The Beginning of Wisdom

We recently read the remarkable confession of an old and honored Hebrew teacher, an Hebraist and a Zionist, Daniel Persky (“Religion and Nationalism in Hebrew Education,” Hadoar, October 26, 1934). This confession strongly confirms the fear which many have entertained for a long time concerning the inadequacy of a secular Hebraic and non-religious education for our children. This type of education was fostered in quite a number of Hebrew Schools and by Bureaus of Jewish Education during the last few decades. In these schools the teaching of the Jewish religion, in its spiritual and ethical phases as well as in its more formal phases of worship and ceremonial observances, was brusquely pushed aside as outmoded, or grudgingly tolerated as an inescapable concession to parents of the old generation who, because of their conservatism, still insisted upon it.

Modern Jewish education, in the hands of these “enlightened” pedagogues, became largely a matter of teaching Jewish boys and girls the Hebrew language. Occasionally a few other items which they regarded as the necessary accessories of a nationalistic education were added. These schools came to resemble more Berlitzer schools than religious schools. These pedagogues who brought over their “enlightenment” from Eastern Europe have now had a full generation in which to experiment with their educational theories, and one of their numbers and a leader among them now honestly and courageously takes stock of their accomplishments.

Mr. Persky states that he was moved to take stock by the rude awakening which he received recently when he attended a large meeting, arranged to honor a group of young American Chalutzim who were departing for Palestine. The meeting, attended largely by young American-born Jews, made a very favorable impression upon him because of the splendid enthusiasm and devotion for all that was Jewish and Palestinian which were manifested there by these young people. Upon inquiry, however, he discovered, much to his great chagrin and disillusionment, that none of these young people knew Hebrew and that very few of them had ever attended a Hebrew school. . . Graduates of the American Hebrew schools, he was led to confess to himself, are seldom numbered among the Chalutzim or among the active workers in the field of Jewish nationalism. Rather are they to be found by the hundreds in the ranks of the young Communists “who despise us and our sanctities,” and who are confirmed anti-nationalists and assimilationists. Mr. Persky feels himself almost driven to the conclusion that “the Hebrew school raises a generation of assimilationist Jews while those children who keep away from us become the faithful builders in Israel. . . .”

What is wrong? And what is the remedy? The principal remedy which Mr. Persky prescribes clearly indicates what he regards to be the true nature of the ailment. He calls for a complete volte-face. We must introduce into our schools, he argues, a maximum religious spirit. We must give our children the “warm” weapons with which to oppose their strongly assimilative environment. We must enkindle their Judaism day by day.

“I recommend that we intensify the spirit of religion and the force of tradition in our classes even to the extent of teaching our children the ceremonial laws and of practising them there and then. . . . We have sinned in having filled our classrooms with dry and parched intellectualism and rationalism. We are now convinced that this is not the way. Let us, therefore, return to the living, flowing fountain. . . . It has been cold and frigid for us here in America. Give us the holy fire, the fire of faith which is the fire of national life and survival!. . .”

There is very little that needs to be said in auditing this balance sheet of what has proved to be such a costly experiment. Both Mr. Persky’s survey and conclusion are correct. Jewish education divorced from a rich and positive religious content is without value and without enduring appeal to Jewish children living in this country, or, for that matter, anywhere else in the diaspora. Even in Palestine, in a thoroughly Jewish environment, an exclusively secular education would be inadequate for the rising generation. In the diaspora it is simply incongruous. The knowledge of a language and a literature (and very few of our children ever really acquire this knowledge to a point where they can truly enjoy it in later life. There is not sufficient time for proper instruction.) is an insufficient equipment for a Jewish boy and girl. They require much more. They require a spiritual viaticum for their future lives a faith, a habit of worship, a religious discipline, a loyal and cultivated attachment to the synagogue. They need not only Jewish nationalism but Judaism the strong simple faith of their fathers, its color, its warmth and its glowing mystery. They need the Jewish religious way of life and thought which fed and sustained our life in the diaspora until now and for which no substitute can be found either in a putative secular Jewish culture or in an imaginary Jewish civilization which is spun out of the tenuous cobwebs of wishful thinking in the study.

The study of Hebrew is, of course, an indispensable part of a proper Jewish education—but only a part. Linguistic ingurgitation does not necessarily nourish the soul. Our children need Torah, of which Saadia said that “were it not for the Torah, this people would not be a nation.” And Torah means faith in God, worship, religious observances, ethical idealism and loyalty to the people of Israel into whose keeping the Torah was entrusted! . . .