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As day school educators gather, focus is on investing in leadership and creativity
When Rabbi Adam Englander arrived at a recent national gathering in Denver of Jewish day school and yeshiva educators, he had a good sense of what conference sessions he wanted to attend and whom he wanted to meet.
But it turns out that one of the most valuable benefits Englander experienced at the Prizmah educators conference were the serendipitous encounters he had with colleagues and the new opportunities for collaboration and creativity they presented.
As head of school at the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach, or HALB, in Woodmere, New York, Englander’s main focus usually is what’s happening at his school, not elsewhere. But at the conference he met with two colleagues with whom he shares a leadership coach, they created a WhatsApp group chat for sharing ideas, and Englander soon walked away with a new idea for a dynamic workshop to run with his leadership team this summer.
“Already just from this group I have an amazing idea,” Englander said. “That kind of good stuff can happen where you might meet someone who is like, ‘Oh, yeah. I have the same problem as you.’ Now you are connecting with some principal from San Francisco whom you’d never have met in a million years.”
He added, “Day school leaders really need to take the time and energy to invest in themselves, and their own growth.”
“Creative Spirit” was the theme of the conference in January organized by Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools, the national network organization that was created several years ago through a merger of five different day school organizations. The conference in Denver drew more than 1,000 professional and lay leaders from over 200 Jewish day schools and yeshivas across North America. It was the third-ever iteration of Prizmah’s national conference.
With tens of thousands of students spread out over hundreds of schools across the continent, day schools have become laboratories of creativity: for learning, for Jewish action, even for tackling societal challenges.
“Jewish day schools are inherently creative places,” said Prizmah CEO Paul Bernstein. “The exceptional level of shared optimism and imagination around the bright future of Jewish day schools was palpable at the conference. Day school leaders clearly share a belief and innovative determination in the opportunity to grow enrollment in the next decade — by promulgating the value proposition of Jewish day school, ensuring a pipeline of excellent educators and addressing the challenge of affordability.”
A salient example of creativity in action is how day schools adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic, not just adjusting to remote learning and figuring out how to return to classrooms safely, but in reconfiguring teaching approaches to suit different kinds of learning.
“Because of schools’ creativity, and because of the way that different stakeholders in schools — from administrators to teachers to parents to students — were able to work together, they solved these brand new problems we hadn’t seen before,” Bernstein observed.
Another area of tremendous creativity is how Jewish schools are managing the challenges of affordability: Day schools are almost entirely privately funded, tuition is a barrier for many families, and yet tuition fees alone are insufficient to cover costs. In recent years, some schools have adapted innovative and flexible fee models, from setting tuition based on a fixed percentage of a family’s income to using Jewish community grant funding to cap tuition for new families.
Much of the conference was devoted to ideas for the future of Jewish day school education, covering everything from curricula to leadership to finances. One main area of focus is recruiting and retaining quality educators and school leaders.
Debra Skolnick-Einhorn, head of school at the Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School in Washington, D.C., who spoke on a conference panel about professional development, said she believes the key to better educator retention is improving compensation and benefits, providing more opportunities for professional growth, and expressing more gratitude toward staff.
Tal Ben-Shahar, an American-Israeli bestselling author who teaches about the psychology of leadership, spoke at the conference about the importance of investing in leaders.
“It’s important to focus on self-care for the teachers, invest in people in the field,” Ben-Shahar said. “It’s critical to treat teachers well, keep them involved, treat them as professionals, and value their opinions.”
“Jewish day schools are inherently creative places,” said Prizmah CEO Paul Bernstein at the organization’s biennial conference in Denver, January 2023. (Courtesy of Prizmah)
John D’Auria, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of four books on leadership, spoke about how great leaders focus on mutual learning — getting colleagues to share and learn from one another — rather than top-down leadership. It’s an approach embodied by many day school curricula, which focus on collaborative and experiential learning.
At the conference, Lisa Kay Solomon, Louie Montoya, and Ariel Raz from Stanford University’s d.school K12 Futures team offered an art project dubbed Hall of Descendants where participants could create a portrait and message for future children and educators.
“While we can’t predict the future, we know it’s going to be filled with a lot of uncertainty, complexity and tensions that we can’t solve,” Solomon said. “The hall creates a relatability to that distant time travel and a sense of responsibility about what we might do today to serve that future descendant.”
Brad Phillipson, head of school for the Jewish Community Day School of Greater New Orleans, said he found the Hall “a powerful exercise in prioritizing the values with which I most closely identify, personally and professionally, and in contemplating the world I want to pass along to future generations — through our students, through my child, and, indirectly, through what my students, and my daughter, will teach their children.”
Tal Grinfas-David, who led a session at the conference on creative leadership and Israel, said it’s important for leaders to take risks. More often than not, she noted, leaders can be “risk averse to placate, to take safe pathways.”
Grinfas-David, who is vice president of outreach and pre-collegiate school management initiatives at the Atlanta-based Center for Israel Education, turned to Israeli history for examples of leadership that educators could emulate.
“What I wanted them to see was examples of courageous leadership and risk taking and where that could lead,” Grinfas-David said. “Hopefully, they see that leaders of Israel have had to strengthen the future of the state regardless of the circumstances, just as the school leaders need to leave behind a legacy of a stronger institution.”
Bernstein, Prizmah’s CEO, said that the recent gathering underscored how important collaboration is to Jewish education — and that regardless of location or denomination, colleagues have a lot to learn from each other.
“What we are seeing is that when Jewish day school leaders come together, whether you are Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, pluralistic, or nondenominational, whether you are from the Southwest or the Northeast, from the U.S. or Canada and beyond — there is so much more that unites than divides,” Bernstein said.
Prizmah’s next conference will be held in the winter of 2024.
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Pro-Israel Lawyers Challenge UK University Academic’s Boycott of Israeli Scholar
The entrance to Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus campus. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
An association of lawyers who support Israel is demanding the University of East Anglia (UEA), located in Norwich, England, investigate and take disciplinary action against a senior academic who refused to consider an application from a researcher because the latter was from an Israeli university, the group announced on Friday.
On Nov. 20, a professor of social science at UEA declined to consider a request by an Arab Israeli post-doctoral researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI) to schedule a research visit to the British university, according to UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI). The UEA professor said the decision was made “primarily as Palestinian colleagues have asked us not to work with Israeli universities at this time,” and noted that the move was “a personal position rather than that of my university.”
UKLFI chief executive Jonathan Turner told The Algemeiner that HUJI shared a copy of both the researcher’s email requesting the visit and the professor’s response with the association of lawyers, following consent from the researcher.
UKLFI wrote a letter to UEA Vice-Chancellor David Maguire about the incident on Wednesday, asking the school to investigate the professor’s conduct, take appropriate disciplinary action, and guarantee that the HUJI researcher’s application is “reconsidered fairly.” The association also called on the university to issue a statement prohibiting discriminatory academic boycotts; examine if similar boycotts are being practiced in the school; and introduce or update training for staff of the UK’s Equality Act 2010, which prohibits discrimination based on protected characteristics that include nationality. The decision targeting the Arab Israeli scholar is likely a breach of the Equality Act, according to UKLFI.
“A refusal to consider an applicant because of her Israeli affiliation directly undermines the principles of fairness, equality, and dignity that the University professes to uphold,” said the group of lawyers.
In its letter to the university, UKLFI also noted that UEA could face legal consequences for the decision and argued that “such boycotts are contrary to fundamental academic values, recognized by international instruments as well as UEA’s own policies.” The UEA has an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Policy that was issued in August and adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism in January 2020.
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Slovenia to Pull Out of Eurovision Song Contest if Israel Participates; Spain Reaffirms Same Position
Yuval Raphael from Israel with the title “New Day Will Rise” on stage at the second semi-final of the 69th Eurovision Song Contest in the Arena St. Jakobshalle. Photo: Jens Büttner/dpa via Reuters Connect
Slovenia’s national broadcaster RTVSLO will compete in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest only if Israel is excluded from the competition, it announced on Wednesday, a day before the president of Spain’s RTVE reiterated its boycott of next year’s Eurovision if Israel is involved.
The 2026 draft programming plan for Slovenia’s RTVSLO does not include its participation in the 2026 Eurovision or even the broadcast of the competition, set to take place in Vienna, Austria, in May.
“However, if next week, on Thursday, when the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) General Assembly is scheduled to vote on whether Israel will participate in the Eurovision Song Contest or not, it turns out that Israel will not participate in the Eurovision Song Contest, then we will propose to the council a change to the program-production plan and we will of course participate in this festival,” said Natalija Gorščak, president of the RTVSLO board.
Members of the EBU, which organizes the Eurovision Song Contest, are set to convene at the 95th EBU General Assembly in Geneva on Dec. 4 and 5 to discuss next year’s competition, the implementation of new rules for the contest, and Israel’s participation.
Slovenia’s explicit actions this week to boycott the 2026 Eurovision follows its previous threats to withdraw from the competition if Israel is included. They join other countries – such as the Netherlands, Ireland and Iceland – that have expressed opposition to Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip during its war against the Hamas terrorist group, which orchestrated the deadly massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
On Thursday, José Pablo López, president of Spain’s RTVE, appeared before the Senate’s Joint Parliamentary Control Committee and defended the broadcaster’s initial decision in September not to compete in the 2026 Eurovision if Israel is allowed to participate.
“Eurovision is a contest. Human rights are not,” Lopez said, after claiming that a “genocide” has taken place in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war. He then falsely accused Israel of breaking the rules of the Eurovision competition by attempting to politically exploit the contest and influence voting in the last two years, referring to performances by Eden Golan in 2024 and Yuval Raphael earlier this year. “Any other country that had carried out this use of the contest, I assure you that it would have been sanctioned and temporarily suspended,” he said.
López also challenged Eurovision Director Martin Green, who has previously defended Israel’s participation in the Eurovision.
“Martin Green recently wrote a letter stating that television networks and artists do not represent governments and that this is a cultural competition,” Lopez told the committee, according to a translation of his remarks by Eurovision Spain. “I wonder, is Mr. Green considering the return of Russian and Belarusian broadcasters to the festival? I hope not, because we all know that if those networks return, they would use it in a similar way to Israel, because for them, the contest is much more than just a competition and has a very significant political dimension.”
Lopez also addressed recent changes by the EBU to its rules for the Eurovision, in an effort to prevent rigged voting and governmental interference. Lopez believes the new rules are insufficient. “They do not guarantee that interference from a government like Israel’s, or any other government, cannot happen again,” he said.
“The EBU knows that these measures are a step forward, but they are not enough, and above all, as I have said, they leave Israel’s actions during this period unsanctioned,” he added. “More measures are necessary, and that will be the proposal we will take to the next General Assembly, which will be held on the 4th and 5th.”
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, a longtime critic of Israel, has also called for Israel to be excluded from the 2026 Eurovision.
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How Dealing with Difficult Challenges Leads to Spiritual Growth and Leadership
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
They say that “the devil is in the details,” and nowhere has that been more evident than in the corruption scandal currently shaking Ukraine — even as the deadly war with Russia continues to rage.
Over the past couple of weeks, Ukrainian anti-corruption investigators have been drip-feeding the world with information: wiretaps, redacted court testimony, and sordid specifics of a large bribery saga. The cast of villains includes prominent businessmen and contractors pressured for hefty “commissions,” high-ranking ministers abruptly resigning, and one of President Zelensky’s former business partners fleeing the country just hours before the police raided his home.
The entire scheme exploited a wartime loophole — a rule under martial law preventing contractors from collecting debts in court from companies providing essential services. Energoatom fits that definition perfectly, as it supplies more than half of Ukraine’s electricity.
But more fascinating than the scandal itself is the sheer level of detail — the way this scheme evolved from small to big to overwhelming, unfolding slowly, piece by piece, person by person, until you finally step back and see the broad contours of the entire sprawling disaster.
And oddly enough, all of this brings me straight into the heart of Parshat Vayeitzei, which was my late father’s bar mitzvah parsha. He would always say — with an unmistakable twinkle in his eye — that Vayeitzei was “the most important parsha in the Torah.” We’d nod and smile, convinced he was just having a laugh.
I mean, yes — Vayeitzei certainly has its blockbuster moments: Jacob’s ladder stretching toward heaven, the extraordinary promises God makes to him, his first encounter with Rachel at the well — one of the great love stories in Jewish history — followed by his marriages and the birth of 11 children who would become the founders of the tribes that became the Jewish people. All of these events are unquestionably consequential, to say the least.
But then you hit the middle of the parsha — the part everyone secretly hopes the baal koreh will speed through. It’s long, it’s intricate, and it’s bewilderingly detailed: the astonishing saga of Jacob’s business dealings with Lavan.
Wage agreements — and disagreements. Livestock negotiations. Contract revisions. Endless sheep rearing. Sheep with spots, sheep without spots, sheep with speckles, stripes, dark patches — every possible permutation of sheep coloration you can imagine. It’s the Torah’s version of a regulatory audit: too many technical notes, too many procedural details, and far too much information.
Most of us, understandably, wonder what all this sheep drama is doing in a sacred text. Why did the Torah — normally so concise — zoom in on this business relationship from hell? Why give us this level of detail? And whatever the answer might be, surely this story doesn’t belong in “the most important parsha in the Torah.”
But my father always insisted that Vayeitzei’s business section wasn’t a pointless, transitional interruption in the narrative — it was the narrative. And perhaps, as the revelations from Kyiv remind us, the line between spiritual greatness and moral disaster is drawn not in grand theological enterprises like ladders reaching heavenward or celestial dream sequences, but in the slow, grinding, unglamorous world of day-to-day commerce: negotiations, promises, deals, and the quiet ethical temptations that shadow every decision we make.
If you think about it, this strange middle section of Vayeitzei is the Torah’s earliest and most elaborate case study in business ethics — or, more accurately, business un-ethics. Lavan is the Biblical version of a man who smiles broadly to your face while his hand is quietly stealing your wallet.
He is charming, generous-sounding, and utterly unscrupulous. He cheats at negotiations. He alters contracts retroactively. He weaponizes hospitality. He manipulates family loyalty. If there were a Biblical Consumer Protection Bureau, Lavan would be its full-time subject of interest.
And Jacob — the bookish, scholarly son of Isaac — finds himself thrown into a years-long masterclass with one of the greatest Machiavellian businessmen of the ancient Near East. The holy patriarch of the Jewish nation, the spiritual heir to Abraham and Isaac, sits across the table from a crook arguing over sheep markings.
But that’s precisely the point. Spirituality is easy when you live a monastic life of solitude and separation. Show me how spiritual you are when you need to negotiate with a scoundrel — that’s when your character is truly revealed.
Judaism doesn’t believe in the mystique of the cloister. Our greatest spiritual heroes aren’t monks; they’re shepherds, merchants, craftsmen, farmers — even warriors and kings. Jacob’s true greatness emerges in the trenches of real life, in the dense and morally dangerous world where money, power, opportunity, resentment, and desperation mingle with our aspirations to become the people God wants us to be.
What Vayeitzei shows, in deliberately excruciating detail, is that Jacob absolutely refuses to become Lavan. Yes, he negotiates, he strategizes, he outsmarts. But he does not become Lavan. He maintains his integrity.
And here’s the deeper insight — the one my father, with his mischievous grin, seemed instinctively to understand: the Jewish mission from the very outset was never to escape the world; it was to elevate it — from the inside out.
If Jacob had spent 20 years in a desert cave meditating on the divine, he might have produced beautiful insights — but there would have been no tribes, no family, no nation, and no legacy. Instead, Jacob becomes the spiritual father of Israel the nation even as he ran a household, raised children, and navigated a business partnership with a morally bankrupt relative.
And that is precisely why the Torah dwells on the sheep. Because the sheep are not a distraction — they are the arena. They are the battlefield where Jacob’s greatness is forged. They are the proof that holiness is not found in what we avoid, but in how we behave when we can’t avoid what we would much prefer to have nothing to do with.
And as it turns out, in the final analysis Jacob was not transformed by his dream of angels — he was transformed by his years in business with Lavan. What we learn from Jacob and the sheep is that building a family, maintaining integrity in business, and dealing with difficult people are not obstacles to spiritual growth; they are spiritual growth.
Which only goes to prove that my father’s twinkling assertion wasn’t a joke at all. He understood something the rest of us tend to overlook. Maybe Vayeitzei really is the most important parsha in the Torah — not despite the details, but because of them.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.