By Devra Aarons, Bay Area Jewish educator, and Jewish LearningWorks’ Mentor & Dr. Betsy Stone. Originally posted on Sinai and Synapses.
What is the difference between religious and spiritual? The big picture answer is that religious experiences are communal and spiritual ones are individual.
As educators at Contra Costa Midrasha, we facilitate a kind of hybrid between a youth group and a supplemental Jewish high school. Thus, we are keenly interested in how social experiences for young people can beget spiritual ones, which in turn give us tools and strategies that last a lifetime. In an exclusive educator training with Dr. Betsy Stone, held as part of Scientists in Synagogues, we learned about what all this has got to do with the development of the teen brain. Dr. Stone cited research about the stages of a person’s life at which they are open to spiritual experiences — along with toddlers and elders, teens are particularly open to spiritual experiences (even though they often won’t talk about it, for fear of judgement).
Dr. Stone went on to explain that spiritual experiences happen internally — in the brain and in the heart. Thus, we, as Jewish educators, cannot create them. We can, however, set up circumstances to facilitate them. One place where we purposefully create spiritual opportunities is our weekend (Shabbat) retreats at a rustic camp amidst redwood threes, free of access to cell towers or wifi. Our teens tell us they love our retreat Havdalah, and how it makes them feel connected to their internal Jewish barometer.
During Havdalah, we go outside, under the stars, with our camp musician leading us in singing the prayers and songs. We link arms and form a tight spiral, all facing the bright light of the Havdalah candle and smelling the sweet spice box. Dr. Stone pointed out that Havdalah, in the way we observe it at our Jewish teen retreats and at summer camp, has all the right elements for a spiritual experience — darkness, being in nature, and involving physical touch and music. All of these “religious” pieces that we set up through ritual create the conditions for the teen brain to dive deep into a personal spiritual experience, connecting to spirituality and, indeed, to the concept of connection itself.
Experiences like this are so important because they help developing minds form strategies for coping and resiliency. As Dr. Stone later explained, “for teens, spirituality can be very important as it serves as a psychological balm or protective shield against loneliness, depression and anxiety.” In providing moments like this Havdalah ritual, where our teens can experience spirituality and deep internal connections, we are helping them construct these shields.
Dr. Stone’s deeper dive into the teen brain revealed a reality we’d all seen, but didn’t totally understand. First, she helped us see why teens struggle with managing stress. The problem is often a lack of a frame of reference for adverse events. Due to a lack of perspective, the teen brain cannot process minor problems as small. Every problem is a crisis because the amygdala, where we feel big emotions, is still in control — not the frontal lobe, where more sophisticated thoughts happen. During a crisis of any kind in the teen brain, the amygdala diverts bloodflow from the front lobe, causing brain processing to slow down. We often see this at Midrasha when teens share challenging circumstances they are experiencing at school or in friendships. They express big emotions and don’t know how to manage them.
When these big feelings are blown out of proportion, they begin to impede cognition, especially those aspects of cognition that are key to relating to other people. Dr. Stone talked about the work of Dr. Laurence Steinberg, who found that when teens are under a lot of stress, they have a lot of trouble reading people’s facial expressions. Their ability to empathize is diminished. They think of others in the binary — either “you like me” or “you don’t like me.” It’s not rational thinking; it’s emotive thinking.
Stress can also lead to increased impulsivity, inability to self-regulate and decreased judgement. As we all heard this being laid out for us, I watched green lights turn on over all our heads: “Oh yeah, teens feel everything in a big way, and they can’t process it rationally.” We’d all seen it, but now we understood how it was playing out in their internal brain chemistry.
It also helped us see how teen spaces like Contra Costa Midrasha can help teens learn to “scaffold” stress. In creating safe spaces that are free of judgement, humiliation or shame, teens can talk through their challenges, getting an on-ramp into stress instead of being dropped into the deep end.
To help with this scaffolding, CCM offers a few tools to our teens. The first is how our educators create safe space with the teens. We remind them to refrain from judging others, but also to listen. Educators and teens together create classroom covenants to set up how classroom learning and sharing happens. Teens are gently reminded about these guidelines when they go astray. Also, we’ve been taking teens on more challenging opportunities like ropes courses, rock climbing, and harder hikes. By doing both classroom sharing of feelings and then asking teens to go on bigger, more challenging adventures together, they grow a supportive community that can help manage stress together.
This current cohort of teenagers also continues to grapple with the pandemic’s impact on their lives. Dr. Stone addressed this specific problem, observing that many teens had missed out on developing “soft skills” — inter-and intrapersonal abilities that are usually acquired in the normal flow of human interaction. When today’s teens were in lockdown and not in school, what soft skills did they not learn?
For example, a teen in 11th grade this school year (2024-25) would have been in 7th grade in 2020-21, the year most teens in California didn’t go to school in person. During middle school, teens should be learning communication, collaboration, and active listening. How would they learn this if they weren’t in school and surrounded by peers? Dr. Stone challenged us to think about how our supplemental Jewish teen spaces can be an opportunity for teens to learn and practice those frontal-lobe cognitive skills, and help fill in the gaps that remain even four years after the beginning of the pandemic.
On Wednesday nights at CCM, we hold a weekly session of “roses and thorns,” where each teen shares one good thing and one bad thing from their week. This check-in uses skills that help teens take care of others as well as themselves. Here they get a chance to practice listening and sharing. Having harder conversations together — for example, about the war in Israel, anti-Semitism and how to be a better friend or ally — give teens practice in listening, constructive thinking and empathy.
Aside from personal and community resilience, Dr. Stone also emphasized that a key protective factor for teens is having an adult who cares, watches out for them and believes in their abilities. This can be a role for parents, but it can also be a potential role for other trusted adults, like Jewish educators — including Midrasha educators like ourselves. Sometimes we are the person holding the metaphorical belay rope in difficult class conversations, so that everyone feels safe and no one can “fall.” Our educators are sometimes the first to hear if a teen is going through a hard time, which enables us to help them find help.
Dr. Stone also reminded us that adolescents are supposed to test boundaries and explore relationships broadly. Jewish educators can also fulfill this role by helping hold boundaries and modeling how to build healthy relationships with peers. On our retreats, this can mean helping teens learn how to ask friends to include them, or coaching them on how to have a conversation with a friend (or parent) who’s upset them.
Boundaries when working with teens also means helping them know when to draw a line — whether that means going to bed instead of another hour of studying, or learning when a friend’s behavior isn’t healthy and how/when to talk with them about it. Sometimes at Midrasha, we purposefully hold conversations about these ideas; how to have healthy relationships is a frequent workshop topic on Wednesday nights. Other times this conversations happen more organically when initiated by a teen.
Dr. Stone has noticed that a common trend in the teen world is to make everything a “Leadership” opportunity. Maybe this is because of the pressure of competitive college admissions, resulting in everything in teen programming-land being framed around building a college resume. Dr. Stone reminded us that it’s okay for teen spaces to emphasize the value of being in community and a place to think and feel; not everything has to be about leadership. While we offer some teen leadership opportunities at CCM, we tend to lean more into the community- and friendship-building work. Prior to our session with Dr. Stone, I had been thinking about creating a more formal “teen leadership council.” But after our time with her, I was relieved to realize that one of the things our teens really love about Midrasha is that they can just be here, without needing to also find a way to “lead.”
I am an unabashed member of the Dr. Betsy Stone fan club. I deeply appreciated how Dr. Stone reminded all of us the value of having dedicated Jewish teen spaces. They are often the only space in our teens’ lives where they get to ask big, meaningful and important questions without judgment, and where Judaism can be a tool that adds meaning and context to their ideas. She helps me weave the threads between the modern teen brain, teen psychology, and Judaism. It’s enabled our Contra Costa Midrasha team of educators to create Jewish spaces for today’s Jewish teens that are safe, spiritual, scaffold stress and build healthy relationships with each other and mentor-educators.
