School of Education Director Miriam Heller Stern Explores the Importance of Jewish Creativity

For Miriam Heller Stern, Ph.D., National Director of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion's School of Education, and Associate Professor, Jewish learning, thought, and creativity have been all around her from the beginning.

"I grew up in a house full of books, and a house full of Jewish art, and Jewish music and Jewish ritual objects, and my father was a rabbi and had a study with three walls lined with books, and some of those bookshelves were three books deep," Stern said during the recent webinar Jewish Creativity: An Essential Aspiration for Jewish Education held by Brandeis University's Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education, where Stern was discussing her research for the publication From Resilience to Renewal: Teaching Jewish Creativity.

"When I started my career as a Jewish educator, I went into the field with that idea of Jewish literacy and those books very much in mind," Stern recalled in conversation with Brandeis professor Ziva Hassenfeld.

One particular volume would prove especially influential as Stern became more and more focused on the role of creativity in education: Judaism as a Civilization, rabbi and philosopher Mordecai Kaplan's proposed architecture for the future of Judaism. "100 years ago, Kaplan was creating a prophetic vision for Jewish life and Jewish education," Stern said. "He was clear that if we didn't learn how to be creative and make Jewish culture, aesthetics, appreciation of beauty, and discernment part of the Jewish educational process, we would not succeed in building Jewish education."

Stern began to see the connection between Jewish creativity and Jewish learning play out in her working life when she moved to Los Angeles, where she began teaching and ultimately assumed the post of Dean of the then-Graduate Center for Jewish Education at American Jewish University. In L.A., she said, she found herself surrounded not only by people who worked in the entertainment industry, but also by Jewish artists who wanted to study and teach in her master's program because they had a passion for educating others.

"I started to realize that there was this magic in Jewish artists who were teaching. And I wanted to unlock the question: what is the magic? How are they teaching creativity? And how are people becoming creative in their midst? And also, how can we start to name and identify the pedagogies they are engaging in that they don't even realize are pedagogies?"

These questions became central to Stern's research, experimentation, and teaching both during her time at AJU, and then at HUC-JIR, where she has been since 2016. Stern used Mordecai Kaplan's writings as a jumping-off point, putting Kaplan in dialogue with leading thinkers on education and creativity such as Ken Robinson, Mitchel Resnick, Jo Boaler, and others. Stern came to define Jewish creativity as "the process through which we ideate and develop chidushim. The idea of chidushim is a classical Jewish idea about coming up with new interpretations and new ideas in the Beit Midrash," she said - while emphasizing that the ideas must be new, original, and of value. "You can have lots of off-the-wall ideas, and that's a lot of fun, but do those ideas have purpose, do they have animating use in the world?"

To help catalyze the connections between creativity and Jewish education, Stern launched an initiative at HUC-JIR called Beit HaYotzer/the Creativity Braintrust, an incubator for artists, practitioners, and academics. "It's inspired by a verse in Jeremiah where God says, 'if you want to understand prophecy, go to the house of the potter, watch the potter throw clay over and over again as that clay gets destroyed and remade, so too can humans remake themselves,'" Stern said.

"I think Jewish education is really a process of remarking ourselves and learning to remake our world. That's what artists do intuitively. So I wanted to understand as a scholar, what does it look like to do that remaking, and how do people learn to remake themselves, and how can we engage the enterprise of Jewish education in this work of remaking and renewal and creation?"

One concrete expression of this concept that Stern has incorporated into her pedagogy is the Japanese art form of Kintsugi, "where we take a bowl, we smash it, we bring the pieces back together in some way, and paint the cracks with gold. And I've created a whole Beit Midrash around it. And what we do with it is, really, reflect on how we hold brokenness, how we face imperfection, and how we take something that is in pieces and put it back together in a new way, and how we become creators ourselves."

Stern said conducting this exercise with educators at HUC-JIR over the years has shown her "the things that people discover about themselves when they are actually engaged in a physical learning activity and a metaphor - learning through metaphor for me is the pedagogy that has opened up new worlds, because people just find insight that they never would have found on the page."

Stern said creative responses to brokenness must be a central element of Jewish pedagogy and its emphasis on identity, community, and continuity - as part of a resilience that is essential amid the challenges after the October 7 attacks and as the world navigates what she calls a watershed moment in Jewish history.

"I think this moment demands that Jews learn how to tell their own story, and that requires a kind of creativity," Stern said. "We need to learn how to be storytellers, we need to learn how to understand ourselves, and then learn how to communicate who we are and what we stand for, as individuals and also as a collective. I would like the Jewish educational process to engage Jews in learning to tell that story."

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