The vibrancy of Tu Bishvat and the Tucson Jewish Community
Tu Bishvat celebrations around Tucson highlighted the strength of the Jewish community: from Federation’s Tu Bishvat in the park for young families to THA’s, the Jewish Day School, nature hike, the J’s Israeli Wine and Tapas event, and Sedarim and nature programs at nearly all of Tucson’s synagogues.
Today, I attended two very different Tu Bishvat programs that represent the sustainable visions of two different synagogue models and their education programs — one that is formal and the other grassroots.
Congregation Anshei Israel held a Tu Bishvat program in the park. Even though this took place in lieu of the regular Sunday morning educational program, eighty percent of the children from K-6 grades and their families attended along with most of the Madrichim teen leaders and Madrichim Coordinator/Youth Group Advisor. This group also comprised nearly eighty percent of all the participants of the program.
More important than the content of the activities that explored our connections to the lands of Tucson, Israel, and our place in the natural world, this program represents the synagogue’s vision of learning through living Judaism together.
Teen leaders replaced individual teachers by combining smaller classes into two large groups (K-2 and 3-6 Grades). With one senior teacher in the room, the teens set a vibrant camp-like tone for the younger kids. The younger kids look up to these madrichim, and remain involved and invested in synagogue life during and after Bnai Mitzvah years so they can take this coveted position as a role model when they reach high school.
The program also replaces one Sunday a month with a “Shabbat’s Cool” morning program so participants will experience Shabbat not just learn about it.
So too, we build the celebrations of the holidays into the curriculum. The best attendance to these programs is of teen leaders. They are maximizing the vision by gradually taking over and animating the culture of synagogue life. These substantive tweaks in this formal educational program are successfully engaging youth and their families and are slowly revitalizing and revolutionizing this rapidly aging Conservative synagogue. As the outgoing Education Youth Director for the past five years, I take pride in the integrated innovative program we have built. This educational program made the synagogue’s Tu Bishvat celebration a success by the participants naturally emerging into a community that celebrates their Judaism together.
Later in the afternoon, our family went across town to celebrate Tu Bishvat with the Midbar Project and Congregation Bet Shalom. How awesome to see a synagogue partner with a counter-cultural group of unique individuals in their 20s and 30s who are actively expressing their Judaism through farming.
The synagogue invited this small group of people to develop a piece of land on the synagogue’s property over the past year. They built lowered beds with compost and coconut husks enriching and aerating the rich desert soil. A member of the congregation built a chicken coop.
Their year-long work naturally culminated with a Tu Bishvat celebration. Hillel students came out to build and paint fences. Children played with the chicks in the coop, did face painting, and planted potato and sunflower seeds in the garden beds. The program ended on a high note with a spiritual Tu Bishvat Seder that took place outside in the garden.
This strategic partnership is a result of Bet Shalom’s eagerness to engage anyone and everyone in Jewish and spiritual life. They attracted a group of Jewish seekers who are expressing their Judaism authentically and passionately through the original spirituality of developing the gifts from God’s earth. This strategic partnership with The Midbar Project is a symbiotic one that provides a traditional home for this local expression of a flourishing national Jewish farming movement. This, in turn, opens yet another broad avenue of Jewish engagement for people in the synagogue.
These two thriving models of synagogues are radically different from one another, but upon closer analysis, there are numerous similarities: both are innovating within traditional contexts; both are providing substantive forms of Jewish engagement; both are tapping into and empowering often alienated populations; both are changing the context in which people are learning. Two very different programs and cultures that are using similar strategies to succeed. Each one has a different vision that is sustainable in, and sustaining, the Tucson Jewish community.
Just as Tu Bishvat celebrates the first blossoming of the year, these programs represent the flourishing of Jewish life throughout Tucson.
-Rabbi Ruven Barkan