“I have learned much from my teachers and even more from my friends, but from my students I have learned more than from all of them.” — Rabbi Ḥanina (Ta’anit 7a)

It has taken me years to understand the truth of Rabbi Hanina’s statement. I began, as many do, with the assumption that teaching was about what I could offer: lessons, guidance, and structure. My first classroom was during graduate school at the University of Southern California with a small group of undergraduates learning how to write college papers. I came prepared with strategies, frameworks, and with a sense of what they needed to know. But again and again, I found myself surprised—by their questions, their perspectives, the ways they pushed against the very structures I offered. Without realizing it, I had entered into a more reciprocal exchange than I expected: not simply the act of teaching, but the unfolding experience of learning alongside them.

That pattern has followed me ever since. In many ways, it reminds me of the days between Passover and Shavuot, when transformation happens quietly, cumulatively, and almost imperceptibly. It is in that in-between—between instruction and understanding, tradition and discovery—that I have learned what it truly means to teach.

My earliest post-graduate teaching setting was filled with young-adult international students learning English as a Second Language. They arrived carrying whole worlds within them—histories, languages, ways of being—now filtered through the vulnerability of limited vocabulary in a new language. In those surroundings, I came to see how deeply language is tied to dignity: how the inability to find a word can feel like a loss of self, and how being understood, even imperfectly, can restore it.

I remember one student in particular, a young woman from Japan who sat near the window and kept a small notebook open in front of her, filled with careful translations. One day, she was trying to tell a story about her grandmother, and she stopped mid-sentence, searching for a word that wouldn’t come. She grew quiet. “I know this in Japanese,” she said, shaking her head, “but not in English.” We sat in that pause together, resisting the urge to rush past it. I offered a few possibilities, but none felt quite right to her. So we stayed with it—through gestures and through a kind of shared patience—until something close enough began to take shape. It wasn’t perfect, but it held the meaning she was reaching for. In that pause, I understood something I hadn’t before: learning is not simply the acquisition of words, but the courage to remain present in the space where they have not yet formed.

From there, I entered a very different world: my own preschool classroom of three-year-olds. If the ESL classroom was about finding language, this one was about discovering it for the first time. Learning lived in the body—in sticky hands, in tears that came quickly and left just as quickly, in the careful negotiation over a shared toy. Time moved differently there. Progress revealed itself in small, luminous moments: a child learning to wait, to name a feeling, to trust that the same story would be read again tomorrow.

I remember one morning when a child in my class—usually easygoing, quick to laugh—suddenly crumpled to the floor when another child took the toy he had been using. He began to cry, not loudly, but with a kind of confusion, as if a feeling he didn’t yet recognize had overtaken him. When I knelt beside him and asked what was wrong, he struggled to answer. “I don’t know,” he said, over and over again. So we sat there together, and I began to offer him language, tentatively: “Are you feeling sad? Or maybe frustrated?” He paused, considering, then nodded slowly at the word frustrated, trying it on like something new. “Frustrated,” he repeated, quieter now. The tears didn’t disappear, but they changed. They had somewhere to go. In that exchange, I saw how learning begins with recognition. With finding a word that can hold what was, until then, just a feeling.

Later, as a substitute teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I stepped into classrooms where I was unknown, and where everything had to be built quickly—authority, trust, a sense of direction. I didn’t have the luxury of building relationships over time; instead, I had to connect with students immediately and find my place in the classroom from the moment I walked in. Each room required a different version of myself: firmer in some moments, gentler in others, always attuned. There I learned that teaching begins with the ability to read the human landscape in front of you. Even in a single day, something real could happen—if I was willing to be fully there.

My work in synagogue settings—teaching pre–b’nai mitzvah students across different communities over the years—has felt, in many ways, like coming home. Here, teaching has been braided with something much older, something inherited. I am not only helping students learn Hebrew or lead prayer; I am accompanying them as they stand on the threshold of Jewish identity.

One encounter, nearly a decade ago, stands out clearly: an eight-year-old girl looked at me one afternoon and asked, “Why aren’t you doing what the rabbis are doing?” There was curiosity, expectation, and a quiet authority in her gaze. Her question lingered with me long after the class ended. At the time, I didn’t yet have an answer—but I felt a shift. I found myself wondering what it meant to step more fully into that role, and what, at its core, that role really was. The truth is that a rabbi is, quite simply, a teacher. Not separate from what I was already doing, but a deepening of it. That small, unassuming question became a kind of invitation—one I would spend years growing into.

That moment also brought into sharper focus a core idea in Jewish life: lilmud u-lelamed—to learn and to teach, as one continuous act. In every classroom I enter, I am not only guiding students, I am being guided by them; each question, hesitation, or insight reshapes how I understand the material, the tradition, and myself. The work of teaching is simultaneously the work of learning, and the work of learning is inseparable from the responsibility—and joy—of passing it on.

The questions my younger students ask—unfiltered and often profound—do not disappear with age. They simply take on new forms, as I’ve encountered with my adult students—those who come to introductory Judaism classes not because they have to, but because they are searching. They arrive with lives already in motion, with questions that do not have easy answers. Teaching in these spaces has been, for me, an act of deep humility. I am no longer standing in front so much as sitting among. The classroom becomes a conversation, shaped as much by their stories as by any text I might bring. Perhaps this is where my work as a rabbi and as a writer meet most clearly: in the shared work of noticing, naming, and making meaning together.

Across all of these spaces, and across the different ages and stages of the students I have taught, I have learned that growth is rarely sudden or dramatic. It unfolds in quiet, cumulative ways—the subtle shifts that take place between one encounter and the next, much like the days between Passover and Shavuot, between spring and summer. Teaching is a liminal space, a place of becoming, where neither teacher nor student arrives fully formed, and where transformation is a slow, unfolding process. Each classroom, each question, each unexpected insight—from an ESL student struggling with a word to a preschooler discovering a feeling, to the gaze of a curious eight-year-old—has invited me to move more fully into that space of presence and openness.

Just as we count the Omer in anticipation of receiving our Torah, I have learned to live in the in-between, attentive to what is growing, what is emerging, and what I am still becoming alongside my students. And in that, the title “rabbi” has come to feel both more grounded and more meaningful to me. At its root, it simply means “teacher.” Not something elevated or distant, but something deeply relational, shaped in classrooms and conversations. It is felt in the ongoing practice of learning and teaching—and in the space between.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)