Teaching history

A colleague asked about a curriculum for Jewish history in grade 7. Here’s what I wrote:

I think that the most important thing is for any history that you teach to mesh with what the students learn in secular school, which varies from state to state. If it doesn’t connect with the general history that they’re learning it will be much harder to teach and the students will retain less.

Several years ago at CAJE, Prof. Paula Hyman argued that American history was the best way to introduce Jewish history. That has been my experience in New England and New York, where we've found it productive to teach Jewish history in America in the fifth grade. Here in New York, it connects very well with the state history curriculum since it begins in 1654 in New Amsterdam.

However, when I worked in Los Angeles, I found that it didn’t connect as well, because students there learned the history of the United States from a California point of view, starting with the Spanish missions, not Jamestown and the Pilgrims.

Anyway, for the seventh grade, we’ve had good results using The Atlas of Great Jewish Communities by Sondra Leiman (URJ Press - we also use Leiman’s American Jewish history book in the fifth grade). Most of our students get an introduction to world history in the sixth grade in public school. Although Leiman’s book is arguably a history text, its approach is more generally social studies, emphasizing the lives of the people in each community, the leaders who are remembered (it’s exceptionally good in representation of women) and, where applicable, the texts from those communities that we still study.

Our schedule also calls for 7th-graders to study tefillah and religious living on the weekday. On Sunday, the world Jewish history/social studies component is about 1/3 of the total work (students attend for 3 hours on Sundays).

Beyond Hebrew Languish

Last week at CAJE I presented a session with the above title, a follow-up to the "Hebrew Languish and How to Overcome It" session that I presented last year (summary here).

"Hebrew Languish" refers to a letter I received from a prospective teacher: "I have many years of experience in Hebrew Languish which I would like to share with your school." Unfortunately, most of our schools have plenty of Hebrew languish already.

Where last year's session dealt with Hebrew language in the primary grades, this year's dealt with a transition to the upper grades, and in particular to the kind of language-based program that our school has. To be clear, we use Shalom Ivrit (Behrman House) in grades 4, 5, and 6; each grade has 1 hour 40 minutes per week (1 hour on Sunday and 40 minutes on Wednesday) with a specialist teacher. We also teach prayer, but it's secondary, using the prayer companions to Shalom Ivrit. Including the prayer component, we have about 2 hours 10 minutes of Hebrew per week.

Most of the participants in this year's session said that their schools have prayer-based programs, and some wouldn't have enough time to adopt a language-based program. The key elements of teaching Hebrew language apply, however, in any setting.

First among these is to emphasize acquiring language in the primary grades rather than learning it. Older students and adults learn a language by studying rules of grammar, verb conjugations, vocabulary lists, and so forth, and then putting the pieces haltingly together. Young children can acquire a language by "picking it up," that is, by hearing the spoken language in simple forms and gradually learning what things mean.

Thus, in kindergarten or first grade, we do best to teach children oral vocabulary and not to emphasize learning the alef-bet very much at all. Ideally, children would have a vocabulary of about 100 common words before we begin teaching them to read. (You knew far more than 100 words in your native language before anyone taught you to read it.)

The principles of language acquisition apply equally strongly to teaching language in the upper elementary grades. With Shalom Ivrit, it is fruitless for students to attempt to do any translating in book 1 (grade 4 for us), but the most obvious way to teach it is to have students translate the stories. Unfortunately, students can't translate effectively until they can paraphrase in their native language, which for most students isn't before grade 6. So it is better to work at figuring out the approximate meaning of entire sentences and not worry too much about the individual words at first.

In a program that emphasizes prayer, it is valuable to do as much work with language as possible. Joel Grishaver, in a session that he presented with Ellen Dreskin, was emphatic about it: we should always teach the common prefixes and suffixes, and the shorashim (roots) of words that occur frequently in prayers. Without this kernel of meaning, each prayer is a vast uncharted sea of Hebrew; if a student can recognize even a few words, they serve as signposts.

All of the common textbooks for prayer-based Hebrew (Hineni, Z'man Litfilah, and others) contain significant language modules, generally related to the vocabulary or syntax of each prayer. Many teachers seem to skip these sections in favor of drill on the prayer texts, but it's a false economy of time. Teaching students even the rudiments of language will improve their mastery of prayer texts.

This is equally true in the primer year (grade 3 for us). I have said often enough that if your only goal for Hebrew in that grade is to teach decoding, Z'man Likro would be the most effective of currently available textbooks, but my friend Dina Maiben points out that Z'man Likro contains a language unit in each chapter. Dina says that too many teachers blast right through it as if it were another page of reading drill, and students are shortchanged by that approach.

My handout from this year's session is here.

Torah & evolution

Last night I had the privilege of attending a lecture by the Rev. Michael Dowd, the author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World. He's a Protestant minister who has given up pulpit work in order to lecture and teach full-time on this subject.

It's beyond my capacity to reduce his message to a paragraph or two, but I'll say that he's speaking to the large group of people who want to believe in both science and religion. I say "believe" even though Jewish tradition does not emphasize faith—which our tradition largely takes for granted—and belief is not exactly the question for us anyway. The truth content of science doesn't depend on an individual's belief in it, and some of us who are engaged with the religious dimension of Judaism value it for reasons other than straightforward belief.

In other words, his audience isn't the extremists of secular society who hew exclusively to science and find no merit at all in religion, nor is it religious fundamentalists who proclaim the literal truth of Scripture and insist that any science that differs from it is simply wrong. It's for those of us who, in the language of Jewish tradition, will say, "You are right—and you are right."

His basic message, that science and religion express the same truths but frame them in different kinds of language, finds Jewish expression in the religious naturalism taught by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, who is usually cited as the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism. (We should remember that he remained a faculty member of the Jewish Theological Seminary for all of his career; I think that his original goal was to shake up Conservative Judaism.)

And in fact, Reconstructionist Judaism has become especially attractive to well-educated Jews who fully accept contemporary science and feel a need to reconcile it with their spiritual needs. Many other modern Jews deal with this either by keeping science and religion entirely separate, or by just ignoring the conflict.

As I grow older, I am more and more drawn to Reconstructionist thinking, but as an educator I've seen the difficulties it presents in teaching children. The problem is that it's based on a sophisticated form of reasoning that we d0n't expect children to comprehend. Years ago I had an interview for a job as education director at a Reconstructionist congregation, and I still remember the looks of horror on the faces of the search committee members when I said off-handedly that children should learn Torah. Their idea was that children needed to be insulated from the Torah until they were old enough (and educated enough, probably with a Ph.D. degree) to understand it properly.

But I still believe that children should learn Torah, even though all but the youngest students will ask questions that we, as teachers, are uncomfortable in answering. When a sixth-grade class, studying parashat Noach, asks me whether the flood story is true (by the way, they never ask whether the creation stories are true), I answer that the Torah is not a science book, and not really a history book, either.

I also tell them that there is some evidence of a massive flood in ancient times and that many other cultures also have flood narratives. But I don't use these ideas to attempt to persuade students of the truth of the Torah narrative. If anything, rather the contrary: I focus on the reasons that many cultures might have found a flood narrative valuable enough to preserve.

The idea that the Torah expresses truths in poetic language (Dowd calls this "night language," the language of dreams and visions) is one that sixth-graders can begin to understand. Leading students toward this understanding ought to be a central goal of Torah study beginning at about this age level. I've written more about this in commentaries on parashot Va'era and Bo.

I'm grateful to the First Baptist Church in Painted Post and its minister, Rev. Gary McCaslin, for sponsoring the lecture. If you have the opportunity hear Rev. Dowd speak, I recommend that you attend. Most of his lectures are presented by churches, especially Unitarian Universalist fellowships; his lecture schedule is on his website.

Benchmarks

A colleague wrote, “We want to try something that has not been done in this congregation.

We would like to use a checklist of skills to keep the families abreast of the student progress.”

I replied:

If you work on this, I hope you will do it in a way that corresponds to the goals of your school. It would be possible to reduce this to a number of discrete items that, no matter how thoroughly mastered, would not by themselves represent the desired outcome of Jewish school.

For example, many congregations have prayer charts listing specific prayers that a student is to learn at each level. But the ability to read, chant, or recite those prayers doesn’t represent the entirety of what we want from Jewish education. I once had a fourth-grade class that had glommed onto the idea that the only goal of Hebrew school was to “do”certain prayers. Some of the students were uncomfortable with class sessions that required working with ideas, or even with learning new prayers, and when the stress became too great, often a student would insist on standing in front of the class to “do” (perform) a prayer learned the year before.

And I once directed a school where the curriculum for many grades consisted of ten or more pages listing discrete factoids that every student should know. (“Maimonides lived in Egypt. Maimonides wrote the Mishneh Torah.”) It would not have been possible to determine from the written curriculum what a student was supposed to do with all those facts. This was in a state that was in the forefront of mandated testing in public schools.

A number of years ago I was involved with competency-based education, where goals are expressed in terms of “competencies” that a student should develop. In its best form, competency-based education defines the competency on a macro rather than a micro scale, so that a competency is an overarching capacity that may comprise many discrete skills. At Alverno College, the institution that is probably best known for this approach, the goals came to be expressed as 8 abilities: Communication, Analysis, Problem Solving, Valuing in Decision-Making, Social Interaction, Global Perspectives, Effective Citizenship, and Aesthetic Responsiveness.

In addition, the acquisition of skills is integrated with the mastery of content. For example, students would develop skills in analysis through working with subject matter in various disciplines.

I’ll give an example from a part of curriculum that I'll be working on soon. In Kitah Vav (6th grade), the curriculum includes both parashat hashavua and the brachot for the reading of Torah. If all we had was a prayer list, we could check off the Torah blessings as each student learned them. If we happened to remember the parashat hashavua study, we could list facts that the students should know and test them periodically. (“The Torah is also called the Five Books of Moses. The English names of the books are....”) We could even test them on the content of the parashot that they study.

But our real goal for Torah study is that students develop the capacity to discern and paraphrase the p’shat of a short section of Torah text in English. This is hard to put down on a checklist. Although there are ways that it might be tested, we don’t consider that kind of testing appropriate in our school, and the way we would measure a student's capacity is through observing the student’s efforts.

Teaching about the Shoah

After our community’s Yom Hashoah commemoration, we were talking about why the attendance is so poor.

As a newcomer, I don’t know what it was like in other years, but I didn’t really think it was poor, compared to other places I’ve lived. I can remember only one Yom Hashoah commemoration that had relatively high attendance. It was during a Shabbat evening service (not in competition with Shabbat services as a Thursday night service tends to be), and the year was 1993.

The year was significant because it was the 50th anniversary of the rescue of Jews of Denmark (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_the_Danish_Jews for background) and a Danish historian at the local college was speaking.

Ordinarily, however, attendance at Yom Hashoah services tends to be modest almost everywhere. I’m not sure why — is remembering the Holocaust just not a priority for many of us now? Do we expect to be made to feel miserable at the service?

I vote for the latter explanation: we expect to be made to feel miserable. This expectation has been fed partly by misuse of the Shoah (e.g., in the Reform movement’s liturgy for Yom Kippur afternoon) to create a sense of generalized guilt that is, I think, misguided. In any case, our community’s commemoration wasn't like that. We emphasized honoring the memories of the victims through telling some of their stories.

I have more thoughts about teaching about the Shoah in religious school. This can lead to heated discussion, even though a focus on the students’ needs cuts through most of the controversy.

Some congregations – my first Hebrew-school teaching job was in one – mandate a Holocaust course, apparently to honor the memory of the victims. That’s a non-educational reason.

Often, in these congregations, it's mandated for grade 7, probably because that may be the last year for some students. That speaks to an educational reason: it’s seen as the one remaining topic that every student must study.

I’m uncomfortable with that, because it implies that the Holocaust is the capstone of Jewish education, the point to which all our Hebrew-school work of the previous seven or eight years was leading. Furthermore, my experience has been that many seventh-graders haven’t quite reached the stage of cognitive development where they can learn what I would hope to teach, with the result that the subject is trivialized.

I think that the best year for teaching about the Shoah in depth is grade 8, partly because Seymour Rossel’s excellent textbook works well at that level.

Torah Aura’s instant lessons are also excellent and could be used in conjunction with Rossel’s book (following the textbook for the course structure), or can be used for a shorter course at the high-school level. If a school teaches about the Holocaust only in grade 7 or earlier, revisiting it at high-school level, when the capacity for historical reasoning has grown, is a good idea.

On the other hand, some school boards all but prohibit teaching about the Shoah. I was the director of one such school. The school board was fearful of doing anything to which any parent might object, and in a previous year there had been a complaint. I don’t know what took place that year, whether a teacher’s handling of it was inappropriate or whether a family was exceptionally sensitive.

A single complaint is no reason to restrict (or mandate) the teaching of any topic. In other schools, I’ve received isolated complaints about teaching too much about Israel (and, from other parents, not enough about Israel), including death and burial in a class on the Jewish life cycle, and Hebrew (again, both too much and not enough).

Some schools do teach about the Shoah as early as grade 6. We touch on it in grade 4 (in connection with the history of Israel) and grade 5 (in connection with American Jewish history), and our 6th-grade teacher approaches it through films that are appropriate for the grade level. We do not currently teach it at the level I prefer, 8th or 9th grade, but I’m recommending it for a 9th- and 10th-grade class next year.

The egg & the orange

A class asked about the meaning of the roasted egg on the seder plate. It's a good question, because the egg just sits there. We don't eat it; except for stating that it's required on the seder plate, the haggadah never refers to it.

In contrast, we eat the karpas, the charoset, and the maror, and the haggadah text refers explicitly to the zeroa, the shankbone. So what's the purpose of the egg?

A student in the class suggested that the egg symbolizes new life. This is the explanation that I learned as a child, and it makes some sense, because the exodus from Egypt marks the beginning of the life of the Jewish people as a nation that will eventually settle in the Land of Israel.

On the other hand, it's not obvious that "new life" needs to be symbolized on the seder plate at all, and the absence of any reference to it in the haggadah text still requires explanation. It's a bit like saying that the karpas symbolizes spring: since Pesach always falls in the spring, a specific symbol of spring is not really as important as it might otherwise be.

Also, it fails to explain why the egg is roasted. Logically, an egg symbolizing new life might have to be raw and fertile.

Another explanation sometimes given is that the egg represents the sacrifices that are no longer carried out. This has the virtue of explaining why the egg is roasted, but since the zeroa represents the Pesach sacrifice, which is stated explicitly in the haggadah, it's still not clear why the egg is required.

Furthermore, at one point in the seder--korekh, the "Hillel sandwich,"--the charoset seems to represent the Pesach sacrifice! The text states, "With matzah and maror shall you eat it," and it originally referred to the sacrifice, but it's actually the charoset that we eat with the matzah and maror.

I usually answer that the haggadah was written by a committee. Like many collective works, it includes the ideas of multiple authors, even when these ideas are inconsistent or redundant.

Thus, the requirement to have a roasted egg on the seder plate may represent the opinion of one rabbi or group of rabbis, while the shankbone represents the opinion of others. Perhaps those favoring the egg also suggested an addition to the haggadah text that would have referred to it, but their suggestion wasn't adopted. Who knows?

It may also represent an established custom that the rabbis of old didn't endorse, but felt unable to abolish. Leaving the egg on the seder plate without any reference in the haggadah text would have been a compromise.

I see the first washing of hands in the seder in this way. No brachah is said then, which also requires some explanation. Conventionally, people say that there is no brachah so that people will ask why there is no brachah, which just sounds silly (unless you think that it is desirable to ask as many different questions during the seder as possible, in which case anything that is odd or inexplicable has merit).

My take on washing hands without a brachah is that the rabbis weren't certain that washing hands at that point in the seder was actually required. The idea of a brachah shel mitzvah is that one says it before performing a specific mitzvah, so if the action isn't known to be a mitzvah, or is there is doubt, usually no brachah is said. We wash with a brachah before eating the matzah, just as before eating ordinary bread, but the first washing of hands precedes eating only a very small amount of a vegetable.

But some of us have another case of a food item that we place on the seder plate, but to which the haggadah never refers: the orange. Ordinarily this is described as representing women who were excluded from full participation in Jewish ritual.

There are several midrashim about the orange currently in circulation. All attribute the origin to Susannah Heschel. Her own account of it dates to a presentation she gave a number of years ago at Oberlin College. As she describes it, someone asked her opinion of the then-new practice among Jewish lesbians of placing a piece of bread on the seder plate as a protest against their exclusion from the mainstream of Jewish life and thought.

Heschel was uncomfortable with placing something treif on the seder plate, especially if the goal was for Jewish lesbians to gain acceptance, in other words, to become kosher in Jewish society. She suggested instead placing something totally new, such as an orange, on the seder plate--something that would not, in and of itself, transgress, but which could add new meaning.

Most households that place an orange on the seder plate don't make a formal addition to the haggadah text for it. Similarly, some add a kos Miryam, a Miriam's cup (of water) to the seder table even though most haggadot make no mention of it.

To some extent, the kos Miryam seems to have displaced the orange as a feminist addition to the seder table. For those of us who worship in settings where women participate fully, and where women serve on the boards and hold office in our congregations, the need to symbolize the exclusion of women from Jewish life, the purpose of the orange, no longer seems compelling. The kos Miryam may turn out to be a more enduring addition, because it symbolizes the omission of women's roles from our texts and history.

Metzora & Economic Segregation

I wrote last week that "just as our ancestors were inclined to reject individuals based on unjustified fears, we are prone to excluding others for reasons that are equally unwarranted, and these two parashot (especially Metzora) teach us to do better."

Anyone who teaches children and adolescents is familiar with this problem, but the tendency to exclude others for flimsy reasons isn't confined to young people. Growing up, I knew that no one in my family was welcome in the region's most prestigious country club - that was why there was also a Jewish country club.

My family didn't belong to the Jewish country club, either. We didn't play golf; it was a distance away; and it was expensive. But that's not the point.

The point I want to make is that many of our Jewish institutions, unfortunately including some congregations, tend to act like a country club. I don't mean that they have golf courses (although I did work for one congregation that had tennis courts and a swimming pool and was building a basketball court). Too often, however, they act as if they're composed of homogeneous groups of affluent Jews, to the point that less affluent Jews feel unwelcome or uncomfortable.

For example, a decade or so ago I had a student in the school who was planning not to celebrate as a bat mitzvah because her family could not afford the kind of lavish kiddush lunch and elaborate evening party that had become the norm in the congregation. To my mind, being called to the Torah at the age of religious majority ought to have nothing to do with the kind of party a young person's parents might throw.

It's by no means a new problem. Centuries ago, some Jewish communities had "sumptuary laws" intended to limit the expenditure connected with a simcha.

It's not, however, just a matter of the cost of celebrations. While it is a reality of nonprofit life in the U.S. that institutions need to cultivate donors of large amounts of money - which, to be clear, helps to keep membership affordable for the rest of us - social mores that make anyone feel less welcome because of income level or occupation have no place in our congregations.