Identifying the Mission

As an educator in a pluralistic, community high school, I have never been committed to students graduating as Conservative, Reform or Orthodox Jews. A student’s standard of observance has never been the measuring stick. My goal has always been to graduate students who, regardless of their particular affiliation – or lack thereof – take their Judaism seriously.

By “taking Judaism seriously” I mean that students graduate from high school with an understanding that, if they are only willing to inquire, Judaism can meaningfully inform any aspect of their lives.

The result of a successful Jewish high school experience will be that students will choose to inquire; that students will be interested in what Judaism has to say. Whether students ultimately choose to act in accordance with a given Jewish standard or value is not what is at issue. Rather, it is the fact that they are willing to let Judaism into their process of decision making and thus into their lives.

But this is only half of the picture.

For Jewish education to truly succeed there must be a relationship between student and subject that is not just unidirectional. Judaism cannot just be seen as a dispenser of good advice. Just as we hope that students will come to an understanding that Judaism has something to offer them; it is also a goal that they understand that they have something of value to offer back to Judaism. Students must come to the realization that they are the next layer in an ever-evolving tradition that will be uniquely enhanced by their particular insight or contribution.

In trying to envision how to successfully achieve this mission I looked to my own Jewish learning experiences for lessons. In my own career as a student there were three essential lessons I learned that informed my vision.

The first lesson was the importance of surrounding a subject. Surrounding a subject means making a subject come alive by opening multiple entry points for different types of learners to access it.
I recall my final years in high school at the Jewish Free School in London, England, where I studied Physics with Mr. Pinto. In addition to the necessary 11th and 12th Grade Physics curriculum, he would surround the material with content that intersected with it. For example, when studying Thomas Young’s Double-slit Experiment we also studied Thomas Young the person – who he was, when he lived and (as I recall) the fact that he was one of the first people to try and decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphs. In employing this very simple method of surrounding a subject , Mr. Pinto was able to take material that may have otherwise appeared dry-as-dust and instead make it come alive.

As educators, on the level of content we need to include material that broadens the scope of the particular topic that is being studied so as to invite students with different interests into the learning – to create multiple entry points for them.

A second lesson I learned is that to understand a subject properly it must be set in context.

Upon graduating from high school I took a “gap-year” to study in Israel. I remember arriving with virtually no background in Jewish learning, my experience during the first two years was painstaking and arduous and included breaking my teeth on Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew, Aramaic, and struggling to understand Talmudic logic.

Three years after leaving Israel, I enrolled in Rabbinical School in New York City. It was there that I was exposed to a method of learning previously unknown to me. In attempting to gain a deeper understanding of the material at hand we would study its Biblical origins (where applicable), its development through the period of the Talmud, the Rishonim, the Codes, and the responsa literature all the way up to contemporary applications.

By studying Jewish law from a historical perspective and taking into account the evolution of a given law and the particular historical influences that may have informed the opinion of one or another legal decision, we treated the law in context.

By contrast, my prior yeshiva experience in Israel did not include any attempt to place a given text in context. It was simply assumed, mistakenly I believe, that the information was of ultimate importance (due to its place in the canon of Jewish religious literature) and that it was able to “stand alone.”

And so the second lesson I learned that is that a fuller and deeper understanding of a subject demands that it be set in context. Preparing our Judaic Studies curricula with a mind to the importance of context will ensure a student’s depth of learning and critical understanding of “how we got here” that will replace the kind of broad and shallow learning so often found in our classrooms.

The difference in methodology exemplified by my yeshiva experiences taught me a third and final lesson about what needs to inform a successful Jewish high school experience.

A crucial distinction between my two yeshiva experiences and their different approaches to studying Jewish texts is their ability and willingness to reflect on the role of history in the unfolding of Jewish life and thought.

What my experience in Israel failed to convey to me was that, just as the world has changed throughout history, so too Judaism has changed, and continues to change. By the end of four years of rabbinical school, I had an acute sense that Jewish law, Jewish thought and Jewish life have all experienced tremendous change.

Only an understanding that all of Judaism has evolved and changed over time will empower and reassure our students that they too can be a part of the process of change within Judaism.

These three lessons have informed my curriculum writing and my classroom instruction (although they are not pedagogical in their own right) and, as such, have opened pathways for students to open themselves up to what Judaism has to offer them and to what they, in return, have to offer Judaism.

Rabbi Darren Kleinberg has written and implemented a successful four-year Jewish Studies high school curriculum at a Jewish community day school in the Southwest. He is currently a Ph.D. student working on issues related to pluralism in the American Jewish community. Rabbi Kleinberg can be reached at rabbi@kidma.org.

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