Daniel Held

Executive Director - CJE

Teaching to Lead

My children are deeply immersed in Jewish education.  They go to day school and Jewish summer camp.  They read PJ Library books, go to synagogue and are active in a youth movement.  We immerse them in these experiences because we want to empower them to have meaningful Jewish lives: To have the knowledge, skills, attitude and aptitude to choose a Jewish pathway for themselves and their eventual families. 

Educational goals are typically arrived at by answering three questions:  What do we want youth to know, what do we want them to value, and what do we want them to do? Know, Value, Do, are the cornerstones of developing strong Jewish identities.  While the particulars of each category differ from school to school, camp to camp, synagogue to synagogue, and family to family, taken together they are the building blocks of empowering children toward lives imbued with personal Jewish meaning.

Jewish education, however, not only shaped the individual learner, but empowers the child to become a community volunteers and leaders.   Education emboldens children to have a ripple effect that stretches beyond themselves and impacts the broader community.

We do this in four ways.

First, we offer role models.  Our reading of the biblical stories of Abraham, Miriam and Moses and others; our study of Zionism, including leaders like Herzl and Golda Meir; our exploration of rabbinic works and contemporary Jewish thought tackling challenging issues offer images of leadership, their ingenuity and struggle. We present children with volunteers, like those featured today, to demonstrate the value of communal leadership

Second, we ask kids to dream.  We help them develop images of the world they want to create, the change they want to enact, and the visions they want to bring to life.  We encourage their creativity and cultivate their passions to volunteer and address the communal issues that are relevant to them.

Third, we build support.  We create the structures to empower leadership.  Mentoring and coaching, supplies and resources.  Sometimes this comes through simple words of encouragement from parents or teachers, sometimes through structured leadership programs like student council or the Jewish Teen Board and often through volunteer opportunities in the Jewish community.  We create the scaffolding that enables kids to exercise leadership.   

Finally, we practice. Leadership is iterative.  At schools, at camps, at Hillel and in volunteer roles, we hone leadership skills in supportive environments learning, succeeding, failing, re-inventing and trying again.  We creative volunteer opportunities to immerse youth in the community, it’s challenges and opportunities. In these crucibles of leadership development we are able to experiment and hone leadership skills which we’ll use again and again.

Like thousands of others, I send my kids to Jewish educational programs not only because it will inform their own Jewish identity, but because these programs empower them to become the next generation of volunteers for our community.

The Talmud (mas Berachot 64a) writes אַל תִּקְרֵי בָּנָיִךְ. אֶלָּא בּונָיִךְ. “Read not banayich ‘your children’, but bonayich  ‘your builders’.  Our children become the builders of tomorrow by observing and learning from the volunteer leaders of today.  How blessed we are to live in a community ripe with volunteers who have the knowledge, skills, attitude, aptitude and agency to lead us today and the foresight to train the next generations of volunteers to guide us into the future.