By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
Eighteen-year-old high school student Tair Bitton of Beersheva, Israel claims he felt reborn upon finishing an after-school math class offered through a project known as the Michael Program. The program’s Israeli creators, Menny Barzilai and Yuval Aloni, believe “that every person can achieve anything” and characterize their curriculum as a human-potential, science-based, skill-driven, self-reliance-promoting, and lifestyle-changing program.
“I was brought to the world on 3 December 1993,” wrote Bitton in a letter to Yossi Ivgi, his mentor and a facilitator in the Michael program, about his graduation, “but the Tair who [is] speaking with you now [was] ‘born’ on 21 March 2010.”
From July 7–19, Ivgi will bring a dozen soon-to-be 12th-grade high school students from Beersheva to Seattle, its sister city, on a dual mission with Rabbi Mark Spiro, executive director of Seattle-based LivingJudaism to meet some of the Northwest’s top entrepreneurs as well as to train Spiro to be one of the first facilitators for the program here.
“It’s a new paradigm to discover the best way for a human being to live,” Ivgi told JTNews. “Not by the spiritual way, but the actual way, on the ground.”
In that time, the students will do their best to “show-off” some of the skills they’ve learned in the program to local students and parents.
The kids will meet with executives at Boeing, Costco, Microsoft, venture-capital company Maveron, Nordstrom, and Starbucks.
“They are learning about the qualities it takes to be successful and innovative, how to utilize their talents, skills and creativity, and they are getting a taste of some of the best entrepreneurial qualities of Seattle,” Spiro told JTNews
For what is being called the Partners in Potential trip, the second year the two have done this, Spiro and Ivgi will host a couple of informal and open community meetings with the students as well as visit local landmarks like Snoqualmie Falls and the Pike Place Market and attend a Mariner’s game. They will also spend a few days at Camp Solomon Schechter.
In his work at LivingJudaism, Spiro teaches core Jewish principles that help people be more successful in their work lives, marriages, and friendships. He is also a life coach for individuals who want to achieve more in their lives.
“I will be teaching [the students] a number of sessions,” said Spiro. “This part of the Michael program will be part of the training that will launch here in the United States.”
Spiro decided to team up with Ivgi while Ivgi was in Seattle for another LivingJudaism program called Wounded Soldiers, a program that former LivingJudaism executive director Chaim Levine now runs independently. At that time, Ivgi, himself wounded during his service as a former Israeli Defense Forces pilot for 21 years, first focused on his own healing and then began to counsel other wounded soldiers back to mental health.
He earned a graduate degree in counseling and is now working on his doctorate in conflict resolution at a Beersheva hospital, where he researches how the most successful patients develop coping skills while under extreme prolonged stress.
Ivgi is also executive director of Mashav, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation within its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He calls the Michael method and the programs developed in Mashav the “solutionary (sic) approach.”
“Students mainly need help with self-esteem, believing in their own abilities, getting motivated, taking responsibility, and changing their habits,” he said.
According to Mashav’s research, the Michael Program attracts no less than 60 percent of its students from “disadvantaged homes…from the lowest socio-economic levels.”
Michael Program subjects include arts and self-expression, speed reading and memory improvement, scientific theory, math, emotional intelligence and life-preparation skills, learning habits, and more while maximizing the effect of the mentor or facilitator of each 35-student group as being one of the most important environmental factors in a student’s success.
Facilitators, said Ivgi, must never judge a student or his ideas.
“To be able to connect with everyone with no issues and no judgment,” Ivgi said, “and not to criticize, but to accept everyone, and to understand that the level of connection in a human being can create a change in a human being.”
Ivgi believes this idea is so fundamental that anyone aspiring to be a facilitator in the program must have the quality of what he calls “naiveness.” This idea is the subject of his book, titled The Second Naiveness, set to be published later in 2011.
In Israel, the Michael method is a 14-week after-school program that meets one night a week for four hours. Students must commit to being on time and to finishing the program.
Although the program description states that “the spiritual foundation forms the basis of consciousness,” the Michael program teaches a scientific hypothesis called The Gaia Principle, which asserts that the whole earth is a “super organism” that seeks to protect its own survival and that of all forms of life on it. Because we all are interconnected, states the theory, we are all responsible for each other’s welfare, both animate and inanimate objects.
“We are not dealing with God,” said Ivgi. “We’re taking science as the major understanding of how the world is working.”
Mashav wants to create a network of Michael method franchises in various countries. International revenues from this enterprise would help to fund educational activities in disadvantaged communities in Israel. In Israel, the Michael Program is a for-profit enterprise with royalty payments that recycle back into the Michael organization there.
Ivgi believes that this model of teaching life and learning skills based on the scientific method and applied determination is a revolution whose time has come.
“A revolution means it doesn’t matter what place you are, you can jump from the bottom of life to the top of life,” said Ivgi. “People have the ability to make this kind of change, not by positive thinking, but actual hard work, taking responsibility and having the right skills.”