Although I have been a parent at my school for the past five years, in August, I became the Associate Head of School of Oakland Hebrew Day School, a Modern Orthodox, Bridge-K through eighth school in the Bay Area. One of my first responsibilities was planning the teacher in-service week. As I was approaching the transition from a place of observation and learning, I relied heavily on the structure of the previous year, which quickly resulted in my ruminating over the fact that the past year’s schedule had ten minutes of mindfulness beginning each day. I could feel my own insecurities and self-consciousness rising as I asked myself what it would mean as a leader to ask my teachers to engage in a practice with which I personally didn’t feel comfortable.

Imagine a world where every Jewish child is filled with the joy and purpose that comes from the knowledge that we are each a unique creation. Imagine a world where Jewish children feel fortunate and blessed to be a privileged part of a nation which partners with the Creator of heaven and earth. While dreaming big is always a virtue, accepting the hard fact that most children do not feel this way, in many instances, is the first step in rectifying the painful reality of the challenges we face as parents, educators, and leaders.

“Mom, I don’t like school!” These words are familiar to many parents. Sometimes they result from nothing more than quotidian tantrums, but they may be indicative of something that is happening—or not happening—in their school experience. Small tweaks and corrections can often reinvigorate the joy that should be innate to learning, and many of those touch on an entire spectrum of experiences that can be identified as spirituality, even amongst the youngest students. We can incorporate spirituality into most classrooms in an interdisciplinary fashion and ensure that our education systems more readily prepare our kids for the tasks of being well-rounded thinkers and Jews.

“God doesn’t exist,” I told my grandparents before my bat mitzvah. I still wanted to have my bat mitzvah, and I did find meaning and joy in Jewish life. So why did I upset my poor Bubbe and Zayde right before our simcha? The short answer…I was 13.

I was in grade 2, and our librarian was reading a picture book to our class. One of the images presented us with a white-haired, bearded man holding a paper scroll. I immediately thought of God, holding the Sefer haHayim (the Book of Life). This realization came along with internal struggle and chastisement. Jews do not picture God as any thing. Jews do not worship idols.

If cultivating spirituality means creating the drive to unify the self with God, to see God’s hand in one’s life, and to transcend the self to connect with others, then literature presents myriad opportunities to experience that transcendent sense of unity. In fact, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952) may be a child’s first literary encounter with the foundations of this experience—friendship, which is woven of loyalty, kindness, compassion, and sacrifice. Interestingly, the spiritual nature of these four elements, i.e., transcending the self to empathize with another individual, is embodied by the web itself.

People are influenced by diverse approaches to spirituality. Greek philosophy purports a rift between body and spirit; Christianity claims that spirituality is a matter of faith, divorced from the realm of action; Buddhism offers a contemplative model of spiritual practice that removes one from worldly matters. By contrast, Judaism (based on Genesis 2:7) understands that our essence as humans is a combination of earthly physicality (adam-adamah) and an intimate relationship with God that animates us (the spirit of life that God breathed into adam; neshama-neshima).

I’ve never considered myself to be much of a spiritual person. It takes a lot to “inspire” me, and I am both skeptical and critical of the neo-spiritual movements that seem to be growing in popularity. So, it took me a while to warm to the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, a critical reading of the Harry Potter series by a pair of graduates from Harvard Divinity School. Their basic premise was that if you read a text, in a community, with rigor and commitment, it can yield meaningful spiritual value. They choose from a variety of spiritual practices, sourced from Christianity and Judaism, to focus on while reading each chapter of the series, looking for the meaning that emerges.

On a wet and cold Israeli January morning, I was invited to lead a “Spirituality Deliberation” with a group of fourteen fifth-grade students at a National Religious school in Jerusalem. The subject that we addressed was one that was familiar to the children from their daily lives and school curriculum, namely “The Meaning of Miracles.” It was clear throughout the forty-minute session that these kids had much to share with their friends and teachers on this topic.

Even if they haven’t theorized it, Jewish educators have known for a very long time that various developmental stages necessitate new and more complex theological approaches and frameworks, and that the failure to properly introduce or develop aspects of our theology stunts the development of the Jewish mind and spirit. The conception of God, the approach to Midrash, the reading of a Rashi—all of these are initially taught in some of our earliest years and in some of the sweetest, most endearing ways. Yet, we would certainly agree that should a student graduate from the day school system with the same conception of God or with the same methodological approach to Humash, that the system has absolutely failed him.