Growing Forward
This High Holiday season is our experiment. Sure, we could do what’s always been done — typical service option on Erev Rosh Hashanah and Rosh Hashanah day plus Kold Nidre and Yom Kippur services, but two things are true about Hillel at Miami that pushed us to experiment:
We are not a synagogue. We are not one 11 months out of the year and do not want to pretend to be one for a few weeks during the High Holidays. We are a community center. We are a community and a place where Jewish students can connect with their Judaism through religious experiences like our student-led shabbat services but also through our cultural, learning, leadership, and activism.
We are student-driven and student-led.
Change is hard. We know that. But growth and excellence never came from staying stagnant and this High Holiday season, our team of Jewish student leaders, in partnership with myself and our Engagement staff, wanted to experiment with a different kind of High Holiday experience. “What would happen”, we collectively thought, “if we shook things up a bit? Did something different? Gave students multiple modalities of exploring the High Holidays aside from traditional prayer?”
The 2020 Pew study of 4,718 Jewish American adults (and please do not forget, college students are young adults) fielded from Nov. 19, 2019, to June 3, 2020, taught us that U.S. Jews are less religious than American adults overall. About one-in-ten Jewish Americans (12%) say they attend religious services at least weekly in a synagogue, temple or less formal setting – such as a havurah or independent minyan – compared with about a quarter of U.S. adults who say they attend religious services weekly or more (27%). The Pew study also told us that 41% of young Jewish adults do not identify with any particular branch of American Judaism. Most of the people in this category are “Jews of no religion” – they describe their religion as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular, though they all have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish and still identify as Jewish culturally, ethnically or because of their family background.
I am a social worker and community organizer by training. I was taught to go into communities and listen — to identify stakeholders, to build a needs assessment, to bring leaders together and support their needs so that they can become the organizers of their own community. My job is not to go in and tell a community what they need. Rather, my job is to support the work that’s already being done, to shine a light on needs not met, and to use the strength of the already established (though sometimes not identified) leaders in that community in order to problem solve and create a more thriving and sustainable community. That’s what we’re doing here at Miami. In listening to the needs of our community as told to us through our student leadership and coupled with what we know of young adult Jews from the Pew study and in a post-COVID college campus, we wanted to offer means of connection that doesn’t look like a traditional minyan. Here’s what we created at Hillel at Miami for this High Holiday season:
High Holidays for Hillel include the week leading up to Rosh Hashanah, therefore, our Engagement team hosted "pop-ups" around campus giving out High Holiday-themed goodies plus Rosh Hashanah and Israel-themed programming every night leading up to Rosh Hashanah.
Experimenting with hosting evening services and family-style meals. Our Jewish student life interns were set on providing an Erev Rosh Hashanah experience that was more Jewish camp vibes and less traditional synagogue vibes but were committed to going more traditional for Kol Nidre, which will be led by Senior Rabbinic student, Anna Meyers Burke
We are using the extra energy for additional niche programs that speak to the variety of ways a student might want to connect: Reverse Tashlich in Peffer park, Yom Kippur Torah study with Israel Fellow, Yonadav Grossman, Fast and Relax: board games and quiet spaces at Hillel all day of Yom Kippur, and a huge break fast at Hillel.
After this season we will gather as a team and evaluate all that we created — we will investigates that hits and the misses. In the meantime, as staff at Hillel, nothing brings our team more joy than being a support system for our Miami Jewish students so that they may create Jewish experiences on their terms. It’s never about us and always about them. These incredible Jewish young adults are our Jewish future and are building our Jewish present at Miami University.
G’Mar Chatima Tova. May you be inscribed in the book of life. May this year continue to bring good health and a vibrant and thriving Jewish community for you and for the next generation.
Shabbat Shalom,
Whitney Fisch, MSW
Executive Director
