Adina Roth – Head of Jewish Life

My parents were not vegetarian hippies
A Lag B’omer lesson

“Ms, I read your article,” exclaimed one of my students as we began our class last Friday. “You read my D’var torah,” I said (trying not to betray too much excitement that my students are reading words of Torah during recess). “No… I read the one ABOUT you… your parents were vegetarian hippies!”.

“Ah…that one,” I said, recalling that the Marketing Team had wanted to do a profile on me. “And that they were,” I said, smiling and hoping it would make me seem a little cool to my students.  But my parents didn’t find it cool. They now subscribe to Ma Nishma and love reading it every week. Last weekend, after Shabbat, my dad said to me, “I wouldn’t have called us hippies”. He followed up the conversation with a message on WhatAapp. Synonyms for hippies: Pot head, hash head, burn out, flower child, stoner, Beatnik, dropout. My parents weren’t thrilled at being reduced in that way to the entire Emanuel community. It even led to a family chat between my dad and his sister. My Aunt Bev offered a re-write, “My parents were vegetarian and meditators, long before it was trendy”. My dad elaborated, “their leisure studies varied from Talmud, Sanskrit and the classics. Yet Yiddishkeit and Modern Orthodoxy was their default. They are both professional in career; my dad is an Optometrist, my mum is a Hebrew teacher.’

The truth is, I used the word hippy as a lazy catch-all. But my dad was right. It doesn’t capture who my parents are. Because often, one-worders don’t describe people. This last week we celebrated the holiday in the middle of the Omer period, known as Lag B’Omer. Lag B’Omer, is the 33^rd day in a 49 day ‘count-up’ from Pesach to Shavuot. While the Omer is a time of semi-mourning, Lag B’Omer is a day of great celebration; think bonfires, s’mores, guitars and BBQs. Most famously, it is known as the day that the students of the great Rabbinic sage Rabbi Akiva stopped dying from a terrible plague. The Talmud recalls that Rabbi Akiva had 12,000 students who were struck with a terrible plague after Passover one year. There are different reasons given for this plague but the Rabbis link the students’ terrible fate to ethics, saying that the students were “punished” because they did not show respect or honour to one another. What does this mean? Some say that the students gossiped about each other, (a bad case of Gossip Girl) some say that they were stingy with their Torah learning and didn’t share it (think the envy of Black Swan with Yeshiva students). But I was struck by an interpretation of what the students did that is brought by an ancient Midrash in Bereshit Rabba; “their eyes were narrow/miserly towards each other”. To put this differently, the students looked at each other in a constricted way, seeing what they wanted to see, and not seeing what was actually there, the fullness, the complexity and the infinite potential of another human being.

We don’t inhabit a world view where plague is a punishment for anything! However if one lives in a community that is rife with gossip, envy and stingy ways of seeing each other, the community would not be considered healthy or thriving with vitality!

I think this kind of “stingy seeing” is very easy to become the norm in a community. We become habituated to each other in a kind of way that we decide you are this and I am that. You are x and she is y. This is pretty much what I did by fixing my parents as “vegetarian hippies”. This is also how social groups form in school, becoming unnecessarily rigid and fixed. You might actually get on very well with a student in another group but the friendship is made difficult because you have some limiting label about the group they are in.

I am very excited to start working with a group of Batmitzvah girls at Emanuel this week. They will be embarking on a year-long journey together, exploring Judaism, and what it means to come of age. Crucially they are doing it in a group. In the past I taught this kind of group with girls from different schools and, so when they arrived, they had no prior labels or preconceptions of each other. When I start with the Emanuel girls, I am aware that they may have prior ideas about each other because they are familiar with each other. I have been thinking about how to challenge these preconceptions so that they can start to see each other anew. Perhaps part of doing this is simply to talk about it together.

We all deserve so much more than one-worders to describe ourselves. When we can recognise what philosopher Levinas calls the infinite potential of each human being, we reinvigorate our classrooms, our friendships and our communities. “My parents were vegetarian and meditators long before either of those things were trendy”.

Shabbat Shalom