Highs and Lows #1: Pretty Damn Low

Working in the Jewish world sometimes feels like riding a roller coaster- prospects, results and experiences hit highs and lows and everything in between. One gloomy minute you sense Judaism's impending demise and another you revel in the little things which give us hope.
These last two weekends, as my social life falls to non-existent status, I took a bumpy and jarring, but ultimately telling ride in the figurative amusement park of Jewish youth work. Here's how...

Part I

Asked how I felt after "songleading" a BBYO event last weekend, I replied, "alarmed", and proceeded to explain that BBYO showcases, as if proudly, all the ways in which the dominant secular culture of our time has doomed the Jewish people.

Every Jewish moment of the BBYO Long Island Winter Convention was a struggle, particularly services. The teen leadership stood before their peers, over 300 Long Islanders, pleading with them to stop talking, disrespecting and ignoring the services before them. Regressing to "apology" tactics, the leaders soon insisted that if the group could just remain quiet for even a few minutes, the Birkat Hamazon, the services, the Havdalah, the "Jewish" programs would soon end, allowing all to return to their flirting, gossiping world of mindless, non-contemplative ignorance.

A "Changing the World" program involved making paper chains to demonstrate how each of our actions effects countless others. In the "Ms. Nassau-Suffolk Region" competition, the girls dressed the boys in tight, revealing clothing and the boys "performed" provacative dances and "booty shakes" on stage to be crowned winner. At the dance, the teens proved they had memorized the newest pop hit by rapping along to "Fifty Cents" even though they could not, would not chant along to the Vahavta only hours earlier. And except when paraded onto the "stage" to lead these pathetic, after-thought services before this careless, "too cool for anything meaningful" congregations, this songleader sat in the back, trying to soak it all in, assessing the desolation and contemplating a seemingly dreary future.....

there must be another way.... (see Part II above)