One cold rainy day last winter, I was en route to visit
someone in a distant corner of the city. The trip
necessitated a change of buses at a bus stop in the city
center.
The bus that I was waiting for only runs three times an hour
and I just missed one. I saw it leaving as I was crossing
the street to reach the stop. Therefore, I expected a wait
of almost twenty minutes. Twenty minutes is not a long time,
but it certainly seems like it when you are standing in the
rain.
Why was I standing in the rain? There are a number of buses
that stop there and the bus stop was filled to capacity.
There were four people huddled together on the bench, a row
of standees crowded in right in front of them and another row
just under the roof of the shelter. The winds were blowing
the rain towards the shelter and the first row of people
under the shelter had to use umbrellas. The people behind
them were dodging the water that was dripping from those
umbrellas and all in all I decided it was probably just as
comfortable at that point alongside the shelter as it was
under it.
Therefore, as buses pulled up and people in the shelter
dashed out, I did not see any compelling reason to step
"inside." There I stood, under my own umbrella, watching the
numbers on each of the steady stream of buses approaching the
stop.
Then the traffic light turned red and all was quiet. A
couple of minutes later, the light changed again and a brand
new, modern bus pulled smartly up to the curb in front of us.
It was really sleek. There were wide aisles between the rows
of seats, which were covered by a cheerful, brightly colored
plush fabric.
Instead of the windows that slide back and forth on most
buses, there were window walls topped by long transoms. The
floor of the bus was almost level with the curb. Passengers
boarded and walked to their seats without having to negotiate
steps. Mothers could simply tip up the front wheels and roll
their carriages on through wide back doors.
The passengers sitting on the bus looked warm, dry and
altogether comfortable. The rain was getting very heavy.
There I stood, umbrella overhead, with the rain blowing
sideways and by then the shelter was packed too full to
enter. Standing there, bus pass in hand, I was sorely tempted
to get on the beautiful new bus.
There was only one problem. I was headed for neighborhood
"A" and the bus was going towards neighborhood "B" in quite
another direction. If I had boarded the bus, yes, I would
have been dry and comfortable for a while but I would have
been heading the wrong way.
There is no bus line that connects "A" to "B" and therefore I
would not have been able to reach my destination!
I was at an outreach lecture recently and that bus incident
came to mind. The kiruv professional who spoke was
telling us about the teens and young adults among the world's
Jewish population who are becoming, Buddhists. Buddhism is
so foreign to my mind that I had to take out my dictionary to
find out how to spell it!
These young people are growing up in a secular world and they
are starving for spirituality. If they do get some form of
"Jewish education" at all, it consists of a smattering of
Hebrew and a couple of hours per week reading passages taken
from Tanach, but translated into stilted archaic and often
inaccurate English.
Just when they are maturing to the point where they have
issues to address and questions to ask, they are given a bar
or bat mitzvah party, a "confirmation ceremony," and they are
bounced out of "Hebrew School."
Secular high school is a rat race. The name of the game is
grades. Good grades will get you into the college of your
parents' dreams, if not yours. College is more of the same
only this time grades will get you into the "right" graduate
or professional school.
It is no wonder that these kids see little or no meaning in
their lives. Every year, some of the Western world's
brightest and best high schoolers and college students end it
all either with a drug overdose or other form of suicide.
In this climate, it is not unusual for sensitive kids to
become spiritual seekers. They are actually fulfilling the
prophecy that in the end of days there will be a hunger and
thirst, not for food and drink but for words of Torah.
However, they do not have the background to know that there
is Torah and they look for spirituality in all the wrong
vehicles.
Just like the sleek bus headed for neighborhood "B," these
seemingly appealing vehicles are taking them in the wrong
direction, and they will not reach their true spiritual
destination, Torah true Yiddishkeit.
What can we do to help them? We can provide more buses to
point "A." We can reach out to young Jewish people. We can
invite the ones who come to Israel to our Shabbos tables. We
can call or write to the ones who are abroad.
At the seminar, one of the participants, a young enthusiastic
chassiddishe woman, volunteered to be a phone partner. She
was trained for her task and assigned to learn over the phone
with a woman in the Far East who had met and married a
gentile man from the Orient and had been living in his world
for over a decade.
What was it that the Jewish-by-birth woman living in the
Orient wanted to know about Judaism? She wanted to know
about its mystical component. To make a long story short, the
two learned together for a while and the woman left her
gentile husband and his alien culture, brought her children
to Israel, and they are all in the process of returning to
their roots.
Kiruv is not just for professionals. We can all
participate. When I was living in the States, I met a
college girl at a most unlikely place. There was a young man
in our city who had been born to a Jewish father and a mother
who had undergone a non-halachic "conversion."
The young man was killed in a tragic road accident. One of
the boy's sisters had converted properly and was a member of
our community. The house of mourning hosted a very mixed
group. I had come to visit the sister and the college girl
had come to see the parents. When we both arrived, a friend
of the sister was talking to her and a large group of people
from the parents' temple surrounded them.
I started speaking to the college girl. She was bewildered
and had a lot of questions. The young man was a very nice
person and he had been killed at such a young age. I tried
to answer some of her concerns and at the same time asked her
about herself.
She told me she had gone away to a top college and found to
her chagrin that there were few Jewish students and no
organized Jewish program. Therefore, she had transferred to
the local college where at least there were other Jews. In
answer to my question about organized Jewish life on her new
campus, she told me there was little.
I had been involved in fundraising activities for a college
kiruv organization nearby and I steered the girl
there. I followed up by arranging a meeting between the girl
and the head of the program. To make another long story
short, the college girl is now not only a Torah observant
woman, she is a kollel wife and mother of a beautiful
family.
All she and many more like her had needed was a vehicle or
lifeline to the world of Torah. Going my way? All
aboard!
