids had many wonderful ideas, and I will try to incorporate as many of them as I can.
Finally, I don't want to forget to tell you that Loui Dobin, the Director of Greene Family Camp, our Union for Reform Judaism Southwest regional camp in Bruceville, Texas, was visiting us yesterday to encourage the younger kids to think about coming to camp next summer. I'm grateful to Loui that he came specially to Confirmation class to speak to our kids about the fabulous opportunities that await them this coming summer. Of course, there is NFTY in Israel, the nearly 5-week summer trip (for which your child received a $250 gift voucher when he or she became a bar or bat mitzvah... time to find that thing!). In addition, he told our students about Kutz Camp, the URJ summer camp exclusively for Reform Jewish teenagers. Kutz offers the chance to be with some 300 Reform Jewish teens from all over the world, studying with wonderful teachers in areas such as music, leadership, drama and arts and more.
I emphasized to our students, and would like to emphasize here, that our Temple believes that completing the Confirmation class is an extraordinary achievement, and that certain rewards come with it. Among those rewards is our commitment that financial constraints will never keep any of our Confirmation graduates from going to Israel with NFTY, or to Kutz Camp. (Indeed, the proceeds from the sale of breakfast tacos that our Brotherhood sells on the first Sunday of each month all benefit scholarships for our Confirmation kids to attend these wonderful programs.)
When I asked the students how many of them were interested in doing one of these programs this summer, a substantial number of hands went up! So I encourage you to begin to talk to your student about next summer. The page on the NFTY website for the Israel trip does not yet have any information about next summer, but it is here, and I encourage you to keep checking back in the coming weeks as I am sure more information will be posted. Information on Kutz Camp can be found right here. Please contact me at any time for more information about these opportunities.
Teaching your kids is a great privilege! Stay in touch!
Rabbi Folberg