by Head of School Emily Charton
As head of The Rashi School, I spend a great deal of time asking myself and others: How can we prepare our children for a future we cannot fully predict?
They will need knowledge, certainly. But knowledge alone is not enough. They will need what educators sometimes call intellectual dispositions: curiosity, cognitive flexibility, intellectual humility, and the capacity to listen closely enough to understand a perspective before deciding whether they agree with it. They will need to recognize nuance without becoming paralyzed by it and to hold strong convictions while remaining open to learning.
In other words, they will need to be curious, compassionate, and critical thinkers.
I believe Jewish education is uniquely suited to this task because Judaism has never asked us simply to know. It asks us to wrestle, question, interpret, debate, and ultimately decide what our learning calls us to do.
This feels particularly important as I reflect on CJP’s 2025 Greater Boston Jewish Community Study, which describes a Jewish community that is vibrant, growing, but also increasingly diverse in how people understand, practice, and connect to Judaism. We are a community navigating questions of identity, belonging, Israel, antisemitism, well-being, and what it means to live a Jewish life today.
These are not simple questions. Our children should not be afraid of that complexity. They should be prepared for it. The Rashi School is consistently and beautifully doing this work.
Curiosity through a Jewish lens
There is something deeply Jewish about beginning with a question.
For generations, Jewish learning has been built around inquiry. We study texts alongside commentaries and counterarguments. We return to the same stories at different ages and discover that they have something new to teach us. We learn that disagreement does not have to threaten the community and that two people can read the same words, arrive at different conclusions, and still sit at the same table.
Jewish tradition offers children something increasingly rare: practice in productive disagreement. Machloket l’shem shamayim (disagreement undertaken for a higher purpose) teaches that intellectual rigor and human relationship need not be opposing forces. We can challenge an idea without diminishing the person who holds it. That intellectual tradition has profound relevance for children growing up today.
At Rashi, Jewish learning is not separate from the development of critical thinking. It strengthens it. Students learn to examine an idea from multiple perspectives, ask why, make connections across disciplines, and consider the ethical implications of what they are learning.
And then comes the essential Jewish question: What will I do with what I know?
That is where critical thinking meets compassionate action. Our tradition gives children a framework for understanding that their choices matter and that learning carries responsibility. We teach them to recognize that they have both the capacity and the obligation to perform acts of tikkun olam (repairing the world).
Joy is part of the education
But if we want our children to carry Judaism with them into adulthood, it cannot be presented only as a responsibility. Judaism must also feel like joy. We sometimes make the mistake of treating rigor and joy as competing educational goals. Children teach us otherwise. Deep learning is often joyful precisely because it is demanding: there is pleasure in discovering a connection, wrestling with a difficult idea, mastering something that once felt inaccessible, or realizing that a centuries-old text suddenly speaks to your own life.
Joy sounds like voices singing together at Kabbalat Shabbat, but it also feels like gathering around a table, celebrating a holiday, debating an idea, helping a neighbor, laughing with friends, and discovering that ancient traditions still have something urgent and meaningful to say about our lives.
And joyful Judaism does not mean Judaism without difficult questions. Quite the opposite. It means giving children the security of knowing that they belong to a tradition strong enough to hold their questions and generations of wisdom to answer many of them. The rabbis of the Talmud never encountered AI or social media, but their teachings about the power of words feel strikingly current when a student pauses before hitting “send” and considers not only whether something is true, but whether saying it will help or harm another person.
The CJP study reinforces how consequential these experiences can be, underscoring the lasting role Jewish education can play in strengthening identity, responsibility, belonging, and connection across generations. In fact, the study found that adults who experienced meaningful Jewish education themselves are more likely to create Jewish educational opportunities for their own children.
What children experience as Jewish life today can become the Jewish community they build tomorrow.
A community for the whole family
Perhaps that is why I increasingly think about Jewish education not simply as something we provide for children, but as something that can transform families.
Greater Boston’s Jewish community is changing. CJP reports that 65% of Jewish households with children are interfaith households. Families come to Jewish life with different histories, traditions, levels of observance, questions, and points of entry.
For Jewish educators, that diversity carries an important implication: belonging cannot be the reward for already knowing how to belong. Our institutions must be designed so that families with different histories, practices, family structures, and levels of Jewish knowledge can enter authentically and grow from wherever they begin.
There should not be a prerequisite for belonging. A vibrant Jewish community meets families where they are and invites them to grow together. Belonging is not separate from rigorous learning. Children are more willing to take intellectual risks—to offer an unfinished idea, ask a question they worry may sound naïve, revise their thinking, or disagree respectfully—when they trust that they are known and valued within the community.
At Rashi, a child may be the reason a family first walks through our doors, but the experience quickly becomes larger. Parents form friendships. Families celebrate Shabbat and holidays together. They learn alongside one another, show up for one another, and discover a community connected by shared values even when their individual Jewish journeys look different.
In an era when loneliness and disconnection are very real concerns, that sense of collective purpose matters enormously. Community is not an accessory to education; it is part of what makes education transformative.
Our children need places where they are deeply known. Our families do, too.
The future of Jewish life will not be secured by asking the next generation simply to preserve what came before them. It will be secured by raising children who understand Judaism as something alive: intellectually rigorous, ethically demanding, welcoming, joyful, and relevant to the world they inhabit.
If we can give children the courage to question, the wisdom to listen, the confidence to know who they are, and the compassion to recognize their responsibility to others, we will have given them far more than an excellent education.
We will have given them a way to move through the world with curiosity and purpose, and a community with which to do it.