Old School Ties

I had an amazing meeting last week. I got together with seventeen members of my 7th grade class, the people with whom I celebrated bar and bat mitzvah. I've really been trying to process what the reunion meant to me. These were people, some of whom I haven't seen in 45 years.      
What would it feel like to see them again? After all, I wasn't really friends with all of them. Like any other group of kids, we went in different directions, both in terms of how our lives had proceeded and geographically. People came from as far as Atlanta and Maine to meet in Connecticut at the home of two of our classmates. While it's true that we were all Jews (from a Conservative and a Reform congregation in Waterbury, CT), this get-together was secular. Wasn't it?

 Well, yes and no. Except for an impromptu "Shehecheyanu" no one spoke much about our Jewish background. On the other hand, we reminisced about our b'nai mitzvah parties, and our memories of Hebrew school (almost universally loathed). We mostly schmoozed, like friends do. We shared old photos (graduations and party-pics) and favorite moments. It wasn't really "Jewish." Except that among the 18 (yes, I know, chai!) of us there were: one cantor, one rabbi, four synagogue presidents or past presidents, a dozen board members (or ex-board members), and one person who was more dati (observant) than any of us might have guessed when we were kids. Even the people who were in no way involved in Jewish communal life were still linked to the group by that tenuous tie, a Jewish childhood.Our education had taken us away and brought us together again. In every town and city to which we had scattered, we sought out a connection to Judaism.


 So, did our teachers succeed? After all, here we are, confidant Jewish adults, able to navigate at least the periphery and in some cases the heart of our religion. At times in my tenure as a congregational cantor I've sometimes thought that synagogue schools do everything they can to make Judaism seem banal and tedious. But most of the people in that room didn't stop at "pediatric" Judaism. We went on to learn more, to delve more deeply, to assume that 3,000 years of history, liturgy, thought, and ritual was more than what we were taught in 8 years of religious school education. Maybe our teachers, rabbis, and cantors didn't do such a terrible job after all.