Back to the Future

The end of the school year is a time to reflect on the year that has passed and it is also a time to look forward towards the future. This has been a great year for the Hebrew School with our wonderful new cantor, an amazing staff, many new families joining our community and veteran families getting more involved. A big step for us this year was forming a steering committee for the Hebrew School -- a body which began the process of articulating a vision statement. Coming off of our latest meeting it is this work on which I want to focus, as this vision statement will draw from our past in order to chart a course for our future -- an apt discussion for the close of the school year.

In this last session, our focus was on generating learner outcomes for our educational program. Most of the time when educational settings talk about learner outcomes, they end up focusing on content and the conversation turns to a set of discrete pieces of knowledge that the students are expected to know. In order for Jewish education to be effective – engaging, meaningful, and relevant, we must move beyond such a focus; the sweep of our reach must be broader. In yesterday’s session, I introduced a schema to help push us past such a narrow, concrete focus. We looked at our goals as fitting under four categories: knowing, believing/feeling, belonging, and doing. In brief, you can think of these categories as stemming from the following four questions: What do we want our learners to know about Judaism? What do we want them to believe or feel about Judaism? In what ways do we want them to feel and express a sense of belonging? What do we want them to do as a result of their connection to Judaism?

We opened the meeting by sharing the most powerful Jewish experience each of us had in our lives. We then used this schema to analyze those past experiences as a way to begin to think about what sort of goals we will want to set for the learners in our own community (e.g. students, parents, other children). In this way we are drawing on our past to envision our future. We will soon begin to put this vision into words. By next fall, our entire community will be invited to help shape this vision which will create a road map for our work together.

This community is on an exciting journey together, one of reflection and imagination. One which I hope will mirror and enrich your own family’s spiritual journey. Let us continue to dream together even as we work to make that dream a reality.