It feels pretentious and premature to be talking about retooling education about Israel. The war is not over, the wounds are still fresh, barely a year has passed since that awful day, there are thousands of children-parents-loved ones still in active combat and separated from their families for months at a time, many of the hostages are still in captivity, the campuses are reeling, the internal divisions in Israel are deepening rather than abating, and the landscape of the Jewish world is muddled at best as the aftershocks of the earthquake still rattle us. And yet, we dare to think that we have something meaningful to contribute as to how to teach about Israel. It is fair to say that everything written in this journal is written with the awareness that when the dust settles, we may need to re-examine everything all over again. Despite the uncertainty and the tentativity, we feel that there is no issue more pressing for Jewish educators and so we give voice to those courageous, thoughtful, and knowledgeable educators who stepped forward to share.

The disparity of the ideas that surfaced in this issue journal is, indeed, breathtaking. There are those who insist on rethinking everything about Israel education and those who insist on staying the course; there are those who want to strengthen and deepen the Jewish narrative and those who believe that it is critical to examine multiple narratives; there are those who are looking to manipulate the system to create a few extra hours to dedicate to Israeli history and others who want to shift the focus of everything to a deep understanding of Jewish history and culture; there are those who want to promote a specific ideology and those who want the students to discover their own bonds with Israel; there are those who want to train their students to be advocates for Israel and those who expressly do not want their students to have to take on those roles.

As Jewish educators and educational thinkers, even if the path forward is unclear, we do not have the luxury of being frozen because we don’t know. We read, we learn, we discuss—and then we must do. Our students need that. Not with a superficial, “everything will be OK,” but with tools to help them internalize their past so that it impels them to help create a better future. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks expresses it exquisitely:

Optimism is a passive virtue, hope an active one. It needs no courage, only a certain naiveté, to be an optimist. It needs a great deal of courage to have hope. The prophets of Israel were not optimists. When everyone else felt secure, they saw the coming catastrophe. But every one of them was an agent of hope.

Let this journal be one piece of that path towards empowering our students to be agents of this hope.

 

BIVRAKHA,

RABBI ZVI GRUMET, ED.D.