Legacy Passage is an innovative Jewish educational tool designed to authentically address the rite-of-passage needs of the minimally observant American Jewish family. A heirloom-quality family workbook and a deck of cards, the program radically re-contextualizes the Bar and Bat Mitzvah (BM) process (preparation and ceremony). The program’s approach transforms the BM from a celebration of the child’s Jewish self to a Jewish celebration of the child’s whole self - abilities, family, people-hood, and soul.
The Legacy Passage curricular tools provide the synagogue educator/Rabbi a well organized framework for a year long BM preparation course that meaningfully and seamlessly integrates the many BM strands into a coherent and powerful process. The artfully designed book, which is structured to neatly store the entire gamut of BM related documentation, is intended to remain a child’s precious keepsake alongside other cherished religious books and paraphernalia.
Three major components:
1. Family and facilitator (rabbi/cantor/tutor) together clarify a vision for the BM preparation year. A shared mission is established, i.e. to transmit the family’s legacy to the maturing child - personal as well as Jewish. We thus invite the parents to be full and equal partners with the synagogue representative in carrying out a deeply meaningful and shared mission. This component focuses on conceptual clarity-making and relationship tone-setting with the BM family.
2. The family takes the lead role in selecting the components of the child’s BM preparation program within the parameters of the synagogue ritual standards and values. The process of Engaged Choice (see ASEM assignment cards) allows each family to design a rite-of-passage program that focuses on their child’s strengths and interests. It further establishes and deepens the parent/synagogue partnership. The BM preparation program is pedagogically centered around two classical BM themes:
a. Legacy Passage.
b. Maturity training and celebration.
3. The synagogue representative inserts into the book’s designated loose-leaf pocket information with practical advice regarding the nuts and bolts of producing their ceremony and accompanying celebration. The family need not reinvent the production wheel. The synagogue representative will offer pragmatic guidance in order to free-up family members’ time and attention toward the BM educational and emotional substance.
Why Legacy Passage?
For the majority of minimally-observant American Jewish families during the past couple of generations the BM ceremony has been a primary motivator for participation and affiliation with the synagogue. Participation with a Jewish educational system and/or prayer community whether Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal, or unaffiliated has provided families with a sense of belonging and pride. The participating BM child has enjoyed the rewards of personal recognition and accomplishment. However, for many families the engagement has primarily been child focused and lasted until the youngest completed his or her BM track. This dynamic has been further compounded by the fact that many a family and their young celebrant have gone through their Jewish educational phase experiencing a great deal of incongruity, dis-empowerment, and cognitive dissonance - belonging and pride notwithstanding. As a result most BM graduates have remained alienated from Jewish communal life until, at best, they themselves have become parents. And so a diminishing cycle continues.
We have developed the Legacy Passage BM program as a response to the incongruous experience that we believe is systemic to the contemporary American synagogue BM. Legacy Passage is designed to enable a different BM paradigm. We approach BM holistically. The program treats the BM preparation period and ceremony as a Jewish celebration of the child’s entire self - body, heart, mind, abilities, family, people-hood, and soul. Our goal is to deeply engage the full spectrum of the child’s and family’s life experience, not only the Jewish “sliver”. Our premise is that each individual in the family as well as the family system as a whole already possess the ingredients for a coherent, congruent, empowered, and Jewishly authentic rite-of-passage process.
Our approach follows from the analysis that a BM program that offers a compartmentalized experience, focusing primarily on the celebrant’s synagogue skill-set, perpetuates a disconnect between the child’s Jewish communal experience and the rest of his/her life. The latter will most likely win the contest of appeal. The Legacy Passage program operates under, and propagates the assumption of identity wholeness rather than a contest between a “Jewish life” and a “rest of life”. Legacy Passage is designed to honor the student and family for who-they-are as-they-are helping them discover and mine their extant identity resources and strengths. Most importantly our program is designed to validate and enhance the family’s wishes for Jewish connection, learning, and practice. The family chooses, we, clergy and educators, follow and guide.
We have found that the family/child centered approach provides participants with a deep sense of relevance and lasting emotional satisfaction. It is our belief that as synagogues around the country adopt the Legacy Passage holistic approach, BM standards and practices will shift to better serve the minimally observant constituency, renewing an authentic reciprocity and loyalty between synagogues and a growing number of their members.
History
The program evolved from our experience with tutoring and ceremony leading with approximately seventy students over the course of the past near decade. While serving members of Congregation B’nai Torah of Orange County NY (Conservative style) and Hebrew Learning Circles (www.hebrewlearningcircles.com) home-study-program participants since 1998, we have been searching for ways to address the ethno-spiritual needs of the minimally observant Jewish family. The all-in-one workbook and card deck concept emerged organically in 2006 as we began organizing our, and others’, best practices into a coherent pedagogical unit. The ASEM assignment-cards system has been met with great enthusiasm by our students ever since we introduced them in 2007. The assignments have been providing us invaluable opportunities for heuristic Jewish education. Our participating families have continually been our best teachers.
Since the start of 2009 we have been working diligently to prepare the program for publication and widespread use. Presentations about the Legacy Passage unit at the Ohalah Rabbinical conference in January 2009 have been received with enthusiastic interest. The wealth of useful feedback has helped us further fine-tune the Legacy Passage Family Workbook and the Legacy Passage Facilitator’s Edition in preparation for publication. Recent presentations of the curriculum to a select group of Rabbis and Jewish educators have stirred-up honest reflections, great discussions, and subsequent enthusiastic interest in the program.
