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Thinking Small: Rethinking the Way We Educate Jewish Children

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by Sam Richardson
 
Last week in this space I challenged you, my dear reader, to consider how you can begin to assure a future for your Jewish family and community by “thinking small”.  For some, this task might seem daunting: How can individuals – as individuals – accomplish the wide variety of needs any family and/or community has to ensure the next Jewish generation?   There are children to be taught, events to plan, services to organize, funds to be raised… the list is long and detailed. Some may point out that Judaism in America developed the now-traditional institutions of the Federation, the JCC, the religious school, Hadassah, etc.Therefore, should we not work to improve and reform these organizations rather than put more burdens on today’s parents and grandparents?
 
I agree – all options must be on the table, including the reform of our most cherished modern institutions. However, I believe we must also keep in mind that 60 or 70 years of a standardized model – that institutional box in which we were reared and work tirelessly to keep in good repair and good reputation through endless investment in bricks and bucks and bodies – does not necessarily equate with viable Jewish tradition. Limiting the focus to synagogue-based religious school, I suggest that if our notion of “tradition” extends only to the mid-20th Century then we are harming ourselves politically, theologically, and ontologically – as Jews. 
 
Politically, we have adopted for ourselves as a standard tool of socialization that which has worked well for secular western society. That tool – institutionalized, outsourced education – has succeeded for almost 200 years in bringing about the melting pot of cultures which is America and to raise the standards for educational excellence at large. But is that model, at a synagogue level, sufficient to ensure the next Jewish generation? The statistics say no.
 
Theologically, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us in his essay, To Be A Jew: What Is It?, that belonging to the Jewish people requires “living in the spiritual order of the Jewish people… Our share in holiness we acquire by living in the Jewish community. What we do as individuals is a trivial episode…”. Given this spiritual reality, is it possible that institutionalized education can sufficiently transmit a Jewish spiritual order to our children without the full participation of their parents and actual immersion of the family into the Jewish community?
 
Ontologically, we must ask ourselves: At what cost comes the convenience of contemporary big-box religious education? Returning to Heschel, himself a man firmly rooted in the issues of his day, reminds us in another essay, A Time for Renewal, that to consider “the present moment is the whole, that the self can live without a past” places us in danger of losing our peoplehood to the tyranny of individualized academic instruction.

To raise our children as Jews with deep, resonant Jewish meaning requires the implementation of traditions older than the tools of the last century. It requires a “small” connection to our people, our parents and our more ancient ways.
 
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Do you agree? Has the time come to rethink the way we give our children a Jewish education? Please comment below to share.
 
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