Rabbis Kaunfer and Tucker talk about how to inspire children and families to learn Torah together through Devash, a publication created in collaboration with our partner, Pedagogy of Partnership.
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Guest Blog
JEIC Founding Director, Rabbi Shmuel Feld, addresses some surprising misconceptions about Chanukah. Rabbi Feld explains the origins of the game of dreidel, uncovers a fun fact about sufganiyot, and answers whether there’s a minimum number of presents to give during Chanukah. You may be surprised at what you thought you knew about the Festival of Lights.
In this blog post, Rabbi Yehuda Chanales maintains, “We must work to bring the Sukkah mindset into our classrooms and schools,” pushing us to re-frame our actions and be more mindful of our surroundings.
He adds, “If we want to make room for God, deep personal reflection and identity building in our schools, we can’t simply look at the actions teachers and students need to be doing differently. While new programs, pedagogy, and curricula are valuable, we also need to think carefully about the culture and environment in which these new initiatives are introduced.”
In this blog, Rabbi Dr. Jay Goldmintz maintains that, “Now, more than ever, there is a need to help students find their personal connection to the Torah they are learning, to find themselves but within the context of tradition and community.”
“This requires a shift in pedagogy,” he relates, further expounding on how he envisions this shift.
In Rabbi Andrew Ergas’ recent piece about “Teaching Hebrews Rather than Hebrew,” he relates that in day schools throughout North America, we encounter different varieties of Hebrew, each stemming from a different historical period of Hebrew’s evolution. Rabbi Ergas suggests that each requires distinct educational goals. “Our task as a community of educators is to appreciate both the connections between the different aspects of Hebrew language learning and their distinctions,” he says. “Unleashing the ways this dynamic language can serve as a key to unlock a multiplicity of pathways toward an enriched Jewish life and community.”
In this thought-provoking piece, Anthony Knopf maintains that “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.”
He suggests several ways that practitioners can make use of a variety of approaches to help students engage more meaningfully in chesed projects and other character education activities, and urges that “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.”
In his op-ed, Rabbi David Stein argues that after a year of “many questions but no obvious answers,” “whatever challenges or opportunities lay ahead must be met with a clear vision of the central goals of Jewish education.”
Five years ago, I had the unique opportunity to design a middle school. That kind of opportunity invites you to ask, “What if we try…,” and to creatively explore the possibilities that we often wish to pursue in education. Filled with all of the visions my colleagues and I had discussed as to what we would do if only we could start from the beginning, I sought to develop a program that encompasses the hallmarks of what we have all seen in successful educational experiences: integrated learning, authentic academic experiences that can have a broader impact, and opportunities for learning that are personally relevant and intrinsically motivating. The outcome of this quest became our Scholars Forum, a program at MILTON that explores contemporary issues through a multidisciplinary lens and that empowers students to use their learning to inform, advocate, influence, and change.
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and with the rapid flip from in-school to on-line learning, I have heard countless statements that school as we know it, will change forever. I certainly understand why some would make these claims: broadly speaking, and with notable exceptions, Jewish day schools were able to pivot and provide a re-imagined balance to the 2019-2020 school year, and as of this moment, most of these same schools have pivoted again to provide Covid-conscious in-building education this fall.
Yes, many changes were made, but will this mean that the institution known as school will be forever changed? Despite extraordinary advances in technology, social upheaval, economic growth, and new understandings of the human mind, history has shown only limited lasting change in schools since the catalyzing events of the 1950s, namely Brown vs the Board of Education and the launch of Sputnik and the ensuing space-race. I add to this a concern that the desire for change is frequently counterweighted by a deep desire to return to the familiar and “normal.”
I would like to posit here that while I am skeptical that schooling has changed forever, I do think that there may be an enduring change in our feelings about school and the parental understanding of what school is and can be.
Here is what I think may have really shifted for good:
This question went through my mind more times than I can count when sitting in meetings with faculty and staff, or having a conversation with a parent. Time and time again, the frustration of not being able to help others see my perspective as head of school was difficult to hide. It took me a while and some hard-to-take feedback to finally realize that it wasn’t just me asking that question – everyone in the room was thinking the same about me: how can I make her understand?
It seems so obvious, but it is not obvious at all. That’s the reason why so many books and articles about leadership, emotional intelligence, and about having difficult conversations are piling up in all our inboxes, nightstands, and e-readers.
How do we focus on understanding others, who are our partners in the difficult discussions in school life?
This past spring, PoP teachers demonstrated that partnership learning could indeed transfer online, deepening learning and relationships via Zoom in place of face-to-face classroom dynamics. PoP therefore turned to creating the conditions and tools for social interaction, relationship building, and rich meaning-making in an online context.
The Book of Devarim that we are reading in synagogue during these weeks is a recap of the previous four books; the material is largely familiar, but is presented in an entirely new way. Some of the classics (the Ten Commandments/Utterances) reappear with changes, while important new material (e.g., the Sh'ma) is introduced. Moshe is recounting the people's history for several important reasons: the new generation needs to review the experiences of their parents; the people require instruction regarding their identity and values before they fight a war upon entering the Land; the teller wants to leave a legacy that defines the meaning of his leadership, that all future Israelites can study and learn from.
However, the emphasis throughout Devarim is less on the recounting and more on the message. The experience that the people are about to undergo, conquering the land and ruling it autonomously, requires different qualities than were required previously. The purpose of Moshe's speech is to fortify the people in their faith and relationship with God and their understanding of the Land as the culmination of their formation and wanderings as a nation.
Three years ago, as part of the Hakaveret initiative, in which the Mayberg Foundation brought together teams of educators to design innovative models, Michal Smart, Rina Hoffman and I developed The Inquiry Beit Midrash (IBM), a project-based learning model for Judaic Studies. I have had the good fortune to bring this model to life at the Idea School in Tenafly, NJ. The idea behind IBM is to find out what the students are passionate about in their Judaism and to use that passion project as the basis for some of their Judaic learning.
High-impact Jewish communities can only make effective change if we address challenges, pursue opportunities, and partner with others. Partnership with Purpose (PWP) builds diverse networks that revolve around shared visions and values and span across a variety of community purposes. We nurture the partnerships and relationships, understanding that every decision and collaboration must first start from a place of mutual trust. Success results in strengthening our community, schools, and institutions by being fiscally responsible, reducing overhead costs, sharing resources, and encouraging cross-pollination among our organizations.
The PWP model is built on trust of organizational leadership. There are, unfortunately, those who prefer to use the term “coopetition” meaning cooperation while being competitive. This mentality is destructive to community building and goes against the values of Partnership with Purpose. It fosters a sense of distrust and skepticism rather than building relationships anchored in our growth as a whole community.
The famous 12th century philosopher Maimonides tells us, “A person should always take care not to cast his thoughts backwards, for his eyes are placed on his face and not his back.” With this, Maimonides reminds us of the value of looking forward without dwelling too much on the past, or even the present. His words ring especially true in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.
With more and more schools committed to virtual learning for the rest of the school year, our minds are all occupied with questions about how to create community when we’re not together, how to engage students in authentic learning when behind a device, and how to support teachers through a process that is new to everyone. While these are all important questions in achieving our present goal of minimizing interruption for student growth and learning, we also must keep in mind the big-picture future of our schools.
In a seminal article published in 1966, Rabbi Shimon Schwab, the former Rav of Khal Adath Jeshurun in Washington Heights, succinctly framed the option facing every family desiring to send their son to a traditional yeshiva today. “Young students attend either a high school which stresses excellence in secular studies as much as in limudei kodesh (Judaic Studies) or ... an institution where the secular program, reduced to the absolute minimum, is grudgingly taken in stride and absolved without enthusiasm and without fanfare.”
The perspective of many yeshivas today is that in order to produce high caliber talmidei chachomim (learned scholars), the full focus of the day needs to be on Judaic Studies. As such, General Studies fall to a secondary status resulting in students losing respect for the little time that has been allocated for Language Arts, History, Science, and Math. The typical yeshiva high school schedule offers rigorous Jewish academics infused with opportunities for spiritual growth until the early afternoon. Following that, for approximately three hours, students are exposed to a typical secular curriculum when their energies are low and their attention depleted. The material often contradicts Torah philosophies, and the students’ growth energy has already been devoted to Talmudic studies. Following dinner, students return to their Judaic curriculum until they end their day, around 9 pm, with Maariv (evening prayer service).
The start of the school year typically presents a challenge with balance. Fall brings us an often-appreciated change of weather, and we shiver a bit from the chilly mornings and sad sight of our slowly shriveling much-loved gardens. Rosh Hashanah’s festive feel includes sweet foods and celebratory meals with family and friends, and it also serves as a time of judgement in determining our fate for the year. And in the same spirit, Simchat Torah represents the culmination of reading the full Torah, and then we find ourselves beginning all over again with the very first word.
This balance between the present and the future, the jovial and the austere, the culmination and beginning might seem contradictory at first, but it is a key part of our annual transition, extending to any time of transition or creation. Similarly, in creating our new Jewish day school, Einstein Academy, we wrestle with making sense of these seemingly-contradictory concepts every day.
I have a new hero, and it’s a bit embarrassing.
Embarrassing to admit that I’ve studied and taught this character for decades and always assumed he was the anti-hero, the person we shouldn’t become, the epitome of someone who was impelled by a mistaken zeal to lead a mistaken life.
My anti-hero has become heroic.
I’m talking about Jonah.
I have a bad habit of assuming that whatever I have loved or enjoyed other people will also love and enjoy. Sometimes this assumption sends me down the wrong path, but in the case of my Jewish literature course for high schoolers, it led to the development of something beautiful and enduring for my students.
Creating this course was a dream of mine since falling in love with a Jewish Literature course in my freshman year of college. I was transformed by the class, and all I could think about throughout that year was: Why didn’t they teach any of these texts to me during my twelve years of Jewish education?
When I began teaching high school English in a Jewish day school bringing Jewish literature into my classes was a priority. The students came from a broad range of backgrounds and many felt detached from Jewish learning through ancient texts. Teaching Jewish literature was an opportunity to broaden their understanding of their religion, culture and what constitutes a Jewish text.
Having been involved in Jewish education for many years as both a student and a teacher, I have often felt perturbed by the attempts to professionalize and academize the field. Rubrics, curricula, assessments, and so on were vigorously studied with the hope of full implementation. In a field like Jewish studies, educators, schools, and parents often wonder: what is success? When does a parent or a school know that they have done well with the Jewish education they provide to children? I would strongly argue that academic measures are the last place to look.