I was engaged in a tense conversation with my teenage son as we made our way to a doctor’s appointment in Jerusalem. “No,” I said to him, “we can’t ‘just rid Israel of all Palestinians’ because it will make life easier for us.” Using the healthy argument tools I know so well from being an educator for exactly these types of important conversations, I began posing questions like “When, if ever, does an easier life justify harming another people?” and “Are there any benefits to Arabs being part of the Israeli people?” 

But before we could finish the conversation, we walked into the doctor’s office. 

Getty Images

The doctor was a middle-aged Arab man, and about two minutes into a very pleasant patient-doctor interaction, he shared a personal observation. 

“Can you believe it, patients who come an hour late to their appointment and expect to be seen? It’s always the Arabs, never the Jews. There’s something about our Arab culture,” he said. 

As we left the office, my son and I smiled at each other over the irony of the doctor conveying his own distinct, and certainly more minor, stereotype as well. That was when some interesting educational work could begin. How could I take this conversation and help my son make sense of it? 

This snapshot of everyday life in Israel is saturated with complexity and is a microcosm of Israel education today: So many challenges. So many opportunities. 

This reality is why the Reimagining Israel Education Framework identifies “complex” as one of its 10 principles to guide educators in delivering a holistic, effective Israel education. The desired outcome is that “educational organizations support Israel without mandating uniformity from learners and families,” and that “educators have the confidence and competence to teach diverse and potentially challenging subject matter.” I agree wholeheartedly. Yet as I read the framework, I found myself asking a different question.

What about the learner?

In my conversation with my son, complexity was present. He encountered contradictory realities within the span of a few minutes. First, we discussed his broad assumptions about Palestinians. Then we met an Arab physician who was kind, professional and caring — and then shared a sweeping generalization about Arabs.

Complexity was there. But what, exactly, was my son supposed to learn from it?

Too often, we treat complexity as a characteristic of the subject matter. Israel is complex. Zionism is complex. Israeli society is complex. The educational task, therefore, seems to be exposing students to that complexity. But perhaps the deeper educational task is helping students develop the capacity to engage with complexity itself.

A student can learn that Israel contains multiple narratives and still emerge with a simplistic way of thinking. In the Reimagining Israel Education framework, complexity is not merely the recognition that an issue has many sides. It is the willingness to hold competing truths in tension, to remain open to ambiguity, to question one’s assumptions and to revise one’s views when confronted with new evidence.

This is what professor Sam Wineburg has spent decades studying. In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone?) Wineburg warns against teaching history as a settled story devoid of uncertainty. Such an approach, he writes, “atrophies our tolerance for complexity.” When students are taught that every question has an obvious answer, every group fits neatly into a category, and every historical fact has an easy explanation, they lose the intellectual flexibility needed to navigate the real world.

The challenge facing Israel education today is not simply that Israel is difficult to understand. It is that we are raising a generation that increasingly struggles to make sense of complexity in any domain. Faced with endless streams of information, many young people find it difficult to weigh evidence, entertain competing interpretations, or tolerate ambiguity.

Perhaps one of the most important goals of Israel education, then, is not merely to teach that Israel is complex. It is to help learners become people who can engage complexity thoughtfully and courageously (another “C” in the Reimagining Israel Education framework). Learners should feel confident embracing complexity, understanding that their thinking on any subject matter, Israel included, can evolve over time, and sometimes even be self-contradictory. 

Israel education is uniquely positioned to do this work. Few subjects confront students so directly with contradiction, irony, competing narratives, changing realities on the ground and difficult moral questions. If approached well, Israel education can become a training ground not only for understanding Israel, but for understanding a complicated world. 

It is worth mentioning that the beauty of the Reimagining Israel Education framework is not just its embrace of complexity, but that it is broad.  Partly because of this, its success will rest on how seriously educators and their institutions take it.

The challenge and opportunity of any framework this ambitious is that it can only serve as a starting point. Each element or standard that is outlined must be interpreted, explored, implemented and ultimately refined through practice. The framework will become increasingly useful and meaningful the more we wrestle with it and test it out, seeking out its strong points and working to improve on it where necessary.

This is the task before us. I hope that others join me in drilling down into each “C,” mining it for meaning, wrestling with its definitions, pushing its boundaries and making it your own.

Rabbi Abi Dauber Sterne is the co-director of For the Sake of Argument, an initiative that teaches how healthy arguments have the potential to make us smarter and bring us closer, and sat on the Field Advisory Committee for the Reimagining Israel Education framework.