Deep Divide

David and Naomi Geffen (née Goss) were studying at Leeds University in England when they met. Both from traditional, Zionist backgrounds, together they followed a path to mitzvah observance and eventually moved to Israel.

Harry, David’s father, was a traditional Jew who wasn’t especially interested in Torah or Eretz Yisrael, but when a Jewish Agency speaker visited his home town of Bournemouth and extolled the virtues of aliyah, he was hooked.

“My father-in-law saw things straight,” says Naomi Geffen. “He said, ‘One second, if there’s a country for the Jews, and we’re Jewish, why aren’t we living there?’ ” So in 1963 Harry packed up his family and went off to Israel, settling in Herzliya for two years.

Among his friends and acquaintances, Harry’s unabashed idealism was completely out of left field. “People in the community thought he went bonkers,” says Naomi. “It was completely premature — he didn’t know any Hebrew and had no idea how he would navigate life over there, but he wanted to be with his people, so he went.”

Naomi had also visited Israel many times in her youth, the first time as a three-year-old girl on the maiden voyage of the ship Moledet, and she was all in with David’s passion for the Land.

Although David was every bit the staunch idealist, part of his teshuvah journey featured a time when he actually sought not to become observant after some initial encounters with the frum Jewish community left him disenchanted. For example, he thought, how could people talk in shul while they were in the middle of a conversation with G-d? David decided he would embark on an experiment of deliberate non-observance. He drew up a list: He would undertake to commit ten sins and see whether Hashem would get in the way. And indeed, he saw the direct Hand of Hashem as he was thwarted on each and every occasion.

One item on his “aveirah wish list” was a resolution not to eat kosher food. But he invariably ended up in a situation where he was about to order or buy something not kosher and it just didn’t work out.

One time, he arrived at the university café and resolved to buy the quintessentially English dish, “bangers and mash” (pork sausages with mashed potatoes). Standing in line to place his order, David salivated at the thought. But Hashem had made sure that the person in front of him got the last available serving, and when David’s turn came, the only option left was salad.

There was something else that got in his way, too, and that was meeting fellow student Naomi. For the couple, moving to Israel after graduation from university was an aspiration they both shared.

But before that, another eureka moment for David on his path to Torah observance was a chavrusa he had in learning the Sefer HaKuzari. For David’s enquiring and analytical mind, it provided answers he was looking for in understanding Hashem’s creative power and the role of Jewish history through Divine guidance and involvement.

“That was the game changer for David between losing the plot on Judaism, going through what he often felt were meaningless rituals,” says Naomi. “After that intense learning, he became convinced. At that point he decided, ‘I have to become more observant.’ ”

Finally, in the 1980s, David and Naomi realized their dream, living in the Old City and continuing to grow in their Yiddishkeit. (David’s original last name was Wayne, but when he tried spelling it for the immigration clerk, it came out “Vine” — a short stop to “Geffen.”)

Soon, an encounter he had with an Aish HaTorah talmid in 1988 would change the trajectory of David’s life. David, who was working as an engineer for Israel Aircraft Industries, decided to try out some classes at the yeshivah.

Although he was devoted to his work at IAA, David’s appetite was whetted, and he decided to switch to full-time learning at Aish HaTorah. He was a driven masmid, making up for the lost time of his youth. He started teaching whatever he learned, and later even received semichah from Rabbi Yitzchak Berkovits. Most significantly, he formed a deep bond with Rosh Yeshivah Rav Noach Weinberg. Realizing he had found his calling, David’s one-year sabbatical from work eventually turned into two years, then three and then four, and he never ended up going back. (David would be instrumental in later years in setting up Aish’s UK branch.)

But the Geffens were bothered by something huge. They were living through a time of deep division in Israeli society, between the left and the right, the non-religious chilonim and the dati, and the Ashkenazi and Sephardi crowds. It bothered their idealistic minds that the Jewish nation, instead of living peacefully, seemed to be doing a good job of self-destructing rather than living in peace and harmony.

A key arena in which those divisions played out was in politics. The early 90s saw the negotiations that preceded the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993. Deep divisions emerged in a country that was split left against right, culminating with the murder of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in 1995.

Concurrent with the national tension, the gap between the religious and non-religious in Israeli society continued to widen. Living in Jerusalem, David witnessed the weekly Shabbos stone-throwing at cars traversing the city’s northern artery, Rechov Bar Ilan, as non-religious travelers drove through the religious neighborhood as they made their way in and out of the city.

Drilled in the Aish HaTorah doctrine of helping to make the world a better place for everyone, David grappled with the stone throwing: Is it going to achieve anything? Is this an act of kiruv? Will it make drivers stop their cars, hug the stone-throwers and declare their love for Torah and Yiddishkeit?

Fundamentally, David wondered to himself, “Who’s doing something about this lack of social cohesion?” The demonization and “othering” of opponents — both in the political and religious sphere, compelled this talmid of Rav Noach to act. David was driven to see what he could do to unite Jews and bring nachas to Hashem.

Spreading the Love

Seeing the passion that consumed David to seek solutions, Rav Noach sent him to visit Rav Shach, who gave his blessing to David to embark on a social experiment to bring opposing sides together through dialogue.

Through the organization he founded in the mid-90s, called “Common Denominator,” he arranged groundbreaking meetings between the stone-lobbing chareidim of Rechov Bar Ilan and their non-religious card-carrying Meretz party opponents.

Over the course of the 20 times the two sides met, David succeeded in achieving a compromise that saw the road closed at certain times on Shabbos.

But beneath the dialogue, the handshakes and the compromises, something far more important and fundamental than cold conflict resolution began to emerge.

“They began to see the humanity in each other,” Naomi explains. “Sitting across the negotiating table from one another, they discovered that although their coreligionists may dress completely differently, life wasn’t at all black and white. In fact, those grey areas provided for a great deal of commonality between the sides. You also light Shabbat candles? You also eat only kosher meat? Family is also important to you? People from polar extremes of Israel society began discovering what they had in common, breaking down divisions and creating friendships. For David, that tentative pilot project of societal stitching together was the most important outcome of all.”

As word of his successes began to spread, David was asked to bring Common Denominator to other communities struggling with societal issues.

But the nice outcomes notwithstanding, David was restless. He felt like his successes were small localized outcomes that don’t actually transform society.

“David said it’s like emergency medicine that treats the symptoms as they flare up,” Naomi remembers. “He felt he was firefighting here and there, but he didn’t want to be a fireman. He wanted to introduce preventative medicine like healthy eating and exercise that would ward off illness to begin with.”

To tackle some of the hot-button issues plaguing society, David assembled a team of educators, social workers, and psychologists to build a program that would eventually morph into Loving Classroom. The team started by going into schools in Jerusalem and Kfar Saba, targeting deprived areas that they sensed were ripe for change.

In its nascent stage, the program entailed a once-a-week classroom session during which the facilitator would provide students with the space and opportunity to talk about personal issues, express their feelings, and learn about positive relationships. Seeing the change in their students, schools were receptive to the idea. Students became more respectful of each other and the staff and schools began to feel more positive places.

The then-Mayor of Kiryat Gat in southern Israel reached out to David. “Can you change the face of my city?” he wanted to know. The schools especially were suffering from a plethora of social and behavioral problems that now included drugs and alcohol that were affecting teens, too.

Once the program began to receive widespread recognition, real social transformation was underway. David became involved in fundraising to pay his staff and keep the program afloat. But with the financial downturn of 2008, his sources dried up. Although he was pretty much forced to shelve the project, his mind was working in overdrive. He had learned lessons from his work, experiences that told him he was onto something big — perhaps he really could create that societal change he so craved.

It’s Your Choice

David set about writing a book correlating his findings from all the societal work he’d carried out. He worked off the premise that we are placed in this world to bring glory to Hashem and to emulate his ways. But how to connect to Hashem? he wondered.

“Apart from his scientific acumen, David was also a musician who played guitar and piano,” Naomi relates. “He noticed that if you have two guitars in a room, if you play the E string on one, the other guitar sitting doing nothing will also reverberate in its E string. The notes have a connection, something in common.” This idea fascinated him and got him thinking: What is Hashem’s note? I need to find His note so I can resonate with Him.”

He looked into Torah, searching and combing through sources, enveloping himself in trying to understand what Hashem wants from the world, from us individually, and from our nation.

David spent two years looking into sources on the word “Echad,” from the first pasuk of the Shema.

What emerged from that deep dive into the fundamental pasuk of Hashem’s unity in the world was a structured program of personal character development and social consciousness that emphasises that we are all one entity, something greater than our individual selves. That understanding fosters a bond between people, creating a shared responsibility for each other and for society.

David, a trained engineer, felt it was possible to actually structure an educational process that cause people to love each other. And so, in 2013, he and Naomi began building a global organization training people to deliver the Loving Classroom program in schools in Africa, the UK, and Israel.

Tens of thousands have already benefited. Better relationships, less school tension or violence and even better academic results can be achieved if we treat one another with love and compassion. So simple, yet so difficult.

The program’s eight foundational virtues, or middos — respect, compassion, listening, kindness, gratitude, love, friendship, and care — nurture people to care for one another, to accept others’ shortcomings (everyone has them) and identify another’s innate goodness, create a better society.

For David, this was much more than simply an ethics curriculum; it was about connecting with Hashem’s creations through these middos, thereby tuning in to His Will.

In school, a new narrative is created in the minds of pupils, something like, “Within my classroom there are a lot of kids who are different from me. Some of them bother me, some of them are hard for me to get along with, some of them even bully me. So what do I do about that? I can choose to find love, to overlook and to embrace the differences through conscious character building. Those kids who irk me — I can make a choice to love and accept them.”

Not Just a Cog

Walk into a Loving Classroom session, and the kids are having so much fun they don’t even realize they’re learning. One lesson, under the category of “Respect,” sees the students with bottles of various drinks placed on their desks. “Before you pour yourself a drink,” begins the teacher (or “Love Engineer” as David preferred to call them), “let’s think about who was involved — in any way whatsoever — in supplying these drinks to the classroom.”

This is the “Billion People Thank You Toast,” a lesson that works on the assumption that with enough creative thinking and brainstorming, the class can find at least a billion different people to thank for the fact that a chilled bottle of drink now sits invitingly in front of them.

As the class begins to brainstorm, the teacher charts their thoughts on the board.

“The person who paid for the drinks,” says one.

“The person who carried the drinks here from the shop,” says another.

“The shop staff who put the bottle on the shelf,” says a third.

“But what about,” wonders the teacher, “the people involved in the production? Who ensured there was clean water to manufacture the drink? Where did the packaging come from? Who made the labels?”

Inspired to think deeper, the students begin to drill down into the totality of the process, starting to think about even the most tenuous of connections in the journey taken until that bottle comes into being. The people who laid the roads to transport the goods, the health inspectors who ensured the factory was safe, the graphic designers who created attractive packaging, even the cleaners who ensured that the shop is a pleasant place to be.

With the board at the front of the classroom now chock full of bullet points detailing every imaginable stakeholder along the way to get that drink from production to the cup, the teacher drives home the broader point: “Now pick any other item you can see or that you own, and imagine all the people involved in those items, too.”

The realization soon dawns: Our lives have been touched by a multitude of people we’ll likely never encounter. “This idea helps us all achieve a new degree of humility, with the startling realization that there are uncountable people affecting our lives who deserve our gratitude and respect — even the garbage collector you’re stuck behind who’s holding up traffic, or the bus driver who’s late,” says Nicci Menashe, a UK program donor. “We develop respect in understanding that all these service people are doing a job that helps make our life better, a cog in a larger scheme that affects our life in a positive way.”

Reset the Game

Loving Classroom’s integration into the South African education system began with a fortuitous encounter with some of David Geffen’s ideas. As Kyle Young, a South African businessman, settled into his seat on one flight a few years ago, he noticed a book peeking out of the seat pocket in front of him. Flipping through the first few pages, he realized he’d stumbled across something special. It was a Loving Classroom textbook, left behind by another traveler.

He thought about Soweto, back in South Africa, one of the largest black townships in the southern hemisphere. Created in the 1930s when the government initiated the apartheid process separating blacks from whites, it is today a severely impoverished environment where crime and violence are commonplace, unemployment is high, and children grow up at a serious disadvantage. Given the harsh reality on the ground in Soweto, a character-building program like the book he was holding could not be more needed.

On his return to South Africa, he emailed David, and also reached out to organizations in Soweto that worked with youth. That introduction led to the youth organisation that Thulani Makhoba (now the Director of Loving Classroom South Africa) worked for.

“When I read the book, I was hooked. It was an answer to many problems and challenges that I saw in school,” he says. He saw an opportunity to reset the clock on some of the negative experiences his students had been exposed to. “The children lack role models and many have experienced violent crime and abusive home environments, and those issues get transferred into school, as children arrive conditioned in negative behaviors that, unless addressed, will govern their future lives — which is where Loving Classroom’s approach for systematically teaching positive character traits comes in. It gives the children a different perspective, a feeling of hope, and the tools they need in life to succeed.”

But even in the Western world where those social issues might be less prevalent, there were staunch believers in the program’s necessity.

Loving Classroom UK director Sir Anthony Seldon says the program is more necessary than ever. “Sadly, the government has largely turned its back on the notion of character education,” he says. “It has made schools focus almost exclusively on exams and tests which are clearly very important, but not all important. We need programs like this to teach emotional intelligence and empathy from a very young age.”

To Mend the World

Loving Classroom was very much a team effort. Locked down in Ramat Beit Shemesh as Covid struck, David a”h and Naomi brainstormed the development of the program and oversaw its expansion. Their apartment in a tranquil area of the Anglo neighborhood became a lab for a global initiative to address the underlying ugliness that has surfaced across Israeli and Western society in a series of crises, from the pandemic itself, to the rancour of politically-divided times.

The positive impact on children from Kiryat Gat to Soweto was evidence both of the universal effect of Torah ideas, and of the power of one couple to change the world for the better.

Since David’s sudden passing, perpetuating his life work has become Naomi’s holy calling. She speaks of the ideas that underlie Loving Classroom with a rare conviction and intensity.

“The only solution for the world’s man-made problems is to learn how to get on with other people,” says Naomi, “and this — David’s program — is the manual for doing it. When Hashem sees us interacting with tolerance and understanding and even love, surely then Mashiach will come.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1032)