“[The teacher] is…the creator of the future of our people. [S]he must teach the pupils to evaluate the past in order to clarify their future.”

~ Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

When I began my work in Jewish education at the Park Avenue Synagogue High School in September of 1967 it was, as some will remember, a tumultuous time. In the Jewish world, the Six-Day War gave a sense of elation (albeit very temporary as we have seen for many decades) and America was filled with social and political crises. Our afterschool and weekend program quickly became a magnet for Jewish and even non-Jewish teenagers from across the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan. Feeling the absence of the “international” (Jewish and beyond) in my own education and seeking to emphasize and expand it in that of my students, we quickly added international travel during summer and mid-year vacations as a key part of our curriculum, and within a decade we were traveling into the Arab world. We began with Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt, and in the summer of 1978, our students had a historic private audience with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat even before Camp David.

President Anwar Sadat of Egypt at his villa in Alexandria and students of the Park Avenue Synagogue High School together with faculty (now) Professor Ross Brann of Cornell University and Dr. Larry Zelnick (retired) July 1978.

This travel and educational venture into the Arab world was limited by two major factors: insufficient academic preparation and insufficient broader Jewish historical context. I began to wonder what had happened to the teaching of Jewish history, what Mordechai Kaplan called “Jewish Civilization.” As a child, a central feature of my afternoon Hebrew School was the study of Deborah Pessin’s The Jewish People (Vol. 1-3); it was considered critical to teach us the history of the Jewish people where we would encounter the events and key personalities of our collective past. In the post-1967 reality, however, Jewish History was replaced by early iterations of what today we call “Israel Education” (with the addition of age-appropriate Holocaust material). This Israel education was a combination of the history of Zionist thinkers, the development of the Zionist movement, and the creation of the State of Israel in 1947-48 with subsequent major events added as the years went by. The events were of course selective and tended to portray complex moments in rather simplistic terms and to ignore problematic issues and events.

This almost seamless shift of emphasis eclipsed the vast heroic and extraordinary story of the Jewish people over thousands of years living in over fifty countries across the world. The story of some of these people was condensed into their new identity as Israeli immigrants or as the story of their murder and annihilation during the Second World War. As one small example, Salonika became known for the destruction of its Jewish community in WW2 rather than as the Jewish-majority Greek city in which Jews thrived for nearly five hundred years and which Vladimir Jabotinsky described as “the most Jewish city in the world,” where even the post office closed on the Jewish Sabbath.

This shift in educational emphasis left both student and teacher thinking that Jewish life was composed of the Holocaust (preceded by centuries of little holocausts) and our national and communal redemption in the creation of the State of Israel and its growing military prowess and eventual technological and economic success. Its periodic struggles only added to the new structure and content of what was now being called Jewish History. Deborah Pessin’s books disappeared from the shelves.

Despite this shift, I continued to develop Jewish travel programs to introduce Jewish teens to their rich heritage. We went to the Soviet Union, Turkey, Iran, North Africa, and Eastern and Western Europe in addition to Israel. We were all stunned by the results. Our students were fascinated and frankly captivated by who they met and what they saw; they began to understand the breadth and richness of the Jewish people—way beyond what they saw in New York or in Israel.

Decades later, when I created an Israel trip for Jewish day school teachers, Kivunim, I sought out in Israel those people, places, and experiences that had roots in the Jewish people’s past from all over the world. We scheduled a private concert of Moroccan Jewish music with the Andalusian Orchestra; we watched and danced with the (Yemenite) Inbal Dance Company in Tel Aviv; we attended a Syrian minyan in the (Halabi) Ades Synagogue in Jerusalem with its Arab-influenced chants. I was discovering a world of Jews and Judaism that my graduate studies in Jewish History had not adequately brought to my attention.

In 2005, I transformed the summer program into a gap-year experience for high school graduates, but with a powerful twist—we would visit 10-12 countries of the Jewish diaspora while maintaining our base in Jerusalem. There was something ironic about this.

On the one hand, we were bringing Jewish youth all the way to Israel for what might be the most critical year of their lives, and on the other hand, we were spending a third of that year outside the country, in the Diaspora. Our critics had a point. How could we come to Israel and then keep leaving, and leaving for the dead or dying Diaspora? What those critics missed, however, was the emotional power of “homeland” that grew with each return. Perhaps even more, what they missed was the story of the Jewish People. The who, what, when, where, and how of thousands of years of the development of a dynamic and creative and locally defined Judaism and Jewish life. A Diaspora Jewish life that had, amongst many other achievements created the rebirth of both the Hebrew language and the Jewish State. I was inspired by the writing of Gerson Cohen:

A frank appraisal of the periods in which Judaism flourished will indicate that not only did a certain amount of assimilation and acculturation not impede Jewish continuity and creativity, but that in a profound sense, this assimilation and acculturation was a stimulus to original thinking and expression, a source of renewed vitality [italics mine].

… If there is anything that modern scholarship has taught us about Jewish culture, it is that a familiarity with the general milieu in which Jews lived is indispensable to understanding any particular phase of its history. How can we understand the “Golden Age” of Spain, or the theological and moralistic emphases of Franco-German pietism, or the mystical doctrines and associations of the Hasidim of medieval Egypt, without some acquaintance with Arabic literary tastes, Christian theology, and Sufism, respectively? And what is the appropriation of many of these tendencies if not religious and intellectual assimilation?

The great Jewish historian Cecil Roth put the importance of the Jewish experiences amongst the nations of the world this way:

It is for him [a Jew] not merely a record: it is at once an inspiration and an apologia. Only from his history can he be brought to appreciate not only his former glory but his former degradation, to realize its causes, and to sympathize with its consequences. It is only from an appreciation of his past can he be imbued with self-respect and hope for his future.”

I suggest, therefore, that as a Jewish education community, we reverse direction. That a new generation of Deborah Pessin’s wonderful “books” be created in the most powerful media we can generate. That we move Israel education to a powerful, even central subset under the term “Jewish Civilization Education.” That we develop chapters of our story around the main historic population centers of Europe, MENA, Africa, Asia, and the Americas and weight them with significance. That we encourage the present awakening within Israel of its multiple international Jewish identities in costume, art, music, architecture, cuisine, philosophy, Jewish ritual practice, and more, and share them with Jewish communities around the world.

I’ll conclude with a powerful example of the implications of this change in orientation and thinking.

In December 2015, Kivunim presented its first Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel/Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Humanitarian Award (posthumously) to King Mohammed V of Morocco in recognition of his actions in protecting the over 250,000 Moroccan Jews from the (Nazi) Vichy French deportation during World War II. His grandson, King Mohammed VI, sent a delegation of leading Moroccan diplomats, headed by his senior advisor, the Honorable André Azoulay to attend the ceremony held in Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York City. In his Royal Message, King Mohammed VI said:

Tonight, you are inviting the Kingdom of Morocco to a date with history. Indeed, this is one of those events that make history, adding the most beautiful chapters to the book of mankind, who knew in the past and still knows today, how to resist the dizzying impacts of the cultural, religious, and social divide.

And he concluded his historic remarks this way:

… these Kivunim students, who are members of the American Jewish community, will be different people in their community tomorrow. Not just different, but also valuable, because they have made the effort to see the world in a different light, to better understand our intertwined and unified traditions, paving the way for a different future, for a new shared destiny full of the promises of history, which, as they have realized in [their visits to] Morocco, is far from being relegated to the past.

Why were Jewish students on a Jewish gap-year program spending time (years before the Abraham Accords) in an Arab-Muslim country? Why would they include in their months of study and experience in Israel meeting with Arab and Bedouin artists, civil servants, university professors, and religious leaders? Why would Kivunim seek to expand their sense of Jewish national identity with the often painful perspective of the Israeli-Arab (now mostly known as Palestinian-Israeli)? Why would we require every student to study both Arabic and Hebrew? Why would we teach about Islam and visit mosques both in Israel and outside it in Morocco, Turkey, and Egypt?

I believe that any educational form or setting aimed at children and young people, even in these challenging times, must be fueled by hopefulness and driven by the optimism that is so characteristic of youth. It is not merely a coincidence that our Jewish national anthem is called Hatikva, the hope.

It is hopefulness that has fueled our people across the ages. It is in our prayers and is expressed throughout our holidays. Why did we visit Morocco? Because our educational decisions are driven by the value proposition as stated in our mission: “Jewish education for the 21^st century must help to minimize fears and maximize comfort with people, cultures, and religions that are different than our own, both as Americans and as Jews.”

This worldview is the natural outgrowth of re-appreciating the Jewish Diaspora, of encountering the richness and beauty of Jewish Civilization.