During Kol Nidre, which ushers in Yom Kippur each year, the Jewish community does something seemingly odd. We publicly declare all of our vows between a person and God null and void from this Yom Kippur to the next one. Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik points out that we nullify vows based on two premises (explained in Shulchan Aruch Yoreh Deah 228).
1. At the time a promise was made, a person was ignorant of some circumstance that made it too difficult to perform the promise.
2. At the time of the vow, the person was not ignorant, but came to regret the promise as time moved on because of new circumstances. Fulfilling the vow became too difficult.
Kol Nidre makes these assumptions with its grand stroke of remitting a statement that all these vows disappear for the next year. This future thinking makes us more attuned to our future vows, cautioning us against making regrettable promises.
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.
Sharon Freundel, JEIC Managing Drector, and Rabbi Shmuel Feld, JEIC Founding Director, were highlighted as featured presenters at The Rohr Jewish Learning Institute’s (JLI) 2019 National Jewish Retreat in Washington, D.C., August 13-18, 2019, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park.
JEIC facilitated a professional development collaboration with The Rohr Jewish Learning Institute, Ayeka and Pedagogy of Partnership of Hadar to enhance methodologies for teaching Jewish text and discussing Gd. These providers learned from one another and explored new ways of engaging students in substantive, robust, and meaningful text study.
This collaboration was made possible due to the support of the Mayberg Foundation and their two funding partners for this initiative: The AVI CHAI Foundation and Kohelet Foundation.
We thank all our partners, and the National Jewish Retreat, for elevating this landmark collaboration improving Jewish education for day school students..
If you google the words “God loves us,” the first page of hits contains all Christian websites. I don’t think this an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) problem; I think it is a statement that we are not good at reminding ourselves and our students through discussion or text study that God loves us. The sources are plentiful...
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.
Recently, I attended a conference workshop devoted to tefillah teaching in schools. One of the explicated tensions concerned the intersection of learning the Matbeah Tefillah (the structure and words in the siddur), having a deep relationship with God, being fluent in tefillah concepts, and understanding how to accomplish this in a short span on a daily basis. The tension increases when thinking about the way tefillah happens in local synagogues where duration matters and good personal behavior may not manifest well as communal paradigms.
To further complicate teaching tefillah in schools, most teachers lack training and focus on compliance, and, as a result of those two elements, create an environment that feels less like a spiritual process and more like a police action. This often results in tefillah being a negative experience for students that hurts their relationships with teachers, Jewish learning and experience, Jewish communal members and, ultimately, the Divine. Unfortunately, in the Jewish day school world, this story is not new.
Recently we hosted a meeting with a small group of Korean Christian ministers and students. They drove a long distance to meet with us to explore the promise of havruta, specifically for their Korean cultural and religious context. While this group gained helpful insight about havruta, our own gleanings from this encounter were unexpected and even a gift. Explaining the meaning of havruta to people outside the Jewish community required us to share more than just the history or mechanics of studying in pairs. We felt compelled to convey the deep Jewish sensibility that learning in our tradition is often inherently rooted in the personal relationships we build and nurture.
One of my fond grade school memories is of receiving fresh mimeographs right off the machine. We would hold them up to our faces and deeply breathe in the pungent, sweet smell. The purple writing never failed to intrigue us. One more 20th Century function has gone the way of the horse and buggy.
Have you ever experienced an “aha moment” when what seems to be an array of disparate parts all connect and form one cohesive whole?
Let me introduce you to a cornerstone of Montessori educational philosophy called cosmic education. Cosmic education emphasizes the value of imparting to our students a more comprehensive and holistic picture of the world and its manifold facets. It begins with learning about how the universe came to be, and continues with a “zoom-in” on the respective parts of the whole, which include but aren’t limited to history, geography, science, communication, and relationships. Ultimately, it describes the role of education as “to encompass the development of the whole person within the context of the universe.’
Do you remember the song This Magic Moment by Jay and the Americans? Magic moments occur throughout the course of the Jewish year. Sometimes, the magic is overt and apparent and other times, we have a greater hand in creating our own magic.
At either end of the Jewish calendar lives a major week-long festival. In the springtime month of Nissan, we celebrate Pesach. It is a massive undertaking to create a seder with its numerous accouterments, not to mention the weeks of advance preparation for the holiday’s arrival.
On the other side of the year, in autumnal Tishrei, we celebrate Sukkot. This holiday, too, requires a great deal of preparation: erecting a sukkah, securing a lulav and etrog, and eating—if not sleeping— outside no matter the climate.
While the similarities are striking, there is a fundamental difference between the two that can be gleaned from the recounting of their respective biblical sacrifices recited in the Mussaf Amidah (additional holiday service standing prayer).
Visitors to Schechter Manhattan often comment to me about how engaged and happy students appear. They notice how the students are busy at work, focused on the learning activities at hand. Sometimes I am asked, what motivates our students? Why do they choose to do hard things in order to learn?
Motivating students, and people, in general, is a challenge faced by all educators, and Schechter Manhattan is no exception. After all, our students don’t get a choice about whether they come to school, the adults in their lives insist. And, at Schechter Manhattan, like at most schools, we adults have made decisions about what content, concepts, skills, and values to include in the curriculum of study- things we think are really important and expect all students to learn. Add to that our approach to assessment and reporting, which includes lots of feedback but no grades or other such external motivators, and the question becomes even sharper. What motivates students to try?
Mid-March was filled with a great deal of excitement and energy for Jewish day school educators, and I’m not simply talking about the festivities associated with Purim. Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools held its biannual conference in Atlanta, and I attended with my Jewish Education Innovation Challenge (JEIC) team and more than 1000 other colleagues in the field. The conference was heartening and inspiring for this diverse population of Jewish educators, funders, and influencers, evidenced by a wide range of blog articles written in the last few days and posts filling our social media feeds.
In the spirit of being a positive disruptor, JEIC conducted an audacious initiative at the conference. Taking the first page out of a design thinking playbook, we created a unique mechanism for connecting directly with Jewish educators and influencers to find out their hopes and needs.
How did we do it?
Usually in a Judaic Studies classroom, a teacher might measure the success of a lesson based on the compliance of students or the ability of students to repeat back the information from class or a summary worksheet. This evaluation method allows students to show progress and the teacher to feel the accomplishment of delivering material or skill development.
But imagine a different paradigm. Consider education as a form of engagement instead of a delivery of goods so that education requires intention and effort in addition to acquisition.
Take a look at the image above. What do you see? Do you see children who are distracted, lazy, or perhaps even addicted? If yes, you’re not alone. In fact, many parents and educators feel that our children are unable to balance the advantages of technology and that it does more harm than gain. Many seek to blame our children for their reliance on technology and believe that the current generation is deteriorating and incapable.
To be honest, I strongly disagree with this perception and hope the rest of this article opens conversation, dialogue, and perhaps even debate so that educators will stop and think about technology’s implications in the world of chinuch now and in the future.
It’s been almost 20 years since I sat in a Lookstein professional development seminar in Israel with a diverse group of Jewish day school colleagues, sharing about our common woes. Dress code violations and tefillah seem to transcend school denomination, size and family wealth. While dress code occupies an interesting place in school policy discussion, tefillah gets a lot of attention in the wider Jewish day school world. In the last few years, a wide range of inspired teachers have reached out to JEIC about eight different tefillah programs, and at least three other new programs have been published since 2016. These numbers do not even include the countless other schools attempting to create a regular and effective tefillah program that students will embrace.
Ironically, what vexes the field about tefillah, I believe, also points to its future success.
When an organization is facing a big change - the arrival of a new leader, a shift in strategy, rapid growth (or decline) - one often hears the well-worn reminder that “change is not an event, it is a process.” Well-intended advice, perhaps, but not helpful. It is not helpful because when change is at hand, hard work is needed, not sage advice. It is not helpful because with all new pressures, we have to focus on the work, not words.
And it is not helpful, most precisely, because it is not true.
After six months of full time work with JEIC I’m still seeing things with “newbie” eyes. One observation that stands out to me is what appears to be a replication of effort among many precincts, all of which share the cause of improving Jewish day school education. Many of us seem to be simultaneously re-inventing the wheel. Perhaps this is part of what The AVI CHAI Foundation recognized when they approached the various Jewish day school networks to propose the umbrella organization, which has since developed into Prizmah.
Below are three examples from the many I have recently encountered of what may exemplify a less efficient use of resources:
JEIC is grateful that many experienced, knowledgeable authors contribute to our blog with compelling articles on educational innovation, change, and excellence in Jewish day schools.
We encourage you to peruse through our blog for the content that is most relevant to you. These are the 8 most read links on our blog in 2018:
The darkness of our times feels particularly difficult for me. Gratefully, Hanukkah this year reminded me that even one small light can brighten a relatively big space and more significantly, one small light (the shamash) can extend its power.
In an era when there is much justified conversation about the fragility of day schools, it is easy to succumb to the dark conversations about our future. I, however, prefer to see the rays of light, the schools whose trailblazing initiatives illuminate the larger field and serve as models from which we can learn. In my visits to these schools and conversations with their professional and lay leaders, eight principles emerge that characterize stronger schools, often defying demographic odds:
