Category: Search for Spirituality (Winter 2007)

Elana Maryles Sztokman, the managing editor of Jewish Educational Leadership, is a writer, editor, and researcher living in Modi’in.

Read more about the principal of Reut in the accompanying article, Spirituality in Leadership: Principal Aryeh Geiger.

Tucked away in a recessed driveway behind a busy intersection on the edge of Jerusalem’s Old Katamon neighborhood looms a set of olive green gates that open up into a serene courtyard. Four teenagers are playing basketball and others are lounging under the broad palm tree, a girl in jeans and nose-ring warmly greets a girl in a wheelchair, and a tall boy with a knitted skullcap hugs a long-haired girl. There is a gentle buzz here as kids lightly roam about, a calmness so contrasted with that of so many educational institutions, as well as with society at large, that you have to take a moment to remember that this tranquil spot is actually a high school in Israel.

This wondrous universe that is the Reut High School is a micro-society in which educational ideals – the kind that tend to peg its adherents as unrealistic dreamers – form a very powerful, and very much alive reality. Reut students volunteer for a myriad of causes without anyone demanding it of them, graduates spend hours of their spare time helping younger students, innovative programs are conceived, managed, and fundraised for by kids, students beg their teachers for number grades and consider class-cancellation a punishment, and more than anything, everyone talks about the principal, veteran educator Dr. Aryeh Geiger, in terms of love and near sainthood.

Reut, a pluralistic Jewish community founded in 1999 by a group of renegade educators and parents, is built upon the philosophy that social activism and respect for others are equal in importance to Jewish learning. Moreover, the founders believe that that this idea is equally applicable to all streams of Judaism and all segments of society. Here, classes are comprised of students from all denominations, from an array of ethnic-national origins, from all political movements, from heterogeneous academic records and socioeconomic backgrounds, and with varied physical abilities. Indeed, no two classes are alike.

The school is brimming with new immigrants from Ethiopia, the former Soviet Union, and English-speaking countries, as well as deaf students, Downs’ syndrome students, gifted kids, and students with an array of challenges. Yet, no student is relegated to the margins; students are not separated out into groups of kids that look and sound exactly like themselves. Instead, they are mixed up, as if in a Lotto bowl in which identities and ideologies randomly bounce around and encounter one another in dozens of interactions, big and small. This is a place where learning to respect differences is as much a part of daily life as eating and breathing.

“The school is about love,” explained Aryeh, as he is known throughout the school (“If anyone called me ‘doctor’,” he insisted, “I would be very upset!”). “The school is a community of a very diverse group of people who have a very strong commitment to Judaism, to spiritual quest within Judaism, to different forms of Jewish practice, different forms of relating to God, different forms of relating to oneself, and the school is about giving all of us, adults and students, tools to carry on that search. That’s what the school is about.“

Kids as Community

Reut is built on the educational philosophy of Janusz Korczak, the renowned children’s advocate who created an educational philosophy, built an orphanage in Warsaw based on his theories, and eventually marched along with the children in the Warsaw Ghetto to the trains leading to Treblinka. Janusz Korczak’s ideas around the rights of children as a social class unto themselves and the development of their abilities for self-empowerment and creative expression have had a strong influence on Aryeh’s thinking, ideas which, he says, “for some reason, most schools have had trouble building on”. But not at Reut. The notion of kids as constituting a true society of equal, right-holding, responsible members pulsates throughout the Reut community.

David, a feisty 16-year old boy who is making a cup of coffee in the staff room as he tells me, “I love this place,” works as the coach for the school’s basketball team. “Not just an assistant coach,” pipes in one of the teachers, “but a fully accredited and officially certified coach.” At Reut, kids are not the future – they are the present. Students take responsibility for many aspects of school life, from class décor and school maintenance, to major decision-making about educational policy. Issues such as dress code and test-grading policies have been discussed and decided upon in joint staff-student forums.

Perhaps the strongest example of student empowerment is the Va’adat Haginut, the “justice forum”, informally referred to as the school court. In this setting, which includes student and staff representatives, anyone can “sue” anyone else. When a group of older students, for example, locked the doors to the music room to keep younger students out, the younger group took the older students to court – and won. Not only were the older students banned from the music room for a few weeks, but the incident led to the formalizing of ground-rules around use of the music room.

One group even took the principal to court. When some 12th grade students skipped an assembly, Aryeh, in turn, cancelled their classes – and the students were so offended that they took him to court. “He was saying that it’s all part of the same package,” explained Dina Weiner, the Bible coordinator who took me around the school. “We’re not just about classes, and that if kids want the classes, they have to participate in the values aspects. But the students were very insulted. For them, skipping class was a form of punishment. So they took Aryeh to court. Aryeh won, but they ended up talking it out, which was very good.”

Active Pluralism
In the corner of the staff room, which is brimming with graduates, para-professionals, adults and kids, two students are quietly gesticulating in front of the computer screen. They call over Co-Principal Avital Levy-Katz. “ ‘Father’ in sign language,” explains the girl in the wheel-chair, “is like this,” as she demonstrates a top to bottom hand motion in front of the face. “Because the father is tall and strong. But ‘mother’ is like this,” she says, demonstrating a side to side motion “because she is always smiling.” The boy, who is deaf, clicks on the Hebrew sign-language web-site on the screen as he and his classmate laugh at the gender implications of these signs. “We really should have a course on the anthropology of sign language,” Avital says.

At Reut, multiple perspectives are an integral part of daily life. . “People come here from every walk of life,” Avital explained. “We don’t ask them if they keep Shabbat or not, we don’t measure their sleeves. We only deal with the things that are important.” As a reflection of this pluralism, for example, Japanese, Spanish, Amharic and sign language are part of the curriculum, art and music are brought into classes to enhance learning, and the entire school dedicated itself to the Sigd Festival, a highlight of the Ethiopian calendar. The school fills a need, Aryeh wrote, for “creating a community in which pluralism is practiced and taught not only through particular Jewish values, but also through a more universal approach…so as to give young people a recognition that other cultures, religions and ways of life exist. Our practice of including people from all socio-economic strata and with various special needs (what others call disabilities), this too is a way of doing pluralism and not just ‘wording it’.”

Indeed, pluralism forms the very fabric of the school. “We chose the word pluralism and not tolerance. It’s not that I put up with you – it’s that I have something to gain from you and from your perspective, that we need one another, and that we’re better off with each other,” explains Dina. “We have kids who are super leftists and kids who live in the territories and they have to learn how to talk about it and to love each other. We are not afraid to talk about it. What matters here is love, learning to love each other.”

Jewish education as fundamentally about love for fellow human beings is an idea that finds expression in a myriad of everyday encounters and exchanges in the school. Aside from all the hugging going on everywhere, students regularly dedicate their spare time to helping others with different special needs, whether by assisting someone in a wheelchair down the stairs, or studying and reading in partnership. Graduates fill the school on Sunday mornings before they go off to army and university, squeezing in every moment to tutor or volunteer wherever they may be needed. The school also employs a pluralistic staff, such as a deaf teacher and an assistant librarian who is a graduate with Down’s Syndrome. Co-Principal Avital Levy-Katz described the experience of seeing a student who has difficulty with reading and writing get up and sing at a school concert. “He sings so beautifully that I get chills even describing it – for that it was worth opening this school”.

“We are creating a greenhouse,” explains Dina, “in which we can all be honest about who we are and still respect each other and gain from each other.” Avital concurs that, “Here, you’re allowed to be happy or sad, you’re accepted as a person. It’s a safe place. It’s a family circle, much more than just about school. It’s a spiritual connection between people.”

“You don’t see this anywhere else,” adds Tzvi, a 23-year old who worked at the school as a para-professional with a student with C.P. who needed extra help. “Here, everyone is friends with everyone, kids from completely different places and background just accept one other as they are. It’s a very special place.”

The pluralism and mutual respect is also cross-age. For example, a twelfth grade student who is matriculating in dance, has a seventh grade student helping her. “It’s more than utilitarian, it’s that they have a human connection,” Avital explained. “It’s not about whose interest it is, it’s a real connection between a seventh grader and a twelfth grader. You don’t see things like that in most places.”

One of the central venues for building pluralism and mutual understanding is in prayer. As Tchiya, who runs the Reut Institute of Pluralist Training, explained, “Every single person is part of the community, and therefore everyone’s presence is important. Everyone is equal in prayer, there is no difference between teacher and student, strong and weak…. It is a place where everyone is accepted as they are, without any connection to their belief system…. It is a place for searching for meaning.”

For several years, the school ran a “hitchabrut” program, which means “connection”. Before morning services, students would choose from a smorgasbord of spiritual pursuits, including Tai Chi, meditation, jogging, Israeli dancing and nature walks. Although students eventually rejected the program as too “new-age”, the school continues to promote these practices in a less intensive way, through occasional day-long mind-body fairs. Moreover, while not everyone has to pray, everyone has to attend services, in order to respect those who want to pray.

Three times a week, there is a girls’ morning prayer service as well, in order to create a venue for girls who want to read from the Torah and lead services. At those services, the leading of which is one of Dina’s many responsibilities, “we do things our way, in a female way that’s comfortable for us. When we have a discussion, it’s much less Lithuanian, much less linear.”

Similarly, the school uses Bible as a tool for inviting pluralism. “The standard religious curriculum doesn’t speak to many students,” Dina explained. “Many kids walk out of the state religious system totally anti-Bible. By 11th and 12th grade, all we taught was commentaries. We never taught the text. It was never, why do we care? Here, we teach the text, and we added hours, which gives us the freedom to make it more alive, to feel the characters, to feel the story. By putting our kids together, kids from all different backgrounds come here and learn together and learn how to talk to each other and how to help each other. It doesn’t matter if you’re religious or secular. It’s about saying, this matters to us, this learning is what matters to us; it’s meaningful. Here we say, we just want to be honest about who we are, about what we believe.”

In other religious educational settings, such honesty and acceptance can be a dangerous pose. “I am not going to hide what I believe because I’m afraid that my boss’ boss is going to fire me if I say what I believe,” Dina added. This is particularly striking in light of the school history: the staff, students, and parents who founded the school broke off from their previous school against the backdrop of debate surrounding the 1995 assassination of then Prime Minister Yizchak Rabin. Aryeh, then principal, had attempted to bring in an open-minded pluralistic approach by allowing students to criticize the role of the religious educational establishment in molding some of the ideas that guided assassin Yigal Amir – and for that, he was fired. “Here, we try to push the arguing, to say I don’t agree, or even I don’t agree with God. We encourage it, the arguing and the doubting and the questioning – it’s a big piece of being Jewish.”

Indeed, Reut not only has added hours of Bible, but has created its own pluralism curriculum, and is working on a matriculation exam in Pluralism. More significantly, however, pluralism forms the very fabric of daily life at the school. The school population is so widely diverse, and students are encouraged to engage with one another at every juncture – always with love and care.

“I know it sounds rather mundane and almost ridiculous,” Aryeh said, “but you take almost any issue in the school system in Israel now – certainly violence, underachievement, lack of motivation – almost all of these have to do with the fact that students are alienated from the schools, they don’t feel compassion, they don’t feel love, they feel they are in a competitive, utilitarian society, they could care less about bagrut or any of the other exams. It could change dramatically if compassion were just back in the system.”

Social responsibility
This love and care is apparent in every corner of the school – from the sign on the principal’s door which says, “We love you Aryeh!” to the hundreds of amateur photos on the wall of staff and students talking, learning, and hugging, to the dozens of flyers, announcements, and certificates of appreciation from every social cause in Israel.

Perhaps the strongest expression of the school’s emphasis on active love and care for fellow human beings is in The Ma’aser Program that encourages kids to volunteer for everything from the cancer society, to soup kitchens, to the environment. The Ma’aser Program is a cornerstone of the school’s educational philosophy, and of everyday school life. As one graduate, who spends her spare time in the school tutoring students, explained to me, “The school emphasizes what kind of person you are, what you do with your life, not just for yourself but for other people. Forcing you to volunteer kind of defeats the purpose. Here you just do it. The school just brings out the best in you.”

In the entranceway, 16-year old Tamir is busy cooking. The tall, striking curly-haired boy has a twinkle in his blue eyes as he hustles around the makeshift kitchen, wearing cooking mitts and scooping out rice into small containers. Tamir is the co-coordinator of the Hot Meals program, which provides 160 lunches to poor kids in the city five days a week, as part of the Reut Soup Kitchen run by students throughout the year, including feeding 300 people a hot supper three times a week. “I love the school,” he tells me as I try to keep up with his pace. “It’s a special place that teaches you how to be a person.” Tamir credits Aryeh with instilling these ideas in him. “The principal here is a legend for me. I love him very much. Whatever he says is holy for me.”

At Reut, volunteering and social activism are part of the rhythm of everyday life. “We used to get up and talk about this all the time,” Dina explained, “but now, it just is. We don’t make anyone volunteer, because if you are forced, then it’s not volunteering. The kids just run everything, and teachers volunteer too.”

Perhaps the most legendary program that emerged from this culture is the Gidonim program for restoring and documenting Polish cemeteries. A group of twelfth grade students went on the school’s “Journey of Remembrance” in October 2003, having spent two days of the trip cleaning and starting to document a local Jewish cemetery. They returned to school profoundly disturbed: they were upset that they did not finish the job. So they decided to go back and spend a few weeks in Poland finishing the job of cleaning the cemetery and working in other towns.

“We didn’t take them seriously at first,” Dina recalled. “ After all, who was going to put off the army or university? And who was going to pay $1,000 for another two week trip in Poland.” But to the surprise – and enormous pride – of the communities, the students put off their future plans for a few weeks, worked to raise money, and went back to Poland for two weeks the following summer where they worked day and night clearing tombstones and recording names and dates. They even uncovered a mass grave that had not been discovered.

Since then, groups of staff, students and graduates have been returning to Poland every summer to work on the cemeteries. This program, called the Gidonim program in memory of those who worked as inside contacts for Jews wishing to immigrate to Palestine, even has its own database website – www.gidonim.com – in which people can search for names, tombstones, and cemetery maps.

“This is an extraordinary act of chesed – lovingkindness,” Dina maintains, “It’s not even a humanist act. It’s something that happens within yourself. The kids say they go not only for their families and for the Jewish community. They do it because it’s a spiritual act. This is the type of program that, for those who take part in it, changes who you are as a person.”

Spirituality as Life

The message that comes across perhaps most powerfully in the school is that spirituality is not about praying once a day, but is woven into every aspect of living life. “When I see kids working at the soup kitchen, after a long day of school, staying voluntarily until 7 or 8:PM,” Avital recalled, “it’s holiness. To feel it, to see them, to see their eyes, it’s moving, it’s spiritual. It’s just holy.”

The emphasis here on spirituality as social awareness is why Reut does not call itself a school but a community. Individual achievement is not valued here – commitment to the well-being of the whole community is. In fact, there are no academic criteria for acceptance, only that applicants have ideological agreement with the Reut community. “It’s not about how you do on math, it’s about, are you a mentsch? Do you feel responsibility for the world around you?”

Similarly, matriculation is neither encouraged nor discouraged. Students are free to take as many exams as they want, and teachers assist in every way possible. The staff prefers not to use number grades at all because, as Dina explains, “it is meaningless. What is that number?” But the students won that debate and so there are number grades. But even those are not significant. As Debbie, the music and Spanish teacher, said, “The place gives me freedom to create and to thrive.” It’s not about academic achievement or individual success but rather about seeing human growth in terms of care and responsibility for the other. It’s the idea of school life as part of a spiritual journey. As a sign on one of the teacher’s lockers reads, “Ani b’tahalich” – I am in process.

All aspects of life at the Reut community reflect this idea that spirituality is about seeing life as this journey – adults and kids alike. Spirituality is not only about praying, but is woven into every aspect of living life. “Spirituality doesn’t only have to do with prayer, but is about doing Torah,” Dina argues. “Spirituality can happen in a learning experience, in a discussion, or in going out and feeding the poor. Spirituality means being touched, making your life meaningful, changing the world. When a kid works at the soup kitchen, it’s an act of Torah.” Kids see everything ranging from The Ma’aser Program to singing in a Polish cemetery as spiritual acts. Spirituality is in the day-to-day acts of human encounter.

“This school is not about a job – it’s a whole ideology, a whole way of life” Dina said. “People give extra all along, they come at 7AM and don’t leave the building at night. The school attracts people who want that, who are willing and interested in growing. Teaching here is not easy – it challenges you.”

According to Dina, staffers work hard on themselves and on the students, to enable the school to be a safe place for personal, spiritual, emotional processing.

“I think most of our graduates are fairly well grounded in good mental health,” Aryeh believes. “I think there are many excellent schools, some of which I’ve been a part of, that stress academic excellence and pursuits and many things that the adult society expects of students in a competitive society, and leave by the side other aspects of growing up, such as being well balanced and having healthy, good mental health. At this school we’re very committed to a more holistic approach. We’re not threatened if kids act out. We would rather deal with the issues and not leave them for later when they’re in the army or building a family, etc. I think for that reason, graduates who finish here by and large are happy and healthy individuals.”

But this is not easy, and it requires constant attention and work. “We are trying to create a utopian world in which everyone loves each other and cares about each other. And we had to work through how you do that, how do you teach Bible, and how do you do prayer, and how do we create a school where a religious family feels comfortable and a secular family will feel comfortable?” Dina asked.

The results of this hard work are indeed impressive. As one recent graduate said, “The school brought out the best in me, because it emphasizes what kind of person you are, what you do with your life, not just for yourself but for other people. I still got good grades, it wasn’t one or the other, but it’s about what your priorities are as a person.”

Another recent graduate concurred, “I left the school knowing that I have the power to change the world.”