‘We experienced what it means to grow up’
Chabad couple creates space for reflection for two decades of alumni
For Chabad emissaries, “the sheer amounts of expectations and responsibilities are enormous, and the pace is relentless,” Chanie Chein said.
She and her husband, Rabbi Peretz Chein, have been Chabad emissaries at Brandeis University for 23 years. “There’s the basic responsibilities of growing and nurturing a community — in social spaces, educational spaces, religious spaces — and there’s always more that can be done. And there was no space to be able to pause and reflect on the growing experiences that an emissary has.”
So the Cheins created that space for reflection. Last month, Ms. Chein spoke about the program the couple created, called M54: The Institute for Insourcing, at a Chabad on Campus conference in Parsippany.
The Cheins started thinking about the need for such a program in early 2020, during the covid lockdown. “We weren’t able to do our regular programming with students because they couldn’t come into our space,” Ms. Chein said. “Many had gone home,” and even for those who remained on campus, “we had to radically shift how we engaged them.”
The lockdown gave the couple an opportunity to take a step back. “The pace and rhythm of our year is very intense,” Ms. Chein said. “The regular programming, and the expectations of how a community leader interacts with the community, changed. This created an open space for us, so we slowed down and thought about what kind of meaningful experiences we could create in that space.
“We had two decades of alumni, all over America and the world, whom we deeply care about, but it had always been hard to find the time and the ability to learn with them,” she continued. The Cheins suddenly found themselves with more available time. “And because Zoom became so familiar to people,” they saw a chance to create “a learning opportunity for our alumni community.”
The slower pace also gave the couple more time to reflect and to think creatively as they considered programming. When they thought about their own lives and took the time to pay attention to their own trajectories, the Cheins noticed a “radical shift” from “the way we entered our calling to be emissaries when we were in our young twenties.
“When we were younger, there was this idealism and naiveté and tremendous passion to commit our lives to working with a community apart from, and not in, a Jewish community, to creating a community from scratch,” Ms. Chein said. “But that naiveté and passion and idealism starts disintegrating naturally as you encounter what it actually means to work towards creating a community, and then successfully creating a community. There are richer and deeper and more mature experiences that are happening.”
In other words, “we experienced what it means to grow up.”
They thought about how growth happens. “Change and growth in one’s life demands that we notice how we are on our own and with other people” at different stages of life. “Our students, who were exposed to a variety of learning opportunities and Shabbat programming in their late teens and early twenties, were now on their own. Were they able to successfully integrate into communities? To create Jewish homes on their own? Some were, and some weren’t.”
The Cheins decided to learn with their alumni “in ways that invited them to reflect and consider their life experiences, and to use that as their learning,” Ms. Chein said. “So instead of using a text, or instead of my husband and I preparing lectures, we invited them to use their life experiences to see what is working well, what areas they’d like to shift in, what areas of change and growth they’d like to consider.” The goal was to give alumni “the awareness and the tools to create a life of meaning for themselves.”
They found that “it was a very successful program on Zoom with our different groups of alumni, including those who were starting off their lives in new communities, those who were starting off relationships, and those who already had children,” Ms. Chein continued. “This kind of learning invites participants to gain the skills with which to create change and reach for a vision on their own, without relying on a teacher or a mentor or a community leader.”
The Cheins realized that their colleagues might also benefit from this type of program. “The responsibility of caring for the community starts taking a toll,” Ms. Chein said. “Our spirits weren’t as vibrant” as they were when “we started our emissary work. The light in our eyes, and we noticed in our colleagues’ eyes, was heavier.”
The traditional response to burnout is “let’s inspire ourselves,” Ms. Chein continued. “Speak to a mentor, call someone who’s been in it longer than you and work it through with them. Or learn a text in our Chabad philosophical teachings and reinspire yourself. Those are valuable ways of realigning and reconnecting to our mission, but they’re not necessarily sustainable because they are quick, shorter-term fixes. We wanted to explore the possibility of reinvigorating ourselves using the experiences and moments in our lives that we have gathered over the decades.
“So much of traditional, or even more contemporary, ways of Jewish learning revolve around a text or depend on the teacher. We wanted to create a space for adults to create the texts based on their experiences, to acknowledge that as we grow we accumulate moments and interactions and experiences that can inform us about the quality of our lives and can give us a glimpse into areas that we are comfortable with and happy about and feel vibrant about, and areas in which we seek a change or growth. We wanted to give them an opportunity to work through experiences in reflective ways and to gain the skills and tools with which to bring change into their lives.”
The Cheins created M54 in 2021. The Hebrew word for life is “chai.” Hebrew letters are traditionally assigned numerical values, and the values assigned to the letters in the word chai add up to 18, so the number 18 is traditionally associated with life, Ms. Chein explained. “When one life, 18, intertwines with another life, 18, in holistic and authentic ways, a new living energy emerges, a third 18. This synergy embodies the magic of 54 — 3×18.”
The institute’s four-month program, which includes a series of weekly Zoom sessions followed by an in-person retreat, is designed to “help leaders realign with their purpose and move forward with renewed energy.” The curriculum is based on Chabad philosophy and encompasses universal values of self-reflection, inner work, and growth. The experience is “deeply informed by a tremendous amount of conversations and interactions with my colleagues over the last 23 years,” Ms. Chein said. She tends to seek out “thoughtful spaces, spaces that move at a slower pace, more intentional spaces” and used “two decades of noticing and gathering data points and experiences” to develop the syllabus.
The program’s learning model is rooted in “the relational connection between learners as they embark on shared, yet individual, explorations.” Ten cohorts of about eight have completed the program so far. “We deliberately keep it small because we have found that eight is a sweet number with which to develop connection to one another and to the ideas.” Participants have seen “profound outcomes.”
M54 “is a very unique educational space that we don’t believe exists anywhere in the way that we are doing it,” Ms. Chein concluded. It offers emissaries “a tremendously intriguing and critical space to reflect on the realities of their lives. Not only are our lives very full — and in many cases over full — but the experience of our internal worlds is something we usually keep quiet and apart from the communities we serve, whether it’s students or young adults or a more traditional community. We often are ensuring that everyone else has opportunities to learn and grow, and we care for other people. Acknowledging our inner worlds that are changing and are challenged by our own families and our own relationships and our shifting roles within our community is not a place that emissaries tend to go into.
“It’s a very new kind of experience to reflect on the realities of one’s life and invite change into one’s life,” and it’s an experience that can be “really hard. It’s much easier to just go, go, go, to give, give, give, to find worth in providing for another. There’s a growing awareness that this work is critical.”
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