Julia Ullman 2:2

This weekend, my temple youth group had an end-of-year event.  On Friday night, the incoming and outgoing youth group board members were invited to dinner.  This was followed by a camp-style congregational Shabbat service where all temple kids going to camp were invited to participate and get a gift to take to camp.  After, we had a bonfire and made smores as a whole community.  And then after that, about 50 teenagers slept over at the temple for a “Shul-In” before heading to Cedar Point for the day on Saturday.  Quite a long day!!

But before any of that programming even happened, Beth and I worked hard all during the day on Friday to get ready.  On Thursday we had done the shopping for the program, but Friday we had to set up the rooms for the dinner and service, figure out logistics, and be generally prepared for the entire night of programs.  As Kate would have if she had been there, I helped Beth with all of these tasks. 

All went surprisingly well. In my time working with the youth group throughout my years of high school, if I have learned nothing else, I have learned that nothing ever goes exactly as planned and you have to just go with the flow and be ready to be flexible.  But this program went as close to as planned as I could have possibly wanted.  The dinner went quite well, as did the service.  It was weird to have been in charge of the planning and organizing but not be leading the service itself, as I often do.  

I did, however, lead a Torah-related experiential activity instead of a sermon, as it was a creative, unusual service.  Every week, a different section of the Torah is read in every single synagogue in the world.  Each week’s portion is a number of verses taken chronologically from the Old Testament (the Torah) to be able to complete the entire Torah within a year’s cycle.  Anyway, this week’s portion was about the Israelites wandering in the desert.  They had limited resources and had to learn to work together as a community to accomplish their goals.  In our modern context, we gave groups of 4-5 people (children, teens, adults, grandparents all participated) each 1 yard of yarn, 1 yard of masking tape, 1 giant marshmallow, and 20 long pieces of dry spaghetti.  In 10 minutes, they had to build the tallest free-standing structure with those materials.  Some groups got really creative, and one even built the entire thing on top of a tall guy’s head…they won.  It was all about being resourceful and being able to communicate.  I was really proud to have come up with this idea for this program (the Marshmallow Challenge is an existing and established program, but we altered it a lot for our own context) and to have run it so successfully.  It was really cool to see adults from the congregation working together, families forming teams, and even random people who happened to be sitting together all working hard on this activity.   This is my rabbi and two of my friends with their tower...