I have been an educator for many years. For a number of those years, I had worked in an organization whose focus was on Jewish outreach. One of my colleagues and I spent countless hours discussing at what age people stop growing, at what age do we stop reaching out and helping our fellow Jews learn about their identity?
When do they stop listening?
I felt that growth was a lifelong endeavor, and my colleagues felt that after one’s mid-thirties, growth stagnates and the incremental changes we make later in life don’t really change us.
I railed against this, often crying in frustration. Not just because, as a rebbetzin in both the synagogues I have had the privilege of serving in, the dedicated community members — the ones who truly come every week, the ones who sign up for extra lessons in Judaism, the ones who push themselves to learn Hebrew, the ones who work hard to wrap their heads around ancient concepts — are almost always middle-aged and in many cases what some would call elderly. Not just because this is the population I most often work with, but because I too am middle-aged. I have seen growth every day from my students and myself. I have become intoxicated by their curiosity, urging myself to find answers to their unending, toddler-esque questions of ‘why?’
Teaching adults is challenging, and that is maybe why people shy away from it. They are set in their ways, they do know a lot more than people half their age, they have lived in this world and they read. One cannot pull the wool over their eyes. Their baseline of knowledge is so much higher than your average university student, and their expectations are equally high. I love the challenge, and I love how hard it makes me work.
Teachers have and will continue to use the line that ‘more than we teach our students, our students teach us’. Imagine how much more so that is when your student is someone who has led a full life, has experienced everything you have, and then some.
This brings me to my past week. I had the immense pleasure of being an educator on the March of the Living for the UK. And for the first time ever, I guided a bus primarily of adults. Aside from three younger people who kept us honest and kept us hopeful, we were all people in full adulthood. And after the year the world Jewry has experienced, I could not have asked for a bus that was a better balm for my soul.
We started on Thursday in Warsaw. On Friday we went to Belzec death camp, then onto a site of mass shootings, and a children’s grave in a forest, then stopping in Krakow for Shabbat.
When I guide, I guide from the front. I share knowledge. But by Saturday night, I had already learned so much about my group, about how open they were to this experience, about how much they wanted to learn, and about how affected they too have been by the last six months, that I became a participant too. I found myself in the center of the group and not the front. By the time Shabbat ended and we took a walk to the site of the Krakow Ghetto, the group carried me, and from that point forward, it became a conversation. We shared knowledge and helped each other process what we were seeing and feeling. I was no longer the educator but one of the participants, and together on Sunday, we walked into Birkenau concentration camp.
And here, I must introduce you to the extraordinary Jacques Weisser. Jacques was born in Antwerp in 1942, and when he was just seven months old, his mother was deported to Auschwitz and murdered on arrival. Jacques, through a series of miracles, survived the war, though he carries the scars that all survivors do. No matter what some may say, there is no hierarchy to survivors; each is a living, breathing testament of resilience and fortitude on a magnitude that we pray we are never tested to use. Jacques accompanied us almost every single step of the way.
Never have I felt more vindicated in my belief that adults can and should keep on learning. Jacques was a sponge; he wanted to know everything, learn everything. He shared as a participant, even though his experience makes him an expert. He taught as well. He taught us humility and vulnerability, never once hiding his emotion, being open about heartbreak, being honest about how difficult this journey was for him, gave us all permission to be vulnerable, to be open, and to be honest. And most importantly, Jacques gave us permission to learn. He also gave me the extraordinary gift of wanting to be a student, which isn’t always the case when a survivor joins such a group.
A couple of weeks ago, Daniel, my husband, buried a member who was 101 years old. His family said that what kept him vibrant and fully functional until his final illness was his extraordinary capacity to learn, always wanting to learn and grow, not feeling that his capacity to take on new things was ever diminished. In my small group of adults who I spent five intense days with in Poland, I saw growth and thirst for knowledge at a level that I have not seen in people half their age. I saw a desire to learn, and I saw change; all the things my colleagues said were rare in people over 30. However, unlike my colleague, I think growth in adulthood is the norm. As I too get older, I know that I will be a lifelong learner, and if ever I feel like I’m done learning, I will keep in mind Holocaust Survivor Jacques Weisser, who while saying the memorial prayer (Kaddish) for his mother, kept on learning.
One last unrelated story to share. As we walked out of Birkenau on Monday, the 6th of May, 2024, it was almost 80 years to the day of when the deportations of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau started, almost 80 years since approximately 400,000 Jews were murdered in six weeks. Auschwitz-Birkenau: a place where one million Jews were killed, of which one in four were children. We, a group of adults, walked out, when our grandparents couldn’t. We walked, our heads held high, led by child Holocaust survivors Eve Kugler and Jacques Weisser, who by the grace of God were saved when so many others were not. They led us out of the gates of hell singing “Am Yisrael Chai!”
But as always, I do need to remind myself that this is a blog about food. Not wanting to take even an iota of focus away from Yom HaShoah that we commemorated just this week, I will just add some of my favourite recipes here for you. Obviously they are all about comfort food because, at times like this, all we really want is comfort.
Meatballs four Ways:
