Teaching complexity and nuance: Jewish education is not just black and white - opinion

Hanukkah is a time of contrasts. The victory of the Hasmoneans over the Seleucid Greeks is encapsulated in the Al HaNissim prayer (for the recognition of miracles, added to the standing prayer and grace after meals on Hanukkah and Purim) as a victory of the weak over the strong, the many against the few, the pure vs the impure, and the righteous over the wicked.

While the Hanukkah miracle was an unambiguous victory of good over evil, it is rare to find such clear distinctions in contemporary society. The world is a place of nuance and complexity, and it is our role as Jewish educators to enable our students to navigate this world with sophistication and integrity.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks emphasized the importance of Jewish education as the very bedrock of our civilization: It is the way we engage and inspire the next generation to become passionate, knowledgeable, and committed Jews. To do this, we must take our students seriously and expose them to the complexity of the world and the various approaches inherent in our tradition. The temptation to present many issues through a simple black-and-white, binary lens does them a deep disservice and rarely prepares them for the challenges they will face in the wider world.

Teaching dialectically

One of the ways Rabbi Sacks suggests achieving this is by teaching our students to think dialectically. He makes this point most forcefully in The Great Partnership (rabbisacks.org/videos/great-partnership), where he argues that the notion that science and religion are inherently contradictory – and in categorical conflict – is both untrue and misguided. As he writes, “Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean.” 

And, “If science is about the world that is, and religion is about the world that ought to be, then religion needs science because we cannot apply God’s will to the world if we do not understand the world... By the same token, science needs religion... for each fresh item of knowledge and each new accession of power raises the question of how it should be used, and for that, we need another way of thinking.”

By encouraging our students to consider multiple perspectives and to recognize that there can be more than one valid interpretation of a text or an issue, we can help them develop a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of the world and how our unique Jewish perspectives can contribute to building a better society for all.

The writer, a rabbi, is director of programming at The Rabbi Sacks Legacy and directs Torah V’Chochmah and the Sacks Scholars Program. He previously served as head of school at the Hebrew High School of New England and principal of Fuchs Mizrachi High School in Cleveland. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Leeds and a master’s from King’s College London, and is pursuing a doctorate in educational leadership.