By Rabbi Dena Klein
After Oct. 7, I became part of a team at The Jewish Education Project that set out to ask what Israel education should look like now. Over 18 months, we worked with a diverse group of more than 400 educators, learners, researchers and organizational leaders from a wide variety of settings ranging from day schools to congregations to camps to Hillels. What emerged is a new educational framework called Reimagining Israel Education.
The framework has 10 principles, and all of them are important. But three feel especially urgent for this moment, and especially personal to me.
The first is that Israel education should embrace complexity. Not false balance, not “both sides” for its own sake, but a genuine trust that learners can handle the real Israel: a country of extraordinary achievement, contradictions and diverse peoples who understand their country in profoundly different ways. It means helping young people become the kind of thinkers who can hold and engage with competing truths.
The Israel education I experienced was not built to hold what came in the wake of Oct. 7. A one-dimensional story could not absorb a tragedy of this magnitude and subsequent events. But learners who have been prepared for complexity, who understand that Israel is a real place full of real people have a foundation that can hold even the hardest moments.
Second, Israel education should be constructivist, meaning that learners — with guidance from educators — are active participants in creating meaning and developing their Jewish identities. Education does not exist to turn younger generations into copies of their elders. Learners are meaning-makers. Our job is to support and equip educators to give learners knowledge and expose them to diverse voices and narratives. Educators play a critical role helping learners develop a positive connection to Israel that can actually endure, because the learner built it themselves.
When I think about my own education, no one asked me what I thought about Israel. I was told what to think. I was told to be proud, and I was. But pride without understanding is fragile. It may not survive the first serious challenge. A constructivist approach does something different. It says: Here is the knowledge, here are the voices, here is the complexity. You are a part of this story.
Third, Israel education should be covenantal. It helps learners confront the obligations central to Jewish tradition. Complexity and inquiry can’t be the whole story. If they were, we’d be teaching Israel the way we might teach any other country, as a subject to study from a safe distance. But for Jews, Israel isn’t just a subject. It is bound up in our texts, our prayers, our history, and our sense of who we are as a people. For thousands of years, Jews have turned toward Jerusalem in prayer and ended the seder with “next year in Jerusalem.” A covenantal approach asks learners to wrestle with what that relationship asks of them: their responsibilities to Israel, to Israelis, and to one another as members of the Jewish people.
This is the piece my own education got half right. I was taught to love Israel, and I did. But that love asked very little of me beyond pride. What I didn’t understand until much later was that my connection to Israel was part of something older and deeper, a bond woven through our texts and our prayers that ties Jews to the land and to one another, and that carries real responsibilities. The connection I eventually built was stronger because I came to understand it as a covenant: a relationship that asks something of me, not just a story I was asked to admire.
This work is not a reaction to Oct. 7, though Oct. 7 made its urgency impossible to ignore. For too long, Israel education has been reactive, scrambling to respond to the crisis of the moment. What we need, and what this framework represents, is a shift to something proactive: an education that prepares learners before the hard moments arrive. This approach enables young people to encounter Israel honestly, to ask hard questions and to build a relationship that can hold the weight of reality. That is what our learners deserve. And it is what we are building now.