Three years ago this week, the massacre of Oct. 7 accelerated a reckoning in Jewish education that had already been building for a long time. In Jewish schools, camps and youth groups, educators found themselves fielding questions they weren’t prepared to answer. Students were scared. Parents were angry. And many of the adults in the room didn’t know what to say.
None of this came out of nowhere. Oct. 7 didn’t create the challenges in Israel education. It made them impossible to ignore.
I know this, in part, because I’ve lived it. My own relationship with Israel was shaped by the kind of education that needed to change. The Israel I was taught was a land of miracles. The Halutzim, the pioneers, arrived in an empty, desolate land and made the desert bloom. They were surrounded by enemies, and somehow this David was able, again and again, to overcome the Goliaths at every border. I was so proud to be connected to this place. The story was simple. It was stirring. And for a long time, it was enough.
I first visited Israel at 16, and I felt all the things that good immersive travel can make you feel: the thrill of being somewhere ancient and alive, the sense of walking through the pages of my own story. But that trip didn’t offer me much in terms of the complexity of life in Israel. It wasn’t designed to. From talking to countless other colleagues from nearly all Jewish backgrounds, I know that my trip wasn’t the exception. At the time, however, I didn’t know enough to notice what was missing.
It wasn’t until college, when I spent a semester abroad in Israel, that I started to see things differently. For the first time, I had academic experiences that opened up Israel’s history and exposed me to its contradictions. I took a class called “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.” The story I had been told as a kid wasn’t false, exactly. But it was incomplete in ways I was only beginning to understand.
I returned to Israel for rabbinical school, and that’s when complexity stopped being academic and became visceral. I was living there when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. The realization that he was murdered by a Jew was devastating. The frequent bus bombings that marked my time there made daily life feel precarious in ways I had never imagined.
Years later, while on a professional development trip with a group of educators, a professor asked us a question that raised numerous other complicated feelings and dynamics: Do you have a photo of the Western Wall hanging in your school? And then he pushed us. Does it show the size difference between the men’s side and the women’s side? Does it show the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque just beyond? The metal detectors you walk through to enter the area? The enormous security presence in nearly every corner? The riot gear sitting at the ready?
One photograph. So many choices about what to show and what to leave out. That one exercise changed my thinking about how we teach Israel.
Looking back now, I can trace a line through all these experiences, from a teenager on a youth group trip to a rabbinical student to a Jewish educator, and what I see is a slow, sometimes uncomfortable education in complexity that I had to piece together on my own. None of it diminished my commitment to Israel and Zionism. If anything, each encounter with complexity produced a more substantive, more durable connection. But no one designed that journey for me. There was no guided route that took me from the simple narrative of my childhood to something more honest. I got there eventually, but it took decades and it was largely accidental.
And that’s why, after Oct. 7, I became part of a team at The Jewish Education Project that set out to ask what Israel education should look like now. Over 18 months, we worked with a diverse group of more than 400 educators, learners, researchers and organizational leaders from a wide variety of settings ranging from day schools to congregations to camps to Hillels. What emerged is a new educational framework called Reimagining Israel Education.
The framework has 10 principles, and all of them are important. But three feel especially urgent for this moment, and especially personal to me.
The first is that Israel education should embrace complexity. Not false balance, not “both sides” for its own sake, but a genuine trust that learners can handle the real Israel: a country of extraordinary achievement, contradictions and diverse peoples who understand their country in profoundly different ways. It means helping young people become the kind of thinkers who can hold and engage with competing truths.
The Israel education I experienced was not built to hold what came in the wake of Oct. 7. A one-dimensional story could not absorb a tragedy of this magnitude and subsequent events. But learners who have been prepared for complexity, who understand that Israel is a real place full of real people have a foundation that can hold even the hardest moments.
Second, Israel education should be constructivist, meaning that learners — with guidance from educators — are active participants in creating meaning and developing their Jewish identities. Education does not exist to turn younger generations into copies of their elders. Learners are meaning-makers. Our job is to support and equip educators to give learners knowledge and expose them to diverse voices and narratives. Educators play a critical role helping learners develop a positive connection to Israel that can actually endure, because the learner built it themselves.
When I think about my own education, no one asked me what I thought about Israel. I was told what to think. I was told to be proud, and I was. But pride without understanding is fragile. It may not survive the first serious challenge. A constructivist approach does something different. It says: Here is the knowledge, here are the voices, here is the complexity. You are a part of this story.
Third, Israel education should be covenantal. It helps learners confront the obligations central to Jewish tradition. Complexity and inquiry can’t be the whole story. If they were, we’d be teaching Israel the way we might teach any other country, as a subject to study from a safe distance. But for Jews, Israel isn’t just a subject. It is bound up in our texts, our prayers, our history, and our sense of who we are as a people. For thousands of years, Jews have turned toward Jerusalem in prayer and ended the seder with “next year in Jerusalem.” A covenantal approach asks learners to wrestle with what that relationship asks of them: their responsibilities to Israel, to Israelis, and to one another as members of the Jewish people.
This is the piece my own education got half right. I was taught to love Israel, and I did. But that love asked very little of me beyond pride. What I didn’t understand until much later was that my connection to Israel was part of something older and deeper, a bond woven through our texts and our prayers that ties Jews to the land and to one another, and that carries real responsibilities. The connection I eventually built was stronger because I came to understand it as a covenant: a relationship that asks something of me, not just a story I was asked to admire.
This work is not a reaction to Oct. 7, though Oct. 7 made its urgency impossible to ignore. For too long, Israel education has been reactive, scrambling to respond to the crisis of the moment. What we need, and what this framework represents, is a shift to something proactive: an education that prepares learners before the hard moments arrive. This approach enables young people to encounter Israel honestly, to ask hard questions and to build a relationship that can hold the weight of reality. That is what our learners deserve. And it is what we are building now.
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is the chief Jewish education officer at The Jewish Education Project, where she helped lead the development of the Reimagining Israel Education framework.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.