A rabbi and a minister meet for lunch. The minister confides, “I’ve got all these rats running around my church and I can’t seem to get rid of them.”
The rabbi answers, “Oh, I had a similar problem. I solved it by rounding all the rats up and giving them a bar mitzvah. I never saw them again.”
The reality behind this well-circulated joke — a significant post-b’nai mitzvah drop-out syndrome — is anything but a laughing matter.
The syndrome has its roots in 1950s America and suburban synagogues. Jewish parents wanted a meaningful lifecycle event, while Jewish professionals wanted children to enroll in religious school.
So a deal was made: Jewish young adults would get their bar mitzvah ceremony, in exchange for a quota of Jewish schooling.
“We’ve had to respond in a deep way to that American Jewish syndrome,” says Deborah Enelow, director of education at Temple Isaiah in Lafayette. “The delusion is that you have a bar mitzvah instead of becoming one, as if you can be certified [as a Jew].
“We try to stress that [the bar or bat mitzvah] is the beginning. Any education worth a salt is going to go beyond a 13-year-old’s understanding.”
Sporting multiple ear piercings and a tattoo at the small of her back, Ariana Estoque, Congregation Emanu-El’s director of adolescent education, takes it in stride. It’s clear she love teens, and her relative youth at the age of 28 is part of her secret to success.
Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue in San Francisco, challenges the notion that the sole purpose of Jewish education is a bar or bat mitzvah, by requiring that all students remain in both their Sunday program and their mid-week Torah program through the eighth grade, even after the students celebrate their b’nai mitzvah.
Once students enter ninth grade they are encouraged to enroll in the “Rabbi’s Honor Cup Society,” in which the teens meet in small groups on Sundays to discuss life’s issues and the place where Judaism intersects with them.
If it sounds a little like “Dead Poets Society,” where learning is a joy, not a chore, and something that addresses the essence of life, then you’ve got the idea.
But the most important part of this, or any adolescent educational program, is listening to the teens themselves, says Estoque.
“Any time a teen comes to me and says, ‘This is what I want to learn,’ I listen to that.”
One new program is Teen Rosh Chodesh, a special program just for teenage girls. In one recent meeting, the girls visited the ritual bath known as a mikvah, and then got manicures.
The social aspect is key. “I think it’s a lot of fun. It’s very good that the temple has a way to keep people who have been going to temple for so long,” says Rachel Israel, an 11th-grader who serves as the president of Emanu-El’s youth group. “It’s kind of a different group of people I can have fun with.”
Across the Bay and through the Caldecott Tunnel, Temple Isaiah, a Lafayette synagogue affiliated with the Reform movement, takes a similar tack.
“We try to [debunk] the notion that Judaism is some small religion in which you can be certified,” Enelow says, “but rather [emphasize] that Judaism is a deep and rich civilization that has to do with how you deal with yourself, the world around you, and how you deal with the problems and trials of the world every day.”
To that end, Temple Isaiah boasts a weekly “Teen School” whose core curriculum focuses on tikkun olam, repairing the world. Recently the teens looked at child slavery and investigated which chocolate companies do not have certified slave-free chocolate.
Down in the South Bay, Congregation Beth David, a Saratoga synagogue affiliated with the Conservative movement, keeps its teens involved with a Hebrew High that meets once a week. Teens must enroll in a core class with titles such as “To Think As a Jew,” “Fixing the World — What Can I Do and Why Should I Care?” and “Who are the Israelis?” Classes on the Holocaust, Israel, American Jewish history and Jewish ethics round out the mix, and an annual camping trip is thrown in for good measure.
Every other year a delegation travels to Poland and Israel with the March of the Living program. In alternate years, a delegation is sent to Washington, D.C., where the teens get a dose of Jewish civics.
The students are put to work as well, with many serving as teacher’s aides in the Sunday school classrooms, including a program for children with special needs. And if they still don’t have enough to do, they are welcome as Torah readers in the synagogue’s regular Saturday morning service.
At Emanu-El, between 55 and 75 percent of post-b’nai mitzvah teens remain involved in the synagogue. However, Estoque says, “I think we can up that. We can do better.”
But with teens enrolling in synagogue post-b’nai mitzvah programs in increasing numbers, perhaps its time to retire that old joke once and for all.