In Israel today, educators are grieving students. Yet we do not have the language to describe what that grief means. After every round of war, we count the fallen. We speak of families, of parents, of siblings—and rightly so.
Standing in the background, almost without words, are hundreds of teachers, mentors and educators. People who loved, guided and helped shape the lives that were lost. Are they bereaved?
In a documentary by Noam Damsky, Rabbi Yaakov Medan resists this term. The language of bereavement, he says, belongs to parents. When educators use the word, they risk taking something that does not belong to them.
There is moral clarity in this refusal. And yet, it leaves a gap, because educators do experience a profound sense of loss, one that remains unnamed and is therefore insufficiently understood.
I am a teacher who has lost students in this war: Ilay Graphinkel, Yuval Shoham, Nevo Fisher and Shahar Buzaglo. Their deaths have forced me to confront not just grief, but the meaning of education itself.
What, after all, is a teacher’s role in a society where students are also soldiers? What does it mean to educate toward a future that some of your students will not live to see? At its core, education rests on three commitments: to human beings, to knowledge and to a vision of the future.
First, there is a commitment to the student as a person. Teaching begins with attention, with care, with a willingness to enter into a meaningful relationship with someone in the midst of becoming. This is not parental love, but it is real and formative. It is what allows a teacher to see not only who a student is, but who they might become.
Second, there is a commitment to knowledge. Teaching is driven by the belief that ideas matter, that wisdom, culture and intellectual traditions should not remain private possessions; they are meant to be shared and transmitted. Each educator is a link in a chain, passing something forward.
Third, there is a commitment to the future. Education is geared to what does not yet exist. It is grounded in the belief that the world can be better, and that the next generation will help bring that future into being.
These three commitments: relationship, knowledge, and future, are what give education its meaning. War fractures each of them. When a teacher loses a student, the natural order is reversed, and the world is shaken.
The relationship is cut short. The act of teaching, once oriented toward growth and continuity, is interrupted. And the eye to the future, which gave meaning to the entire endeavor, is suddenly diminished.
This is why the loss of students is not only personal. It is structural. It touches the very foundations of what education is. In Israel, this reality is not theoretical. It is lived.
Teachers are asked, implicitly, to prepare young people for a future that includes the possibility of war, and at times, the reality of death. At the same time, they are asked to cultivate hope, moral responsibility and a vision of life worth living.
This is not a paradox that can be resolved. It is a tension that must be carried.
How do educators continue? There is no single answer. But acknowledging the nature of this loss is a necessary beginning.
First, we must recognize that the relationship between teacher and student matters in ways that extend beyond the classroom. It shapes identity, values and choices. When a student is lost, something real is lost for the educator as well.
Next, we must reaffirm the role of knowledge and learning, not as an escape from reality, but as a framework that gives it meaning. Education connects individuals to something larger than themselves: tradition, wisdom, a shared human story.
Finally, we must hold on to the future, even when it is wounded. The students we have lost were part of the future we believed in. Their absence changes that future. But it does not eliminate the responsibility to continue working toward it.
In a society shaped by conflict, education cannot remain untouched by loss.
But it mustn’t surrender to it. To teach, even now, is to insist, quietly but firmly, that the future still matters.
In loving memory of Ilay Graphinkel, Yuval Shoham, Nevo Fisher and Shahar Buzaglo.
