Building a Bridge Between Jewish Texts and Reality

Mollie the Donkey has a lot of personality, and because of this, she is the mayor of the URJ Crane Lake Camp farm. If you’re petting the goats, for example, she’s likely to walk over and nuzzle you out of the way, either demanding attention or checking in with her bleating friends to make sure everything is copacetic. She’s likely to steal some hay from the alpaca, who, despite his own caustic attitude, defers to Mollie. The four yapping puppies running circles around her hooves barely faze her.

I spent a lot of time with Mollie and her barnyard friends while teaching an elective course down at the farm. The idea came to me while preparing the story of Bilaam and his donkey for Torah study at my synagogue, just a few weeks before I was set to be on faculty at Crane Lake. What an opportunity: to study Torah next to the animals! I thought about the laws of kashrut with all the talk about split hooves and chewing cud. For kids growing up in predominantly urban and suburban settings, what does that even mean?

So we stood in the muddy pens talking about hooves and how one shouldn’t live in a town where a “horse does not neigh and a dog doesn’t bark” (Pesachim 113a). We talked about human connections to animals: both as protector and friend.

Most importantly, we built a bridge between text and reality. Judaism is tie-dyed into the camp experience, saturated seamlessly, awakening colors of our tradition we thought were muted or outdated. As a rabbi, I too benefited from this magic, leaving an ivory tower for Mollie’s barnyard. I felt connected. Maybe Mollie the donkey was indeed talking too – shedding light on the eternal joy of the Jewish experience.

Rabbi Mara Young ’11 is an alum of HUC-JIR’s Rabbinical School. She is the rabbi at the Woodlands Community Temple.