Daniel Lehmann is the President of Hebrew College (Boston). He previously served as the founding headmaster of Gann Academy — The New Jewish High School of Greater Boston, and as founding director of the Berkshire Institute for Music and Arts. Rabbi Lehmann received the Covenant Foundation Award as well as the Benjamin Shevach Award from Hebrew College for his innovative leadership in Jewish education.

Jewish day schools have the privilege and responsibility to initiate the next generation into the ongoing, multi-millennial conversation of the Jewish people. To be able to actively participate in this complex discourse requires a variety of skills and dispositions. Over the years of my involvement in Jewish education, day school education in particular, I have come to understand that to prepare our students to enter our covenantal conversation, we must help them cultivate the capacity to embrace inconclusiveness. In my experience, this is perhaps the most challenging educational goal, and yet it is a critical key to unlock the treasure trove of Jewish civilization.

The Babylonian Talmud in tractate Hagiga 3b poses a fundamental question about the nature of Jewish education.

“The masters of assemblies”: these are the disciples of the wise, who sit in manifold assemblies and occupy themselves with the Torah, some pronouncing unclean and others pronouncing clean, some prohibiting and others permitting, some disqualifying and others declaring fit.

Should a man say: How in these circumstances shall I learn Torah? Therefore the text says: “All of them are given from one Shepherd.” One God gave them; one leader uttered them from the mouth of the Lord of all creation, blessed be He; for it is written: “And God spoke all these words.”

Therefore, make your ear like a hopper (funnel) and get a perceptive heart to understand the words of those who pronounce unclean and the words of those who pronounce clean, the words of those who prohibit and the words of those who permit…

The hypothetical question in this talmudic passage is rooted in a deep religious need for certainty and clarity. The assumption often made is that Torah, as guide for living in response to God’s will, should give us a definitive direction, lead us down a proven path so that we walk in God’s way. The tradition’s indeterminate debates, the many contradictory claims made by our sages, make it difficult, if not impossible, to discern a clear way forward. The religious purpose of our rabbinic discourse seems to be undermined by the radical rejection of consensus and the celebration of diverse, even dissonant ideas.

In this passage, the Talmud seems to suggest that the process of Talmud Torah, of Jewish education, involves learning to maintain the tension inherent in our dissonant discourse. The goal is not to decide on a course of action that conforms to a particular understanding of God’s will, but to expand our human capacity to hold different, diverse views as a way to discover the divine desire.

Rav Kook (Olat Ra’ayah, Part I), in commenting on the passage from Talmud Berakhot 64a, which is quoted in the traditional siddur, writes that:

“And great (rav) is the peace of your children.” … For the light of knowledge must spread to all of its aspects, to all of the facets of the light within it. But multiplicity (ribu’i) is the sense of rav shelom banayikh, “Great is the peace of your children.” Do not read banayikh, “your children,” but rather bonayikh, “your builders,” because the structure will be built from different parts. And the truth of the light of the world will be constructed from many points of view and varying approaches, for “both these and those are the words of the living God,”… And if one sees a contradiction from one concept to another, out of this will wisdom build its house.

For Rav Kook, Torah study is about expanding and expounding the multiple possibilities inherent in Torah. Our sacred task is to appreciate the value of each interpretation, each lens through which we can gain a glimpse of the divine, multi-faceted truth. True education is open-ended and indeterminate, but, unlike indoctrination, holds out the promise of human growth and enlightenment through encountering multiple perspectives. Michael Oakeshott, the great British philosopher of the last century, described liberal learning as “an endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure in which, in imagination, we enter into a variety of modes of understanding the world and our human condition and are not disconcerted by the differences or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all.” Oakeshott describes an important aspect of education that I believe is resonant with the goals of Jewish education as expressed in the passage in Tractate Hagiga and Rav Kook.

Our Jewish day schools should strive to invite our students to the see that, as Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik has written in The Halakhic Mind, “the white light of divinity is always refracted through reality’s ‘dome of many-coloured glass’.”