Rabbi Scott Slarskey aims to create “sticky” holiday programming for young learners at Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School, meaning that the lessons and emotions associated with Jewish traditions “stick” in students’ minds.
That is why he can be found in a classroom strumming his banjo dressed as a panda — he wanted to make Rosh Hashanah La’Behemot, the new year for animals, meaningful. Slarskey began as the director of Jewish life at Milton in July.
He was ordained through Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies and has worked as a Jewish educator in San Francisco, Boston, St. Louis, and now the nation’s capital. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, the director of lifelong learning at Tifereth Israel Congregation, where they belong. They have a son who attends American University.
Tell me about your Jewish upbringing and background.
I wouldn’t say that being Jewish was a major way we organized our lives growing up. We certainly were aware of being Jewish and went to synagogue a couple times a year. When I reached second grade, my parents made sure that I was going to a Sunday supplemental school at our local synagogue. We lit Chanukah candles, we went [to services] for High Holidays, but there weren’t a lot of ways in which we organized our lives around being Jewish. It was something we talked about a little bit, and it was definitely an important identity marker in our family.
How did you get to where you are today? Have you always known you wanted to pursue a career in Jewish education?
Maybe not? I think when I hit high school, I started getting active in my synagogue youth movement, and I felt like the things I learned through the youth movement were more real, more empowering than a lot of the stuff I was doing in high school. Plus, socially, it just connected me with a lot of other people. I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts with 51 people in my high school graduating class, so I think the on-ramp to more significant investment in Jewish life and learning came through seeing Jewish learning [and] community as being something empowering that connects you with more people and gives you really solid, real-life skills. That’s where I started to learn to be a teacher.
You’ve done quite a bit of moving around throughout your career. What has this experience been like for you?
[My family and I] bounce around a little bit, but we tend to stay in place for a little while. We were in the last place for 10 years, and before that, we were there for eight years. Part of what’s cool about bouncing around a little bit is that I grew up in the Northeast. I grew up in Massachusetts and I went to college in Massachusetts, and I think up through that time, that was very much my perspective on what the world looked like and how people were and how people saw the world.
Going to rabbinical school in Los Angeles opened my eyes to different organizational structures within the Jewish community. Living in San Francisco after ordination gave me perspective and appreciation for some of the aspects of regional culture there, like a sense of entrepreneurialism, startup culture. So trying that out gave me a real appreciation for the importance of relationships and kindness, building social fabrics. The Northeast is where my family and friends were growing up, but it also tends to be a place I think really values academic and intellectual achievement. There are pretty distinctive regional local cultures. It was cool to get a sense of how that impacts Judaism or might influence the flavor of Judaism in practice.
What are your responsibilities as director of Jewish life at Milton?
I help make Jewish prayer meaningful; I help run holiday programming to organize meaningful and sticky Jewish holiday programming — like the kind of stuff that emotionally sticks. I teach sixth and seventh grade — I teach a class in early rabbinic literature, and for seventh grade, I teach a class on Israeli survival.
Why do you incorporate music into Jewish education?
I like music. There’s strong educational research that incorporating music and art helps make learning more durable. When information is connected with personal content, it tends to be sticky; it tends to have more hooks for people to remember things better. [Music] helps people have more positive associations with their learning.
What’s your favorite aspect of what you do?
I really like teaching; I really like working with faculty. I think that’s what’s so exciting about education, that even if you’ve gone through a similar process before, but with different people, you’re always building something new. You’re always helping people to construct new understandings. You’re always helping people to build new experiences. So I think the curiosity around how to build a new emotional experience, or how to build that process of inquiry that really deepens your connection with your tradition or with other people, those things are really exciting. Sometimes it’s an “aha” moment that goes with that, but oftentimes, it’s even just the beginning of a spark of curiosity of “What if we tried this?” or “What if we tried that?”
Outside of work, how do you spend your time?
Most recently, it’s just been moving in. I like biking, playing banjo, seeing live music, designing humorous or thought-provoking T-shirts, spending time with friends, reading [and] fishing sometimes.
