\u201cThe oldest generations is the most religious; the youngest are the most nonbelieving.\u201d So wrote Lane Greene in a recent article in The Economist. Greene traced faith in the U.S., in historical terms, and demonstrated what we know and see: teens are not less engaged, they are unengaged. By extension, the very idea of gathering high-schoolers to study texts of a different language, during vacation time, in a strange place, would logically be doomed to fail.<\/p>\n
This makes it very difficult to explain how I spent my recent winter-break.<\/p>\n
For five days in early January, NCSY hosted a record-breaking conference for Jewish teens who attend public school, to study together. The conference, Aspire: NCSY\u2019s Yarchei Kallah, is hard to pronounce. Of the 350 teens who attended, most don\u2019t know each other. And located in New Jersey, it was decidedly cold.<\/p>\n
NCSY\u2019s most recent Yarchei Kallah is a High-School conference dedicated to traditional learning about a traditional topic. This past year it was about Aggadah in Jewish literature. (Aggadah is a compendium of rabbinic texts that incorporates folklore, historical anecdotes and much more.) As far as I know, no one in attendance had ever studied Aggadic literature, nor are there any video games nor Aggadic literature Apps.<\/p>\n
The teens came in droves.<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n