And Why Confirmation

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Thursday, June 1, 2006

I saw "Keeping up with the Steins" this weekend, and it was funny corny and funny-- but the movie that everyone is talking about is, of course, Dan Brown's The DiVinci Code. And to me the phenomenal interest in the book and movie is related to Confirmation, or more precisely to the many people of all faiths who have not attended Confirmation.

What this page turning novel and now movie has done is to bring to the average American, in a highly sensationalized form, what historians of religion have known for many decades, that there were many different versions of the gospels and that it is an accident of history that the stories of Jesus in Mark, Luke, Matthew and John, became the Scripture of the Christian Church. Now this approach to Scripture isn't taught in Fundamentalist Churches and even in mainline churches, those whose religious education ends in childhood will not have encountered it.

But imagine if you were a Christian parent, would you rather your child encounter these radical and potentially faith challenging issues in Confirmation class with their pastor or on the front page of Time magazine?

Christians are not the only ones to find the basic assumptions of their faith challenged in the contemporary world. Modernity has challenged Jewish belief and commitment in many ways. Biblical studies, and science, philosophy, psychology and anthropology, the Holocaust and personal tragedies, each challenge our Judaism in different ways. In addition once our students leave the comfort of our home community, they will encounter also vehement critics of the state of Israel, which can also be challenging to their Jewish identity. Isn't it preferable that they at least have some exposure to these difficult challenges before they are out on their own.

This year in Confirmation we have talked about understanding the Torah as a composite of the traditions of the northern and southern tribes, of priestly writers, of ancient Jews of many different times and places united in their quest to understand God and what God wants from us. We have spent time exploring the history of the modern state of Israel and the continuum from legitimate criticism of Israel to anti-Israelism to Anti-Semitism. I hope that we have at least touched on some of the most important challenges to being a modern Jew in our Confirmation discussions this year, and though I am sure that we did not resolve all the issues, nor convince each of you to adopt a particular belief system similar, that was not the purpose of our class.

If we have expanded your understanding and opened new ways of finding personal Jewish meaning, and if we have modeled community in class so that you felt part of this people Israel, then Andy and I end the year satisfied.