The Israelites, slaves in Egypt for more than two hundred years, were about to go free…. On the brink of their release, Moshe, the leader of the Jews, gathered them together and prepared to address them. He might have spoken about freedom. He could have given a stirring address about the promised land to which they were travelling, the “land flowing with milk and honey.” Or he might have prepared them for the journey that lay ahead, the long march across the wilderness.
Instead, Moshe delivered a series of addresses that seemed to make no sense in the context of that particular moment. He presented a new idea, revolutionary in character, whose implications remain challenging even now. He spoke about children, and the distant future, and the duty to pass on memory to generations yet unborn…. About to gain their freedom, the Israelites were told that they had to become a nation of educators.
Freedom, Moshe suggested, is won, not on the battlefield, nor in the political arena, but in the human imagination and will. To defend a land, you need an army. But to defend freedom, you need education. You need families and schools to ensure that your ideals are passed on to the next generation, and never lost, or despaired of, or obscured. The citadels of liberty are houses of study. Its heroes are teachers, its passion is education and the life of the mind. Moshe realised that a people achieves immortality not by building temples or mausoleums, but by engraving their values on the hearts of their children, and they on theirs, and so on until the end of time.
The Israelites built living monuments – monuments to life – and became a people dedicated to bringing new generations into being and handing on to them the heritage of the past. Their great institutions were the family and education via the conversation between the generations.1A Letter in the Scroll, 33–34.
A Nation of Educators
Early on in A Letter in the Scroll,2Published in the United Kingdom under the title Radical Then, Radical Now. arguably the book in which Rabbi Sacks zt”l most clearly articulated his philosophy of Judaism, he wrote about the value of education in Judaism and Jewish civilisation. This theme permeated his work across the many mediums through which he impacted the world, from books to parasha commentary, from his frequent articles and broadcasts in the media to his speeches in the House of Lords. It was clear to him that “for Jews, education is not just what we know. It’s who we are.”3Letter 4: Jewish Education, in Letters to the Next Generation.
But if you look closely, you will notice how he places this responsibility not solely on teachers and schools. He did not believe in the outsourcing of the responsibility for education to professionals. For Rabbi Sacks, the primary institution of education in the life of a Jewish child is the family, and the foremost educator with the deepest impact is the parent.
To launch the first annual Communities in Conversation initiative, marking Rabbi Sacks’s yahrzeit, his daughter, Gila Sacks, said of her father:
Perhaps the most defining feature of my father’s life, one that I don’t think I fully appreciated until after he died, was that he learned and learned, and continued to learn every single day, until his last. He learned from books, from text, from laws. He learned from history and from world events. But, mainly, he learned from people. He would seek out people to learn from, from every possible path of life. And he would seek out what he could learn from everyone he met. And he would do this through conversation, through talking and listening. So for him, conversation was a defining and spiritual act, a way of opening ourselves up to something beyond ourselves, of being challenged, the only way we could really become more than we were before. A training, perhaps, for opening ourselves up to God.
This captures the pedagogical vision behind the Family Editions – a resource for parents and families (as well as schools and teachers) to enhance the “conversation between the generations.”
Overview
In 2007 Rabbi Sacks embarked on an ambitious new project – to write an essay on the weekly parasha every week, to be disseminated around the world. He called this Covenant & Conversation, and he continued the project through many more parasha cycles, until the end of his life. The brilliance of these essays was the way Rabbi Sacks found complex ideas of Jewish thought expressed in the week’s Torah reading, articulated them and made them relevant to our lives today, enriching our understanding of them through contemporary wisdom (what he would later come to term ĥokhma – science, including the social sciences, as well as popular culture). In writing these essays in beautiful and elegant language which was nevertheless accessible to all (including non-Jews), he elevated style to the level of substance. As an educator and a parent, for many years I believed that these simple yet sophisticated essays could be adapted for a younger audience, and on several occasions I used them in my own classroom with middle and high school students.
In 2016 Rabbi Sacks and his team intensified their investment in resources to help Jewish educators in their work. I was privileged to be part of this initiative, and one of the projects we worked on together was two cycles of Covenant & Conversation Family Edition, and thereafter a cycle based on a similar approach focusing on the festivals, which we called Ceremony & Celebration Family Edition. Rabbi Sacks passed away between the release of the Sukkot and Ĥanukka editions, on the twentieth of Marĥeshvan 5781. We completed the cycle, and the team at The Rabbi Sacks Legacy has been dedicated to bringing the Torah of Rabbi Sacks to as wide an audience as possible ever since.
Educational Vision Behind the Family Editions
In order to make the ideas contained in the main edition of the Covenant & Conversation essay accessible for younger audiences and families of various ages sitting around the Shabbat table, we divided the ideas into manageable segments, each for a progressively older developmental age. The sections found in the Covenant & Conversation Family Edition are as follows:
IN A NUTSHELL is a short summary of the parasha for all ages.
THE CORE IDEA presents a key thought extracted from the main essay, with the language adapted to be more accessible to a younger audience (middle school age) as well as older teenagers and adults.
IT ONCE HAPPENED is a story that illustrates or complements the ideas found in The Core Idea and the Thinking More Deeply sections. These stories are appropriate for all ages.
THINKING MORE DEEPLY presents the remainder of the Covenant & Conversation main essay (sometimes in edited form and with specific words replaced with language that teens will be more comfortable with) and would be appropriate for older teenagers and adults. This section does not stand alone, but should be read together with The Core Idea.
These sections are all followed by QUESTIONS TO PONDER which are designed to be used for reflection and conversation around the texts and ideas found in them. Suggested answers to these questions are found in an EDUCATIONAL COMPANION TO THE QUESTIONS at the end of each chapter.
FROM THE THOUGHT OF RABBI SACKS presents a short quote from somewhere in the canon of writings of Rabbi Sacks that connects to and enriches our understanding of the ideas contained in the Covenant & Conversation Family Edition.
AROUND THE SHABBAT TABLE provides three questions that families can discuss on the parasha together. They are normally based on Rabbi Sacks’s understanding of the parasha as presented in the Covenant & Conversation essay. Whether those around the table have read the main essay, or the Family Edition, all will be able to use these questions as a basis for conversation about the ideas.
In the Words of Rabbi Sacks
When Covenant & Conversation Family Edition was launched for 5779 (in October 2018), and again when the Ceremony & Celebration Family Edition was launched for 5781 (September 2020), Rabbi Sacks made videos to explain the vision behind the projects. Here are excerpts from these transcripts:
I have called these essays Covenant & Conversation because this for me is the essence of what Torah learning is – throughout the ages and for us now. The text of the Torah is our covenant with God; the interpretation of this text has been the subject of an ongoing conversation that began at Sinai and has never ceased. Every age has added its commentaries, and so must ours. That is what I have tried to do each week through my Covenant & Conversation essays.
That is why I am so excited by the new Family Edition of Covenant & Conversation. The Family Edition is an accompanying resource which will take the core ideas from the main Covenant & Conversation essay for each parasha, and present them in a simpler fashion, as a way of engaging older children and teenagers.
We hope you’ll find this a useful resource to deepen your understanding of the covenant of our Torah, but of equal importance to engage in a meaningful conversation about our Torah with our children and the next generation. Participating in that conversation, and encouraging your children to participate with you, is a major part of what it is to be a Jew, because we are the people who never stopped learning the Book of Life, our most precious gift from the God of Life. There is nothing more beautiful or life affirming than learning Torah with your children. Give them the space not only to be your students, but also to be your teachers, and they will grow tall. That’s how we can truly secure the Jewish future.
A framework for engaging with these ideas and enhancing discussion around the Shabbat table. That is what the Shabbat table is really all about.
The Ceremony & Celebration Family Edition is a resource for families based around the ĥagim, which form such crucial aspects and key moments and educational opportunities throughout the year. This is a wonderful way of starting and sustaining a conversation with your children, and that is something through which you will grow and they will grow. Jewish education has always been based around three institutions: the school, the shul, and the home, and all three are important.
Acknowledgements
We are pleased to acknowledge and thank Lillian and Moshe Tabacinic for their critical support for this series of books. Lillian and Moshe are renowned for their support for Jewish education both in Florida and beyond and we are honoured that they have partnered with us on this exciting project. On behalf of all at Koren, and the families across the Jewish world that will learn from and enjoy these volumes, thank you.
Working for both Koren Jerusalem and The Rabbi Sacks Legacy has been a privilege and an honour and has given me the opportunity to collaborate with so many talented and creative people. Thanks to Joanna Benarroch, Dan Sacker, Debby Ifield, and Jonny Lipczer at The Rabbi Sacks Legacy, who, together with Rabbi Sacks, believed in the vision and possibilities for creating these educational resources, and gave me the opportunity of a lifetime to develop exciting projects such as this one. I would also like to thank the Sacks family for their belief in and support of this and all the educational projects I have been involved in on behalf of The Rabbi Sacks Legacy. Thank you for entrusting to us the holy work of continuing the legacy of Rabbi Sacks and bringing his ideas to a younger audience.
Thank you to our team at Koren whose professionalism, creativity, and expertise can be found on every page. These include Aryeh Grossman for being my educational soundboard, Tani Bayer for the creative design, Tomi Mager for typesetting what became a very complex project, and finally to Caryn Meltz who brings everything together in a way that defies description, as well as our proofreaders, Nechama Unterman and Tali Simon. Of course, thanks must always go to our boss, the publisher Matthew Miller, for his support, leadership, and vision.
Finally, to my family, for their love, support, and inspiration. Our Shabbat table was the first of many around the world to explore the ideas of Rabbi Sacks on the parasha as a family using this medium, and your input and inspiration can be found throughout these volumes.
The last word goes to my teacher and Rav, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l. Not a day goes past without a sense of feeling bereft without you to lead and inspire us. Your commitment and passion to bring your ideas to young people and your belief in my ability to help you to do it gives me the strength to continue with this endeavour. The Covenant & Conversation essay that was sent around the world for the Shabbat that fell during the shiva, entitled Beginning the Journey, explored Avraham's faith in the covenant and the promises from God, despite only experiencing the very beginning of their fulfilment in his lifetime. The essay concludes with these words:
Leaders see the destination, begin the journey, and leave behind them those who will continue it. That is enough to endow a life with immortality.4“Ĥayei Sara: Beginning the Journey,” in Lessons in Leadership, 23.
It is my privilege to count myself among the many who are driven to continue your journey. It is my hope that these volumes will be a significant step in that journey.
Daniel Rose
Modiin
Shevat 5783