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Dr. Miriam is the director of the school of education at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and Incoming CEO of Builders of Jewish Education, Los Angeles. You can explore her new framework for teaching and learning Jewish creativity more deeply in “Jewish Creativity: An Essential Aspiration for Jewish Education,”  Access Stern’s other writings on Jewish creativity, education and leadership here

Resilience Through Creativity to Strengthen Educational Excellence

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For millennia, Jews have responded creatively to their circumstances. After destruction, renewal. In the face of denial of the Jewish historical experience, insistence on memory. Moving and migrating necessitated reinventing and rebuilding. Reading, translating, reinterpreting, and imagining have been strategies for preservation, adaptation, and transformation over time. Our creativity is at the core of our resilience.

As the plates of the earth seem to be shifting beneath our feet, we feel the vibrations of millennia of quakes. We may dream of a pause, a breath of steadiness, knowing full well that the tremors will undoubtedly continue. How can we design and deliver Jewish education that empowers and enables us to navigate the gusty winds of time creatively, to construct a hopeful future?

Our schools should emphasize teaching and learning Jewish creativity, a process of generating chiddushim, novel and valuable ideas and offerings.  By creativity, I don’t necessarily mean incorporating more art projects per se, although the arts are an important way to awaken new perspectives, modes of expression, and imagination. Through a variety of subject matter, from Jewish studies to mathematics, schools can prioritize a framework of habits of creative process and generativity. I summarize this framework in four habits: interpreting, curating, making, and collaborating.

Every Jewish student needs to learn to interpret Jewish wisdom to live a full Jewish life in the present; to curate their own story of what it means to be a Jew; to become creators of their world; and to collaborate to renew Judaism and Jewish communities. Creativity is a means to keep Jewish history alive, live fully in the present, and insist on a future full of light in the face of darkness, distress, and division.