Spiritual Scaffolding
cross posted at ejewishphilanthropy.com
When I was a kid, cold shame would flood my shoulders on the rare occasion that I entered my local synagogue. I grew up in a working-class family in semi-public housing with a single mother; and while I knew absolutely nothing about Judaism, I certainly knew that I was too poor, too low-class, too ignorant to belong there with the swells.
But by the time I was a teenager, I was hungering for a sense of spiritual purpose that eluded me as a kid. Even though the Judaism I encountered didn’t seem particularly concerned with my needs, I believed that my own heritage had what I was looking for. I cold-called rabbis asking for appointments, traveled to Israel and ultimately spent years learning Torah in Jerusalem and New York before being ordained as a Conservative rabbi. Degrees and honors notwithstanding, however, I never completely lost that sense of Jewish inadequacy.
Years later, when I began my congregational tenure in Beacon, N.Y., I found that more than my learning, it was my sense of inadequacy that connected me with my new congregants, nearly all of whom introduced themselves by way of their own perceived inadequacies. “I’m Jewish, but…” they would begin:
“I don’t keep kosher.”
“I don’t believe in God.
“I don’t support the state of Israel.”
“I don’t live with a Jewish partner.”
Or, most commonly, “I’m not really religious. I’m more of a spiritual person.”
They had come to the synagogue because they were all seeking something, as I was when I began seriously asking questions about Judaism as a young adult. When I was a student — with no career, no partner, no children — I had a hunger to advance my learning and a flexibility that allowed me to move anywhere in the world where I could study full-time. The questions I asked and the long journey they led me on have enriched my life beyond measure, but my path could not and would not be the path for most of my congregants in their searches.
My new congregants were generally young working parents, over-burdened and under-resourced. I could not possibly tell them that in order to find the spiritual nourishment they craved, they needed to first relocate to Israel, then master Hebrew and then, maybe, they could find something to meet their spiritual needs. The price for basic admission to the treasure hall of Jewish wisdom simply cannot be several years of intensive study.
What I was able to offer them was spiritual scaffolding, or frameworks that allowed them to utilize their own internal resources, as well as external Jewish resources, to make meaning in their lives.
I didn’t fully appreciate the need for this sort of spiritual scaffolding until my board president said something to me during minyan. I had introduced the Amidah by saying something to the effect of “The words you need for this prayer are written in your heart; if you need help accessing those words, the liturgy can be found on page 100.”
“I love the idea that the words I need are written on my heart,” she said, “but I have no idea how to access those words, and this liturgy isn’t helping.” So, on the spot, I invited her to take her consciousness on a tour of the three major themes of the prayer: “Wow” (shevach, or praise), “Please” (bakasha, or requests) and “Thank You” (hodaah, or gratitude).
This framework became the foundation of how we taught and explored prayer in my community. My congregants might not have fulfilled someone else’s understanding of their obligation to recite the Amida, but they did have the experience of stretching their own hearts towards the Divine, even if just a little bit, and that mattered. It motivated people who never thought they’d be part of a synagogue to keep coming back, to learn more, travel to Israel for intensive study and in many cases to convert or consolidate their Jewish identity and become leaders in the community.
Judaism is a civilization that developed around the core idea that we can stretch our hearts and cultivate attunement to the Divine presence in the world. The core Jewish technologies we have to make that happen — the Jewish calendar, the Biblical and Talmudic traditions and more — are incredibly powerful. They also require years of training to be able to use them, years that most adults with responsibilities simply don’t have.
Spiritual scaffolding involves honoring where people actually are and giving them accessible tools to help them grow. At its core, there are three steps:
Start with human spiritual needs. While society has changed and developed over centuries, core human spiritual needs are unchanging. Among them are the need for human connections in which we feel seen, for the capacity to face the mortality of our own bodies and those of the people we love and for a sense of purpose in our time on earth. Just as our need for shelter is timeless, even as building styles and technologies have changed, so too are our core spiritual needs timeless even as the way we address them changes.
Find the tool that addresses that need. By definition, spiritual resources speak to our spiritual needs, though not always in immediately obvious ways. Like a builder looking for the right tool in her kit, a spiritually scaffolding educator will draw on texts, practices and insights in their kit, and apply them to the learners’ needs.
Teach the student, not the text. A skilled builder doesn’t begin with a hammer and then ask what they can do with it; they look at the needs of the project and bring their tools to it. They are a builder, focused on the building, not a “tooler” focused on the tools. So too a skilled scaffolding educator recognizes their texts, practices and insights are tools that must be used in a way that speaks to the core spiritual needs of the learner.
Ultimately, spiritual scaffolding is an approach that involves flexibility and responsiveness from the educator. This is hardly a new idea — it’s how Hasidism transformed Judaism.
Prior to the rise of the Hasidic movement, Jewish life was dominated by a formal and scholarly approach to Jewish practice that was inaccessible to the vast majority of Jews. Hasidism transformed Judaism with the idea that the complicated theology of Kabbalah could improve the spiritual lives of these regular Jews, if it was scaffolded — rendered in a form that was accessible and meaningful for them. And it worked: Prior to the Holocaust, more than half the Jews of Europe were shaped by Hasidism.
Like our pre-Hasidic ancestors, and like me 30 years ago, contemporary Jewish seekers have real spiritual needs that are not met by a tradition that requires massive study to even begin, and fosters a sense of inadequacy in those who don’t have the requisite learning.
Both at the origins of Hasidism and now, spiritual scaffolding helps people with real constraints in their lives achieve spiritual insights indicated by traditions and texts that are inaccessible to them.
Nearly 100 years ago, the first president of the Jewish Theological Seminary said, “In order to be a success in the American rabbinate, you must be able to talk baseball.” Baseball doesn’t have nearly the cultural footprint that it once did, but the point still stands: To be a success as a rabbi, educator or any other transmitter of our tradition, we must seek what of the Jewish tradition speaks to our own souls, and then build accessible spiritual scaffolding to help our students find what speaks to theirs.
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