Fall 2016(5777) 5777

Knowing people take their politics so seriously, why would we want to risk limiting our ability to share the vibrancy of our Torah with as many Jews as possible?

It’s been two years since Shani has had any contact with her younger sister. She noticed the distancing shortly after her mother passed away. First the unanswered phone calls. Then the two-word text responses and the bare bones, business tone e-mails. Then, nothing.

While Heda is one of a few Orthodox women to be board certified as a chaplain, she believes that chaplaincy is a place where Orthodox women can make a significant difference.

In this section, we define millennials as those born between 1982 and 2002. While we strive in the pages ahead to analyze the characteristics of millennials and how they impact Orthodox Jewish life, we are cognizant of the fact that the analyses are based on generalizations. The study of various generations is never an exact science and obviously, there will always be exceptions to the rule.

From my vantage point, there are three primary challenges. Firstly, it is becoming increasingly common on campus to consider any limitation on personal freedom and personal choice as immoral.
Not different. Immoral.

The difficulties in attracting millennials to traditional religious causes and practices, noted by both the literature and practitioners, by no means indicates that they are uninterested in God or spirituality.

But the young man was also terribly wrong. While the online community is real and significant, it cannot and must not ever replace the actual physical community. Not for millennials or for anyone else.

In the age of social media, it is also important to remember that one’s persona—and certainly one’s social media persona—may not necessarily reflect who one truly is.

The identity formed by this process played a crucial role in defining a person’s life goals—what kind of a person he saw himself becoming—and dictated his behavior. Identity gave meaning to life. However, this has changed.

“When I was a teenager, our rebbeim and youth leaders convinced us that the future of Yiddishkeit depended upon us, our learning, our teaching, our modeling and our outreach.” Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, OU executive vice president, emeritus