Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l famously taught that:

To defend a country you need an army. But to defend a free society you need schools…So Jews became the people whose passion was education, whose citadels were schools and whose heroes were teachers.

Rabbi Sacks emphasized the essential role Jewish education and day schools play in inspiring our young people to live engaged Jewish lives. He deeply admired our teachers and called them the heroes of the community. If teachers are our heroes, then we must ask are we supporting and investing in them sufficiently? 

We recently had a conversation with an administrator at a Jewish day school who stated that: “We don’t need to invest in a curriculum since that’s what we pay our teachers for.” This approach captured for us a failure to equip teachers with the tools they need for success in the classroom. 

Teaching isn’t easy, and Jewish educators are often expected to simultaneously cultivate nurturing relationships with students, collaborate with peers and supervisors, communicate with parents and community stakeholders, master pedagogies and learning strategies, and spend time grading assessments — all before even sitting down to figure out what to teach tomorrow. And while many professional development programs exist there are very few projects aimed at helping Jewish educators create and deliver the content they need to fully engage students.

Schools often employ teachers with excellent content knowledge and then trust them with the task of developing and implementing curricula for their classrooms. While these teachers are undoubtedly knowledgeable professionals, we must ask ourselves if our schools are providing them with the training and skills necessary to create well-designed curricula that meet the needs of a range of diverse students that they encounter in each of their classes?

To address this challenge, The Rabbi Sacks Legacy and Lahav Learning (which began in 2013 as a JEIC school challenge grantee) – a curriculum design and teacher training organization – created the Torah V’Chochmah program to train teachers in curriculum development based on the inspirational ideas of Rabbi Sacks in the areas of Chumash (Bible), Parashat Hashavua (The Weekly Portion), and Machshava (Jewish Thought).

Our initiative, supported by a grant from UnitEd and in partnership with the Lookstein Center and Herzog Global–all funding and/or operational partners of JEIC–brings together world class content and ideas from Rabbi Sacks along with scholars in the fields of Bible and Jewish thought, matching them with training and support for teachers to select sources and build curricula tailored for their specific students – all while providing mentorship and support as the teachers implement these curricula in their classrooms. 

Beginning in the summer of 2023 with an in-person conference, and continuing throughout the 2023-24 academic year, teachers were asked to select a content area to focus on, choosing between Chumash, Jewish Thought, and Parashat Hashavua to learn content from world renowned experts. In addition, teachers would study the fundamentals of curriculum theory and design, gaining the tools to translate expert content into classroom curricula. Then teachers were paired with a mentor to work with throughout the year as they built and delivered these curricula within their school settings, combining content, theory, and design into specially tailored materials for their students. 

Thus far, participants have reported that this program has had a tremendous impact on their classroom teaching and planning, with one teacher writing that the experience “has enriched my understanding of not only the content of parasha, but also how to deliver that content effectively.” Another teacher, who both planned and taught the new curriculum, told us, “My students have really connected to the teachings of Rabbi Sacks’ articles that we've read so far. His writing focuses them on the relevance of the Torah we’re learning, allowing them to appreciate how much the lessons of the Torah apply to their lives today.” 

In addition, we’ve partnered with Rosov Consulting to provide more granular insight into the impact of this unique teacher training and curriculum development program as we begin to expand this initiative further. 

Together we are excited to be equipping our heroes with the tools they need to shape the Jewish world one classroom at a time. 

Rabbi Jeremy Bruce is the director of programming at The Rabbi Sacks Legacy. He served as an educational leader in the US and UK for over twenty years.

Rabbi David Stein is the dean of academic affairs at Shalhevet High School and is the co-founder and managing director of Lahav Learning.