A Conversation With Rabbi Scott Slarskey, MILTON’s New Director of Jewish Life
October 10, 2024 by
October 10, 2024 by
This year, we are welcoming Rabbi Scott Slarskey to MILTON as our new Director of Jewish Life. As Director of Jewish Life, Rabbi Slarskey, or “Reb Scott,” collaborates with faculty to enhance Jewish programming and experiences. He also teaches two middle school classes.
We met with Rabbi Slarskey to talk about how he decided to become a rabbi and work in education, his experiences with the arts, and new initiatives around tefilah, holidays, and student leadership.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
1) How did you decide to become a rabbi?
I grew up in Massachusetts. Both my parents were public school teachers and my brother and I were the only Jewish kids in our school. In high school, when I got involved in a youth group I found that pursuing Jewish life connected me with a much bigger world than the small town where I grew up.
The experiences that nurtured my Jewishness also planted the seeds for my practice as an educator. The learning and the work that I did in my youth group felt much more empowering and much more real, in a lot of ways, than the learning that I was doing in high school. I learned to create programs and lesson plans. I also experienced Jewish learning as a cornerstone of strong Jewish communal life. My role models were rabbis and educators. I think I started to want to be a rabbi because I started to see rabbis as connectors and as people who empower others.
2) What did you do before you became a rabbi?
My first job was delivering newspapers and I also had a significant stint in food service. When I was rejected from rabbinical school straight out of college (ironically, they thought my experience was too focused on children’s education) I had to figure out how to put my liberal arts degree to use. I took a job in a juvenile detention center, working first with boys and later with girls who, as a result of being convicted of a crime, were committed to the state.
After about nine months, one of my friends got into a PhD program at UCLA, so we packed a van and moved across the country together. When I moved out to Los Angeles, I took teaching jobs at several synagogue schools and worked at Starbucks to get healthcare and pay the rent. I’ve also worked in Jewish summer camps and summer programs for teens.
3) And were you always interested in Jewish education?
Yes and no. My parents were both teachers, so initially I was somewhat resistant to following in the same path. I went to rabbinical school at the Ziegler School for Rabbinical Studies, thinking that what I really wanted to do was work with and teach Jewish inmates. I had so come to appreciate the power of living Judaism to empower and humanize people and to build community, and I wanted to help bring that to some of the most systemically disempowered and dehumanized people in our country.
Over time, my love of working with children became a career commitment. I was drawn to schools and particularly to Jewish education. I appreciate that, though we embrace very high standards for Jewish learning, there are no state mandates! In addition to textual literacy and fluencey, the goals are often meaning-making, mensch-making, and hiddush–creativity. Jewish educators enjoy great opportunities to be creative and playful and to center students’ authentic questions in helping them to engage with text and Jewish practice in ways that build meaning and stretch their minds.
4) I wanted to talk about your experience as a visual arts educator, which I know is something that you really value. How did that become a focus for you?
Jewish learning and practice provide us unique lenses through which to see the world. While many people might sit down for a meal and be excited about the flavors of the food, with a Jewish lens, one might ask, “What are the origins of the foods, and what are the appropriate ways to give thanks for the foods?” Or, “What foods do you eat together or not eat together?” “What is the bracha for this food and why?” A Jewish lens shifts the kinds of questions we ask and the things we notice.
Trying out a visual arts lens can work in an analogous fashion. If I were creating an abstract collage of the laws of Sukkah, what colors would I use to represent schach (the shade-providing roofing materials) or “k’sheirah” (fit for Jewish use). If I were representing a conversation in the Torah between Avraham and Sarah strictly using geometric shapes, which shapes would I choose for each? What size would they be? How would I position them relative to each other? The exercise resembles the work of translating from Hebrew, but because of the shift in the modality of expression, some of the questions of translation evoke radically different thinking than translating a language of words to another language of words.
Over the course of ten years working with the Jewish artists and educators of Jerusalem’s Kol HaOt (through the Legacy Heritage Teacher Institute for the Arts), I grew to appreciate how teaching students to think and express themselves visually could be exceptionally empowering for them, their teachers, and their communities. Over and over, with teams of arts and Judaics teachers from Jewish Day Schools around the country, I helped educators discover that Jewish visual arts could transcend “decoration” to become “illumination:” sophisticated expressive capacity. Students were consistently amazed and delighted by what they could create.
5) I also know you’ve been having some conversations about tefilah and student leadership. Could you tell me more about that?
I am committed to empowering students to share their voices and values and to listen to each other so that we can enhance our already excellent program. I have already solicited the perspectives of all of our middle schoolers in multiple fora so that I can gather data that we can review together, with the goal of providing them more choice in the modes of Jewish communal prayer they might wish to experience and the prayer leadership skills that they would like to develop.
It started with a group of enthusiastic eighth graders who approached me in the hall about adding elements to Middle School tefilah that were new to MILTON. When I invited them to meet for lunch and to bring anyone else they thought might be interested in the conversation, I was delighted to see that the numbers of conversants doubled! They shared meaningful prayer experiences they’d had before, and in our next conversation we discussed ways in which tefilah at school could integrate their positive lived experiences at summer camp, or in synagogue.
After that, I was eager to open up the conversation more and introduced a survey to the entire middle school. It asked them what they appreciate about the current tefilah program, if there are tefilah-related skills or content they’d want to learn about, and what experientially would need to happen in order to take tefilah to the next level for them.
I’ve gotten a bunch of responses there as well. I look forward to sharing some of the raw data with a student “construction team” who will sift through it with me and organize it for presentation to the rest of the middle school. I think that a little bit of the art of it is going to be trying to figure out how to let both the data we have gathered and the core values of our institution guide the development of some options we pilot with students. We have a very diverse group, and I think it will behoove us to be strategic about the ways in which we continue to listen to each other and expand our program to really meet the needs and interests of our students.
6) The other thing I know you’ve been focusing on is how we celebrate holidays.
One of the reasons I came here is because MILTON has this unbelievable reputation for being a really thoughtful, rich, deep, educational community. I’m interested in helping teachers enhance what they do, and listening to people to see if there are new perspectives that I could bring or approaches to introduce.
One very concrete thing that we did this year was to make Tashlich into a cross-grade experience. It was really lovely, and I hope, memorable! We took second and third grade together to a really nice location in Rock Creek Park where we had a brief program, sang a bit, and did Tashlich together. We held a similarly structured program for fourth and fifth grade, and I’m really excited that we got to take middle school all together for a picnic and a slightly different developmentally appropriate program, because having shared experiences together builds middle school identity and community. I hope that a significant aspect of fulfilling my charge as Director of Jewish Life will involve building positive memories around Jewish experiences.
7) Okay, I have one more question. What is your favorite Jewish holiday?
I think Sukkot is a fantastic Jewish holiday. There are so many great themes connected with it. And I really like that building and living in a sukkah feels like living within the mitzvah, physically. It’s a big art installation project! That’s pretty fun.
Click here to read Scott’s bio on our website.
A large part of Reb Scott’s presence at MILTON comes through his musical talent and leadership as well—the first thing you may notice when you visit his office is his banjos decorating the walls. Watch the video below for a glimpse.