Jewish Community

By Abe Fried-Tanzer
KOC Assistant Editor
New York University

Throughout my childhood, I always attended some form of Hebrew School, beginning with my synagogue's nursery school and continuing straight into the temple's religious school program, which goes up until seventh grade. After my Bar Mitzvah, I opted to pursue further Jewish education by attending Hebrew College's Prozdor high school program, which met Sundays and Wednesdays each week. Prozdor began in eighth grade during middle school and lasted up until eleventh grade, culminating in a senior year seminar complete with a teaching assistant program for students to gain classroom experience.

My early Jewish education was never my primary education. Unlike many, I did not attend the local Jewish day schools, like Schechter, Maimonides, or Rashi. I went to public school. Temple Israel Religious School was a supplemental thing for me. In my high school years, when I became active in my chapter and region of USY, I never quite got into the learning sessions as much as some of my peers. It's not that learning Torah or studying laws didn't interest me; it's rather that my enthusiastic engagement often existed elsewhere.

As part of the preparation for our Bar Mitzvah year, my seventh grade Hebrew class was required to attend morning minyan once a week, on either Mondays or Thursdays, so as to be present for the Torah reading. I live a twenty-minute drive from my synagogue, so it was an especially active early morning for the brave residents of Holliston, Massachusetts, who had to get up before 6am to carpool around the town and leave services the moment they concluded to arrive back at school only a few minutes late.

Yet, I fully embraced the experience. I had had some interaction with a daily minyan from the two summers I spent previously at Camp Ramah, learning the prayers and the tunes. But this was the first time I really got into everything. I learned how to lead services, so that on occasion I could be the one to lead the people in the small chapel hall in prayer at 6:45am. I learned how to lead other services as well, to the point where I was told that I couldn't actually lead every part of the service at my Bar Mitzvah, as I had wanted to, because it was simply too much for one person to do, with several Torah portions and a Haftarah reading. Looking back, it was a wonderful problem – I had too much enthusiasm for services, something which many people find difficult to get into and absorb.

Over the past few years, I've added a number of other services to my repertoire, and I now lead Kabbalat Shabbat and Shabbat minhah on a regular basis at NYU's Conservative minyan. I've becoming increasingly involved in planning activities, first as a Jewish Life Liaison, then a KOACH intern and now a member of the Hillel board. For me, that's one of the greatest aspects of my continuing Jewish education. I learn so much from my social interactions with other Jews. There's a reason I stay at NYU's Hillel until eleven o'clock or midnight every Friday night and why I walk up a hundred blocks to go shul-hopping on the Upper West Side on Simhat Torah. My Jewish learning is focused not on the study of text but on the wonder of active participation in the Jewish community.

[Posted 10/29/08]