VISION FOR EXCELLENCE
Excellence in Jewish education is aspiring to the highest levels of quality in the following areas:
Vision / Change / Innovation
Excellence in Jewish education requires an aspirational vision that drives learning. Educational vision should be principled, and also dynamic enough to intentionally pursue innovation and change as necessary.
Relationship / Connection
Education creates and nourishes caring relationships between learners and teachers, building a kehillah kedosha, a sacred community. Learners feel connected to Jews across time and space, as well as to Jewish text and tradition.
Inspiration / Impact
Excellent Jewish education impacts learners, inspiring further learning and action. Excellence in Jewish education leads to tikkun middot (personal growth and self discovery) and tikkun olam (repairing the world).
Meaning / Authenticity
Jewish education must be relevant and compelling so that learners will experience Judaism meaningfully and authentically. Excellent Jewish education is deep and content-rich, timely and timeless.
Competence / Confidence
Excellence in Jewish education invites and prepares the learner to be an active participant in and a creator/shaper of Jewish life. Learning is aligned with the larger guiding vision of Jewish life in the institution / organization / community, while also taking into consideration the needs and abilities of individual learners.
Supporting Texts
Vision / Change / Innovation
Educational Texts:
•Seymour Fox, Israel Scheffler, Daniel Marom: Visions of Jewish Education. “Vision is not mere wishful fantasy. The guiding purposes it projects are based not only on an appreciation of the past but also on an engagement with the practical possibilities of the present. An educational vision offers a map of the current possibilities of action, but it also develops an itinerary that takes us from where we are, through realistic steps, to a future illuminated by our purposes. It defines overarching educational goals but also suggests strategies for approaching them.”
•Daniel Pekarsky, Vision-Guided Jewish Education, in What We Now Know About Jewish Education
Jewish Texts:
•Numbers 13:2: “Send men to scout the land of Canaan.” - The scouts teach us we have to scout the landscape, make a plan, and approach the future with a positive attitude/vision
•Babylonian Talmud, Tamid 32a: “Who is wise? He who envisions for the future.”
Relationship / Connection
Educational Texts:
•Nel Noddings, Caring. “Caring is the very bedrock of all successful education.”
•Ron Wolfson, Relational Judaism. “Most people look at others and see what they seem.Great people look at others and see what they are. The greatest of the great see others and see what they could become.” (Quoting Rabbi Jonathan Sacks)
Jewish Texts:
•Martin Buber: “In the beginning is the relationship.”
•Psalms 133:1 “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers and sisters to sit together in unity!”
•Pirkei Avot 2:4 “Hillel says: Do not separate yourself from the community.”
•Genesis 2:8 “It is not good for a human being to be alone.”
Inspiration / Impact
Educational Texts:
•Ron Berger, Ethic of Excellence
•Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom: Our goal must be to teach Judaism as a subject of ultimate personal significance.”
Jewish Texts:
•Moshe ibn Ezra, “The first virtue of wisdom is silence; the second hearing; the third memory;and the fourth action.”
•Menachem Mendl of Kotzk, “If your children see that you are a diligent student, they will imitate you. But if you neglect your own studies, and instead merely wish your children to study, the result will be that they will do likewise when they grow up. They will neglect the Torah themselves and desire that their children do the studying.”
Meaning / Authenticity
Educational Texts:
•Ron Berger, An Ethic of Excellence
•Jonathan Woocher, Reinventing Jewish Education for the 21st Century: “Jewish education in the 21st century needs a new paradigm (or set of paradigms) built around the idea of placing learners at the center of its thinking and asking how it can help these learners achieve a more meaningful, connected, and fulfilling life. If Jewish education can deploy the rich resources of Jewish tradition and contemporary Jewish life to help learners answer their authentic questions and experience the mix of joy, purposefulness, wonder, invigoration,and peacefulness that most humans seek, then it can thrive.”
•Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Insecurity of Freedom: “The significance of Judaism...does not lie in its being conducive to the survival of this particular people but in its being a source of spiritual wealth, a source of meaning relevant to all peoples.”
Jewish Texts:
•Haggadah: “In every generation a person is obligated to see oneself as though one had gone forth from Egypt.”
Competence / Confidence
Educational Texts:
•Jonathan Woocher, Reinventing Jewish Education for the 21st Century
•Julie Lythcott-Haims, How to Raise an Adult
Jewish Texts:
•Proverbs 22:6 “Educate a child according to his way; when he grows old, he will not stray from it.”
•Deuteronomy 30:11-14 “Surely, this Instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor is it beyond reach. It is not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, “Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” No,the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.”
ARJE Vision for Excellence, Adopted June 2019