Dwelling in the Space Between
Resh Lakish said in the name of Rabbi Yehudah Nesiyah: The world only exists because of the breath of school children. (Shabbat 119b) The idea behind this Talmudic wisdom is breathtakingly simple: breath sustains children’s learning and learning sustains a meaningful life.
But now we are living in a topsy turvy time, when the very thing that ought to sustain the world—our schoolchildren’s breath—may actually carry profound danger. And yet we all must continue on, striving to lead lives of meaning and purpose.
At the center of a life of purpose sits the cultivation of sacred relationships. Our tradition teaches that in the innermost and most holy part of the mishkan sat two golden kruvim (Exodus 25:18). The two faced one another, and God dwelled in the space, or breath, between them. According to Rabbeinu Bahya, writing in Spain in the Middle Ages, one of these kruvim had the face of an adult and the other had the face of a child.[1] The sacred relationship between child and adult existed at the center of the mishkan and remains at the heart of many Jewish schools and families today.
Yet the space between child and adult—one place where meaning and purpose can flourish—has shifted. Children and their teachers have been forced apart, and children and their parents have been resituated in close quarters. This shift has ushered in both profound challenges and profound beauty.
The Expanding Space between Children and Teachers
When they learn in classrooms together, teachers and students are in relationship with each other and with the topic they are studying. In the words of educational theorist Parker Palmer, they gather together with the subject as the “great thing” at the center.[2] The relationships among the three—teachers, students, and content—are often thought of as an equilateral triangle, with sacred connection flowing equally and freely between each element and throughout the whole system.
One of the most profound challenges for teaching and learning in the COVID-19 era is the growing space between children and their teachers. That instructional triangle at the heart of schooling is now an isosceles triangle with teachers and students far apart. At its center sits a screen that simultaneously unites and divides.
The new reality has demanded adjustments in both pedagogy and patience. As any parents of a school-age child can attest, the distance between children and their teachers and content has become a gulf filled with obstacles of lost passwords, glitchy Websites, and attenuated focus. Lack of access to computers or insufficient Internet access exacerbate these challenges for many learners. These challenges are met with extraordinary efforts by everyone involved, including the teachers, who suddenly have become learners in front of their students’—and their students’ parents’—eyes.
Teachers’ processes of learning, so often hidden in typical classrooms, have been laid bare for all to see. In our own children’s classrooms, a music teacher learned a new way of conducting—along with the software that allowed it—that made it possible for children to sing in their own homes yet appear in synchronous harmony. A second grade teacher who was also a new mother learned to teach while attending to both the needs of the baby in the room with her and the demands of her students across the city. In each of these cases, and in so many others, students and teachers alike experienced moments of profound frustration and moments of deep connectedness. Both stemmed from the same new space between them.
When teachers’ own processes of learning were made visible to their students as they scrambled to develop new skills, students had the opportunity to become the teachers. In one of the classrooms happening in our homes last spring, teacher tech tutorials were a common occurrence as a fourth grader taught his teachers to use the very platforms they needed in order to teach him. Publicly acknowledging the limits of his own knowledge, the teacher began to send to the entire class and all of the parents technology updates, always crediting his student as the source of this knowledge. Jewish educators often cite the Talmudic wisdom, “much have I learned from my teachers, more from my colleagues, but most of all from my students” (Taanit 7a). In pre-COVID classrooms this wisdom was, at times, offered as hollow platitudes. But now teachers learn from their students the very tools that they need in order to do their work, and they do so in ways that are—by necessity—visible to parents and students.
As they do so, teachers are modeling some of the most important habits of mind needed for meaningful education. They are modeling a growth mindset, showing their students how necessary—and how very frustrating—it can be to learn new skills. They are modeling grit and perseverance—needed because of the profound challenges of the day, but important for students to learn in all cases.
“When the space between teachers and students widens, the distance allows space for unexpected role reversals, producing frustrations and delights and new angles of encounter. At the same time, the space between children and their parents has entirely collapsed.”
When the space between teachers and students widens, the distance allows space for unexpected role reversals, producing frustrations and delights and new angles of encounter. At the same time, the space between children and their parents has entirely collapsed.
The Contracting Space between Children and Parents
As parents, we have the primary responsibility for our children’s learning. In Deuteronomy 6:7, the Torah instructs us, “And you shall teach your children….” But while parents have the ultimate responsibility for seeing that a child learns, that responsibility is generally fulfilled in large part by teachers. In most cases, this means that though children learn deeply and constantly from their parents, they go to school.
In addition to teaching a child Torah, parents are instructed to make sure their child can earn a livelihood and teach them to swim (Kiddushin 29A). The ultimate goal of this parental responsibility for learning is to create an independent healthy adult who can stand on her own. A parent’s job is to send her children out into the world.
As they grow and explore out in that world, our role is to be a soft landing when they come home at the end of the day (or summer at camp, or orchestra tryout, or tough math test). We celebrate their victories, listen as they make sense of what happened during the day, and offer support and guidance before the next day begins. We make sure they don’t drown, but we know—and need to embrace—that they might get a little water up their nose. This terrifying, exhilarating practice of tzimtzum—stepping back—is the cornerstone of parenting.
But during a time of sheltering-at-home or limiting time in the larger community, we cannot send children out into the world. As a result, the space between children and their parents has contracted as we spend increased time together and less time inhabiting separate spheres. And one of the profound challenges of this new reality is that it is harder and harder for parents to create and then step back from a space that allows our children to learn without us. The resulting learning relationship is, at once, beautiful and challenging.
Last spring, in one of our homes, a fifth grader exercised her emerging executive functioning skills combined with a newly fierce desire for autonomy. Children in late elementary school can both handle increasingly complex assignments and at the same time frequently lose the various pieces of that assignment in the bottom of their backpack. As the backpack hung unused on the hook, the pieces of assignments formed piles and drifts on the rug in her room. In an attempt to help her get organized, her parents started visiting her room for frequent “check-ins” about her work. At one point Lauren found herself, multiple times a day, standing over a school-issued planner with a pencil in hand, trying to write down all of the various tasks. In an ordinary world, parents interact with this process only once at the end of the day. In this world, the piles were visible every time she opened her door, making it irresistibly hard to avoid swooping in to “help.”
Famously, contemporary parents are often accused of “helicoptering,” always hovering above children and not allowing them to fail. Yet developmental psychologists have long shown that letting children experience “successful failures” —getting to see the results of their imperfect choices when the stakes are relatively low—is essential for children’s healthy development.[3] One of the greatest challenges of learning at home is that there is no time or space for children to recover from a frustrating assignment or resolve a problem on their own, outside of the watchful eye of parents.
On the other hand, it also means that there is no physical gap between the big interesting ideas children talk about in their classrooms and the dinner table. There are so many fleeting moments of learning in schools that parents do not typically see. Now, the forced closeness brings these to the surface and makes them visible to parents—and thus alive for more discussion and shared curiosity. A child lit up with a beautiful line in a book, a puzzling question about fractions, a small bit of insight can now be the start of a thread that weaves from school to home and back again.
Conclusion:
“We get stuck, perhaps, when we are unable to articulate for ourselves and our children that both exist—the beauty and the pain, the things we can fix and the things over which we do not have any control.”
The upending of these sacred relationships presents profound challenges and profound beauty. Neither cancels out the other. We get stuck, perhaps, when we are unable to articulate for ourselves and our children that both exist—the beauty and the pain, the things we can fix and the things over which we do not have any control.
When Sivan’s son was a toddler, he experienced his first thunderstorm. Living in California in the midst of a drought, there were precious few times that he had ever seen rain, and he was outraged. “Turn it off!” he shouted, and when she could not, he yelled, “why don’t you just listen to me and turn off the rain?” She explained that we cannot control the weather. We can decide whether to stay in and cuddle or go out and explore the puddles. We can only control how we react. While this distinction—of what we can control and what we cannot—is usually more obvious to adults, in these times it may not be easy for us either.
We may need to remind ourselves: We cannot completely bridge the gap between teachers and children, but we can make sure that we center all our classrooms, virtual and in-person, around what educational philosopher Nel Noddings calls an “ethic of care,” and place “receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness” at the heart of these relationships no matter how physically distant teachers and children may be.[4] We cannot fully create autonomous spaces for our children to stumble and grow out of our sight, but we can remember that when we give up some control over their learning—backing away from their planners and letting them figure out how to keep their own iPads charged—we breathe more space into the parent-child relationship.
In the recitation of daily miracles, Nissim B’chol Yom, Jews say, “Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech haolam, asher natan lasechvi vinah l’havchin bein yom uvein lailah.” Praise to You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who has given the mind the ability to distinguish between day and night.” Perhaps like never before, we need to give voice to our capacity to tell day from night, frustration from beauty, contracting from expanding space. Distinguishing between the two, and holding space for each, can allow us room to breathe.
[1] Rabbeinu Bahya on Shemot 25:18
[2] Palmer, P. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's life. John Wiley & Sons.
[3]Levine, M. (2012). Teach your children well. HarperCollins.
Lythcott-Haims, J. (2015). How to raise an adult: Break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success. Henry Holt and Company.
Pope, D., Brown, M., & Miles, S. (2015). Overloaded and underprepared: Strategies for stronger schools and healthy, successful kids. John Wiley & Sons.
[4] Noddings, N. (2013). Caring: A relational approach to ethics and moral education. Univ of California Press.
Noddings, N. (2002). Educating moral people: A caring alternative to character education. Teachers College Press.
