By Shuli Karkowsky, Moving Traditions CEO
In various telling of Persian and Hebrew folk tales, a sultan requests of the wise King Solomon a phrase that will always be true in good times and bad, and King Solomon responds, “Gam zeh ya’avor: This too shall pass.” The phrase urges us to try to embrace all that life has to offer – the bitter and the sweet – as both are inevitable, unavoidable parts of the human condition, and are never permanent conditions.
These days, there is a lot for Jewish youth to feel bitter about. They are witnessing the rollback of women’s and LGBTQ+ rights; the fear and uncertainty of many immigrants in our communities caused by new enforcement tactics; and the increasingly unchecked environmental damage in the United States. They are anxious about the turmoil in the Middle East, and antisemitic blowback domestically.
Fortunately, the Jewish youth in Moving Traditions’ communities have parents and educators who can teach them how to make space for bitterness and sweetness in their lives. As with the Passover ritual highlighted in our annual resource, The Bittersweet in Every Passover, where we dip our bitter herbs into the sweet haroset.
I invite you to tuck this resource into your Haggadah and try it out this Passover. If you feel moved by it, please make a gift to help Moving Traditions.
All of Moving Traditions’ programs encourage teens to make space for the full spectrum of feelings and experiences. We enable teens to explore their Jewish identity and all the facets of identity that make them who they are, which we call shleimut, or wholeness. We give teens tools to connect to each other, to parents, and to educators with building blocks to build strong community and tolerate differing opinions, which we call hesed, or kindness. And finally, we take that confidence and connection and help teens use it to envision and build toward a better world, which we call tzedek, or justice.
I see this process most clearly in our Meyer Gottesman Immersive Teen Experiences, like the Kol Koleinu Feminist Fellowship. Every year, the 40+ participants in Kol Koleinu take the challenges of being a teen in today’s world and respond with action through social change projects. Recent projects have included the creation and distribution of “Know Your Rights” cards in 14 languages for immigrants; an op-ed on the risks involved in restricting reproductive health care; and a survey and report on the effects of social media about the Israel-Palestinian conflict on teen mental health.
As one recent participant shared, “Kol Koleinu is such a unique special community that centers feminist and Jewish values to guide teens through not only program specific projects but also life. It’s a place to learn how to be a leader and how to speak up, but also a place to have fun and form bonds.”
The famously eloquent Abraham Lincoln once incorporated the “this too shall pass” parable into a speech, but he pushed back on its conclusions: “And yet, let us hope it is not quite true. Let us hope, rather, that by the best cultivation of the physical world, beneath and around us; and the intellectual and moral world within us, we shall secure an individual, social, and political prosperity and happiness, whose course shall be onward and upward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.”
President Lincoln’s take reminds us that while we must be prepared to embrace both the bitter and the sweet, we also must never lose our nerve to keep fighting for more goodness.
With your help, and your generous donation, Moving Traditions can help even more Jewish youth to combine the bitter and the sweet to make the world a better place.
Happy Passover!
As we note in our Passover resource, consider serving two harosets this year, to combat all the bitterness in the world.