Joy on Steroids

Joy on steroids. That's my simplest, most to-the-point description of this week. Children of all ages squealing with joy as they reunited with each other; preschool students singing Kabbalat Shabbat songs with the smell of challah pervading their classrooms; elementary school students dancing in sprinklers in Riverside Park; middle school students playing like kindergarteners on the waterfront of a campsite during their field day. There have been giggles and hugs; reunions with old friends and teachers; bonding with new friends and teachers. Lots and lots of singing. A little bit of crying, and a lot of comforting.

The theme of this week has been the love, joy, and embrace of community. Did you see our staff's welcome-back video? It will give you a sense of the vibe I'm describing.

With that introduction, I am sharing my remarks from the opening session at teacher in-service just about two weeks ago. Underlying all the playful learning and growth, there is a lot of planning, intention, and reflection — both with respect to logistical details and with respect to the philosophical questions that guide our work. This is a window into some of the behind-the-scenes thinking, learning, and articulation that helps our team stay true to our mission: Your children. Our people's future.

Opening Speech, Teacher In-Service August 2026

Before we get into schedules and rosters and everything else that fills up these first days, I want to spend our time this morning on something bigger — to start off the year thinking about the why of what we do. And let's keep that why in our pockets, for the moments when we're very much in the moment and need a reminder of the bigger picture.

The Talmud, in Masechet Tamid 32a, tells the story of Alexander the Great coming to the gates of Jerusalem and meeting the greatest sages of the time. He asks them a series of questions that seem almost like riddles. Who is wise? One who sees, before it is born, that which yet exists (nolad).

Nolad is a little hard to translate, so I'll give you some leeway here: whether or not you've seen this text before, how would you make sense of it? Seeing the future… that's a heavy charge for folks like us, who are in the business of conveying and cultivating wisdom.

As educators of young children, we're acutely aware of how impactful these early years of life are.

That belief leaves me with a practical struggle — the dialectic between our responsibility to be a safe, joyful, optimistic sanctuary within the walls of this institution, and, on the other hand, our responsibility to teach our children to navigate and positively impact the beautiful and messy world outside our doors. I vacillate between these responsibilities, and between my sense of what our primary role actually is. I could share many examples, but I'll choose one.

I've experienced this dialectic most intensely as a school leader since October 7th. How much, and with what frequency, do we engage our children with all that has happened on and since October 7th? How much of a responsibility do we have to protect the distance that living in NYC provides? How much do we emphasize the importance of sharing in both the pain and the joy of our people? Would it be different if we were there — would we be driven to engage more directly, or maybe less? These questions have rattled around in my mind, and I hope I've made some wise decisions, but I honestly still can't fully assess the wisdom of our approach.

Beyond that difficulty of assessment, I actually believe there's purpose in this dialectic we struggle with. Our students need us to be constantly thinking about what, how, and when to engage — and what, how, and when to protect.

I'm also aware there's a fallacy hiding in how I've described this dialectic: we don't actually get to choose what our children engage with. We only get to choose whether we're one of the filters through which they engage. This reminds me of the work of Sivan Zakai, a professor of Jewish education who has studied how Jewish children think about Israel. We've read some of her work together over the years, and the finding that sticks with me is that Jewish children know, by first grade, that there's "a conflict" — and that the adults around them don't want to talk about it.

Sometimes we think we're protecting. But we may effectively be abdicating our opportunity to be part of the development of our children's thought process.

Which brings me to two things that have been on my mind — not just as a person in the world, but specifically as a question of how we engage them here, at school: artificial intelligence, and antisemitism. If we can't actually choose what our children engage with — only whether we're one of the filters through which they do — then these are two of the places where that filtering responsibility feels most urgent right now. Bear with me — I promise I'm not just listing elements of the imminent apocalypse. My message isn't that if you were a smart person, you'd see the future coming and run fast and far.

Quite the opposite. I want us to talk about these complicated and scary topics, and make intentional choices about how, when, and how much to engage our students in these conversations. I want us to sit in the dialectic I mentioned before, and feel productive discomfort.

I suspect both of these topics are on a lot of your minds too — whether separately or related, whether you're sitting with them as educators, as parents, as Jews, or just as people.

I did a lot of reading and listening on both topics this summer, and I was surprised how much of it led back to the education of children — to school. There's an obvious reason schooling comes up in the context of complicated societal topics: as I said, these years of childhood have an outsized impact on life. But I think there's a second reason too — there seems to be a real reckoning happening right now about what education focused on, and what it neglected, over the past few decades. What have we taught from a technological perspective? The obsession with teaching coding doesn't seem as relevant anymore. Similarly — how did we do, this past decade, confronting the systemic and historical racism in our society? Did the people who cared most about this navigate it well with our students? In the context of Israel education, it turns out talking points probably weren't the way to go. And it seems that Holocaust education, the way it's been taught in the U.S., hasn't succeeded in preventing future antisemitism.

We're in a moment of enormous change — realities we haven't engaged with in our lifetimes. What does that mean for our responsibility to prepare students for things we have no experience with ourselves? At the same time, we're in a moment of societal reckoning across a number of educational questions — curriculum, methodology, goals. That combination makes for a particularly challenging task of "seeing the future."

As part of my learning this summer, two people in particular have shaped my thinking.

The first is Mike Taubman — a high school educator who's become one of the clearest voices on AI in schools, through his Substack, his videos, and interviews on shows like The Daily. He's developed a curriculum he calls "driver's ed" for AI. We know the immense power of putting the keys of a car into the hands of a teenager. The answer to that power — for good and bad — isn't to ban it, but it's also not to hand it over with no instruction. Instead, we spend a lot of time teaching kids how to drive. So too, he argues, with AI. It comes down to skills: critical thinking, self-awareness, decision-making. Can you tell an opinion from a lie? Do you understand the implications of the choices you're making? Can you see how a system is designed to pull you in a certain direction? I saw a video of one of his students talking about how the course made her feel more confident that she could be intentional with AI, rather than letting it control her. That resonated with me. This is how we think about education — skills, empowerment, critical thinking.

The second person who's affected me deeply is Dara Horn, a Jewish novelist who's pivoted in recent years to non-fiction writing about antisemitism. She's become, as she describes herself, "the antisemitism Lorax" — a role she never expected. In her most recent book, People Love Dead Jews, she documents, with painful precision, the history of antisemitism and the current statistics. It isn't pretty: Jews are targeted in roughly fifty percent of religiously motivated hate crimes in this country, while making up about two percent of the population. Tangentially, she also draws a direct line between AI and antisemitism — how Reddit and Wikipedia feed the data these models train on, and how there are organized efforts to deliberately poison that data with antisemitic content.

But what struck me most as an educator was the latter part of her book. She names a fallacy in how we've historically fought antisemitism: the instinct to say "look, we're just like everyone else." It's not effective, and it isn't even true. We are not like everyone else — take the most obvious fact that we're both a religion and a nation, but not an ethnicity. That's pretty unusual. In fact, our entire history is one of being countercultural — starting at the very beginning, with the introduction of monotheism. Dara's answer is the opposite of assimilation: own the differences. That's the beauty of it. We should want to live in a society where rights don't depend on being the same as your neighbor — for ourselves, and for everyone.

How do we educate toward that? Dara's phrase for it is "inquiry and bravery." She talks about skills — skills she argues, and I agree, are woefully lacking in society, even in the places meant to be palaces of them: critical thinking, collaboration, communication, self-awareness, and pride.

Notice what just happened. Two people, working on completely different problems, landed on the same answer: skills, not content. Dispositions, not talking points. And I found this same thread in nearly everything I read this summer — a sense that these are the skills education must focus on.

Good news: there's a phrase for this that we're all already familiar with. It's called child-centered, or learner-centered, education. It's what we do.

Education usually gets sorted into a few camps: scholar-academic, handing down a canon; social efficiency, producing functional citizens; social justice, reshaping society through kids. None of those, on their own, is the key to solving the big issues we face as a society right now. And none of them, on their own, empower a child to lead through a future none of us can see.

Only learner-centered education does that — building the actual human being in front of us, with the skills, the values, and — frankly — the love, to meet whatever comes. I think that's what Jewish education has always been.

• Chevruta — learning in partnership. Collaboration is essential to the learning process.

• Questions preserved alongside answers, not replaced by them. The humility to say: this can be answered in more than one way, or maybe we don't have the answer yet.

• Machloket l'shem shamayim — argument for the sake of heaven — as a sacred practice, even when there's a lot riding on the difference between the sides.

• Deep respect for precedent, and just as much willingness to engage new realities.

• A willingness to take risks.

• A willingness to be unpopular, because you're proud of what you stand for.

Back to the dialectic: it's productive, and we should stay in it, rather than choosing between being a haven and engaging with the messiness of the world. Beit Rabban is — and can be — a lab school of both, in conversation with each other.

Let's revisit our question from the beginning: so —Who is wise? One who sees the future. This doesn't mean we need to guess at the future — preparing kids for it through a checklist of what they need to get into high school or college, or the exact skills we predict they'll need for future workplaces, or even indoctrinating with particular talking points that we think they'll need. In fact, we don't need to guess.

All we have to do is look in front of us — we already see the future. The future will be sitting in your classroom next week. It's our children.

Our job is to teach these children the skills and dispositions that will carry them through life, irrespective of what it brings: teach them skills of "inquiry and bravery":

• Curiosity.

• Critical thinking.

• Risk-taking.

• Collaboration.

• Self-awareness and pride.

• Love.

And you're already doing it. This isn't a new mandate. It's who we already are — a history we carry, both as this school and as a people, of learning modalities built exactly for moments like this. We have always known how to hold questions and answers together, how to argue for the sake of heaven, how to sit in the discomfort and come out wiser. We understand that our work as educators is first and foremost to empower the child in front of us — the child who will be the future — with skills that will carry them throughout whatever comes. We are not starting from scratch to meet AI, or antisemitism, or whatever comes next. We are drawing on it.

I, and all your administrators, feel honored to be in this work with you. It's always been important — and it's even more important right now, given the pace of change and the scope of the unknown.

Now, we pivot to the holy work of rosters, handover notes, and cubby labeling.