A Narrative of Love conversation hosted by Dr Scherto Gill
▶ Watch this conversation on YouTube
Rabbi David Geffen is the founder of the Loving Classroom — an initiative rooted in the conviction that love is not merely a worthy aspiration for education but its essential foundation. He opens by reflecting on his own formation: how the Jewish tradition’s emphasis on learning as a sacred act, and on the teacher-student relationship as one of mutual care and responsibility, shaped his understanding of what classrooms can and should be.
The Loving Classroom begins with a simple premise: that children learn best when they feel genuinely seen, valued and loved. This is not sentimentality but pedagogy — a recognition that the emotional and relational climate of a classroom is as determinative of learning outcomes as any curriculum. Rabbi Geffen draws on decades of experience to show how teachers who lead with love create the conditions for both intellectual and human flourishing.
The conversation explores what it means to love students across difference — across cultural, religious and socio-economic divides — and how this kind of expansive love is itself a spiritual practice. He reflects on the particular gift of the Jewish tradition’s concept of chesed — lovingkindness — as a daily discipline that can be taught, practised and embodied in institutional life.
His closing vision is of schools as communities of love: places where every child knows they belong, and where learning is inseparable from becoming more fully human.
This is one of eleven conversations in the A Narrative of Love series, hosted by Dr Scherto Gill in preparation for the 5th Spirit of Humanity Forum, June 2021. The series was sponsored by the Pureland Foundation and the Guerrand-Hermès Foundation for Peace (GHFP).