Safe Space or Sacred Space?

Jewish Education After October 7th Doesn't Need More Courage. It Needs a Reason.

Josh Schalk published a piece this week in eJewish Philanthropy titled “We’re Teaching Jewish Teens to Be Afraid.” His argument is worth reading in full, and in its broad strokes I agree with much of it. He observes that Jewish education since October 7th has become overwhelmingly defensive, organized around the recognition of hate, the management of hostility, the careful calibration of what to post, what to say, what symbols to wear. He worries, rightly, that when the first lesson we teach a young Jew about being Jewish is how to defend it, we are forming people who know how to crouch but not how to stand. He calls instead for courage as the foundation of Jewish identity formation.

All of this is well said. But I want to push on the frame itself, because I think the question beneath Schalk’s question is one we are mostly afraid to ask.

The dominant paradigm in Jewish communal life, and in American educational culture more broadly, is the language of “safe space.” We want our teens to feel safe. We want our classrooms, our camps, our youth groups to be environments where young Jews are shielded from hostility, where they can explore identity without threat, where the sharp edges of the world are temporarily removed so that something tender and authentic can grow.

Schalk does not use the phrase “safe space,” but much of what he critiques operates within its logic. The defensive posture he describes, teaching kids to recognize hate, to respond to it, to protect themselves, is the flipside of the same coin. Whether we are building walls to keep the hostility out or teaching our children to carry small walls with them wherever they go, the operative assumption is identical: the world is dangerous, and our job is to manage that danger on behalf of our children.

I understand the impulse. I share it. After October 7th, Jewish educators watched real teenagers suffer real consequences for their visibility. Lost friendships. Social media pile-ons. Classroom confrontations with teachers who should have known better. The therapeutic turn in Jewish education was not invented in a vacuum. It arose because children were hurting, and the adults responsible for them needed to respond. That response deserves respect.

But respect for the impulse does not require us to accept its sufficiency. And here is the question nobody in Jewish education wants to hear: Is the goal to create a safe space, or to teach our kids to live in the space they actually inhabit?

These are not the same project. The first is therapeutic. The second is formative. And the difference between them runs all the way down to what we think Jewish education is for.

If Jewish day school is to justify its existence, if supplementary school is to be anything more than a holding pattern between bar mitzvah and departure, then their purpose cannot be to construct an artificial environment where Jewishness is easy. Their purpose must be to prepare young Jews to live as Jews in the world as it actually is. Not the world as we wish it were. Not the world as it might become if enough awareness campaigns succeed. The world right now, the one with hostile social media feeds and activist faculty lounges and family Thanksgivings that turn into inquisitions about Gaza.

There is a moment in Berakhot 60b that I return to constantly as a parent and as a rabbi. The Talmud records a series of blessings one recites upon waking: when you open your eyes, when you stretch your limbs, when your feet touch the floor. Each blessing marks a transition from sleep into the waking world, and each one names God as the author of that transition. The cumulative effect is not comfort. It is orientation. You wake into a world that is not yours, that was not made for your convenience, that operates according to a will larger than your own, and your first act is to say so.

This is not the pedagogy of safe space. This is the pedagogy of sacred space, which is a fundamentally different thing. Sacred space does not promise safety. It promises meaning. It does not remove threat. It reframes the self in relation to something larger than threat.

When I think about what has gone wrong in how we are forming Jewish teenagers, and I do think something has gone wrong, I do not think the primary problem is that we are teaching too much about antisemitism or too little about pride. I think the problem is that we have accepted a therapeutic framework for a task that is, at its root, covenantal.

The therapeutic framework asks: How does this child feel? Is this child safe? Is this child’s identity affirmed? These are not bad questions. They are, in fact, necessary questions, and any educator who ignores them is failing in a basic duty of care. A teenager in crisis needs to be met where she is. A kid who has been bullied for wearing a Magen David needs someone to take that pain seriously before anyone hands him a theology of suffering. The therapeutic instinct is not the enemy.

But it is insufficient, precisely because it cannot carry the weight we are asking it to carry. The therapeutic framework locates the purpose of Jewish identity inside the self. It makes Jewishness into something the child possesses, a feature of their inner life that we are tasked with protecting and nurturing, the way you might protect and nurture self-esteem or emotional resilience. And under ordinary pressure, that framework holds. But under the kind of pressure Jewish teenagers are facing now, it buckles. It buckles because a self-referential identity has no answer to the question: Why should I bear this cost?

The covenantal framework asks something harder. It asks: What does God require of this child? What does the Jewish people need from this generation? What obligations come with the inheritance they have received? These questions do not begin with the child’s feelings. They begin with the child’s situation, thrown into a particular history, claimed by a particular covenant, responsible to a particular future.

Schalk calls for courage, and I share that call. But courage is not a curriculum. You cannot program it into a scope and sequence. Courage is a byproduct of conviction, and conviction is a byproduct of formation.

You cannot teach a teenager to be brave about being Jewish if you have not first taught them what being Jewish is. Not as heritage. Not as culture. Not as a set of values they happen to find agreeable. But as a claim upon their life that they did not choose and cannot fully refuse.

I recognize that this cuts against some of the deepest instincts of liberal Jewish education, and I say this as someone ordained by JTS, as a rabbi who has spent his career within a movement that rightly values informed choice and personal autonomy. Conservative Judaism has spent decades arguing that the modern Jew must choose tradition freely and intelligently rather than receive it passively. I believe that. But even within a framework that values choice, we have to be honest that the thing being chosen has a claim on us that precedes the choosing. The Torah does not record a moment where the Israelites at Sinai were invited to explore their options. Na’aseh v’nishma, “we will do and we will hear,” is not the language of informed consent. It is the language of a people who understood, however imperfectly, that they had been seized by something, that their identity was not a lifestyle preference but a vocation.

We want our children to arrive at Jewishness through exploration, through positive experience, through the discovery that Judaism is meaningful to them. And there is something beautiful about that aspiration. But there is also something incomplete about it, because Jewish identity has never been only a matter of choice. It is also a matter of inheritance, of obligation, of being called.

I am not suggesting that we bully teenagers into observance. I am suggesting that the crisis Schalk identifies, teenagers who can defend their Jewishness but cannot articulate why it matters, is not primarily a failure of programming. It is a failure of theology. We have given our children every tool except the one that actually sustains a people across centuries of hostility: the unshakable conviction that their existence serves a purpose they did not invent and the world did not grant.

I have watched teenagers in my own congregation navigate the post-October 7th landscape, and what I have noticed is this: the ones who struggle most are not the ones who lack tools for responding to antisemitism. They are the ones who lack a reason to absorb the cost of being visibly Jewish in the first place.

If being Jewish is primarily a source of pride, a cultural inheritance I enjoy, then the calculus of visibility is straightforward. Is the pride I feel worth the hostility I receive? For many teenagers, the honest answer is no. And no amount of courage curriculum will change that arithmetic, because the arithmetic is rational within the framework we have given them.

But if being Jewish is a vocation, if I am here for a reason, if my people’s persistence is not an accident but a calling, if the Torah I carry is not a cultural artifact but a living word, then the calculus changes entirely. The cost does not disappear. But it is absorbed into something larger than cost-benefit analysis. It is absorbed into purpose.

This is what I mean by sacred space as opposed to safe space. Sacred space does not pretend the world is gentle. It does not construct a pleasant fiction and invite our children to live inside it for a few hours a week. It insists that the world is meaningful, that my place in it is not arbitrary, and that the discomfort I experience as a Jew in a hostile culture is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be sanctified.

Every day school, every supplementary school, every youth group that takes its mission seriously has to decide which of these it is building. We do not owe our children safety. We cannot deliver it, and the promise of it is a lie that leaves them more fragile than it found them. What we owe them is the truth: that they are part of something ancient and demanding and irreplaceable, and that the world they actually live in, not the one we wish we could give them, is the one where that truth has to be lived out.

I think of a tenth grader I know, a kid who quietly stopped wearing his kippah to school sometime last winter. Nobody told him to. No single incident made him decide. He just stopped. And when I asked him about it, weeks later, he shrugged and said, “It’s not worth the hassle.” He was not afraid, exactly. He had simply done the math his education had equipped him to do, and the numbers did not come out in favor of visibility. What he lacked was not courage. What he lacked was a counter-argument that his education had never given him, that the kippah is not a personal statement to be weighed against social cost, but a response to a call that does not depend on the world’s approval to be valid.

Teach them that, and courage will take care of itself.