Why Jewish Educators Must Focus on Uncoding Values
Can someone believe deeply in Israel’s right to defend itself, enough to defend the use of force even when it causes terrible suffering, and still be deeply troubled by the suffering in Gaza, enough to ask if at times Israel went too far? Over the past few years, versions of this same question have come up repeatedly in my conversations with educators.
Questions like this have become difficult because the values implicit in them arrive with political identities already attached. Questioning Israel’s conduct can be read as evidence of insufficient commitment to Israel and its security. Conversely, beginning with Israel’s right to defend itself can be read as evidence of insufficient compassion for human suffering.
The difficulty for educators is that students are encountering and absorbing these associations all the time. When someone articulates one value, we often infer much more: where that person stands politically, which other positions they probably hold, which concerns matter to them, and which ones probably do not. A neighbor hangs an American flag and we assume we know their politics. A friend criticizes the police and we decide they do not care about public safety. Someone calls for stronger immigration enforcement and we infer a hostility to immigrants.
This is what it means for values to become coded.
And over time, the code can become a boundary. Students begin to understand which values belong to “people like me” and which values belong to those who are not.
This matters particularly for Jewish education because political coding is increasingly shaping the boundaries of K’lal Yisrael. Jews can be sorted according to who is presumed to care about peoplehood and who cares about justice, who can be trusted on Israel and who understands the claims of human dignity, who values tradition and who values inclusion.
As the code becomes stronger, the breadth of Jewish moral life becomes smaller. Values that should belong within a shared Jewish conversation become markers separating one Jewish camp from another.
With the elections in Israel and the United States, this coding has intensified. Political movements increasingly build support by offering coherent and often highly polarized accounts of what matters, which threats deserve attention, and which values should define the moment. Interpretations of justice, security, patriotism, compassion, sovereignty, equality, or freedom become identified with a particular political camp, while values emphasized by another camp are dismissed as naïve, dangerous, disloyal, or simply wrong for the times.
Values then become political property, claimed so thoroughly that people outside that camp can feel they have forfeited the right to embrace them. But values are, and must remain, larger than the political codes that have gathered around them.
This is where uncoding becomes an educational task. Uncoding means helping students disentangle a value from the political package that has come to define it. It means examining how a value acquired a particular meaning within a community, which histories and experiences shaped that interpretation, which positions followed from it, and which other values were emphasized or diminished along the way. Uncoding gives students the opportunity to encounter a value beyond its most familiar political expression and ask what place it might have within their own moral world.
This kind of education requires conviction. Educators should tell students what they believe, make a serious case for the commitments they hope students will carry, and explain the histories, traditions, experiences, and values through which those commitments were formed. An Israel educator who believes deeply in Jewish sovereignty should teach toward that conviction. A parent who believes that collective responsibility should place demands upon individual freedom should say so. Students deserve to encounter adults who stand for something and can explain why.
But uncoding adds another responsibility to that conviction. An educator can teach a deep commitment to Jewish particularism while giving students serious access to the claims of universalism. A parent can transmit a strong attachment to tradition while allowing a child to ask what inclusion might require of that tradition. A teacher can advocate for social equality while inviting students to consider what individual responsibility contributes to that commitment. The student does not have to adopt someone else’s politics in order to take seriously a value associated with them.
Political identity can shape a students’ convictions without becoming the boundary around what they are capable of valuing. The point is not to move students toward the political center. It is to give them access to a wider moral vocabulary from which to develop convictions of their own. These students may even find that a value they had regarded as belonging to someone else needs to become part of their own moral vocabulary.
Uncoding keeps those possibilities open rather than allowing political identity to settle them in advance. Parents, teachers, rabbis, youth professionals, and communal leaders can give students repeated opportunities to encounter values that have been coded as belonging elsewhere, to understand what those values protect and demand, and to determine how they might live alongside commitments the student already holds.
For years, my work in education has been guided by the premise that a value becomes a value when someone values it. In a politically coded age, this idea carries a particular urgency. The work of education is to help students recognize the codes surrounding their values and uncode them: to make sure that political movements do not determine which values someone is allowed to take seriously. We must continually create opportunities for students to encounter values that supposedly “belong” to another camp and discover what those values might ask of them.
