Robyn Faintich has many years of Jewish communal professional experience, including youth movements and community teen initiatives, early childhood education, congregational family education, and adult education. Most recently she served as the national Executive Director for the Florence Melton Communiteen High School.
When I arrived at the Orange County BJE in the summer of 2002, I had so many things to learn about the community-wide youth education programs which served approximately 700 children in grades 3 through 12 each year. I inherited a part-time staff of 50, a full-time staff of three, a curriculum, a series of highly-guarded communal rituals, and the five BJE values: Hakhnasat Orhim, Kavod, Hesed, Klal Yisrael and Talmud Torah.
It was made very clear to me that while the curriculum, the staff and many of the communal rituals could be revised, the BJE values were there to stay. So how does an “outsider” create an authentic and believable method for continuing the work of teaching these values and leading with these values?
The first step was ascertaining the “reality” of these values. Was this values project just important to the agency leadership or did all levels of the community actually hold the values important as well? During the first few weeks of my tenure, I spent time with various staff members, teen participants, and volunteers. I consistently asked them about the values and was consistently informed that the values were a significant part of the culture, and while the individuals couldn’t articulate how it had become that way, they knew it was a foundation for the BJE community. During a formal staff orientation, I asked the staff (in small groups) to develop a list of the BJE Ten Commandments. When each small group reported out their lists, each had some version of the five values listed.
The second step was to reflect on what the values meant to me. If I was going to have to lead the community through the lens of these values, I needed to ascertain how they had guided me in my ethical decision-making and how they fit into my educational philosophy. When working with teens it’s always important to ante up some non-invasive aspect of your personal life so that the teens will open up and share as well. (Don’t ask them to do something you aren’t prepared to do/answer yourself.) I knew that in order to stand in front of the community and teach the values – which I didn’t choose (and to be honest not sure that those are the ones I would have chosen) – that I had to own them, make them personal to me, and be prepared to share that personal connection with my community.
One of the key pieces of transmitting any Jewish knowledge to teens is making it relevant to them – figuring out a way to help them make the information applicable to their daily lives. So the third step evolved as a process of examining the five values through a teenager’s lens. It was essential to figure out how these values, or a close derivative, play out in the teens’ daily lives: socially, emotionally, and culturally. For example, when teaching about the value of Hakhnasat Orhim, I often appealed to their emotions regarding being left out or feeling out of place (an outsider) amongst a group of people. Any teenager, no matter how popular or socially connected, has at one time or another felt out of place. By evoking that emotion, it was easy to introduce Hakhnasat Orhim as the communal antidote to that problem.
In order to entrench an entire community in a set of ethics, the values themselves must become a part of the general vernacular and a part of the “brand identity” of the agency. We couldn’t just talk about the values once a year and expect that it would infiltrate the thoughts, words, and actions of the community members. We imprinted the values on everything from business cards to t-shirts. I inherited giant illustrated posters, one for each value, which we prominently displayed at every weekend retreat in the main program room. When creating a communal prayer book, we were thoughtful of including these values in alternative readings. When leading guided imagery, yoga, song sessions, cabin activities, hikes, etc. we integrated the values both explicitly and implicitly into the programs. Our code of conduct, which every participant and parent had to sign, along with our student and parent handbooks, emanated the values and helped frame the communal decisions we were setting forth (i.e. dress codes, Shabbat observance policies, social action expectations, program attendance requirements, etc).
Beyond articulating that these values were communally held, it was important that everyone in the community would be equally held accountable from for them. This meant from the youngest and newest participant to the oldest and most-seasoned board member, each person was taught the values and expected to embody them in all of their BJE interactions. In particular, I believe that when a staff member was publically held accountable for showing kavod to a young person, it showed the participants that no one was exempt from maintaining the standards of our communal values.
Knowing that BJE program participants would be presented the five values at the beginning of each retreat, and therefore hear the information many times over the years, it was imperative to find creative ways for delivering the content. Sometimes I delivered the values by engaging the participants in a back-and-forth Q&A, other times I asked staff to share personal stories of how the values impacted their lives, on other occasions I asked junior counselors to work with campers in small groups to play word association games related to the values. During the ninth grade program, Adat Noar, teens participated in five retreats. Often, by the third weekend, I asked the teens themselves to do some peer teaching. Once in a while, the staff would write a skit to present the values and sometimes they even came up with a rap, a poem or a song. It was important to be consistent about introducing the values at the start of each program, but we utilized creative, multi-sensory methods for imparting the information.
Assessment of any education objective, whether implicit or explicit, is a critical step for any learning community. Most of our techniques for assessing the impact of the values education program was informal: observing people holding each other accountable on individual basis for behavior, overhearing the language being used in casual conversation, and taking in anecdotes of how the values impacted participants outside of our program. The most formal way we assessed the process was with our graduating seniors. Each graduating senior was required to write an Ethical Will (see sidebar) in order to participate in the program siyyum. The only guideline the teens were given for their writing is that the Ethical Will must be a reflection of the lessons learned in their experiences in TALIT (see previous article). We learned, as you will read in the examples below, that the language of the five BJE values became the natural language of our teens and that the values themselves impacted behavior, attitude and thought.
Building and maintaining an ethics-based community isn’t easy. It requires the leadership to be consistent in word, thought and action. It entails making the values tangible and applicable. It requires forethought, process, accountability and ownership. But the reward is worth it!
See the related article, Ethical Wills.