Creating Space for Lifelong Conversations, Difficult Questions and Spiritual Growth is Jewish Education
Cherie Koller-Fox is the President of NewCAJE, a pluralistic organization that empowers Jewish educators and multi-medium artists to be excellent Jewish educators through advocacy and professional development. An early pioneer in family education, Rabbi Koller-Fox also advocates for Biblical text study in supplementary schools.
Introduction
Jewish educators need to make a radical shift in how we teach both children and adults about the Divine. Educators must be empowered to discuss God openly and often, ensuring that students’ spiritual identities evolve alongside their intellectual development. I learned about this from speaking to my congregants—highly intelligent professors and professionals—yet most had not revisited their concepts of the Divine since their B’nai Mitzvah at age 13. This raised critical pedagogical and spiritual questions for me. How do individuals become spiritually stuck? How do we facilitate spiritual growth? How do people become spiritually stagnant? How do we as Jewish educators prevent our current B’nai Mitzvah from becoming not only stuck in their 13-year-old theology, but also from becoming estranged from Judaism as adults due to premature theological conclusions or painful childhood experiences?
I have found that encouraging people to re-examine their beliefs is the first step. Asking them when they last formed their opinions about God makes them realize that they had not thought seriously about it since they were teens, that whatever they concluded years ago, life changes who we are and what we believe. They find that when they open themselves up to doubt instead of certainty and questions instead of answers, they recognize the irony of navigating adulthood guided by adolescent thinking.
Why “the Divine”?
You may have noticed that I introduced the language of “the Divine” as a substitute for God. That is intentional. The word God carries connotations that can get in our way: God is gendered; God lives in heaven; God judges, punishes, and rewards us; God has an outstretched arm that took us out of Egypt; God has a long white beard. For some, God carries cultural connotations absorbed from the dominant non-Jewish culture in which we live. For that reason, I use “the Divine” so that that we can begin afresh—with a clean slate and few preconceptions.
“God Jams”
Hospital chapels contain notebooks filled with intimate notes to God, bargaining for recovery of their loved ones by promising to never commit a specific sin again or stop engaging in a specific vice, or offering to do a charitable act. In crises, we can feel that God is incredibly close and powerful. But ideas like bargaining with God can disappoint us long before we have enough life experience to understand the complexities of faith. Bargaining with God is not the only way to get spiritually stuck. In educational and psychological literature this “stuckness” is called spiritual stagnation. This is when your spiritual curiosity dies because we’ve come to believe our own conclusions; we’ve stopped looking deeper because we’ve found our answer.
I call this the “God Jam”—like a traffic jam, but about God. God Jams happen to anyone who doesn’t take the opportunity to discuss God and hear alternative viewpoints. I experienced this spiritual stagnation myself when I was 13. My grandfather died on Friday night after I slept through an important ritual in my family—lighting the Shabbat candles—leading me to conclude that my grandfather’s death was my fault. I carried that guilt for many years until a therapist gently convinced me that I wasn’t so powerful that my absence from that ceremony would have brought about that consequence.
In a workshop for Jewish educators I once facilitated, I discovered that many others experience this stuckness as well. When I noticed that many were uncomfortable with the discussion about God, I opened the question of why. It did not take long for them to share their own unresolved theological stuckness. When they finally settled, I asked if they discussed God with their students. They offered a number of reasons to explain why they did not, but the most important for most of them was because they were triggered by their own unresolved issues about the Divine. Stuckness made them uncertain about how they would answer any question a child might raise.
Teachers can serve as spiritual guides and moral compasses to their students. Teachers often wonder if there is a place to discuss their own beliefs in open discussions with their students. I believe that it can be very powerful, although to keep the students actively engaged and open it is important to ensure that the teacher’s voice is just another one in the group and doesn’t dominate or stifle the students. When teachers speak using the first person, they model their own spiritual path and their understanding. When they share their own struggles or lack of struggles with the concept of the Divine, they encourage their students to authentically share their own, and to question their pre-conceived notions.
Revisiting early conclusions and struggling with questions is a core component of building authentic faith and is deeply embedded in the Jewish tradition. Genesis 32 depicts Jacob as wrestling with a mysterious figure who eventually bestows upon him the name Israel, the “one who struggles with God.” We are all Israel, and we can foster healthy theological exploration by modeling it and encouraging children to voice their own struggles.
Children’s Questions About God
Justin L. Barrett notes that young children “often have a natural ‘intuitive’ inclination to assume the world was designed by an intentional creator.” Children naturally wonder about God as early as three years old. Just like Piaget’s stages of cognitive development and Kohlberg’s levels of moral development, where people move forward by conversing with others at the next step, theological growth is no different. Children grow from primitive notions of faith to more sophisticated ones through grappling with questions.
When my five-year-old granddaughter watched a video about the Passover story, she asked, “I know who Aaron, Moses, Miriam, and Pharaoh are, but who is God?” We brought her question to our seder table. She listened to a dozen different answers from our guests. Afterward, she pointed to two people and said she liked their answers best. We validated her curiosity, explaining that some questions take a lifetime to answer.
Children’s questions about God evolve. Young children ask concrete questions: “Where does God live?” or “What does God look like?” Elementary-aged children ask, “Is the Bible true?” wanting to know if it is factual. As they become adolescents, teens ask deeper questions and may rebel against the idea altogether: “Can I believe in both science and God?” “Why do bad things happen to good people?” They grapple with believing in something as complex as faith. These are good, age-appropriate questions, and deserve discussion.
When my seventh-graders questioned the compatibility of science and the Bible, I invited scientists into the classroom to talk about the unknowns in their fields. Through this experience, the students developed a more nuanced view—learning that religion and science ask different questions, yield different answers, and ultimately both offer vital insights into our world.
Conversations via Prayer, Literature, Text, and Definition
Much of the regular Jewish curriculum in day or supplementary schools provides opportunities to engage students in faith issues. For instance, the evening Ma’ariv blessings focus on the mystery of dusk and dawn—not only the science of planetary rotation, but the miraculous reliability of the cycle itself. If your class meets at sunset, you can bring students outside or to a window and open a discussion about the wonder of nature, asking what an orderly, dependable universe suggests about its Creator.
Modern and midrashic stories about God serve as excellent prompts for open discussion. Sharon Elswit’s The Jewish Story Finder is a great resource for locating them, alongside collections like Dan Ben-Amos’ Folktales of the Jews and works by storyteller Peninnah Schram.
Of course, biblical texts can also spark open discussion about God. An elderly Holocaust survivor once visited my fourth-grade class. The children gathered around him as he told the story of Samuel’s first encounter with God in the book of Samuel, Chapter 3. In the text, When Samuel was sleeping, he heard a voice calling to him. He thought it was his master, the Priest Eli, who called. Eli said that it wasn’t him. The third time Samuel came, Eli told him if he heard the voice again, he should say: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening,” Samuel, did and God speaks to him.
The visitor modeled an open discussion by asking the children: “If God spoke to Samuel, why doesn’t He speak to us?” After listening intently to their diverse ideas, he offered his own perspective: “I think God doesn’t talk to us because we aren’t quiet enough to hear.” He blamed televisions, phones, and the internal chatter of modern life, suggesting that if we were truly quiet, we could all hear God like Samuel did. This lesson left an unforgettable impact on the children and on me.
The Lifelong Conversation
The most effective theological education is woven naturally into daily life. Parents can model this by highlighting natural wonders, demonstrating ethical behavior, and discussing deep questions when prompted by current events or a family death—such as why bad things happen to good people. Jewish educators can provide critical guidance to parents to help them navigate these conversations.
Making time for regular classroom discussion establishes a habit of theological check-ins where teachers ask what the children are thinking about the Divine now—making sure children and teens understand that their ideas will change over time. Making this a natural part of Jewish education requires discussions based around the students’ own questions and ideas. Hearing both their teachers’ and parents’ faith journeys normalizes theological discourse. They learn that they are on an evolving journey of “God Wrestling” that will change throughout their lives.
In Closing…
The study of theology lacks the definitive, empirical answers of mathematics or a game show like Jeopardy. Many inquiries can be informed by ancestral wisdom and determining what personally resonates. Yet, like Jeopardy, theological answers often take the form of questions.
When Jewish educators recognize and confront their own formative adolescent theological constructs, they become open to engage students in authentic spiritual discussions. By becoming “God wrestlers” themselves, educators help students grapple with millennia-old foundational questions: “How do I understand God?” “What does the Divine ask of me?” “What am I meant to accomplish?” “What happens when we die?” With practice, even young children can learn that faith is born from wrestling with a concept so expansive that we could never fully comprehend it. Ultimately, fostering open, ongoing theological dialogue helps both children and adults navigate the complex relationship between the physical world and the Divine, our Eternal Source.
Cherie Koller-Fox is the President of NewCAJE, a pluralistic organization that empowers Jewish educators and multi-medium artists to be excellent Jewish educators through advocacy and professional development. An early pioneer in family education, Rabbi Koller-Fox also advocates for Biblical text study in supplementary schools.
From The Editor: Fall 2026
For part of the time that I was studying for my semikha I had a roommate whom I admired for his faith. It was pure, simple, genuine, rock solid. My friend never seemed to question, to waver. I sometimes challenged him, but he was unfazed. I often wished that some of that would rub off on me. Nope. He remained steadfast; I remained struggling.
The Courage to Ask
An eleventh grader this year wrote about her faith in the wake of October 7th:
In the weeks following…, I found it challenging to believe in a G-d that could allow such horrors to be done to humans, especially His chosen people…. I found myself wondering, “How could a merciful G-d put us in this world knowing the immense suffering that would ensue?” He is supposed to be looking out for us and protecting us…Eventually, my doubts started spreading into other areas of my life. Brachot lost their meaning, teffilot seemed to have lost their power, and motivation for some mitzvot completely disappeared. My day-to-day life lost its “light” without the meaning or motivation to guide me through my days.
Creating the Conditions for Faith: Emunah as Encounter, Not Instruction
Every summer my paternal grandmother, a devout Orthodox Jew from the Bronx, took me on holiday to the beaches of Far Rockaway. On Shabbat morning we would stroll just two blocks from our breezy apartment to the synagogue steps—though it was less a walk than a journey to another place and time. Modeled after the grand edifices of Europe, the sanctuary was physically stunning: soaring, cathedral-like ceilings, colorful stained-glass windows, the women’s balcony above, the men’s section below. The service was scheduled to begin at nine, but on this Shabbat we arrived a full hour early. Sitting together in the silence, alone in the large empty hall, I asked her why we had come so soon.
In God We Trust: Teaching Bitahon
In the immediate wake of October 7, 2023, the instinct of many Jewish educators worldwide was clear: we needed to teach hope. Many of us clung to the timeless words of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “It is not too much to say that Jews kept hope alive, and hope kept the Jewish people alive.” Hope was our life-support system and one of the messages of every piece of Torah I subsequently taught.
What I Do Matters: Educating for Avodat Hashem
When Jewish educators in the modern West discuss “educating for faith,” we may unconsciously import a framework that does not quite fit our tradition. The dominant model in the broader cultural conversation, shaped largely by Protestantism, understands religious faith primarily as a personal relationship with the Divine: belief in God’s existence and love, and the cultivation of trust in and intimacy with a personal God. This is a coherent and meaningful vision, and in fact, we have much to learn from our Protestant colleagues. But this is not the most distinctively Jewish one.
From “What” to “So What”: Educating for Emunah Through Culture, Curriculum, Relationships, and Questions
We begin with a firm belief that each student has a neshamah—a soul, a divine spark—and with it an inherent capacity for emunah, or faith. Our task is not to try to create something new for them. It is to awaken and strengthen that inheritance, to reveal what is theirs already and to help students make it personally their own.
For us, the goal of Jewish education is to have Jewish identity expressed in thought and action. That identity is grounded in an awareness of God (Hashem), a personal relationship with God, and responsibility toward other people. This is not one objective among many; it is the mission of our school.
The Prophet as Rebel: Finding Faith in the Emotional-Psychological Classroom
I stepped into the classroom mid-year as both the homeroom and Tanakh teacher for a group of six 9th graders at an Israeli emotional-psychological school. These were students for whom the traditional educational system had often been a site of failure rather than growth. Most struggled with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) or had other neurodivergent challenges. Most were “talkers”—highly intelligent, deeply critical of systems, and, with one exception, entirely non-religious.
The Hidden Curriculum of Faith: How School Culture Shapes Religious Development
A student walks out of twelve years of intensive Judaic studies. She has learned Humash with Rashi, sat through years of Talmud, and taken courses in Jewish thought. But ask her, some years later, what shaped her relationship with Torah and with God, and the answer does not usually start with a class. Instead, it starts with the memory of a teacher who treated her with care during a hard stretch, an administrator whose handling of a particularly charged moment stood out, or the way that faculty members handled disagreements and differences of opinion amongst themselves and with students.
Faith in the Future: What Jewish School Leadership Has Taught Me About Emunah
It is often said that Judaism is a religion of deed, not creed. In Jewish day schools, that distinction is often taken one step further. Schools teach texts, practices, language, and history, but often hesitate to name faith as an educational goal. In pluralistic settings in particular, educators are wary of imposing theology or defining belief.
Faith and Doubt: Lessons from a Modern Orthodox Scholars Program
Three years ago, I launched what is now the Sloan Scholars Program, an enrichment program rooted in our Modern Orthodox mission to integrate rigorous Torah study with the best of worldly knowledge. Through seminars, readings, guest speakers, cultural outings, and independent research, students explore enduring questions at the intersection of Torah and modernity. Over time, however, I noticed that many of the questions students most wanted to investigate were not merely intellectual; they were existential. Students asked why Jewish traditions developed as they did, how halakha should respond to contemporary challenges, and, perhaps most fundamentally, how a Modern Orthodox Jew should live in a complex modern world.
It Takes a Community
In my role as board president, and as a parent of both graduates and current students, I frequently receive feedback from parents, staff, and administrators about the state of the school. Some of the most impassioned conversations revolve around the question of how schools can help students deepen their faith. Few, however, are able to articulate precisely what this means. For some, faith grounds and manifests itself in resilience. For others, it is a spiritual attachment expressed through greater religious observance, prayer, or ritual practice. Faced with this ambiguity, schools often attempt a little of everything. They expand informal programming, encourage visible religious behavior, and offer courses in Jewish philosophy. Yet these well-intentioned efforts are often premised on the assumption that faith is a discrete educational outcome.
Assessing Faith: The Gift We Owe Our Students
Faith is one example of a “non-testable” priority that Jewish day schools have. In a recent article for 18Forty, Hillel Rapp identifies inspiration as one of the four pillars of Jewish high school. If educating for inspiration, or faith, is as important as academic learning, it is actually essential for schools to find some way to assess and report on the progress, at the time that it’s happening. Otherwise, we run the risk of telling students that this is a core part of our purpose, while showing them that we actually only care about math and science. To be sure, I am not suggesting that we give students a grade on faith. Instead, we need to get back to the core of the purpose of assessment and then use that information to set goals for future growth.
Educating for Faith Through the Arts
When I learned to paint, my father told me to pay attention to light and shadows, there is something spiritual, otherworldly, but also recognizable, in captured light. Like in Rembrandt. Maybe he had read once that Rav Kook suggested that Rembrandt was blessed with a vision of the holy light secreted away at creation.
I never asked him, as he died when I was 14 and most of my questions came later. I wanted to believe in a rational world, yet met a world that didn’t make sense but allowed us to trust in ourselves and our own rationality. Where did God and religion fit in there? At moments in my young adulthood when faith seemed far, I would sometimes find glimmers of it in visual aesthetic experiences; the light of the Shabbat candles and the moments when the sun slips away.
Doubt as a Catalyst for Faith
Jewish day schools today educate students in a cultural environment shaped by distraction, rapid information flow, and exposure to competing value systems. For many students, religious language and practice can feel inherited rather than chosen, and belief can appear fragile or performative. In this context, the central challenge for Jewish education is not simply how to transmit faith, but how to cultivate a form of faith that is resilient, reflective, and capable of growth.
I submit that faith in K-12 Jewish education does not develop primarily through doctrinal instruction or rote assent. Instead, it emerges through lived experience, responsibility, and structured encounters with doubt. Rather than treating doubt as a threat, Jewish education can frame it as a catalyst for deeper commitment.
Faith Without Dogma: A Developmental Approach to Jewish Spiritual Education
Morah Elana gathers her students on the carpet in the morning. Each student sits in their place, though a few still squirm restlessly. But the routine begins, as the teacher and students recite together with the hand motions:
Personal Pathways to Emunah for a Diverse Student Body
AllIssuesJournalCreditsLinoy Even-Kesef is a Judaic Studies and Hebrew educator at Oakland Hebrew Day School (California). She is also engaged in research and writing on Jewish education, Hebrew language instruction, spirituality, and values-based learning. Dr....
And Both are True: Mimicry and Authenticity in Educating for Faith
Every teacher wants to make a difference in their students’ lives, and educating for faith involves relationship building. Jewish faith is founded on an individual’s relationship with God, the Land of Israel, Torah, and the Jewish People. Teachers who want to help students build their faith need to build relationships with their students which support, but do not supplant, the students’ relationships with the foundations of Jewish faith. Similar to the approach used to guide skill development in academic, behavioral, and social-emotional learning, where modeling, direct instruction, or coaching techniques may be effective, the teacher needs to step aside at the appropriate juncture to encourage independence. Emulation of role models can be a useful first stage, but mimicry that does not advance beyond imitation may impede authentic religious growth and development.
Developing Wholeheartedness
In the introduction to his 11th century book Duties of the Heart, R. Bahya Ibn Pakuda poses a question that Jewish educators continue to struggle with today. Bahya asks why he cannot find any source in rabbinic texts that describes the inner life of the Jew. He knows there are mitzvot to learn and perform, he knows that there are intellectual concepts to attain and reason with but where are, what he calls, “The Duties of the Heart?” The book that he writes, one of the most popular Jewish books for 1000 years, starts to enumerate these Duties and weighs them alongside the mitzvot and de’ot, what he identifies as the “Duties of the Limbs.”
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