I teach rabbinics in the middle school of the Jewish Community Day School of Boston (JCDS), a pluralistic school just outside Boston that runs from kindergarten to eighth grade, with nearly two hundred children whose religious affiliations range across the spectrum of Judaism.
I have been involved with JCDS for the past twelve years, since my oldest child (now learning in Migdal Oz in Israel) started first grade there. When I enrolled my daughter at JCDS, I did not know how the school would affect our entire family. I chose the school because the Hebrew teaching was excellent, there was tefillah every day, and there was a commitment to Jewish texts. JCDS was only a few years old and was trying (and still is trying) to figure out what “pluralism” meant in practice. It attracted several Orthodox families the year we joined, but some of the families were coming with reservations primarily about the intensity of text study in limmudei kodesh. The wonderful secular Israeli Hebrew teacher was also in charge of tefillah, humash, and holidays. However, the teaching of these subjects was, from an Orthodox perspective, somewhat dispassionate and not very expressive of a love for Judaism as a living and breathing way of life.
I had been taking some time off from my legal career to be home with my three young children. In my oldest daughter’s last year of preschool, I was trained by Hadassah to lead a preschool holiday program called Al Galgalim. When we moved to Boston, I set up the program there, and trained some teachers. When my child entered JCDS, the principal asked me to help with fundraising. My initial reaction was that I could better help the school by being in the classroom. To my surprise, despite my lack of formal training, she immediately took me up on the offer.
Soon I was in the classroom several times a week, planning which pesukim were to be learned by heart and which stories emphasized. Working with young children was fun, and the work in first and second grades did not seem such a stretch from my preschool experience. I relied on my basic Orthodox day school education, a year in Israel at Michlalah–Jerusalem College, some classes at Drisha, and my own hevruta learning. I had had no formal Jewish education after I finished college. Since law school and a few years of legal work, I had been busy with kids and not studied much beyond parashat ha-shavua. That was to change rapidly.
In the spring of 2001, the principal asked if I would teach Mishnah the following fall in the middle school, which then had about twenty-five students. I had not studied Mishnah formally since middle school, nor did I have experience in teaching older students. My only other experience teaching anyone over the age of seven was for a short period during law school, when I volunteered with a friend to teach a weekly class to college students. Despite my hesitation, I agreed to take on the challenge.
What followed has been a decade of learning, teaching, and evolving into a Jewish educator. I don’t think I ever intentionally left my law career, but at some point I realized that teaching was more enjoyable than working as a lawyer, and that I was better at it. I now think of myself primarily as an educator rather than as a lawyer, although I still pay my bar dues. Of course, I would make more money as a lawyer, and would perhaps be more respected—even in the Orthodox community, which seems to value doctors and lawyers over teachers. But I feel that I am contributing to the world and to the Jewish community in a more substantive way than I would have by reviewing software licenses (as I had done in my last legal position).
From Lawyer to Teacher of Jewish Law
My legal experience has come in handy in my teaching, both for close textual reading and in encouraging me to make connections between Mishnah and American law. For example, in my sixth grade curriculum we spend a month relating the mishnayot in Bava Metzia to labor law.
One nice aspect of being a teacher is having summers to recuperate and plan the following year. I spent my first summer planning my curriculum—because the one that had been proposed seemed technically informative but lacked topics with which the students could identify. I had been given the freedom to teach just about anything that fell under the umbrella of Torah she-B’al Peh (Oral Law). Recalling my own experience starting with Masekhet Berakhot, I decided that for a mixed group of religious and secular students, the traditional subject of birkhot ha-nehenin and tefillah might not be universally exciting or intriguing.
My goals were to expose the students to the breadth of Jewish thought, teach them a Jewish ethical world view, give them the skills to begin to access Jewish texts by themselves and finally to make connections for the students between the texts and their own lives. The first masekhet that I taught was Sukkah. We learned the laws of sukkah construction. We talked about why the rabbis would be so interested in such questions, and learned the basic skills of reading a mishnah. At the end of the unit, the students constructed the various sukkot described in the Mishnah and a fantasy sukkah that fit the rules set out in the masekhet.
I have since developed a curriculum based on Seder Nezikin that extrapolates from the Mishnah’s discussion of fairness in court proceedings and the obligations of workers and employers to one another to current issues that the students face in daily life as they relate to others. They learn how difficult it is to negotiate a contract from a position of weakness (e.g., with their parents) and how they might inadvertently mistreat a poor worker. We apply the rules of the Mishnah both to workers the students are likely to encounter (such as nannies and janitors) and to those they typically do not encounter (such as sweatshop workers who make the clothes they wear). I use the concrete notions of the Mishnah to help the students to be aware of people around them and approach them with the understanding that we all have both rights and responsibilities, and are made b’tzelem Elokim (in God’s image), as my teacher Rabbi Jack Bieler used to say, to see the world “through Torah-colored glasses.”
Over the past decade, I have grown in my teaching and pedagogic skills with the help of some good mentors. I was able to attend the Pardes Educators two-week program in Israel and have participated in a Brandeis seminar on teaching rabbinics, run by Prof. Jon Levisohn.1 I have also grown as a student of Jewish texts. Each year, in my preparation for class, I feel that I go deeper into the texts than the year before. I take delight that preparing for my Pesah seder no longer involves just preparing a d’var Torah for my family, but also working with twenty children to make sure they are ready for their sedarim too, each one doing a small research project on a Haggadah topic of their own choice.
Last year I began teaching an introduction to Talmud class to the eighth graders. We study the eighth chapter of Bava Kama, which deals with damages and the value we place on human life. This is wonderful material for early adolescents; how to put a compensatory value on embarrassment, for example, is very real for them. Each student does an independent research project tracing an idea of his or her choosing from Torah through the Mishnah, Gemara, and Aharonim; for example, a child who was adopted chose that as her topic. I also research each of their topics to help them locate suitable texts.
All this has strengthened my learning and familiarity with texts beyond what I could have imagined ten years ago. At times I get carried away with a topic and am up late at night, my desk piled high with books and my web browser overflowing with bookmarks.
At JCDS, great emphasis is placed on differentiated learning, which I try to embrace more fully each year. I also choose a different lens through which to examine my units each year. This year, my emphasis is on grammatical skills to enhance my students’ abilities to break down texts. When I review the worksheets that I have developed, I see how I can sharpen that aspect. If I can give the students the skills to decipher the texts, the likelihood of their becoming lifelong learners of Torah increases. I have this goal equally for observant and nonobservant students. I emphasize to them that they are a crucial link in the chain of our mesorah—however they choose to observe it.
Being an Orthodox Teacher in a Pluralistic School
I struggle to find my place as an Orthodox teacher in a pluralistic school. I insist that every student know what our tradition is, but am careful about my language. I say, “This is what traditional Jews do on Shabbat. Your observance may be different.” On the one hand, since teaching at JCDS, I cover my hair and wear skirts to school, even though the school has an informal dress code for both students and teachers and I could wear jeans if I wanted. Over the years, I have encountered many people who look at me and “know” what I think on a variety of subjects, from the role of women in Judaism to my views about what they have in their shopping carts when I meet them in the supermarket. I have subtly—and sometimes, not so subtly—disabused them of prejudices about Orthodoxy and introduced many of them to Orthodox feminism. They are often surprised that I don’t condemn them for what they have in the cart as long as they don’t serve it to me or my children.
I have the pleasure of trying to foster ahavat Yisrael on a daily basis.
On the other hand, I have had requests that I put on tefillin at school to be a role model for the girls. It would make sense to do so for my role at school, but it is neither a mitzvah to take lightly nor an obligation I could take on just for school days. There are times when someone wants to say kaddish and I am asked to be counted in a minyan when the majority of people there, including the mourner (unfortunately, at times, a student), would count women. I weigh the Orthodox definition of minyan with the need of a person to say kaddish. In this case, I have come to feel that the ben adam l’haveiro imperative outweighs the rabbinic position and join the minyan.
One thing that has surprised me is the depth of my friendships with many very committed Jews who are not Orthodox. My definition of shomer Shabbat has expanded to almost anyone with a regular Shabbat practice. We might not share Shabbat, but I respect that they are committed to our tradition and to the continuity of the Jewish people. Pluralism demands that one look at each person as a Jew and only then at his or her practice. I might be upset if a school friend tried to feed my child non-kosher food, but I would respectfully discuss it with them and find some way to live together in our pluralistic Jewish community.
There are negative aspects to being an Orthodox teacher in a pluralistic school. It is not always easy to be perceived as an upholder of the faith. I am sure there are events to which I am not invited because of others’ perceptions and misperceptions of me and my children. My children have resolved that they are Orthodox: even though both my daughters learned to leyn for their b’not mitzvah, they will not do so for the partnership minyan that my husband and I established with some friends. My son is one of only a few boys putting on tefillin at JCDS, and he struggles with whether to join with the other students who abridge the tefillah or say a full tefillah and risk appearing arrogant.
After graduating from JCDS, my own children have continued at the local pluralistic Jewish high school, Gann Academy, where they have received an excellent education in both secular and Judaic studies. This is demonstrated by my oldest daughter’s ability to flourish in Migdal Oz’s rigorous Talmud program, which is all in Hebrew. The school is also excellent at promoting the acceptance of differences, whether they are religious or other differences.
But it has not always been easy for my children. Their peers often invite them to eat in non-kosher restaurants and they either do not go or have only a soda. They get invitations that start “I’m sorry you can’t come to my party because it is on Friday night, but I wanted you to know that you are invited. If there is any way …” My daughters have been lucky to have many friends from school and other kids who come to our neighborhood on Shabbat to join the shomer Shabbat crowd. My son has not been so lucky, and has fewer friends on Shabbat. My children have, on occasion, been taunted by some who go to Orthodox schools and say that JCDS/Gann students don’t know much about Judaism. In fact, my experience is that even though they might not be experts in dinim, they are thoughtful text learners, are curious to know more and are sensitive to the kavod of others.
Less Patience for Intolerance
To my surprise, I have become less tolerant of some aspects of the Orthodox community. It is frustrating for me to participate in women’s tefillah when the children’s tefillah in school is more comprehensive. I still occasionally give a d’var Torah at the local women’s tefillah group, but I have little patience for the arguments against women’s tefillah groups that crop up from time to time in our community. Increasingly, I find my own spiritual fulfillment in teaching and learning. I have less patience for intolerance of other types of Judaism and for xenophobia in the community. I find myself more sensitive to political statements dressed as divrei Torah, and attribute this sensitivity to my exposure to pluralism, which has taught me to be aware of a plurality of opinion and not to assume that everyone agrees with me.
On the positive side, I have had opportunities to have dialogues with colleagues about Judaism that have been enriching to all of us. I have had many debates with a strongly feminist, secular colleague about what being a feminist within the tradition means to me. A few years ago I had a hevruta with a colleague who had never before learned Mishnah; when we finished, we invited the rest of our colleagues to their first siyyum. We held a sheva berakhot for a young teacher and included many teachers who had never even heard of the practice before. I have been asked she’eilot by non-religious parents who do not have a rabbi of their own and feel that I have been able to encourage both children and adults to explore Judaism more deeply.
The final verdict on the experiment of pluralism is still out. Will the observant children in such schools stay observant? Will non-observant children become more involved Jewishly? Anecdotally, the answer is yes to both questions. Has it enriched my Judaism? Most definitely. I am comfortable with Jewish texts in a way that I would never have imagined. I have learned how to learn and how to teach.
The most rewarding thing for any teacher is the look in a child’s eye when he or she masters a new concept or understands a text for the first time. Beyond that, I also have the pleasure of trying to foster ahavat Yisrael on a daily basis. Once, before Yom Kippur, we were having a discussion about teshuvah, which, in a pluralistic setting, is a challenge every year. That year I decided go around the class and ask each child what being “a good Jew” meant to him or her. An Orthodox boy was sitting next to a boy from a secular home who said that being a good Jew meant supporting Israel and learning Hebrew. When the Orthodox boy said that being a good Jew meant believing in God and sh’mirat mitzvot, the secular boy turned to him and said, “So, do you not think that I am a good Jew?” The Orthodox boy was dumbfounded and we proceeded to have a wonderful discussion about inclusion in k’lal Yisrael. This is probably not a discussion I would have experienced in an Orthodox school, but it is a good one to have. I was brought up to think that Orthodoxy had the monopoly on ethical behavior and had actually been confused when, in college, I found people of all kinds with strong ethical codes. I have learned from teaching at JCDS to widen the tent of the “good Jew” and appreciate the many different ways we each may contribute to the Jewish people and the world at large.