Lessons in Division

‘Come in, it’s warm inside,” beckoned an ad for the Orthodox Jewish school Shalhevet, and that’s just what Alexander Maksik did.

It was a shock at first. There he was, a young sometime actor, a secular Jew uninterested in religion, newly installed as a middle school English teacher. In the hallways, girls and women walked by in long skirts, boys and men with yarmulkes on their heads. At 7:30 each morning, students gathered to daven. In the afternoon came more prayer, everyone standing, bending at the waist. Shalhevet had a kosher kitchen and no Christmas break, not even on Christmas Day. Maksik had never seen such loyalty to Jewish culture.

He loved this school’s pride. Even more, he loved its wide-open spirit.

Students sprawled on beat-up sofas in the central foyer, shouting and giggling and whispering. Students constantly challenged teachers and one another. Students sat on a fairness committee that judged everyone. Students had weekly town halls where they spoke their minds.

Oh, those town halls.

“This is a community,” argued a small, sallow boy, wrestling one day to keep the roving microphone after his allotted time had elapsed. “We’re not supposed to be making distinctions between student and faculty. There’s supposed to be equality.”

“I want to empower all the girls,” an English teacher declared later that hour. “You don’t have to let males tell us about our dress code. You can respectfully object.”

Shalhevet was modern Orthodox, unusually modern. Boys and girls sat together in class. Students took risks, engaged the outer world. The school, a rambling one-story former hospital in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles, called itself a “democracy,” a “just community.” Shalhevet encouraged students to see complexity, to consider moral dilemmas, to recognize multiple perspectives.

In his early days there, Maksik embraced this approach. It fit well with his own ideas. Shalhevet no longer shocked him. Despite the yarmulkes and prayer schedule, he believed these students were just regular kids.

Then came what he’d later call “the first sign of a problem.”

Visitors from the Israeli Consulate arrived on campus one morning in October 2000 to talk at a town hall. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had just paid his controversial visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Maksik raised his hand. He asked what he thought was an obvious question: Had Sharon been intentionally provocative?

The room fell silent, as if an electrical plug had been pulled. Some of the rabbis turned and glared at the new young teacher.

Maksik saw in their eyes that he had missed something about this school.

*

Free-Spirited Founder

As much as anything, Shalhevet represents its founder Jerry Friedman’s chance to fix the past -- his own past. As a boy, he was considered too active, too much a free spirit -- a bonditt -- at the Jewish day school he attended on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He couldn’t sit still. Who could? The school day was so long. You couldn’t breathe. Once, while they were singing a song in first grade -- night is here, night is here -- Jerry switched off the light. That’s when he learned the Hebrew expression “tayn li es hayad” -- “give me the hand.” The teacher whacked it with a ruler.

He finally went at one abusive rabbi with his fists, which got him suspended from school. Still, raised Orthodox, he wanted a religious life. He found it at a Jewish summer day camp. There he could run around, make noise. Once he’d married, settled in Montreal and started earning big money in real estate development, he wanted to buy a camp, for he saw mistakes that needed fixing. That’s also what he saw when he visited his daughter Karen’s Jewish day school. One night he took his wife Jean’s place at a parents association meeting. How did it go? she asked when he returned. “I don’t know,” he replied, “but I got elected president.”

After tiring of Montreal’s French-English cultural clash, Friedman moved to Los Angeles in 1971 and began reading heavily in the field of education. So did his daughter. She ended up enrolling at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. When he arrived there to attend her graduation from the master’s program, Karen kept talking about “Larry,” kept saying how much her father would like “Larry.” Friedman thought she was talking about a classmate. No, she explained: “Larry” was professor Lawrence Kohlberg, the noted social psychologist.

“You call him Larry?” Friedman asked.

At one gathering that weekend, he heard Harvard’s president urge people from other fields to consider becoming educators. He raised that notion with his wife. She said, “You’re not serious.”

He was. He applied to the Graduate School of Education and was accepted. “Dad, oh, no! You can’t do this,” his daughter protested. She was still a doctoral student there, after all. She had boyfriends.

Friedman didn’t care. He loved studying education at Harvard under Larry Kohlberg. Kohlberg’s father was Jewish; he considered himself Jewish; he’d helped the Jewish defense force Hagenah run Holocaust refugees past the British blockade to Palestine before the founding of Israel. Kohlberg aimed to develop the moral reasoning of students by asking them to wrestle with hard choices. He wanted young people to feel the sense of conflict -- of cognitive dissonance -- that results from facing contradictory notions.

Friedman thought that was a wonderful idea. He told Kohlberg, “I’m going to put your philosophy in a school.”

It would be a school, Friedman imagined, where students and faculty could question everything. Where you didn’t just follow rules, you reasoned for yourself. Yet it would also be an Orthodox Jewish school, and a Zionist school. Which meant there would be rabbis and the written law of the Talmud to mind, and unflagging support for Israel.

No matter if that guaranteed constant tension. Tension wasn’t bad; tension made people think in higher stages of morality.

“Can I put you into an Orthodox school?” Friedman asked Kohlberg.

Why not? his professor replied.

*

Learning Curve

Shalhevet, which means a self-kindling flame, opened its high school 11 years ago and added a middle school in the fall of 2000; it now has a total enrollment of 370. Right from the start, the struggle to fuse a Kohlbergian ethos with Orthodox Judaism made for constant cacophony. The students and faculty challenged each other all the time, usually with gusto. Democracy, parking lot privileges, off-campus conduct, teachers’ manners -- everything was ripe for debate.

Only when Israel came up did acrimony replace gusto. The school’s customary appreciation for nuances fell away, leaving a community riven by the clash of absolutes. Among a deeply divided Shalhevet faculty, the Judaic studies teachers from Israel were the most passionate. Many were rabbis or their wives. Some of the men had served as Israeli army tank commanders -- a great equalizer -- and now wore sport clothes, not the black hats of the more ritually religious Orthodox. They objected to the replay of a “60 Minutes” broadcast about the clash between Israel’s secular and religious Jews. They objected to a documentary about the roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They objected to a fictional film depicting an Israeli religious fanatic.

One of their most volatile responses came three years ago, at the showing of an ABC “Nightline” tape about Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. This town hall event had been the idea of the school’s resident Kohlberg expert, Sam Gomberg, then new to Shalhevet. As a young teacher, he’d brought black activists into his suburban public high school classroom. Now, at Shalhevet, he wanted kids to see the Palestinian perspective, to talk about value conflicts. Did Sharon make the right choice? Who has the right to the land?

The screening aroused a furor. “My learning curve,” Gomberg later called it. By most accounts, there was plenty of shouting. Kohlbergian ambiguity just didn’t play well among those who’d served in the Israeli army and now had children facing combat. My son is there right now, they called out. How dare you show this one-sided tape? This is a big mistake.

Jill Beerman, head of the history department, known as the school’s “resident Goddess of Democracy,” tried to counter: “This guy Sharon was manipulating the peace process. He had to know he was provoking. This was not an innocent stroll.”

That brought a rabbi’s wife to her feet: “How could you say such a thing about him?” Then one of the former tank commanders jumped up: “You think I’m a murderer? Is that what you think?”

All this didn’t surprise Jerry Friedman. He’d recruited his Judaic studies staff from Israel, so he knew some wives “were going to wail,” as he put it. He didn’t think that a reason not to hire them -- or not to present controversial programs. Memories of the school’s “Nightline” debate would make him grin and say, “Oh, I loved it.”

*

Drawn to Teaching

At 29, Xander Maksik had the kind of looks and manner that inspired his Shalhevet colleagues to describe him as “extremely charismatic.” He’d grown up among educators -- his parents ran a private school in Idaho -- but he came to teaching indirectly. First he tried acting. That took him to the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, where he found himself mentoring a young boy from a housing project. Each morning, they rehearsed a small theater piece; at the end of the week, they performed it together before an audience. Maksik loved his student and felt changed by him.

Later, living in Los Angeles and working for a film production company, he volunteered to teach creative writing at a residential center for gang girls. He read them poems and talked about why people write. The girls responded, he could see that. Outwardly, they crossed their arms, they looked him up and down, but they were paying attention.

He signed up with a placement agency for private schools. The general studies director at Shalhevet’s new middle school called. Did he want a job?

The question gave him pause. An Orthodox Jewish school? He had no religious identity himself, though he was Jewish. He’d never belonged to a temple. He didn’t know much about Israel. He knew only that Shalhevet, while Orthodox, had a progressive reputation.

Yes, Maksik said. He wanted a job.

He found it terrifying at the start. He was supposed to teach English and drama to seventh-graders, but he didn’t know what he was doing. He learned as he taught. He began to study more about Israel. He began to ask questions.

He’d grown up being encouraged by his parents to read constantly and make his own decisions. The images of books on shelves colored his childhood memories. He came to think of literature as sacred. He came to love novels for how they could capture a complex and intricate world.

Teaching his seventh-grade English class one day, Maksik wrote on the blackboard: “Nothing human disgusts me except unkindness.” He knew this quote, from Tennessee Williams’ “Night of the Iguana,” might cause a stir, for its implicit subject was homosexuality. No matter -- he liked to push buttons. He didn’t think you could say “this is right, this is wrong,” and then claim you were educating kids.

A girl in class raised her hand. “I don’t believe that,” she said. “Gays are disgusting.”

Why so? Maksik asked.

“It’s in the Torah.”

When they studied “To Kill a Mockingbird,” all the students agreed that the treatment of the black character Tom Robinson was racist and cruel. On the spot, Maksik asked: What would they think if Tom Robinson were a Palestinian?

“I would spit on him,” one boy replied.

This shocked Maksik. He began to see in kids this young an expression, a look in the eyes, of absolute certainty. He feared that these kids were learning to hate other people. They were the next generation, the future. So where would it end? Was there a way out?

To a handful of his fellow teachers, Maksik began to urge the recognition of other perspectives. He did the same with his students. He ran his classes as if they were college courses. He put a couch in his room, and books, and a boom box. He had the kids sit around a big seminar table. Once, he jumped up on the table to pound home a point. He got students to talk, asked for their opinions, urged them to listen to each other. He challenged them, always playing devil’s advocate. See all the sides, he told them. Never be sure of yourself, never be certain.

A handful resisted, those with the strongest, most fixed opinions. They’d go at it with Maksik, back and forth. Some thought him the best teacher they’d ever had. They loved how he got them involved in writing, how he always reached out, how he knew what they felt. He pushed you to your limits, they’d say. He made you want to learn.

Some of their parents agreed. They marveled as their children came home interested, for the first time, in reading and writing and debating issues. Maksik “lit my son’s fire,” one reported. “My son just took off with Maksik.”

Not all the parents appreciated Xander Maksik, though. Certain ones objected to things he taught to “such impressionable youngsters.” A few called the school when Maksik wanted to teach “Romeo and Juliet.” They worried about its language, the love relationship, the suicide. Rabbi Yehoshua Gabbai, the middle school’s principal of Judaic studies, decided Maksik shouldn’t teach Shakespeare’s play to seventh-graders.

That was Gabbai’s first brush with this young teacher. From it, the rabbi concluded that he needed to be more involved with the books Maksik used. He suggested to Maksik that they sit down over the summer and go over an appropriate list. It did not seem to him that Xander liked the idea.

In truth, Gabbai found Maksik exasperating. The rabbi believed Xander had his own agenda. Xander made too much of an impression on the kids. He didn’t have the mature eyes of a teacher. He knew everything. He didn’t think anyone knew better.

*

Cognitive Dissonance

Late one Friday morning in May 2001, Xander Maksik herded his English class into a special Shalhevet assembly. A group of visiting actors was preparing to perform. A mixed group of actors: Arabs and Israelis working together.

If we could only get to know each other on a one-to-one basis -- that, in essence, was the guiding notion for this improvisational troupe called Viewpoint. We’ll discover we have much in common. If we could only listen to each other, we could resolve the Middle East crisis.

Among the actors were a Jordanian, an Israeli Muslim, an Israeli American woman and an Israeli Christian. All had experience in stage and television. Bringing them to Shalhevet had been the idea of Jerry Friedman and his wife, Jean, who chaired the Los Angeles-Tel Aviv Partnership, a cultural exchange program. They’d seen the actors in Israel and liked them. The actors had asked if they could perform at Shalhevet.

Why not? Friedman had reasoned.

We’ll tell you why not, his Judaic studies staff had responded: Now, while Israelis are being killed by Palestinian terrorist acts, is not the time to discuss what we can do for peace. Now is not the time to invite representatives of the murderers to legitimize their actions. Now is the time to root out those who seek our annihilation and stop these atrocities. Would Shalhevet invite a white supremacist to explain why Martin Luther King Day should not be observed? Would a Nazi sympathizer be given the Shalhevet microphone to tell his side of the Holocaust?

What fires it could start, one rabbi warned. This type of thing goes not just to the head but the heart. For fathers and mothers, kids are not so shaded an issue. You should know your audience. You need to be not only right, but smart. “Don’t do it,” the rabbi pleaded. “It will be a kind of bomb, a big bomb.”

Friedman didn’t listen. If this rabbi had said the actors weren’t halakha, weren’t acceptable under Jewish law, he’d have heeded him. But the rabbi had offered political reasons. Politics Friedman could figure for himself.

Although Friedman was religious and aimed to develop caring, involved citizens, he was hardly an ascetic. He ran his school more in the style of a mogul than an educator. Only a few sheets of paper marred his ebony-and-burl desk. On his fingers, two large 14-karat gold rings flashed. One bore a Harvard seal, the other a commemoration of the Bar Kochba rebellion, the Jews’ futile campaign against the Romans for their homeland and Holy Temple. The Bar Kochba ring, Friedman wanted it known, was maybe more than 14 karats -- probably 18 karats.

Let Shalhevet’s students have moral dilemmas, he decided. Let them have cognitive dissonance.

Performing before these students now, in one improvised scene, the actors troupe introduced a pair of characters and asked the audience to suggest settings for them. “A bathroom,” called out a fifth-grader. So the two male actors, a Jew and a Muslim, pretended they were urinating. They looked at each other. Aha, one said, so you too are circumcised. We’re both circumcised.

In another scene, two neighbors, a Palestinian male and an Israeli female, met over dinner at a restaurant. Their talk filled with the promise of a future romance.

In a third scene, sleeping Israeli soldiers awoke and began making plans to kill Palestinians.

Cognitive dissonance, indeed. Sexual references, intermarriage and calumny against the Israeli army -- all played out in Shalhevet’s Beit Midrash, the hall where the school prayed daily. The rabbis rose to object. This is not our experience in the army, they declared. This is offensive.

Among those objecting was a man who would later become the school’s rosh yeshiva -- chief rabbi. In Ofer Sabo’s mind this morning were memories of those night missions when his Israeli army unit would go to pick up someone “who was not OK.” The kids in the Palestinian homes would start to cry when Sabo knocked on the door. What could he do? If he didn’t knock on that door at 4 a.m., the Israelis would get a bomb on their bus in the morning. It wasn’t easy, seeing a little child crying, but who said life was easy? You just tried not to be rough, not to make them suffer.

To the actors, Sabo said: “I am wondering. Could you do the same play in an Arab school? Could you do this in Ramallah?”

They could not, the actors replied. Not now, because of the siege.

Sabo’s wife, Anat, a Hebrew Bible teacher, also spoke out, which wasn’t unusual, for she had a strong will and firm voice. None of this was theory for her, she wanted it known; she’d witnessed wars almost from the day she first opened her eyes in Israel 40 years earlier. Her mother and grandmother were born there too; her great-grandmother came at age 7, and with her husband helped build Tel Aviv, founded in 1909. The Sabos had three children still living in Israel. Their oldest son, 21, was back studying in yeshiva after army service that put him in a tank unit outside Yasser Arafat’s compound. Their second son, 19, was an army paratrooper.

Anat Sabo thought of her children in Israel all the time. How could she not? They were there. This actors troupe disgusted her. We can live together, we’re all the same, we should be connected. That was against what she tried to teach her students. We are Jewish, she told them; we stay Jewish. If that wasn’t being objective, so what. She didn’t need to be objective. She was an Israeli; they were Palestinians.

“My son the soldier,” she cried out. “My son, my son.”

It was no use. The Shalhevet students didn’t seem to understand. Many of them appeared to regard this actors troupe as entertaining and valuable. They kept asking the actors questions about the staging. They kept asking, how do you do the play, how do you act?

Some were Xander Maksik’s students. He didn’t think the performance had harmed them. In fact, later he could recall little of the day, even though the furor over it would continue for weeks, filling the pages of the student newspaper. The assembly just wasn’t momentous to him. As he led his students back to class, he mainly felt impressed that Shalhevet would invite Arab actors to the school.

*

Provocative Book

In November 2001, Xander Maksik traveled to Baltimore to attend a National Conference of Teachers of English convention. There he came across a novel for young adults titled “Habibi,” written by a noted Palestinian American poet, Naomi Shihab Nye.

“Habibi” tells the story of a 14-year-old Arab American girl, Liyana, whose father decides to move the family from St. Louis to Jerusalem, where he had grown up. The novel chronicles Liyana’s introduction to a strange new Arab culture, and includes glimpses of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through her eyes. At times, these glimpses involve rough behavior by Israeli soldiers, and the humiliation of Palestinians. Yet the story is as much about an adolescent girl’s interest in romance and a first kiss. Liyana meets a Jewish boy, Omer, and they struggle to sustain their forbidden friendship. At its heart, “Habibi” is a Romeo and Juliet story, set on the West Bank. Part of its dedication is to “all the Arabs and Jews who would rather be cousins than enemies.”

“Habibi” had garnered a host of awards -- the American Library Assn.’s Best Book for Young Adults, ALA Notable Children’s Book, New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age -- and the book reviewers had been appreciative: “Liyana’s romance with an Israeli boy develops warmly, and readers are left with hope for change and peace as Liyana makes the city her very own.” ... “Inevitably, Arab-Israeli tensions enter into the story, but the message isn’t preachy and remains almost secondary to the story of Liyana’s search for her identity.”

All the same, Xander Maksik knew the book would be provocative at Shalhevet. So he sought guidance from the middle school’s general studies director, Brenda Hollon. After skimming “Habibi,” she judged it a “wonderful” book about the conflict, a wonderful way to provide other perspectives.

Maksik turned once more through its pages. There was Liyana’s mother saying, “People in families love each other, or want to love each other, but they fight anyway.” And there was Liyana with her father. “Do you think the Arabs and Jews secretly love one another?” Liyana asked. “I think,” Poppy said, “they are bonded for life. Whether they like it or not. Like that kind of glue that won’t let go.”

Yes, Maksik decided. “Habibi” would be an interesting book to explore at Shalhevet.

*

Calls From Parents

Rabbi Gabbai learned from a parent that he once again had problems with a book Xander Maksik was teaching. “Have you seen what Xander’s doing?” the mother asked him. “Have you seen?”

Gabbai, born in Israel in 1958 to Orthodox Zionist parents who emigrated from Morocco, likes to say that he is among those who serve as a “bridge” between secular and religious Jews. For four years, he alternated between yeshiva and the army. He observes halakha but also is involved in the world. He usually wears business suits, not rabbinical garb. His dark eyes flash with warmth or fire, depending on circumstances. In the 1982 Lebanon war, he served as a tank gunner and commander.

His was the first unit to go in. He saw combat, saw people die -- seven in 32 tanks, by his recollection, four in his unit. He came to believe that always the best died. One in particular, Shlomo Oman, had been their brightest thinker. When others proposed schemes to get more break time, Shlomo would say no, that’s not right, that’s not moral. He would challenge them constantly, but he meant it, so they loved him. Then he died. His tank took a direct hit, a shell from a Syrian unit. Gabbai got to know Oman’s parents, for they came to Lebanon wanting to hear every detail. Gabbai was 23 then. He had never stopped thinking about Oman.

After years at a progressive Israeli public school in Yavne, Gabbai arrived at Shalhevet just as it launched its middle school. The Kohlbergian ethos of Shalhevet reminded him of his school in Israel. You fit here, they told him. He believed that.

Gabbai’s phone rang again. Another parent of a student from Maksik’s class. “This teacher is upsetting my child,” she said. “This teacher has an agenda.”

*

Points of View

By most accounts, Xander Maksik’s seventh-graders mainly liked the romance in “Habibi.” They could identify with the girl who wanted her first kiss, and they understood this was a work of fiction. A few students, though, objected to the portrayal of Israeli soldiers as rough bullies. They raised their hands to say, no way it’s like that. They’d been to Israel and didn’t believe the army would ever be so abusive to Palestinians.

OK, let’s discuss that, Maksik responded. How do you know? How do you know there’s no way this could ever happen? What if an Israeli soldier lost his whole family to a suicide bomber? Could he be so angry then that it could happen?

No, one boy replied, arms folded across his chest. No way. Impossible. Israeli soldiers would never behave that way.

There it was again -- self-righteous certainty in a child whose voice had not yet changed. Maksik challenged him, challenged them all. It’s dangerous to say anything is impossible, he instructed. Especially when it involves people’s behavior during war.

They talked about differences in points of view. They talked about whether one side could ever be absolutely right and another absolutely wrong. The students argued among themselves while Maksik moderated. It was a great class, he thought. He had a couple of kids standing in their chairs, asking why a person would write a book such as “Habibi.” How often did you get kids up in their chairs? What a marvelous teaching opportunity.

Not everyone agreed. One particularly adamant boy didn’t appreciate the extra attention he drew from Maksik when he resisted the teacher. He found it upsetting.

Write from the Palestinian point of view, Maksik would say.

I don’t want to, this boy would respond. I believe Israel is right and Palestine is wrong. I don’t have to go stand in the other’s shoes.

Don’t be narrow and close-minded, Maksik urged. It’s important to see other points of view.

“It became a power struggle,” the boy’s mother would later complain, recalling the incident. “Xander became invested in opening my son’s mind.”

This prospect disturbed her. She didn’t like how Maksik challenged authority. He was a “gadfly,” she believed, a “provocateur” who gleefully subverted the curriculum. This wasn’t what she wanted for her son. One reason she sent her child to Shalhevet was for protection -- to buffer him for a while from the intensity of the world. Maksik didn’t understand that. It was all just theory for him. Not for her. She had a sister-in-law living in Israel. This relative, from her backyard, could see the Green Line that marked the 1967 borders. She often heard gunshots and mortar fire. Her Arab gardener once told her, “Your house is going to be mine.”

The boy’s mother had only skimmed “Habibi,” but from the pages she’d seen, the book disgusted her. The disparaging remarks about Israel, the romantic relationship between a Jewish boy and Palestinian girl, the perspective of a Palestinian sympathizer -- what was this? “I haven’t read it all,” she told Rabbi Gabbai, “but this ‘Habibi’ book seems inappropriate.”

She knew she was right on this issue. She knew.

*

Soldiers’ Ugly Side

Rabbi Gabbai sat at home over a weekend, reading “Habibi.”

Poppy translated what Aunt Amal said, about how scary it had been for them to pass the Israeli checkpoint when they entered Jerusalem. Her face looked alarmed.... The Israeli soldier shouted at them and they got scared. He had a gun. He threw Uncle Daoud’s pass on the ground because it was slightly bent and made him get out of the car to pick it up....

He turned pages.

Poppy said Israeli soldiers had appeared at Sitti’s house and demanded to see her grandson Mahmud.... Poppy said the soldiers pushed past her into the house and searched it, dumping out drawers, ripping comforters from the cupboards.... They broke the little blue plate she loved.... Then they went into Sitti’s bathroom and smashed the bathtub with hard metal clubs.... They smashed the sink so it cracked into big pieces.... Then the soldiers smashed the toilet ....

Gabbai didn’t read all of “Habibi” either. By halfway through, he felt he got the point. He didn’t like what he was seeing. That it showed the ugly side of Israeli soldiers particularly offended him. Gabbai recalled his army days differently.

One time, his tank unit had been pinned down in Lebanon, being shelled for six hours. Finally, they spotted a Syrian on a hill, directing artillery in on them. They captured him, and right away the shelling stopped. Out of some 300 terribly upset Israeli soldiers, one started kicking the Syrian. Gabbai remembered how he and others pulled the soldier away. They respected the Geneva Convention; they were moral people. Yes, Israel had some ugly soldiers. But one out of 300? It wasn’t fair to base a whole story on that man.

Gabbai called Maksik into his office. On his desk sat a copy of “Habibi” with pages marked up. The rabbi was irate. I have a problem with this book, he said. I’ve heard from parents.

Gabbai and Maksik met several times in the following days. Various students recall overhearing one particularly loud hallway exchange between them. Maksik recalls a “furious” Gabbai insisting that he absolutely could not teach “Habibi.” Gabbai recalls trying to “work on Xander’s heart,” trying to explain that it wasn’t Maksik’s job to show the Palestinian side. By both their accounts, they argued heatedly.

Gabbai asked, “Why would you want to teach this?”

“The only articles on the school bulletin board are about Palestinian suicide bombers,” Maksik said. “All the news is about the horrors to Israel. There’s never discussion of any other side.”

Gabbai bristled. He told Maksik it wasn’t their mission to “show Israeli soldiers ugly.”

Maksik bristled back. Was Gabbai telling him he couldn’t teach this book?

Yes, he was. Maksik couldn’t teach “Habibi.” In fact, he couldn’t teach Middle East history. He couldn’t teach Middle East current events.

*

A Search for Balance

In the hours after Rabbi Gabbai handed down his edict, Xander Maksik spoke openly, telling both his seventh- and eighth-grade English classes what had happened. Because he had the impression he was about to be fired, he also said: “I might not be coming back on Monday. This might be my last week at Shalhevet.”

Some students shouted out their dismay. What are you talking about? How unfair. How could they do this? Soon, one student was circulating a petition in support of Maksik. Another student taped a note on an administrator’s door denouncing the “joke of moral education.” A third student went home so upset that his mother sat down and banged out a two-page letter to Gabbai declaring Maksik “a tremendous asset to Shalhevet.”

Others reacted differently. Some teachers on the Judaic staff averted their eyes when Maksik passed in the hallway. A parent told him she wouldn’t mind if all Arabs disappeared. The older brother of one boy in Maksik’s class sent an angry e-mail message: I hear you are a great teacher and I thank you for that.... But the delusional lies you say are in my brother’s mind ... He yells and talks down to his parents.... What are you doing to my brother that is making him accuse me of being stupid and close-minded? DO NOT force your opinions upon young kids....

When reports of all this finally reached Jerry Friedman, he lifted his eyes to the ceiling. Here he had what he’d always wanted: a school where you could make noise, a school that harbored all manner of viewpoints. This Xander Maksik, though. Friedman didn’t know him well; they had only a passing relationship. Friedman believed the young man was making himself out to be a white knight. To take a Zionist school and turn it 180 degrees.... Maybe in the high school, but seventh-graders weren’t prepared to handle this. There had to be balance. There had to be degrees.

How to achieve that without censorship? Friedman searched the ceiling without finding an answer. Once again, he faced a moral dilemma. It sometimes seemed that was all he ever faced.

“Let’s talk to Xander,” he told his staff. “Let’s go back and start from the beginning.”

*

Glaring Irony

The irony was impossible for them to ignore: There sat Jerry Friedman and his resident Kohlberg expert, Sam Gomberg, preparing to judge Xander Maksik. At another time, another place, both would have been Maksik’s allies.

After all, Friedman himself, just months before, had invited the Viewpoint actors to perform. Gomberg had screened the “Nightline” show on Ariel Sharon at the Temple Mount. Both had been assailed, though -- then, and at other moments. So over time, they had learned. Over time, they had adjusted.

Friedman, who once thought he’d change the world, at 73 no longer knew if he could do all he wanted. I’ve tried to stay where I started, he told those around him, but I’m human. When you have something so emotional, you’ve got to be aware. You have to choose your battles. If a person’s relative has been killed, it’s hard to tell him he’s got to hear the other side. How would I feel if I had relatives being blown up?

There was no avoiding it: To some at Shalhevet, the Palestinians were equivalent to the Nazis. That became clear one day when an otherwise gentle rabbi said, “I hope they kill all the Palestinians.” To Sam Gomberg, the analogy was Germany, circa 1938.

“You’re being insensitive,” he told Maksik now as they sat in Friedman’s office. “Would you have students read ‘Mein Kampf’ at this school?”

Friedman directed the meeting from behind his desk, tilting his high-backed executive chair, inquiring but offering little comment. Maksik sat before him, Gomberg off to the side, Rabbi Gabbai at Friedman’s right. All three would later recall the encounter.

Maksik stiffened at Gomberg’s question. Yes, he’d assign Hitler’s manifesto at this school. “There would be no better place to teach it.”

“Well, then,” Gomberg said. “Then I really have nothing to say.”

Still, on and on they talked, trying to find resolution. Once more, Gabbai told the story about the Syrian he had protected during a battle in Lebanon. I pulled that soldier away.... We are a moral people. Then he said: The situation is so sensitive now. The intifada, all the violence.

You’re censoring me, Maksik insisted.

No, no, Gabbai argued. This is temporary. Until things cool off.

Maksik remained unmoved. He understood this was all a hot button for them, that they saw “Habibi” as an assault. He got that. But he didn’t give much credence to the idea that teaching this book was a threat.

He said: Shouldn’t people who lost family members want to live in an environment where they aren’t shot at? Their losses don’t make me want to teach the book less. They make me want to teach it more. I know that none of my family has been killed by suicide bombs. But as long as I’m a teacher, I’m going to question my students’ blind certainty.

As he spoke, Maksik believed he heard noises of disapproval coming from Rabbi Gabbai. Maksik stopped, turned. It seemed to him that the rabbi’s eyes were filled with condescending dismissal. Maksik said, I won’t sit in this room and continue this discussion while you’re sneering.

Gabbai tried to defuse matters. OK, come on, he said. We can talk. Let’s settle down.

Maksik resumed, but it did not appear to him that he was moving these people anymore than they had moved him. He, no less than Jerry Friedman, saw now how hard it was to fix the world. This is futile, he concluded.

All the same, Friedman wanted compromise. That was his bent, since he so often got bashed from both sides. Some thought Shalhevet too Orthodox, others not Orthodox enough. Some wanted to clone Friedman, others found him maddening. Some resented him for driving a Jaguar XKR convertible, others for allowing coed classrooms at an Orthodox school. Always he had people so angry. At his home in Beverly Hills, he often sat alone before his backyard aviary or saltwater aquarium, seeking escape with his wrasses and lionfish, his doves and canaries. It was easy to be a purist, but he needed tuitions, he needed to deal with banks.

Friedman leaned forward in his chair. He proposed that they let Xander go back to teaching history and current events. He proposed that they also let Xander finish teaching “Habibi.” But Xander could have only five days for that, not the planned month. And it had to be under the supervision of a rabbi who would provide a “balancing” perspective.

Maksik embraced this solution. It never happened, though; a rabbi never showed up in his classroom. Instead, Gabbai and a second teacher provided his students the “balancing” viewpoint in another class, without Xander. Weeks later, Maksik received a letter saying his contract at Shalhevet would not be renewed for the next year.

*

Life Goes On

In June 2002, his final month at Shalhevet, it seemed to some of Xander Maksik’s students that he no longer encouraged classroom debates, no longer liked to debate at all. His sense of hurt and isolation was so palpable that another teacher, one who’d opposed his teaching of “Habibi,” finally reached out, inviting him to her home.

Tzippi Schechet, whose mother is Israeli, believed Xander had found himself transported onto a bizarre planet he simply didn’t understand. So she took time to show, to explain, to share books about Jewish ties to the land. She found him “incredibly kind-hearted” and “incredibly receptive to learning.” If she changed him, though, she didn’t see it.

Instead, Maksik wrote an article for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, titled “The Curse of Certainty,” that asked how the teaching of “Habibi” was “contrary to the mission of a school committed to the idea of moral education.” Sam Gomberg, to his later regret, responded with a public letter that lamented Maksik’s “causey rants” and the “many children” left “hurt and visibly shaken.” Maksik wrote again, this time privately to Gomberg, denouncing the educator’s “sanctimonious” and “condescending” attitude. Parents and assorted readers also weighed in, some suggesting Maksik’s article be renamed “The Curse of Arrogance,” others proposing that Maksik “be commended for his courage.”

The clash of absolutes kept escalating. Jerry Friedman found himself witnessing once again just how hard it was to insist on nuance among people who believe their very survival is at stake. Regret tugged at him, too. He’d “bounced” Xander, he wanted it known, mainly to honor his middle school principal’s judgment. He may have been wrong, how he handled this. He wasn’t perfect. You just weren’t going to find perfect. You learned from your mistakes.

Such doubts did not visit Xander Maksik. He soon landed a new job, teaching humanities at the American School in Paris. With distance, he found himself feeling less angry and passionate, but he experienced no epiphany, no drastic change of heart. He regretted only the loss of his Shalhevet students. He missed their unique spirit, their interest in learning for the sake of learning. They were the ones, he feared, who suffered from the “Habibi” dispute.

If so, they didn’t show it. In fact, of all those involved, only the students of Shalhevet -- who don’t doubt their survival for a moment -- appeared to emerge unscathed. In conversations, they made it clear that they felt comfortable with conflict and ambiguity, that they thrived on their school’s fractious chaos. It’s “so cool,” they enthused, “so fun and interesting.” One boy from Maksik’s class said, “What’s neat is, this never would have been taught or debated at another Orthodox Jewish school.” Another said, “My mind doesn’t remember much about the ‘Habibi’ thing because it wasn’t such a big deal.”

By then, they’d turned to other matters. The Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon had perished in the Columbia shuttle disaster. Kirk Douglas had visited the school. A team of Shalhevet students had taken first place at Yeshiva University’s model United Nations debating tournament. Other students had been caught bringing marijuana brownies to a weekend getaway. There’d been more disputes about parking lot privileges, more calls for free speech protections.

There’d also been a particularly bitter dress code blowup -- six girls disciplined by male administrators -- that left everyone walking the hallways with their heads down, silent and shaken. At the next town hall, they all passed the microphone around, seeking reconciliation.

Our dress code has never been enforced before, one boy argued.

Is it OK to violate a rule if it’s not enforced? asked another.

I apologize for my comments last week, a teacher offered.

In a just community, there’s no finger-pointing, a second teacher reminded.

Then a student rose to the microphone with a different matter on her mind. “There was a bomb in Israel this morning,” she began, reading from a news report. On a commuter bus carrying children to school. Eleven killed, more than 40 injured. Children’s notebooks and backpacks scattered about; hysterical parents rushing to the scene; burnt shoes and blackened flesh.

An abrupt silence fell at the Shalhevet town hall. Unbidden, all rose as one. Together, in Hebrew, they chanted a passage from Psalms designed to raise man’s spirits. “Let Israel hope for Hashem [God],” came their soft voices. “For with Hashem is kindness, and with him is abundant redemption. And he shall redeem Israel from all its iniquities.”

After a pause, hands reached again for the microphone. The debate over the dress code reignited. In the back of the hall, Jerry Friedman sat beaming. When his turn came, he said, “I’m just wondering why we as administrators and teachers have to keep enforcing the rules. Why should the staff have to be the bad guys? That can happen at any normal school.”