Dear Brandeis community,

 

I spent much of my week this week attending the Prizmah Jewish Day School Conference in Chicago, along with Debby Arzt-Mor, our director of Jewish learning. It was a whirlwind of people and ideas, compressed into the certain slant of light that conference hotels generate as a kind of enervating aura. One thousand Jewish educators and school leaders from around the country and world, exploring new frontiers in the field. It was my second weekend in a row of conference attendance—the previous weekend having been at the California Association of Independent Schools Heads and Trustees event—and it left me floating a bit, in the haze of thinking but not of it. I participated in an excellent discussion on the development of spirituality in children by Dr. Lisa Miller, who I’ve written about and discussed before; another interesting workshop was on how school leaders work as storytellers for their community. 

 

One session that stood out to me though was a conversation on the topic of developing cultures of healthy disagreement, led by Dr. Lauren Applebaum and Dr. Sivan Zakai, the lead researchers and educators for American Jewish University’s Teaching Israel Fellowship. The core idea of the presentation was that differing opinions are a good thing, and that we need to develop in ourselves and in our communities the capacity to encounter difference thoughtfully and openly. Part of their presentation included the “ABCDs of Productive Discourse for Israel Education”:

 

Admirable Intentions

Betterment

Competence

Difference

 

The ABCDs encourage us to assume that we are all working for the good of the Jewish people, that we are all trying to improve, that everyone in the conversation is skilled at what they do, and that differences are healthy and make us stronger.

 

It’s a lovely framework for civil discourse around Israel—which can be a divisive topic—and one that I’ve shared with Debby in support of our educators here. It also left me thinking about how we work to encounter difference, in general. Last week, when I was shadowing a 7th grader, my day ended in social studies. In that class I participated in a group research project about Islam, working with my fellows to better understand the basic tenets of the faith. Yesterday, I was in that same class again as the 7th graders welcomed Ameena Jandali of the Islamic Network Group to share with them about Islam and its history and present in the United States. I marveled last week at the wonderful opportunity this offers our children to learn about a marginalized group in our society, and to become more culturally literate, and even more so after Mrs. Jandali’s presentation. I hope this is one small part of the puzzle, as we work toward graduating students who are able to encounter Muslims in the world with well informed and widely open minds and hearts.

 

The word difference comes from the Latin, the combination of dis- (away) and ­–ferre (to carry). To be different, then, is to be carried away, to be taken away. In my own learning this past week, and in the learning I’ve done along with our students, I’m grateful for the frameworks and the opportunities for such difference, and such takeaways, as these—I know my thinking and my world is richer for them.

 

Wishing you all weekends full of betterment and difference, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan