Toward Relationships That Honor, Encourage, and Strengthen (Ve'et-chanan 5776)

The first day of school, even for high schoolers, is a big deal. New social, academic, and emotional challenges await. There are exciting new chances to explore one’s unfolding self. The role of friends is crucial. So, too, is the role played by parents and teachers. For instance, research confirms that parental encouragement in high school and through the many transitions that occur in high school positively impact academic performance.

Encouragement includes parental trust and tolerance, including both words and actions supportive of growth and improvement. Not perfection. Even when student performance falls short, parents in this research offer encouragement to do one’s best. Making the most of their student’s strengths. The positive impact of parental encouragement is so powerful that it’s impact is real even if the encouragement itself is just imagined by a student. Parental encouragement strengthens students to remain resilient through moments of challenge and disappointment.

None of this is news in Jewish education for parents, educators, or mentors. In this week’s Torah portion, Moses learns to “instruct [his disciple] Joshua by encouraging him and strengthening him.” (Deuteronomy 3:28) My teacher Dr. Norman Cohen explains how commentators read this passage to mean that mentors (that is, teachers and parents) need to imbue students and children with strength and courage to lay the foundation that will support them through future challenges.

The JCHS Professional Community (all of our educators and staff) read about this theme in preparing for the school year. This week the Professional Community returned to campus to begin discussing how the vital role each of them plays building relationships with students, and with each other, that honor, encourage, and strengthen.

We reflected together on Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Happiness Hypothesis, that addresses the development of wisdom. He writes that parents and teachers cannot teach wisdom directly - because wisdom is the tacit knowledge that comes from “knowing how” instead of “knowing that.” For Haidt, parents and teachers most important role is to provide a range of life experiences that help students gain tacit knowledge in a variety of domains. And “encourage children to think about situations, look at other viewpoints, and achieve balance in challenging times.” He warns against the type of excessive parental sheltering of teens that “keeps out wisdom and growth as well as pain.”

Without explicit reference to it, Haidt seems to embody the essential teaching of the biblical Proverbs 22:6, attributed to King Solomon, “educate a child according to the child’s way; then even when the child grows old, he or she will not depart from that way.” Students develop wisdom when they set the path of their own lives; their learning is enriched when it is relevant and meaningful to them, not necessarily to us. As parents and teachers we transform student learning when we encourage and strengthen students along the paths they have chosen, not along paths we pick for them or regret we did not pick for ourselves.

This idea is so core to the JCHS mission that the verse from Proverbs 22:6 is illuminated above the Torah scrolls in our library. It is also core to another of the JCHS Professional Community Summer reading books, Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly, that included a student manifesto addressed to parents and teachers, which warned, “when you only see what we produce or how we perform – we disengage and turn away from the very things that the world needs from us.”

Brown's manifesto directs teachers and parents, instead, to “engage with us, show up beside us, and learn from us. Feedback is a function of respect; when you don’t have honest conversations with us about our strengths and our opportunities for growth, we question our contributions and your commitment.”

In the year ahead, may all of us who mentor, parent, and teach be inspired to build relationships with all our students that honor, encourage, and strengthen each of them.