Religous School
by George D. Hanus
Excerpted with permission from the World Jewish Digest
[Since July is a quiet month of planning and work for our 2007-2008 school year, I thought I would reprint a wonderful article I found which is a paean to our devoted faculty members.—Sharon]
Imagine the following scenario: a mother, father and their two sons are sitting around the dinner table. The mother casually asks the older son, aged 14, what profession he would like to pursue as an adult. The son, nervous but proud, proclaims that he’d like to become a middle school Judaic studies teacher.
Science has not yet developed a measurement small enough to describe the miniscule amount of time it would take the typical incredulous parent to blurt out, “You want to do what?!”
Every society needs heroes…Simply stated, a hero is a person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life. They are independent thinkers, doing what they think is right even when everyone else is telling them otherwise. They make conscious decisions to act even when it would be much easier to do nothing.
In Pirke Avot, there is a famous saying: “Who is a hero? It is the person who conquers his inclination.”…
It is absolutely extraordinary that most Jews have been able to maintain this commitment to our heritage year after year for three millennia. Studies reveal that approximately 77 percent of American Jews today attend a Seder. No mater where one goes in the world, on the 15th of Nissan, millions of Jews will be gathered around a Seder table with family and friends, eating matzo, maror and charoset and retelling the story of the Exodus.
How is it possible? How, in the face of persecution, genocide, pogroms and rampant intermarriage, does a living, breathing Jewish people still exist? Our very existence today defies all statistical probabilities…
The answer is really quite obvious. Our eternal continuity is not the result of our Jewish fraternal organizations, committees or congresses, nor is it because of our federations of machers who get their names and pictures in the paper. It is not the product of blue ribbon committees, self-anointed iconoclasts or self-aggrandizing philanthropists.
It is simply the result of the dedicated work of the Judaic studies teacher.
Indeed one of the lower paid members of our Jewish community, the Judaic studies teacher, is actually the unsung hero of our history-defying survival…
Only by teaching our children, one generation to the next, in an unbroken chain, have we achieved this unprecedented feat. These unappreciated minions are the deputized vehicles through which we fulfill the biblical mandate of v'shenantam l’vanecha, “and you shall teach [these commandments] to your children.”…
Judaic studies teachers are some of the greatest heroes of Jewish history. They instilled Jewish identity when it would have been so much easier to blend in to the surrounding society. They did all their hard work for very little glory and even less pay.
Many people might argue that afternoon Hebrew schools are ineffective and have turned more Jews away from Judaism than they have inspired. If so, that is a symptom of the problem of Jewish education being a dismally low budgetary priority on our philanthropic agenda. For many, Hebrew schools have become a punishment for our children, a rote preparation for confirmation or Bar Mitzvah performances with little emphasis on a spiritual connection with God. Many children knowingly send their children to repeat their own suffering experience, calculating it to be a rite of passage.
Notwithstanding these adverse conditions, the Judaic studies teacher alone has been delegated the task of educating our children…
Therefore, the next time you meet individuals who have devoted their time to imparting Judaism to the younger generation, take a moment to thank them and pay them your respect…That way, the next time your own son or daughter tells you they want to be a Judaic studies teacher, you will beam with “yiddisher nachas.”
(George D. Hanus is chairman of the Superfund for Jewish Education and Continuity, the World Jewish Digest and the Jewish Broadcasting Network)
Sharon