For over 100 years, we in the Hillel movement have wrestled with a basic yet complex question: “How can we create Jewish flourishing on campus?” 

Over the past 18 months since Oct. 7, questions of this sort have taken on a particular importance and urgency. According to a recent study conducted with the ADL and College Pulse, more than 83% of Jewish college students have experienced or witnessed antisemitism, and more than 40% have felt the need to hide their Jewish identity. In this environment, clarifying a vision of Jewish growth and learning seems as essential as ever. Our campus Hillel colleagues Rabbi Seth Winberg, Rabbi Ari Weiss and Donna Schwartz recently shared their powerful insights on the topic and noted that professional support, investment and leadership are critical for considering the full landscape of Jewish student flourishing. 

We at Hillel — and everyone who cares about today’s Jewish college students — must establish a path for what Jewish development and maturation toward adulthood during these years might be, especially under the type of stress and challenges that many students are experiencing. 

Jewish Threshold Development Theory aims to guide students through three core, non-linear threshold experiences: becoming, belonging and building. While encounter and exploration of these thresholds can happen at any time during life (and can be revisited at different stages and moments), we believe that there is particular opportunity and potential of connecting Jewish students with these thresholds during the college years, a unique period of life with the potential to inspire and inform Jewish commitment into adulthood.

In the early 2000s, at the same time that Hillel was developing a new understanding of and strategy around relationship-based engagement, two educational theorists, Jan Meyer and Ray Land, suggested that educational development was like passing through a series of thresholds, “which is akin to a portal, opening up new and previously inaccessible ways of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, interpreting or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress.” In other words, students come to new horizons of understanding, application and creativity through particular “threshold” experiences. 

This educational idea, extended to the realm of Jewish development, holds enormous potential when combined with the unique relational focus that has long been a hallmark of Hillel’s work. While the path to Jewish adulthood will always be charted by each individual student for themselves, they are most often within a community and guided by a mentor-educator. Jewish Threshold Development Theory provides a vocabulary and a blueprint for three thresholds:

Becoming: Who am I?

This threshold speaks to the critical stage of identity formation, offering opportunities for students to encounter the breadth of Jewish experience in ways that feel authentic, explorative and personally resonant. As a space of self-exploration, students are supported to grapple with fundamental questions about themselves and their identity, as Jews and humans. This might look like experimentation with different Jewish practices, deliberate exploration of a personal Jewish story and history, and the “trying on” of different ways to relate to and engage with Jewish life. Within the experiences of “becoming,” students are empowered to develop personal meaning, spiritual growth and a strong sense of self. 

Belonging: What am I?

Experiences of “belonging” invite students to discover and deepen their place in community and in relationship to others. Students might explore both the concepts and applications of Jewish peoplehood, connection and communal responsibility. This threshold goes beyond the formation of individual relationships, bringing students into a sense of belonging and proximity to something beyond themselves. This might look like enhancing one’s understanding across difference, deepening relational bonds and experimenting with the boundaries of responsibility to and for others. The exploration of “belonging” allows students to define for themselves a sense of value and obligation as it pertains to their roles and responsibilities within the community, both in relationship to the Jewish people and more broadly. 

Building: How will I?

The “building” threshold invites students to move beyond exploring Jewish identity and community to actively creating and shaping it. As students are supported to stretch and expand their ability to create Jewish experiences, students begin to see themselves as “producers” — not only consumers — of Jewish life (referencing Jon Levisohn’s paradigm of “producers, not possessors”). This might look like bringing communities together around Jewish time, space, ideas and rituals. It might look like engaging people in conversations that matter to them as a Jew. Importantly, this is not always about formal leadership; rather, it is about cultivating a sense of agency, confidence and empowerment, advancing the message that everyone has the capacity to meaningfully contribute to the fabric of Jewish life.

Regardless of how a student progresses through these thresholds, those who care for them (as individuals and as Jews) have an opportunity to meet them where they are and guide them to grow as independent individuals, community members and contributors to the world around them. 

Jewish life on campus must be more than a place for people to come together and be Jewish with other Jews. It must be more than a place to gather, to meet a friend, to enjoy a meal or even to learn Torah with a great educator. It must be more than a place to find solidarity during a time of rising antisemitism and polarizing rhetoric around Israel. Certainly, all of these things are vitally important — but on their own, they do not fully embody the mandate of our work. This mandate calls on us to envision, boldly and bravely, a pathway for Jewish students to become their full selves, deeply embedded in community and with the ability to make meaningful and sophisticated contributions to Jewish life and beyond.

Rabbi Benjamin Berger is the senior vice president of Jewish education, community and culture at Hillel International. 

Mollie Feldman is the senior director of the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Experience at Hillel International and is studying towards rabbinic ordination in the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Beit Midrash for a New North American Rabbinate.