Attention is shaped by experiences that leave a mark.
Millions of people choose Apple products in a market filled with comparable, and often lower-cost, alternatives. The choice is rarely driven by technical specifications alone. Apple has trained consumers to associate its products with trust, simplicity, and a certain standard of experience. The device becomes part of how a person works, communicates, creates, and sees themselves.
Nike has built a different kind of emotional imprint. Its products are tied to ambition, discipline, and the belief that effort says something about who a person is. A pair of shoes becomes connected to the story someone wants to tell about their own potential.
These brands reflect a broader pattern in human behavior. People return to experiences that make them feel something about themselves. They remember what feels meaningful, and form attachments around experiences that become part of their identities.
Young people grow up surrounded by this kind of emotional design. Their attention is constantly shaped by platforms, products, and communities that compete for relevance. Jewish education operates in that same environment and must earn its place in that competition for attention.
If Jewish education is meant to shape identity over time, it has to understand what makes an experience “sticky.”
The brain gives priority to what feels meaningful
There is a scientific reason emotional experiences leave a strong imprint.
Decades of research in cognitive neuroscience, including the work of Prof. James McGaugh, have shown that emotionally arousing experiences are more likely to be consolidated into long-term memory. Emotional significance activates the amygdala, which in turn strengthens memory consolidation in the hippocampus.
More recent research out of Boston College continues to reinforce this understanding, showing that emotionally significant experiences are more likely to be encoded and later retrieved, with coordinated activity between the amygdala and hippocampus shaping how those memories are stored and prioritized.
For education, there is a very practical implication to this understanding. This is why people remember the field trip, the performance, or the teacher who made the material feel alive. Jewish education should be designed around this understanding.
Modern Jewish identity has been shaped by memory of adversity
Jewish identity today is being shaped in real time. In the period following the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, Jewish communities around the world have faced a sharp rise in antisemitism, public hostility, and social pressure. Many young Jews are encountering moments that force them to define their identity – on social media, on campus, and in public spaces.
These experiences are encoded and carried forward, shaping identity over time.
Research on emotional memory helps explain why these moments carry such weight. Negative experiences tend to create strong, focused memories tied to survival, while positive experiences are more likely to be integrated into identity and revisited over time.
Jewish education cannot control the external environment. It can shape the internal experience, which makes the work of building meaningful, positive Jewish memory more urgent.
Much of modern Jewish identity has been shaped by the memory of adversity. Those memories carry responsibility and weight. Jewish education must also build positive emotional memory, grounded in joy, pride, belonging, and connection.
Children should not only know what the Jewish people endured. They should feel what Jewish life gives them.
Sinai offers a model of immersive Jewish experience
At Mount Sinai, the Jewish people experienced national revelation. The experience was physical, all-encompassing, and completely immersive. The Torah describes a moment filled with sensory intensity: thunder and lightning, a thick cloud, and the sound of a shofar growing louder. It goes further, describing how the people “saw the sounds and the flames,” a phrase that conveys an experience that crossed the boundaries of the senses.
The scale and intensity of the moment created a lasting imprint, reinforced by the fact that it was experienced as a community. This may be the most poignant example from our tradition that establishes the power of experience in identity formation.
Jewish education must translate that kind of immersive, shared experience into environments that young people encounter every day, and those moments cannot remain occasional or reliant on any one individual. They have to be designed, repeated, and embedded in how students learn.
From individual moments to intentional systems
Anyone who has been through school can name the teachers who remain in their hearts and minds. They are the educators who created moments that carried meaning beyond the lesson. Many Jewish schools already have educators who do this exceptionally well. The opportunity is to make that level of engagement consistent.
When schools design intentionally for experience, they raise the baseline for every classroom. Impact should be embedded in structure rather than dependent on individual style.
This kind of design is not unique to education. Brands invest heavily in shaping experiences that leave a lasting impression, knowing that those moments influence what people remember and build long-term loyalty.
If Judaism is the identity we are helping to shape, Jewish education must be designed around meaningful experience from the outset.
What should students feel during a Jewish holiday? What role should they play? What memory should remain?
A lesson on a Jewish holiday might move beyond explanation into experience, incorporating music, food, and storytelling that engages multiple senses to create a shared moment.
The answers will vary across settings. A Sunday school, a day school, and a camp each operate with different strengths and constraints.
The work is to build repeatable frameworks that create meaningful experiences. Multi-sensory rituals, opportunities for participation, and moments that can live beyond the classroom and extend into the home.
The real test comes after graduation
The impact of Jewish education is measured in what students choose later.
Will they seek out the Jewish community when they are in college? Share Shabbat dinners with friends? Speak with confidence about Jewish identity in public spaces? Stay connected to the institutions that shaped them?
These outcomes grow from meaningful experiences encoded in memory.
Young people today are surrounded by experiences competing to shape what they value. Businesses have created their designs around this reality for decades. They invest in creating moments that leave an imprint, because they understand that emotionally meaningful experiences are more likely to be remembered.
The question now is whether Jewish education will be designed for it with the same level of intention. Will it create experiences that young people carry forward, or content that is left behind? What young people pay attention to, and what stays with them over time, ultimately shapes how they understand themselves and their place within the Jewish people.
Engagement is where this process begins. For it to endure, it has to deepen. The next phase of this work is about understanding who carries those experiences forward, and how.
The writer is the COO of the Yael Foundation, which nurtures and expands accessible, high-quality educational opportunities to Jewish children globally.