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 Some are superseded by the laws of the countries in which we live.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.

Stumbling blocks

February was Jewish Disability Awareness Month. If this is a surprise, I should add that it was the third annual Jewish Disability Awareness Month.

I missed the first two altogether and learned about the third after it had begun. According to Rabbi David Saperstein, during February Jewish institutions and organizations were supposed to “undertake a variety of initiatives to raise awareness of disability issues, whether it’s by hosting a panel on disability issues, studying relevant Jewish texts and discussing their application to daily life, volunteering with organizations that aid people with disabilities, or embarking on a holistic re-examination of how the community—our synagogues, schools and other communal institutions—includes, or fails to include, people with disabilities.”

So why did we miss this? One reason is that religious entities, including all houses of worship, are exempt from the Americans With Disabilities Act, the law that mandates physical and programmatic access in other settings for people with many kinds of disabilities. Being under no compulsion by civil law to address disability issues, we could choose to ignore them. Another is that the ADA’s requirements for barrier-free design don’t apply to existing buildings, only to new construction and major alterations.

Nevertheless, for both ethical and practical reasons, most new synagogue buildings have included entrance ramps as well as elevators when necessary, as well as wheelchair-accessible restrooms and drinking fountains. Some, but not all, have provided for wheelchair seating in their sanctuaries, accessible telephones, and other accommodations. Some, including many existing synagogue buildings, have added assistive listening systems.

The ethical reasons include the Torah’s injunction, “You shall not insult the deaf, or place a stumbling block before the blind.” Stumbling blocks come in many forms, including less-than-accessible buildings, Shabbat services (how many sanctuaries have wheelchair access to the bimah?), and prayer books. We are also told, “Do not separate yourself from the community,” which implies that we should not impose separation on others.

The practical reasons include the Jewish need for unity. Especially in a community as small as ours, we cannot afford to exclude anyone, even inadvertently. Rabbi Saperstein suggests that accommodation for disabilities may be especially important in the Jewish community: the rate of disability increases with age, and the median age in the Jewish community is several years older than in the general population.

Disability awareness is particularly timely for our community because we are preparing to house all of our Jewish activities in one building. Half the space in that building is on a level that is currently accessible only by stairs, and there is no wheelchair-accessible restroom on either floor. The facilities committee has pledged to make necessary accommodations but may not have planned for everything that is needed, so I hope that everyone with specific concerns will be sure to share them with the committee.

Zecher litziyat Mitzrayim

In the first session of the Crash Course in Jewish History, I said that the ultra-condensed version of the course would be, “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!”

While that’s supposed to be a joke, it represents the extent to which Passover exemplifies the Jewish view of history. We tend to see every event in our history as following that pattern.

In Jewish thought and in Jewish prayer, Passover is even more than our story of survival and liberation. For example, although we teach young children that Shabbat is the weekly remembrance of God’s resting after creating the world, the kiddush for Friday night states that Shabbat is zecher litziyat Mitzrayim, the remembrance of going-out from Egypt.

Many of the instructions in the Torah also tie themselves to the Exodus. Deuteronomy 18:17 tells us, “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless,” and verse 18 adds, “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and that the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment.” The passage continues with the well-known instructions to leave overlooked and fallen crops in our fields and orchards for the poor to gather, and concludes by reiterating, “Always remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment.”

Therefore. Does this mean that we are obligated to carry out these commandments because of our history as slaves in Egypt, or that we are given these commandments to help us remember that we were once slaves?

Or does it matter? The traditional idea is that observing ritual mitzvot helps us to observe ethical mitzvot, but it’s a two-way street. On one hand, the ritual of the Passover seder should strengthen our resolve to help the poor and oppressed. On the other hand, we celebrate Passover only once a year, but our fellow human beings need our help year-round.

Thus, whenever we help someone who is poor, ill, or oppressed, we should understand it as fulfilling commandments of the Torah, commandments associated with Passover.

This has been on my mind recently because of the B’tzelem Elohim (In the Likeness of God) curriculum that our eighth- and ninth-graders are following. The curriculum leads the students to create and carry out community-service projects, but it begins with study of texts from the Torah and later writings about our obligations to help others and, in particular, the best ways of doing so.

Students find these texts difficult and perhaps unnecessary, because the duty to help others seems self-evident. That it does demonstrates how thoroughly some of these instructions from the Torah have become central to Jewish life and, to a great extent, to American life. Nevertheless, we should be mindful that, when we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or work to liberate the oppressed, it is a holy act—a remembrance of our going-out from Egypt.

Torah and Evolution, part 2

Today was Evolution Shabbat in many synagogues, and tomorrow will be Evolution Sunday in churches. Evolution Weekend is the weekend nearest Charles Darwin's birthday (Feb. 12). The Evolution Weekend web site states:

Evolution Weekend is an opportunity for serious discussion and reflection on the relationship between religion and science. One important goal is to elevate the quality of the discussion on this critical topic - to move beyond sound bites. A second critical goal is to demonstrate that religious people from many faiths and locations understand that evolution is sound science and poses no problems for their faith. Finally, as with The Clergy Letters themselves, which have now been signed by more than 13,000 members of the clergy in the United States, Evolution Weekend makes it clear that those claiming that people must choose between religion and science are creating a false dichotomy.

It's an outgrowth of the Clergy Letter Project, in which (as of Friday) 467 rabbis and more than 12,000 Christian clergy had subscribed to letters opposing attempts on any religious grounds to limit the teaching of evolution in public-school science classes.

I had the privilege of speaking about it this morning at Congregation Shomray Hadath. In truth, the idea of opposing the teaching of evolution on the grounds of a conflict with Torah is just about unknown in Judaism, even in Orthodox circles: almost no Jewish adults in North America reject science. A problem does occur from time to time in science classes in Orthodox day schools, but it largely reflects the immaturity of the students.

I said that, in workshops for teachers, I sometimes ask participants to write down the answers to two questions:

1. Do you believe that we should teach the creation story in Genesis, chapter 1, to children?
2. Do you believe that it represents scientific truth?

As a rule, everyone answers "yes" to #1 and "no" to #2, and most do not see any problem with the split.

Religious Jews who "believe in" both evolution and Torah deal with it in various ways:

• Some see Torah and science as occupying different spheres of knowledge. They try to keep them separate and generally manage to ignore any apparent conflict.
• Some see the apparent conflict as demonstrating the limits of human knowledge, an approach dating back to Maimonides, who taught that if science and religion appear to conflict, it is only because our understanding of them is as yet insufficient.
• Many, probably the largest number in the liberal streams of Judaism, interpret parts of the Torah as metaphor and myth. This is the approach that Reform rabbis took in the Pittsburgh Platform (1885), which states, "We hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism, the Bible reflecting the primitive ideas of its own age, and at times clothing its conception of divine Providence and Justice dealing with men in miraculous narratives."

In reality, it is not necessary for anyone to "believe in" either evolution or Torah. The theory of evolution is either correct or it is not, regardless of what any of us believes. (Opponents sometimes want schools to teach that it is "only a theory," but any scientist will say that it is the theory that best describes the data that exist.)

Similarly, Torah exists regardless of whether one "believes in" it and regardless of what anyone believes about it. The question for us is what we make of it.

Zealots might say that the bulk of American Jewry is able to cope with the difference between the creation story in Genesis 1 and what science tells us because most of us do not believe very much in God or Torah to begin with. I disagree with this, and side with the scholars who wryly observe that true faith does not require ratification by a committee of biologists.

It is easier for Jews than for Protestants because faith is really not central to Judaism as most of us know it. We do not have any concept of "justification by faith alone" (in that terminology, Judaism emphasizes justification by works), nor do we have any mandatory confession of faith. And we are not preoccupied with salvation; even on Yom Kippur, no rabbi calls out, "Come forward and be saved!"

The most elegant response is the one presented by Rev. Michael Dowd in his book Thank God for Evolution, about which I've written before. He argues that the Bible and science are not in conflict at all, but are telling the same story. They use different language; he calls them "day language" (the language of science and mundane reality) and "night language" (the language of dreams, poetry, and myth).

They also have different goals. The creation stories in Genesis (chapters 1 and 2) orient us, the People of Israel, to our place and role in the world, and it should come as no surprise that nations who view their places and roles differently should have different creation stories. We want to teach the story from chapter 1 to children because it depicts a universe in which God is control and has a plan, and the plan works as it should. Chapter 2 is less orderly; there's a lot of blundering. It explains to adults why the world in which we live is such a mess.We are seeing a continued and growing attack on the teaching of science in public schools, by political conservatives and religious fundamentalists who lobby state education departments, especially that of Texas—if a textbook cannot achieve adoption by the Texas authorities, it will probably never be published—to weaken the teaching of evolution. These demands include warning students that it is only a theory and presenting other theories, regardless of the fact that the other theories have no scientific support and amount to the teaching of religion.

Sometimes I even imagine a time in the future when we will need to send our students to Jewish day schools, not only in order to teach them Hebrew, Jewish life, and Jewish history, but also to teach them science. (And to protect them from fundamentalist Christian indoctrination in the guise of science.)

The version of the Clergy Letter for rabbis is here, and the list of rabbis who have signed it follows the letter.

It takes a shtetl

It takes a shtetl to raise a Jewish child.

No, that’s not quite right. Although the shtetl experience had significant effects on Jewish thought, it is not central to Jewish life today.

Few of us would willingly trade the freedoms of twenty-first-century America for the forced closeness of an isolated village in eastern Europe. But it does take a community to raise a Jewish child. This is not to say that one can’t be Jewish in isolation, such as when required by schooling, work, or military service. What it means is that to be a Jew is to be part of a worldwide Jewish community that cannot be defined by either religion or ethnicity alone.

Thus, not all Jews are religious, nor are all religious Jews religious in the same way. Our religious practices show a range of ethnic and philosophical differences. Nor are our ethnic customs all the same. Think about Jewish food: what is Jewish food? Sefardim such as Moroccan Jews knew nothing about bagels until they saw them in Ashkenazi bakeries in Israel or North America, but they eat rice during Passover. There are Jews who don’t like gefilte fish!

About a decade ago I taught an eighth-grade class on Jewish family history. The idea was that family history was the gateway to more general Jewish history. Jewish food was one illustration: whatever we think of as “Jewish food” is the typical food of the region of the world from which our families came, perhaps adapted to make it kosher. (Russian borscht might contain both meat and sour cream; in French cooking, à la juive, Jewish style, means fried in oil instead of pork fat.) By the late 1990s this was lost on students, because family food had become either mainstream American food, or the latest foodie craze—that year, Thai. So if family food is Jewish food, Thai food was Jewish.

Furthermore, our Jewish community, especially in America, is becoming progressively more diverse. It includes Jews by birth who are religious and who are not religious, and Jews by choice and other family members who participate voluntarily in the life of the community.

Young children do not think in global terms, and identification with a worldwide community is not automatic. For a very young child, the world is defined by home and family, and gradually expands to include the neighborhood, the school, and the temple or synagogue. As it expands, the child learns to be part of a community that is one step larger than the family, but still familiar and safe.

As the child matures, the connections of those communities to larger ones can become meaningful. This meaning develops through the family’s participation in their Jewish community.

Once children are of school age, religious school (Hebrew school) is the most obvious manifestation of Jewish community, because children spend three to five hours a week in Hebrew school. But school is not the only form of Jewish community, and it’s a somewhat artificial one, focused on specific kinds of learning. School can’t represent all the facets of a Jewish community. For example, the tzedakah component of our school curriculum can’t convey the experience of those who work together at the Community Kitchen on the first Thursday of every month. Our prayer curriculum doesn’t convey the bonding that occurs during a worship service. School parties don’t fully represent the experience of social events in our two congregations.

So I encourage the families of our religious-school children to participate as fully in the life of the Jewish community as they are able. That includes not only worship services—our most frequent community event—but also mitzvah projects, book discussions, social events, concerts and films, or even fund raising, and to bring their children whenever it’s feasible.