T’fillah (prayer) is integral to JCDS’ pluralistic education and is one of the ways we provide a common grounding in Jewish practice and values. It expresses our core identity as a living, celebrating Jewish community. In our T’fillot (prayer services), we seek both to sustain one another and to reach beyond ourselves. JCDS is a safe space for students (and the whole community) to explore and grow into our particular beliefs and understandings. For some, formal devotion to God is an essential practice. For others, the language of what is eternal and transcendant is at once an anchor and a guide. For most of us, T’fillah occupies a mysterious space between seeking, learning, and discovery. For all of us, T’fillah is a community setting fit for song, contemplation, growing mastery, and deepening commitment.

We organize our T’fillot variously over the course of the week:

Our youngest students (K-2) alternately pray with their own class and in pairings with other classes. In both settings, the children steadily add new T’fillot to their routine as they learn them with their teachers. Song suffuses our services, often accompanied by guitar or percussion, along with an emphasis on the particular values and concepts expressed in the act and words of prayer.

Third, fourth and fifth grade is a period of significant growth in students’ understanding and mastery of the T’fillot. The third and fourth graders daven on their own, building their skills in leadership and recitation in the safe company of one another. The 5th graders serve as role models by joining the 3rd and 4th graders one day a week, and on another day they join the 6–8th graders in T’fillah, looking ahead to their becoming B’nei mitzvah and beyond. Torah Trope is part of the 4th grade curriculum.

Our 6th–8th graders join as a group for T’fillah on Torah reading days but separate out by advisory for T’fillah on Tuesdays and Fridays. The students take leadership roles in the service according to a rotation and the students in each of the advisories take evident pride in skillfully leading their peers in prayer.

On Wednesdays we offer the Middle Schoolers Minyan Electives. In this most explicit expression of JCDS’s pluralism in T’fillah, we offer the older students the option to daven either in an egalitarian or mehitza non-egalitarian service. Alternatively, the students have the opportunity to take part in appropriate experiential activities, discussion groups, or informal text or poetry study groups. Each of these options runs about a trimester and helps the students find their place and language as spiritually sensitive, well-educated Jews.

As our 6th, 7th, and 8th graders reach their Bar or Bat Mitzvah, JCDS publicly acknowledges the milestone during T’fillot in a typically sweet and celebratory way, and also presents a gift from the school. Tuesdays the Middle School students recite the Minha service. Fridays include a Kabbalat Shabbat (welcoming Shabbat) service and/or program.

Finally, in order to achieve our ambitious goals, we emphasize training both in the keva (formal skills), and kavvanah (personal connection) in prayer. In K–4, teachers pursue these goals with dedicated class time or as part of their regular T’fillot. On Tuesdays in the Middle School, we offer a Sh’at Iyyun, a period for focused learning on particular areas of the service, including:

• Keva, in which the students learn and demonstrate mastery in specific skills associated with T’fillah

• Kavvanah, in which they pursue some of the questions of faith and heart that they all need to ask

Finally, our faculty are encouraged to personally model for the students their religious and spiritual sensibilities. We encourage our students, in turn, to take advantage of their teachers’ insight and experience as they mature, advance toward their B’nei Mitzvah, and begin to envision their adult Jewish lives.