Confirmation Reflection Project Submissions
Touro Synagogue Confirmation Class of 2025
A Letter in the Scroll: Reflecting on What It Means to Be a Jewish Adult
As the culmination of our class journey, each student has the opportunity to create a reflection project and share it with the congregation during our Confirmation Ceremony on May 9. This reflection project is intended to encourage you to think about the discussions we’ve had this year, your own experiences as a young Jewish adult, and how these Jewish moments inform your commitment to your own Jewish practice and to the Jewish People.
Steps:
- Approach this as an opportunity for growth, not an assignment for school.
- Look through the texts in this document that we have studied this year and think about our conversations during class and what great questions they bring up for you.
- Respond to the prompt below in written form, using 500-1000 words as a guidepost.
- Submit your reflection to Rabbi Bauman by uploading it below no later than April 25th.
Prompt: Being Torah: Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
Several centuries of Western thought, beginning in the Enlightenment, have left us with the idea that when we choose how to live, we are on our own… We enter the world with a clean slate on which we can draw any self-portrait we wish… Against this whole complex of ideas, Jewish life is a sustained countervoice. To be a Jew is to know that this cannot be the full story of who I am. A melody is more than a sequence of disconnected notes. A painting is something other than a random set of brushstrokes. The part has meaning in terms of its place within the whole, so that if history has meaning, then the lives that make it up must be in some way joined to one another as characters in a narrative, figures in an unfolding drama. Without this it would be impossible to speak about meaning; and Judaism is the insistence that history does have a meaning. Therefore each of us has a significance precisely insofar as we are part of a story, an extraordinary and exemplary story of a people dedicated to certain ideas. We are not free-floating atoms in infinite space. We are letters in the scroll. What does it mean to you to be a letter in the scroll?
Please submit it to Rabbi Bauman by April 25, 2025.