Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American - Inspiring Educational Book for Multicultural Classrooms & Interfaith Dialogue

This is a book about deliberation and its effects. What choices does one make -- as a teacher, as a parent, as a citizen -- when faced with challenging circumstances?Blumberg writes about a series of educational successes and failures she experienced and the actions she took in response to them. The actions were rarely simple or easy. They were varyingly effective. But they were always guided by her fidelity to her beliefs.The narrative was electric and gripping, especially for a collection of “school stories.” Who would expect high drama from a kindergarten class’ discussion of how and where to award its tzedakah? Or from whether students at James Madison College would be able to acknowledge and interrogate the assumptions that had structured their lives? Even Blumberg’s own accounts of reconciling her aspirations for her children’s safety, religious education, and place in the world carried an urgency that kept the book pressing forward.Blumberg writes honestly about her struggles with these school stories. She makes clear that asking the right questions is the key to education, both her own and her students'. Asking the right questions fosters deliberation. I thought about how “deliberate” can be broken down into “de-liberate:” a revocation of freedom, a confining. This is not the restriction of a too-small space, but rather the provision of a border between one's own space and the vast beyond. Blumberg shows how deliberation is the means by which one creates boundaries to organize the chaos of endless possibilities. Without it, any and all actions are valid options. With it, a moral structure provides guidance and reassurance.The concept of home comes up a lot in this book. Children discuss it in the kindergarten where Blumberg teaches and, later, in Smith School in response to a Pablo Neruda poem she reads. Throughout the book, Blumberg reflects on places she has called home in her life: Ann Arbor, New York, Jerusalem. The home-making of these places is as central to her life as the moral home-making her deliberations lead to.Homes, whether the moral and spiritual ones built through thoughts and actions, or the physical ones that set apart sacred spaces, are what give people comfort, a sense of safety. No wonder this book is so compelling. It’s about creating a home in and through education.Blumberg concludes her book with a self-assessment of sorts. Predictably, given the complexity of her subject, she has few unequivocal victories. She has no abysmal failures, either. Instead, she has the ambiguity of real life, made more tolerable and reassuring by the deliberations that continue to clarify and shore up her homes.