2023-24 Themes of the Year
Academy
Reaching Out
Reach Out. Reach In. Reach Beyond.
This year’s Theme of the Year, Reaching Out, will highlight our school community’s commitment to fostering connections and embracing both our immediate and broader community. Through acts grounded in arvut (responsibility for one another), we will encourage our students to learn about other cultures and communities and to actively engage and connect with the world around them, to become more globally-minded individuals who build relationships with others.
2022-23 Themes of the Year
Kavanah / Mindfulness
This school year, 2022-2023, we have chosen Kavanah/Mindfulness as our theme of the year. Kavanah is a term we hear often in halachic contexts, especially around tefilla. Mindfulness has been a buzz word of late, as the challenges of multitasking, social media, and the ubiquity of information comes at us while we walk, eat, sleep, drive, work, and play. We look forward to exploring as a school community the connection between kavanah and mindfulness, and the powerful synergy between an age-old Torah value and a relatively newly recognized ingredient to productivity, stability, fulfillment, and happiness.
High School
Middot
“Our theme this year at SAR High School is “Middot.” Through a variety of educational programs and classroom opportunities we will explore and engage in character development, the work of cultivating moral attributes and spiritual values. As we consider diverse approaches–from the philosophers’ “virtue ethics” to those of the mussar movement–we will focus on the ways that our impact on the world is shaped by our middot. Regarding thought, speech, and action we will help SAR students and faculty identify both those middot we aspire to foster and those we seek to eliminate. Our opening program confronted students with the question “who am I?” and asked students to take a personal inventory as the first step on our roadmap to effective character development. SAR High School’s bi-line is “It’s not just what you learn. It’s who you become.” The focus on Middot as our educational theme seeks to help all in our SAR community become the best version of themselves, both spiritually and interpersonally.