Text Study Is Israel Education: Rabbi Joshua Ladon

“I thought we were learning about Israel, why are we studying Jewish text?” Rabbi Joshua Ladon, who received his EdD from the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education in 2023, got used to hearing this kind of question when he taught at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay in San Francisco where he was dean of student life and Jewish life.

Now director of education at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, Ladon sees text study as a unique Jewish way “to advance the Jewish questions and connections that Israel compels.” Ladon believes text study is an important tool for locating Israel education within a broader Jewish educational context. “How do we include texts from varied Jewish creative traditions to inform the big questions we have about Judaism, which obviously includes Israel?”

“When we approach a text with our questions,” said Ladon, “we acknowledge the complexity and power contained by the text itself. With regard to texts that we use to teach about Israel, that complexity is all the more important.”

Ladon believes text study—in all its complexity—can be a potent means to “move from patriotic love of Israel to a sense of responsibility and connection.” Before the war, Israel was enmeshed in societal tensions about judicial overall. This revealed a narrative break from the core texts of cultural Zionists like Ahad Ha’am and Bialik. “Through text study, we can read new, contemporary meaning into foundational sources,” he said.

In both the weekly protests that took place earlier in 2023 and in the numerous rallies in support of Israel, Ladon has paid close attention to the diverse range of speakers and the complex and layered language they use. He has observed a reclamation of the “why” of Zionism over the “who-what-where-when” that typified so much of the way Israel has been taught and venerated. “To early cultural Zionist thinkers, Israel is not just political but actually a vision of Judaism.” Ladon said. “Their texts have a new relevance today.”

“Even in wartime, if our goal as educators is only love for Israel, that doesn’t give a lot of room for really understanding the totality of what Israel is,” said Ladon. “The protesters were speaking in language that is all about core questions such as who we are as a Jewish democratic state, and the communal conversation since October has only amplified these questions.” Ladon believes that educators can follow their lead and use texts to foster a much more nuanced understanding of Israel and, ultimately, to strengthen the idea of Jewish peoplehood.

“Israel educators should be poised to engage learners in text study in order to create new paradigms for connections to Israel,” said Ladon.

Ladon uses the example of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which called for a “Jewish homeland.” “What does that mean in terms of the conceptions of “Jewish” and the vision of the state?” asked Ladon. “By engaging with these texts and using analytical approaches, we can broaden the goals for what we usually expect from Israel education, drawing students into millenia old Jewish conversations at the core of what it means to be a Jew.”

Ladon has written a chapter on teaching Israel education with Jewish texts in Voices on the Page and in the Room: A Pedagogy of Jewish Text Study in Israel Education (edited by Sivan Zakai and Matt Reingold and coming out in spring 2024). Ladon acknowledges that some of these ideas about Israel education are novel and may spark debate. “Not everyone in the field sees Israel education as tied up with Judaism as I do,” he said.

Questioning educational models is nothing new for Ladon. His dissertation at The William Davidson School explored how practitioners create source sheets, on the surface a relatively uncontroversial project. “I researched how educators create source sheets to understand how knowledge is constructed in a digital age,” he said.

“It seems pretty mundane, until you start to realize that the technology enabling educators to build source sheets (digital archives and word processing tools like cut, copy, and paste) empowers educators to construct new narratives. The simple production of source sheets might actually be increasing text study while diluting our inherited core narratives, which is rather radical and subversive,” Ladon said. Narrative and texts are the cultural tools that people inherit and use “for their own needs and contexts,” said Ladon. “The creative act of educators who pick and choose texts—with all-powerful computers at their disposal—and place them in something as innocuous as a sourcesheet actually increases the variety of views about Judaism that are out there in the world,” he said.

Ladon sees his doctoral research about source sheet creation as intimately tied to his Israel education work. He explained, “this is what I loved about my doctoral experience at Davidson, it provided me with the tools to think through complex questions and produce new knowledge. Working with Barry Holtz, I came to understand that a doctorate is a really simple and tight question that offers an opening to a bunch of threads you have to tie together.”

In Israel education, the educational question and frame varies. “Sometimes we are talking about Israel, sometimes we are talking about what Israel means for North American Jews, and sometimes Israel is a prism into American domestic issues,” said Ladon. “Text study is a tool educators can adjust to meet their objectives.”

Above all, Ladon sees himself as a Jewish educator with an ultimate interest in providing access to Torah. “I want to induct people into the sense of Jewish citizenship,” he said. “Jewish history—Jewish belonging—Israel these are three educational ideas that yes, can seem to be in conflict at times and can also form the basis for a sustainable civic identity, or what some might just call Jewish peoplehood.”