KoREH News

A Year of Hope and Change

Happy New Year everyone!

Starting off something new is always an occasion to hope and wish for a better future. At times like these, we can see the bright horizon of tomorrow out in the distance and with a clean slate we hope that we can take advantage of all the opportunities life will bring us in the year ahead. I think that Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, formerly the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, summed it up most powerfully:

“Hope is the ability to combine aspiration with patience; to be undeterred by setbacks and delays; to have a sense of the time it takes to effect change in the human heart; never to forget the destination even in the midst of exile and disaster… Hope is the narrow bridge across which we must walk if we are to pass from slavery to redemption, from the valley of death to the open spaces of new life… History does not give rise to hope; hope gives rise to history… Far from being simple or naïve, hope demands, creates and is the expression of indomitable moral courage.”

[Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Chief Rabbi’s Haggadah (Essays), p. 7-118]

Having that hope in new things is what impels us to teach our children, who will inherit our world, and to push them to make a brighter future. Having hope gives us strength to dare what gives us pause and to venture out in new directions. It that same bright hope that keeps us pushing forward with new ideas, new experiments, and new learning experiences.

Over the past many months, your KRRS teachers, staff, and Advisory Board have been hard at work envisioning the future of our Religious School. We have learned with other leaders from other schools who have revolutionary new ideas for how to build learning communities. We have been looking into how our growing Jewish technologies can impact the ways in which we learn together. Throughout this all, we have been evaluating and piecing together some of our own experiences, with feedback from students, to shape new possibilities for better, more
engaging learning.

Now we would like your help as well. We want to hear from you! Tell us about your interests and learning experiences. Let us know what YOU would like to learn as students of any age. Share with us some of your best and most challenging moments as a learner. We want to work together with you to create a learning community that responds to your family’s needs and interests, while offering you new and exciting Jewish experiences to take home with you.

I hope that this New Year will be one filled with learning and new challenges for us all. I hope that we can learn and grow together in wonderfully new ways. I hope that you will be brave enough to call or email and let us know more about your thoughts, experiences, and dreams for learning. But more than anything, I hope that you will share with us more about you and your family and join us in building something fantastic and new.

Todah Rabbah,
Rabbi Scott Shafrin