Predictions, Agendas, and Paradigm Shifts

In the first year of COVID, organizational leaders were engaged in a three-sided intellectual tug of war between understanding, interpreting, and predicting. The first two items were crucial as Rabbis, educators and executive directors were called upon to make immediate and practical decisions for their communities.  The needs of “today, tomorrow, and next week” took precedence over long-term predictions or scenario planning.

Others, however, took up the slack in the prediction department. Rather than following a line of reasoning that extends from “what is” to “what might be,” many blog posts were filled with dramatic pronouncements. 

Three of the most common claims looked like this: 

  • Nothing will ever be the same!  
  • It’s the end of [fill in the blank] AS WE KNOW IT!  
  • We need to create an entirely new [fill in the blank]!

We are now entering a phase in which things are beginning to “bounce back.” While some things have clearly changed, and will continue to do so, the big predictions continue. Where do these larger-than-life statements come from?

Winston Churchill’s advice - “Never let a good crisis go to waste” – has encouraged some educators and Rabbis to put forward what I believe are their pre-existing personal agendas. For many of them, pre-pandemic synagogue life was seen as problematic, with no real hope for change. For others, Jewish educational programming was not to their liking, but there were no viable alternatives. For these people, COVID provided the perfect opportunity to engage in what the world of Bible study calls “eisegesis” or reading their own ideas into the text (as opposed to “exegesis” – deriving meaning from the text). The facts or trends of COVID, they said, could only be interpreted as a call for major pivots, or as a sign of a paradigm shift. Perhaps…

As explained by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions a paradigm shift occurs when those in a particular field (in his book it was science) come together in a new way of understanding a collection of facts that are and have been, before them. One example is the move away from the Ptolemaic system (earth at the center of the universe) to the Copernican system (sun at the center).

Until such a shift has occurred, research incrementally follows certain tracks, based on consensus opinions. But once enough people have reconsidered the facts before them, and have created a new way of organizing and understanding those facts, a “shift” has occurred. No one launches a paradigm shift; it unfolds; it is discovered.

A question for those of us who work in Jewish Education:  Is there is enough of a consensus, or an already re-ordered (“there’s no turning back”) understanding of the facts before us, to declare that a paradigm shift has taken place?

If your answer is “yes,” what is your new understanding of the field? Is it about methods? Understanding students in new ways? Imagining learning in new ways?

If your answer is “no,” what do we need to do differently, or better, or more often? What do we need to stop doing?

It's a conversation worth having.


Rabbi Jim Rogozen

 

 

 

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