By Andrew Adler
Community Editor
On a recent October afternoon, nearly a dozen high school students were gathered in the first-floor Fleischaker-Greene Community Room at the Trager Family JCC. They were waiting to hear from a pair of guest speakers: Sophia Fayne, a senior music therapy major at the University of Louisville School of Music; and Teddy Abrams, music director of the Louisville Orchestra – two articulate examples of a decidedly atypical approach to Jewish education.
Welcome to Kesher Sundays, where tradition and innovation thrive in stimulating coexistence.
Kesher Sundays (“Kesher” is a Hebrew word meaning “connection”) is a subset of JLE – Jewish Learning Experience, a fundamental reconsideration of how best to immerse young people in the wonder of their personal Judaism. The aim is to offer fresh alternatives to the usual means of engaging teens, organized over two sessions per month over an eight-month academic year, September through April.
As the program description puts it: “The first session will take place at the Trager Family JCC and be a discussion based on a theme. The next session will be a field experience, where students will have the opportunity to learn from Jewish leaders in fields throughout our community.”
“What is Jewish Leadership?” was October’s theme, and first up on this day was Fayne, a young woman not much older than the Kesher Sundays students seated around her.
“I’m originally from California – the Los Angeles region,” Fayne said by way of introduction, “so everybody was like, ‘Why would you come to Louisville?’”
Her answer was simple and practical: Music therapy is a highly specialized area of study, meaning “only around 60 schools in the US offered it when I was applying,” Fayne explained.
“Two of them were in California, and I was like, ‘I love California, but I need to experience something new, to go outside my comfort zone,’ so that’s why I decided to apply to out-of-state schools,” she said. “I think it’s what’s helped me grow as a person, and I love UofL’s music program – it was the best fit for me.”
A quick round of student intros followed, and then it was time to delve into relevant particulars. “I guess the first place to start would be talking about what the Jewish community is like at UofL,” said Noah Klein, an assistant principal at Seneca High School serving as Kesher Sundays interim director (Brooklyn, NY educator Jessie Gindea has been hired as the JLE’s permanent head).
“I always love it when I get that question,” Fayne said, “because that was obviously something I was looking at when applying to schools. I was already very narrowed down because of my major, but I knew it was important to me – do they have a Hillel or some type of Jewish organization on campus?”
Still, Fayne’s progress in that arena was incremental. “During my first couple of years at UofL, I wasn’t involved in Hillel. I took a major step back in Judaism, because I was so focused on school and other priorities I had made outside of being Jewish.”
Then came that unforgettable, horrific day.
“October 7 was kind of a wake-up call for me,” Fayne acknowledged, recalling how not long afterward she encountered a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protest on campus, and began hearing increasing calls for BDS – Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.
Fayne was a member of UofL’s student government, and witnessing efforts to draft a bill in favor of divestment became the impetus for her to reclaim her essential Jewish identity.
“It was at that moment that I looked around and I was like, ‘Nobody is going to stand up for Jewish students,’” she said. “I looked at myself and thought, ‘I need to say something.’ So, I stood up — and luckily, that bill was not passed.”
“That summer was when I started to live in Louisville full-time,” she said, “and I made promises to myself to start going to temple again.” Soon, Fayne was forging connections with the Jewish Community Relations Council and its director, Trent Spoolstra, plus “other people involved with the Jewish community who were trying to help Jewish students at UofL.”
Fayne also deepened her relationship with the campus chapter of Hillel.
“There’s a small group of people at Hillel, but there are so many Jewish students at UofL, and so many facets at UofL for you to be Jewish and to be a safe student,” she said. Not to mention, “people who care about who you are and the religion behind you that makes you who you are.”
It was, to be sure, a demonstration of leadership the Kesher students weren’t likely to forget. Standing up for what she believed in “has been really empowering for me,” Fayne told them. A few minutes later, Klein asked his Kesher students to recall how Cantor David Lipp had visited a previous session and spoke about another leader – Moses – along with guests Abigail Goldberg and Sara Klein Wagner.
“One of the things Cantor Lipp talked about was standing up for those who are voiceless,” Klein said, “but also standing up for those who are your allies. And we talked about ‘situational leadership,’ when Abigail said, ‘I was never going to be a youth director of anything,’ and Sara was saying, ‘CEO of the JCC was not on my life path.’”
And yet, it was.
“Situations arose, and they stepped into that moment,” Klein said. “We talked about how sometimes that becomes a whole job. Sometimes situational leadership is being the right person at the right time to say the right thing.”
That leap of relative faith, Klein told his students, was nothing less than “poignant.”
“Where you’re all sitting, no matter what grades you’re in, leadership is tough – and stepping into spaces that aren’t always friendly is tougher,” he said.
And always remember, Fayne added, that “sometimes the loudest people in the room aren’t the majority. You have to be aware of how what I’m about to do is going to affect everyone. Because even though those loud people might seem like the big majority, they’re really not. And at the end of the day, you’d rather help people who maybe are afraid to speak up for themselves.”
While she was talking, Abrams had come into the room, taken off his bicycle helmet, and slipped quietly into a chair.
“Okay, we’re going to transition a little bit,” Klein said. “I’d like to introduce Teddy Abrams. He is the conductor of the Louisville Orchestra, a fellow Jew, and as promised, one of the things we’re going to do is to talk about how careers and Judaism sometimes can intertwine. And when we find those spaces where our faith and our careers intersect, it makes our jobs and our lives that much more interesting.”
Abrams set the tone by tossing out a few questions most teenagers have heard at least once in their lives:
“How many of you feel like you know what your parents want you to do with your lives? How many of you have parents that would be happy if you did, literally anything. How many of you have parents that would be happy if you did something that was aligned with a certain sense of success in the traditional sense – lawyers and doctors – you know, the Jewish trope?”
A few hands went up. Abrams went on. “What if you join the Peace Corps or Greenpeace and went off for five years – maybe making no money but, you know, saving the planet. Would you feel supported?”
This was all a lead into a bit of verbal autobiography, beginning with a confessional:
“I can’t speak much to the Jewish part of my life,” Abrams told his young audience. “I’m not deeply religious. I’m proud of my heritage, or at least I think – as George Carlin said – I’m happy about my heritage. I think if I’m around a lot of Jews, I tend to be way more secular,” Abrams observed. “But if I’m around a bunch of Gentiles, then I get way more Jewish. So being here, you’re probably going to get one side of me.”
Abrams recounted how he grew up in Oakland, California, one of three brothers whose a father who “came from a liberal Reform Jewish family, but which was very serious about the elements of religion that they practiced” – and whose blond-haired mother hailed from California’s San Fernando Valley, the daughter of parents who were decidedly unserious about the tenets of formal religion.
“I think she rebelled against them and tried to live as much as she could as a non-Jew,” Abrams said, “and we were caught in a kind of tug-of-war between both our parents. “My dad really wanted me to get a bar mitzvah, so he would take us to temple. My mother tried to pull us away from that side of our family’s history.”
Abrams related his familiar professional narrative: studying at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and with his mentor Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. “I heard my first orchestra concert when I was nine and he was conducting,” Abrams recalled, “and within five minutes I’d decided I wanted to be a conductor.”
Jews, Abrams told his Kesher Sunday listeners, became prominent in the entertainment field in large part since many other professions were closed to them. “Music has always been a big part of Jewish culture,” he explained, “partly because it’s the primary art form we practice.”
Likening the role of an orchestra conductor to that of a “servant leader,” Klein asked Abrams, “What intersections do you see between (leadership), your job and your faith?”
“One of the most beautiful things about Judaism,” Abrams replied, “is that because we’ve usually been on the receiving end of oppression, and on the receiving end of people’s hatred and misunderstanding, it’s forced us to use [its] ideology as a shield, to provide us with a sense of who we are.
“Those are important values,” he acknowledged. “But I think there’s something way beyond that applies to anybody in any spiritual condition: If you have a privilege, if you’ve been given something, you have to share it. You don’t own anything. I don’t own anything. Your talents are not your own. You understand, even your money, your land, it’s not your own. If you have some kind of power, you’re supposed to extend that power until it evens out in society.”
There was more, much more, that Abrams spoke about eloquently. And when he finished (“my soapbox,” he quipped) and asked if there were any questions or comments, he couldn’t resist making one final comparison: between the Jews and Jackie Robinson – major league baseball’s first black player.
“He knew he had to hold himself to such a high standard, Abrams said. “He couldn’t just be any baseball player.”
“It’s like us,” Abrams declared. “We can’t just be any young people in America right now. You know what? People hear the stereotypes, and they start believing them. We’ve all heard people slip and say something racist and nasty, right? So we have to hold ourselves to such a standard that it’s beyond scrutiny. Nobody can say that we act in the ways that people have held against us for all these years. That means we have to be even more generous. We have to be even more caring and thoughtful and inclusive. Because, you know, those are the very things that we are sometimes told we are not.”
It all comes down to refusing to be cowed by prejudice, to be crushed by the weight of ignorance. Witness the experience of Noa Chottiner, the daughter of Lee and Rabbi Beth Jacowitz Chottiner, who on this Kesher Sunday afternoon shared a telling anecdote:
“Last year during my first year of high school, I befriended this Muslim girl,” she recalled. “A couple of weeks later, when she heard that I was in support of Israel, she decided that she couldn’t be my friend anymore. And I said, ‘All right, you don’t have to support Israel. That’s all right. I know I do.’
“I told her that we might have different beliefs, but I don’t think they should get in the way of our friendship,” Chottiner said. “I offered to keep the friendship, but she walked away from it, and that really hurt me. I could’ve been nasty and rude to her, but I chose not to. Every day when I walked past her in the hall, I still gave her a smile and said, ‘Hi.’ I chose to be kind, because I feel like, when they go low, you need to be the bigger person.”
Meanwhile, Abrams vows that one day he’ll make his formal entry into Jewish manhood – the one studied for back in Oakland but never quite managed to achieve.
“I’m planning to do a big Bar Mitzvah,” he promised his Kesher Sunday listeners. “Actually, I’m going to make a one-man musical, where the Bar Mitzvah is inside the musical. There will be the whole thing – a Torah portion and everything. And the after-party will be the post-Bar Mitzvah party.”