Tools and Technologies to Support Leaders Today

The Shalom Hartman Institute is a vibrant educational and research center serving Israel and world Jewry, with programs and learning opportunities for people of nearly all ages and varying levels of Jewish knowledge. It's a hub of Jewish learning for Jewish communal professionals, lay leaders, clergy, and many others.

The technology we rely on at Hartman is an ancient one: Jewish ideas and Jewish texts. This approach has endured because it continues to offer depth, clarity, and relevance. Throughout Jewish history, leaders have shaped our collective life by engaging seriously with ideas. Our work carries that forward by helping today’s leaders and communities use relevant Jewish ideas and frameworks to grapple with the challenges they face and to imagine and lead toward a promising future.
- Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield, CEO, Shalom Hartman Institute of North America

Founded in 2020, For the Sake of Argument is a non-partisan educational initiative that develops tools and techniques to help people engage in healthy arguments at home, school, on campus, in the workplace, or elsewhere in community. FSA partners with educators, institutions, community leaders, and organizations to create bold learning environments where argument is a tool for connecting and growth. It's first, and primary, focus is on Israel education.

We're interested in harnessing the power of an argument. We work on channeling that power into a force for learning and for connection. Too often a disagreement leads to harming relationships or shutting down questions. But we believe that an argument done right can actually help people get to know each other better, help them clarify ideas, and even build community. In our FSA workshops, once we've taught basic skills, we read a specially-written story that presents different perspectives and questions that frame a disagreement. We practice the skills learned immediately, by sending people off into small self-facilitated groups. Unlike many other methods, our model relies on self-facilitation from the very start. There is no facilitator in a real-life argument.
- Abi Dauber Sterne, co-Founder and co-Director, For the Sake of Argument

A key part of our work that’s changed over the years is how people feel comfortable or can encounter the texts and ideas we want to share. We previously flew faculty around so they could teach sessions in person and in lecture halls. We certainly still do that and see a deep value in that—relationships are an important technology—but we’ve grown our ability to use digital media, whether through a podcast, Substack, or YouTube videos. These media engage far more people in the conversation and are effective technologies for leaders to use to amplify the ideas they want to represent. A rabbi can deliver a d’var torah from the pulpit and then release a podcast that reinforces those ideas and offers examples building on her or his message to congregants.

Another successful technology involves opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, which is especially impactful with college students. So we’ve created reinforcements that enable text and ideas to speak to each other on the page and allow people in a book group setting to explore those ideas together without a scholar present. I think college students are looking for ways to talk about issues that matter to them—power and powerlessness; Jewish vulnerability; their relationship between universalism and particularism—in ways that are deep, thoughtful, and relevant to their situation. And they want to experience this with their peers. - Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield

In FSA sessions we focus on a technology that might be somewhat surprising to people: speaking. We actually don’t focus much on listening. In many disagreements, the problem isn’t only the listening, it’s really the speaking. For many people who know each other in synagogue or another setting, they feel like speaking up around a contentious topic, such as Israel, is just not worth it. Then there’s a simmering, quiet disagreement that almost always eventually boils over. We try and break through that.

At the same time, some people speak and it’s not productive. To help teach a better way of speaking—a better way of offering opinions—we've developed the “Percentage Tool.” We teach people to offer their quick, gut-based opinion along with their more analytical, cognitive opinion. They share their gut response, along with what percentage their brain agrees with their gut. We want to encourage people to share their emotions and their thoughts, their deepest convictions along with their uncertainties. We practice speaking with humility and uncertainty. If someone says they agree with one perspective with 75 percent certainty and another says they’re for another viewpoint with 65 percent certainty, there’s a zone of uncertainty that they both share even when they have a different viewpoint. This creates an opportunity for connecting through disagreement and is how we want people to practice speaking. (photo courtesy of Leigh Taylor Photography and the Cincinnati Jewish Federation) - Abi Dauber Sterne

In the weeks following October 7th, we did something we don’t normally do because we don’t have the faculty for it: We opened the doors to our beit midrash. We said anyone who wants to learn with us, we will create a session for you. We had more than 200 sessions in those first two months and just tried to hold the community. We knew that people were looking for spaces where they could develop and deepen their thinking of the moment and find comfort. There was a pastoral element to it.

Then, during the Iran war, we were unable to offer immersive learning in Jerusalem. Our surveys show this is such a transformative moment for our learners, but we had to cancel these experiences. While there’s no replacing them, we made a concerted effort to put out more content for people. We produced our For Heavens Sake podcast three times a week when that war started. We created learning opportunities for people through different modalities. There was a real demand for this; listenership went through the roof on our podcasts. People found ideas, which gave them solace. There’s the possibility to find comfort and community through technologies that weren’t necessarily designed for those purposes. These are significant opportunities for the Jewish community. Even when we’ve had flights limited, for example, we can still create deep connections, our faculty can still engage learners in the U.S., and we can still engage in this world Jewry/Israel conversation. - Rachel Jacoby Rosenfield

For the first few weeks after October 7th, we thought our work was done because everyone would agree. That lasted about two weeks. We speak to a lot of educators and leaders and Israel is the topic that they always come back to because that is what they’re struggling with. They are desperate for help navigating disagreements around this issue. Our workshops are in demand from all kinds of Jewish communities, in all kinds of settings, and with people of nearly all ages. When we notice that a topic is getting heated, including around Israel, we write several questions to frame the disagreement. In education speak, these are "essential questions." They don’t have one right value. They’re not yes or no. They don't lead to answers where something is right and something is wrong. They are values-based questions that take the conversation up a level. It still takes a long time to build best practices into habits. We’re hearing over and over again that people are struggling to talk about Israel constructively, but these types of essential questions can move the needle in that direction.

We’re finishing a story now about a person writing a book about the Jewish holidays. But then the publisher says the author can’t include Yom Ha’atzmaut because it’s not uplifting. The yes or no question is "should he take the book deal." But the essential questions are "Have we had enough of Israel? It’s weighing us down as Jews; is it ok to not talk about Israel?" This is an example of how we see issues bubbling to the surface and then write stories that speak to those issues. When we hear stories about conflicts, we try and find the questions at the heart of the matter, write materials that share those questions, and help people think about the questions from many different angles. - Abi Dauber Sterne