Rabbi Jim: Still Learning

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 conti...

In a season 6 episode of the TV show M*A*S*H ( Tea and Empathy ) a British officer (Major Ross) visits his wounded soldiers in the hospital, telling them they are needed back in the war. He loudly criticizes the doctors for “molly-coddling” his men, and insists they are ready to get back to the fighting. Later in the episode he returns and the doctors see him listening while his smiling soldiers read letters from home. When asked about his change in approach, Major Ross explains:   “If I come in here breathing fire they realize they’re going to be all right….my men know I wouldn’t shout at them unless they knew I expected them to get well.   They believed it because I believed it.” Before COVID, schools addressed classroom management issues using a variety of approaches, based on their understanding of children and how they function in school settings. Whether it was the way classroom culture and learning were constructed, or by understanding individual student strengths, le...

  As a child, if I ever said I didn’t like something my mom made for dinner, she would reply, “That’s okay; you just don’t know what’s good,” and then point to the cereal cabinet. While one could argue whether the quality and taste of food could be objectively measured, her point was that I would eventually learn what was “good”- not just in food, but in other areas of life as well. (Full disclosure: the foods I hated back then, such as stuffed cabbage, are now my favorites!) I’ve been thinking a lot about this concept and how it applies to schools.  Here’s a common scenario: Teachers have just read the weekly staff memo and they are up in arms about something the administration decided on, without teacher input. They look at one another and, in unison, shout, “What were they thinking?!” or “Why did they think that was okay?!” The administrators, of course, think the teachers just don’t get it. With such a polarity of views, it’s possible that each side (perhaps using other wo...

My Daughter's Berkeley Minyan Rotation - A Different View of Millennial Engagement My daughter lives in Berkeley, California (yes, that Berkeley, the one where hippies used to, and some still do, roam). Over a couple of visits during her grad school years, I witnessed a thriving Jewish life in the neighborhoods surrounding the campus. My daughter’s little  shtetl  hosts a variety of  shuls  and  minyanim  that attract a real mix of participants, some connected to the university, most not.     To get a sense of Jewish life in her neighborhood, I’ve accompanied her to services at a few of the locations on her regular  Shabbat  rotation:  Netivot Shalom (a Conservative synagogue), Congregation Beth Israel (an Orthodox synagogue), Minyan Dafna (a traditional egalitarian independent  minyan , no Rabbi), and Urban Adamah (an educational farm and community center).     As a Jewish educator and Rabbi, I cannot attend a  shul  or  minyan  without stepping out of my role as a ...