constructed alongside one another, creating
a form of fixed prayer (
keva
).
This structure
becomes a genre allowing others to both
replicate and deviate, hoping to evoke an
emotional response and offer a meaningful
interpretation.
In order for prayer to be complete, in-
tention (
kavanah
)
is also necessary. This is
something that each of us must offer indi-
vidually. The role of clergy is to provide the
atmosphere for meaningful worship experi-
ences that can range from quiet spaces with
little distraction to a box of finger paints or
sidewalk chalk.
As part of the alternative
minyan
,
which
meets on Tuesdays and Wednesdays on
HUC-JIR’s Los Angeles campus, students
have often led morning worship services
with a creative twist. From a service held in
August, the sidewalk leading up to the cam-
pus’s main doors remained decorated with
vibrant, colorful depictions of the morning
shacharit
service long after
Rosh Hashanah
,
Yom Kippur
and
Sukkot
had come and gone.
Following President Obama’s inauguration
speech on January 20, 2009, students gath-
ered once again to offer their visual hope for
the new administration, sharing
the juncture at which these
hopes meet themes in the daily morning
service. Personally, I take these ideas to my
student pulpit in Spokane, WA. welcoming
creative interpretations of the prayer service
from adult worshippers alongside pre-
b’nei
mitzvah
participants during a Saturday
morning creative service.
At HUC-JIR, we are learning to take
what inspires us and integrate this inspira-
tion into our Jewish leadership. We have our
individual boxes of raw materials to create,
fine tune, and strengthen. In training to be-
come Jewish professionals, we are provided
with many white canvasses to experiment on
and a studio space that offers supervision,
instruction, and imagination. Then, we take
our portfolio out into the world, hoping to
collaborate and create alongside others.
As God created, so too do we. It is a
mitzvah
(
hiddur mitzvah
)
to make things
beautiful. By bringing art into worship we
encourage an openness to the divine through
our creative processes. We are given guid-
ance (
keva
)
but we are also in need of our
imaginative self (
kavanah
)
to internalize
Jewish prayer and create a meaningful rela-
tionship with God, and our own creative
communities.
Chalk draw-
ings on the Los
Angeles campus side-
walk enrich worship
through creativity.
Arab and
Israeli
Coexistence
…
in the Most
Unlikely of
Places
Jennifer Gubitz, NY ’12
D
uring my first year of rabbinical studies
at HUC-JIR/Jerusalem, I spent a con-
siderable amount of time in Israel working
with inmates – both Jewish and Arab – who
had committed a variety of crimes, the de-
tails of which I was generally unaware. They
would show up at 8:30 a.m. at a
Kibbutz
ed-
ucational garden. Thrilled to see us, they
would approach us with handshakes and
hugs, and chain smoke cigarettes and drink
instant coffee until we called them over to
the benches in front of the outdoor Ark. My
classmate
Evan Schultz
and I would lead
them in a few songs – a camp singalong re-
ally – and the men would clap and smile and
continue smoking, thrilled to be outdoors,
relatively free, and amused by two Americans
with poor Hebrew. The Jews and Arabs sat
side by side on the wooden benches, Isaac
and Ishmael literally and figuratively, grin-
ning and relaxed.
Occasionally, one would share a story
with me about how he found his way to jail.
One took the fall for a ring of lawyers in-
volved in a scandal; another killed his best
friend in a drunk driving accident. Some
made their crime in America and asked to be
jailed in Israel because the Israeli jail system
has a unique aspect to it. In Israel, one of the
equivalent words used for parole is “
Teshu-
vah.
”
Translated literally this word means
“
turning or returning,” but we also translate
it as repentance, a theme most relevant to
Yom Kippur
.
It is intrinsic in the Israeli crim-
inal justice system that one is able to repent
MEET HUC-J IR’S STUDENTS
2009
ISSUE 72 | 33
