Rabbi Leads JCC’s New Center for Teen Engagement

Rabbi Dena Shaffer of 4Front

In her role as executive director of the new Center for Teen Engagement at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Baltimore, Rabbi Dena Shaffer has been given a lofty charge. But those who chose her for the role say she’s just the person to make it all happen.

The CTE is part of a multi-faceted Jewish teen education initiative undertaken by The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore’s Teen Connection Task Force. It comes to fruition thanks to a five-year matching grant of up to $1.525 million from The Jim Joseph Foundation.

Rabbi Shaffer, who is from Rochester, N.Y., and has “wanted to be a rabbi ever since I can remember,” lives in Woodberry with her dog, Darby.

Raised in the Reform movement, she said she made sure to “experience the entire spectrum of Jewish life from the most secular to Orthodox” while studying at Brandeis University, before receiving her ordination at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.

Rabbi Shaffer’s passion for making Jewish education accessible and engaging is palpable.

“Reform Judaism prides itself on choice through knowledge. [That] has become the underpinning of my rabbinate,” she says. “I want to help young people have the education and ability to build their Jewish identity, chart their course, find their path.”

Rabbi Shaffer believes in non-traditional approaches to teaching, and as a longtime student of tae kwon do (since age 3!) she believes martial arts philosophies and Judaism have “a seamless overlap.”

Which is how she divined Sunday morning “Jewdo” classes, combining martial arts with teaching Jewish values, during her five years as associate rabbi at Congregation Beth Israel in West Hartford, Conn.

“I had great rabbis, great teachers,” Rabbi Shaffer said. “I grew up in Jewish summer camp and got to see rabbis as real people, not just the person behind the pulpit but the man or the woman who sat with me on the hill wearing shorts and said things like ‘cool’ and ‘awesome.’”

A pivotal moment in her life, she says, was a conversation she admits may sound a “bit cheesy, but it’s true.” Just after her bat mitzvah, her martial arts instructor, Sean Pearson, asked her to teach a class in his absence.

“I was in middle school. I was nervous and was pushing back a little bit,” she recalls. “Then he said to me, ‘When somebody whispers the truth into your left ear, and somebody asks for the truth in your right ear, you have an obligation to share that truth.’ It was really powerful for me.”

JCC President Barak Hermann calls Rabbi Shaffer “the real deal. … Her leadership will inspire professionals and members of the Jewish community to create and support meaningful Jewish experiences [for teens].”

Rabbi Shaffer’s supervisor, JCC Chief Program Officer Susan Sherr-Seitz, said the CTE executive director job requires “creativity, spark, vision, the ability to pivot and the managerial chops to bring together professionals and lay people to make it all work. Dena, by virtue of her personality, love of teens and her work experience, creates the right package to do it.”

Rabbi Shaffer said the CTE will provide a meeting and learning place for teen professionals from synagogues, national teen movements and other communal agencies.

“We believe it’s important to empower the youth to have their say, to articulate their own needs,” she says. “Part of this initiative is recognizing the depth of potential that teens have to change the social and Jewish landscape, and we’re hoping to tap into that, to help them make their mark on this community and seek what they need from the community. We’ll be working with their families, synagogue professionals and educators and everyone that’s part of their world to make Jewish identity a real and meaningful part of their lives.”

Jewish teen engagement initiatives are happening across the country and many, like the CTE, are based on research findings from the Jewish Education Project. Evaluation of the efforts will be based on that research.

“The goal is not only to get [teens] to be more Jewish or do more Jewish things. We don’t measure our success by that any more,” Rabbi Shaffer says. “But rather by how Jewish learning, Jewish growth, spiritual learning and spiritual growth is affecting them in their holistic lives.”

Melissa Gerr is a Baltimore-based freelance writer.

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