People, Place, and Purpose: Structuring Jewish Education for Teens
ESTHER WERDIGER
Jessica Fisher is Director of Teen and Educational Initiatives at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
Ethan Linden is a Vice President and the Edward Fein Director of Wellspring at Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.
Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy opened his 2021 advisory report, “Protecting Youth Mental Health,” by acknowledging the increasing occurrence of mental health challenges among American teens. While explaining that these rising rates can be hard, he also notes that, “What practitioners can observe are the interventions that can make an impact on teenagers’ lives.” In other words, whether or not we understand entirely why today’s teenagers are struggling with their mental health, there is no question that we can help them.
Building on research in the field of mental health and our shared experience as teen educators, we want to argue that Jewish education can—in addition to achieving its educational goals—be an essential factor in supporting Jewish teenagers. More specifically, it can be structured to help teens cultivate sustained relationships in safe but challenging environments and offer them a sense of direction. These are interventions that can help teens thrive and deepen their sense of Jewish identity, ensuring Jewish life remains relevant and meaningful to them in the long term.
In his book, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health, Dr. Thomas Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, argues that true mental health recovery depends on three core elements: people, place, and purpose. We are not arguing here that Jewish education is a treatment for mental illness. It is not therapy or medication. However, we believe that Insel’s three-part scheme can serve as a starting point for Jewish education that helps teens flourish emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and communally. And, as we’ll show below, this approach has echoes in our tradition.
People
We all need cheerleaders and companions; role models and teachers; family and friends. Each of these relationships serves a unique function in our lives, shaping us into the people we are and can become. In the Talmud, Rabba bar bar Hana teaches that matters of Torah are compared to fire because, “just as fire does not ignite a lone stick, so too matters of Torah cannot be made to stand by a lone scholar” (bTaanit 7a). Torah study happens best in the invigorating babble of the beit midrash rather than in the work of a scholar alone in a monastic cell. True learning can only be revealed through relationship.
Teenagers, who are in the most tender stage of identity formation, have an even more acute need for connection than adults. This kind of attachment is about fostering a sense of belonging, learning mutual reliance, and looking toward others for guidance. Teenagers need these relationships for their well-being and mental health, as Insel suggests, but they are also instrumental in supporting and expanding teens’ Jewish identity formation and lasting commitments to Judaism. When we talk about Jewish teenagers needing people as part of their Jewish education, we are referring to three groups of people: peers, “near peers,” and adults. Each of these relationships can contribute to their sense of security within their Jewish community and within the Jewish people, which can then launch them to make contributions of their own. The majority of respondents in a recent study of Jewish teenagers published by the Jewish Federations’ BeWell Program and Stanford University reported feeling like they could be their “full self” with friends. Even as studies demonstrate that teens are less social and more isolated than ever before, they recognize the value of finding peers they can trust to be accepting of who they are.
Most Jewish educational settings that are deemed successful are already creating meaningful spaces for high school students to build these sorts of relationships with peers. Dinner before a supplemental Hebrew high school class or a youth group tea party, for example, are opportunities for teens to foster relationships, feel seen and understood, and fine-tune the people they are becoming. But Jewish education can and should go further. Creating opportunities for teens to engage in deep conversations about Judaism and Jewish life, inviting them to draw on ancient texts and their own real-life experiences, can give rise to a sustained commitment to Judaism and a sense of shared responsibility as part of the bonds they develop in social settings. This type of conversation deepens peer relationships and affirms the importance of teens’ own lived experience and expertise.
In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that young people today are in fewer spaces where they both make and adjudicate rules for themselves than earlier generations of teens. This weakens their ability to respond to real challenges with resilience. Again, Jewish educational spaces can offer, if not a solution, then at least some counter-programming. When we introduce teens to the Jewish intellectual tradition with its emphasis on spirited debate, we give them models of constructive conflict. As they engage in Jewish textual analysis in hevruta or navigate shared space over Shabbat, they are learning how to be Jews in ways that we believe will also build their resilience and better prepare them for the world we live in.
All these elements of Jewish education can be furthered by purposefully structured relationships with near peers and adults. A teen’s “near peer” is a role model just a little older than they are, perhaps a college student or other recent high school graduate, who can play a meaningful role in helping Jewish teenagers figure out who they are and who they want to be. Relationships with near peers offer teens a chance to learn from the experiences and mistakes of a relatable mentor and look ahead to the moment when theywill have the opportunity to play that part for someone younger than themselves. Near peers are one of the most effective educational devices employed at overnight camps, where college students serve as counselors to campers who are not much younger than themselves. We have seen this dynamic at work as well in the Hartman Teen Fellowship, where we, too, employ college students (many, but not all of them, graduates of our programs) as counselors. As one respondent in the BeWell study noted, college students “understand teens so well because they were in our shoes not too long ago.”
Engaging with a college-aged counselor—a young adult taking on real responsibilities, caring for others, and building community—demonstrates to teenagers that being a Jewish leader and immersing yourself in Jewish life is cool andwithin reach. In all these ways, near peers can help teens develop a sense of purpose, as we discuss further below. Finally, as much as teenagers are eager for independence and agency, adults, too, can play crucial roles in supporting their well-being and development, particularly adults who take them—their ideas, their experiences, and their concerns—seriously. Jewish teens benefit from observing and interacting with adults who model sincerity and grapple in an honest way with the inevitable tensions that attend our lives and our commitments. This is what it means for us to be invested in them and in their growth as human beings and as Jews in formation, especially in an educational setting. When Jewish educators depict overly simplified, obstacle-free versions of Judaism, teenagers will either find them too shallow to engage with or irrelevant to their own experience. There is not enough to this portrayal of Judaism to make it stick. But when educators reveal struggles navigating their own Jewish commitments or peel back layers of Jewish history in their teaching, teens are attracted to that authenticity and find themselves more committed to the shared project of Jewish tradition.
Place
Whether the setting is a day school, a camp, a supplemental school, or another teen-oriented community, Jewish educational spaces can be important supportive spaces in the lives of Jewish teenagers. They need places for authentic self-expression that also challenge them to grow by allowing them to test boundaries safely, try different personas, and connect with peers and mentors. Too often, Jewish educators emphasize self-expression but not challenge, to the detriment of teens’ growth as individuals and their attachment to Judaism and Jewish community. The places where teens go for Jewish education should be as rigorous as the tradition they draw from and should connect them to people and places larger than themselves.
We want to be careful with our terms and how we define them. The spaces we create for teens need robust policies, ongoing training, and constant vigilance to ensure they are not places of harassment or abuse. But when we speak of safety in this context, we are not referring to the kind of “safe spaces” that have come under criticism for allowing students to avoid topics that are uncomfortable, or to be protected from opinions they might find objectionable. In our view, a place can be considered safe for teens when they have permission to be the truest versions of themselves.
As adults, we are able to create these sorts of places for our teens. Though a school setting, a camp, and a youth lounge at a synagogue or JCC are all different, there are essential questions to ask in all cases: How much leadership do we want teens to exercise in these settings? How much freedom will we give them to choose their classes, activities, or small discussion groups? Are we setting up a place that is explicitly and insistently pluralistic, or are we more interested in gathering teens who fall into more narrow boundaries of ideology, religious observance, or Jewish learning experience?
As we build space for teens, we must communicate our expectations to those who will gather there. Explicit discussions and disclosures are critical because we should be aiming for a place where teens can feel ownership without entitlement. We should not be afraid, as adults, to set boundaries and expectations and to maintain them even if it means that the number of teens who choose our places will shrink a bit. In the Hartman Teen Fellowship, we found that a stricter enforcement of our attendance rules for the various aspects of the Fellowship over the course of the year had the twin effect of reducing the number of those who completed the experience while increasing the quality of the experience for the remaining participants (and, not incidentally, the faculty as well). This is a tradeoff we are willing to make.
When teens are clear on the expectations and boundaries of a place in which they are gathering, it allows them the confidence to explore that place (and the other people in it) to the fullest, and to exert some ownership over the experience they have. If we make the mistake of not enforcing those boundaries, we end up with teens who feel entitled to treat what we are offering them as a buffet, picking and choosing the pieces they want and leaving behind the parts they do not. This will often lead to a set of choices that are narrower than we would prefer and will tend to significantly reduce the part of our work that is about providing a place for teens to explore the borders of where they think they are comfortable.
This is what we mean by creating a place that is safe for teens. It is safe because they can make informed and thoughtful decisions about whether to show up in the first place (a choice responsible adults should help them make but not make for them); it is safe because they understand the boundaries and expectations they will encounter once they are there; and it is safe because they can feel, over time, that they can exert ownership over a place they understand and appreciate. Here, teens can be discomfited by ideas not their own, can be unsettled by positions they do not hold, and can learn to engage with difference and disagreement. They can grow and change in healthy and appropriate ways, they can take risks with their ideas and their relationships, and they can be pushed to develop the skills, resiliencies, and courage that the world will demand of them.
Purpose
As Jennifer Breheney Wallace explores in Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—and What We Can Do About It, teenagers in particular benefit greatly from knowing they matter. Applying this insight to Jewish education must be done delicately, giving them a sense that they have something to contribute to their community without making them feel like they need to resolve all the challenges facing Jewish life.
Pressure to achieve—whether in the form of good grades, college acceptance letters, or a perfectly curated social media presence—is an oft-cited factor impacting teen mental health today. The BeWell study notes that Jewish teens feel additional stress “related to Jewish specific issues,” such as the impacts of war between Israel and its neighbors and increasing global antisemitism. We saw this stress in the Hartman Teen Fellowship applications we received in the spring of 2025, where, when asked, “What do you find meaningful? What challenges or questions do you see facing the Jewish people?” approximately half of the applicants wrote that antisemitism is a significant challenge and went on to articulate a desire for tools to combat it. On the one hand, this is an understandable assessment of Jewish life in North America, and they were demonstrating an investment in and concern for the larger project of the Jewish people. On the other hand, it also suggests that high school students are experiencing this complex issue as a burden they are responsible for solving. Do we want teens’ Jewish identities to be entirely wrapped up in being defensive emissaries for the Jewish people?
When teenagers walk through our doors into a school setting or a youth group or a camp, we need to show them that they have value to contribute, but we should not be training them as foot soldiers in an endless war for Israel advocacy and against antisemitism. We also need to be cautious not to swing too far to the other extreme. In recent years, “Jewish joy” has become a stated goal of Jewish education and engagement. There’s power in this orientation insofar as it encourages a positive connection to Jewish tradition and life. But high school students, like adults, need something more robust than Instagram-able Jewish moments. They need us to help them understand why Judaism should matter to them and why they matter to Judaism.
Instead of shaping teens’ sense of Jewish purpose around either existential fear or watered-down content, we must demonstrate that deep engagement with Judaism—through Jewish ideas, stories, and commitments—is a purpose in its own right. When we do so, we connect them with generations of Jews who came before and with the millions of Jews scattered across the globe today. A midrash in Shemot Rabbah teaches that each person standing at the foot of Mount Sinai was addressed individually (5:9). Each of us received Torah in our own way and so each person—including each teenager—has a unique perspective to offer in the unfolding Jewish story. That is their purpose and what they bring to the table through their presence and passion.
One particular way to bring this kind of deep purpose into Jewish education is by helping teenagers understand that studying Jewish texts can, in the words of Talmud scholar Sarra Lev, “deepen [them] in multiple ways: as individuals, in their relationships with others, and in their relationship with the material itself.” This type of reading text impacts the ways learners see themselves, others, and Jewish tradition. It helps them grapple with ancient ideas that are often challenging and archaic, but still relevant and impactful. Deepening their relationship with Jewish ideas opens up possibilities for a sense of meaning and purpose that will continue emerging throughout their lives.
The teenage years are when identity formation begins in earnest, and it is during this vital time that the process of individuation comes to the fore. As we noted above, the BeWell study found that Jewish teenagers need more contexts where they can express themselves and engage in challenging conversations. Equipping high school students with new ideas, difficult questions, and the confidence to articulate themselves, not only connects their identity formation to the important work of individuation but also binds them more tightly to a mission larger than themselves. Such teens will feel excited and empowered to share a meaningful Jewish text or profound spiritual experience with friends and family. Their Jewish “purpose” then becomes not about how many Israel myths they bust or how many hangouts they organize for other Jewish teens, but instead, about the ways they can be transformed by entering and contributing to a conversation that has been going on for thousands of years.
