Shabbat social weekends engaging Orthodox teens
Jared Krok is a fairly typical teenager. At 15, he sports long hair and attends Irvine’s Woodbridge High School. On weekends, he would often like to spend time with his classmates.
Instead, he usually attends worship services with his family at a local synagogue.
“You want to hang out with your friends or go to a Friday night football game,” said Jared, an Orthodox Jew, “but you can’t do it.”
On a recent Friday night, he attended what some members of the Orthodox community are promoting as just as much fun. Named Friday Night Lights after the popular book, movie and TV series about high school football, the program brings together Jewish teenagers for what organizers hope is a renewal of faith during 24-hour Shabbat sleepovers.
The next one is scheduled for tonight in Century City.
“Teenagers don’t have the excitement for Shabbat that they should, so we’re giving them a reason to love it,” said Rabbi Effie Goldberg, West Coast director for the National Conference of Synagogue Youth.
Shabbat is celebrated weekly by observant Jews worldwide from sundown Friday until after dusk on Saturday.
The holiday is traditionally observed by lighting candles at home and attending prayer services at the temple. Shabbat -- a day of rest for the Orthodox with no driving, operating electrical appliances or engaging in physical labor -- is a cornerstone of Jewish life.
Affording teenagers the opportunity to celebrate it “with friends, being with counselors and having an exciting Friday night prayer service,” Goldberg said, “rejuvenates their excitement toward Shabbat.”
Ouriel Hazan, the 25-year-old director of outreach for the youth organization’s Los Angeles chapter, agrees. “I hope we can inspire Jewish teens to realize that they’re not alone,” he said. “There are [Orthodox] Jewish teens all over California. By running programs in the smaller communities where the light is not as bright, we want to light a torch.”
The first flames, organizers say, were ignited 18 months ago as an effort by the youth group’s New York-based parent organization, the Orthodox Union, to reach Jewish youths who don’t regularly attend services.
Since then, Goldberg said, the idea has spread nationwide, resulting in 10 Shabbat overnights in California during the last year.
They are facilitated by a Los Angeles-based team of volunteer organizers that descends on target cities by van. On a recent Friday evening, well before the start of Shabbat, the team landed in Irvine. After checking in at the homes of their hosts, the mostly college-aged advisors gathered at Beth Jacob synagogue on Michelson Drive to meet their 20 charges.
“We didn’t have much of a Jewish teen life here at all when I was growing up,” said Caitlin Shapiro, 21, an Irvine native enrolled at New York’s Yeshiva University who was flown in by organizers to help guide the event. “It’s important to keep the young ones” in Judaism.
After attending services with the adults of the congregation -- men on one side, women on the other, in traditional Orthodox fashion -- the teenagers held their own gathering in the synagogue’s lobby.
They ate a Shabbat meal of burritos, taquitos, brown rice and salad prepared by a kosher catering service in Los Angeles. They chewed on jelly beans, potato chips and red licorice sticks while singing Hebrew songs. They played a board game called Battle of the Sexes, told jokes and talked about getting into college. Finally, Hazan led them in a discussion on such heady topics as destiny, purpose and free will.
As have other faiths in recent years, Orthodox Judaism has seen a drop-off in participation by young people, Goldberg said. “I think there are lots of distractions,” the rabbi said. “They don’t look for the beauty within their own religion because they are distracted by other bright lights. Religion is trying to compete with Britney Spears.”
After their Friday night gathering, the youths strolled in small groups to the homes of synagogue members to spend the night before returning for a replay Saturday.
For Jared Krok, it was almost as good as Friday night with friends at a football game. “I came to meet people and have fun,” he said. “Here you can meet people coming from where you’re coming from.”
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