For the past week and change, I’ve been immersed in the annual marathon that is getting ready for a new school year. Between making sure my children have all of their required supplies and readying my own classroom and materials, I felt like a whirlwind delivered me to the doorstep of the first day of school, which was Tuesday. While it’s only been two days back with students, I’ve noticed something interesting about my experience so far: it seems to me almost like I didn’t just come back from a summer away from school. Instead it feels like this school year is just a continuation of what I was doing back in June. 

Perhaps this phenomenon is due to the fact that I’ve been at Schechter for a good number of years now and I’m accustomed to the rhythms and character of the institution and the community. Perhaps it’s that I’m fully now comfortable with my curriculum and my approach to it and I’m able to slip back into it more easily than in the past. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I didn’t change my classroom setup from last year and everything looks the same. Whatever it is, the past few days have been a bit of a time warp for me and it has me thinking back on what I’ve taught before and imagining how I’ll approach it again this year. 

Our 7th grade Tanakh class has an extensive unit on the book of Devarim. We look at the text thematically, exploring the various ways it serves as a manual for establishing a thriving and just society. Toward the end of that unit, the students do research in the text, starting with the famous line from the beginning of this week’s parashah, Shoftim: צדק צדק תרדף (tzedek tzedek tirdof), translated as “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” (Deuteronomy 16:20) From there, they examine laws and rules about different facets of society. They look at rules for kings, rules about upholding the law, rules about treatment of others’ property, laws about war and family life and caring for the needy. The majority of the texts they study also come from Parashat Shoftim, demonstrating this parashah’s concern for establishing and maintaining a just society. 

The students are tasked with explaining the rules contained in their section and quoting commentaries that illuminate the meaning of the text. Then they’re asked to evaluate the set of laws they’ve studied. We ask them: How do these laws make society more just? How is one or more of these laws unjust, or not entirely just?

I’m always impressed at how the students, especially when discussing laws they deem to be unjust, don’t simply refract the Torah’s rules through their own contemporary lens. It’s not that difficult to find biblical rulings that don’t square with our own notions of justice and fairness. They also look carefully at the laws, often noting ways that these laws compromise justice or defeat it entirely even within the society that Devarim is trying to create in its own time. They see how the Torah’s vision of a just and thriving society is incomplete, even flawed. 

This exercise helps develop the students’ moral compass - it’s values formation in action. I teach my students to respect the Torah and love it as part of our ongoing tradition, and I also teach them to look at it critically, noting places where it might be in need of reinterpretation. They learn that to live within a system is not to accept all of its practices and dictates blindly, never questioning what they see around them, never challenging their society to improve and to live more fully by its professed values. They learn to identify and pursue justice, even when it seems far off from current reality. 

It is my hope that they grow into adults who do the same. May we all follow their example.

Shabbat shalom.