It was Monday morning, Oct. 9, 2023, just 15 minutes before the school bell. Waiting for my students to arrive, I sat alone in a quiet classroom, a closed siddur on each desk and sets of tefillin neatly arranged along the row where the boys usually clumped together, keeping to their own invisible mechitza within our 10th-grade classroom. The job of Jewish educator had never felt so heavy on my shoulders. Living in a shomer chag community, the time between havdalah Sunday evening and the first period bell on Monday morning was too short for meaningful collaboration between colleagues. The shock of the scale and brutality of the Oct. 7 attack was still too overwhelming for my own internal processing, much less for careful lesson planning. 

I couldn’t help but think back to 9/11. I had been about the same age then as my students now when a crackling disembodied voice from the loudspeaker announced an unscheduled assembly. I remember walking into the gym, eerily silent, and scanning the faces of adults — furtively, so that my peers would not see — in search of reassurance amidst the extremely disturbing news circulating in jumbled bits and pieces, whispered from one ear to the next during first period by classmates who themselves had heard it via contraband radios or texts on their flip phones. 

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During the assembly, as our most veteran history teacher gave a brief overview of terrorism and Middle East geopolitics, I felt an ebbing of the bewildering feeling that some errant, incomprehensible thing had punctured the thin veneer of civilization, and everything familiar and orderly was suddenly gushing out in a dystopian torrent. Learning that there was broader history behind what was happening offered us a first foothold of order against chaos. Equipped with background information and shared language, we were able to engage in a community of public discourse about the event for years to come. Without this, we would have been bystanders in a confusing adult world, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible alone. 

Like all Jewish educators post-Oct. 7, I spent last year trying to steady myself in a careening world while students were turning to us, if furtively, for guidance. Teens’ emotions were all over the place: some frequently in tears, some coping with life-disrupting anxiety, some swelling with Jewish solidarity and some barely aware anything had happened. What struck me most was not the wide emotional range of responses — which was par for the course, especially for adolescents, and didn’t unsettle me or other any educators I knew — but the wide range of knowledge they brought with them to the conversation. While a handful of the teens coming from day school, Hebrew school and unaffiliated backgrounds whom I have encountered since Oct. 7 know a lot, most have such a surface-level understanding of what happened and what is going on now that they are barely able to make sense of basic headlines.

And that’s where the challenge lies: How can we facilitate meaningful discussions about such a complex issue when most of our students don’t have the foundational knowledge to engage in those conversations? 

The barrier to entry for understanding what’s happening in Israel today is higher than we adults often realize. To begin to grasp the events of Oct. 7, and all that’s happened since, teens need to know, at a minimum, where Gaza is, who governs it and what Hamas’ stated goals are, which too many young Jews do not. And as a teacher, of course, I want teens to have a higher level of discourse than the most rudimentary who-what-where. I want them to understand what had been happening in the months and years prior to Oct. 7 that might help explain the attack’s timing, why Hamas’ targeting of these particular communities around the Gazan border was so painful and enraging, and why the military response from Israel has drawn international outrage. 

To have such a conversation, however, my teens would need to know a lot more information. They would need to have at least passing familiarity with the Abraham Accords, the demographics of Israel’s south, the political diversity of the Israeli population, the population density of Gaza, Hamas’ typical tactics in warfare, what the international community is referring to when it condemns “the occupation” and some framework for understanding the antizionism-antisemitism continuum. The list is long, but none of it requires an adult mind, an advanced degree or full-time immersion in an Israel education program. These benchmarks are all achievable educational goals for any Jewish teen; and yet, too many teens are helpless to access a meaningful conversation about what might be the defining Israel story of their adolescence. This isn’t because they aren’t capable. It’s simply that they haven’t been given the tools — yet. And that’s where our role as educators becomes critical.

When it comes to Israel education, teens need content knowledge, social-emotional scaffolding and room to think for themselves.

What’s sometimes overlooked in modern education is just how vital background knowledge is. It’s the key that grants access to community, public discourse, and current events, which in turn fuels more learning. In the age of information, it’s too easy to assume that anyone can find facts on their own; but the human mind is built to learn best in the context of interpersonal relationships, and content mastery remains the foundation on which critical thinking rests. Information powers our ability to draw new connections, generate counterexamples, imagine solutions, and think critically about new information we encounter. It is not the stodgy antithesis of meaningful engagement; it is the kindling that fuels it. 

I am not alone in my emotions of the past year as a teacher, nor in my assessment of teens’ knowledge over wide demographic swaths. A recent survey from The Jewish Education Project and M², which surveyed over 1,000 educators across denominational lines and educational settings, found educators across settings almost unanimously feel responsible for helping students make sense of the historical moment, yet did not have a lot of confidence in their own ability to do so (only 42% felt prepared). A lot of educators (more than half) say they are feeling despair and anxiety. The dominant emotion they report in their learners, however, is “confusion.” Jewish educators need more support teaching about Israel and teens need more information. 

Fortunately, these are problems we can address. As David Bryfman argues in his article in eJewishPhilanthropy, “A Canon for Israel Education,” we need to establish clear curricular goals for teaching Israel. I would add that while an emotional connection to Israel often underlies educators’ planning in the classroom, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to inspire a love for Israel. Teens’ own authentic connection will naturally develop when they have enough knowledge to take their place at the table and are given the space to form their own opinions. Our job isn’t to dictate how they should feel about Israel; it’s to equip them with the facts and frameworks to form those feelings on their own. 

What I needed last year, like so many Jewish educators around the world, was a ready-to-go curriculum that winnowed the enormous amount of information about Israel, its place in Jewish history, its conflicts, and its culture down to a few thoughtfully selected, achievable content goals, selected with teens’ emotional needs and thirst for complexity in mind. This year I have been fortunate to help create a pilot program for exactly such a curriculum. We are embarking on an ambitious Israel education program at Moving Traditions that helps eighth and ninth graders gain the foundational literacy that they need to make sense of the world around them. Our eight-session curriculum carefully selects content (including many of David Bryfman’s suggestions), provides facilitator framing adaptable to one’s own institution or educational goals and scaffolds thoughtful discussions for teens.

As our curriculum is implemented, we may learn we need to fine-tune the balance between informational content versus social-emotional focus or adjust specific content. We will keep at the center, however, our trust in teens to digest complex information for themselves. Teens will leave our Homeland session, for example, knowing that “Hatikva” is the national anthem of Israel, composed in the diaspora decades before the state was founded by Naftali Herz Imber. They will know that it was once banned by the British as part of their attempt to quash Jewish nationalism, and that it first became the anthem by force of custom and only later by law in 2004. They will be guided in an exploration of the themes of “Hatikvah” and will mine its lyrics for values. They will decide for themselves, however, how the lyrics make them feel, whether singing expresses their own Jewish values, and what they think the significance is, if any, for a diverse country like Israel to have an anthem that explicitly references Ashkenazi longing for a Jewish homeland.  

This session focuses on a single song, and yet it contains multitudes – facts, history, politics and room for teens to understand their own self in relation to all of those things. It is just one small example of how we can give teens access to important knowledge and meaningful tools to process that knowledge emotionally, even in the short opportunities provided by synagogue schools, and camps, and other places where Jewish learning is taking place under time constraints.

We believe that gifting teens the knowledge and the power to form their own conclusions is essential to their thriving. The more they know, the more they can participate in conversations that matter — not just in the classroom, not just in moments of Israel’s deepest anguish, but in the broader Jewish community and beyond, for a lifetime.

Jonah Peretz is the manager of curriculum design for Moving Traditions.