Three years ago this week, the massacre of Oct. 7 accelerated a reckoning in Jewish education that had already been building for a long time. In Jewish schools, camps and youth groups, educators found themselves fielding questions they weren’t prepared to answer. Students were scared. Parents were angry. And many of the adults in the room didn’t know what to say. 

None of this came out of nowhere. Oct. 7 didn’t create the challenges in Israel education. It made them impossible to ignore.

I know this, in part, because I’ve lived it. My own relationship with Israel was shaped by the kind of education that needed to change. The Israel I was taught was a land of miracles. The Halutzim, the pioneers, arrived in an empty, desolate land and made the desert bloom. They were surrounded by enemies, and somehow this David was able, again and again, to overcome the Goliaths at every border. I was so proud to be connected to this place. The story was simple. It was stirring. And for a long time, it was enough. 

I first visited Israel at 16, and I felt all the things that good immersive travel can make you feel: the thrill of being somewhere ancient and alive, the sense of walking through the pages of my own story. But that trip didn’t offer me much in terms of the complexity of life in Israel. It wasn’t designed to. From talking to countless other colleagues from nearly all Jewish backgrounds, I know that my trip wasn’t the exception. At the time, however, I didn’t know enough to notice what was missing.

It wasn’t until college, when I spent a semester abroad in Israel, that I started to see things differently. For the first time, I had academic experiences that opened up Israel’s history and exposed me to its contradictions. I took a class called “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” The story I had been told as a kid wasn’t false, exactly. But it was incomplete in ways I was only beginning to understand.

I returned to Israel for rabbinical school, and that’s when complexity stopped being academic and became visceral. I was living........

© The Jewish Week