“Doesn’t the Torah say that Hashem created the world less than 6,000 years ago? But that doesn’t seem to fit with what modern science says, and I know that when science uses carbon dating and other methods, they aren’t just making it up—it’s real science—so how can Judaism and Torah beat that?”

A version of this question has been asked to me by high school students countless times. Many are bothered by questions they have about evolution, Creation, and the age of the universe and crave sophisticated, coherent answers. For some students, questions can stem from a place of genuine curiosity: they are fully committed to Torah and Judaism but just would like to know the gamut of Orthodox thought on these matters. Other students find these issues deeply troubling and have difficulty placing their full faith in Judaism until they can satisfy their yearning for answers. 

In my experience teaching in yeshiva high schools, I have come across a handful of sources that I find are often useful when addressing these questions, sources that help engage in dialogue while encouraging and reinforcing the authenticity of Torah and our Mesorah. Naturally, some students find these answers fully resolve their questions while others find that this is just a step in the right direction. Either way, I have found that they are excellent for approaching students in conversation and helping them wrestle with issues of belief.

Below are five different sources that address some of these big questions and some of my own thoughts on how they might be used in conversation with students.

The Big Bang and the Ramban 

The Ramban differentiates between the terms bara’, yatzar and ‘asah in Bereishit 1. He defines the word bara’ as creation yesh me‘ayin (ex nihilo). According to the Ramban only the very first thing was created in this way; it is something so small that אין בו ממש אבל הוא כח הממציא, “It has no substance but the energy to create.” From this first creation, Hashem fashioned other things. Ramban tells us that there is no word in Hebrew for this first creation; the best approximation is the term hyle, Aristotle’s term for “matter.” This hyle, claims the Ramban, is what the Torah intends to convey with its term בוהו, found in the second verse in the Torah.

At a time when mankind thought that the world was flat and our solar system was geocentric, the Ramban essentially describes the modern concept of the Big Bang. The Big Bang Theory maintains that “the universe as we know it started with a small singularity” that expanded into the universe as we know it. Essentially, both the Ramban and the Big Bang Theory propose identical universe-originating stories: an infinitesimally microscopic “first thing” that expanded into the vast universe we inhabit today. What Hashem created yesh me‘ayin may be more than simply compatible with modern cosmology; it might predate it by centuries.

The Rambam and Abarbanel on Bereishit

In several places, the Rambam posits that what the Torah portrays at the beginning of Breishit is not intended to be understood literally. Rabbi Natan Slifkin, in his book Challenge of Creation, translates one portion of the introduction to the Rambam's Guide for the Perplexed as follows:

“Now, on the one hand, the subject of Creation is very important, but on the other hand, our ability to understand these concepts is very limited. Therefore, God described these profound concepts, which His Divine wisdom found necessary to communicate to us, using allegories, metaphors and imagery. Our sages put it succinctly: “It is impossible to communicate to man the stupendous immensity of the Creation of the universe. Therefore, the Torah simply says ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’.” Thus, they pointed out that the subject is a deep mystery, as Solomon said, “It is elusive and exceedingly deep; who can discover it?” (Kohelet 7:24). It has been outlined in metaphors so that the masses can understand it according to their mental capacity, while the educated take it in a different sense.”

Rabbi Slifkin quotes a more succinct statement from the Guide: “The account of creation given in Scripture is not, as is generally believed, intended to be literal in all its parts.” He also quotes the Abarbanel in his commentary: 

The Rambam believed that there were not separate creative acts on six days, but rather everything was created on one day, in a single instant [again, in line with the Big Bang Theory]. In the work of Creation, there is mention of “six days” to indicate the different levels of created beings according to their natural hierarchy; not that there were actual days, and nor were there a chronological sequence to that which was created in the acts of Genesis.

The fact that heavy hitters like the Rambam and Abarbanel are “in the camp” that could support a deviation from the classical understanding of the age of the universe being less than 6,000 years old may help many students process the discrepancy they see and feel when they look at their high school science textbooks.

Evolution and the Malbim

Many of the comments made by the Malbim, who happened to be born in the same year as Charles Darwin in 1809, seem to plug in seamlessly to many elements of modern evolutionary theory. The crux of the theory of evolution is that one species evolved from another, and that all life today evolved from a common ancestor. At first glance, this might seen counter to the Torah’s perspective on Creation in Bereishit 1:24, which implies that Hashem created each species as it was—a horse was created as a horse, a dog as a dog and a gazelle as a gazelle.

However, the Malbim does not see this as a contradiction. He says that when Hashem wanted to create life, He essentially partnered with the land itself. The land was given the power to create physical bodies but not the power to breath life into that physicality; that is the arena of the Divine alone. Hence, Hashem’s comment to the water was to enable physical life to teem, but the water alone was incapable of accomplishing this task. Creation of life in earnest needed God Himself. The various species, by contrast, maintains the Malbim, were created yesh miyesh, from preexistent matter, not yesh me‘ayin.

It seems from the outset that the Malbim’s understanding of the spread of life fits, in broad strokes, with Darwinian evolution. But I’d like to argue that upon closer examination we will discover that the Malbim’s comments fit, even snugly, into many of the finer details in evolutionary theory as well. 

First, modern evolutionary theory believes that life did indeed start in the ocean, just as in the Torah. Second, the question of the origin of life, among the murkiest and most difficult for scientists to solve, currently focuses on the development of amino acids in vents in ancient volcanoes. The actual process is still far from understood. Arguably, the Malbim might say that the holes in the theory can be resolved with the terms bara’ or yesh me‘ayin. As for the rest of the process of speciation from a common single-celled ancestor, I think the Malbim and modern science would agree in principle. Science will use terms like “genetic mutation” and the Malbim terms like yesh miyesh, but essentially, they agree that life diversified from one creation.

Chazal on Human Progress

The Gemara (Shabbat 88b) notes that the Torah was concealed for 974 generations before Adam. With 26 generations between Adam and Moshe, the giving of the Torah thus takes place at exactly 1000 generations into Creation. Let’s do some math here. Assuming an average of about 30 years per generation, we find that the 974 generations would equal about 30,000 years of pre-Adam time, to which we would need to add 6,000 years from Adam until today, assuming a literal reading of the Torah and its timetable. That number could easily be stretched if the amount of time between each generation was more than 30 years. 

While this Gemara does seem to lend some credence to a universe more than 6000 years old, I’d like to focus on a different point. According to anthropologists, homo sapiens appeared around 200,000 years ago, but didn't really make much progress for many thousands of years. There is no writing, no cave art, and no clothing until about 50,000 years ago, when burying of the deceased and cave art start to appear.

Biologists estimate that life has existed on Earth for roughly 3.5 billiion years. Archeologists date the first major advancement of human culture to just 50,000 years ago, right around the time when the 974 generations before Adam would have begun. The Gemara alludes to about 30,000 years of human prehistory, and science now corroborates the fact that the first advancements of human culture occur right around then.

The Age of the Universe and Rabbi Yitzchak d’min Akko

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, in his book Immortality, Resurrection, and the Age of the Universe, opens Chapter 1 with a kabbalistic approach, authored in the middle ages, that squarely dates the universe in the ballpark of 15 billion years old, just a stone’s throw away from the 13.8 billion years cosmologists and astrophysicists currently date it at. It requires delving into a bit of Kabbalah, but the math works out in a fairly astonishing way. 

Sefer HaTemunah, attributed to the tanna Rebbi Nechunya ben HaKanah, discusses Divine shmittah cycles, quotes the verse (Tehillim 90:4) comparing one divine day one thousand earthly years. He then cites Sanhedrin 97a, whichstates that the world will exist for six thousand years and be destroyed in the seven thousandth. Sefer HaTemunah notes that the existence/destruction referenced in Sanhedrin is actually a cycle that will be seven times, just as the shmittah cycle is repeated seven times in a yovel. Rabbi Kaplan quotes an opinion by a commentary known as Livnat HaSapir claiming that we are in the seventh such cycle. If each cycle is 7,000 years, and there have been six cycles prior to our own, the world would be 42,000 years old before Adam would have walked. 

Rabbi Yitzchak d’min Akko, a contemporary of the Ramban and renowned kabbalist, argues that when the Sefer HaTemunah tells us about the 42,000 years, they need to be counted as “Divine years,” not “human years.” If oneDivine day = 1,000 earthly years, then a Divine year, at 365.25 days, would be 365.25 x 1,000, or 365,250 years. Factoring in the number of years in the first six shmittah cycles, 42,000 x 365,250 =15.4 billion. Once again, a Jewish author, roughly 800 years ago, using Torah sources, essentially arrived at the same conclusion as physicists in the last century.

Taken together, these sources give depth to conversations around the creation of the world, the age of the universe, and evolution. This article was designed for Jewish educators to help them inspire and reach their students. I share these thoughts so that you may develop your own approach with students, using sources that might resonate with them and help them deal with challenging issues regarding the relationship between science and faith in Hashem.

Rabbi Aaron Horn is the dean of students and the chair of the Gemara and Halacha Department at the Kohelet Yeshiva school in Merion Station, Pennsylvania.

In a recent episode of the podcast On Point, Margaret Heffernan speaks about her latest book, Uncharted: How to Navigate the Future. The book takes the idea of uncertainty head-on, and, given our current reality, it couldn't come at a better time. 

We love imagining the future. Particularly within schools, we spend a lot of time envisioning what's next: mapping out scope and sequence, articulating specific learning goals, preparing students to step-up, graduate and commence new phases of their lives. Heffernan asks: How do we think about the future--and when we do, how often do we get it right? She suggests that even with all the preparation and planning and data available to us, more often than not we get our forecast of the future wrong. 

If you're like me and starting to peer around the corner to what is looking like the (hopeful) end of this pandemic, this observation can be a bit deflating. But all is not lost: Heffernan deeply believes in the power not of planning, but of preparing. While planning imagines a more definite future, like how am I going to get to school in the morning (what is the route, where might there be traffic, do I have extra masks in my car), preparing involves creativity, curiosity and imagination.  

At Prizmah, we recently concluded a JFNA Scenario Planning project for Jewish day schools and yeshivas, I found that creativity, curiosity and imagination was abundantly evident among the 20 participants, including school and field leaders, federation and foundation professionals and other thought partners who embarked on this future-looking exercise. This project was developed by our friends at JFNA and funded through the generosity of the Mandel Foundation. Over the course of two months, using the framework developed by JFNA, we imagined multiple scenarios that Jewish day schools and yeshivas might face and charted a path through the current Covid-19 crisis and into the post-pandemic time horizon. Thescenarios envisioned two factors shaping our future scenarios: To what extent will our ability to gather (social, workplace and civic) be possible? and, What level of financial stability will we have?  

Throughout our time together, we honed the challenges and opportunities of the different scenarios that day schools could face and imagined what our options could be to face them. What should schools and communities start doing, stop doing and keep doing in order to be best prepared for the different scenarios? It was a time to think big and imaginatively, to examine what our schools have done to reach this point, and consider what we should be leaning in to even more. 

One of the key questions addressed was, What are the innovative, creative shifts that schools have made due to the pandemic that you can imagine contributing to longer-term success of Jewish day schools? There were so many solutions and adaptations that schools have made, from online parent teacher conferences and events to rethinking instructional hours, teaching modalities and creative assessment of student learning. School and community leaders have collaborated and coordinated in new ways, and everyone has struggled with the challenges that pandemic learning has wrought on the mental health and wellness of students, teachers, administrators and families. From this past year, what do we want to learn,to keep and to accelerate from the pandemic response to help propel Jewish day schools forward? 

As we concluded our last session together, we drafted the framework for a few key strategic ventures that could help schools prepare for the future. These included:

• Leveraging the open-mindedness of the world and advancing the value proposition of Jewish day schools and yeshivas
• Expanding collaboration and coordination among communities of day schools and with the greater Jewish community
• Increasing capabilities and capacity for pedagogy in Jewish day schools and yeshivas, and investing in the pipeline of teachers and administrators. 

You can follow the entire thought process of the working group, and explore the initial sketches of the strategic ventures here. 

While the intended deliverable for the JFNA Scenario Planning was sharing the process and the creative thinking of the group broadly with field leaders in Jewish day schools and yeshivas in forums like this, we at Prizmah have already begun conversations on multiple aspects of the ventures. One of these consists of an extensive interview and research project to understand what turned the heads of so many families to choose Jewish day school this year. The report will offer schools an essential view into what helped advance their value proposition under Covid. In addition, in partnership with Jewish Education Innovation Challenge (JEIC), Prizmah continues a pilot we started during the summer of 2020, offering fieldwide professional development in online pedagogies and supporting teachers to excel in socially distanced, online, hybrid and concurrent learning environments.

There is so much more to continue to learn, explore and prepare. The JFNA Scenario Planning Project provided a dedicated space to harness the creativity, curiosity and imagination of a wonderful group of field leaders. In sharing these resources with the field, we hope to contribute to the creative conversations already going on in the field, and prepare for the potential scenarios that the future may bring. In the last line of her book, Heffernan provides inspiration for preparing for the months to come: "It doesn't matter where you start, it only matters that you do." 
 

Marc Wolf is Prizmah's VP, Program Strategy and Impact

Fannet Nater, Director of Admissions, Robert M. Beren Academy, Houston

How was the Leveling Up process helpful to you? How might you use it in your school? 
As someone new to the education field, it was extremely eye opening to hear so many different perspectives from various types of faculty and administration from different types of schools. Participants as well as my coach brought up things I had not yet considered, ultimately helping me craft a more strategic plan for my project.

Describe your project. How did you come up with it?
Due to the pandemic, we struggled to find efficient and effective ways to preview the school. Our school medical committee recently approved the return of shadow days on campus, which will give both the school and prospective family a better understanding whether our school is the right fit for the student. Understanding that a shadow day exposes the school for its strengths and weaknesses, the need for trained student ambassadors to accompany students in school shadow days (and beyond) is imperative. We also understand that the student ambassador program needs to be mutually beneficial for the participating students. As a result, we want to incentivize ambassador applicants with leadership training that can help foster a stronger sense of pride in the school and instill a precious skill set in service / interpersonal communication that can be used in college applications and life.

What new realities are you designing for?
Having a trained set of student ambassadors will be helpful regardless of the state of school (in person or virtual). Currently, if the school were to rely on a student to represent the school in any way, we’d be taking a risk. Current students, regardless of how naturally polished they may be, do not have a true concept of how the school should be represented and what is appropriate versus inappropriate to communicate to prospects. As administrators, we also do not have a full grasp of how a student feels about the school. Having a set of trained students ready to represent our school is invaluable for shadow days, virtual meetings and beyond.

How will you know if it’s successful?
I plan on developing surveys for both ambassadors as well as parents whose child participated in shadow days.

Jill Cross, Director of Curriculum and Instruction, and Daniel R. Weiss, Head of School, Bornblum Jewish Community School, Memphis

How was the Leveling Up process helpful to you? How might you use it in your school? 
This year, we have pockets of innovation happening across our school. Many of these pockets are crystallizing now, because of Covid, but the impetus behind them was brewing even before Covid. Leveling Up helped us to map these pockets of innovation, look for the through lines, and develop a plan to capitalize on teacher innovation to meet the needs of our students and the expertise of our faculty. It has allowed us to think about how to better encourage and initiate grassroots change through teacher leadership. At the heart of this is harnessing teacher voices to propel real and innovative change that can last beyond this school year.

Describe your project. How did you come up with it? 
Our project is called “Planting Seeds, Growing Leaders.” Using faculty collaboration meetings, grade level meetings and professional learning to discuss, create buzz and highlight effective instructional strategies already evident in classrooms, we will identify and create a community of teacher-leaders/learners who share expertise, enhance one another’s school experiences and strive for professional growth. We will place an emphasis on core needs that align to our strategic plan by teaching and assessing in multiple modalities and combining joy and rigor. Our project will allow for a support group of teacher leaders/learners in planning for communities of practice (facilitation, professional learning techniques, art of gathering). Our teacher leaders/learners will be provided additional professional learning in areas of expertise such as writer’s workshop, 3-act math and inquiry-based learning.

All faculty will self-select a group that aligns with the topic they personally want or need to explore, and together will create an educator learning calendar with at least one faculty meeting a month devoted to communities of practice. 

What new realities are you designing for? 
As much as this is about designing for the new realities of our students, it is even more about designing for the new realities of our teachers. Covid has opened new practices when it comes to professional learning and has given us the opportunity to reinvent how it looks in school settings. This project will allow us to enhance professional learning and expand professional growth for all educators at our school.

How will you know if it’s successful? 
Our success lies in the follow outputs: 

• Team members are examples of how to be collaborative and reflective. 
• There will be an increase in research-based instructional practices across the school. 
• We’ll see greater faculty engagement by allowing faculty to choose and implement strategies that match their teaching style, their classroom needs and the core needs of the school. 

We are grateful to have been a part of the Leveling Up program, as it has allowed us to think strategically about leveraging the successes we have experienced this school year and will enable us to strengthen our school for years to come.

Fannet Nater, Director of Admissions, Robert M. Beren Academy, Houston

 
Jill Cross, Director of Curriculum and Instruction, and Daniel R. Weiss, Head of School, Bornblum Jewish Community School, Memphis

Ariella Weitzman, Board Member, Hebrew Academy of Nassau County, New York

What was this experience like for you, in your role as lay leader?
This was my first experience working in a think-tank setting with scenario planning guiding the strategizing process. It was simultaneously challenging and exciting. The idea of embodying different personas while existing on the fringe of various scenarios stretched my thinking beyond the immediate day-to-day decision making that has become synonymous with Covid-19. As a lay leader, I was able to offer the perspective of a parent going through the motions and struggles of our current educational environment. 

Furthermore, as a member of the board of directors of my children’s school, I was able to illuminate the governance and financial challenges we are facing as a board. The tricky part was then living in a scenario two to three years from now and breaking down those challenges in a way that would enable us to find opportunities in them. The most rewarding part was hearing the wisdom that was shared by the leaders in the field of education from across the country on our calls.

From the very first meeting to the final session, the ability to share, strategize, and create meaningful takeaways went beyond my wildest expectations. I have been able to engage with my school’s administration, board of education, and board of directors about our planning sessions and solicit feedback for new ideas. I look forward to hearing the ultimate plan that gets rolled out by Prizmah and feel truly honored to have been part of the plan’s inception on this granular level.

What are a couple of your greatest takeaways?
The entire experience was engaging and eye-opening. The creativity that was fostered and the ideas that emerged throughout this process were nothing short of inspiring. I was particularly impressed with the unprecedented collaboration between schools and the possibilities that presents for Jewish education in communities across the US. Some of the strategic ventures that were developed revolve around making schools centers of community and articulating their value proposition in a more global manner.

It was fascinating to see as we fleshed out the “stop, continue, and start” action plans in each scenario that the responses were somewhat consistent across the board. This led to my greatest takeaway - no matter which scenario we end up existing in over the next two years, the strategies that will ultimately get rolled out to Jewish day schools and yeshivas will require a multifaceted approach with a focus on finance, governance and communal wellbeing.

Are there conversations/discussions/exercises from this process that have found their way to your board? To your staff/leadership team/faculty?
I have had the opportunity to speak with the members of both the HANC Board of Education and Board of Directors about the scenario planning process, as well as review the various questions posed by our facilitators. All members agreed that those events which have moved to online platforms successfully, such as parent-teacher conferences, should remain online post pandemic. Several board members were intrigued by the discussion of new online educational tools and the potential to utilize educators from around the country in our programming as well as to personalize learning. 

The idea of a joint medical advisory board across Jewish day schools and yeshivas by region was also well received. In general, the concept of looking beyond putting a band-aid on our daily problems as they arise and implementing well thought out strategies to promote a better academic Jewish environment was an idea everyone I spoke with supported wholeheartedly. Finding financially viable solutions for the tuition crisis and ways to expand our school’s fundraising base were also topics we agreed needed deeper exploration. 

Has your sense of the future of the “field” changed in any way?
It is an interesting time to make changes as we navigate with great uncertainty. Mergers and closures will surely alter the landscape of Jewish day schools and yeshivas, as will the rollout of the Covid vaccine. Now is the time to leverage the open-mindedness of the world and expand the role of Jewish day schools as a center of community. While enrollment in many day schools is up, in many yeshivas it is down. Collaboration and transparency among neighboring schools is a must for sustaining the success of the Jewish day school and yeshiva worlds. Blended and online learning as well as the use of technology for cross-school activities have without a doubt changed the future of the field.

Benjamin Cohen, Head of School, Bialik Hebrew Day School, Toronto

What was this experience like for you, in your role as head of school?
The opportunity to interact with and learn from leaders in the day school field across North America was very rewarding. We can all get a bit myopic, focusing entirely on our own schools/communities and the specific challenges that we face. The scenario planning gave me a chance to break free of my own particular experience and consider the state of Jewish day schools writ large. 

At the same time, I regularly found myself mapping the creative ideas that were shared through the discussions onto the landscape of my own school and community. What made sense for Bialik and Toronto? What did or did not translate well to the Canadian environment? What new ideas could be the seeds for innovation and future growth? These questions have led to the kind of “big picture” thinking that I believe will serve our school well. 

What are a couple of your greatest takeaways?
The pandemic has disturbed the status quo in the JDS world in a huge way. This has meant much stress on the system as a whole, and on all of us as educators and administrators. But COVID has also elicited from us a kind of innovative thinking and mindset. “More of the same” was simply not going to be sufficient; we have needed to rethink our approach and realign our resources to meet the unique challenges that the pandemic presents. Previously finding it only to be a burden, I came to recognize the hidden benefit of the crisis as a stimulus for new and innovative thinking. 

Perhaps the greatest specific takeaway for me related to the “liberation” from our school buildings. The physical separation of our teachers from our students has been perhaps the most negative consequence of the pandemic for our schools; there is no compensating for the richness and complexity of the teacher-student relationship in the classroom. At the same time, though, there have been developments in digital connections that will serve us well even after a return to “normal” classroom-based learning. And the realization that we are not necessarily limited by the walls of our school building during traditional school hours is a profound one. We can reach out to student populations we had not previously reached; strengthen our connections with parents, grandparents and other stakeholders; and enrich the curriculum through connections with myriad sources, including other schools and institutions, both Jewish and secular. 

Are there conversations/discussions/exercises from this process that have found their way to your board? To your staff/leadership team/faculty?
For the time being, we are still largely mired in the very practical and very immediate fiscal and educational needs of our school and our community. But our educational leadership group has already begun to discuss major initiatives for the coming years. By necessity, these priorities will be influenced by our experience of the pandemic, and the innovations born out of the realities of hybrid and fully remote learning models.

At the board level, we are focused on how the pandemic and its echoes will influence our enrollment, annual budgets and donor base—all topics that we processed at length in the scenario-planning discussions. Can we retain our newest students and families that fled a public system unable to cope with COVID’s challenges? Will there be lasting burdens on our budget in the form of PPE, smaller class sizes, and other health-related expenses? And how will the overall economic climate affect our families and their ability to support the school financially? Even if the answers are still unclear, we are at least focused on the right questions. 

Has your sense of the future of the “field” changed in any way?
On the one hand, I believe that there is going to be tremendous pressure to return to “business as usual” once the vaccinations roll out and the pandemic begins to lift. We have all been so negatively affected by the hardships of the last year, and there will be a natural desire to hurry back to pre-COVID modes of operation. 

On the other hand, there are changes on both the micro and macro levels that are likely to endure. On the smaller scale, innovations like parent-teacher conferences on Zoom, and community events on digital platforms, are probably here to stay. Thinking bigger, Jewish day schools may find that there are ways that internet-based remote-learning programs prove beneficial for the long term. Perhaps schools can reach students living outside of traditional catchment areas, either independently or in cooperation with JDSs in other localities.

Finally, the pandemic has made clear how vulnerable our schools are financially to unexpected crises. The need to focus on long-term financial security and sustainability may not be entirely new, but has certainly been reinforced. I suspect that the creation of endowments and affordability programs will get even more attention in the months and the years to come. 

Rebecca Lurie, Head of School, Solomon Schechter Day School, Newton, Massachusetts

What was this experience like for you, in your role as head of school?
I was grateful to have the chance to participate. I think having multiple voices around the "table" and ensuring those roles were each represented in the various breakout groups was critical. Everyone brought a unique perspective that was needed to account for the diversity of views as well as different geographies which also really mattered.

What are a couple of your greatest takeaways?
For me, I am not sure there were truly different outcomes based on the scenarios. What I found so clarifying is that transformational change in the Jewish day school world should happen no matter the outcome of COVID. Maybe it is just about timing that could change the next steps but it is needed in all scenarios.

Are there conversations/discussions/exercises from this process that have found their way to your board? To your staff/leadership team/faculty?
No, not yet. But conversations about transformational change are happening in the Boston area and this just helped clarify things for me.

Has your sense of the future of the “field” changed in any way?
I was grateful that the broader group of people is thinking as big as they are. But what I worry about most is whether anything will come from these discussions as I have felt many times in the past that big and bold ideas are discussed but then I don't see big and bold change as much as I wish I did.

Ariella Weitzman, Board Member, Hebrew Academy of Nassau County, New York

Benjamin Cohen, Head of School, Bialik Hebrew Day School, Toronto

Rebecca Lurie, Head of School, Solomon Schechter Day School, Newton, Massachusetts

So you have this idea.

Maybe this idea has been in the back of my mind for awhile.

Maybe it is new.

Maybe this idea isn’t so much of an idea, but a nagging in your heart that tells you that you are in the right place and the right time and that now is when you could address an issue if you put your mind to it.

So there is this nagging feeling that you want to do this thing, to bring this idea forward, to elevate your school, to bring us up to next level—to accelerate us, to level up.

And now you ask yourself:

How should I design it so it will work?

What do I need to know and do to set it up for success?

You wish:

If only I had the time, the space and the people to step away from it all with me for a little bit, so that I could develop this thing.

If only I had a coach to help guide me.

If only I had access to voices and opinions of people I trust, but maybe whom I do not work with, who could help me see what I am missing and how my ideas may impact areas in the school.

If only I could ask experts out there what they think even before I bring my idea to my team.

If only I could do all of this while still working full time and not traveling.

This was the thinking that the program called Leveling Up was designed to address.

So often, we meet educational leaders who have ideas, small ones that tweak us for good and larger ones that can change a school’s trajectory, and the thing that keeps them from taking their idea and bringing it to fruition is this piece of the puzzle. This “pre-work” step that sets you up for the pitch and the plan. So we, at Prizmah, got together and imagined what we could do to address this place in time for our leaders.

Here is what we came up with:

A three-part process with both synchronous and asynchronous components, elements that harness the power of thinking of experts in the field, and elements that provide the structure and process for each leader to plan in his or her given context and unique situation.

We invited schools to send us teams of two to go through this experience together and help one another design a proposal that would accelerate improvement and excellence in their schools. Each team was given a playbook to take them through the process and help guide them in their thinking. The playbook included a personal reflection sheet, a self-assessing survey of the strengths of the school and worksheets to help leaders focus their goals based on the school’s values and mission. The other key element of our program was creating small groups of educational leaders who would establish trust and offer one another suggestions, ways of approaching challenges, resources and unique insight and perspective.

It took us one three-hour session to kick the program off, explain the process, and establish our groups of trust, which we called PBOT: Personal Board of Trustees.

Once the first synchronous piece was done, each participant had nine days to work on their playbooks and write a plan. During this time, each team received a coaching call, and this became one of the highlights and transformational points of the experience.

Questions from coaches:

Tell me about your why.

How do you know this is a need?

How will you know you succeeded?

What may stand in your way?

What strengths do you and the school already have?

Who can you bring on board?

What might it take for you to be successful?

During the calls, coaches helped each person crystallize his or her goals and proposal so it was clear and concise. Each participant was asked to prepare slides to share when we would meet synchronously again, and on the slides, each person would share basic background information about the school, the goals of the program, the needs it hoped to meet and the ways we might measure your success. Each participant would then ask the group of educational leaders in his or her group to reflect on a specific question or aspect of the plan they want help thinking through. This protocol was followed for each person in each of the PBOT groups.

During the coaching calls, teams from the school had time set aside, with the help of an unbiased voice, to formulate their goals clearly and come up with their why and their focus. When we came together again to share our ideas in our small groups, we followed a standard protocol to present and offer feedback.

The teams left their sessions with the following:

A more clear and focused plan

A greater sensitivity and understanding of how their topic, along with others, impacts many areas in the school

Insight and wisdom about their own possible blind spots

A group of colleagues in the field they can reach out to in the future 

A model for planning that they can bring to their schools and communities

Change is difficult. We reviewed classic change theory approaches (see slides), of which there are many that are valid and exciting. One thing is clear: when there is a change, it must be rooted in values and mission in order to take root and elevate.

The program design presented a new challenge for us at team Prizmah. On the one hand, many aspects of this design were familiar to us, like workshops, webinars, asynchronous programs and even the design of the playbook mimicked a high level worksheet. All of the pieces alone have been done before, but this unique combination of elements was a first for us and for many in the field. We want to thank the folks who participated in trusting us with this new model.

The many modalities, the many voices and the many exciting ideas all converged together to accelerate changes and improvement in thinking, planning, design and program that will surely help us to “level up.” We hope that schools will use this model and the modalities we offered to accelerate changes in their schools and communities.

Rachel Dratch is Prizmah’s director of educational innovation.

In Democracy in Education, John Dewey is unequivocal about the role of education within a functioning society. “Without [the] communication of ideals, hopes, expectations, standards, opinions, from those members of society who are passing out of the group life to those who are coming into it,” Dewey states, “social life could not survive.”

For society to exist and to thrive, we have to successfully pass our most cherished values to the next generation. We can never take for granted that this process happens naturally. We cannot leave it to chance. It is our profound obligation to the next generation. It is our legacy.

Last week, we received a collective wake-up call. We got a taste of what can happen if, as a nation, we fail to communicate the core of our democratic ideals, and the hopes and expectations we have for how our democracy should function. As we witnessed frightening scenes playing out in our nation’s capital, we found ourselves struggling with many important questions. 

Who are we as a country? Will our nation get through this? Are the fissures in our public life able to be healed? Is our democracy strong enough to rebuild trust across the divides? What does our society need at this moment?

As educators, we ask ourselves a whole other set of challenging and nuanced questions. What is our professional role in this moment? When is it our job to give just the facts, and at what point is it our responsibility to share our moral beliefs? How do we best educate young people for healthy civic engagement? What is our role in ensuring that the voters, leaders and activists of the future have the skills they need to communicate and build trust across differences?

Sometimes the questions are more important than the precise answers. 

We understand as American educators that we hold the future of American democracy in our hands, so these questions have to be on our minds at all times. These are not just questions for current events and history lessons, but questions for playground conflicts, science lessons and Torah study. Each time we help a child listen to someone they don’t agree with, each time we support a student to articulate their thoughts in a calm and clear way, each time we allow for multiple paths to solve a math problem, each time we encourage perspective taking, each time we celebrate the holy arguments between our Torah sages—each time we make an intentional pedagogic move to strengthen critical thinking, empathy, curiosity and so many more essential skills—we are laying the foundation for a functioning democracy.

Educators in Jewish schools are particularly well-equipped to lay this foundation. As the inheritors of our ancient tradition of respectful debate, we know exactly what it looks like to argue for the sake of heaven. We know that this means putting truth above ego, and it involves an intentional balancing of the needs of the individual with the wellbeing of the social structure. We teach our students to grapple with ancient legal texts and to analyze logical arguments, and as we do so we emphasize both head and heart, making sure that our students understand the underlying ethical and spiritual values that inform differing opinions. 

We know what it sounds like to listen with an open mind. When we pair our students for havruta learning, we expect to see a meaningful exchange of ideas that pushes each student’s thinking towards a deeper understanding of the text. We celebrate when these discussions are intense and impassioned while remaining respectful. We want our students to articulate ideas that are grounded in evidence, and we want them to value the ideas of another, listening with curiosity, asking follow-up questions and checking for understanding.

These are Jewish learning skills, but they are also powerful democratic engagement skills. We know how to lay the foundation for a civic society. We have been doing it for thousands of years.

We also know what it looks like when these skills fall out of use. We know the cost a society pays when baseless hatred undermines our Torah values of respect and responsibility for the other. And our painful history has taught us what happens when critical thinking and empathy are sacrificed for demagoguery. 

In this vulnerable national moment we, the educators of America, must focus on the facts and do our best to help our students feel safe and calm. And every day, for all the days to come, we must redouble our efforts, continuing to ask ourselves nuanced questions that bring us back to the purpose of our work. As Jewish educators and as American educators, we must do all we can to nurture the mindsets and skills that our future democracy depends on.

Tania Schweig is the head of school at the Oakland Hebrew Day School in the Bay Area.

This school year, Hillel Torah Day School is participating in JUF’s Partnership Together Chicago, Kiryat-gat, Lachish Shafir, a program of the Jewish Agency for Israel that links communities in the Diaspora with communities in Israel. 

Through this program, a pilot group of sixth grade students from Hillel Torah, led by Judaic studies teacher Lior Kakon, will “twin” with sixth grade Israeli students from Even Shmuel, a community located in the Negev. In this year-long partnership, the students from each community will get to know one another and learn about life in the other’s community. 

Hillel Torah students will speak in Hebrew and Even Shmuel students will speak in English. Mrs. Kakon has been working closely with teachers from Even Shmuel to build lessons that integrate Hillel Torah’s academic goals of improving Ivrit skills and the cultural goals of a commitment and connection to Medinat Yisrael and learning about Israel on a personal level. The student meetings will begin in January. 

This partnership also aligns with Hillel Torah’s school theme this year of Connect the Dots מחוברים ,providing students with an even stronger connection to Israel.

Rabbi Menachem Linzer currently serves as the head of school/principal at the Hillel Torah North Suburban Day School in Skokie, Illinois. Previously, he served as associate principal at the SAR Academy in Riverdale, New York, and as a rebbe, advisor and Israel programs coordinator at the Ramaz High School. Menachem graduated with a BA in Physics from Yeshiva College and a master of science in secondary education from the Azrieli Graduate School of Jewish Education. He studied for a number of years in yeshivot in Israel including Yeshivat Har Etzion, Yeshivat Sha'alvim and at the Gruss Kollel, and he received his smichah from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.

Rockwern Academy serves toddlers through sixth graders (and in some years seventh and eighth graders), and our enrollment is 215 this year. Founded in 1952, Rockwern is a community day school and the only non-Orthodox Jewish day school in Cincinnati. 

At Rockwern, tuition increased 85% from 2002 to 2012, and enrollment precipitously declined during that time. As a result, the school concluded that affordability had likely become a major factor in people’s enrollment decisions. The board, in partnership with our most generous funder, the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati, developed and implemented a plan for addressing affordability, which included several grants and discounts for families. Rockwern has the tremendous good fortune of being funded by the Foundation, which has long recognized the value of Jewish day school education.

Fast forward to 2021, and Rockwern’s tuition of $14,300 is quite reasonable, as it is generously subsidized by our funders and is intentionally low in order to compete with the high quality free public schools that surround us. Also, many families had been receiving additional significant discounts that were implemented as part of the affordability initiative (discounts in kindergarten, first and second grade, multichild discounts, new family discounts, and Jewish professional discounts). However, in the last three years, we have gradually moved away from many of these discounts, because we began to recognize that we were subsidizing many families who did not necessarily need the additional discounts they were receiving. 

Despite eliminating most of our significant discounts, the ones we have retained are for our employees and for children of Jewish professionals. We do this because we believe that by making a Jewish day school education more affordable to Jewish professionals, it will increase the number of their children who attend, increase enrollment from members of the Jewish community who are influenced by Jewish professionals, and help to create stronger relationships between our school, local synagogues and partner organizations. 

Brian Jaffee, executive director of the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati, shared, “When we launched this program in partnership with Rockwern, there were few, if any, rabbis in Cincinnati sending their own children to day school. Today, almost all of the rabbis with school-age children send them to Rockwern. We know that this enhances both the school community and also the broader Cincinnati Jewish community. We are proud to support our Jewish professionals in Cincinnati while simultaneously supporting our community day school.” 

Launched in 2012, the Jewish professional discount started as 50% and shifted to a 40% discount in 2018. This year, 36 students from 20 families are benefitting from this discount, up from 17 students and 12 families in 2015. 

As Rockwern has worked to strengthen the relationship between the day school and congregations, having the children of clergy enrolled in our school has helped to create synergies with the congregations, and we believe it has strengthened enrollment as rabbis can speak to their own communities about being parents in our school. For example, this year, for the first time, Rockwern hosted an online Hanukkah celebration in partnership with all local Reform, Conservative and Modern Orthodox congregations, further building on the relationships formed with clergy at those synagogues.

Rabbi Miriam Terlinchamp of Temple Sholom explained, “We never really imagined ourselves as a Jewish day school family. My husband was not raised Jewish, we both attended public schools, and we currently live in an excellent school district. But when we had our first child and heard about the discount for Jewish professionals at Rockwern, we were eager to learn more about the school. It has been a wonderful experience for our family, and I am grateful to Rockwern and Cincinnati’s Jewish community for encouraging us to send our children to Jewish day school. While my children could get a wonderful and free education in public school, only at Rockwern can they get a loving community that truly nurtures their spirits along with their minds.”

When the discount program was launched, there were not a lot of restrictions in place. Now, we offer the reduced tuition only to professionals who work at least 20 hours in the Jewish community, and we prorate the discount for those who work between 20-40 hours a week. We have also clarified that if a Jewish professional’s employment status changes, there may be a change to their tuition at Rockwern. We are thrilled that both clergy and non-clergy Jewish professionals participate in this program.

While some number of our community’s Jewish professionals would likely send their children to Rockwern even without the discount, we believe for others it strongly influences their choice for day school. And for those who would attend anyway, it creates goodwill and stronger relationships.

Rabbi Laura Baum is currently the head of school at Rockwern Academy in Cincinnati.  Prior to that, she served as the Associate Vice President of Learning and Engagement at Combined Jewish Philanthropies in Boston, and from 2008-2015 she was a rabbi at Congregation Beth Adam in Cincinnati and founded OurJewishCommunity.org, an online synagogue with a global reach.  She is an alumna of the Wexner Field Fellowship and the Rabbis Without Borders Fellowship and was educated at Yale, Hebrew Union College, and Xavier University (where she earned an MBA).

By Jonathan Posner

Making Jewish day school education more affordable is a long-standing goal shared by day schools of all stripes across the US and Canada. In 2016, the Julia and Henry Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Education (CJE) at the Toronto Jewish Federation published a report describing a wide range of alternative tuition models and an index which documented the various schools and communities that had implemented an alternative tuition model.

Schools that implemented an alternative tuition program in the earlier part of the decade had primary goals of attracting new students and increasing enrollment. At the end of the decade, program goals emphasize affordability for all of a school’s families, new and existing. Today about one-third of all schools in Prizmah’s network offer some type of alternative tuition program, and we are cautiously optimistic that, under the right circumstances, alternative tuition models can improve affordability and attract new families. 

Our optimism is baked in the findings of a survey we conducted as a follow up to the 2016 report. We sought to gain a better understanding of the field and of factors influencing schools’ choices about alternative tuition models. In turn, we hoped our findings would help us better guide day schools through the process of adopting or adapting an alternative tuition program to suit their school’s needs. 

Eighteen schools across the US and Canada responded to our survey, representing major metropolitan areas, along with smaller and mid-sized communities. We bolstered our survey’s findings by interviewing leaders of schools with highly effective alternative tuition programs. While not conclusive, our survey’s results gave more clarity to the contexts in which alternative tuition models are likely to be used, what challenges schools face, and what makes for a successful tuition program. Overall, the latest generation of alternative tuition programs is more intentional and data-oriented than the first generation captured in the Toronto report.

Among respondents, the most popular and common types of alternative tuition programs were middle income or income cap programs, tuition discounts for Jewish communal professionals, and indexed or flexible tuition. Interviews with schools with middle income or income cap programs suggest that anywhere from 10% to 30%  percent of a school’s families typically participate in the program. Successful models include the Hebrew Academy of Montreal, as part of a community-wide cap program; the Charlotte Jewish Day School, and the Ottawa Jewish Day School. Prizmah is working with several additional schools that are expected to announce middle-income programs shortly.. 

Regarding discounts for Jewish communal professionals, interviews suggest that programs offering discounts of 40 percent or more are highly effective at drawing new families into schools. Schools with such programs reported about 10%- to 20% of their families benefit from a communal professional discount. Many schools began by offering steep discounts of up to 40%-50%, though as the popularity of those programs increased and enrollment grew, the discounts were often adjusted down to just 25%  or 30% off full tuition. This type of alternative tuition program may be one of the simpler programs to adjust.

Most responding schools offer more than one alternative tuition programs. The combination of programs differs by school and by region, though many programs seem to share common goals of increased affordability, attracting new students and student retention. 

External factors may cause a school to prefer one mix of alternative tuition programs over another, including the number of Jewish schools available in a certain community, competition with high quality secular private or public schools, the support or wishes of a particular donor and the backing of a strong local Jewish federation. Most schools with middle income or indexed tuition programs do this without donor support. Certain schools offer tuition reductions across all grade levels, which likely also means a smaller pool of funds available for need-based aid. These programs are significantly, if not fully, donor-supported or leverage a Jewish federation for backing. Several schools with schoolwide tuition reductions, including TannenbaumCHAT and New England Jewish Academy, are showing strong early results. 

Some schools are also transitioning from an earlier, more experimental phase of an alternative program to a new phase. TannenbaumCHAT just introduced a middle-income program set to begin in the 2022-23 school year that is billed as an “add-on” to its overall tuition reduction. 

Results among respondents were mixed. Most schools felt programs were still too new to fully evaluate their results. Schools with definitive results formed a minority of respondents. Discounts for Jewish communal professionals required the greatest amount of program adjustment since their initial implementation at each school, while more comprehensive programs required less adjustment over time. Discounts for communal professionals were effective in attracting new students and targeting specific demographics, while middle income and cap programs over time appear effective at increasing or stabilizing enrollment.

Across the field, schools are experimenting with new models and learning more about their effectiveness in achieving their primary goals. The negative financial ramifications of COVID-19 appear to be a further catalyst to the exploration of new tuition models. Prizmah would be delighted to work with you and your school or your community of schools as you consider whether one or more of these tuition models is right for you.

Jonathan Posner is a graduating rabbinical student and master's candidate in Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. He is interning with Prizmah as part of a capstone project for his master's degree and focuses primarily on catalyzing resources, educational innovation, and data analytics to help Prizmah schools operate more effectively and do what they do best - educate our Jewish youth for a new age and securing a Jewish future.