AN OUTLINE FOR EDUCATING FOR APPLIED JEWISH WISDOM

“Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Members of the Great Assembly” (Pirkei Avot 1:1).

What often gets left out of that story is that in the course of transmission, Joshua forgot 300 halakhot, became uncertain about 700 more, and introduced 10 significant reforms (Babylonian Talmud, Temurah 16a; Bava Kama 80b-81a). On top of that, the elders, prophets, and Members of the Great Assembly made so many changes—from replacing animal sacrifice with prayer to instituting Torah reading as a weekly communal practice and developing many of the food practices that we now know as kashrut—that by the time the tradition was in the hands of the rabbis who wrote Pirkei Avot, it was unrecognizable. To capture this point, the Talmud goes so far as to describe Moses as traveling through time to sit in Rabbi Akiva’s classroom, but not being able to understand anything that was being discussed (Babylonian Talmud, Menaḥot 29b).

These transmitters of the tradition made such drastic changes because they believed that the ultimate goal of Jewish life is to help people live better lives. And in a constantly changing world, a Judaism that helps people live well must always evolve.

Today, the world is changing at breakneck pace, but Jewish life and education are all too often built on a model of preservation rather than adaptation. We need to regain the sacred chutzpah of Joshua, the elders, the prophets, and the Members of the Great Assembly to rework Judaism, often in radical ways, so that it can continue to be a source of guidance in our lives. As Dr. Jonathan Woocher (z”l), founding president of Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah (LKFLT), put it, we must switch our guiding educational question from, “How can we keep Jews Jewish as they go through the process of embracing American life?” to “How can we help Jews find in their Jewishness resources that will help them live more meaningful, purposeful, and fulfilling human lives?” (Reinventing Jewish Education for the 21st Century, 2012).

As LKFLT’s mission states, we believe that answering this guiding question entails “helping people apply particular Jewish wisdom to universal human questions.” This means expanding the focus of Jewish education from answering parochially Jewish questions (How am I supposed to pray or chant Torah with the words and melodies of my ancestors? Should we light Hanukkah candles from left to right or right to left?) to universal human ones (How might I be a good parent, friend, partner? How might I be a good citizen of my community, my country, and the planet? How might I be a responsible, economic actor?).

These are questions that Jews and others face not because they are Jewish, but because they are human. And they are questions to which the Jewish wisdom tradition offers compelling and inspiring answers. From mikvah helping people navigate life’s transitional moments, to Shabbat offering a pause from an increasingly unbound workweek, to studying the multivocal Jewish tradition as a means of cultivating appreciation for viewpoint diversity, and so much more, Jewish tradition offers an abundance of wisdom to draw on. Today’s Jewish educators have a tremendous opportunity to make this value proposition clear.

Reinventing Jewish education to meet these goals will take many partners, a lot of work, and patience. It also demands learning from past revolutions in Jewish education. While there are countless lessons we can learn from earlier generations, these four are essential:

1. Leading thinkers who will dedicate themselves to the new paradigm. The seminal moment in the evolution of biblical to rabbinic Judaism was when Rabbi Yoḥanan ben Zakai acquiesced to Jerusalem’s downfall—including the destruction of the Second Temple, the center of Jewish life at the time—in exchange for the Romans permitting a group of rabbis to study in Yavneh (Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 56a-b). In today’s terms, Rabbi Yoḥanan effectively accepted the destruction of the existing Jewish paradigm so that a single fellowship of Jewish educators could create the next one. Thankfully, we do not need to make such extreme sacrifices in order to convene thought leaders to map out the future of Jewish education; and we are honored to have partnered with The William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education of JTS to create one in the form of the Fellowship in Educating for Applied Jewish Wisdom.
2. Draw heavily on the wisdom of the past. When the Members of the Great Assembly and early Rabbis replaced sacrifice with prayer, they looked to the structure and function of the sacrificial cult for inspiration and guidance for creating new forms, without being beholden to the earlier ones. They were only able to draw on this wisdom because they committed to retaining, studying, reinterpreting, and drawing on the texts and praxis that preceded them. The scope of Jewish tradition is even larger today, but the lesson remains the same: interrogating the past offers unique perspectives for thinking about and designing the future.
3. Create new content and frameworks. The chain of transmission, whose beginnings are captured in Pirkei Avot but which continues until today, didn’t just winnow down the Jewish tradition. Each link in the chain reimagined it and created entirely new content and frameworks for Jewish life. They created new practices, like prayer; new institutions, like the synagogue; new texts, like the Mishnah and Talmud; and new frameworks, like halakhah. The next paradigm of Jewish education will need new content and frameworks of its own. And while these will take time to develop, the fellows offered one example of what such a framework could look like with the Shlemut framework they developed.
4. Develop new pedagogies. If the early Rabbis had just created the Talmud without an effective means of transmitting it, it’s unclear how successful their approach would have been. Part of what made their work so successful is that Jewish educators developed a pedagogy to accompany it: havruta learning. They realized that a multivocal text was best studied multivocally, and they popularized a form of dyad-learning to support that. We do not yet know what the content and frameworks of the new paradigm of Jewish education will be, but whatever they are, they will require new ways of teaching.

The new Jewish educational paradigm these principles produce will look quite different from what preceded it. One of the ways we will know our new institutions and frameworks are successful is when the early rabbis would be just as confused by them as Moses was in Rabbi Akiva’s classroom. The goal, however, is not to break with tradition—it is to continue it. If Moses had been comfortable in Rabbi Akiva’s classroom, Rabbi Akiva’s students would almost certainly not have been taught a Judaism that helped them live better lives in their historical context. Healthy continuity and adaptation are two sides of the same coin. As the second half of our mission statement states, when Jewish education once again returns to a focus on living a better life, Jewish continuity won’t be a goal in and of itself but rather an outcome of people wanting to “cultivate Judaism’s evolving wisdom tradition as an enduring source of value for human civilization over the long term.”

Aaron Dorfman is the president of Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah.

Rabbi Ayalon Eliach is the director of learning and strategic communications at Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah.

THROUGH THE LENS OF TORAH GODLY PLAY

Imagine a piece of brown fabric on a carpeted floor with 20 pounds of sand forming a mound in the center. Our colleague Rabbi Dr. Michael Shire is sitting opposite our group of fellows on the other side of this fabric, gazing down at the sand. In a calm, slow, quiet voice, he begins to tell you about the sand as he runs his fingers thorough it, moving and molding it:

“This is the desert. It’s not all of the desert, it’s just a part of the desert.  We need the desert to tell our story today.“

“The desert is an amazing and interesting place; it can be dangerous but also great things can happen there.”

“When the wind blows, it changes the shape of the desert. People can get lost in the desert and may want help to find their way.”

“The desert can be a dangerous place. People don’t go out into the desert unless they have to. But the desert is also an open clear place without distraction and great things can happen in the desert.“

We the fellows at the Fellowship in Educating for Applied Jewish Wisdom first saw this piece of the desert within the context of a much larger desert, at a retreat center in Phoenix, Arizona in January 2018. In the warm desert, away from the myriad distractions of our busy lives, we were presented with the potential for amazing things to happen.

We gathered then as a group of strangers. We met in a room with comfortable oversized chairs and couches. We began by asking questions. One of the fellows, Rabbi Lizzi Heydemann, posed a question that continues to haunt me, “Are we just art-fully rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic?” We were 11 fellows of different ages, from different parts of the country, different personal practices, serving different populations and functioning under different mission statements. What did each of us uniquely bring to the table, or deck, to extend the metaphor?

We discussed philosophy, learned in havruta (partner study), and shared our crafts. We pursued the question, “What is the ultimate purpose of Jewish education?” “Thriving” or “flourishing” seemed to evolve as that goal as we loosely compared our practice to “Soul Cycle.”

Another fellow, Beth Huppin, taught a text about tables: “It has become the custom in some places for a number of people to be buried in coffins which were made from the tables upon which they studied, or upon which they fed the poor, or upon which they worked faithfully at their trade.” (Kav HaYashar, Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Kaidanover)

“Good-hearted people who fed the poor at their tables should have a coffin made from that table, as it is written: “And your righteousness shall go before you.”” (Isaiah 58: 8; Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, 1874)

We wondered at length about the meaning of these texts for us as Jewish educators whose lives are devoted to teaching our Torah at our tables, (or possibly on the deck of the Titanic).

A third fellow, Dr. Jane Shapiro, began a text study by using walnuts to engage our minds and our senses. Then she presented us with the text:

“When Israel was in Egypt, awareness was in exile; the shell which preceded the fruit, served to cover it. This is the hard shell of the nut spoken of in the Song of Songs “I went down to the garden of walnuts” (6:11), referring to the exile in Egypt. The nut has a hard outer shell and several finer membranes inside it, hiding the meat within. The hard outer shell was broken in Egypt so that we can see what is inside. The thin membranes are still there, until our messiah comes (speedily in our day!).Then inwardness will be revealed completely.” (Me’Or Eynaim on Parashat Va’era)

As Jewish educators, how do we nurture and strengthen those fine membranes?

After our time in Phoenix, we continued with virtual meetings in webinars taught by scholars and rabbis, followed by havruta sessions. Then in June 2018, we met again, in Chicago. This time, Michael did not bring sand, but rather a large circular piece of black felt, six small chalkboards, and six large wooden letters: S, P, I, R, I, and T. He had composed a new Torah Godly Play story, “Spirit” about the practice of Torah Godly Play and he used these elements to tell that story. While the chalkboards and letters did not mesmerize as the sand did, the model, with six points that became a Jewish star, promoted deep thinking and a different kind of wondering. Torah Godly Play is about sacred Space, Play (the work of childhood), the Imagination of the child, the child’s many Relationships, the child’s Inner life and the sacred Texts of our tradition. We then asked ourselves, could we envision a model for Jewish education with a similar six-pointed star?

The Torah Godly Play star actually had two sets of three points: one set (Play, Space, and Text) represented the approach and the other three (Imagination, Relationships, and Inner Life) represented the dispositions of the learner. Michael explained, “Torah Godly Play uses the features of a pedagogical practice to cultivate dispositions of heart and mind able to draw upon sources of Jewish language and story in order to form and deepen the spiritual lives from the very youngest to those ever open to spiritual awakening.”

Thus, our group of fellows began to wonder, could this be a model for what we all aspire to do? The Torah Godly Play model challenged us to create something that represented the “what” that we hope we do. It developed into a new set of six inter-related points that could also be a Jewish star:

• Cultivating dispositions,
• Being in relationship,
• Attuning to the world,
• Presencing the sacred,
• Practicing Jewish, and
• Authoring the self

For me, each session throughout this fellowship experience seemed to be highlighted with “I wonder” questions. While this journey has served to concretize my understanding of and investment in the Torah Godly Play philosophy and methodology, it has also stretched my thinking. In fact, within our group of fellows, we became a circle of critical friends refining our frameworks for questioning, clarifying, understanding, and responding.

As always, I would return to Torah Godly Play. After each Torah Godly Play story is told, those who engaged in the story are invited to wonder. The Torah Godly Play storyteller asks:

• I wonder which part of the story did you like the best?
• I wonder which part of the story is the most important?
• I wonder which part of the story was about you or where were you in the story?
• I wonder what part of the story could we leave out and still have all the story that we need?

As I consider our new inter-connected six-pointed star, or jewel, as some have begun to refer to it, I wonder, which point do I like the best? I wonder which point is the most important? I wonder where I might be in the star or which part of the star could be about me? Finally, I wonder if we could leave out any point on this star and still have all the points that we need?

I wonder where this will lead? I wonder who will join this journey? I wonder how might Jewish education provide opportunities for thriving and flourishing? I wonder which points on the star are essential for flourishing? I wonder where do we go from here?

 

Gretchen Marks Brandt serves as a Torah Godly Play instructor in the Shoolman Graduate School of Jewish Education, Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts. She is also associate head of school for education at MetroWest Jewish Day School in Framingham, Massachusetts.