You made it!
Can you believe it?
I can’t believe it!
After all, we had every reason to believe that we’d never make it to Confirmation this year.
We made it, despite your rabbi’s unintentional icecapades on the morning of Halloween. I figured, that’s it, the Confirmation retreat is definitely off…. But thanks to the Confirmation Class of 5772, we made it! You stayed clear of my crutches, schlepped my luggage, brought me Advil, propped my gimpy foot up on a pillow all weekend, and didn’t make too many jokes about my facial hair experiment.
We made it, despite the bus conspiring to break down on its way home from our mitzvah project at the Westchester Food Bank. Rather than kvetch to Grace, or insist that your parents bail you out, you organized the only logical response: a massive song session. Who would have guessed that the Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys would have such a far-reaching cultural impact but Grace is pretty sure that she heard Will singing along to “I Want It That Way.”
We made it, despite repeated attempts to make one another other violently ill on the flight simulators at the Air and Space Museum during our trip to Washington, DC. Yes, Ethan and Annie, I'm talking to you.
We made it, despite Rabbi Jacobs taking off in the middle of the year in order to begin his new work as, basically, the Pope of Reform Judaism... and then, just when things were starting to settle down, we learned that our very own Crabbi Dan Sklar was heading off to an outstanding new position as Senior Cantor of Temple Israel in Westport, Connecticut.
Yes, Confirmation Class of 5772, you made it! So for a few minutes I want to reflect on why I think you made it and what I think it’s going to take for you to make it in this complicated, challenging, and often confusing world in which you are rapidly growing up.
Since 2000, the Global Language Monitor (GLM) has been selecting the Top Ten Words, Phrases and Names of the Year. To select these words, phrases, and names it analyzes language usage in the worldwide print and electronic media, on the Internet and throughout the Blogosphere, including social media. In its annual global survey of the English language, GLM announced its Top Words of the Year for last year. Tellingly, “Occupy” was the Top Word, and “Arab Spring” the Top Phrase. But do you know the top name for this past year? No, it was not Dan Sklar, although if GLM had analyzed global e-mail output for the last year, it might have yielded a different result!
Hint: Think Different.
The top name of the last year was Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was the top name of 2011, and “Think Different” was the top slogan for Apple Computer from 1997-2002, right up through the introduction of the iPod. “Think Different” is an amazing slogan, one that I embrace, despite its deliberate misuse of the adjectival form “Different” instead of the adverbial, “Differently.”
The “Think Different” campaign featured posters with photographs of different icons like Albert Einstein, Jim Henson, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Amelia Earhart, and Mahatma Gandhi. It presented this text: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Confirmation class of 5772, “Think Different” is one of the two reasons you made it here today.
You are growing up in a culture that does not want you to “Think Different.” You are growing up in a culture of conformity. The voices of conformity speak not just in unison, but in a mind-numbing monotone: Get yourself into the right school. Get yourself the right clothes. Get yourself with the right crowd. Get yourself some sleep and exercise and healthy food, unless you need to study some more, in which case, don’t.
Over one hundred seventy years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson put it this way; remember it well: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood [today, we would add, ‘and womanhood’] of every one of its members….The virtue most [requested] is conformity….Whoso would be a man [today, we would add, ‘or a woman’] must be a nonconformist” (from "Self-Reliance").
Think Different!
Confirmation Class of 5772, do you know the most common spelling mistake in the history of Confirmation? A number of you made it in your Personal Statements.
It’s okay. Don’t panic. Jessica Miller, our amazing Intern who joined the RAC trip and helped to coordinate today’s service, caught them all.
It’s when a student spells Confirmation like this:
“C.O.N.F.O.R.M.A.T.I.O.N.”
Oh, that pesky “O!”
Your spell-checker won’t catch it, because “conformation” is a perfectly acceptable word.
But make no mistake, it’s a mistake.
You are not the “Conformation Class of 5772.” You made it here today because you gloriously, giddily, wildly, celebrate nonconformity. We have students towering over six feet tall and barely scraping 5 feet tall. Sorry, Alex. Although, the heels are fabulous. We have cheerleaders and knitters, athletes and artists, geniuses with a lacrosse stick and geniuses with a xylophone mallet. This is, no doubt, the first Confirmation service in the history of Reform Judaism to feature a Xylophone solo. Next year, the theremin! Look it up.
We have singers and speakers, lovers and fighters (well, debaters), bloggers and tweeters. We have pianists, composers, wordsmiths and woodchoppers--and that’s just Rabbi Sklar. We have representatives of J-Teen, BBYO, and NFTY. We have students who have been to Israel and some who are going this summer. And you are all part of YoGWRT, the Youth Group of WRT, whether or not you like the name and the logo with the sprinkles on top.
“When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money,” said Steve Jobs in 1994.
“That’s a very limited life,” he went on. “Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is - everything around you that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
...That’s maybe the most important thing. It’s to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just gonna live in it, versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.
I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better, cause it’s kind of messed up, in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
Now I could just stop here--and perhaps you wish I would--but I feel that to end by just repeating a brilliant statement by Steve Jobs would actually dishonor the point of his remark. And, what’s more, I promised that there were two reasons you made it here today, and “Think Different” is only the first.
The second is that “Nobody can make it out here alone.”
Confirmation Class of 5772: You have not come here today to conform but you have come here to confirm, to confirm your unique voice in the chorus of your ancestral faith, to confirm the place of your unique thread in the fabric of this amazing global civilization that we call The Jewish People.
You are growing up amid a crescendo of disgust at so-called “organized religion,” some of it justified and much of it misplaced. When the Catholic Church shelters priests who sexually abuse child parishioners, is it any wonder that a new generation has grown up to resent the religion itself? When a group Jewish extremists, grown men, find justification in their version of Orthodoxy to spit on an eight-year-old Orthodox girl for wearing allegedly “immodest” dress, as happened this past December in the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh, is it any wonder that the vast majority of Israelis laugh at the idea of joining a synagogue? It is a shame, and a crisis, that the reputation of organized religion has been hijacked and sullied by its most fanatical elements.
But it is a cop-out--both intellectually unsubstantiated and morally weak--to dissociate from organized religion because of the abuses of a fanatical fringe. The whole point of being part of a congregation, being part of a religious movement, especially a movement with a progressive outlook and a social conscience like Reform Judaism, is to band together to multiply the good that any one of us could do alone.
Alone you can read a book; as a Confirmation Class we learn and practice Torah. Alone you can write a little check to tzedakah; as a Confirmation Class you raised over $6,000 at our Fundraiser, and as a class you selected two very deserving recipients about which we will hear at the end of today’s service. Alone any one of you can visit Israel; with NFTY-in-Israel you can travel with teens from all over North America to understand what it means to be part of a people that has survived oppression, exile, and every Jew-hater’s prediction. Alone you can write a letter to a Senator or Representative; as a Confirmation Class you can lobby in the halls of Congress. Alone you can whisper a prayer to God; as a Confirmation class you can lift the voices of hundreds in song, as you have today. Alone you can feed a table of hungry people; as a Confirmation Class you can stock the county’s Food Bank, the bus be damned!
Together, we have power. Alone, we are, ultimately, alone.
You did not come here to conform, but you did come here to confirm, and you can’t come to this bimah alone. Judaism does not work by oneself. You need the Jewish People and the Jewish people needs you. Synagogues, the hub of every Jewish community, need you--to care enough, to lead, to continue to confirm your choice to be Jewish, to be part of a bigger Jewish picture, in 11th grade, and 12th grade, in college, and after college.
Today is Shavuot. We read from the Book of Ruth. We read the Ten Commandments. Both are about confirming--confirming one’s place amid a community, confirming one’s commitment to something bigger than him or herself. Ruth, born a Moabite, says to her Hebrew mother-in-law, “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you dwell I will dwell…. Your people will be my people and your God will be my God.” Ruth confirmed that she couldn’t make it out there alone. She needed a people. It was the same at Sinai. The Torah says when the people heard the ten commandments, they proclaimed in one voice, Na’aseh v’nishma: We will do it. We will listen. We, the people. Not each man, each woman for him and herself. We. Together. We confirm.
So here we are, Confirmation Class of 5772. We made it. Thanks to two messages we made it. You will need these messages to make it in this difficult world. The first message is Think Different. The second message is Nobody can make it out here alone. I didn’t come up with either of them. The first, as you know, belongs to Steve Jobs. And the second, to Maya Angelou. Listen to her words:
Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
There are some millionaires
With money they can't use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They've got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Now if you listen closely
I'll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
'Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
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