Vision at the heart

Andrew Silow-Carroll
NJJN Editor-in-Chief

Before the first jet strafed Beirut, before the first missile crashed into Haifa, there was someone I was going to tell you about. His name was Seymour Fox, and either you never heard of him or you probably agree with the education professor who said in 1993 that he “might validly be considered the most important figure in the field [of Jewish education] in this century.”

Rabbi Fox was most recently the director of programs of the Mandel Foundation. Before that he directed the School of Education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before that — well, do you have time? Raised in Chicago and ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1956, he served as assistant to the chancellor and later as dean of the Teachers Institute. He was instrumental in the development of Camp Ramah, especially in cementing its role as a font of Jewish learning and identity for a generation of emerging Conservative leaders and lay people.

Fox made aliya in 1966, which gave him an opportunity to play a central role in Jewish education in both Israel and the Diaspora. He brought then cutting-edge ideas in teacher training and educational research into classrooms across the country. He helped establish the Melton Center for Jewish Education in the Diaspora, which lifted the field out of its traditional backwater.

I first encountered Fox almost three decades later, when I took part in another program he founded: The Jerusalem Fellows. The Fellows brings together Jewish educators from around the world for two years of study and then kicks them out of the country to spread the gospel according to Seymour. I was an experiment — as JTS professor Barry Holtz once wrote, Fox “had an eye toward bringing somewhat more unconventional types into the field.” Apparently “unconventional” means someone with a shaky grasp of Hebrew and a shakier grasp of educational theory, because I got in.

I had mixed feelings about the program — and Prof. Fox. He was a disciple of educational theorist Joseph Schwab of the University of Chicago, and Jerusalem Fellows were obligated to memorize Schwab’s four “commonplaces” of education: instructors, learners, content, and milieu. I often beat my head against the wall, trying to figure out what this all had to do with me and my profession. And Fox himself was an intimidating figure, outsized in the way that certain politicians, CEOs, and football coaches seem large — and slightly scary — even when they stand a head shorter than you.

But two things stuck with me. Much of Fox’s philosophy is summarized in the title of a monograph about his days at Camp Ramah: “Vision at the Heart.” “A great vision,” Fox said, “will inspire educators to creativity and even to the invention of new kinds of institutions. Goals certainly matter, but by themselves they’re not sufficient. And they are often so pedantic as to leave no room for vision. A vision that is intelligible and worthwhile is guided by great ideas that will survive periods when those ideas are out of favor.”

In the years since I left the program, the mantra of “vision” remains with me, and I’ve seen both how a clear vision sustains an institution through change, and how the lack of one is a recipe for failure and irrelevance.

The other thing that stuck with me were the people assembled around the Fellows’ conference table. Call it pluralism, diversity, a mishmash: My class, hardly atypical for the Fellows, included Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, and one avowed Israeli secularist; the principal of a Yiddish culture day school in Mexico City and a Hungarian philosopher; a dentist-turned-day school principal and a rabbi who would eventually write a book on being gay and Orthodox. This was the whole Jewish world in one room, it seemed, and the lessons it taught me in tolerance and in the ability to share ideas and learn from those with whom we disagree have shaped me personally and professionally ever since.

So why am I telling you this story this week, with missiles raining on Haifa and Nahariya and Israeli jets flying deep into Lebanon? Firstly, and most importantly, Seymour Fox passed away last week, not violently but unexpectedly. He was 77 and was buried at the Eretz HaChaim Cemetery near Beit Shemesh.

But it’s also important to tell you about him, in this of all weeks, because Fox represented everything that Israel’s enemies want to destroy and everything that Israel’s people want to defend. Terrorists may have forced Israel behind walls, but it is not a garrison state. Behind those walls scholars help teachers do their jobs better, teachers help kids discover their own Torah, and the kids grow up, some to be teachers, or just about anything else they want to be. Israelis argue (most are Jews, after all), but somehow there’s room for all kinds of people, and all kinds of ideas and beliefs.

And frankly, that’s what terrifies Israel’s enemies. That in the short span of its independence, Israel was able to corral its rival political factions into a functional, even flourishing, state; that in the face of violence it could develop a culture of peace; that in the midst of rejection it could still imagine — no, plan on — a future of coexistence.

Israel cultivates its own crazies, to be sure, but they are on the margins. At its heart, however, is a vision — a vision, you might say, that is guided by great ideas that will survive periods when those ideas are out of favor.