Daniel Bonner, a graduate of Levine Academy and Yavneh Academy in Dallas, is student president of the Columbia/Barnard Hillel.
Daniel Bonner shares a student’s perspective on his experience in a high school which sought to empower students.
Rarely does a day go by at college when I don’t look back to my experience as a Yavneh Academy student; I can pinpoint the moment I learned to edit, to run a meeting, to make a big “ask” when raising funds for charity. One thing made it all possible for us, Yavneh’s students: a spirit among Yavneh’s professional and lay leadership of empowerment. In their eyes there was no task too complicated for Yavneh’s students, no meeting too serious, no decision too weighty for our input.
In order to arrive at what you do not know,
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
– “East Coker” by T.S. Eliot
We could end here; the poet understands the human nature. To build a more innovative, creative, effective school, those in power must, up to a point, relinquish control, give up something of themselves. They must acknowledge, before the community, their limitations. In contemporary parlance, what got us here, won’t get us there.
But this theory of leadership is not limited to early 20th century England. It is an authentically Jewish concern. See the Gemara in Berakhot 5b which seems to exhort the same value. “A captive,” it says, “cannot free himself from prison.” I do not mean to suggest, of course, that my day school experience was prison-like, in any way. But even educators find themselves constricted, stuck in the educational style to which they are so accustomed. Rather than make the effort alone to be different, Yavneh’s educators said, time and again: “This is your turn. Unsatisfied? Build a class schedule; take this grant and design a program; go out into the community with a charge to make a difference and do us proud.”
Theory aside, how did this work at Yavneh? Perhaps our most important empowerment experience involved Students Against Terrorism, Yavneh’s student-founded, student-run organization that has, since 2002, raised over $200,000 for victims of terrorism in Israel. Long story short: SAT planned a yearly basketball tournament, Points for Peace, that included about 300 local players and close to 1,000 volunteers and spectators annually. The organization’s Standstrong 4 Israel wristbands, with more than 50,000 sold on five continents, raised awareness about the situation in Israel. Roses imported from a Moshav in Sedeh Nitzan, Israel brought a dozen reminders of Israel to Shabbat tables weekly.
There were days when we wondered how much more successful we might be if we had an adult advisor governing our every step; observers would not have been crazy to think that we really had no idea what we were doing. And sometimes, they were right. Sometimes, our parents and mentors let us fail. But they saw the educational value in learning from error. As one community leader put it to me, the Dallas community “had our backs,” every step of the way. That one small PR success for our school was worth a whole lot less than a lifetime of leadership lessons.
On one occasion, SAT’s leaders petitioned a local philanthropist to underwrite the first step of a new campaign – and were swiftly turned away. It took months for the Roses for Israel program we organized to turn any sort of profit. I’ll never forget where I was sitting when I called one of Dallas’s most famous cultural icons, having prepared for an hour for the call, to have the phone put down not three words into the conversation. As students at Yavneh, we never had any doubt that our organization would have the funds to send to Israel. Buoyed by the example set by our parents, we had no doubt that we would eventually learn to plan a successful program. And so, failures aside, we learned to take risks – the most valuable skill any student empowerment effort can impart.
You might be familiar with the story of Eldad and Medad (Bemidbar 11) – the seventy elders leave the camp in the direction of the Mishkan, preparing to receive prophecy from God. Two of them, Eldad and Medad, remain in the camp (their rationale is a matter of debate among our sages). There, while the elders are elsewhere and preoccupied, they begin to prophesy – perhaps the earliest textual example of decentralized Jewish leadership. Even Joshua – who was a keen observer of human nature (Bemidbar 27: 15-18) – is concerned. “My Lord Moses,” he says to his mentor, “restrain them!” Moshe dismisses Joshua’s concerns in a famous response: “Would that all the people of the Lord might be prophets, that the Lord would put His spirit upon them!”
Empowerment is a gradual process. As freshmen at Yavneh, we received the flexibility to organize our own free time on campus; as sophomores, to build much of our schedules. And the options extended throughout the four years. Perhaps this is the advantage of attending a school with a smaller student body, but if any student was ever unsatisfied with anything in our school, we knew where our principal’s door was – and we knocked on it often.
The notion of “student empowerment” can be applied to nearly everything we did at Yavneh Academy – in the classroom, in the adult boardroom, and beyond, in the community at large, because its leaders believed in this education model’s unlimited potential. Student leaders were invited to share divrei Torah with lay leaders. Returning from the March of the Living, a two-week trip through Poland and Israel, there was no question that we would stand before the community to explain why their support mattered.
And what of limits? I asked one administrator. “Danger to self, others, or institution. That pretty much is it.” Dallas was a place, Yavneh was a school, and these were people who believed deeply in the latent potential of this community’s young people. They allowed us to take risks; we failed. And we are better communal leaders today for it.
If my experience at Yavneh taught me anything, it is that one cannot expect a student to adjust to the freedom of college if he or she is not accustomed to choice, and the power of informed decision-making. Yavneh’s graduates are many things, good and bad. But above all, they are remarkably well-adjusted. Accustomed to the travails of institution building, to the tough decisions inherent in communal life, they are ready to face questions of those varieties and others on the college campus.
Day schools are engaged in the production of modern day prophets. When developed carefully, an empowered young leader is an asset to his or her school and, by extension, to his or her people. T.S. Eliot might have been talking about Moshe when he emphasized the value of dispossession – of relinquishing one’s own power for the sake of another’s growth. And only through that process, freeing the Jewish people from the prison of convention, might a prophesying Eldad or Medad emerge.