Over the last 20-plus years, The Covenant Foundation has received thousands of inquiries about how we make funding decisions and how the results of our grants bear out in the field. We’ve compiled data culled from conversations with hundreds of grantees and we’ve learned much about the behaviors and preferences of grantee organizations. But there is one repeated trend we’ve noticed: a preference for large grants over small. In fact, when the granting scope is described, most institutions tend to go for the largest grant amount over the longest period of time.

However, we have also found—through our research, outgoing interviews with grantees and results of grant success over the past eight years—that it is not unusual for organizations to do much better with a smaller short-term grant.

In 2007, The Covenant Foundation introduced a new category of smaller-scale grants, called Ignition Grants, which provide up to $20,000 of funding for a single year. As the name suggests, these “Ignition Grants” are intended to spark innovation and to allow organizations to “explore new, untested ideas or determine how established practices can become even more effective.” Since the stakes are not as high as in the case of larger grants, this type of grant allows an organization to test the waters.

Consider:

  • Smaller grants can begin a conversation
  • Smaller grants lower the risk and allow dreams to grow

As one Covenant grantee put it, “[T]he grant provided the incentive/‘ignition’ for us to think through the program and become more reflective. It helped us formalize the program and take it to the next level. It was mission specific programming-a growth experience for our organization.”

Seth Godin, an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age, speaks about testing the waters this way:

“Perhaps it's better to commit to wading instead. When you do a small thing, when you finish it, polish it, put it into the world, you've made something. You've committed and you've finished.

And then you can do it again, but louder. And larger. It's easy to be afraid of taking a plunge, because, after all, plunging is dangerous. And the fear is a safe way to do nothing at all.

Wading, on the other hand, gets under the radar. It gives you a chance to begin.”

More on What We’ve Learned

First and foremost, a program’s success depends on educators who believe that Jewish education is a positive force in changing times. These people are situated on the cutting edge of Jewish communal life, and are passionate practitioner activists who do not accept the status quo. Their actions show that they are ready to take risks, to push back boundaries, and to boldly seek out and experiment with new possibilities. The most successful projects are conceived by visionaries who translate their dreams into realities, or who have the wisdom to surround themselves with a capable team that can do so. Both parts of the equation, vision and implementation, are necessary.

We’ve also learned that programs cannot succeed in isolation, but are dependent on networks, collaborations, and community support. Basically, people support what they help to create. As a result, gathering a coalition of supporters to be part of the process ensures that there are supporters as the project evolves, and makes the task of recruitment far easier. Creating change in an organization or community, while challenging, can be accomplished through a combination of effort, support, and inspiration, leading to constant discovery and celebrating it.

Tamara Ingram, Group Executive Vice President at Grey Group puts it this way:

“Today’s world is amoebic, biological, organic. It’s less about the perfect solution than about constant discovery.”

When Does a Gift Become a Burden?

The question of when a gift becomes a burden is central during the Covenant Foundation grant selection process.

We have watched in dismay as projects and initiatives that showed great promise eventually fizzled and in some cases even caused strife within an institution. The lesson: be careful what you wish for—receiving a grant, large or small, raises the stakes on success because not only are there dollars at risk, but also the currency of self-esteem and reputation.

This Foundation assesses not just a project’s merit, viability, and durability, but also the ability of the environment to support it—and we ask potential grantees to do the same. We ask several questions to help uncover the most potentially successful partnerships:

  • Is the project mission aligned with its host institution, and does the host institution have enough in the organization to support it?
  • Is there truly a partnership between the idea champion (meshugah l’davar) and the leadership of the institution?
  • Can an organization institute a new and/or exciting program without exhausting the staff, or diminishing the works of others?
  • Is it possible to create a team that can carry on the work beyond the life of the grant even if an entire staff or group of teachers may not be ready or interested in the new work?

Grant recipients, many of whom have very limited previous grant project experience, not only have to be willing to learn about how to propose doable projects in a clear and concise manner, and how to articulate and craft measurable goals, but also must learn how to administer and implement their projects in the context of ongoing institutional work while simultaneously monitoring and documenting their accomplishments.

In many instances institutions are much more facile at managing these smaller grants.

Regardless of the scope or breadth of a project, turbulence in the host institution inevitably stresses a project; when there are staff changes and the founding visionaries leave, projects founder; when practical implementers are unavailable, most times very promising ideas cannot get off the ground.

A final question:

When all is said and done, is the risk of getting a grant worth the time, effort, and the possibility of failure?

As another Covenant grantee put it:

“Getting a grant gave me a greater sense of purpose. It helped me understand that I wasn’t acting in a vacuum. That an organization outside of my institution was endorsing my work drove home that I was doing something for the greater good for my world, a greater sense of Tikkun Olam, as opposed to ‘my little olam.’”

Returning to Seth Godin once again: “The tiny cost of failure...is dwarfed by the huge cost of not trying.”

Dreams fade away because we can’t tolerate the short-term pain necessary to get to our long-term goals.

Delighting a few with an idea worth spreading is more valuable than ever before

By Harlene Winnick Appelman, for The Covenant Foundation

Sam Ball, co-Founder and Director of Citizen Film in San Francisco, has long had a keen interest in the ways in which film and new media can encourage people - particularly teens and young adults -to explore their religious, ethnic, and social identities. In 2002, The Covenant Foundation funded The New Jewish Filmmaker Project, in which more than 50 emerging Jewish storytellers/filmmakers ages 15 to 25 collaborated with a team of documentarians to create short films based on their personal stories. The project gained local, national, and international exposure through appearances on public television, screenings at more than 1,000 high schools across the country, and distribution through Jewish and secular film festivals, Jewish museums, libraries, and community centers. In all, these new films have been viewed by over 100,000 people.

More recently, Citizen Film joined with Columbia University to launch The New Media in Jewish Studies Initiative, which helps Judaic Studies professors incorporate new media tools and digital storytelling into their teaching, student assignments, and scholarship. The project was launched with a Covenant Ignition Grant, and received additional funding from the Jim Joseph Foundation. During the initial pilot period, professors Deborah Dash Moore at the University of Michigan and Noam Pianko at the University of Washington developed plans to reinvent two of their courses using new media and digital storytelling. Sam Ball recently spoke with The Covenant Foundation about the impact that teaching with digital media had on the professors and their students, and the broader impact he thinks such projects can have on Jewish education and the wider Jewish community.

What was the inspiration for The New Media in Jewish Studies Initiative?

 

Jewish studies has lagged behind a lot of humanities disciplines in embracing the idea that scholarship and teaching that uses traditional textual methods isn’t really serving the needs of people in undergraduate programs today. We’re in the middle of a cultural turn towards using different forms of media as text and as part of an academic learning experience. Nobody really knows yet where we are in this turn or where it is headed; we just know that we’re in this turn. A number of campuses are starting to recognize and invest in that cultural turn. However, Jewish studies was not one of those humanities fields that had embraced new media and non-traditional texts as a way to teach, research, and encourage students to do something with their research.

How would you define “new media?”

When we approached The Covenant Foundation, we originally used the term “digital storytelling,” but we found that the term did not fully encompass the range of projects we were doing. For example, the Facebook photography project we did around the sukkah is new media in the sense that it’s a form of creativity that would not have been possible prior to Instagram. So in this case it’s an Instagram project that’s able to migrate into different digital forms. I’m not entirely comfortable with the term “new media,” but it’s a term that people understand more easily when we talk about the work that we’re doing.

The fun thing about the Jewish Studies project is that we’ve been able to work with a wide range of people in terms of the focus of their research, what they’re interested in teaching, and their technological skill level. Our early theory going into this project was that people have more media skills than they realize; it’s just such a part of our culture, working and communicating online. So it doesn’t take a high level of technical aptitude to create something that has a high level of content interest and communication richness.

What are some examples of the work that’s been done through this project?

One project that’s been very successful is a collaboration we started with Deborah Dash Moore at the University of Michigan, where she had been teaching a traditional course on the history of Jewish photographers in the 20th Century. This is one of several examples where we’ve taken an existing course and completely reimagined it as a new media production course. For example, at the end of the year, each student had to create a portfolio about a particular body of work - such as “The Americans” by Robert Frank - by doing a series of creative exercises. The students had to create a plan for taking pictures inspired by Robert Frank. They also had to ask themselves what speaks to them about Frank’s work, what they know from researching his work about his process, what he was doing culturally, and how his Jewish heritage might have played into how he saw the world and used photography to make sense of and act upon that world. Each student chose a different photographer; the students then found ways to explore their own personal experience through the reading they’d done and the inspiration of the photographer they had chosen. They came up with some really creative ways to a) take pictures and b) use their picture-taking process to make sense of the current moment and how it was impacted by this iconic work that took place primarily by American Jewish photographers in the 20th century.

The creative projects are a way for students to synthesize the reading, and also to get them to work closely with each other. The idea of working with a colleague is built into the production plan. Once the work is complete, it’s shared so that there’s engagement with the audience. One of the activities we designed for this project was shown in the Bay Area by the Contemporary Jewish Museum. How exciting that an activity developed for freshmen at the University of Michigan is completed by more than 200 students in the Bay Area because they came into contact with it at a photography exhibition. That was a good example of the ways in which the seamlessness of new media can be harnessed to take a good idea and adapt it to a new context.

Initially, Professor Moore did not think of herself as a New Media practitioner. However, we pointed out to her that she had designed a well thought out website for the Frankel Institute at the University of Michigan, so she was clearly thinking about this culture in an organized way with a mission and goals in mind. The same skills that allowed her= to be successful as a Program Director, a scholar, and a public intellectual are actually the skills that can be applied to new media. We also told her that we’re much more interested in those collaboration skills than we are in the ability to write code. Rather than trying to invent new platforms or new tools, we’re trying to harness what’s already ubiquitous within the culture and put that to use in an academic setting. Another big goal of this project going forward is to try to build bridges between the academy and community by creating work that’s in a lingua franca as opposed to something that only has utility within the four walls of the academy.

Another example is Noam Pianko, the Director of Judaic Studies at the University of Washington, who turned a traditional Jewish American History survey course into a media production course. In a traditional survey course, students show that they’ve understood history chronologically. We worked with Noam to make this class story-based; each student is assigned a story that’s a way into all of the historical issues that are being explored in the class. So the students essentially do the same reading, but they also have the opportunity to delve into historical people, most of whom were ordinary people living in Seattle. By telling the stories of those ordinary people, the students develop a sense of the relationship between these larger historical and cultural forces and what it meant to live at that time. I think that history becomes a lot more powerful and interesting because of that.

Again, in terms of connecting the academy to the community, that project received a Jewish Federation grant, and the Pacific Northwest Jewish Archive is a partner. Our goal is to take this archive that had been sort of languishing, with very few people looking at it, and start to digitize it and make sense of it by remixing it. Doing so gives the students the sense of contributing to a larger culture rather than just doing assignments that are turned in for a grade.

What are your future plans for this project and other similar projects?

There are three ways that we’d like to deepen and expand the work. One is to build on those projects that create bridges between the academy and the community. So, for example, we would continue working with Deborah and expand the impact in a Phase II by finding more institutional partners, thereby creating more opportunities to collaborate to push student work out. We would also work closely with Deborah to translate her own ideas into these visual forms, since a project about photographers inherently lends itself to online expression where there’s interactivity between images and words. Taking the four or five most successful projects and building on them to help the scholar find a voice through new media is quite exciting.

A second way is to continue building the community of scholars and to start having each person be an ambassador within his or her subfield of Judaic Studies. We want to give historians, like Deborah and Noam, more of a profile as public intellectuals; perhaps more importantly, we want to give a broader profile to their work, so that we move beyond scholarship just for scholars. In addition, because they constantly work with other historians, we want to find ways to seed projects in other history departments, those that are just waiting for the phone to ring because they’re set up to help faculty embrace new media tools. The resources exist within the university, so we want to position Jewish studies at the forefront to use those resources.

Finally, we’re interested in getting graduate students involved in new media production and teaching, so that we start to permeate Jewish studies departments. Most of the people who get doctorates in Judaic Studies don’t go on to become Jewish studies professors. Instead, a significant percentage of them wind up as cultural programmers at Jewish institutions, who inherently have roles as ambassadors to the community. Therefore, by training graduate students, we hope to infuse the idea that there’s creative work to be done using new media tools that can also have a high level of Jewish content.

Any final thoughts about the role of media and culture in Jewish life?

The Jewish establishment sometimes considers culture to be secondary, something nice but less important than twenty other things. However, I see it as so essential to Jewish identity at this time, in this part of the world, and probably everywhere. Culture and art are essential to a well-lived life for everybody, perhaps especially for Jews because it’s the one glue that holds all of us together.

Tamar, Bat-Yiftach and Judith. Hannah, Serakh bat Asher and Lilith.

These are the names of some of the most interesting women in the Jewish tradition. And yet, for many of us, these names aren’t nearly as familiar as Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.

There is the midrashic lore about Lilith, in some sources thought to have been the first wife of Adam, predating Eve, a woman with demon-like qualities and a “spiritual darkness.[i]” There is the devastating tale of Bat-Yiftach, the unnamed daughter of Jephthah, sacrificed by her own father after he makes an ill-conceived vow to the King of Ammon. In the Book of Judith—excluded from the Hebrew Bible but featuring a fascinating tale of a Jewish female heroine—we learn of Judith’s unwavering loyalty to God, her destiny to be forever unwed and her acts of extraordinary courage to save her people. Miriam was a prophetess and symbol of female strength in the Book of Exodus but was then exiled for leprosy, her service to God and her people rendered irrelevant. Hannah, one of the earliest stories of infertility, was barren and then blessed with children. Ruth and Naomi were ancient models of female solidarity. Deborah was a righteous judge and prophetess, and Yael fulfilled Deborah’s prophesy and is thus listed in the Book of Judges as yet another Jewish female heroine.

Many are the accounts of Jewish female biblical characters that struggled, took risks and made sacrifices for their families and their people. And yet, for so many Jews, these stories aren’t accessed and discussed, held up as mirrors to the struggles we face today, or used to help modern Jews process ancient dilemmas.

Alicia Jo Rabins is trying to change all that. “The outside nature of these characters, and the Torah’s respect for these characters makes for a powerful combination,” Rabins remarks when discussing her immersion into the narratives. “There is something very relatable about these stories. We think that our problems today are really modern problems, but at the root, they’re age-old, universal problems.”

Rabins is speaking both explicitly—about the modern-day problems of women’s rights, infertility, failed marriage, illness and estrangement—and implicitly, about what it means to be human, and how these stories can soften the blow of our journey down life’s path. “I’m particularly interested in how the present moment intersects with ancient traditions and wisdom,” she explains. “Where the most mundane aspects of daily life touch the more transcendent and spiritual aspects, and how they’re all related and linked.”

It is precisely this sort of link—how the spiritual informs the mundane, and vice versa—that inspires Rabins’ latest project, a curriculum titled “The Complicated Lives of Biblical Women.” Supported by a grant from The Covenant Foundation, her curriculum will complement a collection of songs Rabins has written, composed and recorded with her band, Girls in Trouble. On the surface, the songs and lessons are about these women in the Torah. But Rabins’ deeper focus is on “the emotional connection we can make to our foundational stories, and how that connection functions differently than other forms of text study.” We know the power texts have to move us, unite us, inspire us, and keep us connected to tradition. But unless the texts are continuously re-imagined, they can’t provide the intellectual, cultural and emotional framework for a changing community.

This is where Rabins’ work comes in. A musician, a poet, a performer and a Torah scholar, Rabins is hesitant to define herself as one any more than another. “I feel like I’m essentially all of those things, and they’re all in flux,” she says. The common denominator, however, is art. All of Rabins’ proverbial “hats” are artistic ones, and in this way, she is performing her own reinvention of the sacred. “Art meets us where we are,” she explains. “Using visual art and music and literature, contextualizing midrash as a Jewish art form and looking at the stories of these women is a powerful way to reach those adults who grew up with a sense of not being able to identify with Torah values.”

Part of the challenge for many educators who seek to convey such values to their students is that, as Rabins puts it, so many of us have only a “pediatric” understanding of Judaism. “For many adults, our Jewish education ended in our teens,” Rabins explains. “And we don’t necessarily encounter stories like Tamar’s.” During the Bar and Bat Mitzvah lessons she teaches through her company Personal Torah, Rabins has worked with young Jewish teens faced with challenging portions like that of the Sotah, the accused adulteress from the Book of Numbers. She thus has experienced firsthand the value of introducing budding adults to some of the lesser known texts. In the liner notes to her song “Secrets/You’re Always Watching,” from Volume I of Girls in Trouble, Rabins writes, “I’ve taught three Bat Mitzvah students who have been assigned this portion. It’s been humbling and poignant to experience this story with twelve-year-old girls being brought into their tradition. I was thinking of each of them when I wrote this song.”

Just as toddlers learning the alphabet are more apt to recall letters if they learn a song about them, so, too, can adults more readily understand and accept certain lessons of our tradition if they are presented in an accessible way. “Part of the power of using the arts is that text can be hard to access or require more guidance, but anyone can look at a painting of Judith [or listen to a song about her] and experience its impact… regardless of age,” Rabins asserts. “I think part of my goal for this curriculum—which will include both music and art—is that it be engaging for a wide range of learners. The curriculum will be scalable, geared toward teens through adults, but in the right hands, it could even be used for younger ages.”

Rabins’ curriculum is intended to be trans-denominational. Rather than focus on God, the lessons will look at the biblical stories from a woman’s point of view, so that God becomes another character in the story. The first two Girls in Trouble records contain ten songs each, and the curriculum will have a section focusing on each. In identifying new biblical women to profile, Rabins says she tries to “locate moments that feel sensitive and interesting, and find something that I can legitimately connect to.”Her third album, currently being recorded, will include songs about Queen Vashti, the daughters of Tzelofchad, Hagar, Noah’s wife and others. Indeed, the stories of each of those legendary women are rich enough to fill hundreds of albums and lesson plans.

Despite the scope of her endeavor, Rabins remains committed to her inspiration for the project. “I am someone who loves these texts,” she says, “and I want to bring that out in my teaching and curriculum writing. I want to use these texts to help us feel less alone, to energize us, to look at these characters not as representative of despair and darkness, but rather, with companionship and love.”

For some, it might be a stretch to feel love for a biblical character. And yet, Rabin’s lyrics reflect her own affection and empathy for these women. In listening to her songs, one can understand how stories at once ancient and perhaps inaccessible can be reinvented to draw one in and make one feel connected.

In her song “Emeralds and Microscopes,” which imagines Rebecca singing to Sarah, Rabins writes:

“You are welcome to visit me
I live where you used to be.
I will leave the door unlocked
Come inside and let me say your name.”

It is this process of listening to and speaking the names of these women which roots one deeply in tradition, adding layers of meaning to a text that might otherwise have been overlooked or left unexplored. Rabins’ art invites us to visit and revisit these stories, to hear them and sing them and muse on them, to see these women as trusted guides, as beloved friends, and to let them teach us and comfort us, as we go on our way.

 

Tiffany Shlain has a lot going on.

Considering the Emmy nomination for her AOL series “The Future Starts Here,” the global premiere last spring of her film “Science of Character,” which drew millions of viewers together for a free screening and worldwide Q&A session, the opening of “The Brain Portrait,” an “interactive, visual, and educational art exhibit” at the Sandler Neurosciences Center in San Francisco, a 2013-U.S. government-sponsored trip to Israel to screen her film “Brain Power,” countless awards, speeches, addresses, talks, interviews and, of course, a continued push to conceive of and develop new films, it’s no wonder that the filmmaker, founder of The Webby Awards, author, Covenant Foundation grantee, wife and mother Tiffany Shlain has spent the past five years unplugging on Shabbat.

November 10, 2014 Tiffany Shlain Presentation from The Covenant Foundation Pomegranate Prize Program.

“Technology Shabbats,” as Shlain has dubbed them, mean no screens for twenty-four hours. “It’s life changing,” she says. In fact, the experience has had such an impact on Shlain and her family that the first episode in her AOL series “The Future Starts Here” is dedicated to the topic and has been one of the series’ most popular episodes.

But it’s not just screen-free Shabbats that have changed the way Shlain thinks about her life and work. In fact, tech Shabbats were inspired by another life-changing event that has, in many ways, crystallized the objectives of Shlain’s oeuvre. “Losing my father really inspired the Technology Shabbats,” Shlain remarks, when asked how Leonard Shlain’s death in 2009 has affected her filmmaking. “We might [physically] be with the people we care about, but we’re often staring down at screens. I feel really blessed that because of my father’s death, I had a chance to experience the preciousness of life at a young age. I have a sense now that things can end at any moment. Losing my dad made me a more present person….All of the topics of my films now are about how to live a good life and be present.”

This sense of life’s fragility is reflected in Shlain’s filmography. As one watches Connected, The Science of Character, Brain Powerand others, it becomes obvious that Shlain’s central thesis is about the very human need to connect, reflected in the  desire to open up dialogue, to consider why character matters, and to remain present.

“My films are usually about stuff I’m trying to figure out,” Shlain admits. “Films are a way for me to process deeply what I’m curious about.”

In 2005, what Shlain was curious about was Jewish identity, which led to the hugely successful release of her 18-minute film The Tribe. Although the film premiered at Sundance over eight years ago, Tribe has had a lasting impact. “I just got an email today,” Shlain said in August, “from a Jewish educator who told me that she uses the film in every one of her classes.” And at a recent keynote address at the Foundation for Jewish Camp Leader’s Assembly last March, when Shlain asked the room full of hundreds of people how many had seen the film, 80% raised their hands.

“We want to widen our reach,” Shlain explains, when asked to consider the legacy of Tribe. “We want to make another Jewish film, hand Jewish educators yet another tool to reach younger generations.” With Tribe, educators had access to curriculum guides and teaching kits that were produced with a Covenant Foundation grant. In this way, the film became a teaching tool and a genuine “new Jewish text” particularly appealing to younger generations.

In thinking about what made Tribe a compelling new Jewish text, and how artists might continue to offer similarly innovative and engaging material, Shlain posits that “as opposed to some other Jewish films and documentaries that are much more earnest, Tribe used humor and irony to tackle complicated subjects.”

“It took deep research to get there,” she adds, “and every line was written with a tremendous amount of thought and was grounded in such depth. I’ve really tried to evolve that model, to come at serious topics in unexpected ways, and to go deep, to trigger conversation.”

Next on the docket for Shlain is a film about what it means to be human in the 21st century, and, she hopes, another Jewish film. In fact, it was at the Jewish Camping conference that Shlain was inspired. “It was there that I learned about the Mussar Movement,” Shlain explained excitedly. The Mussar Movement, founded by Israel Salanter in 19th century Lithuania, focuses on practices that allow an individual to turn inward, consider ethical conduct and ideas of piety. After learning more about Mussar, Shlain realized that there was much overlap between those ideas and ideas explored in Science of Character. “I realized that we could do a Jewish version of our Science of Character film, thinking about character development through a Jewish lens.”

It’s  particularly appropriate, that Shlain has turned some of her inexhaustible energy toward the ideas of Mussar in the wake of her father’s passing, for the word “mussar,” which means “instruction,” comes from Proverbs 1:8 which reads, “Hear, my son, the instruction of thy father.”

And indeed, Shlain honors her father’s memory, his “instruction,” by pushing herself to continually re-imagine ways in which her filmmaking might contribute to, inform, and better the Jewish conversation—and the global conversation in general. As narrator Peter Coyote tells viewers in Tribe, “American Jews now live in a multicultural world, where cultures circulate and mix freely. And this freedom allows them to redefine and reclaim their connection to tradition.” This process of reclaiming and redefining is precisely the noble endeavor to which Tiffany Shlain has dedicated herself and her work.

To Learn More about Tiffany and her work, visit Let It Ripple: Mobile Films for Global Change

What makes a piece of art “Jewish”?

Must it consider a subject with an explicitly Jewish theme? Does it have to be about Israel, or the Holocaust, or bear a Jewish symbol, or reference some other idea with great cultural cache? Must the work of art deal in bar mitzvahs and bagels and the Torah or a Jewish text to hold within it the essence of Judaism? Or can an artist and a participant learn something, improve upon something, contribute something to a rich cultural and religious Jewish life by focusing not on what makes us different, but rather, by the close examination of where the edges of one idea bleed into another?

Liz Lerman, a world-renowned choreographer, activist, educator, founder of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and a Covenant Foundation grantee, has been thinking about these “porous borders” as she debuts her latest creation, the theatrical dance production “Healing Wars” which opened at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC in June 2014.

“We recognize a piece as being Jewish if its about something Jewish—like the shtetl, or anything we [as a community] have come to decide is a Jewish subject matter,” Lerman said, when asked if her latest work might fall under the rubric of ‘new Jewish text.’ “But lets start with the most essential premise: I’m Jewish. Therefore, anything I do is Jewish too. If I’ve made that piece, then it has to be Jewish.”

“We need to get ourselves out of the “box,” she says. “I have been at various times in the Jewish box, the modern dance box, the post-modern box, the female box, the middle aged female box and soon to be the old-female-white-girl box…I am all those things.”

The same might be said of Lerman’s “Healing Wars.” To call it a dance performance is reductive, and ignores the visuals, the music, the drama, the cinema and the spoken word of the piece. Rather, “Wars” refuses to be defined solely as one thing. At the beginning, in a backstage pre-show, audience members wander through a “living gallery” of portraits—one performer portrays Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross and a volunteer nurse in the Civil War, as she sorts through letters to soldiers. Another “portrait” shows a soldier suffering from what today would be defined as PTSD. He sits in a rocking chair, locked in an attic, as black and white images of violence are projected onto his head via an old-fashioned reel. As audience members wind around the gallery they end up on the stage, where they encounter the actor Bill Pullman, emcee of the performance, in conversation with Paul Hurley, a war veteran and an amputee, who also dances in the show. Pullman and Hurley are engaged in a conversation about Hurley’s service in the U.S. Navy and the attack in Bahrain where he lost his leg.

One  witnesses  all of this before the dance portion of the performance has even begun. From the moment audience members enter the theater,  they are pulled out of their lives and confronted with the “unrest,” as Lerman puts it, that forces one to consider, evaluate, and hopefully, leave the theater perhaps a bit more impassioned to act toward change.

While the content of “Healing Wars” is not explicitly Jewish, the ideas and motives of the piece most certainly are. Part of the Civil War project, which commemorates the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War, “Healing Wars” considers the experiences of the healers who treated both the physical and emotional wounds of those in battle. Here, as audience members watch dancers and actors portray both the wounded and those who heal them, one can’t help but meditate on ideas of loyalty, compassion, struggle, and resiliency. These are all Jewish ideals. These are all Jewish values.

Then there are the interrelated concepts of loss and death, central to this performance, widely explored and addressed within the laws and customs of Judaism, and ever present in our daily news feed. One can’t help but see “Healing Wars” through the prism of the international conflicts of today, and not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the performance directly addresses. For as the initial run of “Healing Wars” closed in DC, the political situation in Israel rapidly destabilized. Children in Israel and in Gaza cowered in bomb shelters as sirens blared, just as Lerman’s dancers cowered on the stage under the thunder of staccato drum beats.

“The wars are different but the functions don’t change,” Lerman asserted. “A soldier is a soldier and a mother who loses her son is the same as any mother who has ever lost a son in battle. I see “Healing Wars” as an effort to bring the civilian community to its senses about what its like to be at war for this long,” she offers, upon considering the effects of the performance. “I think we’ve numbed ourselves to the fact that it’s happening.”

There’s also the question of what happens after; after war, after death, after the shooting stops and there’s an eerie calm on the battlefield. To begin to try and answer this, Lerman created two characters that represent spirits—one, portrayed by Samantha Speis, is tasked with helping soldiers die and escorting them to “the other side.” This spirit is tired, she’s restless, but she’s also ever-present, on stage in most scenes, gently coaxing the dying toward death.

And then there’s the character portrayed by Keith A. Thompson. He is a wanderer, a former slave. Audience members watch him flit lightly on his toes, floating above the rest, his presence almost ethereal.Lerman explains that in her research she learned that freed slaves often buried the dead in an effort to earn money during the Civil War.

“I see him as Elijah,” Lerman confides, when asked about Thompson’s character. According to the rabbis of Talmudic times, Elijah was a prophet who escorted souls to heaven or hell, and the only hero from the bible who never dies, but rather, leaves the world on a fiery chariot, destined to return when the messiah comes. Some might also see Thompson’s character as a one-man chevrah kadisha, aided by the female spirit, who is perhaps a re-invisioned shechinah.

The multiplicities in Lerman’s work cross the boundaries we routinely erect around social status, religion, race, ethnicity, gender and age. Instead, audience members are free to ponder interconnected ideas, which is precisely as the artist intended.

“Inquiry, questioning, searching for truth, these are pursuits that are shared—by scientists, artists, rabbis—even if we go about it differently, we’re all on that same quest,” Lerman says, though she notes that she feels a certain pride in how Judaism is set up to encourage such questioning. “What [Jews] have to offer is that we’ve thought about and written about moral questioning. Yes, this inquiry may be true of all people, but Judaism has multiple systems within our books to come upon the problem again. Are we being compassionate enough? Are we taking care of each other, enough?”

Lerman wants the art to change you, and its impossible to leave a performance of “Healing Wars” without feeling even a little bit changed. Whether its watching Paul Hurley gently slide his prosthetic limb under a bench and give his full weight to Keith Thompson in a beautiful duet dance, or listening to Bill Pullman argue with the spirit about who shall live and who shall die, or watching footage of American soldiers in Iraq as they stare death in the face and release tension by dancing to a Lady Gaga song. The sights and sounds of this work shake the audience out of complacency.

“I’m interested in people’s potential to create meaning out of their own lives and out of the world around them,” Lerman says. “I’m interested in understanding the way in which one’s own knowledge can be revealed to them through art and how one might emerge from that experience renewed, reconnected, or willing to do something…to realize they have some power in themselves.”

Rivy Poupko Kletenik, Head of School at Seattle Hebrew Academy, Covenant Award Recipient, and acclaimed teacher of Jewish thought and practice, presents at the 2014 Pomegranate Prize Breakfast in National Harbor, Maryland.

Rabbi Tully Harcsztark is Principal of SAR High School and a 2017 Covenant Award recipient. Dr. Susie Tanchel is Head of School at JCDS-Boston’s Jewish Community Day School, and a 2018 Covenant Award Recipient. While their schools are in different states, cater to different religious populations and different student age groups, both educators are committed to instilling within their school communities a culture of empathy and respectful dialogue.

Here, Susie and Tully engage in a conversation about how character education takes shape at their schools and why it’s such a critical piece of any learning environment in 2018.

TULLY: Susie, can you share with me how the goal of character education became a part of the JCDS curriculum?

SUSIE: Sure. Thanks, Tully. Our commitment to character education and development began with our founding in 1995. At the time, a group of deeply committed parents created JCDS with the explicit goal of building an intentionally pluralistic Jewish community day school that offered a rigorous, intensive Hebrew language program. A key component of this founding vision was an emphasis on the development of the whole child. Our founders believed that academic excellence is essential, but insufficient; our children need to be mensches as they walk through the world, capable of contributing to the common good in meaningful ways.

Over the last 23 years, we have continued to look at the changing world around us and to think critically about who and how we want our children to be in it. As our world becomes increasingly fractured and polarized, our founding vision remains a beacon: we aspire for our children to be able to navigate complexity, participate in difficult conversations, and be agents of change in their communities. In order to accomplish this, they need countless opportunities to develop the skills, capacities, and inclinations necessary to live lives of meaning and purpose — and we need to create the training ground for them to create this practice here at JCDS.

SUSIE: Tully, I have heard about SAR for many years and I am inspired by all you are working to accomplish. What was the impetus for your character education curriculum at the high school?

TULLY: Susie, just as it has been at JCDS, respectful discourse and the capacity to learn from peers have been foundational principles at SAR since its inception. We value honest dialogue, and our teachers work hard to create an environment that encourages our students to raise challenging questions while learning to listen to each other in earnest.

A few years ago, we found ourselves struggling to maintain the respectful environment of which we were so proud. The increasingly contentious political climate surrounding the 2016 election, as well as some of the debates taking place within the Jewish Orthodox community, had begun to generate notable tension within the school walls. We realized that we needed to take a closer look at our habits of mind and to raise our collective awareness to ensure purposeful engagement and discussion when approaching issues of membership and citizenship.

As an administration, and then as a faculty, we set out to unpack some of the underlying core issues. We noted that as Zionist American Jews, there are many ways to tell our story. And the way we tell that story can shape the kind of citizen we become. For some, Jews are a minority in the United States. For others, Jews are a remarkable success story in the United States. While not a contradiction, the starting point matters. From a cultural perspective, we are a minority; economically, we have integrated remarkably well. Considering that, we realize that our core narrative can determine our political alignment as Americans - and students need to understand and reflect on that idea.

How I understand my Jewish story can shape how I understand my story as an American citizen. And that is not all. Our support for the State of Israel makes the situation even more complex. What does it mean to be a proud American with a Zionist dream? Do we vote as Zionists or Americans? What do we do when those affiliations do not align?

Being Jewish in America is a wonderfully rich, multifaceted experience. Having the capacity to understand and navigate the various parts of our identity is crucial to becoming an engaged citizen and a productive community member. This has become a significant conversation in our school community and has provided a forum for rich learning discussion for our students.

Susie, I know that JCDS recently took its’ commitment to character education to an even deeper place with something called the Seven Habits of Mind and Heart (I read about it in your Covenant Award materials!) I’d love to understand that more.

SUSIE: At JCDS, we believe that character education is not something that can or should be taught for 45 minutes on a Tuesday morning; rather, we that it should find expression in every part of our educational program and community, whether it is in the Tanakh or math classrooms, or during a school-wide celebration of Rosh Hashanah.

To that end, a few years ago I led the JCDS faculty through a process of defining the seven Habits of Mind and Heart that animate our educational vision. As a group, we engaged in deep dialogue about what our goals and aspirations were for our graduates as we narrowed down the list of skills and capacities necessary to function in pluralistic communities. These include: integrity and ethical living, multiple perspectives and empathy, curiosity, perseverance and resiliency, capacity for reflection, desire to solve problems, and rigorous appreciation for evidence.

The goal is that these Habits of Mind and Heart will become just that: a natural way of being for our children as they walk through a world that will require them to remain in conversation with people who think and believe differently. Our abiding hope is that our students understand that remaining in community does not demand agreement and that disagreement, the sharing of different opinions, strengthens us all. We hope they develop the courage to embrace productive disequilibrium — some amount of tolerable discomfort, as they continue to search for new answers — in the midst of important and challenging conversations.

Our teachers explicitly teach these Habits in developmentally appropriate ways and offer students opportunities to practice them repeatedly in a myriad of circumstances. For example, our Kindergarteners explicitly practice the habits of curiosity and multiple perspectives when they explore one another’s Shabbat customs. By second grade, they are utilizing these same skills and capacities when they share different possible strategies for arriving at the solution to a multiple digit addition problem. As our students grow older, we scaffold their learning as they practice the capacity of holding multiple — even contradictory — perspectives or interpretations, whether when interpreting a piece of art, a Biblical or Shakespearean text or an argument on the playground.

We are building a scope and sequence for the Habits of Mind and Heart that allows our teachers to meet students where they are in their development, and to challenge them in their continued growth. Our children are developing into human beings who are capable of contributing to, and effecting change in, the ever-changing world they inhabit.

Tully, I’m curious if your implementation differs because you are working with older (high school-aged) students?

TULLY: This year, we have begun a number of new initiatives to encourage meaningful learning around citizenship and communal membership. SAR High School has adopted צדק as our theme, and it will shape our informal programming and is reflected in a number of curricular units as well. Our focus on justice from a communal and institutional perspective has given students the opportunity to explore the ideas of rights and obligations - as citizens of the United States and as members of their local and Jewish communities, and as Zionists supporting the State of Israel. Students consider public vs. private education, learn about the origin of the Hebrew Free Burial Association and other institutions and explore ways to balance Jews’ commitments to their own community with their obligations to the broader society.

Our new citizenship course, The Values of Citizenship developed by Dr. Rivka Press Schwartz, takes a different approach than most of our other general studies courses, which equip students to know, understand, and think. This course seeks to do something more akin, in fact, to what we do in our Judaic studies courses—to also have our students act and feel as American citizens. An essential part of the course is to ask students to engage, as Jews and Zionists, in deliberation about the meaning, obligations, and commitments of their American citizenship.

Finally, SAR High School is a founding partner in the Civic Spirit initiative, an undertaking to develop curricula and approaches for teaching American citizenship and civics in faith-based schools. Educators from the twelve participating schools, six Catholic parochial schools and six Jewish day schools, spent a week on a retreat in July working on developing curriculum, considering foundational texts, and designing action civics projects to engage their students in the practice of citizenship. The vast differences in demographics and religious approaches among the schools, and the deep shared commitments to values that derive from religious commitments, spurred profoundly meaningful reflection and conversation among the participants.

Susie, how does this political moment inform how and why you teach character education at JCDS and how do you convey even to your youngest students, the importance of empathy and kindness?

SUSIE: In the tumultuous times in which we live, we are more likely to hear stories of isolation than inclusion, of alienation than acceptance, and of greed than gratitude. Our society is marked by polarization and an increasing lack of kindness. In stark contrast, stands our shared Jewish tradition and values. Today the intentional nurturing of community might be viewed by some as counter-cultural, but it is the lifeblood of the Jewish people. Our ancestors knew the timeless truth that our destinies are intertwined. The Torah teaches that we are all connected and our individual actions have far reaching implications for the collective.

This very same belief animates our community at JCDS. We know it is our sacred responsibility to raise our children in a school that teaches Hebrew, STEM, Tanakh, literacy, and just as importantly, cultivates our students’ empathy, resilience, and growth mindset. As our name, Jewish Community Day School, suggests, we are first and foremost a community. A community characterized by acceptance, warmth, kindness, and joy. In short, we teach our children we are in this together. The K-8 years are the most formative for character development. We take that weighty responsibility seriously and it informs everything we do here at JCDS.

More to Consider

The day my family moved into our then-home on West 16th Street in Manhattan three years ago, I noticed a line of people circling the corner and waiting outside a building across the street. The next day, I entered the church where the throngs of people had gathered and introduced myself. I learned that the church, St. Frances Xavier, has been a haven for the homeless in the Chelsea community, serving 1300 men, women and children a free meal every Sunday for the past several decades. As a rabbi, a religious Jew and fellow New York neighbor living right across the street, I asked how our community at Base might be of service to that community.

The national project that is Base Hillel, home-focused outposts of Jewish engagement spearheaded by pluralistic rabbis and partners now in nine cities and growing, started with us unpacking boxes, both literal and figurative. We were privileged and poised to pose the question on that Chelsea street: How can we be collaborative, supportive partners in our local diverse communities?

Since that Sunday morning over three years ago, our community at Base Hillel in Manhattan has delivered a weekly home cooked meal to the church’s smaller nightly shelter, The Fred Kaughlin Men’s Shelter, which houses 12 men suffering from homelessness. Graduate students and young Jewish professionals in their 20s and 30s come to our home after a long day to chop carrots, onions and whatever else is on the menu to those in need. We’ve framed our service at the shelter as a deeply Jewish act, like Torah study or ritual observance. It is but one small effort of our community’s contributions in building bridges and bolstering the undervalued neighborliness of our city.

But Base’s partnership with the church has extended far beyond breaking bread. I quickly formed a friendship with the young Jesuit priests working there when we realized that we were all just starting out in our respective careers. Fathers Sean Toole and Dan Corrou and I would meet for coffee and discuss our theological differences, our religious upbringings, and our political views.

Shortly after Elie Wiesel passed away, I reached out to Father Sean. Wiesel had come up in our casual conversations and now, Sean and I imagined something that extended beyond our coffee chats. A monthly learning group called Spiritual Readings for Base MNHTN participants and the young adults group from the Church of St. Frances Xavier was born.

Alternating locations between our living room and the church, each gathering centers on a different theme or topic. Together we’ve explored writings from both our traditions as it relates to forgiveness, gratitude, companionship, community, despair, trauma, family, and more. We also gathered the night after the presidential election to share reactions and explore what our faiths might have to offer us in politically tumultuous times.

“I love going to Spiritual Readings,” wrote Sam Bowser, a Base regular. “It’s a space created by people open to and actively seeking to understand the experiences and teachings that exist outside their own immediate circle. While we are privileged to discover new perspectives from our friends down at St. Francis Xavier’s, we more often than not stumble across these incredible similarities and parallels between our communities that resonate deeply. I always walk away feeling heard and recognized with my worldview widened enough to keep my mind in motion until our next meeting.”

The unique opportunity to engage in meaningful conversation around challenging issues with people from diverse religious and personal backgrounds is illuminating. For these young Jews and Catholics, it is an opportunity to step outside one’s own echo chamber and encounter the other. This holds true for the teachers as much as it does our students. Leading the course has allowed me to co-facilitate with fellow clergy and experience the dissonances and shared values of our traditions. Moreover, I’ve learned to cherish the value of facing outwards, that my rabbinic work is that of translation: of texts and traditions, certainly, but of values and stories as well to our post-modern, politically and ideologically messy times.

“While New York City can be a vibrantly diverse, open, and inclusive city, it can also be easy for any group to turn inward and to silo into individual communities,” shared Katherine, a doctoral student in her early 30’s who is also a parishioner at St. Francis.

“I feel uplifted and inspired after our meetings, as a hopeful idea undergirds this interfaith group—namely, that different groups might be able not only to identify similarities and differences, but also to celebrate both with love and respect.”

Katherine and Sam have created a community within Spiritual Readings. Each comes to the table with their own preconceived notions, experiences and belief systems but over the course of learning together, they encounter what they share in their faiths and families.

And so it was only natural that when our nation saw an ugly resurgence in xenophobia and Islamophobia, the Spiritual Readings community asked how we might we include our Muslim neighbors into our monthly conversations. Not because our tiny act of kindness would radically change the outside cultural current, but because it was ours. With an overwhelming news cycle and action items, which seem insurmountable, simply breaking bread and engaging in philosophical study with our neighbors was our civic spirit in action.

Depending on location, the church or Base sponsors the gathering with wine and refreshments, setting up a living room or church parlor space in a circle. Source sheets are provided. Texts are shared. But it’s more than the ambiance and aesthetics of a particular class that draw people. Father Sean articulates it best:  

“Regardless of their spiritual tradition, young people in New York struggle to feel at home in faith communities,” he said. “Many are experiencing significant life transitions and are overwhelmed by how impersonal a large city can seem. Like the rest of Base's offerings, the Spiritual Readings evening reflections allows young adults of our city to enter more deeply into faith and community with each other. We bond over shared values and struggles, both sacred and secular.”

With the high-holiday season behind us, we’re back in motion at Base. That includes our weekly service project, Torah classes, Introduction to Judaism offerings, support spaces and of course, Spiritual Readings gatherings. To frame Spiritual Readings as yet another “program,” though, would be a disservice. Base is about people, not programs, and the relationships that serve as an undercurrent. Spiritual Readings highlights this for us and reminds me why I do what I do.

By Rabbi Avram Mlotek

More to Consider

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…

Most Americans can immediately recognize the immortal words of Emma Lazarus’s famous sonnet The New Colossus, written in 1883 and inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. But how many know the deeper story of the intellectual life of this 4th generation American Jew and the contributions she made to society in the years after the Civil War?

As the national grappled with issues of race, gender, labor and immigration, Lazarus entered the political fray by writing essays, articles and poems in response to all that she’d read in the journals of the time. Now, her sitting room in that brownstone where she penned so many of her prized works, will become a place of learning and exploration, as the American Jewish Historical Society prepares to mount the exhibit “From Sitting Room to Soapbox: Emma Lazarus and Union Square, 1860s-1930s.” 

The planned installation, which is slated to open in Fall 2019, will allow visitors to explore these debates by immersing themselves in a recreation of Lazarus’s sitting room, complete with an interactive “illuminated touch-activated storybook,” and a window that dissolves first into a screen projection of The New Colossus and then dissolves again, to feature the poems of visitors to museum, a meta feature meant to engage visitors in the act of writing as protest, debate and giving voice to those without a natural platform.

Learn more about the planned exhibit by watching this short video, created by the AJHS

Once visitors exit Lazarus’s sitting room, they will enter a recreation of Union Square, where Lazarus herself spent hours listening to orators on their soapboxes. In the 1880’s, Union Square was a magnet for debaters who would speak on issues such as abolition, suffrage and labor. Visitors will have the chance to hold up a picket sign on a topic of their choice and upon doing so, will be surrounded by a backdrop image that reflects that particular topic, immersing themselves in a virtual world of politics in the late 1800’s. In each case, the stories on the backdrop screen, composed of text, images and speeches, will explore the context and the opposition of the issues at hand during that rich and intense time in our nation’s history.

“Emma Lazarus’s “New Colossus,” written in 1883, is perhaps America’s most enduring poem, but few people know about its author, and the context in which she wrote the poem,” said Annie Polland, Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society.

“AJHS has Lazarus’s notebook in its collection, and it inspires us to tell a fuller story about Emma: her involvement with Jewish refugees, her thoughts on Jewish identity and history, and how she actively wove her American identity into her Jewish identity. While people know the poem, we want to tell the poem’s story in a way that highlights Emma’ civic participation and engagement.”

By Adina Kay-Gross for The Covenant Foundation

More to Consider

If you happen to walk by a high school, you’re likely to see teenagers sitting together in tight-knit friend groups. Most likely, however, they won’t be speaking to each other. Rather, they’ll probably be immersed in the virtual world of their cell phones.

It’s a common sight these days -- not just around schools but in parks and restaurants, too. Though they come from a wide variety of backgrounds, one thing Generation Z shares is an addiction to their cell phones.

Indeed, the majority of teens today prefer texting and social media to in-person communication. While these technologies have opened up incredible opportunities for today’s students to hear a wide range of voices from teens across the planet who are different from them, passively reading from the safe distance of a cell phone screen is simply not the same as encountering diversity face-to-face. In today’s divisive political climate, there is no doubt that teens need to develop robust communication skills now, so that when they enter college, they will be able to converse respectfully in-person with those who do not share the same political views, religion, gender, race, socioeconomic background, and more.

Now, a new pilot program called The United People of Faith (UPF) project will aim to do just that kind of preparation. A partnership between InGlobal Learning Design and the Interactive Communications and Simulations Group at the University of Michigan, with funding provided by The Covenant Foundation, the UPF project, which ran for the first time in Jan-March 2018, brought together middle and high school students from De La Salle North Catholic High School in Portland, Oregon, Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle, and Toledo Islamic Academy in Ohio. Their charge: to design a school that would honor all three faith traditions—Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam—and, in the process, increase cross-cultural understanding, build empathy for peers of other faiths, and practice communication and collaboration skills with a diverse group.

“We see the need for programs like United People of Faith in too many parts of our world,” said Jeff Stanzler, UPF Co-Director and a member of the Educational Studies Faculty at the University of Michigan School of Education. “This seems especially to be the case among young people, which makes it incumbent upon us as educators to seek inventive ways to provide our students with these kinds of opportunities.”

For students used to studying side by side on a daily basis with peers of the same religion, like those who learn in a Jewish Day School setting, it could have been intimidating to join the project. It isn’t easy for adults to venture beyond their comfort zones, let alone teenagers. And it can be hard to know what to say and what to talk about when the usual small talk might not necessarily be familiar (e.g. holidays, schoolwork, family life). No one likes to have awkward conversations, teenagers least of all, which is often why they prefer texting, as it provides the time and space to craft just the right response, instead of being on the spot in the moment.

Stanzler, however, was confident that students would want to participate in UPF. “Our team members [at the University of Michigan] share a fundamental belief that most people are eager to meet and learn more about people whose lives, and ways of thinking, are different from their own,” he said.

It turns out, he was right. Despite the challenges and the uncertainty they would face, students were very eager to participate in the program. “We found that many of the students were hungry to not only learn more about people from other faith traditions, but to teach one another about their respective traditions and practices,” Stanzler said.

Gloria Joseph, a recent graduate from De La Salle North Catholic High School, explained that what piqued her interest in the program was that fact that her school is actually one of the most diverse in Oregon and their senior year curriculum focused on faiths from around the world. Dalia Cape, a recent graduate of Jewish Day School of Seattle, expressed similar interest in learning about other faiths: “I wanted to participate in the UPF project because I found the concept of a multi-religious school quite interesting,” she said.

Over nine weeks, student groups used design thinking to drive their creative process. In the first phase, they learned about each other’s faiths. Then they developed problem statements and needs statements. Next, the students brainstormed potential solutions to the design challenge based on the needs of each faith. This phase was followed by prototyping and feedback.

Receiving feedback on their designs was a critical part of design process and was also a window into the faith practices of their peers.

“Our Theology teacher would go around and meet with the groups and would talk to us about any flaws in the system that needed to be corrected,” Gloria explained. “When we’d get that correction we would do extra research on our own to see what would fit better.”

For instance, upon learning that her proposed basketball uniform’s compression shirts would not be appropriate for the Muslim dress code, Gloria researched other options and found that dry fit joggers were loose enough for modesty purposes but also have a cuff at the bottom to prevent the baggier style pants from sliding off your feet. Little tweaks to designs like this one were key in making sure students of every religion would feel comfortable in the school.

And as it happens, communicating with peers from other faiths was not as challenging as might have been expected and was made easier by having the common goal of designing the school, students reflected.

“It was no different than if I was working with one of my friends who was Jewish,” Dalia shared. “There seemed to be no religious separation between all of our ideas because we were all working to be inclusive of all three religions. We shared a common goal and were doing the same work.”

Gloria pointed out that communication across faiths cannot be based on what the media might say and what other people think, but rather on mutual understanding, sincere listening, and commonalities.

“It’s just better to sit and listen to where [the other students are] coming from and then see where it connects with your own experience in life,” she explained. “Communication is based on listening more than speaking, and understanding more than inferring or making assumptions about people and their beliefs. The more you understand, the more you can work with someone to make an important product, article, or whatever you want to achieve. ”

The skills developed in UPF also made Gloria more comfortable speaking with a Muslim friend from her own school and more open to learning about the friend’s faith and experiences of living in a war-torn area in Syria.

The students’ mutual understanding and respectful listening led to an important discovery: a universal desire for expressing individuality within the boundaries of each religious tradition. Despite coming from different faith-based cultures, they all had the same fundamental expectations for the school.

“We all wanted to feel safe, protected, and wanted our individuality respected. That was crucial,” noted Gloria. Her group focused on clothing and had to do background research on what is acceptable attire for someone from the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths. Although they designed the school uniforms to be comfortable for students of each faith, individual expression was encouraged. For example, Muslim students could choose to wear any color hijab, and everyone could choose their own shoes and accessories. At the end the month, there would also be a free day when everyone could wear their own clothing.

Another student group designed the cafeteria and focused on making a wide variety of foods available.

“Students charged with thinking about eating and food preparation decided that the school would have a farm onsite so that students could participate in every phase of the process that leads up to their sitting down for a meal,” Stanzler shared. “Students who attended to the various kinds of spaces within the school envisioned an ‘orientation room’ near the entry to the school where students could share personal artifacts, stories and other information related to their respective faith traditions.”

Gloria noted how they wrote welcoming language on the school’s banner. They also included a prayer room and a miniature mosque for the Muslim students, a chapel for Christians who wanted to go to mass, and a synagogue where Jewish students could pray. Each classroom would also contain holy books from all three religions.

One of the most important lessons from UPF was that diversity can truly be advantageous. Dalia noted that collaborating with a diverse group enables everyone to bring their unique knowledge to the table. You might know little about a certain topic but your peer from a different background might know a whole lot.

When there are multiple viewpoints and perspectives, everyone can learn and benefit, and the experience of collaboration is that much richer.

“For the design on the shoes of the basketball uniform, I used purple, blue, pink, and white,” Gloria said, “like the colors you see in photographs of the universe. There’s that variety of colors, so I imagined how we’re like stars in constellations; we’re all different and we come together to make something extremely beautiful.”

By Yonah Kirschner, for The Covenant Foundation

More to Consider:

Public School Students Need to Study Religion (Education Week, October 9, 2018)

Do Children in Jewish School Need More Contact with Those of Other Faiths? (The Jewish Chronicle, September 23, 2018)