Building Older Elementary Students’ Connections to God and Spirituality

The God Issue

Shalom School is a small community school serving students early childhood through 6th grade. For the past several years, grade-level classroom tefillah has been complemented by twice-weekly all school prayer experiences: a Shacharit service on Monday mornings and a Kabbalat Shabbat on Friday afternoons. In preparation for this school year, we identified a goal of enriching and reinvigorating the prayer and spiritual experiences for our older students, those in grades 4-6. We began with a new, weekly Minchah service for those students. We meet for half an hour once a week with the aim of offering spiritual experiences targeted to older elementary students. Activities are designed to balance direct instruction with experiential opportunities and discussions.

For example, one session involved a discussion of the Misheberach prayer and the teaching of the Debbie Friedman song based upon it. We asked students to consider that the order of healing prayed for in the traditional prayer and the song are reversed, and this led to a discussion about the relationship between the healing of body and of spirit. Students offered their own ideas about which healing needs to come first, with some feeling that the healing of spirit and the sense of connection with God is what precedes the ability to physically recover from illness and others of the opinion that basic needs, including bodily health, need to be met in order to allow people to truly experience a spiritual healing and divine connection. Another takeaway from the lesson was our older students introducing the Debbie Friedman melody to the younger grades and the following week’s Shacharit.

In designing this activity, we were mindful of the ways in which prayer tends to become more problematic for children as they approach the middle school years. As Saul Wachs has noted, as students mature “a typical pattern emerge[s]. In the younger classes, the pupils seem to enjoy tefillot but as they grow, enthusiasm wanes and many of them start to disconnect emotionally.” Wachs connects this alienation to an emphasis on skills over meaning. This has certainly been borne out in our work with students in the upper grades, who tend not to express the unmediated connection to prayer and God that our younger students seem to easily access.

One of the most important ways we have built upon the success of the Minchah program is by reviving an annual Shabbaton for the upper grades. For the first time in several years we implemented a Shabbaton for the same group of 4th through 6th graders. Over 95% of the students participated, and in follow-up conversations about the program, many said it helped them feel more connected to God and their own spirituality. In exploring their reflections, several themes emerged that echoed what we have learned from the Minchah programming. The students really appreciated being a smaller group of similarly aged students. In terms of prayer, sitting together in a circle and being introduced to new melodies helped deepen their connection to prayer and God. They reported that it was easier to concentrate and “feel” the prayers.

We also had a college-aged madrichah assisting as a song and prayer leader, and the students reported liking having a special guest and also appreciating seeing a younger person in addition to regular faculty. “It feels really good to pray in a new way,” was the response of one student, and another noted that using new melodies made it feel more like they were “sing[ing] songs to God.”

Our goal in creating age-specific opportunities for our older students to pray and learn together has been to offer more occasions for open-ended, experiential, and discussion-based exploration and connection. We are very conscious of the fact that our school ends after 6th grade but our students spiritual lives do not, and we are laying the foundation for them to continue to deepen their understanding and connection to tradition and spirituality.


Nancy Leaderman, Head of School, Shalom School, Sacramento, California

Talking about God with 8th Graders

The God Issue

My favorite part of my job is reading my 8th graders’ theology papers, and especially their God Talk Responses. God Talk is a speaker series that I run as part of theology. It was not my idea, but I have worked hard to make it a powerful part of my course. Eighteen or so times during the year I welcome a speaker into the class to share their spiritual journey with my students. The speaker might be Jewish, about half the speakers are, or perhaps Wiccan or Bahai. The speaker might actually not walk into my class, but rather be sitting on their porch in Bat Ayin or their living room in Sarajevo and join us via Skype. Whoever or wherever they may be, my students are sitting attentively, ready to take notes and ask questions.

One speaker, a Chabad rabbi, doesn’t think that I should invite non-Jews to speak, as it is a temptation. Despite this, he continues to come and share his beliefs and humor with my students. And just as with the Wiccan and the Bahai and the Lutheran, my students are able to clearly and insightfully speak to what they share with this Chabad rabbi and where their beliefs part ways. Middle schoolers are curious. They want to know about other religions and people. They will find out about other faiths. I prefer they do it in my classroom, from speakers I have vetted, and who I know are coming to speak in an effort to inform and share, not convert.

My first year I finished off with a fantastic Sufi Muslim speaker who fascinated the students by showing the connections between Islam and Judaism. They listened to every word of the prayer he said before speaking and loved that they could understand some of the Arabic. I was so thrilled with this interaction that I blogged about it and was questioned by parents who wanted to know when I was going to have the “real, fatwah-issuing Muslim” in to speak. I was grateful for the opportunity to clarify that I, like my speaker, taught theology and not politics. My goal is to foster connections between my students and people of other faiths. I want them to know where we are the same and where we are different. I trust that they know who they are and will not decide that being Methodist sounds so great that they want to leave Judaism.

And my students don’t disappoint. Week after week they tell me, “Of course I don’t believe in Jesus like the speaker, but I find it interesting we both agree on…” A student this year wrote this in his paper on our Wiccan speaker: “It would be pointless to mention the things that I disagree with Stephanie about regarding our religious beliefs because we follow completely different religions, so I will talk about the concepts in Wicca that I think hold value and should apply to everywhere outside of religion as well. One of these concepts is doing whatever you want as long as it does not cause harm.”

Students also show high-level thinking and make amazing connections, as in this recent reflection:

I really liked when Pastor Katie said, “God is water and Methodism is the cup.” I think that this means that the cup, Methodism, is a belief that holds inside it God. This quote really expresses her belief of God and her religion. I say this because when you have an empty cup it is without use and when you have water without a cup you can’t drink. Without God, her religion doesn’t have a meaning, and without Methodism, God doesn’t have a place to go. When Pastor Katie said that God is always changing makes me wonder if this could relate to the glass metaphor. I think that it could mean the content in the glass is always different, it could be whatever you want it to be depending on the way you view God…

In addition to introducing my students to other religions, the variety of Jewish speakers who participate helps to show that there are many ways to be Jewish and many types of Jewish communities. Hearing rabbis and lay people from Secular Humanistic Judaism through Chabad shows them the various ways people make meaning out of Jewish text and tradition and can surprise them in what makes sense. One year I had a number of students eager to meet the Secular Humanistic speaker; they were sure this was where their beliefs would fit. They were surprised to find themselves realizing that, regardless of one’s personal belief, Judaism without God made no sense to them. They pressed the speaker to help them understand the difference between a “gratitude” for bread and “Hamotzi” and an “appreciation” for wine and “Kiddush,” but were not able to get an answer that made sense to them. This made them rethink their assumptions, and their ability to do so showed the value of this program.

Discussing God can be hard, and providing just one point of view dangerous. My God Talk program allows my students to discover for themselves the many ways to encounter God, as a Jew and as a human. It encourages them to think deeply, view the world differently and respect the beliefs of those around them—Jew or Gentile. It shows them that there is a place in the spectrum of Judaism for them, regardless of their observance, belief in God or connection to traditional views. It allows them to feel pride in seeing the influence of Judaism on other religions, but also know where we are different and why. Despite the fears of my Chabad friend, I remain convinced that my God Talk program makes my students stronger and prouder Jews rather than weakening their connection to Judaism.


Nance Adler, Middle School Judaic Studies/Social Studies at the Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle in Bellevue, Washington. [email protected]

Student Encounter with God

The God Issue

Paradise from Paradox By Yonim Schweig

As the last rays of dawn collide with the first of dusk

And deer crawl while slugs run,

I enter an orchard called Paradox

Where enigmas question reality

And the truth questions me.

I am quite afraid of being questioned.

Amidst a realm of such terror and chaos,

A rain begins to fall

Of which the paradox is, that in the land of Paradoxes,
her drops do not collide—

But stack neatly, one atop the other, both supported
and supporting at once.

An infinite chalice embraces each drop,

And I am in awe of the globules of water that
do not fuse;

That with each drop taken, the chalice gives space;

And that the organic constants of both liquid and expanse

Allow the droplets substance.

I see myself within a raindrop or two

And see my peers within the others.

The voice of that which was, is, and will be,

Drinks deeply from the chalice,

And explains to me:

Your ancestors once called this place of Paradox “Paradise.”

Though there truly is no difference between the two,

For both are infinite and full of opportunity.

But be wary of divorcing “Paradise”

From the lexicons of truths that lay wrapped within Paradox alone.

I watch those few upper raindrops that kiss the lips of the chalice—

Anticipating the fluid exodus from cup to mouth.

And the lower ones, that remain oblivious and yet subject

to the voices’ thirst.

The majority of drops, the middle ones, sit in denial—

Of their impending decision, that was orphaned from a question.

The voice of Paradox speaks,

And asks of me to become a drop of water in a chalice.

And secede from misery,

To a world of mystery,

That may be Paradox—

Or Paradise, depending on who or what is speaking.

I am no longer afraid of being questioned by truth,

For all is reliant on who is singing- not what is being sung—

And droplets of water in a chalice of infinitude

Help the parched Voice to sing.

 

Background: Whereas the biblical revelations come in the context of G-d’s divine plan for the world, I imagined my divine encounter as a revelation that befits my personality, beliefs and struggles. I often find myself stuck between those that insist on Jewish tradition as being pure paradox, an endless struggle of feuding claims, and those who perceive Judaism as a fluid text completely void of any moral challenge to the reader. This poem follows the theme of Yaakov and Moshe’s arrival in a supernatural location, by setting the protagonist (me) amidst a beautiful “orchard of paradox.” Additionally, in all three narratives, the protagonist experiences a fear at entering their respective places of wonder. Although the location is fictitious, the garden represents my real life predicament of living among those who devoutly believe in the paradoxes of life as being the only truths.

The Revelation: While experiencing the oddities of “Paradox,” I experience a revelation that combines natural and supernatural occurrences. Like Moshe’s experience at the burning bush, my revelation begins with a captivating but normal process, that of rainfall. My vision of the rain is such that it falls with order and precision, into a (vaguely described) chalice. Different from ordinary precipitation, though, is the tendency of these raindrops to maintain their individual structure, even when mixed with the other drops. At a point in the poem, I realize that I identify with certain raindrops, and recognize other drops as embodiments of my peers. Following this recognition I, as the onlooker, realize that G-d’s presence is available to me as manifested through “the voice of that which was, is, and will be.” G-d then appears to me, drinks from the rain collected in the chalice, and begins to relay a simple but important message.

The contact with G-d: My contact with G-d is expressed through his answer to the underlying struggle in the poem. At the end of the first stanza, I admit to the reader that I am afraid of living in a world of homogenized paradox. In real life, I do indeed feel distant from the straightforward explanations of religion that unimaginatively and defensively dismiss thousands of years of history. In my revelation, G-d explains to me that life in this orchard should not be seen simply as paradoxical, as the physical signs suggest, but should be viewed only as another voice in the ongoing pursuit of truth. In my poem, G-d blends for me the concept of religious paradise (through a hope for a physical paradise, and through belief in text as an intellectual one), and the atheistic intellectual’s belief in Paradox (this assumes that atheism is validated by the paradoxes of religion). In my poem, G-d exists. However different beliefs in his existence are simply separate expressions of the same Eden. One can interpret this to mean that both atheistic and religious thought are given sustenance through the endless discussions and questions that both entail.

The metaphor: The metaphor in my divine encounter consists of rain assuming physical forms, and then filling an infinite chalice with its abundance. Following this, G-d’s voice drinks the collected rain from the chalice, revitalizing itself in the process. My thought behind the specifics in my metaphor is that the different components combine allegorically to explain the true meaning of the revelation. In simple terms, the chalice represents the world, and the drops of rain, the people that inhabit our earth. In the same way that the raindrops are only able to maintain form by being created amongst the world of paradox and paradise, human beings are only given the right to exist by being created with a backdrop of meaning—whether that is through paradox or paradise.

My allegory seeks to explain how humanity is meant to interact with G-d, by emphasizing that G-d’s voice benefits from the pursuits of man. I specifically included the voice of G-d, and not some other part of his being, due to its mention in the revelations in the Torah, and because I believe that voice is the ultimate expression of the discussions and deliberations which, in this metaphor, man is destined to fulfill. My revelation closes off with G-d communicating to me that my individual role as a drop in the cup of rain—my perspective among the myriad of opinions that give life to Torah—is essential to the creation of Paradise from Paradox, order from chaos, logic from accusation, and G-dly from profane.


Yonim Schweig, 10th grade student, Jewish Community High School of the Bay, San Francisco, California

Beit Knesset as Theology Laboratory

The God Issue

Specific classroom teachings about theology can be shown to directly connect to specific parts of the liturgy, forging a connection between intellectual learning and active awareness of God. This can be done when tefillah leaders highlight and reinforce theoretical paradigms about God first introduced in the classroom into the service at calculated moments. Specificity is key, requiring careful pairing of teachings with particular parts of the liturgy, forging a connection between intellectual learning and active awareness of God.

It is helpful to have a multiplicity of teachings about God to draw upon. For example, in my theology classes, we’ve explored the notions of omniscience and omnipotence. We have talked about and written personal responses to the nature of the “Mysterium Tremendum.” Students have related parts of their personal lives in the language of Buber’s I and Thou, Heschel’s Radical Amazement, and the Lure of Process Theology. Each of these paradigms is likely first experienced by the student as purely intellectual, i.e., as material to jot down, understand, memorize, and be tested upon. Exposing the students to this material in the classroom is like providing them with the bricks that will eventually build a road leading to an encounter with the Divine.

Here are some examples of bringing the classroom into the service, drawing upon my dual experiences as theology instructor and tefillah facilitator.

When I teach a unit on Baruch Spinoza and the Zohar’s concept of God as Ein Sof (Infinity) in the classroom, in that week’s tefillah I like to describe God in that same way prior to the Shema. “The Shema is more than a declaration of faith, it is an insight into the nature of the universe. For God to truly be ‘One,’ God is indivisible. As we say these six words of oneness, contemplate the possibility of a powerful interconnectivity between yourself and all people and things. This was Spinoza’s God, it might be yours. Try it on.”

It may be that only the students in my senior theology class know about a particular theory, but the rapt and specific attention of the few at key moments in tefillah is enough to focus the others. Meaning, purpose, and the idea are being considered. In this brief moment, a classroom discussion where students personally invested time, energy and opinion enters into a community prayer setting. As you might expect, we circle back to that moment in the next class meeting. The benefit of the classroom over the synagogue setting is that big ideas, even ideas as big as “God,” can be explored in conversation, and not just mentioned in passing through page 65 of the siddur.

When some of our students return from an extended visit to Israel, we welcome them back with the blessing of Shehechiyanu. Buber’s language of I-Thou fits nicely here: we have God between us. At Chanukkah, I like to use Heschel’s language of Radical Amazement. “The mitzvah of Hanukkah is pirsumei nissa, sharing the miraculous nature of God. Can we notice a touchpoint of God, the Mysterium Tremendum, in everything and at every moment?” Jacob had to actually run into God (Va-yifga ba-makom) before he noticed that God had been with him the whole time. In tefillah, I can teach that the miraculous is all around us if we allow ourselves to notice.

God of Process Theology, God as the Lure, fits nicely in the silent section of the Amidah. “Which of the blessings recited spoke to you the most? It did so because there is something going on in your life that has something to do with that blessing. Focus on just that one blessing. A reasonable personal prayer can be for clarity to hear the Lure of God call you to your best possible choice in the issue you have been thinking about.”

Beit Knesset becomes the experiential aspect of our learning; it moves us past theory into practice. As it turns out, theology is like biology: both are better taught with a lab.

 


Tsafi Lev is a Rabbis Without Borders fellow and the rabbinic director at New Community Jewish High School (soon to be de Toledo High School) in West Hills, California. [email protected]

The Young Child’s Search for God: A Critical and Formative Journey

The God Issue

Hadas listened carefully and was perplexed as she noticed how the other children were also pondering Liora’s question. How to respond? At that point Hadas realized that Liora was posing a poignant and challenging question that caught her off guard on multiple levels. First of all, Hadas had been reciting the Birkat Hamazon her entire life, and had never stopped to consider the deeper meaning of this blessing. Furthermore, Hadas realized that in all her professional training, none of her courses had addressed children’s theological questions, and none of her mentors had ever discussed how we might respond to such critical issues in the lives of young students.

We believe that young children are eager and capable of formulating penetrating theological questions, and that early childhood educators as well as parents should consider appropriate ways to respond. In reviewing the recent literature on young children’s questions about God, one is struck by a dramatic shift in the types of issues that are currently being addressed. In his classic 1990 book The Spiritual Life of Children, Robert Coles focused primarily on how children picture God, and the startling differences between children from diverse religious backgrounds. Subsequent studies followed Coles’s lead, and this dominated the research for the next decade. However, current studies on children’s theology focus less on how God looks and consider questions about why God acts in certain ways, attempting to make sense of such knotty questions as miracles, theodicy, the meaning of historical truth, etc.

One might question the need for early childhood educators to probe such sensitive and complex issues. First and foremost, as our opening story demonstrates, these types of questions are pregnant with meaning, puzzling, and relevant for many of our young students. As they try to make sense of the world around them, children are witness to some of life’s most challenging issues and express a healthy curiosity to explore these issues more deeply. Second, allowing children to freely pose theological questions assures them that their concerns are real, and they should never fear to raise their innermost concerns in honest and explicit ways. Furthermore, thinking about God encourages young children to reflect beyond the here and now; it triggers their sense of imagination and stimulates symbolic play, enabling them to explore the critical world of the unknown.

Finally, discussing theology and exploring God’s actions has always played a formative role in Jewish life. Classical Jewish literature has never shied away from confronting these life questions in bold and reflective ways. The Midrash and other forms of rabbinic literature are replete with stories, philosophical debates and polemics that present a plethora of diverse approaches and teachings about theological questions that have challenged Jews of all ages throughout history. In summary, we believe that young children are keen to explore theological questions, and the key challenge is to enable educators like Hadas to best meet this challenge in constructive and age-appropriate ways.

A first necessary step in this process is to encourage educators to contemplate their own theological positions. As noted above, Hadas is part of a significant number of well educated and gifted Jewish educators who have not been exposed to theological ideas, and certainly haven’t considered their implications for teaching. This is a complex and sensitive task, but at the same time is a prerequisite for engaging children in a theological conversation. In practical terms, professional development programs should provide educators with the knowledge, resources and confidence to address their own theological positions.

Creating a Discourse with Children

We need to offer teachers guidelines on how to best raise these questions in ways that are engaging and relevant for young children. Here are several suggestions.

Authentic Dialogue

In order to initiate a meaningful exchange about God and theological questions, adults need to demonstrate a respect for young children that acknowledges and affirms their ability to make meaning of the world around them. This worldview does not underestimate or belittle children’s ability to express wonder about existential issues and to pose sophisticated and rigorous theological questions. It appreciates the fact that children possess different modes of expression than adults. In accepting this premise, adults should consider ways to explain concepts through analogies, stories, the arts and other expressive forms that make sense to children. How do we enter into a deliberation with young children about theological questions in ways that enable them to express themselves coherently and compellingly?

Listening to Children

Adults should recognize and appreciate the multiple languages, symbols and codes that children use to express themselves. We need to listen with all our senses, not just with our ears. We also need to appreciate that effective listening takes time, and that oftentimes this involves pauses of silence. Sometimes, effective listening requires us to suspend our judgments and prejudices and demonstrate a readiness to consider alternative viewpoints which may prove somewhat challenging and possibly unsettling.

Encourage Wonder Questions

Meaningful theological inquiries require a sense of openness to wonder. It stirs us to search for questions, rather than insist on answers. Wonder questions are generated by curiosity, doubt, desire and uncertainty. They cannot include a priori assumptions that prescribe responses as this can inhibit or stifle candid ongoing conversations. In that sense adults should prod the young child to ponder issues in an open and non-judgmental way, and thereby create a community of young learners who demonstrate mutual respect and care.

Legitimacy of Stating “I Don’t Know”

Rashi is widely recognized as one of the greatest pedagogues in Jewish history. At several points in the Bible, Rashi offers the following comment: “I don’t know what this teaches us” (e.g., Genesis 28:5). We well know that Rashi did not explain all Biblical verses, and he could easily have skipped over certain puzzling ones. However, in making this statement, Rashi is endorsing a crucial pedagogic principle which encourages educators to candidly share with their students that there are valid and legitimate questions that at the present time, we do not yet have satisfactory and compelling responses. We encourage all Jewish educators to consider the relevancy of Rashi’s practice for our teaching students of all ages.

Modes of Engaging Children in Questions about God and Theology

In attempting to provide educators with practical strategies to promote theological discussions, here are some ways to explore “everyday theology” within early childhood settings.

Stories

The power of children’s stories to shape and impact children’s lives on multiple levels has been documented and researched extensively. In addressing theological issues, we share stories that engage the child’s imagination and thereby allow her to explore these questions in safe and constructive settings. Among the stories that we have used, the following have proven most effective in capturing children’s attention and generating powerful theological discussions: Old Turtle (1992); Bagels from Benny (2001); Yellow and Pink (1984); Dad, Are You the Tooth Fairy? (2005).

Walks in Nature

In a deeply insightful educational message, Maimonides argues that one of the most effective ways to achieve a love of God is by actively exploring the world of nature (Basic Principles of the Torah 2:2). We believe that allowing children to probe the wonders of nature inspires them to ponder God’s omniscience and at the same time, may provoke additional theological questions. When embarking on a nature walk, imagine the impact of studying the following verse: “In His greatness, God renews every day the acts of creation” המחדש בטובו בכל יום תמיד מעשה בראשית. Children will seize the opportunity to actively search and identify everyday miracles that we might otherwise ignore in our hectic daily routine.

Dramatic Play

A fascinating example of a project which helped young children contemplate theological issues was conducted at the Eliot-Pearson Children’s School, a lab school at Tufts University that serves three-year-olds through second graders. The “Beliefs Project” began with children drawing pictures of their theories and questions about God. The children and teachers then discussed these theories and generated additional questions. This was followed by meetings with parents and religious leaders, and then the youngsters listened to and discussed music with spiritual significance.

They then transformed the dramatic play area into a children’s vision of heaven. Children were invited to submit drawings and other creative works, and eventually, the area included individual, small-group and whole-group activities. The amount of excitement, sharing of ideas and curiosity that this project generated is extraordinary and worth examining for its application in Jewish early childhood education. (See http://ase.tufts.edu/epcs/documents/newsFunThing.pdf.)

Ritual

Much has been written about the power of ritual in the lives of young children. Like adults, children are constantly seeking ways to introduce different forms of ritual into their daily lives. One of the most spiritually uplifting and powerful Jewish rituals is the weekly Havdalah ceremony. Unique to Havdalah is its ability to engage the various senses and to stir our emotions in dramatic ways. The traditional Havdalah ceremony signifies our parting from the extraordinary peace and serenity of the Shabbat experience and reentry into the daily routine that we all experience. Havdalah can be a transformative experience as we activate our senses of taste, smell, sight and feeling as a means to help us anticipate the challenges and exciting new possibilities that the coming week presents.

Imagine Jewish early childhood education centers beginning the school week with a collective Havdalah ceremony. Imagine children’s excitement if they were able to plant and grow the spices that are used for the Havdalah, crafting the candles that light up the darkness, or drinking the grape juice that accompanies the ritual. And finally, imagine if at the end of the Havdalah ceremony we invited each child to consider how they would like to do something different during this new week. How can the upcoming week be enriched by a new thought, insight, behavior, or feeling that the child shares at the conclusion of the group Havdalah?

In conclusion, we have attempted to show how young children are eager, competent, and creative theologians. Our Sages believed that “young children’s breath is free from sin.” Let us exploit this outstanding educational period of their lives in order to allow them to think about God and consider theological issues in open, thoughtful, and constructive ways that will ultimately enrich their lifelong spiritual development.


Dr. Howard Deitcher is the director of the Florence Melton Institute at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. [email protected]

Beyond Belief: Metaphor and Awe

The God Issue

After teaching for ten years in a Jewish day school, I’ve heard these questions and comments too many times to count. They point to two of the perennial questions Jewish studies teachers face: Is there a place for God in the classroom? If so, how can we best attend to it?

When I was a graduate student, writing about the philosophy of language and Jewish thought, I undertook to understand how Jewish texts refer to God: Tzur Yisrael and Avinu Malkeinu (Rock of Israel and our Father our King). What do these words convey? Why do they refer to God in contradictory ways? At least one of them must be taken to be a metaphor, for God cannot literally be both a father and a rock. How do we know which is literal and which is metaphorical? Are both metaphors? What is suggested by each description? These were the kinds of questions that drove my intellectual curiosity during this period.

As a Jewish studies teacher and leader in Jewish day schools, both high school and a K-8 school, my focus has shifted from a purely philosophical and intellectual pursuit to a pedagogical pursuit. Namely, why and how should we teach about God in the classroom?

Let me be transparent about where I am coming from when I talk about teaching about God. I don’t really care whether my students believe in God or not. Promoting belief in God is not a goal for me as an educator. For me, answering the question of why we should teach about God in school is simple. The role of God in the classroom is to inspire awe. We teach about God because it shifts students’ attention away from themselves and deepens their sense of wonder, of gratitude and of humility.

How we teach about God is perhaps the more complicated issue. While I do not profess to have all the answers, I want to share some of my thoughts and experiences, many of which are rooted in my former experience as a student of philosophy.

Teaching about God begins with text. During Torah study students encounter references to God as well as descriptions of God. When we think about God as “above” or “beyond” or “infinite” or “eternal” or as capable of hearing everyone’s prayers or as creator, we are using metaphorical descriptors that direct our attention beyond ourselves and beyond the here and now. By suggesting a “beyond” or an “above,” these descriptions of God can move us to ponder life’s grandeur. They can even lead us to wrestle with questions such as “What am I here for?” or “What is the purpose of human life?”

Likewise, many descriptions of God draw upon remarkably human qualities. For instance, in Exodus 34:6-7 it says, “Lord, Lord, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness…” We can only look to what those terms mean when applied to us to get an idea of how they might describe God. In describing God, they cast a light on us. When asked to think about concepts like “infinite” and “compassion” together, these conversations engender awe.

Let’s talk for a moment about awe. In a book entitled The Significance of Religious Experience, Howard Wettstein describes different kinds of awe. One can stand in awe of human greatness, such as acts of heroism, compassion or caring, or great works of art. One can also be in awe of the natural world, such as the night sky, a beautiful sunset, or a worm (especially among small children, who seem to have a natural proclivity for awe). One can also experience awe in connection with the fragility or fleetingness of life. Awe of this sort can lead to a sense of the significance of human life.

Abraham Joshua Heschel spoke about awe as radical amazement. He wrote, “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement...get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” We can cultivate this kind of awe when we pause and ask questions such as, “What is suggested by the phase ‘God resides at the pinnacle of the universe’?”

For older students, a brief study of philosophy can be an effective hook. A central purpose of the Guide for the Perplexed is to clarify the meaning of words that describe God. This was important to Maimonides because language offers our only indication of God. When the Bible describes God in human terms (for example, as “speaking” or leading the people out of Egypt with a “strong hand” or as becoming “angry”) it is speaking about God in a way that we can relate to. Those descriptions are not literal descriptions of God, however.

Maimonides devoted himself in the first part of the Guide to showing how every word that describes God is actually a metaphor. For instance, Maimonides explains that when the Bible says “God saw” or “God heard” it means “God understood or knew.” Likewise, when the Bible refers to a part of God’s “body” such as a hand or foot, it means God caused something. For example, when it says God led the people out of Egypt with a “strong hand,” it suggests their great escape from slavery was for a purpose. Maimonides devoted himself to this work because he wanted to promote “correct thinking” about God.

According to Maimonides, God is ultimately beyond our knowledge. No wonder, then, that we find metaphors so useful in talking about God. They help us to speak about the unknowable in terms of the known. In fact, this is how metaphors work in our everyday speech. We often refer to the unfamiliar in familiar terms. Or we use metaphors because they convey or suggest many things that can be true at once. Think, for example, of Shakespeare’s famous line “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances.”

When we talk about God, we end up referring to ourselves or to the world in ways that deepen our sense of wonder, engender gratitude and cause us to reflect on our conduct. This is the pedagogical relevance of God. References to God and descriptions of the divine have the capacity to direct our attention beyond ourselves, beyond our knowledge, beyond belief and toward a sense of awe at the grandeur of our world. To cultivate awe as a mindset or lens on life—this is the role of God in the classroom.


Dr. Peg Sandel is the head of campus at Brandeis Hillel Day School in San Rafael, California. [email protected]

The Missing God in Israeli Education: Conversations About God Among Faculty and Students

The God Issue

Religious education operates on the assumption that God is so important and so immanent that there is no need to talk about Him. For some, the conversation between man and God is personal and intimate, and this intimacy could be disrupted by talking openly about God. This intimate relationship is not just a private affair; it is what binds them to performance of God’s commandments. God is beyond reach—simultaneously near and far, beyond the capacity of language to contain. At the same time, He is so sublime and beyond reach that any talk of Him could disrupt the intimacy between man and his God. This approach reflects the Talmudic saying, Seek not things that are too hard for thee, and search not things that are hidden from thee. The things that have been permitted thee, think thereupon; thou hast no business with the things that are secret” (Chagigah 13a).

In Israel’s system of secular education, based on early Zionist secular Hebrew culture, there was no room for God. The secular-revolutionary spirit that drove the establishment of the State of Israel created an educational system in which God had no relevance in the present, and thus there was no need to relate to Him in any special way. God was, at most, a figure in Bible studies and an echo of times long past.

Why Speak of God?

Why do we recommend beginning a process of talking about God? More precisely, why deal with an issue so complex on emotional, faith and social levels, in a system that so delicately bring together staff who hold such different perceptions of God?

They are foundational questions that most people ask themselves. Questions of truth, justice and the absence of justice, reward and punishment, ethics—these are questions of how the world and man operate. Often they are questions about God and His involvement in the world.

From discussions we have held with educators in joint education schools, we found, not surprisingly, that indeed the question of God’s existence and mode of operation in the world occupies the children both religious and secular, just as it occupied us when we were pupils. Young children also ask about God: who created God? They ask questions about justice: how did God order Abraham to sacrifice his son? Why did God harden Pharaoh’s heart? etc.

In other words, children are thinking about God—His image, His leadership of the world, the possibility of His existence as well as the possibility that He does not exist. Whether we like it or not, questions of God are present in children’s worlds and occupy them. God is part of our culture—both the ancient culture and the modern and renewing one. God is the hero, and sometimes the anti-hero, in the Jewish world. He is a central part of the text in a world of diverse identities that can include faith without the commandments.

There is room to recognize different approaches to faith, and different facets of the concept “God.” This is so, because God Himself has multiple identities. God is He who created the world, who forbade man to eat from the tree of knowledge, who exiled from the garden of Eden, who regretted what He had done and almost destroyed humanity, who freed the children of Israel from the Egyptians, who punished them and showed them the way while providing for their needs in the desert. God tests Job and is the One who promises Abraham that he would make his descendants as numerous as the sands on the seashore.

It is God who chose King David and gave His people the Ten Commandments and the Torah. God sees in Moses His servant the most humble of men, and has a unique relationship with him throughout much of the Torah. God is the object of Jewish prayers and He to whom Jews turn in defiance, in love, in rage, in demand for justice, in hope and in despair—from Abraham, through generations of Jews, till the last of modern Hebrew poets and contemporary thinkers. Thus, God is not only part of the text; He is a central character in nearly every Jewish text, religious or secular. His spirit hovers over traditional texts, while the absence of his spirit hovers over some modern texts.

When we speak about God, to what God are we referring: a compassionate and gracious God, or God as the “Man of War”? The God who forgives iniquity, or who visits transgressions to the third generation? Conversation about God brings to the fore that God has different identities, and that we, teachers and students alike, are talking about a multifaceted God. Talking about God enables us to understand our own perception of God—when we say “God,” about which “face” of God are we talking?

Whether we talk about God or we continue to avoid the subject, the children and youth that grow up in our schools will continue to ask questions about God—His nature, His practice, His existence or absence.

Talking About God with a Secular-Religious Staff

Joint education strives to create an open discourse; it encourages the asking of questions that have personal relevance from the lives of children and to the lives of children. For all of the above reasons, it is appropriate that joint education schools should consider introducing conversations among staff members about their perceptions of God.

Such conversations convey openness, listening, and an ability to contain and accept a variety of beliefs, and they promote a fruitful dialogue between different Jewish worlds. They also enable the staff to develop an educational language that integrates a multiplicity of beliefs, and in which acceptance of this variety is a basic value. In this way, a language can be created that is daring but is also careful and delicate when discussing intimacy with God, or questions and objections, or His existence or His absence. As noted, developing a shared educational language when talking about God requires respect and gentleness, as is also required whenever we wish to talk with children about any issue that is close to their hearts.

The sages interpret Job’s words “No flatterer can come into His presence” (13:16) as follows: ”The prophets know that their God is real and is not to be flattered” (Jerusalem Talmud, Berakhot 7:3 and Megillah 3:7). In other words, the sages see conversation with and about God as entailing a sincere search for the truth. We think that significant education is education that promotes a search for sincerity and truth, including about God.

That same demand for sincerity and for a search for truth leads to the asking of questions, some of which have no absolute answer: Does God exist, is there personal Providence, why do the righteous suffer, etc. All these questions should be raised, and we would want the adult world to relate to them, but without providing definitive answers that the children must accept. In order to do this, the adults must first talk among themselves about these issues. The very act of speaking aloud provides us with clarity as to our beliefs and the questions that occupy us. Listening to other opinions clarifies that there is indeed diversity in the teachers’ room and beyond it. Teachers of course know about this diversity without any discussion, but talking heightens our awareness of them.

Talking about God can take place only in a space in which the teacher feels that he/she can trust his colleagues, in a containing space with no fear and with an ability to share. We are aware that this is a complex and delicate issue. We therefore believe that the staff room has to reach a certain degree of maturity in order to engage in this conversation. The conversation can take place and be fruitful when staff members have already been through a great deal together, when they feel secure in the framework they have created and in the sense of community in the school and in the staff room.

A joint conversation about God should take into account that not all of the teachers are in the same place. There are new and veteran teachers, extroverts and introverts, teachers at different stages of developing their evolving identity, and others whose identity is more static. In order to make it possible to engage in open and sincere discussion of God, we believe there should be a process and not a one-time conversation: a process of dialogue, of peer learning, in which people are encouraged to raise their questions and their puzzlement about beliefs and about lack of belief.

And What About the Pupils?

Our intention here is not to put forth a structured lesson plan, but to suggest a process for teachers to develop the ability and comfort to lead conversations about God when pupils raise the issue. The conversation about God in the staff room raises questions about the implications of the subject for educational work with children.

In the context of joint education, the challenge is how to talk about God with children who come from homes in which belief is axiomatic, side-by-side with children from homes in which God does not exist. We suggest an emphasis on the legitimacy of diversity. There are pupils who believe in God, and there are others who do not; the multiplicity of beliefs and Jewish identities is legitimate. The believer, the atheist, the skeptic and the one who has questions about God can all share a commitment to Jewish existence. Significant Jewish existence and commitment to a Jewish way of life is possible and legitimate even without belief in God. This, in our view, is a key insight.

The issue of children’s ages also needs to be considered. In very young ages, there is a tendency for children to innocently accept what has been conveyed to them by their parents and family. That said, there are questions about the way God leads the world that develop as the child grows older. In adolescence, questions arise with full force. All these require consideration that goes beyond the limits of this article, but that are critical for decision-making by every school and teacher.

It should be remembered that the joint school is part of a community: educators, parents, families and pupils. Just as each of these stakeholders differ, so communities differ from one another. The variety among communities affects also the appropriate way to channel the conversation, and therefore we do not suggest that there is one legitimate or optimal process. The details will no doubt vary from place to place, in accordance with the unique communal identity, the age of the children, the internal relations of the educational staff, and the relations between the staff and other elements of the school community.

A word about the “how.” There is a well-known Talmudic saying, ”The merciful One wants the heart” (Sanhedrin, 106b). The teacher’s heart needs to be in a place that allows talk of doubt, of belief, of questioning, all this without being judgmental of pupils who express their relation to God. School must be a place that encourages heart-to-heart communication.

Conclusion

In her poem ‘‘O Great Omnipotent and Awesome One,’’ the Jerusalem poetess Rivka Miriam describes the movements and changes in one’s relationship with God. The words in the prayer book are the same words, but the person changes—with many identities of past and future, shifting emotions depending on whether they are close to or far from God, at times beseeching and at other times full of praise and gratitude. Just as God’s faces are many and different, so are our own—as a joint community and as changing individuals.
We need a conversation about these changing faces, about our beliefs and about the different identities struggling within us. A conversation about God provides an additional level upon which the shared and separate Jewish identity of the joint school can be built.


Michal Bergman is educational program content developer and supervisor at Tzav Pius, an organization that fosters dialogue and co-existence between religious and secular Jews in Israel. [email protected]

Tova Avihai-Kremer works for Tzav Pius as a moderator in the advancement of pluralistic schools in Israel, and previously served as principal of two Keshet schools, with a mixed religious-secular community.

Hide and Seek: When and How Our Students Might Find God in Their Lives

The God Issue

For the students, this story was disarming in that the God they were encountering here was not the biblically based all-powerful, controlling and commanding God whose presence is always evident in the world, which they could and did readily reject as not consonant with their reality and dissonant with their sensibilities. Moreover, the biblical conception of “hastarat panim” (the Hiding of God’s face), whereby God punitively abandons His people to suffering and misfortune (Devarim 31:17-18), an unsatisfying resolution for most of them, whether proposed within the biblical context or that of the Holocaust, was being inverted in this chasidic story. God here is crying in His hidden state, suffering in being abandoned by and lost to His people (cf. be-mistarim tivkeh nafshi, “My being will weep in hiding,” Jeremiah 13:17). Thus, this story’s message was empowering to the students, as its perception of God, whose roots also lie within our biblical tradition, was calling upon them to be partners and active agents in welcoming the presence of God in our world.

In the course of exploring this notion of actively seeking God, a group of high school students and I discovered rich insights embedded in two biblical commands.

Korbani Lachmi Le-ishai

Entering Aseret Yemei Teshuvah, the “Ten Days of Returning” leading into Yom Kippur, the “Day of At-one-ment,” we turned our attention to the practice of korbani lachmi le-ishai, the biblical command to bring “My sacrifice, My food, offered through My fires.” Cognizant of the sacrificial service of the Temple, we now together sought to realize the chasidic attunement of these words: “My sacrifice/coming close to Me [korban, sacrifice, being of the root word “to draw close”], is through offering My food to My people [reading “ishai,” My fires as plural for ish, My people]” (Pinchas of Korets).

Joining our larger community in Project Isaiah (“This is the fast I desire … share your bread with the hungry,” Isaiah 58), our school, students and families, collected and distributed food items to local food banks. Still, understanding that it is in the giving of ourselves that we truly sustain another, our students created and bagged individual lunches which we personally distributed to hundreds of homeless and hungry individuals on our city’s eastside. On these streets and in a downtown soup kitchen, where they made and served hot dinners, our students were conscious of nourishing the souls of the needy no less than their bodies. Then, on Sukkot, we realized the often neglected words that follow “share your bread with the hungry”: “and bring the downtrodden poor into your home.”

Making and sharing a sukkah meal with the homeless of our community was a transformative experience for our students. The Zohar speaks of the ushpizin, supernal guests, enjoying the divine light which resides in our sukkah, and only afterwards the portion which otherwise would have been theirs is sent to the poor (Emor 103a). For our students it was the seven very human “homeless” individuals, whose presence within our sukkah granted them an understanding of the temporality of abode, the fragility of life and the strength of community, that served as the enlightening source of the Shekhinah/divine among them.

As the students and I prepared for our sukkah dinner, we had considered the import of Isaiah’s words, prior to his beseeching us to share our bread with the hungry and to bring the needy into our home: “To be sure, they seek (yidroshun) Me daily … They are eager for the nearness (kirvat) of God.” To deepen our understanding of this prophet’s teaching, we turned to similar language found in the poet Yehudah Halevi (“Yah Ana Emtsa’akha”): “I sought (darashti) Your nearness (kirvatkha) … but only when I emerged to welcome You did I find You welcoming me.” These words helped express what our students had themselves experienced in our shared sukkah: God comes out of hiding only when we do.

“Through tsedek [understood by our rabbis as tsedakah infused with lovingkindness] do I see Your face” (Psalms 17:15) was more deeply understood by us in the sukkah that night. Together, we had revisited the biblical narrative in which we learn that it is only when Ya’akov is first able to see his brother beyond his self-interests does he exclaim, “Seeing your face is like seeing the face of God” (Bereishit 33:10). Considering anew hastarat panim through the living text of practice, our students discovered that it is we who make for the disclosing (and hiding) of God’s face.

Several days following our sukkah dinner, with time given for personal reflection and sharing, I met with our students in an effort to ground what we had discovered within a text we utilize daily in seeking to connect with God, the siddur.

We read together the following rabbinic passage appearing in our siddur, at the beginning of the morning service (Siddur Sim Shalom).

Once Rabbi Yehoshua, following his teacher Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, came upon the Temple ruins and said, “Woe to us, the place through which Israel gained at-one-ment (through animal sacrifice) lies in ruins.” To which Rabban Yochanan replied, “My son, do not be grieved. For us, there is another way of at-one-ment. What is it? Lovingkindness (chesed). For, it is said (Hoshea 6:6), ‘I desire lovingkindness not sacrifice (zevach).’” (Avot de-Rabbi Natan 11a)

The students soon noticed that they were encountering here the very understanding of karbani lachmi le-ishai that had resonated with them and whose practice brought personal meaning and an experiencing of the divine into their lives. They found that the siddur, which they felt did not succeed in bringing them close to God, was a primer in how we may effectively repair our breaches with and estrangement from God. In discussing lehitpallel, to pray, as being a reflexive verb, denoting entering into judgment of oneself, we considered how the siddur may serve as a means, rather than an end, in challenging us to experience God in a world of relationship, described within but found beyond its pages.

As a guiding example, we explored the siddur passages immediately following the quoted words of God, “I desire lovingkindness not sacrifice,” which consists of biblical and rabbinic texts as to how we, like God, may bring lovingkindness into our world. The siddur’s preceding morning blessings, Birkhot Hashachar, which our students held to be untruths, which they could not in good conscience recite (“Praised are You, Lord our God, who clothes the naked … who releases the bound … who raises the downtrodden”), were now seen as an urgent call for them to effect the presence of this God in our world (much as they had recently done) rather than lamenting the absence of the same. Prayer, they glimpsed, seeks to propel us (and God) beyond the “limits” of what is to the possibilities of what might be.

Kol Ha-Neshamah Tehallel Yah

We next explored how each of us is central to the praise and presence of God in a way that the students welcomed but had not imagined. Returning to the siddur, we studied the section Pesukei De-zimra (verses of song), which includes the last five psalms from Tehillim, all beginning and ending with the word Halleluyah. These Psalms end with the summative statement, Kol ha-neshamah tehallel Yah, halleluyah, “Let all that breathes praise the Lord, Halleluyah.” The students began to sing these commonly chanted lines joyously. But, in our taking into account that these words constituted a command, a bit of anger and a sense of betrayal set in. “We weren’t told this!” “How can we be commanded to praise God? That’s not true praise.” Worse yet, this was, they felt, “sort of a brainwashing,” being called upon to say it twice in the liturgy.

We took a breath and then considered a biblical passage (Bereishit 28:16) they had already studied but would now encounter anew. “And Ya’akov awoke from his sleep and said: Surely, the Lord is present in this place, but I did not know (anokhi lo yadati) … and he called the place the House of God.” As pointed out by the chasidic tradition, the inclusion of anokhi, I, can lead us to read the text as “but I, I did not know.” Thus, this passage might be understood to be telling us that Ya’akov could not come to know God inasmuch as he had not come to know himself (anokhi signifying both “God” and “I” in the Jewish tradition—see Shmot 20:2).

The students began to understand that before them was the dissembling Ya’akov, who, having presented himself as his twin brother, to gain the love (blessing) of his father, was now fleeing from his family as he had been fleeing from himself. He was asleep to God, they were now discovering, because he was hiding from himself. By awakening to himself, he was awakening to the presence of God.

We came back to the troubling command Halleluyah, “Praise the Lord,” via a bridge text that appears at the very start of this Halleluyah section in Pesukei De-zimrah: Ahallelah Adonai bechayyai / Azamrah l’Elohai be-odi (Psalm 146). The students’ newfound understanding of Ya’akov’s divine/self-revelation now brought them to an insightful appreciation of these words: “I will praise the Lord through my life, I will sing to my God with all of my being.” Our unique lives are the life and song of God, which only we can bring into the world. In an expression of discovery, and most appropriately, a student exclaimed, “Oh, my God!”

Halleluyah now granted the students a more welcoming though no less challenging perspective. We are commanded to discover and realize our unique lives, for therein lies our greatest and fullest praise of God. Only in bringing our unique selves to the center of our being can we truly see those who have been marginalized and hidden from us, the “homeless,” the “elderly,” the “poor” and God.

Returning to the Baal Shem Tov’s story of the hidden God which we are called upon to find, the students understood that it is no accident that the one representing the hidden God is called Yechiel, Live God! For, in seeking Him, we give God life. At the same time, the students appreciated that seeking God, in being our unique selves, gives us life; as the prophetic voice (Amos 5:4) calls to us, “Seek Me and live” (Dirshuni vichyu).

Our mystical tradition (Tikkunei Zohar 91b) reminds us, Leit atar panui minei, nothing is devoid of God. To the degree that students are empowered to authentically explore and realize meaningful relationships within the wider world as well as the growth and discovery of self, they bring God out of hiding. As educators, engaging our students in Jewish learning and living, we are asked to challenge them to make their lives, and that of others, a God-revealing and God-experiencing journey.


Daniel Siegel is the head of Jewish life at the Emanuel School in Sydney, Australia. [email protected]

Hating God in Front of the Whole School

The God Issue

In the middle of all-school tefillah at Albert Einstein Academy in Wilmington, Delaware, one third grader announced publicly that he hated God and that he hated prayer. The outburst had its own behavioral issues; the theological quandary, though, also needed to be addressed. In the spirit of recognizing the divine value in each of us, I noted that the moment was not the best time to address the student’s feelings. I did, however, offer a quick response with implications still to be worked out.

My response was informed by a pivotal experience I had when I served as a pulpit rabbi. A divorcee told me that I had given her the most important advice she could have received when she began her divorce process: I told her that God could take whatever anger she had, so she should bring it. In the logical framework most of us operate in, God’s infinitude should mean that God has the capacity to absorb all the anger we may feel, all the frustration, all the sadness, and then some. By sharing those feelings and getting them out of us, God might just end up being our greatest ally.

What I shared with the school in response to the outburst was similar. I said that it is okay to be angry with God. I also said that I believe, though others may feel differently, that God—who we say is infinite—is big enough to take our anger without getting mad in return. I then noted that this idea of God would take a longer time to discuss and that we had to move on at that moment.

The challenge, especially in a school system which prides itself on excellent academics, is that God-as-ally is a foreign concept. Third graders are very good at getting stuck in a logical mindset, but they are not the only ones. The irony is that logic is applied first to a personal God: God did not answer my prayers; God did not stop that fire; God did not save so-and-so; my life is so hard, and it is God’s fault; etc. The calculus takes away all chance of God being close or caring.

When we teach students to reason and to think critically, we often tear down possibilities. When it comes to God, there is little room for a God who is neither ephemeral and removed nor anthropomorphized and absent. There is the biblical God of personhood and the tefillah God of omnibenevolence. With a broken world and enough brokenness in students’ lives, neither God satisfies.

How can we open our young students to the notion of a God who is infinite and personal? How can we align our curricula with opportunities to talk through God-ideas? How can we not try?

In my follow through with the third grader, I found that his hatred of God was really a search for God. He reported that he does not see God doing all the things that would make life better. He has never experienced God, at least not in a way he recognizes on his own. This student is bereft of a God with whom he can relate.

Relationship is, I believe, our challenge. We talk about God, we teach God, and we pray to God; but do we relate to God in school? Expressions of generalized gratitude or High Holy Day promises to do better are not the substance of a relationship. A relationship has more of, at least, a feeling of being two-way. In the apparent absence of a God who intervenes in our daily lives, we need a God with whom we can relate: a God who gives us the space we need, absorbs our sorrow and our anger, and who loves us.

We have been particularly adept at explaining that God made room in creation for us to act, to repair the world and complete God’s work; we call it free will. Otherwise, our strong emotions are relegated to a school counselor’s office or another appropriate place of removal to gather ourselves. Could we teach a relational God by sending students to the prayer room by whatever name we call it, beit knesset or mikdash me’at? What would happen if the school counselor, or another adult, accompanied a student in crisis or meltdown to a space before the school ark? How much holier would that space become and how much whole-er would our students be?

One student shouting out his hatred of God is the tip of the iceberg. Underneath their achieving exteriors, our students’ souls, and perhaps our own, too, are storming without direction. It is time to offer more than solace or strategies for handling strong feelings; it is time to offer an immanent God who can be there for us without speaking or intervening. Each of our schools has its own unique culture; we should open that culture to include the chance to come before God to yell, to cry, or to be acknowledged. If we start to talk about it, we will find ways to teach this God and to bring ourselves and our students into relationship with God, for the better.

A 21st century community Jewish day school is the perfect place for this effort. God is bigger than any denominational divide. God is more than a sparring partner for atheists. God is not stuck on a workbook page. God is a Presence and a Place. As we welcome people into the warm community of our schools, let us welcome our communities into a relationship with a God big enough for us to bring our full selves. If we do, the next outburst is likely to be much more positive.


Rabbi Jeremy Winaker is the head of school of Albert Einstein Academy in Wilmington, Delaware, a K-5 community Jewish day school. [email protected]

Talking about G-d in a Pluralistic Day School

The God Issue

Due to these factors, it would be easy for us to get into a difficult situation with respect to the way we talk about G-d. I think the initial question needs to be broadened. How do we teach about G-d in a pluralistic Jewish day school that aims to educate a diverse community of students and families about Judaism? How do we validate and educate while being respectful of the atheist, agnostic, and religious families that call our school home?

As a Jewish educator, I need to both respect where each child is coming from and validate their right to make decisions for themselves, while at the same time sharing with students the ways Judaism and important Jewish thinkers have described G-d. Generalized discussions about G-d have the potential to alienate students and make them feel defensive or confused about their own beliefs or their family’s way of observing Judaism. There are several ways to combat the potential for hurt feelings and confusion among students when it comes to G-d.

The first line of defense needs to be a strong understanding of community. Students need to be part of and understand what makes a community and how a community operates, and this is something we teach across all content areas. Even the most homogeneous communities contain a diversity of thought, and the better students understand this the more resilient they will be when confronted with ideas that differ from their own. A strong classroom community is built upon trust, and it is trust that allows students to share their own perspectives without fear of ridicule. Teachers can’t rely on the bonds of friendship and shared classroom experiences to build community; the rules and value of community need to be taught.

At the Lerner School our teachers and students focus heavily on creating an open and respectful classroom community through stories, discussions, middot and setting expectations. This hard work presented itself to me several weeks ago when I visited a 1st grade classroom. As soon as I entered the room I was approached by two students who had come to me to clear up a theological debate they were having about the story of creation. They disagreed about the “truth” of the story. I took the students aside and asked each to share with me their side of the debate. At the conclusion of each student’s argument they asked if they were right. One student saw the story of creation as a symbolic story in contradiction to science, while the other student viewed the Torah story as a true description of how the world began. In the end I told them they were both right. I discussed the diversity of Jewish thought about creation and explained that there was no one right answer. We also discussed that this diversity of thought is what makes our classroom and school community great. At this the students nodded their heads and returned to their classwork. Their understanding and experience of community, personal perspective, and trust made this argument a positive part of their Jewish education.

Often as Jewish educators we want to simplify Judaism as a way of making the ideas easy to digest and simple for students to understand. I think this does a disservice both to our students as individuals and to diversity within our school community. Over the last few years I have learned that the best way to create a debate-driven classroom is to empower students with access to diverse Jewish viewpoints around any topic. Contradictions within Jewish thought or within the Torah itself are a great starting place for amazing discussions that allow students to build a stronger appreciation for the myriad ways one can express their ideas about G-d while still being Jewish.

Comparing Kohelet’s, Maimonides’, and Baruch Spinoza’s thoughts about G-d leads us to vastly different G-d concepts. Often students coming to a pluralistic or community day school don’t feel “Jewish enough” in comparison to some of their peers. When these students gain a broader understanding of what Judaism is and of the diversity of thought about G-d embedded within it, they are more likely to see themselves as part of the group rather than outside it.

G-d is a difficult concept for students to understand and an equally difficult concept to teach about honestly, because each student has their own concept of G-d and these beliefs are often surrounded with anxiety about whether or not they are “right.” By teaching community, the value of personal perspective, and the diversity already existing within Jewish thought, we have the ability to create a nurturing Jewish environment for students to explore what they think about G-d and Judaism.


Nathan Somers is the director of Jewish life at the Lerner Jewish Community Day School in Durham, North Carolina. [email protected]

Children’s Writings about God

The God Issue

Recent research into the spirituality of children tells us that children often do not have the language for the experiences they feel. These religious experiences of intimacy and immediacy are deeply felt and have long term significance but are mainly non-verbal. They remain individualistic experiences often considered very private since they come from a place of vulnerability in the child. Once expressed, their descriptions may be deeply particular featuring clouds and dreams, giants and scenes of nature.

Children find these images so powerful that they can be said to be their own individual “signature.” These formative images become the basis upon which their theologies are built. It is often the case therefore that we as Jewish educators have to listen for these experiences by earning their trust and confidence and offering opportunities to reflect intentionally on their religious encounters. One way of enabling children to reflect on their own experiences is to write about what they think, feel, sense and experience about God.

Reading children’s writings about God requires a sensitivity to the ways in which children express their “relational consciousness,” defined by Rebecca Nye in her research on the spiritual life of children as a heightened awareness to the connections and relationships around and beyond the self. Often attributed to a religious feeling or presence, it can express itself in relationships with loved ones, the natural world, or images of transcendence, and it is frequently found in familiar and everyday contexts resulting in expressions of awe or wonder, reverence or surprise and greater openness and clarity.

God is with me when I am Outside

With my bare feet touching the newly soaked grass

I see the clear blue Sky dotted with little white puffs

Running freely almost flying

Dancing with nature as the wind sways in unison

I AM FREE

Here a ten-year-old child associates a sensing of God with Outside (capital O). She is attentive to the experience of being in the natural world, and her feelings are heightened and opened to the wonder and beauty of grass and sky. The freedom of wind and cloud connects her to feelings of unbounded perception, wanting even to fly. She makes a connection between God and her own experience of freedom of movement and openness to the heightened sensations of touch and sight. Her freedom of movement, “almost flying,” is associated with the experience of being with God.

This poetic form highlights the ways she feels when God “is with her,” and there is both a concrete reality and a sense of liberation in the way she expresses her reflected experience. How this makes her feel is an important feature of this writing, as it connects her to something greater than herself and her capacity to know it. She is beginning to understand that knowing God is different from knowing other things, and that her ultimate yearnings for unbounded freedom are wrapped up in the religious experience. The openness to the experience of the natural world and its beauty and mystery is the beginning of a child’s expression of relational consciousness.

As children come to this consciousness, they can make connections to the religious narrative and metaphor of our religious tradition. Where the God language of our classrooms intersects with the personal experiences of our students, we find that children can find the language or symbolism to give expression to their religious encounters.

I feel God at night when I am in bed. Staring at the stars. Searching for different formations. It’s so quiet, just how it was in the beginning. I hear a dog bark and maybe even an owl hoot. I hear the crickets chirping and I see the stars sparkling. Just how it was in the beginning, quiet and peaceful. Just how it should be.

In the quiet darkness of an individual encounter, the child experiences heightened perceptions of sights and sounds of the near and far universe which are connected in his mind with Bereishit, In the beginning. This is a comforting experience, one that puts him in harmony with the world around him and sets the day and place as safe and protective. He is reflecting on a perception of harmony and stillness both within him and beyond him. These elements will become formative for him in experiencing spirituality as contemplative and reflective. This is his particular spiritual signature, which is so different from the writing of the previous child above. Here in the presence of darkness that is so comforting, he gets a reminder of how the world came to be in stillness and harmony and how it should be in its ideal and natural state. It gives him a moral message of what should be as well as what is.

Night time is of course a common theme, but it can be frightening rather than comforting; and God might be considered in a different role.

I feel God’s presence when I am about to fall asleep. It seems that He shuts my eyes and starts projecting my dreams. I sometime have really weird dreams. When I was really little, I dreamt that a huge orange blob was chasing my mom. I was chasing the blob on our balcony with no railings. I think that those dreams are supposed to make me appreciate what I have. When the dream is over, I dream that God is front of me telling me that the movie is over and that I should wake up.

Here it is God’s presence that brings on fears and anxieties about familiar things, home and family, and the child is unsettled and fearful of what can happen to overturn the essential anchors in her life. Her own dream interpretation is that this is a warning to appreciate the things she has and that God is a prefigurement to the experience of growing up. Children who reflect on the loss of a childhood think and feel it running over them with nothing to stop the progress of time.

James Fowler would call these the issues of faith, ultimate questions of significance, power and meaning, and here the child is grappling in her own way with her own images and language to interpret how life is changing for her. It can be at this time that the questions of faith become divorced in the child’s mind from the questions of religion. Unless the religious educator has a means to offer the child religious language, narrative and symbolic images that resonate with his or her own individual spiritual signature, the explicit religiosity of the tradition will be divorced from the implicit personal questions of religious experience.

We have long thought that this disconnection with classic depictions of God and belief takes place in late childhood, but children’s writings tell us that their formative experiences take place in early childhood, and only in late childhood are they expressed and interpreted.

When I was three, I dreamt that I was playing hide go seek with my mom. I was hiding in my dinosaur tepee thing. When the flaps opened, I thought it was my mom but it was really a knight with a big axe. When I woke up, it was as if God brought me back to reality.

Everything here is very real for the three year old child: play, toys, knights and axes. However, the ten-year-old interprets God as the one to distinguish between the fantasy and reality. God takes away the possibility of another way of knowing something, a dream-like state. The God he has been taught now wants the child to focus on more “real” images: God as king, father or judge. “Knight with an axe” as a mother figure retains its own symbolic meaning to that three-year-old. Jerome Berryman would ask us to wonder with the child about his own innate images and allow those wonderings to become his own theological language and perspective.

When we start to listen for children’s own theological language and expression, we find that we have so much to learn from them. The richness of their imagination and the natural way they connect to God’s presence or experience can powerfully move us in reflecting on our own childlike images, and in wondering about the possibility of religious encounter in a whole new way.

This piece of writing from another ten-year-old says much about the place and context of encouraging the search for and reflection on religious experience in all of us. The sad reality is that no one in this child’s family or religious school probably knew about this until he wrote it down.

The first time I experienced God was when I was at a sukkah party. Every year our next door neighbors have a sukkah party. It is like a maze outside of a castle. There is even a little pond filled with fish. It is an amazing backyard. One year when I was little I was playing in the backyard with my sister. We were playing hide and go seek. I don’t know why, but at that particular moment for about 15 minutes, I felt God s presence. It was amazing. I felt like my mind and my heart were somewhere else. My brain was going crazy, like it is doing now as I remember that moment. Now that we have moved a little further away, we still go to their sukkah party and I always make it a point to walk in the backyard.

His imagination and wonder is heightened in the context of the place at a time when his community gathers to celebrate the fragility of God’s presence as in the sukkah. Hide and Seek becomes the metaphor for seeking and finding God’s presence in the garden. For this child, his mind and heart go somewhere else in what seems to him a very long time; his senses are overwhelmed, including his power of reason and thought. It is truly an I- Thou moment which cannot be experienced again but can be recollected each time in its time and place. This may be the most significant religious experience this child will have throughout his whole lifetime, and the clearest recollection of it is the holiness of a backyard sukkah!

Though religious experience is powerful for young children, children too use their reasoning and mind to “think” the possibility of a God.

Once in Humash class, Eliana raised the subject of God. She wanted to know what our opinions on God were. One girl questioned God’s inability to solve all the problems in the world… When Humash class ended, Eliana took us to recess. I sat down in a chair and continued to think about God. My friends asked me if I’d like to play with them but I said “no thank you.” I thought and thought and thought some more. When recess was over and I got in line, I was still thinking about God. I was even thinking about God at home after I had done my homework. At the dinner table, I said, “Mom Dad I have been thinking about something.” I asked them, “Is God the most powerful being in the Universe? If not, what or who is?” My parents were stunned by my questions and said indeed those are powerful questions.

In his written paragraph he emphasises how much he needed to think God through at school, with his friends, at home encompassing his whole world. The thought wouldn’t go away and he needed to deliberate long and hard on his question. Finally like the greatest philosophers, he realises that the problem is one of theodicy; God’s power in the world. His question is actually the culmination of a process and his parents wisely reflect on the power of the question.

This serious thinking of course can take a child in another direction, a direction in which many adults finally end up.

God

I don’t believe in God

When I don’t believe in God its

Because

Bad things happen to me

I have two allergies and temper issues

And to think someone would curse me

With my problems

That would be just mean

If there is a God

To me

God is an illusion

Others believe in God

And they can if they want to

I’m an atheist

And I don’t believe in God

But

Thinking of all the good things that happen to me

Maybe someone blesses me with these things

If there is a God

Many, if not most, children will express their unbelief in God by the age of 10 or 11, but for some it is an ambivalence and for others it is a yearning that it could be otherwise. The deeper the thought about why there couldn’t possibly be a God can have the effect of moving a child through a faith transition to a point where he or she shapes a belief on her own answers to her own questions about God. This child reflects so much of our tradition, from the blessing and curses of Deuteronomy to the suffering in Job. For her the questions will remain more powerful than any answer, and our guiding role is to continue to get her to ask the challenging questions.

We learn from children’s writings about God that they commonly have religious experiences associated with the presence of God. These experiences are everyday and routine, but hold a particular signature image for each child. They are often non-verbal in that the child has no capacity or ability to explore them at the time, but they become recollected and significant just a few years later in late childhood. They form the questions of faith in young children, offering purpose and meaning to issues of trust, protection, family, growing up, fear, suffering and death. They are strongly felt and sometimes thoughtfully explored. By and large the passages about religious experience do not use explicit religious language, symbol or metaphor. They are not particularly concerned with what God is like, but rather how close or faraway God can become in their daily lives.

For us as religious educators, it is extremely hard to elicit these experiences. They become endangered as we seek to provide the answers to questions of faith before we have listened for and understood the children’s own questions of meaning. Perhaps the best we can do is to tell our sacred stories, sing our liturgy and sit back in silence as we ask, “What are you wondering about? I’d like to wonder with you.”

Writing about the question “What is God to me?” opens up new language for children with opportunities for connecting their innate perceptions with the religious language of symbol and metaphor of their tradition. Children writing about their experiences and thoughts about God have a key to unlocking this nonverbal language and enabling them to find their own spiritual signature, as in one fifth grader’s moment of clarity: “God is a mystery and that’s what I think He is.”


Rabbi Michael Shire PhD is dean of Hebrew College in Newton Centre, Massachusetts. [email protected]

Writing about God

The God Issue

In most subject areas we pose questions to challenge and stimulate. We ask questions to gain a better sense of what our students know and understand. What colors might we mix to make the right shade for this painting? How did the character change on her journey? Is it okay to do something wrong for the right reasons? We ask open-ended higher level thinking questions all the time, but how often do we ask them what they think about God? And when do we have our children write about God?

If we value the whole child the way our mission statements say that we do, then we need to find creative ways to nurture their spiritual selves, along with their social, emotional and intellectual sides, and to develop them. Writing about God, from my experience, is an untapped avenue toward helping students develop and grow understandings about their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

Writing about God is the only ELA (English Language Arts) writing assignment I have implemented every single year that I have taught. As a graduate student, I had a writing assignment that made me wonder why, as a child, I had never been asked big questions about God, Torah and spirituality. I recalled doing a lot of asking and wondering, but I couldn’t remember being given time to work on framing my own thoughts and beliefs until a theology class in graduate school. Some of my grown-up thoughts felt naïve and childlike, as if they had not had time to fully develop because they had been left undisturbed, or abandoned. In fact, they had been.

What did my students think about God, I couldn’t help but wonder. What might they write about God, if asked? As a writer, I know the power of the written word. Profound thoughts aren’t easily put into effective prose. And often, the very act of writing reveals to the writer thoughts she wasn’t even previously aware of. When that happens, the writer grows as a thinker, as a writer, and as a person.

And so one day during my first teaching year, I introduced a writing assignment about God with absolutely no idea what the outcome might be. I knew I had to act on my curiosity and on my instincts, grounded in my teaching pedagogy. I believed in the Deweyan idea that children are innately drawn to learning and will thrive when given meaningful work. God was a particularly meaningful topic for my fifth-grade students. Since this was an unusual kind of writing assignment, it felt wrong to give them a rubric or even an assignment sheet. I didn’t want to limit or restrict them in any way. This assignment would require them to think and to write. I simply wrote God on the board, and I circled it. I told my students I was interested in their thoughts and feelings about God. On some level, it was that simple: I was curious, I asked, and they responded. I got ten- and eleven-year-old children to put their hearts on the paper, to care deeply about their writing, and I brought their Jewish selves into the general studies classroom.

In the decade since, I have observed that this is some of the richest writing my students craft and one of the assignments they are most invested in. They work tirelessly to ensure that every word conveys the meaning they intend and need for it to have. This is deeply meaningful work, and the absence of a rubric or a grade has never diminished the weight of this assignment. After many years of witnessing the passion my students have for this task, I am led to think that it is in fact not brilliant to ask children to write about what they believe. It is necessary.

When we ask children big important questions, we demonstrate that we value their thoughts and opinions. We show them that we are interested in what they think, that what they believe is important. In fact it is. And learning how to articulate one’s beliefs at an early stage can only lead to an increased ability to do so throughout one’s lifetime. How often do children say in school, “I know what that means, but it’s hard to explain”? The more practice one has at explaining, the deeper the understanding. The more one can articulate one’s thoughts, feelings and beliefs, the more clearly one understands and can support those beliefs.

The act of writing is an effective path towards that articulation and understanding. It’s one thing to think and quite another to attempt to compose one’s thoughts into prose. One year after explaining the assignment, a girl boldly asked, “Well, what if I don’t believe in God?” She savored her moment of perceived defiance and stood in disbelief when my response was, “So write about that.” A while later she showed me her opening paragraph, which began, “I don’t believe in God because God gave me allergies.” I smiled, then pointed out the inconsistency. I told her she could write about not believing in God, but that if she felt God had given her allergies, it was rather hard to disavow belief. She was genuinely shocked.

In the end, she created a very nuanced piece of writing with several tiers, describing times when she felt she was angry with God, times when she questioned God, and times when she didn’t want to believe. The writing process revealed to her the complexity of her feelings and relationship with God in a way she did not know before she had to make her written words make some sort of sense. She was a big talker, but it was the act of writing that led to deep introspection and allowed her to understand her thoughts in a new way.

Another year I had a serious student claim to have finished after only one writing block. I had given my students weeks to work on this; I asked him how he could possibly be finished so soon. “So soon? Mrs. Woods, this has been in my head for seven years; this is just the first time anyone’s ever asked me to write it down.” Each year I create a compilation of their work, and the pieces vary considerably both in their content and style, with similarities year to year. There’s a range from the concrete to the abstract; there’s poetry and prose; there have been song lyrics and even a scripted dialogue; usually there are a few short stories as well as an expository avalanche of questions.

Fifth graders wrestle with understanding, or to be more precise, reconciling the God they know from Torah with their personal feelings and their scientific questions. They’ll start with a few questions, only to realize, through writing, how many more questions they have. In some ways the questions are my favorite, mostly because as a teacher I aspire for my students to ask and to wonder. If we want our students to think deeply, then we want them to question. And we need to be there to support them as learners, even if their questions make us uncomfortable. Especially if they do.

This year I asked a group of fourth graders if they’d ever been asked to write about what they think about God. One child told me she didn’t think this was talked about “because it’s a serious question.” One of my fifth graders said, “I think the serious questions should be the questions that teachers ask more.” “More often than they do,” added another. A student went on to explain that it could help when they’re older to begin talking and writing about serious questions when they’re young. “If you at least get to think about it when you’re younger, you have more to think about when you’re older.” And don’t we want our children to have more to think about? Imagine if every year our children wrote seriously, in an age-appropriate way, about God. How fascinating it would be for older students to chart their own growth and change, to see how their thoughts evolved as they grew up and also as they engaged more with Judaism.

I began with an assignment because as a teacher I was curious to know what my students were thinking. It is only through knowing our students as learners and as children that we can know how to best engage them. My advice to teachers is to be curious. Genuinely curious. As educators we must encourage curiosity and questions in our students. We must celebrate the art of the question and focus on wonder. We must also model curiosity, not for the sake of doing so, but because we really ought to be curious about what our students think, feel and believe. The more we understand about our students, the better we’re able to plan inspiring and engaging curricula. Writing is a powerful tool to use to get to know our students and for our students to understand themselves in a new way.


Jamie Faith Woods teaches 5th graders and serves as the teacher leader for grades 2-5 at the Jewish Community Day School of Rhode Island. [email protected]

Student Voices on God

The God Issue

In the Child’s Hands

When your child knows that he or she possess a great and holy quality —a soul that is a part of G-d— the child will realize that he or she has the potential to overcome difficulties and temptations. Teach your child that all it takes is a little effort on her or his part, and he or she will receive considerable assistance from on High. —The Rebbe (Advice for Life: Education)

At CJDS G-d is not a subject, nor a topic. Rather, G-d just is. G-d is when the students get up in the morning. G-d is when the students go to sleep at night. And G-d is also when they say Birkat Hamazon after lunch. When the general studies teacher picks sticks to decide who is going to partner with each other so that there are no hard feelings, G-d is the one who is making the decision. When it rains on a trip and changes have to be made that at first might be disappointing, it is part of G-d’s greater plan. Our students will sometimes say it first, before we even have a chance to suggest that possibility.

 

If there is anything our fifth grade graduates take away or remember from their experience at our school after spending middle and high school and college away from much Jewish influence, it is the core connection, understanding and awareness of G-d.

Our success with this message is first and foremost with our teachers. Each and every one of our Judaic teachers have an unshakable and steadfast faith in G-d because children can smell indecision and uncertainty a mile away. It is so important to gift this treasure of faith and belief and to offer them this wondrous possibility. I believe it gives them a sense of security and confidence when exploring their own beliefs. They don’t necessarily have to buy it, but if they choose it, it is because we made it available to them.

G-d is woven into our activities, our stories, our lessons and our choices. The connections and visualizations are constantly made so that each child can fit G-d into his or her life as they see fit. We don’t have a one-size-fits-all attitude and belief system, rather each child establishes their own relationship with Hashem. One story to illustrate this is with a kindergartener who told his teacher, “Morah Rochel, I had a Jewish dream, there was a phone in my garage and I could talk to Hashem on it.”

This year our school introduced Project Based Learning in a formal and structured manner. In our Judaic studies, we have chosen to create Torah Art by taking parashot drawings by an artist in California and coloring them by using a chosen technique after studying various artists and their art. In addition, the parashah chosen by each student was researched thoroughly to understand the importance of the specific picture chosen by the artist.

The students were then visited by three Torah experts: a community rabbi who brought a Torah to visit and to demonstrate various characteristics of it, another community rabbi whose expertise is in Kabbalah to answer some of the more esoteric questions, and a fourteen year old graduate of CJDS who often reads from the Torah. The students did research on the Internet and explored various reading materials until most of their answers were gathered. They then wrote explanations to go along with their parashah picture. By the time the students completed the project, their ability to appreciate the Torah portion read each week at the synagogue was so much more internalized, understood and engaged.

However, before they dove into the project, it was important that the students explored their understanding of G-d, the Torah and its content. First they brainstormed, discussed and shared their wonderings. Listed here are just a few of the questions and speculations that were expressed in these conversations.

Why is the Torah in a scroll?

Who wrote the Torah?

How or does the Torah predict the future?

Is the Torah true?

How did Hashem create the world out of nothing?

Was there anyone before Hashem?

If Hashem knows what’s going to happen, how do we have free choice?

These questions tell us that the environment at our school is ripe and set for the students to feel comfortable to pose controversial, deep and thoughtful questions. We know that the answers are not simple and that we continue to encourage learning, studying and discovering to come to their own understandings.

These are thoughts and reflections jotted down by some of our students during this process:

We cannot understand and take in what happened and understand such a giant force that is Hashem. The only one who knows about before Hashem is Hashem. I used to think there was an answer. I guess there isn’t.I learned that before there was anything, there was G-d. He moved over to make room for us, the earth. G-d is a mandatory existence. He must be there. Hashem gave us choices so that we know the difference between right and wrong. If we don’t know the difference between them, we would do bad things and think they are perfectly good and we could do good things and feel ashamed.

The foundation of a strong Jewish education is G-d and the Torah. A Jewish education is much, much more than dreidels and hamantashen. It is deeper than the rote knowledge of our history. It reaches far beyond the stories and practices. It provides a safe place, a center and a compass for our students as they navigate the world they live in.


Mariashi Groner, Head of School, Charlotte Jewish Day School, Charlotte, North Carolina

Column Keeping The Vision: What Stories Do We Tell?

The God Issue

I wanted to get a better sense of what it’s like for Jews to come together for Jewish learning in some of these places, so I sat in on a session sponsored by Limmud International, the umbrella for the worldwide movement, and joined a conversation with conference organizers from Turkey, the Netherlands, Hungary and Argentina.

This was before the horrible events in France that took place just a few days later. But part of the conversation at that session was about security arrangements, how widely to publicize the conferences, and what help could or could not be expected from local authorities if something bad happened. When the news from Paris hit, my first thought was about the vulnerability of these Jewish communities: Would they go ahead with their conferences in the current climate? Do these communities even have a future?

I quickly realized, however, that framing the story this way ignores another story that is quite different and equally, if not more, important: the remarkable fact that these communities, and numerous others, are holding Limmud conferences. The people I was sitting with were all volunteers who had traveled hundreds and thousands of miles to a classroom in Coventry, England, because they wanted to bring a powerful Jewish learning experience to their communities. And they were coming together to discuss their challenges and to get sage advice from veteran Limmudniks because they believe that Judaism has something to contribute to their lives and the lives of their fellow Jews.

Two stories, with messages in tension with one another, yet both true, and both important to be told. I think about stories in tension when I think about Purim and Pesach. In this case, both are stories of redemption, but told from very different perspectives. Megillat Esther, where the Purim narrative is recounted, is notable for the absence of God in the text. Perhaps there is indeed some Divine power at work behind the scenes, but the story we tell is about humans taking action to save the Jewish people. Contrast this with the Haggadah, the narrative we recite on Pesach, in which humans—even Moses—play almost no role (except as props). Here it is God alone who is responsible for the great redemption. Which is true: are we responsible for taking action to save ourselves and others, or must we look beyond ourselves to a greater Power to set the world aright?

Our ability to tell complex stories, stories in tension with other stories, is vital, I believe, to what we might call a Jewish approach to the world. At our foundation, we have a term for it: we call it an “eilu v’eilu” sensibility—“these and these are the words of the living God.” As humans and as Jews, we often yearn for things to be simple, to be able to grab onto one aspect of a situation and say, “that’s the truth; that’s reality.” But life rarely works that way; there’s rarely one, obvious right answer, one interpretation of a text that’s correct, one way to be Jewish that’s meaningful and sanctifying.

One of the great strengths and great challenges of community day schools is making room for multiple stories in what and how we teach. In today’s world, the idea of multiple narratives has often been reduced to an indifferent relativism that denies the “truth” of any narrative. I (and many others) see an “eilu v’eilu” pluralism quite differently. It is the assertion that there are elements of truth in many narratives, and that our role is to be open to those elements of truth, whatever their source, and to do our best to hold onto them, even knowing that sometimes they don’t add up to one grand Truth that makes everything whole and coherent.

This is not an easy approach to teach, whether we’re applying it to analysis of current events, to how we read texts, or to matters of theology. But it is both an intellectual and a moral virtue, and one worth affirming proudly. Telling complicated stories and more than one story, challenging our students to engage in sense- and meaning-making in ways that are open, respectful and tentative, but also affirmative and confident, may be one of the most important things we can do to equip them for a complex and changing world.

As I head off in a few weeks for Limmud New York, held in the relative comfort and security of a Stamford, Connecticut, hotel, I’ll be thinking about those men and women organizing Limmud conferences this year in places like Bulgaria, India, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and (yes) France. Their stories are very different than ours and from each other. The stories are chastening and exhilarating, inspiring and confusing. More than anything else, though, they—and so many others—are stories that need to be told and heard. Perhaps in the end, that’s what we want our day schools to be: places where all of our stories, past and present, can come together to help create a dynamic future.


Dr. Jonathan Woocher works in a senior capacity with the Lippman Kanfer family on its philanthropic and educational initiatives. [email protected]

God in the Christian Classroom: Lessons for Jewish Day Schools

Sarah Rubinson Levy
The God Issue

Focus 1: Recognize that God is the source of all truth and knowledge.

From Christian schools: In his Christian Education: Its Mandate and Mission, Ronald A. Horton states, “The whole body of Christian educational theory rests upon the recognition that all truth is of God…All truth, whether discerned or undiscerned by man, comes forth from a single source and, therefore, is one harmonious whole.” Paul W. Cates, in his A Christian Philosophy of Education, echoes this idea, stating, “The Biblical view of knowledge presupposes a source of all knowledge, for knowledge is dependent on truth; and truth, in turn, is dependent on God. All avenues of knowledge stem from God.”

For our own schools: God should be abundantly present in our schools, and students should be encouraged to develop their understanding of God. Schools could consider incorporating theology into the curriculum, looking at different perspectives of God and God’s actions, and encouraging students to engage in questions related to God. Students should be provided with a safe space to explore their own questions related to God and engage in a dialogue in order to better understand their own theologies.

Focus 2: Make biblical text the center of learning about God and life.

From Christian schools: If God is the ultimate source of truth, the Bible, then, is the ultimate work through which we learn about God. Horton states, “Students come to know God by studying His revelation of Himself in His Word and in His works…and, therefore, the Bible is the center of the Christian school curriculum. The Bible is not only the most important subject matter but also the source of the principles determining the other subject matters and the way in which they are taught.” In Walking with God: Christian Approaches to Teaching and Learning, Harro Van Brummelen explains, “The first way we use the Bible is to teach it as educational content. Particularly in Christian schools, the Bible functions as an object and field of study…It enriches their insight into God’s purpose and meaning for their lives.” Cates also echoes these assertions, stating, “Thus, the revelation of God must become the heart of the subject matter curriculum…It, as God’s primary revelation to man, must become the integrating and correlating factor in all that is thought and taught at the school.”

For our own schools: By focusing on the text throughout the curriculum and programming, our schools can work towards being “Jewish day schools” rather than “day schools with Judaic programs.” Although the biblical text forms the basis, Judaism is fortunate to have so many rich, relevant texts from which to learn. Rabbinic literature and modern commentary can be integrated in order to better understand what it means to be Jewish and how Judaism can serve as a framework for living.

Focus 3: Make God’s words and teachings relevant to the lives of today’s students.

From Christian schools: After accepting God as the ultimate source of truth and knowledge, based upon the Biblical text, the next step is to integrate His teachings into the students’ lives. Roy Zuck writes, in The Holy Spirit in Your Teaching, “Teachers are to relate God’s Word to the pupil’s experiences.” Brummelen continues, “Teachers and students need to seek to apply God-given truths to current contexts,” outlining the role of the teachers to “explore with our students how the truths of the Bible need to be interpreted and applied to today’s cultural situations and conditions.”

For our own schools: Traditional Jewish texts were written quite some time ago, yet the themes explored in these ancient texts are as relevant today as when they were written, often serving as the basis for the newest movies and books. The curriculum should place an emphasis on encouraging students to take the lessons they are learning and apply them to their own lives, reinforcing those lessons and allowing the students to internalize them.

Focus 4: Teach about God in every subject and throughout the school.

From Christian schools: By placing God’s teachings at the center of education, the study of the biblical text and its teachings naturally permeates the entire curriculum. As Cates explains, “The principles of biblical truth should be applied to and in all other subjects.” As such, he also suggests that “every teacher must know the Bible. Because the Word of God is relevant to all subjects.” Through the integration of God’s teachings, Christian schools connect God and His creations. As Horton explains, “Students learn how to apply, analyze, evaluate and appreciate based on God’s standards, not just something someone made up. For example, in Science, we know the world shows beautiful design and pattern, because it was created that way—and that impacts how we interact with that world. In Literature, students will learn to analyze the author’s meaning, comparing it with Christian values and beliefs—and that ability of critical analysis translates to many other areas of life.” Brummelen gives another example: “When you teach probability in mathematics, you can teach it as the story that life is full of unpredictable chances, and that you have to take advantage when things go your way.” This integration is echoed in the literature promoting various Christian schools. The website for Zephyrhills Christian Academy in Florida, for example, states that “everything that is taught is fully shaped by a Christian worldview—whether it is history, math, science, literature, or any other course. Since ‘worldview’ is your perspective on everything, Christian school students have a much greater chance of making the right choices that lead to success, because they know how God’s world works.”

For our own schools: Judaic and general studies should be integrated whenever possible. By learning in a more holistic fashion, students will be more able to apply concepts when relevant as opposed to restricted to certain subjects. Additionally, they will be more likely to see the teachings of Jewish texts, such as values and life lessons, as applicable to their own lives if they see them as applicable to subjects other than Jewish studies. In order to work towards this goal, schools could consider offering learning opportunities for faculty members so that they are more familiar with and more comfortable integrating selections from Jewish text and tradition.

Focus 5: Guide students towards understanding and doing the will of God as we are created in the image of God.

From Christian schools: By placing the biblical text and God at the center of the school curriculum, Christian schools work towards instilling a connection between God and their students’ roles in the world and actions towards others. As Horton explains, “The purpose of Christian education is the directing of the process of human development toward God’s objective for man: godliness of character and action.” He adds, “In endeavoring to fulfill the purpose of Christian education…the Christian school teaches…the imitation of God. Students learn of God so that they may imitate Him… To imitate God in His actions as well as in His attributes is to develop abilities into skills and to exercise them as instruments of God’s will.” Again Christian schools, such as Zephyrhills, echo this ideal: “Everything that is taught emphasizes man’s (and woman’s) special place in the world: we are created by God to love and be loved by Him, and to be stewards of the world He created.”

For our own schools: One of the primary roles of modern schooling is to prepare the students to be productive members of society, both in terms of their knowledge and skills, but also in terms of their contributions to society through their characters. Focusing on Jewish values and middot should be a priority, using the idea of all humans’ being created in God’s image as a guide. By looking at certain aspects of Judaism as a framework for living, especially when considering topics such as Jewish values in the context of treating those around us, students will continue to apply their learning to their own lives and make it their own through their actions.

Focus 6: Motivate communal action through God’s intervening grace.

From Christian schools: Based on the concept of the “fall of man” in Genesis 3, the curriculum is based around the idea of modeling God’s grace and forgiveness in actions as a motivator for student social action. Bob Goudzwaard shows, for example, how God’s intervening grace can cause individual and communal action to lead to a more peaceful and just world (Hope in Troubled Times). As Horton explains, “In following God [students] imitate both His nature and His works. The imitation of God’s nature results in holiness of character...The imitation of God’s works results in service.” Brummelen continues, “What is important here is that students begin to recognize that they are ‘actors,’ or participants, in Act 3 of this biblical story.”

For our own schools: As the old saying goes, “Actions speak louder than words,” so schools should seek opportunities for students to put their learning into action, really allowing them to take ownership and apply that learning. Although many Jewish day schools already include a community service requirement for graduation, the concept of service could also be brought into the school. Experiential educational components should be incorporated into the school curriculum, tied to the biblical texts with space for reflection and connection, enhancing and reinforcing student learning and also strengthening the community.

Focus 7: Aim for spiritual growth and connection with God as well as academic learning.

From Christian schools: As Zuck states, “Teachers are to rest satisfied with nothing less than spiritual results. A teacher must constantly test his teaching to see if it’s resulting in spiritual growth on the part of his pupils.” Horton elaborates, explaining, “As education in general begins with physical birth, Christian education proper begins with spiritual rebirth, when the life of God is communicated to the soul.” Horton elaborates, “This knowledge of God implies more than just knowledge about God…the knowledge of God that is unique to Christian education is a personal knowledge that...It follows that without a student body composed mainly of students possessing this personal knowledge of God, no school can legitimately be regarded as a Christian educational institution.”

For our own schools: Although academic achievements and grades do hold importance, focus in our schools should also be placed on the personal and spiritual development of the students, giving them ample time for reflection and growth without the pressures of qualitative measurement. Schools could consider implementing a portfolio system that could be tailored to the interests and needs of individual students and would help track the spiritual growth of students during their time at the school.

Focus 8: Embrace the challenge of teaching as God’s work.

From Christian schools: Teachers are really seen as agents of God, deeply connected to their roles and to God. As Zuck explains, “Remember that Christian education is a supernatural task. The presence of God’s Holy Spirit in teaching takes Christian education beyond mere programming, methodology, and techniques.” He continues, “Teachers must recognize that…It is God who does the teaching, a teacher is merely a channel of His grace, an instrument doing the planting and watering.”

For our own schools: Teaching, in any situation, is an immense responsibility. When dealing with spirituality and theology, however, that responsibility is elevated, so having a clear sense of self is essential. Teachers at Jewish day schools should have a clear sense of self and developed personal theology in order to be best situated to guide students in their own journeys. Additionally, schools could offer some training for teachers about talking to students about topics such as spirituality and theology, topics that can often lead to complicated discussions.

Those involved with Christian education have very similar goals to those of us in Jewish day school education. We all want for our students to be impacted positively by the education they receive, religious and secular, in our schools and for that impact to last long after they leave our classrooms. As such, Jewish day schools would be remiss if we did not consider the philosophies of education related to God implemented in Christian schools and think about how they could be adapted to our specific situations.


Dr. Sarah Levy is a teacher at Denver Jewish Day School in Denver, Colorado. [email protected]

A Speaking God

The God Issue

This article will focus on a small selection of these thinkers with the goal of opening up these issues for further discussion. Maimonides’ remark about another difficult topic could easily be applied here: “Its measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea, and many fundamental principles and lofty ideas are dependent on it” (Hilkhot Teshuva, chapter 5). Of course, the only way to span even the longest of distances is one step at a time—let this stand as one step in that direction.

In Yehuda HaLevi’s Kuzari, a dialogue between a representative of Judaism (the Chaver) and the king of the Khazars, the question of God speaking is presented as the very doubt Bnei Yisrael had after the exodus from Egypt, and the revelation at Sinai is framed as the answer. After the Chaver retells the story of the exodus the king responds (starting with Part I, Section 80):

No one could imagine for a moment that [the events of the exodus were] the result of necromancy, calculation, or phantasy. For had it been possible to procure belief in any imaginary dividing of the waters, and the crossing of the same, it would also have been possible to gain credence for a similar imposition concerning their delivery from bondage, the death of their tormentors, and the capture of their goods and chattels. This would be even worse than denying the existence of God.

The king sees these events as being beyond doubt. The Chaver, of course, does not disagree. However, he does believe that one very significant doubt remained for the Jewish people even after all the wonders and miracles of the exodus, specifically: does God truly speak with flesh and blood? Here is the Chaver’s formulation of the people’s doubt:

Although the people believed in the message of Moses, they retained, even after the performance of the miracles, some doubt as to how God could speak to humans, and whether the Law was not of human origin, and only later on supported by divine inspiration. For they found it exceedingly difficult to associate speech with anything other than humans, since speech is something physical.

This formulation of the people’s doubt is highly intriguing. Why was it so difficult to associate speech with God? Why would they not experience the same perplexity in regard to the miracles wrought by God in Egypt and the desert? Were those events any less physical than speech? Weren’t they in fact more so?

It is one thing to say that God interacts with His creation. It is quite another to say that He speaks. In speech, God’s separateness is obliterated—He enters into a personal encounter which brings Him closer to what is perceived as being uniquely human. The difficulty of scriptural anthropomorphism (from the Greek anthropos, meaning human and morphe, meaning form) is not just that God is being described as physical, but that He is being described as human.

According to Yehuda HaLevi, the revelation at Sinai was designed to establish that God does communicate with human beings. The God that gave man the capacity for speech is not beyond speech—this too can be a medium for expressing His will. God can manifest Himself as Speaker. The word is not man’s alone.

Maimonides’ approach in the Mishneh Torah is reminiscent of the Kuzari. Though categorical in his denial of any physical characteristics to God—famously invoking the principle “the Torah speaks in the language of men” to explain Scripture’s copious use of anthropomorphisms—he is surprisingly reserved when it comes to speech (and wisdom), negating only speech of the human variety (Hilkhot Yesodei HaTorah, chapter 1):

There cannot be attributed to Him, neither death nor life; neither ignorance nor wisdom, like the wisdom of a wise person; neither sleep nor wakefulness; neither anger nor levity; neither joy nor melancholy; neither silence nor speech, like the speech of man.

To completely negate the speech of God would contradict another fundamental principle of the Torah (ibid. chapter 7), that God communicates with the prophets. To put it simply, in the Jewish tradition it would be too ludicrous to say that God does not speak (or communicate, to use a word that carries less of the anthropomorphic) at least in some sense, no matter how much that might bristle up against our notion of God’s immateriality.

Moving from the medieval to the modern, the resistance to a Speaking God goes to the heart of an essential tension described by the 20th century philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. In an essay titled “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition” (in Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures), he distinguishes between two worlds—two worldviews—that stand side by side, contradicting and complementing each the other: the West and the East; the Greek tradition and the Jewish tradition; Athens and Jerusalem; the philosophical contemplative and the biblical tradition of Revelation. In the Greek tradition, as described by Levinas,

Reason is solid and positive; it begins with all meaning to which all meaning must return in order to be assimilated to the Same [the “Same” being Levinas’s evocative term for the self or the ego], in spite of the whole appearance it may give of having come from outside. Nothing in this reason can cause the fission in the nuclear solidity of a thought which thinks in correlation with the world’s positivity, which thinks from its starting point of the vast repose of the cosmos; a thought which freezes its object in the theme, which always thinks to its measure, which thinks knowingly.

In contrast, the tradition of Revelation, according to Levinas, is “a relation with exteriority which, unlike the exteriority with which man surrounds himself whenever he seeks knowledge, does not become simply the content of interiority, but remains ‘uncontainable,’ infinite and yet still maintaining a relation.”

In the Greek tradition everything must be contained as a concept—the goal is to fully grasp, mentally and, if possible physically, the object of knowledge. There is little room for the infinite, uncontainable and ungraspable word that comes from beyond. Language must point to definite meanings; it serves to organize and make our world comprehensible. The ultimate objective is that the world become “assimilated to the Same.” Language is man’s possession and tool.

But in the tradition of Revelation, language has a very different cast. Language is that which seeks to overcome an infinite gap—it seeks a relation from beyond. It is in language that this infinite separation seeks to be bridged—in which the Most High, God, maintains His absolute separation while simultaneously—and from a Greek perspective, paradoxically—being revealed. These very different views of language are not meant to supplant each other; they each have their place. However, in the Greek tradition there can be no word that emanates from the Infinite. Greek ears cannot hear the voice of Sinai.

Now to turn to what might be the most profound challenge to viewing God as a Speaking God. The systematic genocide of the Jewish people from 1933-1945 and the subsequent founding of a Jewish state in 1948, followed by numerous wars to defend its existence, had no small impact on the development of Jewish philosophy. The tormented questions of Job that pierced our hearts during and after the Shoah, turned, in the blink of an eye, to the triumphant hallelujahs of the psalmist with the establishment of the State of Israel. The face of God that was wrapped in mystery and hidden from view now shined so radiantly that few could doubt God’s providential hand.

In his beautiful essay Kol Dodi Dofek, The Voice of my Beloved Knocks, Rav Soloveitchik uses the stirring allegory of the fifth chapter of the Song of Songs to frame a response to the events of the 1940s. There, the lovely woman, representing the Jewish people, lies sleeping with wakeful heart when she hears the voice of her beloved, representing God. He knocks at the door, waiting in anticipation for her to open. But she has already taken off her robe, she has already washed her feet—she delays. Not until her beloved releases the latch does her innermost being stir with longing. But it’s too late. By the time she has opened the door, he has gone; she calls for him, but there is no reply.

Using this imagery, Rav Soloveitchik recounts six “knocks,” six ways the Beloved has called upon His people in recent history. The following is what he describes as the fourth knock:

The Beloved is knocking in the hearts of the perplexed and assimilated youths. The era of self-concealment (hastarat panim) at the beginning of the 1940s resulted in great confusion among the Jewish masses and, in particular, among the Jewish youth. … Buried, hidden thoughts and paradoxical reflections emerge from the depths of the souls of even the most avowed assimilationists. And once a Jew begins to think and contemplate, once his sleep is disturbed—who knows where his thoughts will take him, what form of expression his doubts and queries will assume? (Translated by Lawrence Kaplan in his Theological and Halakhic Reflections on the Holocaust)

So where do these thoughts lead? Is the knock loud enough? It is one thing to acknowledge God’s providence, but after the deafening silence of the Shoah can we shift back to a scripture that testifies to His eternal word? Are the miracles of 1948 enough to answer the questions “of the perplexed and assimilated”? Finally, can the new Jew of Medinat Yisrael, who with her own hands drained the swamps, made the desert bloom and sacrificed her sons and daughters to defend her land—for whom, after millennia of debasement at the hands of her oppressors, self-reliance, self-confidence, self-sacrifice are emblems worn with pride—find a place in her heart for the word of God? Can she break the shackles of her past without also severing her connection to God’s eternal word? There is, of course, no simple answer to these questions. It is, above all, the role of educators to make the texts of our tradition speak once again—to make God speak once again.

I conclude with the words of Menachem Begin who, defending his decision not to allow El Al to fly on Shabbat, made the following statement (emphasis added): “The Shabbat, the day of rest, is one of the loftiest ideals in all of human civilization. … Just one nation, a nation who searched for God and found Him, one small nation heard the voice, saw the voices: ‘Guard the Shabbat to make it holy’” (quoted in Daniel Gordis, Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel’s Soul). The same could—and should—be said for the rest of the Torah. Let us embrace the voice of our heritage. Ultimately, Jewish education must go beyond a mere exposure to tradition. It must enable students to fashion ears that are attuned to revelation, echoing the words of the Psalmist, “You have fashioned ears for me…To do Your will, My God, is my desire; and Your Torah is deep within me” (Psalms 40:7-9).


Rabbi Yehuda Rapoport is Judaic studies curriculum director at the Seattle Hebrew Academy. [email protected]

Into The Mystic

The God Issue

Most liberal traditions portray Judaism as more concerned with actions than theology. The only time theology may raise its head is when schools have multidenominational panels to discuss the differences between Orthodox, Conservative and Reform. Invariably, God is portrayed as the One who either did or did not give us the Torah. The nature of God is usually totally absent from this discussion.

Whereas Lord Valdemort was called “he who shall not be named,” but whose essence was well understood, the Jewish God’s essential Name shall be not only ineffable, but incomprehensible as well. Other than talking in platitudes about a higher power, we are reluctant, and maybe ill-equipped, to speak about the Holy One and what S/He has to do with us. Can we teach about the nature of God in a way that would challenge and engage high school students, or is the subject so alienating it would be best avoided? If the answer is the latter, then I’m afraid much, if not all, is lost.

Kabbalah offers a fresh approach that can provoke students’ understanding of what belief in God can mean, and how empowering that might be for those who seek, and question the purpose and meaning of life.

OBSTACLES

The Problem of Reward and Punishment

The first introduction the Torah gives when describing the Creator’s relationship to Israel is that He rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. If the meaning of this were taken at face value, then life for a Jew who followed the Torah’s precepts would be simple. Good actions would result in reward, and rebellious actions would be immediately punished. But it has never been that simple, and at a superficial glance such a perspective does not reflect reality as most of us know it. This is not a modern problem, but one that has plagued rabbis and mystics for millennia. Because this is such a vexing and critical issue, the literature is rich with complexity and creativity. The God who resembles the corpulent man in the red suit who lands on rooftops and goes down chimneys is a fantasy that suits the needs of small children, but not those of us who want this relationship to make sense.

Engaging High School Atheists About God

When students claim that they don’t believe in God, I always ask, which God is that, and what’s He like? Invariably, they offer a fairly conventional answer that reflects the thought of famous atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens. When I answer, well I don’t believe in that God either, I usually get a raised eyebrow. Renowned atheists often reject the notion of God out of hand because they find the concept so preposterous; they won’t afford it a scintilla of seriousness. Before one can intelligently reject an idea, one must first understand it. Engagement in ideas that one ultimately doesn’t accept allows a person to appreciate the creativity, elegance and complexity of the ideas themselves, and by extension, the people who believe them. Avoiding the subject invariably impoverishes the spirit of both the believing, and the nonbelieving student.

Teaching Spiritual Experience Without Context

The rote nature of our devotional canon challenges the most devout and earnest supplicant. It is supremely difficult to see the same words as fresh every day, and it is unreasonable to expect students to have a relationship with the Creator without having a foundational understanding of the Creator. By design, in this case, the proverbial cart is placed before the horse, and sooner or later the cart needs some guidance. The question is, when and how do we make this a priority, and when we choose to do so, what do we offer? What context do we provide for the text that has become a pretext for the melodies I learned at camp or at youth group conclaves?

THE IMPORTANCE OF KABBALAH  IN THIS JOURNEY

As much as we may scoff at the emergence of Kabbalah by all those denizens of popular culture, one has to wonder why this anemic version of Jewish wisdom is so compelling. And to sharpen the question, why is it better than our good old belief in reward and punishment? As noted, reward and punishment promises a reality that is not in evidence: the wicked on earth seem to prosper, and the righteous, too often, suffer. It feels simplistic and almost primitive. There has to be more going on.

Kabbalah presents the theurgic notion that God is empowered by the deeds of humanity in general, but Jews in particular. Not that God won’t reward us if we sin, but He can’t. We are the ones who determine, by our actions, whether we will bask in Her graciousness. It also makes a person responsible, yet humble. Especially when it comes to prayer, the focus on thinking “let me be the light, so that I can be a vessel from the light above” is an idea that resonates for many, and to those for whom it doesn’t, it will provoke thought without offending sensibility. It is a philosophy that demands both action and contemplation at the same time. Giving tzedakah is elevated to an ethereal action. All aspirations that are sincere and pure elevate the person in his connection to the Infinite. In an age where being spiritual is valued but being religious is not, these ideas bridge the gulf between the God they know and the God that would challenge them to be engaged not only in their own growth, but to the betterment of the world at large.

This is a lot to digest. Here is an overview accompanied with several concrete examples of what the study of Kabbalah can offer.

When anyone reads the Torah it is hard to miss that the One God seems to have many Names. The Torah has already indicated that each Name serves as an aspect of God’s power. The Patriarchs did not know the ineffable Name that God revealed to Moshe. The Sages of the Talmud further develop this idea by defining the essence of some of these Names. Elokim is judgment, YHVH is mercy (among other things). From these Names, the Kabbalists articulate ten different emanations of God that are connected to each other by channels. The lowest emanation is the one most accessible, and through our connecting to that emanation, we may ascend the channels until we reach the highest and most inaccessible emanation. The lowest emanation is called Malchut (Kingship) or Shechinah (Indwelling), while the highest is Keter (Crown), and is the infinite source of life.

From Keter, there is an energy, which I neologize as the everflow that connects one emanation to the other. The everflow never ceases, but if the connecting channels are ruptured then the everflow is subject to entropy, and from this evil emerges. It is we who rupture the channels; our misdeeds disempower the benevolence and compassion of God. And it is also we who can repair them.

Each emanation has a Name, an aspect of God, that is connected to both what precedes it and what succeeds it (except for Keter and Malchut, the first and the tenth). The ninth emanation is called Yesod, and the mitzvah of tzedakah is connected specifically to Yesod. The verse Tzaddik yesod olam, “The tzaddik is the foundation of the world” (Proverbs 10:25), is brought to demonstrate biblical origin of this connection. What happens when one gives tzedakah? It reinforces the channels from the emanations that come before it, and causes the everflow to pour into Malchut. Automatically, we are the beneficiaries of God’s bounty through our generosity of providing for others. There is a mystical dimension beyond the utilitarian concept of helping others. By being Godly we enable God to care for us. These ideas allow for spiritual language to be used in regard to fundamental human interactions. In many ways mitzvot that actively engage in the world are more mystical than prayer in their effectiveness.

There is a law that enjoins us to say one hundred brachot (blessings) a day. The Talmud quotes a verse from the Torah that elliptically alludes to this requirement. The Kabbalist Rabbi Joseph Gikitilla found the talmudic interpretation weak and offered one of his own. He said the Tabernacle was constructed with one hundred sockets, in Hebrew ADaNIm. If one socket was missing, the whole Tabernacle would be in disrepair.

The word brachah shares the same root as the word breichah which means pool, and also refers to a natural vessel that receives and contains water. A hundred blessings is a conceptual Tabernacle that needs all of them in order for it to be completely functional. This means that a brachah is not merely a thank you, but a means for Jews to be receptacles for God’s love, compassion, generosity and certainly sustenance. The idea that we open ourselves up to acknowledging the wonder of gifts we take for granted as receivers and transmitters of brachah truly transforms what has either become rote or ignored through the teenage years.

Beyond learning these concepts, one may give students a challenge to create kavvanot, phrases that serve as foci for meditation, before saying a brachah or doing acts of compassion and see how it qualitatively effects their lives.

After I witnessed the film Apollo XIII, I discussed the kabbalistic motifs in the movie, as I saw it, with my students. The first thing that struck me was that the people on the ground were the heroes, while the astronauts were totally at their mercy. They knew that if they did nothing that the astronauts would perish, but they also knew that if they did everything, it may not be enough. In the end, they did everything they could, and then they prayed. A kabbalist might say that through their commitment they opened up the channels and empowered God to ensure that the factors they could not control complemented their intense efforts. The positive outcome was not a foregone conclusion, but when one is truly a vessel for sanctity, one may be responsible for repairing the channels that bring the Shefa, the everflow, in abundance. As a metaphor, it is a commendable way to live a life.

We all know that kabbalistic texts like the Zohar are beyond the understanding of many of us, but once one describes its worldview, it is possible to take snippets from anthologies that vividly illustrate how God interacts with the world, the Jews, and each individual. The Essential Kabbalah by Daniel Matt is a good place to start, as well as his anthology of the Zohar in his Classics of Western Spirituality series. For an overview, any Jewish encyclopedia article might be helpful, but it is the texts themselves that will prove to be most inspiring.

Transforming our students into sacred vessels for receiving the Divine and generously transmitting it to others has the power to make routinized terms like tikkun olam into electric volts of sanctity that may empower students toward greater Jewish commitment. At the very least, they will have encountered a complex and sophisticated mixture of interpretation and philosophy that will challenge even the greatest skeptic.


Rabbi Avi Weinstein is head of Jewish studies at Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy in Overland Park, Kansas. [email protected]

Encountering God through the Texts of Life

The God Issue

How did we conceive of our book?

We are two rabbis who have spent our careers sharing our love for Jewish tradition with a wide range of individuals we’ve been privileged to meet and to study with. Long-time friends, we are privileged to be among the first generation of Jewish women who have had access to Jewish texts and Jewish teachers. Our book brings together twenty women rabbis and scholars who have benefited, as we have, from this major change in Jewish life, and each of our contributors shares one part of her own Jewish story with our readers.

How did we select our authors?

We are blessed to live in a time when there are many thoughtful and incisive Jewish women whose stories would open doors and hearts. Selecting our authors was a great joy and a significant challenge, for there are many more talented writers than we could contain in a single volume. We reached out to several women we knew well, and to others whose work in the world of Jewish thought we admired.

Our authors represent a wide spectrum of contemporary Jewish communal “norms,” yet readers may not be immediately aware of what we might label as “denominational” differences. Rather, each of our writers speak from deep engagement with a vibrant and nourishing Judaism, even as individual practice may vary considerably one from another.

The Jewish feminist project of the last forty years has been to add Jewish women’s voices to our textual inheritance and to see that inheritance through new eyes—of interpreters and readers. These essays share twenty particular Jewish stories that contribute to the repair and rebalancing of our tradition.

How are our writers’ relationships with God reflected in their essays?

Our writers’ images and words reflect and explore some of the rich and varied ways Jews think about and write about God: with language new and traditional, as a Source transcendent and immanent, as a God both personal and universal. Many of the writers write of themselves as active God wrestlers, claiming their place alongside our matriarchs and patriarchs.

Rabbi Vivian Mayer, who has spent much of her life repeating the Amidah prayer, writes, “I opened in usual form with the customary salutation, bowing low to position myself before ‘our God and God of our ancestors.’ I named each mother and father with the phrase, ‘God of’ attached to their respective names.” Mayer’s essay explores her intimate relationship with each of the matriarchs, and with those ancestors’ relationships with the Holy One. In her essay, Rabbi Margaret Holub writes, “I have found comfort and clarity in many difficult moments over the years by remembering that God, and not I, is King and Queen of the universe; that this world, with all its complexities, is God’s beautiful world; that human beings, with all our horrors, are created, like the rest of the world, in the divine image.”

Rabbi Amy Eilberg, reflecting on a time when her daughter was battling anorexia, cites the psalmist’s words, “‘God is near to all who call, to all who call upon God in truth” (Psalms 145:18) and continues, “We have the most access to sacred sources of comfort and meaning when we face reality as it is…the pain of this honest grappling…tears us apart, but only through this tearing can healing come.” The theologian Judith Plaskow writes, in her chapter “Wrestling with God and Evil,” that God is not concerned with justice. “This is our task as human beings in the face of an all-embracing God: to affirm the ties that bind us to each other and creation, and to be the justice required for creation to flourish.” The visions and understandings of God in these essays are rich and varied.

What surprised us about the book?

When we began the project, we imagined that our typical reader would be a Jewish woman, seeking some inspiration from Jewish tradition in a relatable form. Indeed, many women readers have told us that these pieces speak to their hearts and, at the same time, open up aspects of Jewish text and teaching that had previously been opaque or unknown to them. A nice surprise has been the men who have also found this book meaningful to them.

What might your book have to say about the pedagogy and curriculum of Jewish studies?

The expanded Jewish literacy since the Enlightenment has opened our tradition to many who, in prior centuries, were dependent on the interpretation of others. We are among the first generation who have the opportunity to encounter Jewish life and Jewish text for ourselves. Just as we now embrace a Jewish historical legacy that includes the contributions of women as well as men, just as we acknowledge that when we read sacred texts we must follow the lead of our teachers and rabbis both ancient and modern who look beyond the immediate, or pshat interpretation of those texts, and delve deeper, we must continue to discover wellsprings of meaning that may have been invisible to previous generations of Jews.

Why should day school professionals read this book?

Because Chapters of the Heart speaks about God:

We know that when we use exclusively male God language, in English, Hebrew and every other language in which Jews pray, we limit our imagination of God. Expanding our theological vocabulary, embracing an expanding number of names for and images of God, is well within our rich tradition. It is our responsibility to expose the next generation to the rich and varied images of God, God’s power, God’s limitations, and the images that our tradition has cherished—and, at times, rejected!

Because Chapters of the Heart models several approaches to Jewish memoir:

This book offers parts of each contributor’s story. We chose the title Chapters of the Heart to reflect the deep and personal narratives shared by each of our writers. Telling—and reading—personal narratives is an essential part of sharing our larger Jewish story. Students who read memoirs, including, perhaps, the Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, the Letters of Etty Hillesum, the Diary of Anne Frank, the memoir of Golda Meir, Letty Pogrebin’s Deborah, Golda, and Me, Naomi Levy’s Talking to God, and Danya Ruttenberg’s Surprised by God, know that words that come from the heart enter the heart. Each of those voices (and many more, of course) makes history come alive for the reader, and can challenge—and change the way the reader, or student, sees the world.

Because Chapters of the Heart reflects and celebrates diversity:

Our contributors represent Jews of different ages and backgrounds, and their diversity is made explicit in the way they share their stories. Jewish schools must teach a rich range of Jewish experiences. We hope that Chapters of the Heart is one of many examples of Jewish lives and choices that will open conversation and provoke lively discussion.


Rabbi Nancy Fuchs Kreimer directs the Department of Multifaith Studies and Initiatives at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. [email protected]

Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell PhD is the founding director of the Los Angeles Jewish Feminist Center and the first rabbinic director of Ma’yan: The Jewish Women’s Project of the Manhattan JCC. [email protected]

Grappling with Proofs of G-d

The God Issue

At the Ottawa Jewish Community School, we are engaged in a project to revolutionize the teaching of the essence of G-d and His relationship to the Jewish people through the study of the different proofs of G-d’s existence, in addition to the normative study of themes that abound in the study of Tanakh and Aggadah. In effect, we ask our students to imagine themselves sitting with the great philosophical giants, from Aristotle to Maimonides, and debating the various points presented by these thinkers. Considering the developing minds of our students, it is imperative that we challenge students to critically analyze these approaches and others more traditional to gain insight and awareness of the complexities involved in the understanding of what is G-d, and how does He impact our lives.

The main proofs of the existence of G-d stemming from philosophical literature are ontological, cosmological, teleological and what is known as Pascal’s wager. On examining these proofs, students learn to discern and determine which of these proofs can indeed be utilized to enhance one’s belief in G-d, and what aspects of these postulations conflict with traditional Judaism’s application and understanding of an involved, caring and judging Deity. At the same time, students are invited to express their views regarding the proof presented.

The ontological argument espoused by Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century emphasizes the idea that G-d is perfect, and, therefore, all-powerful, all-knowing, and existing. As all matter by definition exists, so too must G-d. Another way of putting it would be that if the mind perceives of G-d as existing, then He must exist. On presenting this concept in grade 8 or higher, students have found this argument to be unconvincing, an example of sophistry. It remains for the instructor to demonstrate clearly why such a proof is not Jewish, so to speak, as in the case of traditional Judaism, the existence of G-d is not purely a matter of belief. The Torah speaks as the word of G-d who takes an active role not only in creation, but in day-to-day existence in the roles of communicator, judge and loving deity.

The cosmological argument speaks of G-d as being a Prime Mover, an approach embraced in some medieval Jewish philosophy including the Rambam‘s Guide to the Perplexed. Briefly, the concept of the Prime Mover centers around the idea that every object comes from a previous source. However, at some point there must be a cause that is not caused by anything else. That primary cause or mover is G-d. Students are urged to assess this argument, and usually refute it with the question of how the Prime Mover came into existence. Further, students have indicated that the argument presented by the cosmologists does not enter into the realm of purpose and commandment, thus prompting these same students to deny its efficacy as a means to prove His existence.

The teleological argument, or an argument from design, speaks to the concept of purpose. There is a purpose and order to the universe, which extends to those who believe in G-d. The goal of existence for Jews is to serve G-d through the commandments given to the Jewish people, and for non-Jews to follow the Noahide laws. Students sense the idea of seder or order, and begin to see the interrelationship between G-d, the Jew, and the world at large. However, the student is encouraged by the instructor to examine the presence of evil in the world, and how evil can exist in a universe created by a purpose-driven G-d. This leads naturally to issues of theodicy, the existence of evil in a world created by God. The teacher may discuss how Kabbalah deals with these challenges, such as the idea of tzimtzum (G-d’s withdrawal in the universe in order to allow evil to exist), or other rabbinic and philosophic sources that touch on these issues.

Pascal’s wager revolves around the question of whether it is necessary for an individual to live his or her life as if there were a G-d. To put it crassly, faith in G-d which is based on probability or lack thereof has proven to be unsatisfying to the average student who successfully challenges the premise of this approach. Depending on the educational and maturity levels of students involved in this type of class, the instructor may see an opportunity to discuss various conceptions of the existence of G-d such as panentheism, pantheism, immanence and others.

It should be emphasized that the program described in this article only addresses the cognitive but not the affective domain of the student. This program is intellectually oriented in enabling students to analyze and appreciate the different nuances of the proofs of G-d’s existence and how they impact our understanding of the existence of a Supreme Being.

It is imperative to challenge our students’ concept of G-d by introducing them to approaches taken from philosophy which they can debate and discuss. Too often our students have a puerile understanding of G-d, and enter into adult life with this childish evaluation which undoubtedly influences their commitment or lack thereof to Jewish life. We are familiar with the adage of Bechol derachecha da’ehu: Know Him in all your ways. There are many pathways for our students to traverse in learning about G-d. Exposure to philosophical viewpoints about God gives our students the opportunity to think and to assess those points of view and to draw sophisticated conclusions about G-d.


Rabbi Howard Finkelstein is the dean of Judaic studies at the Ottawa Jewish Community School in Ottawa, Ontario, as well as the rabbi of Congregation Beit Tikvah in Ottawa. [email protected]

God's Time

The God Issue

With the rise and spread of industrialization, and especially the network of railroads transporting people and goods throughout the United States, the dominance of local times became increasingly unworkable. Train schedules were particularly unwieldy, with the amount of time travelled having no relation to the local time upon arrival. An alliance of businessmen, railroad companies, astronomers and mapmakers banded together to create an artificially unified time across a wide swath of territory. People were empowered to override nature, to set the clock as a tool of convenience for the juggernaut of trade and commerce. In some places the clock was reset by more than a half hour as the people experienced two noons in one day.

While this difference may seem minuscule to us, in an age when we are used to flying between time zones and suffering from “jet lag,” the change represented much more than the dialing back of the minute hand. Indeed, many people at the time recognized the significance of this change and chafed at it. In the words of one protester from Pittsburgh, “God Almighty fixed the time for this section just as much as He did for Philadelphia or New York” (Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch). This observation is, I believe, a profound one, representing much more than the typical American bid for local power against larger outside interests. As the Torah makes clear, time is an essential medium for our relationship with God. By sundering the nexus between time and nature, the railroad magnates made it much harder to experience God through the medium of time. To restore that relationship in ourselves and our students requires us to recapture an awareness that “God Almighty fixed...time.”

WHAT IS CREATED IN GENESIS 1?

To understand the importance of time in Judaism requires reading Genesis 1 with fresh eyes. Despite this chapter’s beauty and simplicity, the magnificent sense of order and structure conveyed by the repeating phrases, it is one of the most difficult parts of the Torah to grasp, as reflected in widely different interpretations. For some, a “literal understanding” demands reading this chapter as a description of the beginning of the world: on day one, God created light and darkness, etc. In seven days, one week, God created everything that exists in the universe out of nothing. Others read this chapter in a more expansive way that meshes the order of “events” with a scientific sense of creation and evolution, the biblical “days” referring to enormous eras during which the world as humans know was formed. Both of these interpretations have in common the notion that the Tanakh is primarily a book of history; Genesis 1 offers a foundation for the history of the world and of humanity.

In a careful reading of the Hebrew, Rashi gives Jews license to interpret this chapter differently:

But Scripture did not come to teach the sequence of the Creation, to say that these came first, for if it came to teach this, it should have written: “At first (barishonah) He created the heavens and the earth.”

The Torah begins not with the word meaning “In the beginning,” barishonah, but “In the beginning of,” bereishit. Rashi explains that the proper way to read the first sentence is thus, “In the beginning of God’s creation of heaven and earth...the earth was unformed and void” etc. In other words, before the events in Genesis 1, there was already something that existed. Therefore, Genesis 1 does not come to teach us the order of creation. It does not need to be read—in Rashi’s view, it should not be read—as a literal statement about history.

How, then, should it be read? Rashi doesn’t answer this directly, but another statement by him provides a clue:

Said Rabbi Isaac: It was not necessary to begin the Torah except from “This month is to you,” (Exod. 12:2) which is the first commandment that the Israelites were commanded.

 

Rashi quotes his teacher Rabbi Isaac, who is perplexed by the Torah’s beginnings. Who cares about the sun and moon, the animals, insects, fish and trees? The Torah is, as its name suggests, a book of instruction for living; the content of that instruction is the collection of mitzvot. Rashi’s explanation of why Genesis 1 is needed—so that non-Jews should know that the same God who created the world also gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people—is less relevant here than the insight that the Torah is informed throughout by the notion of mitzvah, a vehicle for people to relate to God. That insight is critical for understanding Genesis 1 as well.</p>

In her classic sociological treatise Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas devoted a chapter to the laws of Leviticus that exerted considerable influence in biblical studies. Douglas draws out the relationship between mitzvot and creation:

The precepts and ceremonies alike are focussed on the idea of the holiness of God which men must create in their own lives. So this is a universe in which men prosper by conforming to holiness and perish when they deviate from it. ... Holiness means keeping distinct the categories of creation. It therefore involves correct definition, discrimination and order.

In Genesis 1, God created an order to reality constructed upon a series of distinctions between different categories of objects. The mitzvot are premised upon the idea of kedushah, holiness, requiring a system of separations that are modeled upon the separations that God built into the universe, expanding them into all aspects of human life, personal, familial, and communal. Biblical laws are based on a system of separation that is designed to implant a consciousness of holiness. Lack of differentiation does not register on our minds; distinctions enable us to grasp, to recognize, to attain higher meanings. Distinguishing between kosher and nonkosher animals, for example, provides us with a way to keep a consciousness of God in our minds through the most basic daily activity. God’s creation of the universe and God’s commanding of the mitzvot are thus completely of a piece, the same kind of action. As described below, this understanding is thoroughly woven into Jewish prayer.

THE DIVISIONS OF GENESIS 1

The language of separation permeates the description of creation. For distinctions in the heavens between light and darkness, the Torah uses the word le-havdil (5 occurrences). Distinctions between different creatures draw upon the word min, usually translated as “kind” and indicating separate categories of living beings (9 occurrences). Regarding water, which by its nature is not divisible and threatens to overwhelm the neat distinctions on land, God contains its reach through the root word kuf – vav – heh, based on the word kav meaning line. God draws a line to keep the water away from the dry land, and the drawing of lines is the essence of all the activity in Genesis 1.

Through these lines, God creates the dimensions of time and space; and of those two, time clearly predominates. Creation is framed by time: day 1 (the day), day 4 (the moon and sun to rule over day and night, or, according to other interpretations, the year and month), and day 7 (the week). It’s important to note what is created on day 1: not the sun, not a source of light, but time. God creates light and immediately separates it from darkness, naming them “day” and “night.” That is, God defines time as the alternation of light and darkness.

The prevalence of time in biblical creation highlights the notion that Genesis 1 describes the creation of consciousness. Only a conscious being, endowed with sight, can perceive the alternation of light and darkness and then interpret it as day and night, a unit of time. Human consciousness alone is capable of distinguishing larger units of time. The lines that outline and separate different kinds of things enable people to understand the world, to explore and explain it, to perceive patterns and to use things for our purposes.

Moreover, through the system of separations, God has imbued human consciousness with the ability to perceive God in time and space. When people notice the setting of the sun and the rising of the stars, they can recall to consciousness that God has created the universe and can, intuitively or through reflection, perceive God’s presence through their senses and minds. Understanding of the world and consciousness of God go hand in hand, thanks to the nature of creation. This twinned knowledge is what constitutes the biblical conception of wisdom. Solomon’s wisdom derived from the combination of his encyclopedic knowledge of nature together with his fine-tuned sensitivity to God’s planful role in creating “the earth, and the fullness thereof.”

The creation narrative establishes not merely a system of differences. Through linguistic repetitions and the dense weave of verbal patterning, it also introduces similarities that invite comparison, consideration and investigation. Take this striking example:

And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and [the fish shall] fill the waters in the seas, and the birds shall be plentiful on the land. (1:22)

This verse is repeated nearly verbatim in God’s blessing over humanity in 1:28. One can of course emphasize the differences: only people are commanded to “subdue” and “rule”; and notably, in the order of human conquest, the first creatures mentioned are “the fish of the sea and the bird of the sky,” the same order in the prior verse. Nonetheless the similarities are unexpected and worthy of reflection. Why does God bless the fish and the birds, like people? More pointedly, what does it mean for God to give them a commandment?! If the Bible may not be a founding document of animal rights, it does at times ask people to ponder our similarities with our fellow creatures.

TIME, CONSCIOUSNESS,  AND JEWISH TRADITION

Foundational to Jewish prayer is this notion that distinctions built into the creation of the world provide a vehicle for people to connect with God. This idea governs tefillah at several key points, serving as a framework for the prayers that follow. The first place is Birkhot Hashachar, the morning blessings, which are the first prayers recited together by the minyan. They begin:

Blessed are You our God, King of the Universe,who has given understanding to the rooster to distinguish between day and night.

Our prayers begin giving thanks to God for the distinction between day and night created on day one, a natural cause of praise in one who has just awoken. Fascinating that the prayer thanks God for the rooster, nature’s alarm clock, for giving the rooster this very consciousness of night and day. The prayer thus stresses our links to another creature at the same time that it recognizes division as the basis for consciousness. The next three prayers in the series praise God for “not making me” like someone else: a non-Jew, a slave, a woman. These prayers are among the most challenging and controversial in our liturgy. The main point to observe in this context, however, is that they are meant to flow directly from the first blessing, because the divisions of creation are the source and paradigm for divisions between people. The categories of people referred to in these prayers, all described in Halakhah as having differential levels of religious obligation, these categories derive from the same action in which God separated day from night.

Both the Shacharit and the Ma’ariv services are framed by prayers that connect creation with mitzvot. (Minchah, the afternoon prayer, is much shorter and hence lacks this frame.) After the Barkhu, the call to prayer, the first blessing praises God who “forms light and creates darkness,” proceeding with a long prayer whose main emphasis is God as the creator of light. The second prayer, Ahavah rabbah, praises God for giving the Torah and mitzvot, “the statutes of life.” Similarly, Ma’ariv starts with praise for God who “creates day and night, rolling away the light before the darkness and darkness before the light,” followed by the prayer Ahavat olam, very close in language and message to its morning counterpart: “Torah and mitzvot, statutes and judgments You have taught us.”

The pinnacle of Jewish prayer hearkening back to creation is reached in the Havdalah prayer. As we saw, the verb le-havdil, to separate, is one of the crucial actions that God undertakes in creation. God separates light and dark, night and day to create the day. In addition, the Torah describes the creation of an additional unit of time, the week. Both the day and the week are built by a rhythm of alternation: night-day, everyday-sacred. This rhythm is not intrinsic to a week (nor is it obvious or necessary that a week should have seven days); indeed, our English days that recall the ancient deities and planets imply no difference between Moon-day, Wotan’s-day and Saturn-day. As the sociologist Evyatar Zerubavel glowingly describes the biblical week, in his history of the week in human societies, The Seven Day Cycle: The History and Meaning of the Week:

We can thus view the pulsating week as a cycle of periodic alternation between ordinary and extraordinary days. It is the regular pulsation between the “on” and “off” phases of such a cycle that underlies our very experience of a seven-day “beat.” The essence of the experience of the pulsating week is the fundamental cultural binary contrast between the extraordinary and the ordinary.

The Havdalah prayer commemorates the fact that the Shabbat represents a double separation, and as such, an opportunity to connect to God through a double portion. In the concluding blessing, we thank God for separating “between light and darkness”—namely, the unit of the day—and “between the seventh day and the six days of creation”—the week. This prayer reinforces the bond between creation and all other religious distinctions, “between the holy and profane” and “between Israel and the nations.” As the final moment in the weekly cycle rooted in creation, the Havdalah ceremony furnishes a culmination of the biblical themes before rendering a separation between one cycle and the next.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Here are some ideas for helping your students to turn back the clock before November 18, in an attempt to encounter time as God’s time.

1) The daily schedule of Jewish services depends upon local time, the exact moment of sunrise and sunset. Explore Judaism’s daily clock, the division of sun hours and the halakhot concerning when prayers and services are allowed to be said. The specific times for a given day and city, with explanations for the halakhic concepts along with the differences of opinion by the major poskim, are available on myzmanim.com.

2) Make a sundial and use it to calculate the prayer-hours.

3) During a class trip, in the countryside, spend a day without any recourse to clocks, watches, devices or other means of time-measurement, if possible also without means of artificial lighting, as a means to experience the “world of creation” that all people inhabited before the inventions of standard time and the lightbulb. Draw connections between the words of tefillah and students’ observation of the daily cycle.

4) During a Havdalah ceremony, point the students to the two cycles of time that the prayer explicitly references, the importance of time in creation and time as a medium for experiencing holiness and a relationship with God.


Dr. Elliott Rabin is RAVSAK’s director of project and content development and the editor of HaYidion. [email protected]

Disability and God Talk

The God Issue

As such, I believe myself to be uniquely placed to help to lift up and center the perspectives of our fellow Jews who have often not found their communities receptive or welcoming and who, as a result, feel alienated from Jewish life. Though much of my work has centered around the experiences of Jews with disabilities, I am deeply invested in this work from an intersectional lens—in other words, across identity categories, and with the full understanding that there is multivocality in every community, including the disability community.

My way of experiencing the world and my thoughts on how best to center the voices of the marginalized is mine alone and is not representative of anyone other than myself. I humbly offer my thoughts and reflections on the critically important question of teaching about God, and do so from the perspective of celebrating the diversity that is within our midst. I believe that the sooner children learn to honor the beauty that is our diverse human family, the better, and the more accepting they will be of difference in their community, family and the wider world.

At the heart of my thinking is Judaism’s beautiful teaching, found in Genesis 1:27, that human beings are created be-tzelem Elohim—in the image of God. In other words, human beings all have a spark of the divine within them, regardless of who one is. The divine spark that we all always carry is indicative of the fact that God does not place arbitrary value or differing social classifications onto human beings. We are all, regardless of how human society tends to perceive us, inherently valuable and inherently unique. We are all children of God, and we are partners with God in renewing creation on a daily basis.

Thus, in addition to having inalienable worth merely because we are human beings, our ceaseless partnership with God in the renewal of creation I understand as a broad mandate encompassing how we live in the world and how we do our part to make the world better than we found it. The work of constantly lifting up the divine spark in every human being and even the divine sparks found throughout creation is reflective of the familiar Jewish imperative to do tikkun olam, repair the world.

Being created be-tzelem Elohim is commonly cited as the reason to act rightly in the world in relation to our fellow human beings in the broadest sense, but rarely are the radical implications of this tremendous teaching brought to bear on how we are to do that. Introducing students to this concept at the earliest opportunity would be incredibly transformative, and the most impactful way to do this is by modeling it in classrooms, synagogues and other communal spaces, as well as in the home. In order to do this wholly, it is critical to think deeply about what it would look like if we were to fully actualize the power of this teaching.

Every human being is created in the image of God. Every human being has a spark of the divine within. When people are taught to honor and lift up the divine spark within their fellow human beings, the all-too-common impulse to “make other” or to exoticize those who are different from us begins to give way. As human beings, we tend to categorize, make quick judgments, and place people in boxes as a means of creating order out of the chaotic and constantly changing world around us. This pattern, though apparent across many markers of personal and social identity, is particularly acute and noticeable when it comes to individuals with disabilities. Whether out of a fear we do not know how to articulate or out of a fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, we tend to place those with disabilities in a category separate from the norm. If disability is addressed at all, particularly in a religious context, it tends to be used as a vehicle for the continued othering of the individual, even when it appears that it is being used to build bridges.

An example of this in Jewish tradition is the brachah that one is supposed to make upon seeing a “strange” individual: meshaneh habriyot. Blessed are You, God, ruler of the universe, who diversifies or makes different the creatures. On its face, this appears to be a beautifully inclusive brachah, one that we might want to teach our children from the earliest age as a means of honoring the diversity that is humanity. However, for many individuals with disabilities and other visible differences that fall outside of social norms, including myself, this brachah, instead of building bridges and honoring the beauty within our non-normative bodies, instead places us firmly within the category of “other.” When we thank God for diversifying God’s creatures, the inverse of that is that we are thanking God for making us normative in body, normative in appearance.

One can make a similar argument about many of the brachot in Birkhot HaShachar, the blessings we say every morning which thank God for many of the abilities we have been granted. I am profoundly privileged to be in a position of being able to do cutting-edge work involving rethinking and reimagining many of these brachot from a disability justice perspective. Pokeach ivrim and zokef kefufim are two such examples. Our society places tremendous value on the normatively abled body. Even as we might be grateful for the physical abilities we possess, we can encourage our students to think critically about the messages these brachot send about the non-normatively abled body, and to think about alternative ways of thinking about them. An example of a radical rethinking of a brachah that I have seen is matir asurim—who frees the captives. For many people with disabilities who use adaptive equipment in their daily lives, that adaptive equipment levels the playing field.

One exercise that I have seen used successfully when thinking more deeply about meshaneh habriyot is to have people think for several moments about a time when they observed someone noticeably different and a time when they were observed for being noticeably different. Reflecting upon the feelings that arose during either of these encounters is instructive for beginning to shift one’s understanding of the brachah. It is also useful to use these reflective moments as a catalyst for thinking more broadly about the ways society would be transformed if we took the notion that we are all created in the image of God seriously.

Other ways of living out this teaching can be done in service learning trips, in which time is spent volunteering with a disadvantaged group. We tend to situate these encounters as the more privileged group giving back to our community by helping those less fortunate. This places the privileged group in the position of problem-solver, rather than humbly asking how we can be useful. To return to a teaching I brought up earlier in this piece, if we are indeed partners with God in the work of renewing creation daily, this applies to how we treat those whom we see as less fortunate. If children are implicitly or even explicitly taught that their role is to serve and to solve a problem—hunger, by making sandwiches at a homeless shelter, or helping individuals with disabilities by serving as aides of some variety or another as examples, the relationship employs a transactional rather than a relational model. We reinforce the notion that those who are different from us are other. However, if we emphasize a relational encounter, in which we encourage students to ask questions, learn about the groups they are working with and seek to work with those groups as equal partners, learning as much as they teach, truly hearing and absorbing the perspectives of the communities with whom they work, we are living out our radical teaching that we are created in the image of God.

With Birkhot HaShachar, a useful exercise might be to have students reflect deeply upon the brachot individually and collectively. What are we saying communally and individually when we make these brachot? Do we find some of them more resonant than others? A good model for this kind of critical work is the profound discomfort many feel around the she-lo asani brachot, thanking God for not making me a non-Jew, a slave, and a woman. If appropriate, use that discomfort, and the innovations and changes that have been adopted as a result of grappling with this discomfort, to reflect upon new ways of understanding the brachot.

My overarching goal is to instill within all children that we are more alike than we are different, that children with disabilities are peers, not other, not to be feared or pitied, but human beings, created in the divine image. When we begin to truly examine the notion that we are created in the divine image, radical possibilities for reimagining what our world could look like begin to emerge. Though it might be uncomfortable to use a critical lens upon many of our brachot, I think it highly instructive for understanding the messages we send and the ways in which we might alter those assumptions.


Lauren Tuchman is a rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary. [email protected]

Almighty? No Way! - Embracing the God We Already Love

The God Issue

This is the tale of my grieving, hopeful journey through libraries of science and philosophy as well as walking the streets of Jerusalem, out of which, I began to articulate what I believe is a revolutionary way of loving God, God’s creation, and God’s Torah. And, in the end, it is a tale of finding these revolutionary, liberating ideas hidden right where I had started—in the Torah, in the Talmud, in the Siddur, in the Kabbalah. I just needed open eyes to see what had been there from the beginning, hidden under the crust of the theology most people think religion is supposed to mean. I want to share a new way to receive and embrace God and Torah. But it’s also not new at all, because the God I now love is, I’m guessing, the One you love too, and already know.

When my beautiful son, Jacob, was diagnosed with autism as a child, some 20 years ago, at the age of three, I stopped putting on my tallit and tefillin. I had been taught that God was all-powerful, which meant that God could have prevented Jacob’s autism but didn’t.

There are several accessible explications of Process Thought available, each with bibliographies for further reading: John Cobb, Process Perspective: Frequently Asked Questions about Process Theology, Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process, and Bradley Shavit Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology.

I could not pray to someone who could inflict autism (or choose not to prevent it). I said to God, “It’s better if we don’t talk for awhile. You’re not going to want to hear what I have to say, and I don’t want to make small talk.” And for a year and a half, God and I just didn’t converse (which is a bit awkward professionally, because I am, after all, a rabbi). I wrestled with tormenting thoughts: “I’m a good person; how could God do this to me? I keep kosher, I don’t mix linen and wool in my clothing; I help people all day long. I am fighting for the survival of the Jewish people, for the repair of the world. How could God let this happen to my beautiful, innocent son?” I know that life is not a quid-pro-quo; as Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, puts it, expecting the universe to make exceptions for you because you are a good person is like expecting a bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian!

I could not believe that my son’s burden was a trial, a test, or a punishment. But if God didn’t give Jacob his autism, doesn’t cause suffering and evil, then what is the explanation? In the words of Job: “If not God, then who?”

In order to uncover a deeper answer to this age-old question, we have to revisit the dogma of creation from nothing, a teaching derived from Aristotle and one that makes belief in God’s goodness so difficult for so many. It might surprise you to learn that the Bible doesn’t mention creation from nothing—indeed, it seems pretty clearly to deny it. What the Torah actually says is, “When God began creating heaven and earth, there was tohu va-vohu (chaos) and the ruach (wind/breath/spirit) of God was vibrating over the face of tehom, the deep, God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.” According to the Torah, was there tohu va-vohu, chaos, before God started creating? Yes. Unambiguously yes! When God launched the process of creating, tohu va-vohu was already existent, and the ruach of God flutters over tehom (that had to be there already for the spirit of God to be able to flutter over it)! The simple meaning of Genesis 1 is that there is pre-existent darkness and chaos. The tehom, the chaos, already exists—bubbly, uncontainable, and undomesticated. God’s creative act is not the special effect of something from nothing, but the steady chesed (loving kindness) of converting chaos into cosmos. Tohu va-vohu and the tehom have always existed, always will, and the chaos threatens still. God has always been, and is still, inviting/commanding the chaos into cosmos. We have misunderstood the nature of Divine creativity and power.

We are taught to think about God’s power as coercive, I suspect, because when we think about human strength and force, we think of coercive power: warriors, despots, pharaohs, führers, commissars, and terrorists. But it turns out throughout history that long-term power is rarely coercive; the most transformative power is persuasive. Pharaoh was brought down, and the persuasive ideals revealed among those ancient Hebrew slaves has been liberating people ever since. In your own life, think about the abiding impact of a really inspiring teacher. Reflect on how you have been transformed by a great mentor, or parent, or lover—people who broadened your vision, encouraged you, and made it possible for you to do something you never thought possible. They did not accomplish this task using mere coercive power; they invited you to become a better version yourself, lured you to surpass your prior limitations, inspired you to live in the light. Jewish sacred writings abound with examples of God using not coercive but persuasive power to enter into relationship with us, to enlist our participation in creating a worthy, covenanted future.

During my decade of reckoning with God and coming to terms with Jacob’s autism, I began to develop a different relationship with God and a different understanding God’s relationship to our world.

The ideas I’ve just sketched (a God whose power is persuasive, not coercive, of a God who works with chaos to invite it toward cosmos, who creates us and everything in freedom and invites us to be partners in the continuous process of creation), the ideas I now advocate are called Process Thought, and in researching these ideas, I was delighted to learn that I had “discovered” a powerful system of speculation and insight which others had articulated long before me, most notably by Alfred North Whitehead. According to Process Thought, the cosmos is not composed of solid substances that bang into each other from the outside. Instead, the universe is made of dynamic events that respond internally and intuitively to the choices made by each and every other event. Every aspect of creation, all participants, are in a dynamic process of becoming, and every process—you, me, the world, the cosmos, God—is not a substance, a thing, but rather a distinctive pattern of energy that retains some measure of constancy in the midst of change and growth. Rather than interacting in ways that endlessly repeat the same old patterns, we find ourselves in a universe of renewing novelty, of increasing complexity and deepening relationship.

Indeed, for the past 14 billion years, our cosmos has been emerging in more complexity, more mindfulness, more connections. Process thinkers see a kind of directionality at work, inviting the cosmos toward that greater relationality and expanded capacity for experience. We perceive that directionality to be made possible by, and to come from, God who provides the grounds for our creativity, our becoming more connected, more just, more compassionate, more loving. God cannot break the rules, but God can and does work with creation, through creatures, to give us a sense of the optimal next step each of us can choose to take. And God gives us the capacity to make that optimal choice, which Process thinkers call “the Lure.”

Take a moment and let this new articulation sink in: the universe operates according to unchanging physical laws. If you were to do the same thing over and over and over again without change, wouldn’t the result be the same each time? Yet the universe has instantiated the same unchanging laws for 14 billion years, and new and increasingly complex events continue to emerge. Why? I see God in that emerging novelty and increasing complexity. God is the One who makes relationship possible; the force that makes for greater complexity and deepening experience. God makes possible our ability to love, reach, and help each other.

It is God, working through Jacob, who allows Jacob to triumph over his autism day by day.

I stumbled upon Process Thought almost by accident, researching new approaches to integrating science and religion, and to how God relates to the world. The external, bullying, punishing ideas of God melted in the mist, leaving a transformative, healing balm of relationship, novelty and persuasion. I fell in love again with God as understood through Process, and with God’s creation as a continuing expression of loving, relating, and of novelty. And in that rediscovery, I returned to a more biblical view of God and covenant as freely entered and lived in love.

John Levenson has documented a similar vision of God throughout Torah and the Wisdom literature (in his brilliant book Creation and the Persistence of Evil). This view of God accounts for the rabbinic openness to telling stories in midrash, to a sense of living Torah and developing halakhic process, and it carries deep parallels to the kabbalistic notion of a dynamic God of yearning, broken vessels and striving becoming, and the chasidic notions of a God who both surrounds and fills the cosmos. Process Theology allowed my intuitions about God to weave more profoundly with Jewish insights and writings, with a timely God who loves and chooses and journeys.

The insights of Process Thought saved my love of God, because instead of looking to God to be the all-powerful exception to the rules (the up there/out there Bully-In-The-Sky), I started looking to God as the very exemplar of the rules: the One who makes it possible for us to surpass ourselves, the One who inspires us to ever new levels of love and creativity. Instead of looking for God in magic, I look for God in Jacob’s refusal to let himself be defined or limited by his autism. I see God in Elana, my resilient and courageous wife’s refusal to abandon our son to a marginal existence. I see God’s persistent lure in people in the community who look past the autistic label and embrace Jacob as a young man of hope, strength, joy and astonishing wisdom. Working with, in and through creation is the arena for God’s unique amazing persuasive power. Tanks can knock walls down, but there isn’t an army in the world that can give Jacob the capacity to sit through a class for an hour and a half. That transformation requires the resilient, determined, persuasive love of God, manifest not as the exception to the rules of physics and biology, not in the suspension of Jacob’s autism, but as the way the very universe is tilted towards interrelationship, complexity, and creativity. God doesn’t work from outside creation, intervening from afar. God bubbles up from within, working in us, through us, and with us.

I don’t think that God gave my son autism, or could have stopped it. Tohu va-vohu is always seeping through the cracks of creation. I don’t believe that God caused the Holocaust or could have prevented it. Creation is about containing the chaos, inviting order where there was none. The tehom is always bubbling chaos, and God is steadily extending cosmos. But the tohu va-vohu remains real, innovative, and dangerous. The tehom continues to threaten and to beckon, bubbling over in crisis, tragedy, and novelty alike.

God is the resilient force luring us/commanding us to rise to the best choices, celebrating our creation into freedom and asking us to covenant as partners (the rabbinic term is shutafim) in the continuing creation of the world. That we are given the Godlike ability to create, to innovate, to perform deeds of loving kindness and acts of justice is what it means to embody tzelem Elohim, God’s image, in the world. And God’s persuasive love is sufficiently resilient, sufficiently determined, to see us through in love.

In that sense, God is like the GPS system in my wife’s car. When we drive, the GPS routinely models a Process understanding of God for me. The GPS suggests the best way to reach my personal destination: “When you get to the stop sign, take a left.” Sometimes, for reasons beyond comprehension, I won’t listen to the suggestion. I might, for example, drive to the stop sign and then keep going straight. This is where the GPS and a conventional view of God part ways. No damnation for not having heeded, no rage or exile or plague threatened. The GPS simply says, “Recalibrating,” and then offers a corrective next choice that integrates and builds on my previous driving decision: “At the next corner, take a right, then a right, then a right.” The GPS remains calm, unruffled, and will recalibrate however often a driver makes a wrong choice.

I now know that God is like the GPS in that way: God doesn’t judge or condemn us; God doesn’t coerce us. God offers us the best possible choice (mitzvah) at this (and every) moment. If we rise to God’s lure, then God says, “Good. Now here’s the subsequent best choice (the next mitzvah).” If we don’t accept the lure, God says, “Recalibrating. OK, given your last choice, here’s the optimal choice you can now make.” Like the GPS, God persistently invites us, lures us, commands us to make the best choice. That model of God invites us onto a path of compassion, justice, and resilient strength that the Bully in the Sky never could.

There is an old rabbinic tale about the wind and the sun arguing about who is stronger. Turns out it is a Process story. The wind says, “I’ll show you that I’m stronger. I’m going to get those people to remove their jackets.” But the more the wind blew to force their jackets off, the more the people clutched their jackets tightly. The Sun said, “You’re trying the wrong kind of strength. Watch.” And the sun simply radiated light. And as the sun’s beams beckoned, the people loosened up their jackets. Eventually the sun’s light was so beautiful and so intoxicating that they chose to take their jackets off, because they wanted to savor the warmth.

A God of invitational power is actually the God we believe in, and one that Process Thought allows us to see in the unvarnished beauty of Torah and masorah. We now have the science and the philosophy to be able to embrace what we know, and to live what we love.

I do not believe in the up there/out there bully in the sky. I would much rather celebrate the Cosmic Companion who is creating a universe in which I, and the rest of creation, are invited towards cosmos, connection, justice and love. You already know in your heart what your best choice is at this moment. Yet even now, you remain free to demur, free to indulge your anger, your pettiness, your hunger, your exhaustion—whatever it is that makes you deviate from the mitzvah that awaits, and your truest, best self, the tzelem Elohim within. But God loves you with an ahavat olam, an abiding love. God bids you to make the best choice and gives you the capacity to make it.

“See,” says God, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your children may live.”


Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson holds the Abner and Roslyn Goldstine Dean’s Chair of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, American Jewish University, and is the author of God of Becoming & Relationship: The Dynamic Nature of Process Theology.

Debate - The Key to Nurturing Lifelong Engagement with God

The God Issue

How, then, should one teach God in a Jewish day school? How might a school foster a sense of engagement with these different sensibilities in a way that might nurture a student’s personal spiritual quest?

We know that a Jewish education is the education of a soul—an education for a full engagement with all the aspects of Judaism that will provide a meaningful foundation throughout the lives of the students and their families. In addition to teaching the prayers of the various prayer books and the weekly Torah portions and the holidays—no small thing—perhaps a recurring focus on a few foundational texts that inspire debate and model the core elements of what scholars call our “interpretive culture” can lead to very different kinds of discussions over time. And perhaps these kinds of discussions and debates, when nestled in an environment where Jewish learning and praying are modeled and encouraged will, over time, allow for a deeper and more personal engagement with the larger lifelong questions of ultimate relevance: How do I understand my role in the world? What does God/the Jewish people want from me?

For even if our students pray, celebrate Shabbat and holidays or relate to Israel in very different ways, there is one thing that we can and have always found a way to do together: engage with and interpret the sacred texts of our tradition. At the heart of what makes us who we are, regardless of our halakhic or Zionist commitments, is that we are all engaged with text as the heart of who we have been and who we are. A culture of interpretation and debate makes us who we are. Without a full soulful and personal engagement with Judaism and Jewish texts in this way, a commitment to Jewish identity and peoplehood will be likely and less compelling in the postmodern reality in which we now live.

We have developed a culture of interpretation and debate that seeks to inspire its young students to engage with the text not because they have to but because it is simply so interesting and so compelling to be part of it. Inviting out students, from the youngest ages, to interpret and think about some core texts repeatedly will help initiate them into a culture of interpretation. But it could be even more interesting if we could also instill in our students, their families, and the wider community a healthy spirit of the culture of pluralistic debate in a way that engages minds and souls as they develop and grow. This is the unique role that a school can play in a community.

Might each of our students, at each and every stage of their development, not be able to grasp that there is more than one way of understanding God? That we that we know that there is more than one way of understanding what God wants of us? That God is always beckoning us to engage with sacred texts and with what a real presence of God in our lives, whoever we are and however old we are, might mean?

Three essential and foundational texts might form the basis for a more complex engagement with God and Jewish identity if their multiple interpretations and the questions that emerge from them might serve as a chorus throughout the life of a school. Of course there are many different texts that we might consider, but let us consider three possibilities: Genesis 1-2, Genesis 12 and Exodus 19. Each one captures the imagination, asks profound questions about identity and God, and about the nature of our role in the world.

In fact, even a preliminary study of the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis reveals two contrasting and conflicting stories about the creation of humanity, the role of each gender, and our respective roles in the world. Genesis 1:27 speaks of creation as a simultaneous creation of male and female: “And God created the human being in God’s own image, in the image of God created the human being, him; male and female God created them (zakhar unekeivah bara otam).” Here, both male and female are created in the image of God, while Genesis 2:21-23 tells of a lonely Adam created as a single human being unable to find true community among the animal kingdom. In this better-known narrative God causes a “deep sleep to fall upon the man … and took one of his ribs… and made a woman.” The first story is one of male and female being created simultaneously in the image of God with a shared purpose, while the second story tells of the secondary creation of woman to be man’s “help-mate” (ezer kenegdo).

These two narratives at the outset of Genesis, the beginning of it all, teach very different ideas about creation, gender and God’s expectations of us. They also demonstrate that our complex relationship with God begins at the very moment of the creation of humanity. Each story reveals God’s incredible confidence in humanity, how God sought to give us stewardship and power and responsibility for the world. It is a fundamental aspect of God and at the core of Jewish theology. But what does it mean today to take responsibility?

If our role in the world and with God is sometimes unclear and changing, isn’t it important to show how our most sacred texts in the very first chapters model those dilemmas? Indeed, if we are a reflection of God, created in God’s image, there must be both masculine and feminine elements in God, and perhaps in each of us. This nuanced interpretation might open conversations that both support and yet can also soften the absolute binary nature of how identity and gender play out in an educational setting.

If gender and identity are at the forefront of how we think about the development of our young people, isn’t it powerfully engaging to study the different models portrayed in these first chapters? Why are both narratives maintained and what might they continue to teach us today about what it means to be a human being and what kinds of relationships we might have with God and with others? In God and in us there are multiple possibilities. Perhaps such conversations might allow a young person to find themselves included rather than excluded from the tradition and our interpretive culture.

While the traditional commentators resolve the conflicts of Genesis 1-2 in different ways, we can embrace and model the best of an interpretive culture: a culture that embraces and doesn’t shut down debate. The mishnaic idea of a debate, a machloket “for the sake of heaven” (le-shem shamayim; Avot 5:17), is balanced with the caution that there are some debates that are destructive. The challenge of a community school-based encouragement of a healthy pluralistic culture of debate is significant. But to fail to encourage a culture of discussing competing interpretations only offers a Judaism that will be deficient and certainly less compelling as students grow and encounter new questions about identity and commitment.

But the engaging and compelling and conflicting narratives of creation are only one example of texts that when revisited, reinterpreted and debated can help nurture an emerging Jewish identity. Consider next the complex notion of God’s covenant established and re-established with the Jewish people. In Genesis 12:1-2, God calls to Abraham, “Go forth,” Lech lecha… to a new land, to be the father of a new people, and to “be a blessing” ve-heyeh brachah. This seminal moment in our emergence is at once incredibly dramatic, powerful and unclear. What does it mean to “be a blessing”? What should that mean at every stage of development? And yet a much more all-encompassing covenant is later established and re-established with the Jewish people at Sinai in the book of Exodus 19. These foundational texts have had very different interpretations in different ages and for different communities. Indeed, the foundations of Jewish thought and identity throughout the ages have revolved around these three texts and their interpretations and applications.

In a pluralistic setting there may be multiple morning minyanim /prayer groups in addition to all the measurable educational goals that a Jewish day school seeks to achieve. Yet teaching, modeling and nurturing the development of a child’s spirituality is not easy. Teaching a pluralistic theology and nurturing spirituality in a Jewish community day school context demands that the combination of text study, Hebrew, prayer and celebration each allow for different ways of understanding ourselves spiritually as part of a people.

Day schools have to be the environment where the machloket about God and about Jewish peoplehood are alive. We have the chance to constantly model how engaged adults continue to be in these primal narratives and how many different legitimate interpretations can be embraced simultaneously. While we work hard to ensure that all the teaching of Hebrew, Torah, Rashi is excellent, it should all be seen as preparation to be part of the Jewish people. Knowledge is one tool that students develop which can later allow for the capacity to take part in our ongoing machloket, that great eternal Jewish engagement with the text and with the world. It’s a kind of depth of engagement that ensures that Judaism isn’t just a pediatric endeavor but constantly demonstrates how profoundly important it is at all stages of life.

Integrating these aspects into the education of the development of young people might make some uncomfortable. Discussion and debate may not always lead to easy consensus. But they will cause us all to think and feel more deeply what it means to be Jewish. Knowing how much room there is for the questions and struggles of the individual in an ancient and modern and wildly complex Jewish culture of interpretation and debate is probably one of the most important goals we might have for an education that will penetrate and remain deep within a student from kindergarten into adulthood.


Rabbi Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi PhD is the national director of recruitment and admissions, president’s scholar, and director of the office of community engagement at HUC-JIR in Cincinnati; she is the scholar-in-residence this year for RAVSAK’s Project Sulam Alumni. [email protected]

Setting Boundaries with Administrator’s Children

The God Issue

As stated in the last column, living in the community where you work is a mixed blessing. All the more so is the situation when your child is a student in the school in which you work. How is this best handled? The following are some guidelines. While they seem very “black and white,” and even somewhat harsh, the reality is that most of the time you will simply be able to enjoy both the convenience and the pleasures of being with your child in school each day. But there are dangers, and areas that require thoughtful contemplation and planning. And while most likely you will not be able to adhere to these guidelines all the time, they can provide an important compass for you at critical moments.

You should be able to set some clear boundaries and “rules of engagement” from the outset. In school, your child is just another student. Don’t pay more attention than necessary. Do not linger outside her classroom to make sure she is ok. Do not spend extra, unnecessary time in his classroom beyond that which you would spend in any other class. Don’t automatically give her special privileges, like buying her a special lunch in the lunchroom or being the monitor more often than the others. Don’t check where he is sitting, if she has friends at the lunch table or if he put his snow pants and hat on for recess (you can tell where I live!) Trust that school staff will be as attentive to his needs as they are to those of all other students. Try to remove your parent hat during the school day. Does this mean that you should ignore your child if you pass in the hallway? Of course not. Presumably you would greet any child you know.

In addition to the day-to-day interactions, your potential ability to impact long-term planning may tempt you to orchestrate your child’s classroom placement, select his teachers and sign him up early for popular programs. It is very hard to close your eyes totally and allow random decisions to take place. And certainly, if all parents may enter requests for specific teachers or for special friends, your child should not be the only one without that right. Allow your professionals to do their jobs as you believe they should, without your interference. Save that for the very few, really critical times when you feel strongly that intervention is a must.

If your child is one of those who is always well-behaved, who never forgets her homework, who requires no remedial services and rarely has serious social issues, you are, indeed, very lucky for many reasons. But most of us have children who, at least occasionally, “get in trouble” and need individual intervention from a staff member or administrator. Parental involvement may be needed. If at all possible, do not be that parent. If circumstances permit (and I know that in some schools both parents are employed, and that there are single parent families as well), decide from the beginning that your spouse will be the “go-to” parent for all school communication. Even if teachers approach you directly in the school building—such a convenience—direct them to your spouse. Similarly, if you are the head of school, ask your principal or another administrator to be the point person in regards to your child. Teachers who are experiencing difficulty with your child should ask for advice and support from this person.

Parent-teacher interview evenings pose a particular dilemma. Should you attend the meeting? Should your spouse, in your stead? Should you let the teachers know in advance that you will be coming? Do you risk the ire of other waiting parents who think that “you can talk to the teacher any time—why add to their wait”?

On the other hand, don’t let your focus on the big picture prevent you from enjoying your child’s programs, presentations and projects. When all parents are invited to the class, you should be there as well. When all parents are asked to help with a specific task, you should take on the challenge. The guiding question is: Is this for all parents, or is this something only I can do because of who I am?

Be very careful about the conversations about school that you have at home. If your child is to feel comfortable, he should not be aware of your school issues. Don’t discuss difficult teachers, troublesome parental interactions, or student problems ever when your child is nearby. You may think she is not listening, but, I assure you, she may well be. And conversely, take extreme care with the things you hear about students from your children. Don’ t ask them to report on their friends, tell who did what at the last Bar Mitzvah party, or divulge who bullied whom in the schoolyard. The other kids should never see your children as the “stoolies” who gave away information.

As soon as you think your child is old enough, have a clear and honest conversation about this issue. Tell her your guidelines for yourself and for her. Discourage her from coming to see you in school inappropriately. Just as you must disengage as parent, she must disengage as child. The same school rules that apply to all other children must apply to him as well, and he should understand that he must direct questions or concerns to the same school personnel that all the other students use. But be certain you also assure your child that he may always let you know what is troubling him at school, and that she can talk about any unhappiness she experiences because you are in the position you are in.

Being on the front lines of your child’s growth and development can be a rare privilege, one for you to appreciate and enjoy. But it can be a treacherous road as well. By following these few pointers (and others that I am certain you have developed), you can navigate a successful path.


Cooki Levy is the director of RAVSAK’s Head of School Professional Excellence Project (PEP). [email protected]

From the Board: Stronger Heads for Stronger Schools

The God Issue

Rabbi Sacks boldly declared what most of us in the field already know. But we also know that, particularly outside of the Orthodox world, educational quality is the driver for enrollment and success of the day school. Of course our families are attracted to the values that we stand for. Of course they are seeking a sense of Jewish identity. Of course the appeal of being a part of a close and embracing community is strong. All that said, without a sense of academic excellence, our schools have minimal ability to compete with the independent school world, and even the quality public schools in the demographic areas our families populate.

Focusing on specific ways to help our day schools achieve this excellence, RAVSAK undertook a research project which identified a primary component of day school success: professional leadership. The resulting report studies the Jewish day school head—from role model, to influence, to leadership, to skills, to expectations—and to longevity and compensation: from the sacred to the mundane.

The study helps us to reflect on the “headship” by confronting important and sometimes difficult realities, which should lead to some strategic planning and future decision making.

First, the day school world does not differ significantly from the independent school world, which makes the following conclusion by NAIS quite dramatic and relevant to us: with 69% of heads planning to retire in the next 10 years, and 78% of responding administrators indicating that they are not interested in pursuing the head of school position, the independent school community (read Jewish day school community) could face a serious leadership crisis in the coming decade.

This potential crisis has significant implications for the strength of our schools. Thus, the next conclusion of the study focuses our attention on a possible solution. Day school heads are, for the most part, lifetime day school educators, with 80% of them having held previous leadership positions in the day school world. This points us to a strength and a challenge—with an obvious solution inherent in the data. If the road to leadership is “largely through promotion from within,” training and mentorship programs become that much more important for midlevel administrators, and learning on the job becomes an expectation.

An important reality that has become dramatic is that the job description for heads has changed radically. The study shows that “heads of school demonstrate a high level of self-awareness” and see their greatest strength in the interpersonal realm. With changes in expectations including community outreach, development and fundraising, finance and budget, and strategic planning, there is a clear mandate: heads need—and want—training, mentoring, and strong support. All that will inevitably result in stronger leadership, stronger heads, and stronger schools—which translates to stronger enrollment and a stronger future.

As members of an organization that has a bold vision, we are uniquely positioned to confront the challenge ahead of us. RAVSAK has candidly asked the questions and, underpinned with authentic data, provides us with resources and direction to discover the answers.


Zipora Schorr is the director of education, head of school at Beth Tfiloh Dahan in Baltimore, and a member of RAVSAK'S Board of Directors. [email protected]

From the Editor: Teaching About God: Hows and Whys

The God Issue

In a time when religious strife disturbs our world as greatly as it did in the Middle Ages, dedicating
an issue of HAYIDION to the theme of God is perhaps audacious. The atrocities in Paris and Nigeria, the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, all carried out in the name of God, are reminders,
as Gandhi wrote, that “the most heinous and the most cruel crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion.”

A friend recently asked the following question on Facebook: “How do I explain to my children why they do not have to take their shoes off when we go through airport security?” This is a heartrending question, because to answer it honestly means raising many terrible issues that no parent ever wishes
to address with a child. Similarly, how do teachers explain what happened at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, or why Israeli families have gas masks, or how a loving God can permit evil in the world?
How do teachers explain God at all? How do they do so in a Jewish school?

The authors in this Passover issue of HAYIDION wrestle with these and other issues, in articles that are sometimes deeply personal and always professionally relevant. We can see clearly how the thought leaders and teachers and heads of school who are featured in these pages have spent many hours pondering, examining, questioning and debating the hows and whys of teaching about God in the classroom. The views expressed are very diverse, reflecting the nature of RAVSAK schools, which are pluralistic community schools, embracing students with diverse backgrounds and goals.

And it is perhaps this personal approach that is most compelling. Those who chose to work in the Jewish day school world are very special and very committed individuals. In this issue of HAYIDION, they exemplify the message expressed by New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, who wrote, “Don’t speak to me about your religion; first show it to me in how you treat other people. Don’t tell me how much you love your God; show me in how much you love all His children. Don’t preach to me your passion for your faith; teach me through your compassion for your neighbors. In the end, I’m not as interested in what you have to tell or sell or preach or teach, as I am in how you choose to live and give.”

In focusing on God, HAYIDION does not presume to answer the Big Question, the one even God couldn’t answer. Exodus tells us that when Moses persisted, “Who shall I tell the people you are?” the response was the dimensionless “Ehyeh asher ehyeh.” Thus you will find some provocative queries in this issue of HAYIDION, and also some responsible answers, but at the end you will still be left with questions.

Perhaps the best way to deal with these ambiguities is summed up in the following story. Two rabbis argued late into the night about the existence of God and, using strong arguments from the scriptures, ended up indisputably disproving His existence. The next day, one rabbi was surprised to see the other walking into the shul for morning services. “I thought we had agreed there was no God,” he said. “Yes,” replied the second rabbi, “but what does that have to do with it?”


Dr. Barbara Davis is the secretary of RAVSAK’s Board of Directors, executive editor of HAYIDION and principal emerita at the Syracuse Hebrew Day School in Dewitt, New York. [email protected]