To begin, I need your help setting the stage. If the taller congregants could remove the ceiling that would be a good start - I require an Israeli sun in an Israeli sky. This floor must go, and all the floors below. Could the more muscular congregants knock out the foundation? We must stand atop Mount Carmel, on the Western slope to be exact. This Northern wall must come down - we need Haifa in the distance. If we could place the ark carefully to one side, the Eastern wall must be demolished, because that is where our village of Yemin Orde lies - all 77 acres of wandering paths, dwellings, school buildings, a synagogue and dining hall. Most importantly, we must look to the West with unobstructed vision - so the balcony, hallway, entrance and steps must be deconstructed, pronto. That’s better. Now we can glimpse the fields -- lush with crops and bordered by pines, fruit trees, and bamboo. Interspersed are buildings of kibbutzim and other settlements. There are splashes of wildflowers which erupt from the earth and intoxicate our senses. Beyond the land is the Mediterranean Sea. Beyond the Sea the horizon -- the furthest visible point - where our earth ends.

Who is this congregation who stares out to the Mediterranean? We are not Agudath Israel; our rabbi is neither our rabbi, nor our cantor our cantor. Even the eternal Nat is not Nat. They, and we, are lost children - but not of Peter Pan fame. No, we are the orphaned of the world, the ones no one wanted, the ones whose parents have disappeared, some through the violence of others, or of themselves. We are the abused and the molested. We are the ones who have seen our parents die and other family members slain. We are the one who were left behind, or went ahead - to somewhere or to nowhere -- to fend for ourselves. We are the homeless, the parentless, and the abandoned.

We come from the Ukraine, Ethiopia, Brazil, Argentina, France, Czechoslovakia, Yemen, and Israel - from all the places the Jew has wandered. Today we are 500, but we have been gathering at this village for decades. The man who speaks to us today is the same man who has spoken to other adolescents of other generations - the victims of other abominations and of other unexplained departures.

His name is Chaim Peri. He asks us to consider every piece of wood, pebble and stone -- every light illuminating every path, every blade of grass, every branch and twig. He tells us that they, the man-made and natural sinew of which this village is comprised, have been waiting for us - to bid us welcome. He tells us to look down the slope of Mt. Carmel, across the fields, beyond the tree borders and villages -- to land’s end, and to the sea, and across the sea to the end of our ability to see. He tells us that this distance is not too great for us to travel; that we may traverse a space as large as our vision, as great as the world; that we are not forever broken; that our most profound hurts can heal.

In the days and months and years that follow, he teaches us how to make ourselves whole. We come to him not as infants nor as young children, but as adolescents, at a time when scholars opine that we cannot be healed. We are damaged, and our hormones are raging. Our past has been lost in pain. Our future is obscured by anger. Our present is so impossibly narrow that there is no room to act; only to act out.

But Dr. Peri says to us: "Not only will you heal yourself, but you will help to heal the world. You will redeem your past; you will discover a point of solace and strength in a person or experience that today you dare not look at. Your past will become a river and you will flow towards the future in your own story and in the story of your community." And so the healing begins.

From forty years of making good on this promise, Dr. Peri has written a book, entitled "Reclaiming Adolescence," which discusses what he has learned from the universe of abandoned children whom he has helped. One of Dr. Peri’s themes is that we have developed too narrow a view of normality, and that much of what we consider pathological, conduct that scares us and turn us into stone, must be re-embraced as within the scope of normal. From dealing with a wide range of anti-social behavior, Dr. Peri extracts a deeper understanding of the dimensions of rebellion, and its linkage to past abandonment and the fear of future abandonment. Dr. Peri sees rebellion as the most profound test of the adult world. When face to face with abandoned children, to fail this test is to fail forever. One cannot blink.

Rebellion poses profound questions. Do you love me despite what I have done, or is your love conditional? Can you assure me that I am the same person from moment-to-moment, and not at risk of disappearing? Are your values sufficiently secure to weather my assault, or must you punish - and prove that your world is not built on justice, but on violence? Can I count on you not to abandon me? Am I safe?

These questions embody the adolescent’s quest for justice. Rebellion lashes out against the perceived inequity of the adolescent’s losses and injuries. Even in a family blessed with good fortune, there are deaths and illnesses, humiliations, sibling rivalry, the cruelty of peers, the pain of not measuring up. These hurts cry out for justice. If I am injured, was I not wronged? Who will avenge my loss and my pain? If the world will not make me whole, I will smite it.

In Yemin Orde, and in every home according to Dr. Peri, there is a need for rules, but not unmoored from relationship; there is a need for hierarchy but not detached from emotional intimacy; there is a need for punishment, but not divorced from insight and never an end in itself. Never the punishment of excommunication. Never the threat of abandonment. Never that this home is not your home. Dr. Peri quotes a Robert Frost poem - "Home is the place, where when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

Although Yemin Orde is an institution of learning, it is first and foremost an institution of living. The children do not reside in the school. The school is separated from the homes in which they live with adult supervision. School is to which they go in the morning, and from which they return in the afternoon. They return home, where they are free to mock their teachers. They have a private space where the keepsakes of the past can be kept away from prying eyes. Around the village there are innumerable reminders of their countries of origin: pictures, articles, praise of their national customs, honor for their national heroes, celebrations in which their native foods are featured, teachers to speak to them in their mother tongue. The childhood home, the place from which the adolescent has been cut off through trauma and injury, is redeemed. Teenagers are encouraged to search for a memory of wholeness -- a kind uncle, a village elder who unlocked a life riddle, a moment when a father offered praise, when a mother offered a hug - the penultimate moment before loss.

In helping adolescents reconnect with a past that had abandoned them, Dr. Peri finds a wellspring of curative powers. Dr. Peri sees adolescence as a second birth - arising from the fact that every child must undergo two awakenings -- the first upon leaving the womb, the second in becoming a member of adult society. All cultures have rites to mark this transition into adulthood. Thus, there are powerful forces, both genetic and societal, that may be brought to bear upon the creation of a healthy adult identity. To experience this rebirth, however, the adolescent must be able to shed past trauma by giving it expression, rather than burying pain and becoming a stillborn adult.

Throughout the village are scattered womb-like structures, where adolescents can spontaneously gather, and talk. These spaces are code-named "Jonah's Whale," in reference to the incubating space in the whale’s belly, where Jonah rediscovered himself, and in so doing became an instrument to save the civilization of Nineveh. Dr. Peri sees adolescents as being obsessed with justice, but not within the narrow confines of parental definition. Indeed, the failure of parents to be justice-seekers in their own lives - in their deeds - the failure to engage adolescents in battles for justice - win or lose - teaches a debilitating lesson. In belying their own words, parents instruct adolescents in insincerity. Adolescents learn -- not only that there is no justice in the world; not only that justice is not worth fighting for, but that there is no justice in their home; no justice to appeal to in their parents’ hearts.

Dr. Peri encourages parents to encourage their children to write letters of protest when a public official does wrong, to gather in opposition when a community is endangered, to campaign for social goods -- to be adults in training -- to engage the world for the sake of justice and to demand a response. Dr. Peri recognizes the wisdom in traditional societies which allocate to adolescents responsibilities of importance to the community, and thereby build an identity of self-worth; societies which respect elders and the life wisdom passed through them, societies in which family values is more than a shibboleth.

Modernity, despite astonishing scientific advances and profound psychological insights, challenges the stability of self. It requires that parents establish bulwarks against the dizzying array of new fashions, fads, and faiths, of the glamour marketing of newness to feed our economic engine. For Dr. Peri, the devaluation of the past poses risks to adolescent identity formation in ways parallel to what he has observed among orphans who have been robbed of their past by violence or abandonment. Parents must be guides and mentors in the transmission of value systems and life-learning to their children, rather than mimic teenage excess, and thereby convey that there is nothing to grow into - that adults are simply children with more power to be childish.

A few vignettes before returning from Mount Carmel. Dr. Peri received a call from an army base commander about Shai, a Yemin Orde graduate. Shai had been assigned to kitchen duty, and had refused to perform his work. Shai asked the commander to call Dr. Peri and tell him -- "Vayigash Eilav Yehuda." This phrase refers to the story of Joseph, when Judah approached the Viceroy of Egypt - his brother Joseph in disguise -- and argued for the release of his brother Benjamin. Shai’s act of disobedience was to protest the food that was thrown out at the army base. At Yemin Orde, Shai had been taught that such waste was a sin. The Biblical expression was a Village code to protest official misconduct.

There is a story of the graduate, Tedesse, who was failing in mathematics. This Ethiopian refugee did not lack intelligence, and the solution was not to be found in more homework. Rather, it was to help Tedesse recover his memories of minding flocks of sheep in his native land. In re-associating with his past, Tedesse overcame the self imposed emotional embargo against learning.

Another Ethiopian refugee, Shalom, had seen his father, a respected community member in Ethiopia become useless upon immigrating to Israel, grow ill, wither and die. Shalom was dysfunctional for years until the Operation Solomon airlift, which brought thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, when Shalom disappeared from Yemin Orde. When he returned weeks later, he was not punished, but was honored by the community. He had lent his language and other skills to help Ethiopian Olim adjust in their first weeks in Israel. Shalom had finished his father’s journey, and regained the respect his father had lost. Dr. Peri points out how clearly adolescents recognize when their parent’s dreams have been shattered, and the powerful forces that lead them - in their own lives - to bring parental ambitions to fruition.

Sammy had lost his father and mother and remained alienated at Yemin Orde. He was accused of stealing and sought out Dr. Peri to clear his name. When Dr. Peri could not be found, he went to his office and began throwing stones. Not the small pebbles that Dr. Peri had encouraged adolescents to throw at his office window if there was no other way to get his attention. These were fist sized rocks. Sammy screamed about being abandoned by his parents and that Dr. Peri was doing the same. When the stone throwing ceased, Sammy ran off to the woods. Ultimately he returned, and there was no punishment. Dr. Peri understood that from Sammy’s perspective, stoning was an appropriate response to adult abandonment. The fact was that he hadn’t stolen. It took years for Sammy to heal. Along his journey he got in trouble with the law and acquired a police record. Later he wanted to become a fireman, but was precluded because of his record. Dr. Peri took up Sammy’s cause, and appealed through channels all the way up to the President of Israel, who granted Sammy a pardon. He became a fireman, and Dr. Peri recalls how he received a call from Sammy when he had saved his first lives, pulling two people from a car accident before the car exploded. Sammy dedicated the rescue to Dr. Peri, because Dr. Peri had rescued him.

Or there was the time when Dr. Peri kissed the open sores on an adolescent’s face to provide reassurance.

Dr. Peri is larger than his book; he is a Jewish hero. To read his book is to become entangled in goodness as in a vine; even more so, to hear Dr. Peri in person. It was a minor miracle to be introduced to Dr. Peri, during the Shul’s February Israel mission. We stopped at Yemin Orde because of Tina Wyatt. . The story of Tina’ involvement in Yemin Orde would require another presentation, and she will be with us at today’s lunch and learn. Tina is a leader in raising funds to establish a Yemin Orde type youth village in Rwanda. Why Rwanda? To rescue a remnant of the 1.5 million children who have been orphaned as a result of the genocidal barbarity perpetrated there. As one teacher at Yemin Orde told us about the Rwandan project, "I have never done a more Jewish thing in my life." Now Agudath Israel is sponsoring an Ethiopian graduate from Yemin Orde to join the Rwandan youth village as a mentor and shaliach - as one who can say - "I was as you were and this is me now; this can be your truth too." To participate in this effort is to become entangled in a righteous vision; it is to be redeemed from narrow straits and from an insular Judaism.

In closing, I am grateful for this opportunity to speak in honor of my father. He was a great lover of books, but he loved children more, and started his working life in an orphanage in New York City. He was enchanted by the curiosity of children, and was a parent who knew in the marrow of his bones how to transform the home, and the world, into a place of meaning, a place of welcoming, a place of love.