Liberal education

This is a column that Racheli Melek Buda wrote a few years ago and you’ve probably seen it. But I only started reading you last month, so I don’t know if you’ve responded to this column before. If so, I’d be happy if you’d direct me there. In any case, the reason I’m sending you the column is because you’re constantly educating against conservatism and here she points out many of the failures of open education. I’d be happy if you’d respond to her claims.
For a good few hours now, the text message from the synagogue committee has been waiting on my smartphone. “What’s up,” it said, “Would you like to teach a lesson on Shavuot? This year’s theme is ‘water,’ you can take it in any direction you want.”
I used to answer such a request with an automatic “yes.” What’s the problem with picking up a lesson for a former midrash student? A few glimpses into Rambam and Rabbi Tam, a beautiful anecdote from an Agnon story, and here’s a source page with a brilliant move you’ll never forget.
But instead I was overcome with anxiety. Which quickly turned into shame. I didn’t know how to tell them that… well… I forgot how to study Torah. I had neglected this muscle. And suddenly when I have to reactivate it, I have a cramp.
The truth is that it had caught my attention even earlier, on Shabbat evening in the village, when I heard Shabbat songs emanating from one of the houses. It was a rare occurrence. I assume that the neighbors were hosting a really, really ultra-Orthodox family if they allowed themselves to just sing songs in the middle of the night, because among us, singing has long since ceased to be a part of the Shabbat table.
Where did the singing disappear from our lives? I suddenly asked myself. We eat together, we worship together, Shabbat is Shabbat. But the pleasantries have evaporated over the years and have been replaced by lively conversations or political debates. From a natural ritual without which it is impossible to spend Shabbat, they have become a tedious matter. What, suddenly stop the laughter and bring it to some “Sparrow will cry”? That’s something that puts you at risk of officially becoming a party wrecker.
When my son wanted to be accepted to a religious high school, they announced that there would be a Jewish exam. “Tell me,” I asked him on the way to the exam, “do you even know the blessing for living by heart?” Of course he didn’t remember. After all, in the exemplary Laity home where he grew up, children are no longer forced to recite the blessing.
And last Shabbat, when the boys refused to go to synagogue and I found myself pleading with them with forced moderation (“I don’t want to force you, but maybe you’ll go to honor me?”) it hit me hard: I had failed educationally. All these years I told myself that it was possible to educate children in folkloric religiosity. If we just sent them to a mixed school and didn’t pressure them about Judaism, we would succeed in bringing out of them the perfect progressive religious person. Knowing Torah but skeptical about it. Knowing halacha but not necessarily loyal to it.
I wonder if my children will remain religious. I used to think it wouldn’t matter to me, but in recent years the thought has started to hurt a little. I remember one day discovering that my cousin, who had come out of the closet many years ago, had suddenly returned to wearing tefillin. “The boy is celebrating his Bar Mitzvah soon,” he explained to me. “I used to know how to read Torah, I thought I could teach him, and I forgot everything. Suddenly I asked myself, what am I going to leave him? What legacy?”
“What am I going to leave to my children?” This is the alarm clock that has begun to ring in my life. The religious post-traumatic stress disorder that governs me, the one that makes me afraid to get angry at my daughter when she draws on Shabbat lest I look at her like a sentry from the ulpana, has also managed to scrape from the walls of my house the element that every average lite-religionist wants in his life – Yiddishkeit.
Slowly and gradually I feel how Torah is being forgotten. How entire prayers that I once knew by heart are fading in my head. How rituals that were a childhood favorite have become a vague memory. I thought I would be able to teach my children to be religious in theory. To know blessings but not to bless them. To come to synagogue but not to pray with devotion. And I failed in the experiment.
And now, I can only admit – if my children remain religious, it is thanks to their grandfather who insists that they have a kiddush. Thanks to their grandmother who is not willing to buy them ice cream at a stand without a kosher certificate. Thanks to the pushy educators that we ourselves feared becoming.
All our lives we’ve tried to escape from being those parents who force their children into synagogue and get angry with them when they play outside instead of praying, and now – all we want is for them to know something about these prayers, even just a little bit.
I was born on Shavuot. There is quite a bit of irony in that. The girl who was born on the day the Torah was received and ran away from it as long as she had the spirit – receives it back like a slap in the face. And suddenly I understand a little bit about my father, who insisted that we sit at the table during the Zmirot and that no one be absent. He understood what I am only beginning to understand now – that it is impossible to instill a way of life without repeated and deliberate assimilation. It is impossible to raise a generation that continues through episodes of folklore. As annoying as it may sound, there is no way to educate in meaningful religiosity without a hint of coercion or a demand for a certain sacrifice. We wanted to raise a generation of sophisticated religious people free from halachic trauma, and before we knew it – we had a generation of peoples of the lands.

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