What I Do Matters: Educating for Avodat Hashem
Jon A. Levisohn is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish Educational Thought at Brandeis University, where he also serves as director. Professor Levisohn most recently authored Jewish Literacy (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming).
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.
A more Jewishly focused approach would have Jewish educators orient their work around a different ideal: Avodat Hashem, the service of the Divine. The fundamental claim of Avodat Hashem is not “God exists” and not “God loves me.” In fact, as I will explain later on in this essay, the fundamental claim is not about what specific tasks God has told me to do, either. The oved/et Hashem does not necessarily walk through the world with confidence about a set of propositions that they affirm.
Instead, the fundamental claim—or perhaps more accurately, the fundamental stance—is more like this:
I believe that what I do matters. I walk through the world with confidence that the choices that I and we make are significant. There is someone (or Someone) to whom it matters what I and we do. The commitments that I enact in the world are part of something bigger than me, and to which I hold myself accountable. There is a structure of obligations and relationships that encompasses my life and gives it meaning. My task, in specific situations and in general, is to try to discern what is being asked of me, what I am called upon to do.
This is faith not primarily as belief in, but belief that: belief that I have a duty to serve—to serve people, to serve causes greater than myself, to serve the Divine. This is what God wants of me. It entails belief that orienting my life in this way is good and healthy and meaningful. It entails belief that what I do matters.
The concept of Avodat Hashem that I am proposing cannot be defined mechanically through the 613 mitzvot, or limited to them, as expansive as they are. Our understanding of the Divine, and especially our understanding of what God asks of us, is mediated through our traditional texts and practices, through our communities that have formed around those texts and practices and been shaped by them, and by those who have wrestled with these questions before us. Yet the goal of that tradition, the purpose toward which Jewish education should aim, is not merely knowledge of the tradition. Instead, the goal is the formation of people who consistently hold themselves to account. To paraphrase Deuteronomy (10:12) and Micah (6:8)‚ we want our students to consistently ask themselves, as we want to consistently ask ourselves, “What does God want from me in this situation?”
To flesh out this foundational ideal, let me sharpen it by contrast with three other ideals: tikkun olam, talmud Torah, and submission. Each of these has genuine value. But none of them captures what is distinctive about Avodat Hashem.
Avodah and Tikkun Olam
Tikkun olam, especially in its contemporary form as a commitment to social justice, represents a powerful orientation towards the world. First and foremost, the tikkun olam orientation—or what I will call the “mode of tikkun”—refuses to avert its eyes from what is broken, and assumes responsibility for fixing those problems. The mode of tikkun is ambitious, strategic, and systematic. It analyzes the problems and designs solutions.
But the mode of tikkun has characteristic limitations. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the mode of tikkun, we risk seeing everything and everyone as a bundle of deficits to be fixed—students, clients, patients, community members, the people we love. This instrumentalizing gaze degrades our relationships.
Moreover, the mode of tikkun is governed by an implicit time horizon: there is a problem, so we design an intervention to achieve a result within some reasonable period of time. But the most important human obligations don’t work this way.
The mitzvah of bikkur holim‚ visiting the sick, isn’t a technology for producing health outcomes. Similarly, if you think the purpose of nihum avelim, comforting the bereaved, is for your visit to dissolve their grief, you’re doing it wrong. There is no “purpose,” at least not in the fix-the-problem sense that is familiar in the mode of tikkun.
Likewise, teaching—the work of education—reveals the limitations of the mode of tikkun. Educators have problems to solve in their work, every day. But it does not serve us well to think about teaching as fixing anything, nor to think of our students as problems! And the work of teaching is never finished. Our students may graduate, but they are still our students, and in any case, the next year begins and we have a whole new crop.
The mode of avodah is different. It does not ask, “What is broken and how do I fix it?” Instead, it asks, “What is being asked of me by this person, or this situation?” This orientation resists the logic of completion. The oved/et Hashem‚ the one who serves God‚ does not envision the day when the work is done and the term of service is complete. That’s not the goal. Avodah is a feature of our lives, not a bug.
For educators, the implications are significant. Schools that educate toward tikkun olam may produce graduates who scan the world for dysfunction and measure themselves by outcomes. They are attuned to brokenness and take responsibility for doing something about it. That is enormously important. But at a deeper level, I’m suggesting, we want our students not just to know how to be strategic and solve problems, but how to relate to others, how to ask what the moment demands, how to show up and be present, and how to serve.
Avodah and Talmud Torah
The celebrations of Torah study within the Jewish tradition are well-known and abundant. “Talmud Torah is equivalent to all [of the mitzvot]” (Pe’ah 1:1). “Turn [the Torah] over and turn it over again, for everything is in it” (Avot 5:26). The Sifra on Leviticus (26:3) explains the phrase, “If you walk according to my rules,” as referring to expending effort in the study of Torah (amelim ba-Torah). In fact, it is easy to assume that talmud Torah and Avodat Hashem are simply the same thing. One classical source (Sifre on Deuteronomy 11:13) explicitly makes that identification: “What is the service of God? This is Torah study.”
At its best, talmud Torah is genuinely transformative: it cultivates intellectual rigor, moral formation, reverence for tradition, the capacity for nuanced judgment, and a deep sense of groundedness that comes from receiving and contributing to an ongoing tradition.
Yet there is a characteristic pathology to talmud Torah as well. It can train us to experience everything‚ including religious and ethical demands‚ primarily as objects for interpretation and analysis. The question “What does this text mean?” can crowd out the more urgent question, “What is being asked of me?” We may even tell ourselves, sometimes, that we cannot respond to the call before we have fully understood it‚ which conveniently allows us to remain in the mode of talmud Torah indefinitely. This the point of the famous story about the R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Habad (often called “the Alter Rebbe”) and his grandson (the “Tzemah Tzedek”), sitting and studying while a baby cried in the next room. The grandson, deep in study, did not hear. The Alter Rebbe heard, and went to the baby. The point of the story is that, if our immersion in Torah has trained us not to hear the crying baby‚ something has gone terribly wrong.
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (in his essay, “Redemption, Prayer and Talmud Torah”) describes talmud Torah as a “redemptive experience” through which a person “returns to his own self.” Study, at is best, has the quality of self-exploration, self-understanding, and self-transcendence. This is beautiful—but notice its self-directedness. Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein (in his essay, “Why Learn Gemara”) writes that we engage in talmud Torah “not out of quest for intellectual stimulation but out of cleaving to devar Hashem.” Again, a powerful vision, but as we consider our educational objectives, it seems to demand a complementary attention to the call of the proverbial (or actual) baby.
In the mode of talmud Torah, the self faces the object of inquiry, Torah in its expansive sense, and seeks to grasp and understand. The movement is centripetal; the text is drawn into my sphere of understanding. In the mode of avodah, by contrast, the movement is centrifugal. The self does not primarily seek to comprehend what stands before it, but to respond to it, to go out to it. Ovdei Hashem do not imagine themselves as the interpreters of text, primarily, but as the addressees of a call. The purpose of learning is not merely to know what God has commanded, but to become the kind of person who can hear what God is asking us to do.
Avodah and Submission
Finally, I want to propose that we need to distinguish between Avodat Hashem and simple submission to Divine authority. There is, to be sure, a deep strand within our tradition that emphasizes the subordination of human will to the Divine will. The idea of kabbalat ol malkhut shamayim, “acceptance of the yoke of Heaven,” and kabbalat ol mitzvot, “acceptance of the yoke of the commandments,” evoke the image of an unthinking ox that is steered this way or that way by the yoke on his shoulders. And yet the tradition itself is ambivalent. The famous midrash taught by R. Avdimi (Shabbat 88a) about the mountain held over the heads of the Israelites imagines God saying, “Accept the Torah or this will be your grave.” But the continuation of that passage immediately introduces another voice, R. Aha, who argues that a covenant in which one party is coerced into submission is no covenant at all.
More fundamentally, Avodat Hashem is not well served by a vision of the servant as a passive, obedient instrument. When we picture the eved ne’eman, the “faithful servant‚” we do not picture blind compliance. Instead, we picture a wise and trusted officer, empowered to act in the world on behalf of the Master, who must interpret and apply the Master’s intentions in specific and local contexts. Service requires judgment, creativity, and ownership. Avodah demands agency.
The ideal of submission, at its extreme, is defined negatively, by the absence of autonomy. This can be important in a time when autonomy seems unconstrained. But Avodat Hashem is more than this; it is a positive vision of the Good Life, a life lived in faithful responsiveness to the call of the Other and the other, a life in which the self comes to its fullest expression precisely through that responsiveness. R. Haninah’s teaching in the Talmud (Kiddushin 31a) captures this paradox: the one who acts out of obligation is greater than the one who acts without being obligated. Obligation, on this view, is not a constraint on meaningful action. Obligation is what makes meaningful action possible.
Educational Implications
If Avodat Hashem represents a mode of being in the world‚ a sustained responsiveness to the Divine call as mediated through tradition, through other human beings, and through the concrete situations of one’s life, then what does it mean to educate for it?
First, it means we need to be honest about what Avodat Hashem is not. Schools that emphasize social action projects without cultivating spiritual depth may produce activists but not ovdei Hashem. Schools that emphasize textual mastery may produce scholars without the sensitivity to hear the proverbial call of the baby. Schools that emphasize compliance with external norms in the name of submission may produce observance without moral ownership.
Second, educating for Avodat Hashem means normalizing the language of Avodat Hashem, but especially, making the question of what God wants from us in any particular situation more than just a prelude to a pre-packaged prescription. Our students should learn that the question is as profound a guide to life as any alternative moral theory on offer, and also, that like all those other theories, it does not provide easy answers. The significance of the question of what God wants of us, as a guiding principle for how to live my life, is not well captured by the rather simpler and straightforward question of what the halakha is.
Third, educating for Avodat Hashem means attending to formation, not just content. This is the hardest and most uncertain kind of education, but the most important. It requires us to emphasize relationship-building and responsibility-taking, moral exploration, and emotional and spiritual maturity. It is not easily accomplished through mitzvah projects and service days.
We should practice asking not, “What did we accomplish?” but “What did we see and hear?” We should prioritize not only demonstrations of learning but also explorations of attunement. We should cultivate neither self-expression nor self-abnegation but embeddedness in obligations and commitments that comprise a life of service, and that give life meaning. This kind of education is often at odds with the grammar of schooling and our emphasis on achievement. But it is the most important educational work that we do.
This article is adapted from a longer study in “What Avodat Hashem Is Not”, Tradition 58:4, pp. 118-140.
Jon A. Levisohn is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Associate Professor of Jewish Educational Thought at Brandeis University, where he also serves as director. Professor Levisohn most recently authored Jewish Literacy (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming).
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.
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
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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
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Faith and Doubt: Lessons from a Modern Orthodox Scholars Program
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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....
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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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