Beth+El+(Bennington,+VT)++Elevator+Pitch

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=**Green Mountain Shabbat**= Congregation Beth El, Bennington, Vermont

**Elevator Pitch**
The heart of the Green Mountain Shabbat proposal is to instill Shabbat as a central value in our community, to re-create Shabbat as the real locus of Congregation Beth El, both for families and individual members of our community. In recent years our holiday programming and Sunday Judaism school were successful, but we had found Shabbat itself to present a stumbling block; for most of our community Shabbat celebration had become marginalized. We want to address this by making Shabbat come alive; by giving more of our congregation a way whereby they can plug into Shabbat life, and through that, to life at Beth El and to Jewish life in general. Our plan is to have one Shabbat morning a month where we have electives from 9-10am (Torah yoga, Introduction to the Shabbat Liturgy, Cooking and craft classes for kids, etc.), separate children and adult morning services, a potluck lunch for everybody, and then intergenerational afternoon activities from 1-2:30pm. We will also have one Erev Shabbat a month (not the same week as our special morning programming) where we have a family and adult services (with music) sandwiched around a Friday Night potluck meal which will give both groups a chance to interact.

Our plan dovetails with our recent decision to move Sunday school to Saturdays (something we have been experimenting with the past two years). While this is not part of our Legacy Heritage proposal directly, we feel it is an important and central companion to the Shabbat changes we are making at Beth El.

Through our proposal, toward which we have been building steadily, we hope to increase involvement, and bring together more sectors of the community who currently rarely interact with one another, at the synagogue on Shabbat. We hope to be better able to offer a variety of programming throughout the day to allow congregants to engage with Shabbat in different ways and better reflect our community, to create opportunities for those with morning conflicts to engage with Shabbat, to increase communication and excitement within the congregation, to focus our energies, and use Shabbat as an opportunity for outreach, //tikkun olam//, and increased lay and family participation. But the most important thing perhaps is centering our community more on the //enjoyment// and //value// of Shabbat, which is intergenerational by design.

By creating these opportunities for parents, children, and others to experience Shabbat as a community: learning together, teaching together, doing //tikkun olam// together, and having fun together, we are in relationship with our core vision, which has, at its root, a commitment to providing a family-centered Jewish educational environment and a high degree of community involvement where our children //and// adults are empowered to engage in a life-long meaningful relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people.

**How to Become more Systemic**
We want to make these new changes integrated and systemic by giving people ownership and making them partners and active participants in what we are planning. To paraphrase a piece of feedback we received in Newark: stay away from the ‘if you build it they will come’ mentality, and switch to //having them come and build it//. Just in the past six months, we have had four new Torah readers complete a trope class, we have formed a Shabbat Committee with diverse representation from different sub-groups in the shul, we have had a core member begin a Torah Yoga training that she wants to teach on the Green Mountain Shabbatot, and we have ratcheted up our teen programming in hopes of making them greater participants in Shabbat life beginning in the fall. Our new rabbinic intern will be creating a curriculum for intergenerational Shabbat programming, which we’ll be able to re-use in future years.

We need to keep our human resources well-nourished, and empower people to take on leadership roles. And – it feels imperative that the group most centrally focused on the Legacy Heritage work be able to communicate their vision, receive feedback, and empower the rest of the community in turn. It feels all about building relationships: between the Board and the Shabbat Committee, between the Green Mountain leadership and the rest of the congregation, between the elderly and the teens in our community, and so on.

**Challenges in Implementation**
Among our challenges are the facts that we are both geographically quite spread out, and small in size. It can be difficult to really do community building that feels organic, when people don’t see each other that often outside of synagogue. Since we are small in numbers as well, we want to effectively use our existing leadership, as well as learning to effectively build new leadership – in a way where the work does not fall on too small a group. Put bluntly – we don’t want the rabbi, the Shabbat Committee chair, or any of the other Green Mountain leadership to get too burned out.

The community also has expressed a sense of being ‘gun shy’, and not wanting to take steps that are too big or unrealistic, and where they set themselves up for failure. This seems to speak to having our changes come from real needs and desires within the community, and to move slowly but consciously in the new steps that we take, rather than creating a feeling of too much programming that people will be expected to attend. We also don’t want to send a message that Shabbat is all about activity.

The main challenge is the cultural shift. In recent years, people have lost some of their sense of ownership around the synagogue. Involving them in this new Shabbat programming will be key to making the synagogue feel like a safe and vibrant place again, a place that they recognize as theirs. If we find the right pace to move at, taking baby steps, but taking them well and with community support, we feel optimistic that this year will be the beginning of a Shabbat and community renaissance up here in the Green Mountains.