Volume 6, Issue 2

Striving for Shlemut—Realizing Our New Paradigm for Jewish Education

In spring of last year, we published our Gleanings issue with articles advancing the emerging goal that Jewish education in the 21st century should help us thrive as human beings. Around the same time, we launched our Fellowship in the Educating for Applied Jewish Wisdom, gathering an exceptional cohort of experienced and creative Jewish educators and faculty to develop a new paradigm for Jewish education that would help us educate to this goal and subsequently develop innovative pedagogies and frameworks to bring this vision to life.

In January of this year, the Leadership Commons held our Striving for Shlemut (wholeness) conference. We brought 100 of our fellow Jewish educators together to learn from the participants in our fellowship who presented their new paradigm, a six-pointed, interconnected jewel that challenges us to consider the various elements of a Jewish education that ought to be present and active in order for our learners to reach shlemut.

This issue of Gleanings highlights the work and perspectives from those involved in our fellowship. Inside, you will find a description of the how and why of this approach from our dean, Dr. Bill Robinson, and our colleagues at Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah, our leading funder for this work, along with reflections from several members of our fellowship cohort on their fellowship experiences, the jewel, and how we can put this work into action.

As always, we seek your contributions to advance this conversation; it is, indeed, up to all of us who care deeply about strengthening our Jewish future to come together; share, challenge, and advance ideas; and be aligned in the desire to guide all we seek to impact through Jewish education toward their own individual and communal shlemut.

Shalom and to our collective success.

Mark S. Young served as the Managing Director, Leadership Commons at the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education of The Jewish Theological Seminary.