God in America

I watched most of the second installment of God in America on PBS, and I was startled by some of it.

From the segment on Judaism, a person would think that Reform Judaism originated in the United States, and that Isaac Mayer Wise invented it all himself. While the program was right to emphasize his enormous efforts to spread Reform, his accomplishments in founding the major institutions of Reform Judaism in America, and his hope that it would unite all Jews in this country, I think it was wrong to overlook the origins of Reform in Germany and the pre-Wise stirrings of Reform in America.

It also slighted the effects of the radicalism of other Reform rabbis of the period, some of whom were much more radical than Isaac Mayer Wise. Wise's Minhag America was a comparatively traditional siddur, while the Union Prayer Book, first published in 1895, was based on Rabbi David Einhorn's competing siddur, Olat Tamid, which made far more sweeping changes than Wise's.

I was also surprised to hear that Wise found resistance from thousands of "Conservative Jews" emigrating from Europe around 1870. Now, the philosophy of Conservative Judaism did originate in Europe, e.g., with Zecharias Frankel and the "Historical School" that asserted the capacity to interpret Torah, Talmud, and halachah in the light of modern scholarship. But there was no large-scale movement called, or even like, Conservative Judaism in 19th-century Europe, and the Jews who emigrated from eastern Europe after 1870 (many significantly after) certainly did not come from anything like a Conservative synagogue. Conservative Judaism is more genuinely an American phenomenon than is Reform, in my opinion, even though both have roots in Germany and German Reform Judaism remained somewhat closer to traditional Judaism than did American Reform.

The affinity between Jewish emigration from eastern Europe and Conservative Judaism had more to do with the fact that it was the less traditionally religious Jews, those more oriented toward the opportunities of the modern world, who were most likely to emigrate. Thus, they were more open to a style of Judaism that combined more traditional form than Reform with a less traditional philosophy than what we now call Orthodox Judaism.

The program had expert advisors, including Prof. Jonathan Sarna, so it is possible that I am wrong about all this. But what it said was so different from what is almost universally taught that I really wonder how well the producers followed expert advice.

Irrelevance

There's a very old joke that goes like this:

What did the parson preach about?

Sin.

What did he say?

He was against it.

I remembered this while reading a recent op-ed column in The New York Times by Rev. G. Jeffrey MacDonald, a UCC minister in Swampscott, Mass. He writes, "the advisory committee of my small congregation in Massachusetts told me to keep my sermons to 10 minutes, tell funny stories and leave people feeling great about themselves."

That also reminded me of something that Hebrew-school parents sometimes say when I ask them what their goals are for their children's Jewish education: "We just want them to feel good about being Jewish."

My heart sinks when I hear this, for several reasons. First, it might well be possible to feel good about being Jewish without ever attending Hebrew school. For example, a child could grow up with a lot of ethnic pride even if it's unfounded.

Second, parents might think that some, in fact a lot, of what we teach is likely to make children feel bad about being Jewish: we might teach about religious obligations that our families don't fulfill (kashrut, Shabbat). Or we might teach about Jewish history and include the low points. I once had to deal with a rabbi's wife who wanted to come into the school and teach a course on the history of persecution.

Third, what do we mean by good? Happy because we get lots presents at Hanukkah, plus challah every Friday evening? Happy because the newest Justice of the Supreme Court is Jewish? Some of these things are like eating ice cream -- they feel good up to a point, but too much can make you sick.

In other words, we gravitate toward a different sense of good: the moral sense. We want our students to feel good about being Jewish because Judaism provides moral guidance and a sense of meaning in life. From the feel-good point of view, however, this is a downer, because it requires actually learning stuff.

It's much the same with sermons. As background, let me say that I grew up in a Reform congregation when an average sermon lasted at least 20 minutes, often 30, occasionally more, and rabbis preached mostly about current social issues. People actually came to temple to hear those sermons!

It's not the same today. For one thing, it's no longer true that a rabbi has superior education to all but a tiny minority of congregants. Today most adult Jews are college-educated and many have graduate degrees: although our education is almost all in secular fields, we have plenty of it overall. We don't feel a need for our rabbi to interpret everything to us and we certainly don't want anyone to tell us what to think.

As an adult I've lived in every region of the country, belonged to a number of different congregations, and visited many more. In addition, for most of my adult life, I attended Shabbat services every week, so I've experienced a variety of different approaches to sermons.

To generalize -- I hope not unfairly -- it seems to me that many rabbis have given up. Faced with congregations of members to whom religious Judaism appears irrelevant, rabbis have retreated from sermon topics that might possibly make it relevant, to topics that don't require much engagement with the religious dimensions of Judaism at all.

Thus, we can hear sermons that do not contain a single word of Torah, even sermons that seem explicitly contrary to Torah. Please don't take me for a traditionalist zealot; I'm not arguing that rabbis should never disagree with any element of Torah or halachah. But I do think that if the moral lesson to be drawn from a sermon seems to be at odds with the Torah, it needs some explaining.

Nor am I saying that rabbis should exhort us to be more observant. I think it was a mistake for Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum, the rabbi in And They Shall be My People: An American Rabbi and His Congregation, to measure his success only in terms of the number of congregants whom he persuaded to become fully observant.

Too many sermons, however, come across as something akin to group therapy, except that no one else is allowed to speak. The working out of an individual's personal problems usually isn't promising material for a sermon.

Rev. MacDonald also writes,

When they’re being true to their calling, pastors urge Christians to do the hard work of reconciliation with one another before receiving communion. They lead people to share in the suffering of others, including people they would rather ignore, by experiencing tough circumstances — say, in a shelter, a prison or a nursing home — and seeking relief together with those in need. At their courageous best, clergy lead where people aren’t asking to go, because that’s how the range of issues that concern them expands, and how a holy community gets formed.

Leave out "Christians" and "communion," and how is this any different from what we really should hope to hear from our rabbis?

Early Childhood

Some schools have curricula that are like those that I inherited in a job in another city: basically a multipage list of discrete facts (you could call them factoids) that each student should know by the end of the year. This would be compatible with end-of-year testing (and it was in a state that is strongly into testing), but not everyone agrees that it should even be called a curriculum.

Most curricula describe goals and methods. This kind of curriculum could emphasize facts, skills, ideas, or any combination. A curriculum based on the principles of Understanding by Design would emphasize ideas and would describe the learning activities that should convey them.

Lately I've been writing a curriculum for an early-childhood class in a Jewish supplementary school. This came about because parents on the school board were concerned, basically, that their children weren't learning enough. (Every time parents have said that children weren't learning enough, anywhere I've worked, it was in pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, or first grade. This doesn't mean that students in higher grades are learning enough.)

I thought that perhaps they meant that our pre-K class didn't have the kinds of goals that their children's weekday preschools had. I've worked around weekday preschools and I know that, although they don't have the kind of idea-based curriculum that I would want in a later grade, they have very clear goals for skills (motor and social as well as cognitive) and programs for achieving them. Those kinds of goals don't seem really appropriate for a Sunday school class.

My friend Nachama Skolnick Moskowitz had a different take on it. She suggested that the parents might be dismayed by the cycle of not-very-meaningful activities that is typical in a Sunday-school class like this. These are activities that are often sanctified by decades of use, but which either don't teach much of anything, or teach something that we don't really want to teach. For example, having children plant radish seeds in little pots at Tu Bishvat doesn't teach anything about trees, and Tu Bishvat isn't about vegetables.

When I asked in various online groups about curricula for a Sunday-school pre-kindergarten class, the replies surprised me. One colleague in a nearby (and larger) city asked why we have such a class at all and recommended family education instead. We have the class in response to demand, which exists because our community isn't large enough to have weekday Jewish preschool.

An early-childhood specialist at one of the national religious movements wrote that there is no such thing as a pre-kindergarten curriculum, because early childhood education is all about emergent curriculum – building the curriculum around the interests of the pupils. That's eminently feasible in a weekday preschool where there is no fixed list of topics that must be taught and teachers can respond promptly to whatever interests develop, not so feasible in a once-a-week class.

In the end we moved to a combined kindergarten and pre-kindergarten class with two teachers, and a curriculum called HaMakom, which means "the Place." In a religious setting, however, it denotes the place in which we find God, and may serve as a synonym for God.

Our idea is that the classroom itself should be HaMakom--an environment that models the best forms of contemporary Jewish life. We want it to be rich with Jewish symbols and objects and provide multiple opportunities for Jewish play. We also want it to be uncluttered and airy, which will be a challenge since the classroom is not large.

Part of the plan is to use the room decoration and various stations to engender interest in appropriate topics – a twist on emergent curriculum. These will include a holiday station – what class at this level doesn't study the Jewish holidays – as well as a Shabbat station, a Hebrew station, and so forth.

The full curriculum is here.

Little atheists

Almost nothing rattles a religious-school teacher more than a student’s claim not to believe in God. Sometimes this claim is merely an attempt to derail a class, but sometimes it is a sincerely held opinion. In either case, the teacher struggles to deal with it and still continue with the intended lesson.

The same statement would present no problem in an adult class, but would probably not be made at all. In teaching adults, I say that whether to believe in God is not as productive a question as what to believe about God. Contemporary Judaism encompasses a wide spectrum of belief, from a God who frequently intervenes in everyday life to an impersonal God that comprises all the forces of nature. We have no mandatory “Confession of Faith,” and all strains of Judaism teach that how we live our lives is more important than what we profess to believe.

When a class has time to pursue the topic, students may advance various reasons for not believing in God. When a Torah class studies the two accounts of creation in Genesis, or the story of Noah and the flood, students usually point out that the stories differ considerably from what they learn in science classes. Teachers are, of course, well aware of that, but to most Jewish adults, it is obvious that the Torah is not a science book, and that religion and science represent truth in very different ways.

One especially interesting argument is that God, as described in the Bible, does some things, or orders us to do things, that are evil. For example, in I Samuel 15:3, God, speaking through Samuel, commands Saul to exterminate the Amalekites. Saul’s failure to do so is later cited as the reason for choosing David to replace him as king, and Jewish tradition holds that both Haman and Hitler were descendants of Amalek.

In our time, however, a commandment to exterminate an entire people seems self-evidently wrong. Our children, furthermore, are learning that all kinds of racial, religious, and ethnic discrimination are wrong. Jewish tradition suggests that God may make exceptions to God’s own laws, but now we want more consistency.

It is actually encouraging when a student advances this argument, because it shows that the student is learning what we most want to teach—ethics and values—rather than accepting everything uncritically. What makes it difficult in classes is that not all students will be equally ready to deal with inconsistencies and conflicts in the text; some will read literally what others will interpret metaphorically.

In fact, students who raise these questions are bringing up issues that have troubled rabbis for many centuries. It is not always possible to explore this kind of question fully in a single class session, but the essential point is that the purpose of religious school is education, not indoctrination. When a difficult question arises, it is more important for a student to learn how to think about it than to learn what to think.

Low expectations

Concerned that the study of Talmud had become so complex that most Jews of his time could not follow its arguments, the medieval scholar Rabbi Moses Maimonides wrote a book he called the Mishneh Torah—second Torah, or restatement of Torah. He intended it as a handbook of Jewish practice and belief for average Jews, so it wrote it in simple Hebrew and organized it clearly by topic.

Maimonides covered not only not only the laws stated in or implied by the Torah, but also provisions he believed necessary to implement them. He wrote, for example, that it was mandatory for every town to establish a school. (He meant a school for boys. Typical of his time, he believed that women were exempt from the requirement to study.)

He also wrote that a teacher is required to continue teaching a subject until all the pupils understand it. In modern schools, we call this learning for mastery, but we apply it more to skills, such as multiplication, than to ideas. In his view, furthermore, it was incumbent not only on the teacher, but also on the students, to insist on mastery:

Neither should a pupil say “I understand” when he does not, but should keep on asking questions repeatedly. If his teacher gets angry and excited on account of him, he should say to him: “Teacher, this is the Torah! I must learn it, even though my capacity is limited.”

What is most striking in today is the idea that every student, regardless of ability, must learn the Torah, and not only superficially. Maimonides says that the class should stay with a topic until all students understand “the depth of the halachah.” He refers specifically to halachah—Jewish law—because his overriding concern is that every Jew know how to observe it correctly.

Most of us do not share that concern. There are large areas of halachah that do not affect us today: laws pertaining to the operation of the Temple in Jerusalem, including sacrifices; many that pertain only to priests, kohanim; and some that apply only in the land of Israel. Most of these were already in abeyance by the time in which Maimonides wrote. Some are superseded by the laws of the countries in which we live. And there are many that we observe differently, or not at all, because of our own religious principles.

With less sense of urgency about halachah, we tend to see mastery of the subjects taught in religious school, however desirable, as less essential. Although we may press for mastery of Hebrew skills, congregational and community religious schools usually do not strive as much for mastery of Judaic knowledge. We value the students’ total experience of Hebrew school more than mastery of content, and we know that academic pressure would not contribute to the environment that we want.

To some extent, we encourage a culture of low expectations. A high grade in math--really, a high grade in any subject in secular schools--may help a student to get into a selective college. High achievement in Hebrew school won't (unless it's a Hebrew-high program that's accredited to offer courses for high-school or college credit, as in a few cities).

Some congregations use bar/bat mitzvah as an incentive, by setting and enforcing requirements. These standards often strike students and parents as arbitrary and capricious. More to the point, the requirements are almost always for attendance, not mastery: at least three years of Hebrew school, or a prescribed number of sessions of Junior Congregation. If a student has met the attendance requirement, the burden falls on the tutor, not on the student, to bring about a creditable "performance." Neither of the congregations that enrolls students in our school has any school-related requirement at all.

There are exceptions. In regions where state-mandated testing in public schools is especially pervasive, religious schools tend to adopt similar practices, often with respect to Hebrew, sometimes also in other subjects. One school board in such a state asked me, more than a decade ago, if there was an organization similar to the Iowa Tests that we could bring in to test all our students in Judaic knowledge. I worried that, to a student who received a low score, it would feel like a failure in being Jewish.

Thus, I don't think that it would be productive to attempt to raise standards through lots of testing. Nor do I think that the strategy used by some public schools in gifted-and-talented programs--assigning mountains of homework--would be a good idea, even if parents would tolerate it. We rarely assign any homework at all, knowing that parents would nullify the assignments anyway.

On the other hand, it is important that we teach with serious purpose. Although students are not always eager to do real academic work in Hebrew school, they take pride in accomplishment and readily distinguish between making progress in learning and merely marking time. Maimonides says that it is wrong for a teacher to do other work with them or to teach sluggishly. By “other work” he probably meant work for financial gain, but we might also include activities that seem appropriate in school but fulfill no actual learning objective. Teaching “sluggishly” might include teaching below the students’ capacity.

Should students enjoy Jewish learning? Yes! But fun in school is not enough: some of the enjoyment should come from making progress, mastering new skills and ideas, and growing in the appreciation of Jewish life.

God's back? Shabbat chol hamoed Pesach

The pilgrimage festivals of Sukkot and Pesach interrupt the cycle of weekly readings. In addition to a special Torah reading for each day of the festival, there is an assigned reading for the Shabbat that falls during the festival that replaces the weekly parashah. In contrast, the Shabbat in Hanukkah has no special Torah reading, although it has a special Haftarah, the famous “not by might and not by power” selection from Zechariah.

The readings for the first two days of Pesach come from Exodus 12 and 13. They describe the Pesach sacrifice, commandments about the festival, “as an institution for all time, for you and your descendants” (Ex. 12:24), the slaughter of the first-born Egyptians, and the flight from Egypt itself, ending with additional instructions about the festival.

The reading for the Shabbat during Pesach, however, is a problematic passage in which Moses asks to know more about God, even to see the Divine Presence. It’s from parashat Ki Tisa, which was the weekly reading only a month ago. It follows the episode of the golden calf and ends with a second Covenant.

Moses’s instance on learning more about God and seeing God’s presence should remind us of his resistance to being chosen to liberate the Israelites from Egypt earlier in Exodus. There, he argues at length, until God’s anger flares up; here, even though he seems still to need outward signs of God’s favor toward him and Israel, his request is granted. God replies, “I will also do this thing that you have asked: for you have truly gained My favor and I have singled you out by name” (Ex. 33:17).

But Moses will not be allowed to see God’s face, “for man may not see Me and live” (33:20). Instead, it is God’s back that he will see.

God’s back? On the surface, this implies a physical existence for God that Jewish theology rejects. Taken too literally, it may even seem somewhat indelicate. Rabbi J.H. Hertz suggests that God’s presence would be seen in the form of a fire, too intense to look at directly, so Moses will see only an “afterglow.” In contrast, Rabbi Plaut, in the UAHC Torah Commentary, interprets God’s “back” as representing the deeds and actions that reveal God’s nature to us.

This appearance, whatever we take it to be, is accompanied by a text that we repeat as part of the High Holiday liturgy: “The Lord! the Lord! A God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet He does not remit all punishment, but visits the iniquity of fathers upon the children and children’s children, upon the third and fourth generations” (34:6–8).

It is not altogether clear who is speaking, God or Moses, but an ordinary reading of the Hebrew text suggests that it is God, and that is how the JPS version renders it.

Jewish tradition understands these verses as stating thirteen attributes of God—and, unusually, stating them in a positive rather than negative formulation. From the liturgy we are also familiar with other statements of the attributes of God, particularly Yigdal, based on the interpretation of these thirteen attributes by Maimonides.

The Haftarah for this Shabbat, from Ezekiel, is also a famous one: “O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.” In addition to it, some communities also read selections from the Song of Songs (I recommend the translation by Marcia Falk).

Two Secrets

There are two open secrets about becoming a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah. The first is that one becomes a bar or bat mitzvah automatically upon reaching the requisite age, whether there is a special ceremony or not. Although it’s our custom to recognize the coming of religious majority by having the young person participate in the worship service, every Jewish adult has exactly the same religious privileges and obligations.

The second open secret is that one is still Jewish on the morning after the mitzvah event. Students in religious school sometimes ask, “Do I have to learn this for my bar/bat mitzvah?” as if there were no reason to learn anything not required for the ceremony. Students at this age are pragmatic learners: they’re ready to learn everything that seems useful, but not always receptive to knowledge and skills of uncertain utility.

The problem is that – obviously – a young student has no personal experience of any later stage of life, no frame of reference for determining what may eventually be useful. It’s also true in secular education: in math, for example, students learn to calculate percentages before there is any practical need to use percentages.

What this tell us is that education focusing solely on preparation for a bar/bat mitzvah service is insufficient for Jewish life. Our choices about religious-school curricula embody not only immediate utility, but also predictions about the knowledge and skills that students will need throughout life.

For example, an acquaintance with the worship practices of other streams of Judaism is valuable whenever you attend services away from home—whether as a guest at the bar/bat mitzvah celebration of a friend, in college, or later in life. This is an area in which a community school has an intrinsic advantage, because congregations’ schools rarely teach any practices except their own.

Jewish history is helpful in understanding our place in the world. It helps to know that Jews have lived in America since 1654, when New York was still New Amsterdam, and that one 18^th-century Jew, Haym Salomon, helped to finance George Washington’s army. And with Israel in the news almost every day, we all need to know the history of modern Israel.

Ethics? It may be true that all that is really necessary is to try to be a good person… but how do you learn how to be a good person? Learning how to think about ethical issues is an essential part of growing up, and it’s important to have a framework of values that transcend popular culture.

Most important, perhaps, is that each student develops a capacity for lifelong Jewish learning. It’s not only that school time is too limited to include everything that would be worth learning, but also that we are ready to learn different things as we mature. Thus, we want each student to learn more than the minimum to get through a bar/bat mitzvah service, because breadth of learning in school sets the stage for learning throughout life.