Building relationships lies at the heart of my high school teaching. Content mastery and scholarship drew me to graduate school, but learning to cultivate a space for personal and collective growth has kept me in the classroom. These are the values I hope my students recognize: Deep listening. Curiosity. Owning oneself as a learner. Community building. Seeing the others in the room as integral to your learning process. Leaning into the riches that diversity affords. Finding the benefits of being asked what you really think. Moving away from debate or defensive discourse into a modality that is rich, exciting and rewarding.
Each year, students enter my classroom with more divergences than I can name. On the intellectual, emotional and spiritual planes, each student has a unique composition–ready to be seen and supported. We sort students into useful categories, but many fall somewhere in the middle: introverts and extroverts, visual and auditory learners, self-starters and rule-followers. To address the complex mix of orientations, I work hard to create a shared sense of purpose, to empower each student, to provide equal access to our conversations, and to encourage each student to develop their skills and actualize their potential.
So when Max* [a pseudonym] entered my classroom last year, I had no reason to suspect that my classroom culture would be challenged. I knew that Max had recently started to self-identify as non-binary, and my singular focus was learning to use the correct pronouns. This effort occupied more brain space than I care to admit–it was new for me, and I wanted my students to see me as a safe and accepting teacher. But I was not practiced in this vocabulary, and it took me time to adjust. I made mistakes. Max was generous and laughed with me. They said they got it–older people take longer to learn.
As it turns out, Max brought several unexpected challenges into the room that unsettled my classroom culture. Pronoun use was beyond secondary. Some of these challenges cut right at my pedagogical assumptions.
First, Max resisted categorization, not just on the level of gender identity, but in the way that they think and process the world. Over many months, I came to appreciate their holistic approach, but at first, it seriously interfered with the way I ran the class. We were studying Jewish philosophy, a basic tenet of which is the usefulness of categories as epistemological tools. Rigorous analysis of philosophical topics involves classification, identifying the boundaries between ideas. For years, I was largely unaware of the centrality of this mode, and I had never experienced resistance to it, but Max would not do it. At first, I found myself asking Max clarifying questions when they would offer a suggestion that evaded intellectual binaries. But over time, I came to see that we were working with different systems. It was best for me to give them space to articulate the ideas as they experienced them, without my interference (or judgment). And when Max passionately proclaimed that they could not handle comparing God to anything, that God just is, I loosened my grip on the primacy of analogies and let Max think about God in their own terms.
And then Max enrolled in my advanced 12th grade Genesis seminar. I took this as a sign that I had not (yet) failed them, but I was still concerned. Genesis opens up so many issues at the heart of humanity, including gender and sexuality. I spent the summer mulling strategies. Should I teach Joy Ladin’s incisive essay on Genesis 1 and 2? (Ladin, J. (2019). The soul of the stranger: Reading God and Torah from a transgender perspective. Brandeis University Press.) Would that normalize Max’s experience? Or would they experience that as too personal? How would other students react? I wasn’t sure how much Max wanted to bring their identity into the communal learning space, and I did not want to overstep. The first two Genesis chapters would take us through November. If I messed up, then what?
I chose to let all the students encounter the biblical chapter on their own. I will never forget when Max ran to me in the Beit Midrash, breathlessly sharing what they discovered in Genesis 1. They were pretty sure they just read that the first human was both genders! Words tumbling out, they breathed deeply and said: “I have never felt so included by my tradition as at this very moment.” I was blown away by how effective unmediated reading had been, but I recognized that I had always taken for granted my students’ sense of inclusion within the tradition. Of course, students find many points of tension when they study Torah. Those I had come to expect–and embrace. But their very identity was never called into question by Torah; I had never witnessed such a conscious feeling of inclusion. And yet, I knew it was precarious. Genesis 2 awaited.
Days later, deep into Genesis 2, I noticed that Max seemed withdrawn, quieter than usual. I inquired, and Max shared that indeed, Genesis 2 was so unsettling that they were having trouble focusing in class. They couldn’t bring themselves to pursue interpretation or raise questions; they felt like such an outsider to the Bible. Genesis 1 had uncovered their place in the tradition. Genesis 2 had delivered the opposite message: There is no place for them here. The high stakes that reading Jewish texts created for Max were entirely new for me. Leaning in, I said to Max: “You need to create some buffers. If you read biblical verses and allow them to directly impact on your sense of self and being, you will not survive as a long term Torah learner. Torah learning is personal, but you need to cultivate just enough distance so that you can breathe a bit, so that you can examine and evaluate and consider, without calling into question your own identity with each new verse.”
Over the course of the year, we returned often to that conversation. For their final project, Max explored the topic of Havdalah, or separation, that they found to be operative in many more Genesis stories than I had ever noticed. Max argued for the usefulness of separation in order to appreciate the unity in creation and human experience. They had found their own way into Genesis, using a lens I would have never employed. Genesis will never look the same to me again.
It feels too early to identify the enduring pedagogical lessons I will take from these two years with Max. But I do know that I have been challenged to stretch in new ways, and I have learned that I cannot hold all the reins in establishing epistemological norms for teens. Remaining open–and creating space for new styles–feels essential to accommodating the expanding range of teens’ encounter with our tradition. At the same time, I am even more committed to teaching students how to create those critical buffers between themselves, their emerging identities and the texts they study. Falling in love with Torah for the long haul relies on effective strategies to embrace Torah–integrating it on a personal level–without conflating each verse, text or idea with the internal questions a student is asking of themselves. All my future students will benefit from learning to navigate this essential balance between closeness and distance.
Dr. Jacobowitz is the chair of the Tanakh Department at SAR High School and is the founding director of Makom B’Siach.
About Machon Siach:
Machon Siach was established in 2015 with a legacy gift from Marcel Lindenbaum z”l, honoring the memory of his wife, Belda Kaufman Lindenbaum z”l.
