During his six years at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Yosi devoted himself to becoming a master teacher of Jewish texts. Upon graduation, in 1972, he began his first full-time position as Assistant Principal at the Los Angeles Hebrew High School. There, he worked for six years in various administrative and programmatic capacities but, most important, as a teacher. His students gave Yosi his greatest satisfaction. When asked to send samples of his "products" to the Covenant Foundation, Yosi objected, "They won't agree to climb into envelopes."

In 1978 Yosi moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to become Director of the communal supplementary school, the Talmud Torah of St. Paul. Working alongside a talented faculty, he guided the school to excellence. He helped create a communal day school, which now numbers 200 students and has inspired a sister school in Minneapolis as well as a Twin Cities middle school. Students from Yosi's adult Rashi study group founded Beth Jacob Congregation, his shul, in the early 1980s, and other students in his teenage Rashi study group and his Sunday night adult chug have gone on to provide extraordinary Jewish leadership in their adult lives.

After twelve years as director, Yosi resigned to devote himself full-time to teaching, which he had been doing part-time for eighteen years. At the Talmud Torah schools in both cities, at the new Twin Cities Jewish Middle School, with hundreds of new Americans from the former USSR, and at three universities in Minnesota, Yosi's courses in Jewish texts, Hebrew literature, and Jewish thought have attracted hundreds to serious Jewish learning. In addition, Yosi became the spiritual leader of a thirty-three-household synagogue in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, allowing him to claim the title of "Chief Rabbi of the Chippewa Valley."

Yosi is always teaching. Last year he taught forty-five class hours per week. The "call" from the Covenant Foundation interrupted his eight-grade Tanakh class. Even over the summer Yosi teachers and tutors children and adults while writing voluminous textbooks for his own classroom use.

Asked to list teachers and friends who have shaped his thinking and work, Yosi notes rabbis and educators Nathan Reisner, Max Ticktin, Hershel Matt z"l, Burton Cohen, Lou Newman, Moshe Bailiss, Sheldon Dorph, Arnold Band, Nehama Leibowitz, Dale Lange, Helaine Minkus, and Morris Allen, and his many students. "I hear their voices echoing in my conversations with my students; it reassures me that I am really teaching Torah."

From Rabbi Yosi (Joel) Gordon's Statements of Motivation and Purpose:

"As long as I can remember, my fantasies and fascination were with teaching. I have always preferred the title 'teacher' to 'educator.' It conveys what is most important for me in my work and my life. A teacher is a person who works directly with students, who conducts a class, who transmits Jewish learning and helps students create a community of Jewish learners, one which shapes their lives and gives them the tools and purpose to continue to live lives of Jewish communal learning forever. 'Teacher' connotes kinds of relationships with students, individually and as a group. It is a limited relationship in scope, place, and time; yet ideally it creates directions in students which extend beyond those limitations.

After thirty-eight years as a Jewish teacher, it's a bit odd to consider what I hope to achieve in my career in Jewish education. That is not because I feel I have done it all, or because I am ready to wind down. Rather, I have seen so many trends in Jewish education. I have found a few that have produced respectable results, but I remained committed, both philosophically and temperamentally, to a rather traditional model of Jewish teaching.

I find the best international programs for revolutionizing Jewish education, the greatest innovations in curriculum, the grandest institutions and organizations are often too many steps away from the real arena for change in Jewish education: the classroom. It was my summers at Ramah in California and Wisconsin that enabled me to test my ideas as a Jewish teacher. I began as a counselor, soon became a head counselor (rosh aidah), returned to counseling, again served as a head counselor, and finished my summers at Ramah again as a counselor. That is a peculiar path to take, moving down from the more prestigious position to a lesser one, twice; but I sensed that the real education was taking place in the intimacy of the cabin, in the day-to-day routine, in the realm of the ordinary.

I am deeply committed to supplementary Jewish education, not because I feel it is equal in its impact to day school education, but because I cannot write off the majority of Jewish children, and because I am convinced that good supplementary education can dramatically change the lives of a significant percent of our students.

Thus my goal over the next few years is to continue my initial curriculum work for all areas of our middle school: in Bible, Rabbinics (Mishna, Talmud, Midrash), Prayer, Hebrew Literature, and general Jewish learning. I would like to produce polished materials which can survive me in the school and which can be used or adapted for use in other middle school or supplementary school settings. I would hope they can also serve as a model both for other Jewish educational materials and for the process of teaching-with-research-and- development, which I believe to be an excellent model for Jewish schools wishing to grow and foster teaching professionalism. Through example I would like to serve notice that the teaching vocation is a proper one for rabbis, respectable and useful. Finally, I hope to teach as long as I am able. It continues to provide me with surprise and challenge and enormous satisfaction in my life." 

From his Letters of Support: Rabbi Morris Allen

"In the hierarchy of the [Camp] Ramah world, the goal is to become a Rosh Aidah—a division head. Yosi reached that pinnacle one summer and then, surprising the entire community, chose to return to the ‘lower level' of bunk counselor for his final years at Ramah. Why? Was he unsuccessful in his administrative abilities? Hardly, as Rosh Aidah he saw his division undertake some of the most creative programming ever done over a summer. He brought out talents in counselors that few understood they had. Yet, Yosi understood that it was not in administrative modes that lives were easily changed, but rather in the one-to-one contact and the creation of a true 'tzrif-community' that transformation took place. For Yosi, it was about creating Jews who understood that their greatest inheritance was their Judaism. By taking a stand for substance over style, content over casings, and constancy over passing fad, Yosi continues to transform lives and community through the texts of our people and the stories of our lives."