The Abraham Joshua Heschel School is an independent school named in memory of one of the great Jewish leaders, teachers, and activists of the 20th Century. Unaffiliated with any single movement or synagogue, The Heschel School sees as essentially the creating of a community with families from a wide range of Jewish backgrounds, practices and beliefs. The School is devoted to equal participation - boys and girls, men and women - in all aspects of the School's religious, intellectual and communal life. In our High School, to meet the needs of our diverse community, we offer prayer options. The Heschel School is dedicated to the values and principles that characterized Rabbi Heschel's life: integrity, intellectual exploration, traditional Jewish study, justice, righteousness, human dignity, and holiness. It regards the texts of the Jewish tradition and the history of the Jewish people as fundamental resources for developing ideas, beliefs, behaviors and values to shape and inspire the lives of individuals in our time. The School's approach to education is governed by profound respect for children. It nurtures their curiosity, cultivates their imagination, encourages creative expression, values their initiative and engenders critical thinking skills. In an academic setting that values open, engaged inquiry, the School's curriculum interweaves the best of both Jewish and general knowledge and culture throughout the day. Within the context of this integrated and interdisciplinary approach, the School honors the intellectual integrity of the core subjects. Our educational ideals are drawn from the strands of the Jewish, Western and world traditions to which we belong. They are reflected in our deep concern for the whole child and the balance in each child's academic, aesthetic, emotional, intellectual, physical and spiritual growth. In addition, the School seeks to create an environment that encourages the professional and personal growth of teachers and administrators. Among the specific goals of The Abraham Joshua Heschel School are the following: The Heschel School is dedicated to fostering a lifelong love of learning. It seeks to engineer the understanding that the discovery of personal meaning and the growth of individual identity can emerge from the rigors of study. The Heschel School seeks to create an ethical learning community that encompasses the children, staff, parents and all those who join in the work of the school. The school values both the uniqueness of each individual member and the relationships they form with one another. The Heschel School is dedicated to cultivating the spiritual lives of its students along with teaching them the skills to enable them to participate fully in contemporary Jewish life. The Heschel School is dedicated to building bridges between different sectors of the Jewish community, and between the Jewish community and other communities, as expressions of our religious imperative to unite human beings through justice, shared humanity and mutual respect. The Heschel School is dedicated to engaging our students in a relationship with the language, culture, land and people of the State of Israel. The Heschel School is dedicated to inspiring its graduates to become responsible adults and active, compassionate citizens. Finally, it is our goal that from our midst will come a generation that will embody the teachings of Rabbi Heschel: A central concern in Jewish thinking is to overcome the tendency to see the world in one dimension, from one perspective, to reduce history exclusively to God's actions or to man's action, either to grace or to man's initiative. The marvelous and the mundane, the sacred and the secular, are not mutually exclusive, nor are the natural and the supernatural, the temporal and the eternal, kept apart. The heart of the relationship of God and man is reciprocity, interdependence. The task is to humanize the sacred and to sanctify the secular.