Tessa Rapoport and Tobi Kahn-The Inherent Creativity in Jewish Education

What an exciting start to our wonderful work together-over 650 leaders committed to the Jewish future through Jewish day schools. It has been a pleasure to be involved with the planning team for this historic occasion and learning from the remarkable educators who have brought their inspired vision to our collective experience. It is so appropriate that our keynote speakers reflect on the value of creativity in making the Jewish experience meaningful, as it is our task daily to think creatively about the future of Jewish education.

The charge of Tobi Kahn that we must actually see the context of our past in real life artifacts reminds me of my great teacher, Rabbi B. Barry Levy, who challenged us to understand that "the Bible does not exist in a vacuum," and that our task as students of Judaism is to understand the context in which Torah is relayed. And while that meant exploring the world of the ancient near east in which the early Israelites lived, it challenges us today as well to understand how we view Torah in the context of the world around us. That we cannot ignore the reality of a declining connection to the Jewish world and increasing gaps in Jewish knowledge in North America is a challenge to reinvent our institutions as relevant to the current landscape of the Jewish world. This is not a new challenge, simply a new landscape in which we all must work. And it takes creativity to continually reinvent Jewish education for its maximum efficacy.

As Nessa Rapoport says, what does it mean that we teach our students to value equally the opinions of our great teachers, whether their comments are 2000, 1000 or 50 years old. We as Jews view the world through a specific lens which colours our experience, as basically as our understanding of Creation impacts our view of the world. As she says, our students are each creating their own Jewish stories and need to be led along a personally meaningful path to find themselves in our intricate story. This is something we all understand as we try to connect with each student in the way which sparks the desire to seek a personal spiritual path. That is our holy task every day; may we all have the creative inspiration to dedicate ourselves to it despite the obstacles in our path.