Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello everyone. Welcome to opening up sar's podcast. We started this podcast last year. I believe this is episode number six.
And we have some very special guests today to talk about. I would say certainly a critical and a central topic, an important topic. I would also say a hard topic.
And maybe we'll discuss why that's hard. But first, let me introduce our guest. My name is Binny Krause. I'm the principal of SAR Academy. I am here with full disclosure, my brother in law, Rabbi Tully Hartstark, principal of SAR High School and dean of Machon Siach. Welcome, Rabbi Hartstark.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. Great to be here.
[00:00:40] Speaker A: You've spent some time in this building. Tell us about that a little bit. How many years have you been at SAR?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: I am approaching the completion of, I think my 30th year at SAR. Probably spent about eight or nine of them in this, maybe 10 of them in this building.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Well, if SAR High School is celebrating its 20th year this year.
[00:00:58] Speaker A: Amazing, Amazing. So all together between s Academy and SR High School, we have over 1600 students this year, growing or not. Maybe that's a topic for another podcast, but 1600 students who we're responsible for and we hopefully are thoughtful about the way we educate them. And we're also flexible in terms of things that we do well, things that we want to do differently or better.
And we're going to talk about all of that today. We have Dr. Rivka Schwartz with us today. Dr. Schwartz, tell us about your history at SAR.
[00:01:32] Speaker C: I started at SAR 18 years ago. This is my 16th year in SAR. There's a little two year hiatus elsewhere in the middle and I was here since the first year the high school had in 11th grade. I started as an 11th grade history teacher and then spent time in different roles and now teach history, service administrator and work on Mahlon Siach with Rabbi Herzstar.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Okay. And I can tell you as aside from my professional role as an SIR High school parent and parent of alumni, we all, they all, and we all benefit from your, from your wisdom and from your passion and for all that you do for sar. But let's get, let's get right into it. The topic is Israel. I think that I didn't, I didn't do this research formally, but I would imagine if you look at the mission statement of most or all of the day schools, modern Orthodox day schools, Jewish day schools in this country, you would find Medinat Israel in there somewhere.
Connecting with Israel, loving Israel, teaching ivrit. It's certainly in ours we have kind of sub mission statements for the academy and for the high school. But Israel is very much present in our mission and our culture. And I actually think I could speak for the academy. When we do our parent surveys. One of the things that we get.
[00:02:45] Speaker A: Highest scores on or great feedback on is the fact that kids love Israel and we're very proud of that. We have kids who love Israel. 12 months a year they go to camp that, you know, camps that focus on Israel, you know, some more, some less. But certainly Israel is very present in their experiences at home at camp. Most of our kids and families visit Israel and have visited Israel, many of them multiple times.
What percentage of our students graduate the high school and study in Israel?
[00:03:16] Speaker B: We've been averaging about 90% of our graduates over the past quite a number of years already that spent a year, at least in Israel.
[00:03:23] Speaker A: Okay, so you're talking about almost every. Most everybody. That seems to be a rite of passage.
[00:03:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it's actually a source of real pride and I think a testament to the bond and connection. The way that our graduates see Israel is really deeply part of their lives. I think the Al numbers are growing as well.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: So I. I'm going to call this the easy part. Right. I have memories of kids. When kids talk about their experience here, they talk about how on the steps, they talk about the Yamatzmut barbecue, they talk about friends from Israel, teachers from Israel, loving Israel, flags of Israel, Hatikvah, connecting in, you know, in so many different ways. And also to, to be, to be real. Right. Yomati Quran is a real day here too.
Mourning with Israel. Not just Yom Hazikaron, but when real things happened. When Gilad Shalit was in captivity, we davened every day. When Gilad Shali was released from captivity, we celebrated together with Medinat Yisrael. Those are the things that I think we have always done and we naturally do. I guess my question to you to start off this conversation is.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: So why do I say it's a hard topic? Has it gotten harder?
I guess it's a leading question because I feel like it has. But maybe you can help me articulate why it feels that way in terms of teaching Israel, loving Israel, connecting with Israel. How has that gotten harder over the years?
Or maybe it was always hard, I don't know.
[00:04:45] Speaker C: Well, I think it feels like it's gotten harder in one way, which is that imparting those messages now feels countercultural in the broader culture in a way that I'm not sure that it did years or decades ago. I don't think I'm telling anyone anything they don't already know when I talk about. And certainly our students in high school experience this themselves on social media. They don't have to be told about it secondhand.
The normalization of very strident anti Israel rhetoric and anti Zionist rhetoric the kids are exposed to. Again, I'm not talking about on college campuses. I'm talking about when they themselves are using social media and just ask out in the world virtually the way they are out in the world.
And so trying to inculcate those positive feelings towards Israel feels, in a sense, countercultural. Our kids sometimes feel challenged or beleaguered or under attack. So I was actually teaching the Israel unit in my 10th grade history class two years ago in May when Israel went to war in Gaza. And my kids came into class to say, like, how do we Defend Israel on TikTok?
They felt like what they were seeing was so hostile and so harmful and they wanted to know what to do. And I was the one who had to break it to them that you're not going to change random people's minds on TikTok. And that's not the most effective or efficient way to engage on behalf of Israel. But I think that's a piece of what makes it feel harder, is that the broader cultural sea that we're swimming in pushes against these things. And at the same time, we don't want to end up in a reactive mode in which if you say Israel's the worst, we have to say Israel's the best and never did anything wrong at any point in its 70 odd year history.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:19] Speaker C: We still want to be able to maintain a thoughtful, nuanced, realistic discussion of Israel, not Israel as some, you know, fake.
[00:06:28] Speaker C: Disneyland version of Israel, but understanding the real country as it exists and the real people in it and the real politics and the real complexities and the real everything and not being pushed in the other direction by the intensity of the hostility in the broader discourse.
[00:06:41] Speaker A: So let me ask you a question. I mean, is that, is that what we need to be doing? A lot of people I think would say that, oh, we need to be. And your high school is, we're going to push you on the ELC too, because I need some help. So we're going to, we're going to go through, you know, 2 to 12, but is that, is that the biggest challenge? Like these kids are showing up in college and they need to learn how to defend Medina Israel better, how to be more prepared for their campus life, assuming that they're not.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: I think. Well, I want to go backwards a little bit to what Rifka was talking about in order to answer your question. One of the things I think is important for us to think about just from the school perspective, when we think about it curricularly, we've actually worked really hard over the years, and I think that most of our Yeshiva day schools work pretty hard to develop Zionism curricula. And not only in terms of the. I think we do really great jobs in terms of what you were describing, the celebratory days and morning, but also in the classroom teaching about teaching Tsiyonut in a meaningful kind of way. One of the things that has struck me over the recent years pretty strongly is that we, in large part, this is a little bit of an oversimplification, but I think we end up teaching from the middle of the 19th century, and then somewhere around Oslo or shortly afterwards, it kind of grinds a little bit to a halt. And I know that we're going to talk a little bit about the trip that we went on this summer, but one of the things that we experienced in our conversations with Israeli educators as well is that talking about the curricula don't really cover the last 20 years that much. And so teaching Tziyonut has a certain sense of kind of culture, building, history, learning, identification, things that are really important to learn.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: But it also has to continue, it has to keep on going. The country is developing, the circumstances have changed dramatically.
And I think that that requires us as educators to really learn, learn, actually to learn a lot more than we have been, than we've been doing.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: That's an interesting point. I think I went to SAR, graduated in 1984, and I remember we had that. I don't know if that program exists.
I think it was called ami, where we learned a lot of facts about Israel. But whether it was learning facts or just talking about it, it was kind of the wars. And maybe, obviously in my case it was 84, but maybe at some point we still talk about the same things and we have a harder time talking about the last 20, maybe even the last 25 years. I'm going to.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: Also, I didn't. I actually want to answer the question that you were asking about whether it's all about preparation for college campus, which I actually think that it isn't. If we. I know this, like, kind of imaginative exercise will work, but if you're, you know, if I think about my family members in, in Israel, whatever age they are, you know, they can be 10 or 15 or 45 or 65. They're actually engaged with the issues that Israel is tackling as insiders to the conversation. It's not just about supporting the state. It's actually, if you're a citizen in Israel, you're thinking about kind of complex issues. What do you think is the right way for the country to grow and develop and kind of deal with some of the challenges that it has?
When you're living in a diaspora, it's easy to fall into a kind of a space where our job is to be supportive, but actually to be insiders to the conversation. We need to know a lot more. Our kids need to know a lot more. And it's not just about defending Israel on campus. It's actually being able to have.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: Moral, ethical, culturally identifying, like strong kinds of conversations among us, like really thinking. My cousins in Israel talk about the news all the time, what's happening in Israel, in America. We have to be able to have more of that. Our kids need to be able to really talk about what's going on on the ground in Israel.
[00:10:31] Speaker A: So let's get, you know, let's get a little uncomfortable. So we all agree that we should love Israel. I think that I'm going to accept that. That's a fair statement.
[00:10:41] Speaker C: Fair statement.
[00:10:42] Speaker A: Kids coming to SAR should be, I don't like to use the word trade, but that should be the culture. The culture should be that SAR is a place where, among other things, we love Israel, we love David. I'm thinking of David Winter at the parade. Right. SAR loves Israel and we do. And we have those, like I said before, that's another one, the parade, you know, things that we do to show that we still love.
And I am going to push back on elc, lower school, middle school, high school for any of these groups. Should we be, or how should we be, or should we be telling them that. There are lots of people that love Israel who have very, very different ideas about what loving Israel means. And again, I'm going to be specific because I think that's what people really want to talk about.
Can you love Israel and support left wing and right wing governments of Israel? Can you love Israel and have opinions about the Palestinians or about the Abraham Accords or about lots of other things that are happening there.
[00:11:46] Speaker A: That are broad and diverse? And if so, sorry for the long question.
What are the parameters? Like what are the, what are the extremes that are out of line or that should be out of line for us?
[00:12:02] Speaker C: I have to say that this question, if we want broad and civil discourse. What's outside the lines is one that I actually spend a lot of time thinking about and working on, both in American political discourse and in Israeli political discourse. I was once having a conversation with Yehuda Kircher, the head of the Shell department, Institute of North America and a high school parent, as it happens, about one of these kinds of questions. When do we limit free speech because it's so harmful? And he said that sometimes thinking about the edgiest of edge cases doesn't really illuminate the giant middle. I actually want to say to our kids that there's a whole wide range of positions and opinions and ways to think about things that should be part of what we think about as being the pro Israel discourse instead of what we often see today, which is if you deviate from me one iota to the right or to the left, your trafe, your puzzle, you're out of the camp. Throw you out the door. I'd like to say to our kids there are lots of ways to do it and I'd like to model for them. There are lots of different people doing it in lots of different ways.
And so you find people who are manifesting their support for Israel by serving in the Israeli army, obviously Israelis, but also American students of mine who are volunteering to serve in IDF as a manifestation of their support for Israel. And you have people who are manifesting their support for Israel by volunteering for NGOs to work in Israel to help take care of people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and otherwise disempowered in Israel. And there's a lot of people in, in a lot of different ways who are trying to contribute to Israeli society. And rather than saying what exactly is the line across which I have to. I would rather spend time in the big middle saying to kids, and I think Rabbi Heartstruck said earlier, the more our kids have a broad sense of this, if they think about Israel as Not that we have anything against Anglo Olymptimodean. Some of my best friends are Anglo Olymptimodean, but if they think of Israel as Anglo Olimptimodean, they have a very limited sense of what Israel looks and feels like. What we do in our modern Israel course in the 12th grade is we really try to give our kids a sense of the breadth and the reality. So there are an enormous number of Olim from the former Soviet Union and what is their participation in the life of the state of Israel look like? More than half of the Jewish population of the State of Israel is of Sephardi or Mizrahi descent. And that's not what our kids are thinking of when they think of their Ashkenazi Anglo Olim friends and Modi' in and what does that mean and look like? And a fifth of the population of the State of Israel are Arab citizens of Israel. And what's their experience in the State of Israel like? And to have our kids have an understanding of Israel that admits much more complexity because it is much more reflective of what Israel actually is. And this, I think gets back to what Berhad Sark was saying, is that there's just a lot of education that has to happen. There's just a lot that our kids don't know. And if Israel is their experience, give.
[00:14:41] Speaker A: Me an example of something our kids don't know. Another example. Some of their kids don't know that maybe they don't know because we've been having a hard time telling them.
[00:14:53] Speaker C: There's don't know because we've had a hard time telling them. And then there's just don't know because.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: Don'T know because we don't learn enough.
[00:14:57] Speaker C: The entire story of the aliyah to Israel of Jews from the Middle east and North Africa in the late 40s and early 50s and the real difficulties that came with their assimilation and those Jews feeling that they were suffering discrimination from the Ashkenazi European origin Jews were the power structure in the State of Israel.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: They don't know that.
[00:15:21] Speaker C: That whole story is a story that we need to know. And there's a lot of significance to that even in Israeli politics today.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: Anything else they all know that you want to know.
[00:15:29] Speaker B: It's endless. I just want to add two things. One is that it's not just about what the students don't know. I think it's actually about educator learning. And this is not that. Our teachers, you know, if I think about our staff, they are amazingly dedicated people who are real learners. They continue to be learners. But we need to set up opportunities in general, but especially here for the educators to be able to learn on these areas. And I think about something more recent. You know, one of the.
There are, there's a Jerusalem five, there's a five year plan for Jerusalem. It just. There's a now a second five year plan for Jerusalem after there was a first five year plan for Jerusalem, which was a first for the government to basically put into place. This is what we're hoping for for kind of the broader Jerusalem. And well, for the moment I'm just gonna say, do we like, are we following that? Are teachers aware that there are thoughts of how to manage all of the broadest population in Jerusalem and to manage all of those factors? You know, what did the first plan look like? What did the second plan look like? What are the decisions that are being made to provide for the people who don't have Jewish and also, you know, people living in East Jerusalem? There's, there are many, there's, there's just a lot to learn on all of those fronts.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: And I'm going to bet that there are some people listening in their cars right now who hear about the five year plan for Jerusalem and they're like, they're not interested in it because they don't think there's, they think that Jerusalem is clear. Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the people of Israel and they're not really interested in them or maybe their kids.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: And as plenty of Israelis are not really.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: This is not a, this is not a peace plan. This is an economic plan. This is what the government, as a government of Israel is responsible to decide for all the people living under their jurisdiction. Actually, that little nuance is really the difference between seeing it as a.
Well, is this a political. I know what I think about Jerusalem. We all know we love Jerusalem, but what does that mean on the ground? Like, we don't have the responsibility of managing all the people. I'm not talking about now politically.
I'm not talking about conflict issues even. It's just, it's across all of it. There are a lot of, Even if we were living in peace, there's a lot that needs.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: Managing and obviously that much more. So given the complexity of the context, learning about that is really important. You need to know, to not be paying attention to that, to not be thinking about that is, I mean, how many examples, like, to what's. If I'm a citizen of the United States and don't really want to, you know, I know, I know. I don't, I don't really like taxes. It's, you know, it's like, okay, but there are, there's a lot, there's that enormous middle you said in thinking about, like, what can be done, what decisions to be made to provide for the people under your jurisdiction. We need to learn those things. We need to know, know them better than we do.
[00:18:31] Speaker C: Can I, can I give another example of this? Sure. I think that a posture of, I know that Israel is the eternal undivided capital of Jewish people, so I don't have to learn about Or Jerusalem, sorry, is the eternal undivided capital. So I don't have to learn about what things are actually happening and what things look like on the ground. And is really doesn't not helping Israel particularly, and it's certainly not helping our kids feel like hearts are cold or earlier insiders to the conversation.
So to pick one very specific example, there's a security barrier, a wall. There are places that are inside the municipal boundaries of the city of Jerusalem. They are part of the city of Jerusalem, but they are on the other side of the wall.
That's a super interesting and complicated thing. One of them is the Shuafat refugee camp, which was the recent site of violence. And then the Israeli government, the Israeli military went in. All kinds of things going on. If our kids don't know that that is a place that is both inside the municipal boundaries of the city and on the other side of the separation barrier, the security barrier, the wall, whatever you'd like to call it. They're missing information when they hear that news or when they interact with that story. It's not political to have that information or to know that it's being informed about. When I hear about this in the news, what are the nuances of what's.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: Going on which can allow you to think about it in whichever way you want to think about it? When you're informed and have learned about.
[00:19:49] Speaker A: It, is there a time where it makes more sense to start getting more nuanced?
Does it make sense to you to say like, I don't know again? You'll say third grade, fifth grade, we just focus on it's all good. And then at some point we start talking about the Ashkenazim of the Spartan more, the conflict or whatever taxes or what. Like, is there a right age where we should flick the switch and say, like, yeah, you know, it's not so simple.
[00:20:15] Speaker B: Yeah, it's very hard to say.
We. I'll just first of all describe what we do in 10th grade. Dr. Schwartz talked about the 12th grade curriculum. We have 10th grade when really start learning about it in earnest. And they're able. They're critical thinkers and able to learn the complexity, I think really well. I certainly. There's no right answer and I'm not sure I know the answer to it. But if I'm just taking the two examples that have been raised here, like, understanding the wide range of.
[00:20:43] Speaker B: You can strengthen your commitment to Medina Yisrael by understanding the wide range of Jewish people who live in Israel, understanding Mizrachim and Ashkenazim and being broadened out to understand what that even when you're, you know, kids are younger, that's like a beautiful thing to learn. And then understanding what's beautiful about it on the one hand and what's maybe more difficult and what's happened that's more difficult.
[00:21:05] Speaker A: Age appropriate nuance.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Is strengthening. I, you know, wouldn't think the same about some of the more complex conflict related.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Issues which I think we are comfortable raising in 10th grade and also try to be very careful about it.
[00:21:21] Speaker A: Are you worried about. And I guess when I say are you worried about it? I'm saying it because as I am worried about.
[00:21:28] Speaker A: Decisions that we make around this to teach some of the harder things. And I am, you know, I'm not only. But I am also talking about the conflict and the borders and you know, some of the more charged issues around, you know, what support of Israel looks like.
Are you worried that whatever we do we're going to upset someone and therefore we maybe are reluctant to do? And I say again, it's a leading question because that is what I worry about when I do or sometimes choose not to do because it feels hard.
[00:22:00] Speaker C: I think that there's a better question about what's hard. And well, let me say that's not fair because at the high school level, I take that back.
At the high school level where we are, as every Hartzer said, trying to introduce a lot of this nuance and complexity, a question that comes up for us all the time is if we teach enough nuance and enough complexity, are we going to erode the that pure, beautiful love that you see here on the steps in Yom Hat's mode?
[00:22:21] Speaker A: Good question.
[00:22:22] Speaker C: So at a high school level, that's our question. Does the introduction of complexity diminish commitment and diminish love that someone's gonna be upset at us?
[00:22:30] Speaker A: My family members have told me that it does.
They don't like when I ask some of the hard questions, they say, I thought you taught us at sir that it's all great, but go ahead.
[00:22:42] Speaker C: So I think we can all have our anecdotal responses to this and I think there are a lot of ways to think about it.
One way to think about it is that most of our kids are going to be adults who are encountering the broader world in some way or another and they will encounter these questions. And if we never engage with them, if we never said we've also thought about these things, here is some of the complexity of it and here's how we think about it that sometimes leaves them. You know, you see this column in some of the different Jewish newspapers. Every so often, kid comes home from college and says, everything my teachers taught me was lies.
And we'd like to be in a situation in which we've already opened up those conversations so students don't feel like they're blindsided by them. And also, I will say to me, there's an analog here to the process of maturation or growing up, that when you're four, you think your parents are the tallest, smartest, strongest, everythingest people who ever lived. And then you go through a stage somewhere between 14 and 16, where they're totally dumb and useless. And then at some point, we hope you. You hit a stage in your late teens or early twenties where you say, my parents are flawed human beings. They have feelings. I can actually hurt those feelings. There are things they're better at, There are things they're worse at. And they're my parents, and they're wonderful and I love them.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:23:52] Speaker C: And that's why I do think there's a developmental piece to it here. I'm the only person at this table who's never been an educator below the high school level, so don't listen to anything I have to say on the subject. But I do think there's a developmental piece here that it may be appropriate to give more, not complex, messages to younger kids and then as kids get older, to introduce more complexity just at the time that they're realizing that their parents are flawed human beings and have weaknesses and aren't good at trigonometry.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: I agree with that very much. I also.
[00:24:20] Speaker B: Want to say that the, you know, when you. When you describe raising something with your kids, I think I want to distinguish one of the things that can be very powerful about the classroom and that kind of setting. Teachers can be really thoughtful about how to raise issues. And sometimes things that come up at a Shabbos, you know, I'm sure that. Do you raise it at lunch table? It goes great. No, didn't need it that way. But actually, it does take a lot of reasoning.
Learning about kind of the complexities takes careful preparation. And one of the things that the classroom.
What's great about school is that if you're wrong teacher and if you're thinking about what should happen in the classroom, you're thinking about, like, actually, do I raise this issue for kids in which they say, yeah, I can.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: I understand what you're saying, and I want to go back because I think it's really important to hammer Home. The insider versus outsider side of things. It's like things are only great if you're perfectly great. If you're an outsider, life is complicated. That's the way that it is. And if you're an insider to any kind of conversation, certainly a policy conversation, a government conversation, there are decisions to make and there are complexities that are involved.
And we want kids to be on our adults to be insiders to that conversation. That means understanding various sides to all of these kinds of issues.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: Should everyone be welcome to speak here? We have guests. That's a pretty broad question. But, you know, we've had. We've had Naftali Bennett, Shai Pirro, Ehud Barak.
I don't know, we could probably go through more. You know, we have delegations all the time of mayors and heads of, you know, type places, you know, that come visit us all the time. And then a lot of them speak to our kids.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: So what should be the range of that? Should we be having Arabs, Palestinians speak to our kids? Should we be having people who really are questioning, you know, asking, asking some hard questions that people find really offensive speak to our kids? Is that a good thing, a bad thing?
I don't want, you know, you can give me a nuanced answer because we're.
[00:26:24] Speaker B: Talking about nuance, but I'm actually going to.
What I do think is that the. I'm going to go back to the teachers because that's really. What I think is really important to invest in, is a teacher should be able to hear from lots of different people. It is also a question. I'm not saying that that's not a question that needs to be answered. What's the range of who should present to kids?
But I think that we don't think consistently enough about what are the voices. How can we allow teachers to have really the opportunities to be able to learn and hear the wide range of voices? This is true again in all disciplines, but in this one, it's really important.
It's part of what our.
[00:27:03] Speaker A: Understanding. You correctly saying that to you, which will lead into what you did this summer, an important first step. Is that what you kind of said, let's start with the teachers?
[00:27:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that, I mean, you can't start and put everything else on hold, responsible for running and having students. There's no. I'm not denying that. And on that front, I feel like we have certain principles that we probably all agree on. Kids should be really committed to strongly identify with love, Medina Yisrael, and also, as you say, like Tus. It's like that it should be centered in our kishkas and feel really strongly connected to it. And also to try to be inside as the conversation, which means understanding that complexity. That's kind of a basic line. But teachers can make decisions about what to present and how to what the best way is to teach kids. But in order for that to happen, they need an opportunity to be able to learn themselves and deliberate together to figure that out.
[00:27:55] Speaker A: That resonates with me, I think. You know, I guess I think about a lot. Like maybe one of the reasons why I have a hard time thinking about speakers is what are the teachers going to say? And maybe that's skipping a step a little bit. So let's talk to our teachers and make sure. And maybe our parents, I don't know.
Community.
So you do that first of all, is an area of focus for you now and over the last couple of years, maybe tell everybody what Machon Siyakh is and does. We have. I don't know how many thousands of people are listening to this recording.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: Yeah, at its core, that's really what Machon Siich is about. It is.
I think sometimes I put it in the context of a pet peeve of sorts when I think about university professors and their jobs.
[00:28:44] Speaker B: I don't know if this is an accurate statistic or not, but I'd say that if a University professor teaches 25% of the time and researchers 75% of the time, we think about a high school teacher. I wouldn't lobby for anything like that. But right now, the way that schools run, and I think this is true for really K12 teachers, you're stealing time for some professional development and it has to do. It's hard to build that in. And it's pedagogy oriented. I think that what teachers need an opportunity to do research and think broadly about their disciplines, whatever that might be. It's not just about Israel. This can be about Gemara, it can be about technology.
Some people might know that we've done work on substance use in the community. We are working on sexuality. Things that are really the core of kids experiences. And teachers should have opportunities.
[00:29:35] Speaker A: And is it just for sar or we try to.
[00:29:38] Speaker B: Well, the way that we'd say that this is work that we think is really important, which should impact our community and overflow to other communities.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: Okay, and this trip that you took this summer was not just with SAR teachers or principals. So tell us about what you did, where you were, why you did it.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: And what it was like this Trip was an outgrowth of partnership with the center for Middle East Peace. Actually the S. Daniel Abraham center for Middle East Peace had run it's under the direction of the Honorable Robert Wexler. And he's really expert in the region. He had taken a number of rabbinic delegations, groups of RCA rabbis on a trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories areas. ABC and the pitch actually was that it is common to think about investing in, in these kinds of trips, taking political leaders and maybe taking rabbis. Educators are not always the area of focus. And the argument was investing in schools and educators is really important.
And on this issue in particular, because how the next generation is going to think about Israel is going to grow from here.
[00:30:50] Speaker A: So how many people, how long?
[00:30:52] Speaker B: So the trip, the group was 18 educators. It was principals and department, department heads from as it turned out, nine different yeshiva high schools.
This was postponed twice because of COVID So this was kind of the group that ended up, ended up going. And it was a really powerful, it was, it was really powerful experience.
[00:31:13] Speaker A: Give me a highlight.
[00:31:16] Speaker A: I guess the highlight in terms of what we're talking about.
[00:31:18] Speaker C: There are a lot of them. I'm actually going to give you one of the hardest ones, not one of the easy ones. We visited a refugee camp and we met with some of the UNRWA history teachers who teach history in a refugee camp. Now you say unrwa. UNRWA is the UN agency that was specifically created to manage the lives of Palestinian refugees.
And you know, people familiar with Israeli history, with Zionist history who are listening to this have a pretty strong reaction when you hear unrwa. UNRWA does not have a great reputation for how it works and what it does and the messages that are being given over.
And I think the idea here was to directly encounter UNRWA teachers in their context, meeting with the large European cohort of executives overseeing this Palestinian staff.
And one of the things that the UNRWA teachers shared with us is that because UNRWA is now digitizing all of its records about families Experiences In 1948, as a state of Israel was being established and many, many Palestinians, all of the above, fled, were encouraged by their leaders to leave, were expelled from their homes and ended up in refugee camps and refugee situations. So they're getting access to the documents and learning about their own families histories from that. What that evoked for me is my own daughter, as a senior in high school, really just a couple of months before, had done a similar genealogy project, locating documents to learn about my own family's history. Which is also disrupted by fleeing countries they were in and becoming right. We all have this in our experience in our history, and even across very, very, very significant lines of difference.
It was very striking for me to hear that there were certain things that could resonate with me or that I could feel or that I could identify with. That doesn't erase the, the difference. That's the complexity. It doesn't mean, oh, I hear your story and your story is powerful. So now I give up all of my claims to Israel and you know, or I grant that all, everything you've said about everything else is correct, but it means that there's an ability to open to the complexity that I can hear the power of someone else's story even in circumstances that in so many other ways set us up across so many lines of difference.
[00:33:32] Speaker A: Do you think people came out of this trip hopeful?
I'm going to get out of education for a second hopeful about people coming together and peace and like that, or no?
[00:33:44] Speaker B: No, I don't think that people came. I think. Well, I shouldn't, I shouldn't say. You have to always hold on to hope. But I think that the feeling was certainly there's no clear path forward, you know, going forward, you know, in the immediate, short term future.
But also part of what we saw were people who were making.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: Kind of CBMs, you know, confidence building measures, small things that I'll be able to take certain, certain steps.
[00:34:14] Speaker A: Can I. There's a word that I guess is used in business a lot, disruption. Did you feel like this trip was disruptive in a positive way to the educators in terms of, I guess like really eye opening and different and, and hopefully, again, I think I really respect what you said before. It's not about like going and showing up in your classrooms, but starting more conversations between the adults which will then maybe change culture a little bit.
[00:34:39] Speaker B: Yes, I think maybe I would use an example. There's.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: Many different opinions about the feeling about the government that just fell and Mansur Abbas presence in the government and people are in favor or not or they think about it, but as a learning moment. Understanding where he came from is one of the things that actually came out of the trip that we went on.
There is an organization that's run by Rav Melchior in Israel called Mosaica. And one of the projects that they run is called the Religious Peace Initiative. And he is in partnership now with Sheikh Raid Badir, who's Sheikh in a Kfar Qasim, who is a student of Sheikh Abdullah Nimur Darwish. And if I can take a minute to do a draft of history, Sheikh Darweesh was the founder of the Islamic movement in Israel.
He was imprisoned in the early 80s, and that's when Islamism started through him. He was the founder. After he left, got out of prison, he decided that this was not a path, it was not going to work this way to just fight. There had to be an opportunity to be able to work in more peaceful ways and actually to work with religious leaders in that front. And the Islamic movement in Israel split into a northern front and a southern front. He led the southern front, which believed that there had to be ways to find a road to coexist with Israel. And the northern front was not willing to accept that. And without getting into all of the detail, there's remarkable work that the Religious Peace Initiative does.
The sheikh is a student of.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: Sheikh Badir, is a student of Sheikh Darwish, who died.
Right now, like Mansur Abbas is a Talmud of that.
[00:36:31] Speaker B: Of that movement of people who've said. And again, I don't know that it can.
We don't know whether there's a path forward there or not a path forward there. But understanding where he came from, what he came from, that he's in a context that's an outgrowth of sheikhs and rabbis who actually are talking to each other.
[00:36:54] Speaker B: Is just edifying to understand where it is that this is coming from so a person can think of, well, when I think in the long term, is this something that I can consider is kind of a potential path possible, hopeful. I want to learn more about that, or I don't think there's a chance that that's actually going to make a difference, but learning about it, understanding it feels very important.
[00:37:15] Speaker A: And I guess you might be answering my question, but the lens, as you were talking, I'm thinking about maybe some Israelis or American Israelis, more likely, listening to this podcast and saying, why are a bunch of people in Rabio even having this conversation? Like, they're talking about what's going on in another country. We're getting kind of deep into the political situation and, like, what's our role here? Like, do we have any business talking about this? And why are we doing this?
[00:37:41] Speaker A: What is it about?
[00:37:42] Speaker C: Well, I think that, again, gets back to the question of do we want our kids to think of Israel as a place to have a bar bat mitzvah, go on Machach, spend a year and visit for Sukkot, which is all great. I'm not against any of that. Or do we want our Kids to think of Israel as something that to whatever extent, and obviously not with the same responsibility and not with the same ownership and they don't vote and they don't. But to some extent that they are insiders to, they are participants in, that they are members of or connected to in some deeper way, that it's not just a place that I go tour and visit every so often and hit the highlight experiences and come home with the photo album, but that my connection to an appreciation of this country means a deeper understanding of its history and a deeper understanding of its present and a deeper understanding of its peoples and a deeper understanding of its challenges. All of that is part of really feeling connected to Israel. And I think very strongly and will continue to argue that this is not a taking away from the commitment of flag waving. This is the next step stage. Not that you. You don't have to stop waving flags. You can keep waving flags, but at a certain point, if you're going to grow into a deeper adult relationship with anyone or anything, it's going to encompass that person or institution or country in all of its reality and all of its complexity. And so it might seem strange that we're raising American kids. I've done work on citizenship with teachers in together with teachers from Jewish schools and Catholic schools. And it's always fascinating to the teachers who are not from Jewish schools and how much time we invest teaching our kids about a different country. Like, why aren't we spending all of our time on American citizenship and on American government, and instead we're explaining to them how parliamentary system works, that you could be up to election number five in two years or whatever. Exactly. The count is up to. Right. Why are we teaching our kids about this parliamentary system? And the answer is, because I don't want them to just say Israel. That was where I went when I was 13, and I'll go back after 10th grade. I also want them to say, I understand something at least about what the government, how the government functions or doesn't function, and what's going on with the government and why they're holding elections.
[00:39:39] Speaker B: Again, when we think about when I was, you know, one of the things that I learned from Congressman Wechsler that, you know, really internalized terms of my language about this before the trip, I actually was pretty anxious about how it was going to, you know, is our group of yeshiva, you know, high school educators are going to go and we're going to kind of leave in the middle and say, I can't. What's happened? This is Too much. And, and you know, he kept framing this as this is a learning opportunity. That's what this is about. It's actually about learning.
And that's a good thing. For all the reasons Dr. Schwartz just described.
[00:40:15] Speaker A: You've anticipated my next and I think final question.
I was invited to go next week. Next Moze Shabbat for a few days.
[00:40:26] Speaker A: And I trip sponsored by the JCRC Bronx Spiritual Leadership, Jewish and Muslim leadership. We're going to know more about exactly who the group is in the coming days and I'm going to be there for a few days with them. I've obviously been to Israel dozens of times. I've done all of those things, sent my kids on bachah, made bar mitzvahs, had family vacations and all that great stuff. Never been.
[00:40:54] Speaker A: Never been to Ramallah. I think Ramallah, I know that Ramallah's on our agenda.
Give me a, give me a tip. What should I be, I don't know, looking out for expecting. And a tip that I guess we're sharing with everybody in terms of what this, how this could be a meaningful.
I'm sure it will be. But what I can do to make it a meaningful experience for me.
[00:41:16] Speaker B: Yeah. I would say that.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: There'S a way to think about this that I wouldn't recommend is going on a trip that's joining the politicians because now it's a school principal is getting involved in politics.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: There is going to be a politician, there's going to be a congressman.
[00:41:30] Speaker B: Understood.
[00:41:31] Speaker A: Richie Torres is going to be joining. We love Richie Torres.
[00:41:35] Speaker B: We do. I totally understand that. I'm actually talking about wheelhouses and long term plan. Like what is this about? I'm not saying.
On the contrary, I think that that's great, great and very important.
But I asked myself when I was on the trips, like what is my role here? What am I doing here? I'm not learning in order to solve the conflict. I live like you said, I live in New Jersey, New York, what's that? But I do have a responsibility to my kids and responsibility to the school that we're in.
You said we have 6,900 kids here and lots of hundreds of families that we are.
That's a responsibility.
And I think that going on a trip like this is an opportunity to understand and to learn in order to think carefully about what you want to bring back.
[00:42:21] Speaker B: How we should teach our kids about this. And I think it's different to think about it as I'm kind of going into a different or I'm actually bringing back into my school world, what I'm going to learn out there. That feels really important.
[00:42:33] Speaker A: You are scheduled to do something on Zoom with some of the other participants from other schools.
[00:42:38] Speaker B: There is a panel on November 2, that April.
There's an email going out on Zoom panel, and we'd love for people to join. Yes. Thank you.
[00:42:46] Speaker A: Okay. I really hope that that will be, as you said, and maybe the best piece of advice that we've had that just talking, like having conversations with adults, actually, maybe before the students or, you know, not only the students, so to speak. And I think those conversations are really important. I guess you would encourage me to talk about the things that I learned. I think that sometimes, like I said earlier, sometimes you feel like, you know, you don't want to talk about it because you might be raising some politically charged issues. But politically charged issues are charged because they're important.
So I appreciate what you have done and what you continue to do in the work of Sir High School and La Jonesia in this conversation. I hope that I will learn and I hope that we'll be able to continue these conversations. Obviously, there are three of us here right now, but the conversation really is. Is. Is meant to be a conversation with the community, and this is just. Just one part of it. I think for the sake of our audience, we will. We will end here. Thank you for your time.
[00:43:44] Speaker B: Have a wonderful trip.
[00:43:45] Speaker C: You're very welcome. Enjoy the trip.
