Three teens stretch out on an enormous circular, rainbow colored rug, surrounded by posters covered in printed text from TaNaKh, Talmud, Mishneh, modern books, and government documents, as well as post-it notes posing follow-up questions and colorful sharpie-scrawled annotations to match. They’ve been annotating the texts on these posters for 7 weeks. In this moment, they are silent, though this is not at all our normal state of being. I’ve charged them with a task: sift through the texts we studied this semester and summarize your conclusions. Quiet music plays. When a timer chimes, their typical, chattering, cacophonous, excited debate resumes. Eventually, they present a scrawled list of their conclusions to Beverly, Gaby, and I, and cap the whole evening with a chocolate milk l’chaim, delighted to have summarized the last 7 weeks of study so succinctly.
When Makom Community set out to pilot a teen learning program, my goals as educator were simple: we wanted our teens to know, in their souls, that Torah is for them. To this end, I challenged them to dive deeply into Jewish texts on the topic of privacy, agency, and personal boundaries and to note what they notice, like, wonder, or want to challenge inside these texts. Our texts ranged from ancient to modern, and we considered Jewish wisdom in conversation with our current reality. We rarely all agreed with each other, let alone with the points made in our texts! In the end, the teens generated their own guide to navigating privacy, boundaries, and freedom of movement in our world, and this is what they concluded:
- Sharing your successes is permissible and encouraged, unless you are specifically bragging, which could inspire jealousy, hatred, or violence towards you.
- Do not go looking for private information about your neighbors, unless you have really good reason to believe they are a danger to themselves or others.
- Don’t put yourself in a situation where you might overhear sensitive information, but also don’t share sensitive information in a place where it could be overheard.
- If you do learn or have dangerous/sensitive (eg. how to build a weapon) information, don’t yap about it, lest you provoke violence or other trouble for yourself or others.
- Don’t show hatred for your bro (gender neutral, affectionate) by spreading lies about them.
- Sharing words of disgrace and/or other private information about a person can be allowed if and only if not doing so would cause more harm, such as if that person often uses derogatory language/slurs or has a history of violence or predatory behavior.
This ranked list captures the Torah of these teens in their own words, and demonstrates the level of nuance and intention they approached our intensive text study with. I cannot wait until we gather again over pizza bagels and maybe more chocolate milk, and once again delve into the fascinating and murky waters of Jewish wisdom.
