Resilience v. Resistance (Korach 5778)

Each summer as students engage their assigned summer reading, the entire JCHS Professional Community (educators and staff) also have assigned reading. This summer it’s Elana Aguilar’s “Onward: Cultivating Emotional Resilience in Educators.” I selected this book for the JCHS professional community to deepen our individual and collective reservoirs of reflective learning, self-awareness, and ability to engage in thoughtful conversations about growth and learning for ourselves and our students.

Ironically, it is the lack of these same attributes that dooms the biblical Korach and his followers when Korach launches a rebellion against Moses in this week’s Torah portion. Korach has a fixed mindset believing he is infallible, smug about his talents, and lacking doubts about his abilities. Korach’s rebellion falls because of his intellectual and political hubris. Moses, by contrast, faces the Korach’s rebellion with open humility and eagerness to learn more about and grow in his leadership. As a result, Moses leadership endures.

JCHS is blessed with dozens of educators and professionals whose growth mindset empowers students and inspires colleagues. Our professional community’s commitment to a growth mindset began a decade ago when the JCHS 2009 summer reading was Carol Dweck’s seminal book, “Mindset.” 

Dweck’s work affirmed what most of us at JCHS already were practicing. That is, encouraging and teaching students toward achieving high goals instead of judging them and fixing limited impressions of their capacity to meet those goals. In Dweck’s words, “great teachers set high standards for all their students, not just the ones who are already achieving.” Teachers who believe in a student’s (and their own) capacity to learn and grow create the conditions of that growth. Those who don’t believe it can’t create it. 

Korach’s hubris is a kind of fixed mindset rooted in resistance that fails. While Moses’ humility is a kind of growth mindset rooted in resilience that endures.

Through the years, the themes developed through our professional community’s summer reading have included affirming that it is what one does, not what one’s got that matters most. Holding a deep commitment to developing a community of character that identifies who we want our students to become in relationship to each other. Building resilience and strength through practice, healthy risks, and reflection about mistakes. 

My colleague, Rabbi Deborah Waxman, beautifully writes that “Judaism, writ large, is about resilience.” Her review of Jewish history reveals the consistent, repeated cycle of Jewish trauma and survival, reassessment and repair. In her words, “from trauma, we have had to heal. We have had to recover and re-vision, regenerate and re-seed vital Jewish life. We have found ways to cultivate resilience, both individually and collectively.” 

“Jewish history is, in many ways, a recurring cycle of crisis and renewal. The Second Temple in Jerusalem, the center of religious life, was destroyed in 70 CE, and our ancient sages created rabbinic Judaism, organized around synagogues and home observance through the prism of halakhah (Jewish law), was created. After Sephardi Jews were persecuted and expelled during the Inquisition, Jewish mystics responded by building up Kabbalah, a deep and complex tradition. In Eastern Europe, Hasidic Judaism emerged in the aftermath of the terrible Chelmnitsky massacres [17th century, Poland]. Jewish emancipation, made possible because of Europe’s Age of Enlightenment, brought many opportunities and also much confusion about identity and community. 

This ferment sparked tremendous cultural creativity, itself a vibrant expression of resilience – witness Spinoza’s philosophy, Marx’s political theory, Freud’s psychiatry, Durkheim’s sociology, Einstein’s physics, Schoenberg’s compositions, and the list goes on. Emancipation, its opportunities, limitations, and crises also gave rise to Zionism, the Jewish nationalist movement, which ultimately created an independent Jewish state after nearly 2000 years without one. Even as these developments are more complex than this summary suggests, they are also only a handful of examples of collective Jewish revival after trauma.

At JCHS we believe this communal and individual capacity for renewal is the beating heart of education -- for students and for educators. Aguilar’s book coaches educators so that they might be even more effective at coaching their students. The traditional morning prayers of Judaism include an affirmation that creation is renewed every day. 

Read through the lens of resilience, this prayer affirms that the world is not frozen in place when yesterday ended. Rather, the start of each new day gives us the opportunity to actively pursue the type of world and relationships we seek. May the summer ahead bring us many opportunities to refresh and renew.