Imagine an elevator pitch from a company looking to differentiate itself five years from now:
“Hire us for a competitive edge and benefit from our revolutionary approach. Our organization believes that a face-to-face, in-person relationship will give you a qualitative advantage over all our competitors. We offer an in-person, personal touch. Not just a face on a screen.”

Like any new invention or technology used in school, Zoom has enormous benefits, but also has unanticipated downsides. It enables students to stay current in their courses from anywhere in the globe, avoiding disruptions and missed classes. At the same time, both teacher instruction and student learning face challenges when done over Zoom, where students are often preoccupied by other apps on their phones and computers and distracted by whatever else may be going on in the location they are Zooming from.

Watching our sixth graders perform on Lag Ba’Omer was a particularly poignant, multilayered moment. This was not your typical grade school performance. This year it was a milestone, our largest gathering of students at an assembly. It was a sight. The masked performers—yes, a further hinderance to audibility—looked out at their masked, socially distanced audience, sitting a luxurious three feet apart.

The COVID pandemic brought the potential of irreparable divisiveness to our school communities. We were forced to grapple with core issues such as sakanat nefashot, danger to life, hillul Hashem (disgracing God’s name), and bitul Torah, squandering time allocated for Torah learning. These values, foundational to our religious personas and the ethos of our school, often seemed to conflict. There was a heightened level of intensity and passion marking any decision that touched on these topics.

Embracing the notion that everyone has experienced trauma during the pandemic leads to the acceptance that all schools require a trauma-informed education approach now and for the years to come. Jewish day schools must be equipped with the tools and resources to support the vast and pervasive emotional distress that has resulted from the range of trauma that our children and adolescents have experienced. Students need to be given a voice to express themselves, and to know that they will have someone who will deeply listen to and support them.

One of the most certain features of the COVID-19 period is the unprecedented level of uncertainty in our lives. Uncertainty is all around us, as the COVID-19 pandemic has heightened uncertainty over our physical and mental health, the economy, relationships, education, employment, and finances. As human beings, we crave a sense of security. We want to feel safe and maintain a sense of control over our lives. Uncertainty leaves us feeling diminished, stressed, anxious, and powerless.

In June of 2020, our high school Judaic team met to discuss programming for the coming year. We had just experienced a few months of Zoom-only classes and programming with mixed results. We needed to plan programming that would be COVID-safe in person yet also work on Zoom since we didn’t know what the year would look like.

As educators, we work hard to refine a sixth sense pertaining to our students’ well-being: we hear their words, listen to their manner of speech, and track their body language. When a student walks into class and has their hoodie up, or puts their head on their desk, a sensitive teacher sees distress and reaches out. When remote learning began, reading our students from a distance became more complex.

Passover 2021 was approaching, as was another round of virtual learning for Jewish day schools. Even North American day schools meeting in person were scheduling online classes for some pre- and post-Passover days as a safety measure, allowing teachers and families to be with extended family for the first time in a year. Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, MD, aimed to maximize the virtual learning time and created an “innovation minimester” for their middle school.

In the Spring of 2020, as the world reeled from the seismic shifts precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Ziva Hassenfeld initiated a teacher research project with her Brandeis University lab, SCRoLL, to study the pedagogy of early elementary education remote Tanakh instruction. Our research team set out to capture the unique pandemic era culture of textual interpretation that developed in our combined preK-1st grade classroom.