ANNOUNCEMENTS

Car Shows, Beach Birds…
Now It’s Your Turn!

By Audrey Shore
Columbia/JTS
KOACH on Campus Editor

Word Association is my favorite game ever. It requires no special cards or squeakers or materials, just friends… it’s like "connect the dots" but for thoughts.

Person One might start with the word "cheesecake," to which Person Two adds "factory" (as in, the restaurant), to which Person Three adds "sweat shop" – which clearly has nothing to do with "cheesecake" at all! Okay, so it’s a weird way of discovering how people think, but it can be lots of fun, and it’s Shabbat-friendly too.

Soon after my Word Association obsession began, I realized it could be a useful tool instead of just fun. I gave former campers different phrases to "associate" for a sociology project at Barnard. I started playing in Hebrew to practice for oral exams at JTS. Lashon hara (gossip) was brought to new heights… oops, just kidding.

I decided to test-drive the Word Association theory by applying it to this, my first article as editor. My starting phrase was "High Holidays" and the answers, from my Jewish college student friends on different campuses all over the continent, really ran the gamut. Of course there were the staple symbols – shofar, synagogue, machzor, etc. But a few answers really made me re- evaluate how I observe the High Holidays.

"Car show" and "fashion show" were my favorites. While at first I just got angry and grimaced at the thought of people showing up for their three days in synagogue a year donning fur coats, I reconsidered and thought instead how unfortunate it is that as a community, we’re unable to show everyone how much more there is to the High Holidays. People play dress-up because we haven’t given them more to delve into / think about / connect to their own lives.

As Jewish college students, we’re in a unique position to educate both ourselves and our families. Showing our family new concepts and rituals from our college adventures could provide them with a fresh perspective on the High Holidays and might give them a path to discover heightened meaning in these days.

"Book" was a comment that I assessed as pretty basic, but it turned out to be much more thought provoking. I gave my friend a hard time for being so simple, but she replied that "Rosh Hashanah is the day we are written into the Book of Life, but as Rabbi Mordechai Gafni teaches, it is also the day we write ourselves into our own books."

It seems that we’re so quick to buckle to outside pressures that we rarely use the High Holidays as a time for personal introspection, and not just in regard to mitzvot (commandments) and aveirot (transgressions).

What initially seemed to be the weirdest response was "seagull." When I heard it, I was convinced that my friend was making reference to a Jewish last name (Segal? Siegel?) and not the bird.

But "seagull" popped into his mind because he has a tradition of breaking the Yom Kippur fast at his family’s beach house. They all sit on the deck, savor the food, and enjoy spending time together on their last trip to the beach for a while, because Yom Kippur usually marks the end of beach house season. The cry of the seagulls, flying south for the winter, is something he associates with the scene, and thus with the High Holidays.

The deeper importance of this really resonated with me. How fortunate he is to have such a strong family ritual! At school, we should all be so lucky to have this kind of experience. Spontaneity isn’t even a requirement, since this kind of ritual can also be created. In the upcoming school year, we should all invent our own warm family rituals. Not just with our biological families -- roommates, fraternity brothers, sorority sisters and random friends from classes make up our extended family. How beautiful it would be to have a holiday ritual to share with them!

Here’s the point. Let’s say you and I were playing Word Association and I said "High Holidays" to begin. What would you say? Email me at koachoncampus@uscj.org. Best wishes for a fulfilling and enlightening holiday season!