Sweet Potatoes, Stuffing - But What's Inside That Pumpkin?

I put a lot of pressure on myself around the holidays. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Passover, Rosh Hashana, or Thanksgiving -- you’ll find me agonizing over menus and shopping lists weeks in advance. In fact, my husband believes it’s possible that I derive more satisfaction from the planning and preparation portion of the experience than from the experience in and of itself.

Why? I couldn’t have told you myself, until I read Joan Nathan’s article in Tablet Magazine. She writes of Thanksgiving meals: “These dishes tell you who you are.”

To come through the force of fusing tradition and a personal touch of creativity to a place where you feel: I am these dishes – if you really took that seriously (which clearly I do), then yes, that’s a lot of responsibility.

It’s also a lot of power. I think about the Thanksgiving dishes I grew up on: sweet potatoes with marshmallows, for instance. For me this dish will forever be tied up in the very essence of Thanksgiving; it is impossible for me to imagine a Thanksgiving without it. I possess the power to similarly influence what my daughter’s quintessential Thanksgiving food associations will be – perhaps even, by extension, her basic understanding of her roots, of who she is.

So who is she? I wonder. We have my American side – the sweet potatoes with marshmallows, butternut squash, stuffing, pecan pie, the pumpkin pie. We also have my husband’s Israeli side – hummus (quite good with turkey actually!), Israeli salad, pita.

Finally, we have the Jewish/religious side, which includes the kosher turkey, of course. I also find myself preparing traditional foods of the Jewish parallel to Thanksgiving, Sukkot – such as a stuffed pumpkin. The common explanation for why we eat stuffed vegetables on Sukkot is based off an image of a cornucopia, of giving thanks for a harvest of plenty. I once heard a spiritual spin on it which has to do with hidden meanings. Think about it: The most important things in life are intangible, hidden from view. Inside of everyone there is a piece of these essences – of goodness and, ultimately, of the Divine. The mysteries of G-d’s grand plan might be hidden from us – but we have this spark in each of us to help us along the way.

In truth, I don’t think it’s just that the dishes tell us about ourselves. We have a hand in curating who we want to be – not just on the holiday table, but in our day-to-day lives as well. This is what we have to be thankful for – and the ability to share it with family and friends, of course.

Ballet Class

I took my 2-year-old to ballet class for the first time. I was sure she was ready for it because she loves imitating the moves in that old Sesame Street clip of kids in dance class, and doing the “Snuffle Shuffle.” But when I tried to prep her by showing her selected YouTube clips of “The Nutcracker” and “Swan Lake,” she watched in a silence that I was sure was pure enthralled fascination, but could also have been a blank and uncomprehending stare – and then after 5 minutes yelled “Watch Oscar!” So maybe it’s just a love of Sesame Street.

I personally had watched the clips in, yes, enthralled fascination, which was also filled with nostalgia. My parents had taken me as a child to “The Nutcracker” every year – and every year I had dreamed that I could do it too. In fact, for 10 or so years of my childhood and adolescence, I spent 1-3 days a week trying.

When asked about these endeavors, I have a standard answer: “My parents knew I was going to be tall, and they wanted me to have good posture. So they sent me to ballet class.”

Tall I definitely turned out. If you looked across a row of girls in the class, I was easy to spot – I was the aberration shooting up out of the even horizontal line of their heights. (Good posture is more debatable.) I also inevitably turned out in ways differently than perhaps my parents envisioned – religiously observant of Judaism, for one.

Now I’m the parent, and I find myself projecting. What skills, values, and character will sending my daughter to ballet class draw out of her? For that matter, how will she be shaped by being sent to Jewish Day School? What other educational experiences should – or shouldn’t – we as parents instill into her to influence how she thinks and acts?  

If observance of Judaism complicates a girl’s practice of ballet in the long run, the religious implications of sending a 2-year-old to dance class may be slight. She doesn’t understand that there will be a big recital at the end of the year that she won’t attend because it’s on Shabbat. She also wouldn’t understand the difficulties inherent in an invitation for a playdate at a classmate’s house. Unlike me, she doesn’t pay attention to the parents trying to engage me in conversation about the rationale and means for getting a head start on Christmas shopping.

But someday she will. I can’t help but play it out in my head.

Ultimately, though, I come to realize that nurture only goes so far. My daughter is blessed with her own personality, reasoning and logic skills, and has her own likes and needs. From what I can tell as of right now, she’s the leader who doesn’t care if she has followers, who enters a room full of kids watching TV and, instead of sitting unobtrusively in the back as I might, marches up and positions herself in front of the very first row. I think she’ll do fine.

More importantly, I believe that it’s necessary for one’s identity to engage in the process – the experience – of working through these questions for oneself at some point.

For now, I just got great nachas from watching her eagerly prancing around doing her darnedest to imitate the instructor’s every move. She came out of class beaming, her first words, “I did it! I DANCED!”

She’s probably going to be tall, and it’d be great for her to have good posture. I also want her to have self-confidence and strength in her own identity and abilities. I believe in her, and I want her to believe in herself.

The Power of Network Development

This article I wrote was first published here on eJewishPhilanthropy.com. Thanks for the opportunity to contribute to what I feel is a very exciting conversation!

After being a part of the ROI conference for Jewish innovators last June, David Brown, Social Action Coordinator at JHub in London, came home inspired – and filled with questions. How do these young Jews and the initiatives they represent relate to the establishment? And what is “Jewish” about Jewish innovation, anyway?

There are many approaches David could have taken to seek answers. Ultimately, I encouraged him to conduct a SurveyMonkey.com survey of around 70 innovators he was in contact with, the results of which he distilled for PresenTense Magazine. By utilizing the power of his network, David learned what his peers were thinking about the issues on his mind – resulting in a new consciousness of the “why” behind what he does that will inform his sense of purpose as he continues his important work.

Creative thinkers and doers are emerging as leaders of the Jewish people. But they can’t achieve change in a vacuum. They need to reach others – to leverage the power of those who care about the same issues they do. This could mean recruiting supportive connections to join their cause through instrumental commitments of money, time, or advice to help them grow for the future. It also could mean connecting with others engaged in similar work to explore best practices, ways to work together, and channels for emotional support from others likely experiencing some of the same challenges, frustrations, and rewards.

The process of reaching others happens by maximizing connections through a network – where together we can achieve more than we could as individuals.

Network development is an emerging area for Jewish organizations. Many are rising to the challenge of engaging the next generation. While establishing one-on-one relationships with young people is important, some organizations are additionally recognizing that they can achieve powerful results through enabling young people to connect with each other and leveraging the power of the emerging network.

I have come to fundamentally believe that this is best way to foster young leaders, within an individual organization or at large: through finding ways for them to collaborate, form communities, and connect personally and professionally, whether through social media, in-person, or in a conference setting. Through engaging in such network development work, an established organization can provide these new voices with an invaluable conduit to the wider Jewish world, enabling them to connect with and influence the larger, global conversation. At the same time, the organization itself benefits from the ideas, new energy, and passion of these up-and-coming leaders. It can also be recognized as a convening organization which brings thinkers and doers to the table and empowers them to realize their goals and dreams.

Over the past five years, I have had the opportunity to dedicate my passion and energy to the burgeoning field of network development through my work at PresenTense, growing a network of more than 500 community members organized principally around the production of PresenTense Magazine. I have been continually amazed and inspired by a richly diverse spectrum of contributors and their intense commitment toward solving the critical challenges facing the Jewish world.

Through the experiences of my work, I have distilled some strategies in network development, some of which include:

Recognize the importance of the process: Up-and-coming leaders are surely more than capable of networking and sharing ideas on their own. However, the effects of these efforts can be magnified by providing them with a set process and forum. This will allow for growth, connections, and the refinement of ideas – and training in how to network effectively.

Practice sharing ideas: In a world of social media and information overload, powerful messages communicated fast can go further than ever before – and the network can be the place for the research and development of compelling narratives.

Connect those with expertise in a given field: Peer learning can be extremely influential and avoids the unnecessary re-creation of the wheel.

Enable a prosumer ecosystem: Encourage each person to both “consume” and to “produce” – to learn, contribute, collaborate, and absorb. This creates a culture of activism and yields results that truly represent the voice of the network.

When done successfully, network development should instigate a vibrant conversation on important Jewish issues, where everyone can express themselves, learn what others are thinking, and find ways to collaborate to take action. It should also provide personal and professional development – where young leaders gain skills to communicate ideas effectively and to listen effectively to help refine the ideas of others. Finally, it will produce strong connections – individual to individual – which ultimately build an active network.

The Issue of Community

This post originally published here on PunkTorah.org - thanks to PunkTorah for enabling me to share my thoughts!

My memories of Camp Ramah are vivid but fleeting: smiling children dove and swam all the way across the screen as the projector rolled in my after-school Hebrew School in suburban Connecticut.

I never did persuade my parents to send me to Camp Ramah. But it certainly was not for lack of trying. Throughout my childhood years working my way through public school, I craved what those smiling children represented to me: a sense of community, built off the commonality of a shared Jewish identity; a place with people like me.

I first found this Jewish community for myself in perhaps the most unlikely of places – Princeton University, to be exact. I found religion too, and my husband. But when anyone would ask on a deeper, more psychological level why I choose to be religious, or start a family, I would come back to this core, human concept of the search for community (or my equally innate and possibly related desire to cook and feed people – but that’s a story for another time).

Post-college until the present, my husband and I have found ourselves in non-transient, suburban Modern Orthodox communities as young married adults with less-than-school-age children. We’ve discovered that, for better or for worse, the world is not a college campus. The casual observer of Modern Orthodox life might ask: really? Communal meals, organized programming, living walking distance from one’s closest friends – surely this all exists for both populations.

The truth is that my demographic is a hard sell, in Modern Orthodox circles and beyond. It’s not that the communities we’ve lived in haven’t given us a warm welcome, because they have. And it’s definitely not my lack of a desire to participate in local, community-building activities.

The usual excuses for my demographic holding back include our preoccupations with our budding careers and attention-demanding babies. While this may have been true historically and may even still be true currently, I believe the root of the issue comes to the complexity of the concept of community in today’s world. Who is your community? Your 1,067 “friends” on Facebook? Your family and friends developed over your 20-something years including, yes, former college roommates, who, probability has it, are now spread around the country, if not the world? The people in your inbox, Google hangout, or Twitter stream, who you may or may not have met in person? These avenues and more all lead to an inevitable feeling of hyper-global-connectivity, and the Modern Orthodox just as well as anyone else of this generation face multi-faceted decisions about where, how, and why to invest their community-building efforts, and with whom.

The issue of community has become so murky that there are those who declare it irrelevant and passé entirely. I beg to differ, and not only because of the weekly thud back into the territory of the local and non-virtual known as Shabbat. I differ because of this longing I have felt from such a young age to feel connected, supported, and identified with on a basic and intimate level. Technology’s increase of the number and variety of means to connect aids but does not necessarily abet such natural desires.

Given all of this, perhaps it’s not terribly surprising that personally, and rather unconsciously, I ended up professionally fixating on the issue of community and how to build it in a Jewish world, transdenominationally. I want to help people connect on personal, Jewish levels, to answer these needs for each other, and to create more ways to expand and spread this supportive community. I want people to see all the advantages of having opportunities to connect, locally as well as globally, personally as well as professionally – because the lines between these categories seem to be blurring all the time.

Through the process of doing this, I have even found ways to fulfill needs of community for myself. Yet while I have developed plenty of processes for community-building, I do not know of a singular answer to the questions around community – especially when it comes to the simplest ones, like what it is or where to find it. Rather, I believe engaging in the exploratory process is part of the point. I believe that community-building is a life-long journey, and however much effort you invest in it, relationship by relationship, you will see a corresponding reward. That’s the fabric of life, and one I want to teach my children to weave – whether or not I send them to Camp Ramah.

Ayelet on Tour

 As a tourist, it is difficult to escape spending a certain amount of time actually on tour. While instructive and orienting to the average adult, tours can be quite the opposite to the average two-year-old, who seems to learn best through a seemingly random exploration of the territory around her, without much regard to spatial or chronological order. Here are some of our experiences taking Ayelet on tour:

Caesaria: I had envisioned Ayelet scrambling happily amidst the ruins, following in the footsteps of Romans and Crusaders of yore. What I had neglected in my imaginings was that these ruins are not exactly child-proof and thus, considering the distinct possibility of tumbling down stone cliffs, not the ideal stomping ground for a two-year-old.

We decided the tourist center might be a safer (did I mention air-conditioned?) bet, and ended up in a lecture/video presentation on the legendary building of Caesaria.

Ayelet happens to be a big fan of videos. In fact, her favorite word just might be “DVD.” The problem is that in her vocabulary “DVD” is reserved exclusively for usage with DVDs of Sesame Street (or, as Ayelet refers to it as a baby-in-the-know, simply “Street”).

Never mind; we viewed this not as a problem but rather as an opportunity. “DVD!” we enticed Ayelet, “Do you want to watch a DVD?!”

The ruse worked, for approximately 5 minutes, during which she waited in anticipation for her favorite fuzzy friends to materialize. When presented instead with diagrams of port construction, she began questioning, “Ernie? Elmo??” and then lost interest entirely. Lesson of the day: Apparently historical thrillers don’t make the “DVD” cut.

Zichron Ya’akov: We had the treat of being led on a wine, beer, and dairy tour by Esther Cohen of myisraelwinetours.com. The finer points of wine-making – which my husband now thoroughly enjoys touting to our Shabbat guests – might be a little lost on a two-year-old. In fact, from her perspective a lot of the processes we went over must seem a little opaque, even for products she enjoys. For instance, we looked at some cheese; then we looked at some cows. Connection? Unclear.

“Moo!” she said. That much she knows cold.

I can’t wait until she hits the science fair stage.

In the meantime, there were some unexpected occurrences, even for those of us familiar with the ways of the world. The dairy was hopping, and apparently not just because people like cheese. There was some kind of festival going on, and… President Shimon Peres?! Check (off the item in the itinerary: See random famous person).

We went on to a lovely lunch and wine tasting under grape vines at the Tishbi Winery. Lunch: now there’s something we all can relate to.

Tirat Tzvi: We spent Shavuot at Kibbutz Tirat Tzvi, a religious kibbutz near Beit She’an. While enchanted by beautiful views of Jordan in the distance, where we were was currently hot! And extra-buggy. This made more sense when we figured out that the land used to be entirely swamp, the religious kibbutzniks not having been allotted the most choice of the properties available (Tirat Tzvi is one of several religious kibbutzim in the area).

See, history can shed light on the present! I tried to explain to Ayelet. She wrinkled up her nose at the bugs and looked hot.

We took a walking tour of the kibbutz led by an old-timer who was born there in the early days. We learned the story behind the tower (the Tirah) and saw the room with the hidden weapons cache where school groups now come.

However, I personally spent much of the tour chasing after Ayelet, who had some questions, but mostly relating to why she was being asked to sit in the stroller for so long and where was the best place to run around wildly and evade one’s Ima.

Ayelet and the Animals

Ayelet loves animals. At least that’s what we tell ourselves. I’m not really sure, honestly, why a girl growing up in the suburbs has to be drilled on “What does a cow say?” “What does a goat say?” But she has a whole barnyard of these animal sounds down to rival any farmgirl (except when she’s presented with an animal whose sound is outside her area of expertise, say a camel, in which case she’ll take the educated guess of either ‘woof’ or ‘quack’). She even has books teaching her more exotic animals that she certainly wouldn’t encounter in New Jersey, lions and tigers and bears and the like, and an iPad app that schools her, “This is the sound a zebra makes: ‘woot woot woot! woot woot woot!’”

Our principle of animal ed is strongly affirmed by Israeli theories of child entertainment, which seem to suggest: if in doubt as to whether a place of attraction will be attractive enough to a child, you can’t go wrong with a couple of farm animals. Ein Zivan’s fruit picking fields have an adjacent petting zoo. Kibbutz Tirat Tzvi has a petting zoo – not just for farm animals, mind you, which might be logical on a farm, but owls and peacocks and other exotic birds labeled in Hebrew. Continuing with the bird theme, the Israeli Air Force Museum in Be’er Sheva has a formidable collection of squawking wonders, with the tenuous connection that airplane designers have learned much from these expert fliers – which doesn’t really explain the ostriches.

The Jerusalem Biblical Zoo is definitely the place to go if you’re actually on an animal hunt from the get-go. It’s got satisfyingly humungous brown elephants, exotic monkeys, even some woot-woot-woot zebras.  How did Ayelet react?

“Zebra,” she said, pointing definitively.

Then, she turned around and walked away. Clearly, when you make a zebra a household item, it gets treated as one.

Ayelet was more captivated by the goats in the petting zoo. In Israel, it seems a “zoo” is a place where the animals are enclosed and the people are outside, whereas a “petting zoo” is a place where the people go in and roam about with the animals. Ayelet has been trained by my mother, who has a dog, to do “nice to Gloria” patting her gingerly on the side. So Ayelet felt compelled to go up to every single goat, pat it and say “niiice…” and then move on to the next one. Until the goats started nibbling on her dress. Then she started crying and held up her hands to be lifted out of the enclosed area.

On the Alpaca Farm in Mitzpe Ramon, I was given a bag of food to feed the alpacas. Actually it ended up only going to one alpaca, who almost knocked me over with his persistence and appetite. “This guy is really hungry,” I hinted at the staff.

“Oh, he’s always like that,” they told me.

While I had meant to give Ayelet a turn at the feeding – she loves feeding people and Gloria the dog significantly more than feeding herself – I was too busy keeping the hungry alpaca at bay to delegate. They offered to allow Ayelet to participate by riding a llama. But, given Ayelet’s not-too-stellar and rather squirmy performance riding in my lap on the plane, I thought I’d better decline.

Touching, handling, or being in close proximity to livestock? I think Ayelet would answer the US Customs form: ‘woot woot woot! woot woot woot!’

Playgrounds of Israel

When my husband, who left Israel at age 5, gave me a tour of his hometown Holon, it was comprised mostly of where he used to frequent: the playgrounds in the area. If you ask Ayelet to detail this trip, I speculate her review would consist largely of playgrounds as well.

With a child in tote, it suddenly enters your consciousness how very many playgrounds you pass, and in the most unpredictable places – mostly because you feel a little tug on your arm, which means that your route is about to be detoured for a while. Here are some highlights of the playgrounds of Israel:

1. Ayelet Has No Pity on Babies: In a Jerusalem playground in Katamon, Ayelet encountered Shoham, who at the tender age of 1 was content rolling around in the sand, waving his fat little legs in the air. But not Ayelet – she immediately seized upon a pail and shovel his babysitter had brought.
   
   As soon as she had made herself busy with it, Shoham wiggled over and started crying pitifully. Alas, Ayelet continued industriously. And then I uttered that troublesome word: “Share!”
   
   Now, a note on Ayelet and sharing. Ayelet understands perfectly well what “share” means. In fact, she has been known to go over to kids with toys or food she wants and demand, “Share!” However, her enthusiasm for sharing entirely diminishes when she’s on the other side of the pail and shovel.
   
   I somehow pried the items from Ayelet’s grasp and delivered them to the baby, who immediately quieted down just as Ayelet started screaming her head off. Then the babysitter persuaded Shoham to give up the toys, and he started crying while Ayelet started shoveling. And so it went, alternating playing and crying, until we had to go.
   
   If anyone has advice on teaching sharing, I’d appreciate if they… shared… Also if anyone has another pail and shovel.

2. Girls Have No Pity on Ayelet: In a beautiful and very crowded playground at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, Ayelet had barely marched onto the scene when a group of Israeli 7-year-old girls fell in love with her. That sounds nice, but in reality it meant that they picked her up and carted her away into a swarming blur of children on the move. I darted under bridges and over slides after them, trying in vain to think of words, in either Hebrew or English, that might be able to communicate my sentiments. Finally I caught up. The girls were alternatively carrying her around, giving her kisses, and pushing her down slides while she made mild complaining noises and generally looked confused. I chased after them a bit, and then tried explaining to the girls that Ayelet really, really had to go, while they looked confused and made mild complaining noises.

3. Playing with Danger: Ayelet found a children-oriented oasis in the desert, in the form of a playground on Kibbutz Ein Gedi. But as she played happily on it, we began to notice troubles in paradise: protruding screws, rust and splinters, and… missing planks in walkways? Then we noticed a sign: “This playground has been inspected and found to be NOT SAFE!” We whisked Ayelet away quicker than we could contemplate what a condemned playground was doing in the middle of an otherwise not-too-shabby kibbutz where it could still bait innocent children, or to realize that perhaps that was why there were in fact no other children to be found there.
   
   Far away in the Golan, on a Shabbat when Ayelet was feeling a little too restless to stay in the synagogue (let’s be honest, that’s every Shabbat), a local recommended a nearby playground for distraction. But Ayelet was more interested in some nearby attractions: two pretend cars and a swing. I was relieved that finally something was holding her attention – until some boys came over and started whining to me and gesturing wildly at some signs, which I previously hadn’t noticed, appended to the play equipment in question.
   
   From what I could gather, it was not OK, forbidden, in fact, to play on that equipment. But with my Hebrew I didn’t really understand why – it seemed perfectly OK to me, and was, furthermore, still keeping my baby busy, which made it seem downright fantastic. So I let her keep at it until she eventually lost interest.
   
   Then I noticed that the boys had returned and not only were they now playing in the previously “forbidden” area, they also had torn down the posted signs and were saying in a sing-song voice, “Now it’s OK, now we can play.” I looked away, a tad embarrassed by the mayhem I had caused, and then saw one of their mothers march up and start trying to explain the difficult concept that tearing up a sign doesn’t make its meaning go away. She sternly smoothed out the wrinkled offending sign, as if it held any weight at this point.
   
   Moral of the story: playgrounds have ground rules, and when you don’t quite understand them, you change the playscape for everyone.