by Rabbi Samantha Frank
What should an educated Jew know? This question is at the forefront of our minds as we revise the Machon curriculum each year. For some Jews, the answer to the question, “What should an educated Jew know?” is clear, because halacha (Jewish law) governs the major decisions of their life: what activities are forbidden on Shabbat, how to keep a Kosher home, how to read a page of Talmud.
But for many Reform Jews, the answer is more complicated.
Living Jewishly is a choice, not a piece of identity taken for granted. Most of us do not strictly follow the laws of keeping Kosher or Shabbat. We too often think of Judaism as a list of things that we don’t do, as opposed to seeing the value in that which we do. Yet our Jewish convictions and the behaviors that stem from them are exactly what we seek to teach at Machon Micah.
Edmund Fleg, a French-Jewish writer (1874-1963 ), wrote:
“I am a Jew because in every place where suffering weeps, the Jew weeps. I am a Jew because at every time when despair cries out, the Jew hopes.”
How do we translate this feeling, this sense of being Jewish and of the spiritual and actual responsibilities imbued therein, to knowledge and action? This is a Judaism of the head, intellect, the heart, feeling, and the hands—action.
In the Machon, we believe that an educated Jew should know the stories that have shaped us through the millennia, and should feel comfortable practicing the rituals that accompany them. This means that our students know that we shake a grogger to blot out Haman’s name. That our families know that Shabbat Shirah and the musical celebration of the Israelites coming out of the sea is part of the Passover story that we tell at our seder tables. That our students know that we light Hanukkah candles to celebrate our people’s triumph of light over darkness—our freedom from oppression.
Knowing the stories and the rituals is so important that we build a spiral curriculum, meaning that each year our preschoolers through fourth graders are learning the same stories, but each year with added depth and complexity. Our youngest learners explore Abraham and Sarah as the great-grandparents of the Jewish people, while our older students explore Abraham and Sarah as the first people to welcome the stranger. They ask what it means to welcome a new student into class at school. And our middle schoolers start to think about the framework of covenant: Abraham and Sarah were the first Jews. How does their commitment and relationship to the Eternal shape our own Jewish choices? In other words, students learn Jewish stories in ways that relate to their lives.
Finding relevance in our Jewish stories is important, but it is not all we teach. Jewish identity asks something of us. Being Jewish means that we have responsibilities in how we relate to the world. The mitzvot are not only about how we eat or pray; they are the moral foundation of our ethical obligations. In our classrooms (and in the social hall, and in the kitchen, and in the sanctuary), we give our students the building blocks and the space to learn Jewish stories and then to make connections on their own.
One question that the liberal Jew asks is: why do I need Jewish language to express the thing that is the right thing to do? In other words, do I need to be Jewish to stand up and say that ICE’s wanton violence against immigrants is wrong? The answer is, of course, no. But we help our students make the connection between the story of the Jews’ enslavement in Egypt and modern day ICE policies against immigrants. We help them understand that we can— and must—use our Jewish moral imperative to say and do the right thing. It is our responsibility as Jews to clothe the naked, deal justly with the stranger, and care for the modern day widow and orphan. We provide opportunities to act on these convictions through the Underwear Drive and at other touchpoints throughout the year.
An educated Jew should know that we come from somewhere: that the stories in the Torah are our ancestors’ attempt at making sense of the mysterious beautiful cruelty of being alive in this world. At Machon, we look back at our Jewish stories to build a Jewish future of joy, wholeness, and justice.
This article originally appeared in the Sep/Oct/Nov 2026 issue of the Vine.