A journey, not just a destination: why Jewish education matters more than ever

Every lesson, every Shabbat programme, every classroom conversation about who we are and what we stand for is part of the journey that shapes a young person

Ask any parent what worries them about their child’s future, and the answer rarely starts with academic achievement – important though that is. Instead, it starts somewhere else: will they cope? Will they know who they are, when the workplace they’re heading into is being remade by artificial intelligence, when graduate jobs are harder than ever to find, and when public life feels louder, angrier and more fractured by the day? And as Jewish parents there is an equally important and challenging layer: will our children feel safe and proud to be visibly Jewish in a climate where antisemitism is rising and the world can feel more hostile to us than at any point in recent memory?

As Director of Jewish Life and Learning at JFS, the largest Jewish school in Europe and home to children from every part of our community, this is what occupies my thinking most days. There are certainly no easy answers. But one answer can be found in the unlikely place of this week’s Torah portion, Matot-Masei.

The book of Bamidbar closes with what looks, on first reading, like the driest passage in the Torah: a list of forty-two places where the Israelites camped on their way through the wilderness. They set out from here, they camped there. Forty-two times. No drama, no plot twists, just an itinerary. But the list is the point. The Torah refuses to skip the journey to get to the destination. It names every stopping place because the forty years in the desert weren’t an obstacle between Egypt and the Promised Land, they were the making of a people. A generation born in slavery had to become one capable of recognising freedom. That transformation didn’t happen at the destination. It happened in between, at each of those forty-two stops.

As Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l put it, for Jews, education is not just what we know, it is who we are. This is the thread running through everything we do at JFS, and it is captured in our school motto, Orah Viykar, “Light and honour.” We want to take our students step-by-step on a journey, and for them to leave us carrying Jewish values that light their own path and bring honour to every life they touch, whatever challenges lie ahead.

Which is why at JFS, that identity is built into the structure of the school day, not bolted on around it. Through a curated Jewish Life programme with a focus on chesed, Jewish learning that is turned into Jewish practice, and pastoral and psychological support built around who our students are, not just how they perform, we are able to take our students on their own Jewish journey. We do this at a scale no other Jewish school in Europe can match, for children from every part of our community. Every lesson, every Shabbat programme, every classroom conversation about who we are and what we stand for is one of those forty-two stopping places, part of the journey that shapes a young person into someone capable of carrying their inheritance forward with pride.

None of this happens without a community willing to invest in it. This weekend, JFS is running its Future Makers matched funding campaign: every pound given will be matched, doubling its impact on the education we can offer the next generation. This is not simply an investment in a school. It is an investment in who our young people will become, and in the kind of community and country they will go on to build.

To find out more or to give, visit https://tinyurl.com/JFSFutureMakers