The Shabbat of Love & Honor
Please read below for the words our Executive Director, Whitney Fisch, spoke at The Shabbat of Love & Honor:
Shabbat Shalom and Good Evening. For those of you who I haven’t had the chance to meet yet, my name is Whitney Fisch and I am the proud Executive Director of this Hillel at Miami. I want to first thank, from the bottom of my heart, President Crawford, Dr. Cristina Alcalde, and Elizabeth Mellenix for their powerful statement in support of our Hillel and the Miami Jewish community and for their continued support of our Jewish students. This Shabbat would not be possible without the partnership of Dr. Alcalde and the entire Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion as well as the Center for Student Engagement Activities and Leadership and we thank you so much for being genuinely willing to help. I’d also like to thank the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati for jumping in and offering any support necessary so that a small but mighty Hillel like ours could pull off hosting this many people for Shabbat dinner. I’d also like to thank the American Jewish Committee - AJC Cincinnati and AJC Cleveland for their support in making this community shabbat a reality. As an Executive Director of a Hillel and a Jewish mother, I truly felt the warmth of so many people RSVPing for this shabbat but also the fear that there just wouldn’t be enough food! Ask the Hillel staff – that fear is real and so without the help of all the community partners listed above, my fears would be pretty valid so bare minimum, thank you for relieving my Jewish mother anxiety about there not being enough food. I’d also like to thank my partner in Hillel, our Board Chair, Patty Rubin, for making the trip from Cleveland to be with us tonight (and for bringing all the cookies). You are an absolute joy to work with and learn from and I cannot imagine the last 2 years without you. And most especially, I’d like to thank the greatest team in the world – the staff and student leadership of Hillel at Miami – If you are a part of the 2022- 2023 Hillel AJS Va’ad Leadership team or the staff at Hillel at Miami, could you please stand up so we can applaud you?
What is Hillel? Who are we? First and foremost, we are a pluralistic Jewish organization that seeks to engage, connect, and empower Jewish students to explore their Jewish identity so that they may help in the continued creation of a vibrant Jewish community who will go on to inspire the next generation of Jewish leaders.How do we do that? How do we build a community of leaders who want to inspire the connection and leadership of other Jewish students? By creating lasting connections with students, inspiring and training them to become leaders and build their own communities. For example, our Va’ad student leadership team creates and executes every single program Hillel at Miami delivers. When our Jewish Student Life interns wanted to find a way for Jewish students who don’t connect with a typical synagogue prayer service to connect with Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish new year), they decided to create a Jewish camp style Rosh Hashanah service complete with yoga mats, arts and crafts, and yes, the sweet stylings of Cyle on the guitar. Prayers were said, connections were made, God was in the backyard that night. When the war in Ukraine broke out earlier this year, our students and staff mobilized to bake and sell over 150 challahs in 36 hours raising over $2500 to fund psychological services for children affected by the war in Ukraine. And when our sukkah was vandalized almost 2 weeks ago, our student president, Lauren Somers, made herself readily available to staff and her student team and anyone else who needed support knowing that she was the face and voice of our Hillel Jewish students. We cook, we advocate, we listen, we support, we educate, and we learn. We do it all together.
If this is your first time at Hillel and you are Jewish – let me be very clear on this: There is no Jewish prescription needed to be here. You are part of this community automatically. No one is going to question if your family is Jewish or just ‘how Jewish’ you are. You don’t have to join. There are no dues. You are welcome. That’s how we define radical inclusivity. You don’t have to be the ‘right’ kind of Jew to find your space here because there is no such thing as the right kind of Jew. I am a tattooed, non-Jewish dad having, kosher-eating, shabbat loving Southern Jewish woman and not only am I here, but I’m leading this diverse team of leaders. Our students represent all kinds of Jewish – religious, non-religious, cultural, ethnic, Queer, non-binary, neuro diverse, Jews of color, cis-gendered, Greek-affiliated, the list goes on and on. You can be conservative, progressive, left of center, right of center. You can love Israel. You can feel conflicted about Israel. You can have literally no opinion whatsoever and you are welcome here. Our inclusion does not come with caveats (except for being a respectful human. You do kinda need to be a respectful human being to be here). Hillel is a community space for Jewish students. Full stop. You get to explore your religious, cultural, social, spiritual self here. Our incredible staff and student leadership exist to create and maintain a space for you to take a deep exhale and just be the Jew you want to be.
I wear many hats — mother, wife, Jew, sister, daughter – but one of my biggest hats is that I am a social worker and community organizer. The first thing you learn in social work school as a community organizer is to listen. Identify your stakeholders and listen. Do not, under any circumstances, walk into a community and start telling folks what you think they should be doing to build a strong community. No. Instead, you must first listen. Nothing for us, without us as we say in community organizing. Find the leaders – some of whom are obvious, some of whom don’t realize that they’re leaders – but find them and ask questions and listen to them. Watch. Observe. Support. Uplift. Give tools and eventually, make yourself irrelevant because the leaders will eventually shine so bright that you might have to look away because you can’t handle the glare. And for those still unsure of how to connect or be a part of the solution, continually work to understand who they are and not only what drives them, but what are their stumbling blocks from self-identifying as part of the community and how can you remove those stumbling blocks, brick by brick. That’s what we do here, at this Hillel.
To be a Jewish leader on a college campus in 2022 is to feel simultaneous electrifying joy and devastating frustration. I started this job in 2020 – during a time when fear was so palpable you could almost touch it. News cycles and politicians were exploiting it and I was tasked with building a community and offering support to a Jewish student community that weren’t allowed to gather for fear of sickness and even death for some. I think about the students who guided me through this time and lovingly held my hand to welcome me into their Jewish ‘spaces’, their Jewish minds and souls – Sam Belkowitz, Josh Akum, Emily Addalia, Hila Eitam, Hannah Lefkowitz, Marley Ruskin, Maddie McQueen, and Emily Garforth to name a few. I think about the differences of each of these students who now forever live in my heart but the throughline of their Jewishness that brought them all together during that moment of time. I wonder how I can even tell them what their radical empathy meant to me then and how I might ever explain to them the magnitude of their gift to me – these incredible young, gifted MIami Jewish students who weren’t afraid to lead the leader.
To be a Jewish community leader on a college campus in 2022 is to be asked all this week, “If the actions of the three young men from that security footage was just the act of drunken college students and not antisemitism, will you still move forward with this special shabbat?” Yes. Always, yes. Please come and feel our Jewish joy. Please, come and learn who we are – ally and stranger, Hillel student leader and the Jewish Miami student who might never have stepped foot through those doors if not for the voices of the community rising up and saying, “Your Jewishness is welcomed here at Miami” Why should we gather only to commemorate our collective trauma? Why not commemorate our collective pride. I am so proud to be Jewish. I am so proud of this Hillel. I am so proud of who we are and who we want to grow to be. If you are here for the first time and you’re not sure what a Hillel is or what we do here, well look around. This is what we do. We welcome you. We believe in radical inclusivity. We believe in radical acts of Jewish joy and engagement. We believe in radical empathy. How could my cup not runneth over with pride. Look around you. Look at this community.
This year in the Jewish calendar is the year of Hakhel – during the Temple times, the year after the shmitah year (the shmitah year being the seventh year in the seven-year agricultural cycle, when the land is left to lie and rest) - Millions of Jews – men and women, infants and their great-grandmothers, scholars and laypeople – assembled in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount. This mammoth gathering of millions of Jews would watch as the royally bedecked king of Israel ascended on to a platform and read sections of the Torah. The nation of Jews were inspired and invigorated. A display of unity and a statement of purpose converge to revitalize and inspire a diverse people. This event of deep inspiration would occur once every 8 years and how apropo that we are living in a year of Hakhel – of assembly. Please hear me – I make no assumptions that I am a bedecked king of Israel – but the gathering, the waking up, the reinvigorating reverb that is taking place in this backyard tonight is our moment of Hakhel.
And so let me answer this question loudly and clearly – what is it like to be a Jewish community leader on a college campus in 2022? It’s absolute love and honor.
Shabbat shalom.
