by Rabbi Howard Jacoby Ruben, Head of School
My childhood rabbi used to tell the story about Ben, a boy lost in the woods. He wandered for hours—hungry, thirsty. Then he nearly tripped over Sarah who looked just as lost as he felt. Sarah had an idea: “What if you remember the sounds you’ve heard while wandering? And I’ll remember the things I saw.” Ben concentrated, listening for highway noises, while Sarah focused on the widest, most well-worn parts of the path. Working together, they found their way out in minutes. Each had something essential the other needed. To find their path, they had to develop a relationship.
That story came to mind this week when the JCHS Professional Community returned to Ellis Street to prepare for the coming school year. We reflected on research from Vanderbilt’s Peabody College about the power of relationships to elevate learning. This research demonstrates that strong relationships with teachers are essential to student learning and to helping students discover their deeper sense of purpose. They enable essential risk-taking and help students move from external validation toward intrinsic engagement—exactly what students need to find their calling.
This connects to our earlier work on helping students discover their purpose. A few summers ago, many of us read William Damon’s ”The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life*. Damon teaches that purpose reaches out to the world beyond the self, deriving from a desire to make a difference. Each student has a spark of that desire inside. A teacher’s most vital role is to look for that spark, then encourage and nurture it. As the Peabody study confirms, this success depends on relationships.
These lessons echo this week’s Torah portion, Eikev. Moses declares a three-fold purpose for each person in the Jewish community: “to have awe for the divine, to walk on the divine path, and to love and serve the divine with heart and soul” (Deut. 10:12). Notice how each element requires relationship: awe develops through encountering something greater than ourselves, walking the divine path requires guidance from teachers and family, and loving and serving happens in partnership with others.
Just as Ben and Sarah needed each other’s different perspectives to find their way out, we need both divine connection and community to discover our path. The Torah’s call to serve “with heart and soul”—complete dedication to something greater than oneself – perfectly aligns with Damon’s finding that meaningful purpose reaches out beyond the self.
For JCHS students, these relationships help each discover their unique gifts that can serve both community and the broader world—much like Ben and Sarah discovering that their different abilities, when combined, could accomplish what neither could achieve alone.
As we begin this new year together at JCHS, may each relationship we build—between teachers and students, between study partners, between friends—help reveal the unique spark within each person. And may those sparks, nurtured through relationships and directed toward service, light the way for a meaningful year ahead and beyond.
