By Dana Sheanin, Jewish LearningWorks’ CEO
Originally published on eJewishPhilanthropy, February 26, 2025
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles in the 1970s. I was raised in a Conservative synagogue and attended day school. With the exception of summer camp, I checked every box a Jewish child can check: youth group, confirmation, Jewish service awards — all of it. Those things are undoubtedly the reason I will soon celebrate my thirtieth year as a Jewish professional. From preschool through college, I felt loved and guided by Jewish community. However, I have no memory of ever talking or thinking about God or spirituality in any of those places. God was in the background, understood to be a foundational part of Judaism, but with no discernable presence in my life. I know from conversations with colleagues that I am not alone.
A year ago, the educator team at Jewish LearningWorks began imagining a day of learning for Bay Area Jewish educators across settings. The war in Israel was still fairly new, the presidential election was looming, and our colleagues were depleted by the pandemic and years of responding to crisis after crisis. We sought to bring people together to feel restored, connected and reminded why our efforts toward Jewish life and learning remained essential. We felt the need to remember that, as Jon Kabat-Zinn writes, “We are human beings, not human doings.” To that end, we designed a day-long opportunity for teachers and educational leaders to explore how, as role models for the next generation of Jewish children and teens, we might center (or re-center) spirituality in religious education and Jewish communal life.
This was not our first venture into this conversation. Over the past five years, we have partnered with Nancy Parkes on a series introducing the basics of SESL (social, emotional and spiritual learning). We brought both Betsy Stone and BaMidbar to the Bay Area to teach educators how to help teenagers build emotional resilience. And we have twice hosted Michael Shire to share his creative Torah Godly Play methodology, inviting young children “to experience and become increasingly aware of the spiritual call within sacred stories.” Jewish LearningWorks does not need to be persuaded of the power of teaching social, emotional and spiritual skills; and yet, we notice that in the rush to manage the endless logistics involved in Jewish educational programs, to say nothing of the deep well of content we hope to teach, spirituality often gets lost.
To begin to shift this, we invited Lisa Miller, author of The Awakened Brain and professor of psychology and education at Columbia University, to give the keynote address an event we called “Soul FULL: Unlocking the Neuroprotective Potential in Jewish Education.” Miller’s groundbreaking research focuses on how connecting to one’s spiritual self is neuroprotective; it actually rewires our brains to become more resilient. She suggests that an awakened brain allows us to perceive that we are on a journey or path, anchoring us and taking some focus off the quest for achievement. It is our spirituality, Miller asserts, that is “our greatest resource for renewal, for healing and for hope, all desperately needed by children and teens in 2025.”
If this is true, why are so many liberal or progressive Jewish adults reluctant to talk about spirituality in general, and God in particular? It is likely that many of us lack the tools to explore and discuss our spiritual lives. However, our discomfort seems to go beyond this. Parkes suggests that, as the People of the Book, Jews generally emphasize intellect above emotion or spirit. This means that even when we do notice moments of spirituality — an act of kindness, a breathtaking sunset, a deep connection with someone, or that still, small voice within—we don’t always name them as such. We don’t pause to tell our children or ourselves: God was in that moment. Because of this, God, and God’s role in our lives, can feel invisible.
As a career Jewish educator, I am regularly asked about the fundamental whys of our work: Why should I enroll my children in day school or congregational school? Why should I send them to camp? Why does Jewish teen programming still matter when my middle or high school student has so many more compelling options? I always give the same answer: While Jewish life is frequently spoken of in terms of continuity across generations, we miss the point entirely if we think only in terms of the future. Jewish education is, or ought to be, about our spiritual lives — who each of us is, right now, today. When we talk with children about empathy, how to resolve conflict or how to self-regulate, we are also teaching them about I-Thou relationships, finding their purpose and encouraging them to act in a way that leaves the world they are living in right now a little better than they found it. We are transmitting Judaism’s countercultural message that who we are and how we behave today truly matters. We are — child by child, soul by soul — creating the world we want to live in.
A recently released study by Rosov Consulting found that Jewish “parents articulate several core aspirations for their children: building a strong sense of Jewish identity, cultivating empathy and respect for diverse backgrounds and fostering positive engagement with the broader world.” Particularly in this moment of polycrisis, it is critical for schools, camps, youth groups and other settings to ask questions about how to foster not only religious education, but spiritual education. Miller’s first book, The Spiritual Child, offers many actionable suggestions as to how to do this. These include things like establishing classroom rituals, modeling breathing exercises that calm the body and mind, listening to music, spending time in nature, publicly recognizing small moments of kindness as well as familial and developmental milestones, increasing eye contact and, importantly, tolerating doubt and children’s questions wherever and whenever they arise.
Many educators already know how to do this. For some, however, this is a new skill to develop and cultivate. Each of us must be intentional about it and choose to teach about not only the God we meet in the Torah, but also the god we meet in a blade of grass, in an act of service or when sitting alone with our thoughts. This will benefit not only the children we love, but also ourselves and the community we choose to serve. As is so often true, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel seemed to understand this fully when he wrote that “the beginning of faith is not a feeling for the mystery of living or a sense of awe, wonder or fear. The root of religion is the question: what to do with the feeling for the mystery of living, what to do with awe, wonder or fear?”
Amid so much tumult, it is the perfect moment to highlight spirituality as a critical component of Jewish life and to lean into God talk. From the classroom to the playground to the bima, we are in a moment to recognize that the tradition we so value has much to say about how to combat widely documented epidemics of loneliness, lack of meaning and despair. If we do this, we will increase the chances that we might all thrive — now, and for generations to come.
