Judaism embodies a strong ethical core. The halakhic corpus includes laws relating to judging others fairly, practicing honesty, avoiding deception, not bearing a grudge, offering hospitality, respecting the elderly, visiting the sick, respecting copyright, and avoiding envy. Pirkei Avot teaches that “if there is no derekh eretz, there is no Torah,'' which, according to Rabbi Menachem Meiri (1249-1315), recognizes that Judaism requires the development of good character traits and not merely legal compliance. 

Given the prominence of ethics in Jewish tradition, an important barometer of our schools’ success should be whether those graduating have been taught to understand, internalize, and apply Judaism’s ethical values.

While numerous schools do teach Jewish ethics to their students, these classes tend to focus on Jewish laws or moral reasoning from a Jewish angle. The thinking is that knowledge of correct behavior and skill in moral reasoning will result in more ethical conduct. It is important to point out that, to the contrary, psychologists have reported accumulating evidence of a generally weak relation of moral reasoning to moral action. This tenuous relationship has become known as the “judgment-action gap.”

Take, for example, a teacher who wants to help the students learn how to engage in conflict with others in a way that is dignified and respectful. A class on Jewish approaches to conflict may impart important conceptual teachings such as the notion of “an argument for the Sake of Heaven” – perhaps with the explanation that this frames dispute as a collaborative venture in a joint pursuit of the truth. While these concepts are valuable, they are unlikely to leave students equipped to identify and navigate challenging emotions such as resentment and anger when in the heat of conflict.

This example is illustrative of the inadequacy of teaching moral knowledge and reasoning alone when helping students to develop character. Character education can only succeed if students are also guided in gaining self-knowledge: awareness of their own feelings, thoughts, and emotions. Teachers seeking to help their students develop self-knowledge should consider using mindfulness to deepen the children’s awareness of the connection between their emotions, thoughts, and bodily sensations. In this framework, mindfulness would not merely be used to increase positive emotions but to help children develop the ability to listen to their inner barometers – the emotions that indicate whether their behavior is aligned with their moral values. Through mindfulness, kids can listen more closely to their conscience by tuning into what their bodies are telling them.

Moreover, an improvement in moral conduct requires the capacity for self-regulation: the ability to control one’s impulses and give due consideration to the most appropriate response in challenging situations. To help children develop the capacity for self control, schools could use Harvard University’s Brain Games to teach them to deal with overwhelming emotions and think before making decisions.

In addition to self-knowledge and self-regulation, successful character education programs help students to develop a moral identity. People who have a moral identity are those for whom character traits such as kindness and integrity have become part of their self-concept. They see their sense of self as organized around their moral beliefs. As such, they are likely to prioritize moral principles when these conflict with other goals like peer approval, personal convenience or a cathartic release of frustration. Indeed, psychologists advance both theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that the centrality of morality to one’s self concept may be the single most powerful determinant of concordance between moral judgment and conduct.

To successfully integrate character virtues into the conception of self, the students’ engagement in the program is key.

Practitioners can make use of a variety of approaches to help students engage more meaningfully in chesed projects and other character education activities. Examples of such strategies include having the students write down three to five personally meaningful values and to explain why these values are important to them, or asking them to write about the positive impact they would like to make on the world in five years time. In pilot studies, participants in these activities reported being inspired to think about what they valued in their lives, what they are working towards, and how they define themselves.

The forgoing offers only a few representative examples of how our schools can more effectively cultivate Jewish virtues in our students. Much more work needs to be done to develop innovative and integrated models for ethics education to help our students understand, internalize and apply Jewish ethical values.