“I have learned much from my teachers and even more from my friends, but from my students I have learned more than from all of them.” — Rabbi Ḥanina (Ta’anit 7a)

It has taken me years to understand the truth of Rabbi Hanina’s statement. I began, as many do, with the assumption that teaching was about what I could offer: lessons, guidance, and structure. My first classroom was during graduate school at the University of Southern California with a small group of undergraduates learning how to write college papers. I came prepared with strategies, frameworks, and with a sense of what they needed to know. But again and again, I found myself surprised—by their questions, their perspectives, the ways they pushed against the very structures I offered. Without realizing it, I had entered into a more reciprocal exchange than I expected: not simply the act of teaching, but the unfolding experience of learning alongside them.

That pattern has followed me ever since. In many ways, it reminds me of the days between Passover and Shavuot, when transformation happens quietly, cumulatively, and almost imperceptibly. It is in that in-between—between instruction and understanding, tradition and discovery—that I have learned what it truly means to teach.

My earliest post-graduate teaching setting was filled with young-adult international students learning English as a Second Language. They arrived carrying whole worlds within them—histories, languages, ways of being—now filtered through the vulnerability of limited vocabulary in a new language. In those surroundings, I came to see how deeply language is tied to dignity: how the inability to find a word can feel like a loss of self, and how being understood, even imperfectly, can restore it.

I remember one student in particular, a young woman from Japan who sat near the window and kept a small notebook open in front of her, filled with careful translations. One day, she was trying to tell a story about her grandmother, and she stopped mid-sentence, searching for a word that wouldn’t come. She grew quiet.........

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