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 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.”
Learn about JEIC’s work to reimagine Tefillah, in partnership with the Jewish Federation of Broward County at Brauser Maimonides Academy and Shaarei Bina Torah Academy for Girls in this piece by Rabbi Arnold Samlan in eJewish Philanthropy, titled “Bringing a Spirit of Innovation to Town.”
There’s no time like Rosh Hashanah to think about the big picture. God created the world with great potential and only the creation of humans on the sixth day enabled that potential to be realized. A midrash in Chullin 60b reveals to us that while the earth brought forth grasses on the third day of creation, they grew underground, unable to sprout above soil until the needs and will of a human being to pray for rain brought vegetation to fruition. All of creation hovered in potential until Adam was created and developed a relationship with the Creator.
And so we carry that legacy now thousands of years later. We carry the responsibility to bring forth potential from our world. From the most mundane material object to a divinely created soul we are blessed to care for, we are tasked with developing the potential of each in its fullest form.
