Abstract
A handful of programs in the USA, Israel, and across the globe serve students seeking personal enrichment through torah lishma – the study of Jewish text for its own sake – in a gender-inclusive environment. This paper explores the educational visions of four coed yeshivot – so called in light of their commitment to teaching traditional Jewish text to persons of multiple genders – based in Israel and the USA. The core research questions addressed by this project are: (1) What are the animating ideas which comprise the vision of each coed yeshiva? And (2) in what ways, and to what extent, do these ideas vary across the coed yeshivot?\r \r Torah lishma programs typically assume minimal prior knowledge of their students and are not restrained by the need to prepare students for any particular profession or expertise. Consequently, I believe that decisions concerning teachers, students, and subject material may provide the clearest indication of the educational priorities of their host institutions.\r \r This paper adapts and adopts a model of educational vision expounded by Jon A. Levisohn in “A New Theory of Vision” (2014), in which he draws an equivalency between an educational vision and a set of animating ideas, ideas which “provide the motivation and guidance for practice.” It proceeds to present the educational visions of four institutions through the lens of five categories of animating ideas: ideas about Judaism, God, and Israel; ideas about human flourishing and the ideal community; ideas about subject areas; ideas about teachers and teaching; and ideas about learners and learning. My goal is to demonstrate the similarities and critical differences between these educational visions through an analysis of these animating ideas, and thus to illuminate the contours and intricacies of educational vision at coed yeshivot.\r \r The primary conclusion of this study is that uniformity or diversity of animating ideas among the coed yeshivot is a matter of scale, rather than binary. Broadly, there are three types of relationship that can be identified between animating ideas: general consensus, which occurs when institutions share animating ideas, fundamental disagreement, which occurs when one or more institutions were animated by an idea which was rejected or ignored by the others, and maḥloket leshem shamayim, which arises when institutions share two or more values which come into tension in some way, and elect different ways of resolving or managing this tension.\r \r This study demonstrates some of the explanatory power of Levisohn’s model of a dynamic relationship between vision-guided Jewish educational practice and a sphere of animating ideas, namely: the mutually causative relationship between ideas and practice, the possibility of tension among animating ideas, and the categorization of animating ideas. It also reveals some shortcomings of this model: an overcorrection of Seymour Fox’s hierarchical model of educational vision, an inability to account for changes in vision introduced by factors other than educational practitioners, and a failure to account for variation in intentionality between institutions.