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A TRANSDENOMINATIONAL APPROACH TO TRAINING JEWISH EDUCATORS Jacob Meskin, Assistant Professor of Jewish Education at Hebrew College, teaches educational theory and practice in the Shoolman Graduate School of Jewish Education and is a Me'ah faculty trainer. He received his PhD from Princeton University and has taught in the religion departments of Princeton and Williams College and in the philosophy departments of Rutgers University and Yeshiva University. In this essay, Dr. Meskin tackles an issue central to his classroom and to the classrooms taught by his graduate students—how to foster the dynamic interchange of transdenominational Jewish education as a means to deepen connections among all Jews.
But Sarah had everyone's attention because she was talking about a burning, central question that all of us in the room that day shared across our many different points of view: how to get our students, both young and old, to hear the voice of Jewish sources and Jewish tradition today. This challenge turned a room of religiously, personally and spiritually diverse Jewish educators into an interconnected classroom community, where distinct individuals come together to explore the textual possibilities, the pedagogic strategies, the psychological complexities and the personal pitfalls involved in trying to help students to hear the vital voice of the text. The text from Pirkei Avot Sarah had brought in for her 12-year-old students advocated self-control and, in particular, control of strong emotions, like anger. She thought the text uncontroversial and persuasive—her young charges thought it stiff and unreal. They insisted instead on the virtues of self-expression, of not bottling oneself up, of personal spontaneity and authenticity. What to do? Oppose her students and fight on behalf of the text? That might damage her credibility in their eyes—she would cease being "cool." On the other hand, should she dismiss the text as historically outdated and move on? That might damage the students' continuing sense that the texts had something to say to them; and, as one of us around the table that day jokingly put it, "They (the rabbi or staff of the congregation in which one was teaching) might not ask you back"—since, after all, you would have "stopped selling the product." This small example of a practical dilemma in contemporary Jewish education points to a much larger issue—an issue that has at least two sides. First, education has always occupied a central place in Jewish culture. It was the process through which young Jews came to internalize a rich heritage of ideas, rituals, stories and language. Jewish education, in this sense, represented one generation passing Jewish tradition on to the next, thereby enabling each young Jew to assume a natural place within the ongoing life of his or her people. In the modern world, however, as the distinguished philosopher and educator Israel Scheffler has remarked, Jewish education must somehow create the very culture and tradition it is supposed to be transmitting and inculcating! In other words, the Jewish educator today cannot assume the environing backdrop of Jewish tradition; if anything, he or she usually does better to assume that many and possibly most students will have little familiarity with Judaism. This remains true whether the students are young people or adults.
We can see the flip side of this attenuation of a once-rich Jewish context in the markedly independent cast of mind that characterizes our students today. In accord with the virtues praised in our culture, they think for themselves, tend to challenge every received idea and have an inherent distrust of authority (except in certain limited situations). This being the case, appeals to hoary tradition, to hidden or obscure profundity, or to the need for years of training and study to understand—none of these works well in contemporary Jewish education. The modern Jewish educator must somehow discern the actual interests and concerns of the young people or adults sitting in the classroom, and then use this tacit knowledge to find an angle or way into the text that will allow it to speak, across great distances of time and space, to often quite skeptical students. Needless to say, these two facets of Jewish education today pose an enormous challenge. Yet they also serve to clarify the urgent importance of what Jewish educators do, and the somewhat daunting responsibility that goes with it. When Barry Shrage, the President of Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies, speaks to groups of Jewish educators, he likes to pause, look out at the group, and say, "You know, it's up to you to save the Jewish people!" While that may be an exaggeration, many Jewish educators do feel that they are, in a certain way, on the frontline in a war against ignorance, alienation and forgetting. When we succeed, our students may come to find themselves in constant inward conversation not only with Plato, Shakespeare—and cable TV—but also with Jewish texts and the great Jewish minds and souls of the past. From such conversation and inner ferment, who knows what may follow? When we fail, though, those voices do not enter into and find homes within our students, and we may feel as if we have momentarily left those same Jewish texts, minds and souls childless and "without issue." I hope this goes some way toward explaining what drives the "transdenominational" approach. The existential urgency of Jewish education today can, in and of itself, connect Jewish educators who are Modern Orthodox Jews, Conservative Jews, Reform Jews, Reconstructionist Jews and as-yet-uncommitted Jews. My role, as instructor in this sort of profoundly diverse classroom, lies in encouraging, facilitating and allowing myself to get drawn into a very special kind of exchange. I'd like to say some things about it. All of us in the classroom need to keep in mind that transdenominational does not mean "post" denominational. Jewish denominational commitments and identities are basic givens of our conversation together; we need to accept that these differences of outlook and community define ourselves and our interlocutors in important ways. Our interaction is not about leaving these distinctions behind, nor is it about getting beyond what some might take to be the "limitations" of history and community. Training Jewish educators in an academic institution like Hebrew College has nothing to do with trying to escape reality: it has everything to do with working to understand reality ever more clearly, to see its many different dimensions simultaneously.
Similarly, to work together, Jewish educators need to put the temptation of a "non" denominational approach behind them. Jewish education always takes place somewhere, in some specific sort of institution, with actual students, and with a concrete somebody or somebodies doing the teaching. In our classroom of Jewish educators, therefore, we need to have the maturity to abandon the "parve project" of arriving at some fictional, all-inclusive kind of Jewish education. As often happens in our exciting exchanges, we find ourselves rediscovering the reasons that led Jewish thinkers and leaders at the beginning of the modern period to take the very different paths they did—and that, in turn, gave birth to the various denominations. As our discussions constantly remind us, each denomination embodies a different kind of cogent Jewish response to the unprecedented phenomenon of modernity. Our ability to appreciate the compelling set of Jewish intuitions that lies at the heart of each denomination—whether we happen to profess it or not—not only deepens our own self-understanding but also enriches our understanding of others, and consequently allows us to gain great insight and knowledge. As contemporary Jewish educators walking into the breach, we need all the insight and knowledge we can get—we cannot afford the sort of truncated vision that results when we fail to understand the other's position or the valid historical reasons that gave rise to it. All of us in the classroom need to keep in mind that transdenominational does not mean "post" denominational. When I work with a religiously diverse group of Jewish educators in a transdenominational way, I find myself forced to do something that I try very hard to do in all my teaching. What I am thinking of here is quite difficult (at least for me!), but when it works, all of us in the classroom fly high. It involves a quintessential teaching skill, but not one that gets talked about enough: a teacher's ability to create an environment that positively invites students as a group, and individually, to try to work out their own position. By this I mean not merely some sort of sensitivity or openness—I mean, rather, the teacher's ability to model the personal energy and intellectual joy of authentic, open-ended inquiry, the kind where one sees objections to one's position and data that contradict it as genuine opportunities for one's own growth, and not as potential threats. During the exhilarating give and take of a vibrant discussion, the multiplicity of views reveals all the things I did not see—yet far from being a painful experience, this may also generate a sublime pleasure in feeling the sheer vastness and variety of reality. In other words, what my own point of view failed to encompass, far from saddening me, might excite me with the prospect of discovery and expansion. Here we see the close connection between the transdenominational approach to training Jewish educators and the practice of pedagogy itself. The teacher's "negative capability," his or her ability to entertain mutually contradictory perspectives, to praise their virtues and condemn their vices, to live and think with integrity from within the whirlwind of compelling and yet conflicting opinions—this capacity, when exhibited in the classroom, can galvanize the sort of honest interchange and self-expression that is so often missing in higher education. To do this well, of course, the teacher must "feel" where the richness in the text lies; he or she must sense which issues, like sparks, can ignite the class. Moreover, he or she must trust the process of learning, of change, of growth—for these are crucially what Jewish education is about. In the contemporary Jewish education classroom, final, denitive answers paralyze the process of reflection and discourage dynamic exchange; as modern Jewish educators we are in the business of becoming, not being. For Jews today, after all, "working out one's position" involves both the "working out" and the "position." We need both of these moments and cannot let either one impair the other. During the exhilarating give and take of a vibrant discussion, the multiplicity of views reveals all the things I did not see. The class discussed Sarah's problem with great energy, but with little sign of resolution. Then someone made a suggestion. Why not seize upon the young students' dislike for the text in Pirkei Avot as a chance to start a debate in the class? But a debate about what? Well, one of our company suggested, how about a debate precisely on the topic—is it always good to express all of one's emotions? Is there ever a place for self-restraint? Many of us around the table thought this an excellent proposal. But then another voice was heard objecting that this would only offer the students a debate and that, as interesting as that might be for them, it would not get the students to "buy" or internalize the Jewish ethical value found in the text. Wasn't that, after all, what we were supposed to be doing as Jewish educators? An uneasy moment of silence hung in the room. I worried that the snowy gloom outside, which the energy of our conversation had dispelled, was making its way back inside. Suddenly, almost as an afterthought, someone pointed out that even if that were true, if you got the kids to have that kind of vigorous, engaging, relevant debate over the pages of a Jewish text each week then, even in the worst case, they would surely come away with the idea that Jewish texts were "hot." Maybe they'd want to read more of them—maybe even keep reading them on their own, outside of the class. And how bad could that be? Perhaps I only imagined the spark of sunshine outside the room, but the one inside the classroom was unmistakable. |
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"No, you don't get it—they totally rejected the whole thing!" It was a crucial moment in our master's level Jewish education class atop the hill on Herrick Road; the snowy gray morning visible through the glass doors at the back of the classroom had faded from consciousness and given way to a warm intensity around the table. With considerable animation, Sarah was explaining the unexpected reaction of her young students to an ethical text from Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers). Sarah teaches in a religious afterschool program in a nearby congregation. The other students in our class work as family educators, Hebrew teachers, Jewish youth coordinators; most work in synagogue schools, some in Prozdor or at the Bureau of Jewish Education. They themselves range in age from early twenties through late forties, while the students they teach can range in age from pre-adolescent through adult. The students sitting around the table also come from very different places religiously.
