A number of years ago, at a community Shabbaton in Cape Town, I was presented with a dilemma. Until then, the government oversaw all learning even in private schools. That meant that there were governmental standards in Jewish studies and that Jewish studies grades appeared on students’ official transcripts, like their grades in History and Science. The department of education had recently decided to change the policy and get out of the business of overseeing non-core subjects, and the Jewish community was anxious—why would their students pay any heed to their Jewish studies classes if they were not going to “count?”

A friend once told a story of her first year in rabbinical school. The Rabbi who was leading the class gave an assignment to work with a partner to study a section of the Torah. The student raised her hand and asked the teacher, “How far do you want us to get?” The Rabbi smiled and said, “You get as far as you get.”

Jewish educators speak about meaning in multiple ways: There is a factual or descriptive sense (e.g., The meaning of the Hebrew word סוס is “horse.”). Meaning can also refer to the relevance of what is learned, the ability of learners to engage with learning in a way that has some emotional investment (e.g., Max found the unit on horses to be meaningful because he grew up on a farm. The unit on iguanas? Not so much.).

Three stone cutters were engaged in exactly the same task—cutting stones to build a cathedral. They would take a large piece of stone, cut it into a cube, and then place the cube into a pile with all of the others. A passer-by asked each of them, “Excuse me, what are you doing?” The first looks up with a scowl on his face and barks, “Can’t you see? I take the stone, cut it, and put it in the pile over there. I’ve been doing the exact same task for the last ten years, and I probably will do this until the day I die.”

Race, ethnicity, and nation are not entities in the world but ways of seeing the world. They are ways of understanding and identifying oneself, making sense of one’s problems and predicaments, identifying one’s interests, and orientating one’s actions. They are ways of recognizing, identifying, and classifying other people, of constructing sameness and difference, and of “coding” and making sense of their actions.

There are those who view meaning-making as fluffy or non-substantive. Truthfully, sometimes it is. One can make meaning out of anything; we are a species that thinks symbolically. We infuse meaning into all sorts of things that intrinsically may have no meaning at all. At the same time, once we imbue an item with meaning, such as a stuffed animal, family heirloom, or a flag, we treat that item as something special and distinct from all else around it because it brings us comfort, connection, and substance.

I do not think a Jewish studies teacher, in the 75+ year history of Jewish day school education, has ever said to themselves, “I don’t want my students’ learning to be meaningful to them today.” By implication, on some level, every Jewish studies teacher, every time they walk into their classroom has, at least implicitly, the intention that their teaching be meaningful to their students.