Spirituality and its connection to the words and actions of ritual are not always easy to teach.

While I do teach classes on spirituality and ritual with many age groups, I spend much of my time working with teenagers. One of my chief goals, as I prepare them for the rite of passage of Bar/Bat Mitzvah is to give them some tools for dealing with the connection of theology, spirituality and ritual action.

With these young adults I try to think outside the box and use different classroom experiments to illustrate the concepts of spirituality and prayer. One of my recent experiments focused on the Jewish value of syncing.

In Judaism we try to get ritual act in harmony with a particular story at the time the story took place. For example, we have a Passover Seder to retell and re-live the experience of the Exodus from Egypt on the anniversary of that event.

This happens again and again in Judaism as we try to sync personal experience with the grander story of the Jewish people and all of the cycles of nature that constantly flow around us. In this particular activity I challenged my students to see how many mirrors they could line up in the beam of flash light.

Could we get the energy of one act (light on a mirror) to connect withe next act, creating a circuit? They ran back and forth across the large room, having one circle of light reflect to the next mirror. Last year when we attempted this, we did not have much success.

The flashlight was not strong enough and the beam of light diffused before we got many reflections. We had to position the mirrors right next to each other, making the effect very weak. This year I went and got a stronger light, from 20 lumens to 200 lumens. I figured that with a brighter light and a better plan we would have this reflected disc of light dancing across the room.

We were more successful for the first few reflections but then the light spread out and we ran into similar problems to the year before. That is until a student said, I have a stronger light.

Sure enough with even more light we created this awesome effect with light from one mirror/place flowing to the next. We had five or six discs of light reflecting back and forth across our darkened social hall. We had a great discussion about how we have to make adjustments and be a flexible to connect story and value and ritual.

The next morning as I thought about our progress from weaker to stronger light, I realized that while the increase of light was important to make our experiment successful it also highlighted one of the difficulties of modern religious experience.

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