The Jewish community’s commitment to its college students is one of the most remarkable things about Jewish life today: Hillels, Chabad houses and dozens of other organizations, staffed by some of the most dedicated people in the Jewish world, backed by extraordinary philanthropic investment. Perhaps no other moment in the Jewish life cycle receives anything close to this concentration of resources, talent and love. 

But college doesn’t last forever, so every one of these organizations, whatever its particular approach, shares a single ultimate aim: informing how these young people will live as Jews after college. Which raises the question that should keep all of us up at night. What kind of experience actually carries over to the day after graduation, and to the years and decades beyond it?

Courtesy/Chabad at Brandeis

M54: The Institute for Insourcing's first cohort of students. M54 was founded in 2021 by Rabbi Peretz and Chanie Chein, the founders and longtime leaders of Chabad at Brandeis.

Here is the uncomfortable part. An experience that is provided to a student is, by its nature, a socialized experience. The Shabbat dinner someone else cooked, the class someone else taught, the trip someone else paid for: all of it is borrowed from the setting that supplies it. This is not a criticism; it is a structural fact. Our operating assumption has been that if the experience is wonderful enough, students will want to integrate it into their lives after they leave. But wanting is not the same as owning. When the provided environment dissolves, the graduate steps into a world of career pressure and social pressure, a culture that dissolves particular commitments and, increasingly, contains open hostility to Jews and to Judaism. A borrowed identity, however warmly borrowed, was never theirs to keep.

Jewish tradition has always understood the difference. “Lo hatalmud ikar ela hama’aseh” — the learning is not the essence; the deed is (Pirkei Avot 1:17). Learning, for all its indispensability, remains in some measure external, received from text and teacher. The deed is where a Jewish life becomes personal, practiced in one’s own way — owned. Our tradition never confused giving people Judaism with people making Judaism their own.

Developmental psychology has arrived at the same distinction. Developmental psychologist and consultant Robert Kegan’s research on adult development describes the move from a “socialized mind,” an identity held together by the expectations and frameworks of the surrounding group, to a “self-authoring mind,” in which a person steps back from those frameworks and deliberately makes them their own. His research suggests only about a third of adults ever complete that move, and those who do typically do so in their thirties or forties, often through hardship, when the structures that held their borrowed identity collapse and force the work upon them.

None of this means our earlier education failed. Childhood and adolescence are supposed to be socialized; that is the design. A child needs to receive the big ideas of Torah, the skills to access our texts and practices absorbed in the warmth of family and community. Borrowed is exactly what a young Jewish identity should be. 

The question is when, and where, does a person get to do the work of making it their own? Not in childhood; the capacity isn’t built yet. Not easily after graduation, either, when a person is out in the world alone, building a career, forming a family, with no environment structured around their growth. There is exactly one window: college. Students have left their families and communities but have not yet gone out on their own. They are still inside a setting built for learning, with time, mentors and the freedom to work out who they are. It is the last fully immersive environment most people ever enter. The developmental capacity for self-authorship first opens there, and it is largely left to chance.

So here is an invitation to those of us who work on campus: What if we stopped thinking of ourselves as marketers of Judaism, attracting students by making the product appealing? What if we started thinking of ourselves not as educators of texts and ideas alone, but of something deeper: the art and skill of self-authorship itself?

This is harder to teach than a text. It is closer to ballet or swimming: a craft learned through practice rather than from the page, taught by people who have mastered it themselves, acquired through repetition and correction over time. It cannot be delivered in a single immersive trip or a one-semester course. It requires a pedagogy, a cohort, mentors and a culture that lives what it teaches. College, where students remain for years inside our communities, is precisely where that kind of formation is possible.

We know it can be done, because we have done it. Over the past five years, through M54: The Institute for Insourcing, which we founded in 2021, we developed such a pedagogy, the Soular System. Rooted in the Chabad Chassidic framework of avoda pnimis, what we call insourcing, we taught it to 70 Jewish community leaders across the U.S. before bringing it to students at Chabad at Brandeis.

The early signs from our first two student cohorts are what you would hope for. One student wrote, “I’ve grown in my Judaism in a way that I now am learning to incorporate it into every aspect of my life,” which is what an owned Jewish identity sounds like: not attendance at what is provided, but integration into a life. Another described the experience as “a time for me to step outside my life to look at it more objectively, analytically and reflectively,” which is the developmental move itself. Students also report that the work is already reaching beyond their Jewish lives, changing how they see their own commitments.

We share this not to claim ours is “the” way, but it is proof of concept. Others can and should develop their own pedagogies out of their own traditions and strengths. The point is that self-authorship can be taught — deliberately, on campus, now.

The warm and welcoming experiences we have all built remain essential. They create the trust in which this deeper work becomes safe to attempt. But warmth is the precondition, not the outcome. And funders have an extraordinary role to play here: to fund what endures, to ask not only how many students came but what kind of adults they became, and to invest in the longitudinal research that would let all of us learn, honestly, what our methods produce over the course of our students’ adult lives. That evidence would make every organization in this field better.

The infrastructure is already there. The dedicated people are already there. The resources are already there. What is needed is an honest assessment and the courage to act on it. Done right, this will not move the needle. It will change a generation.

Chanie and Rabbi Peretz Chein are co-founders of Chabad at Brandeis, established in 2001, and of M54: The Institute for Insourcing, established in 2021.