What is Jewish Education?

This is a piece I wrote for the newsletter of the Reform congregation where I work.
Happy Chanukah!

It is a basic assumption that Religious School provides a religious education. I spent a lot of time in the halls of academia studying education, and although I don't have all the answers, I know how to formulate the right questions about education. But religion is different.

What do we mean by Jewish education? Mordechai Kaplan viewed Judaism as an evolving religious civilization, which ultimately led him to found the Reconstructionist movement. The Israeli Talmud scholar and biophysicist, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, saw Judaism as a path with a set of God-given laws for us to follow. Solel families send their children to our Religious School with their own notions of Judaism and I guess that no two of these are the same. So what does it mean provide a Jewish education? And how do the answers to this question affect all members of Solel?

There is a popular program called "Birthright" that assumes the right of Jews, by virtue of their birth into a Jewish family, to travel to Israel to see the Jewish state up close. Large foundations have established a program to get all young Jews who want to travel to Israel to go for free. The problem with this approach is that it avoids exploring the question of what constitutes a Jewish family, nor does it address whether Jews-by-choice have such a birthright. Neither of these questions would be a problem for Kaplan because the borders of a civilization are not as fixed as those of a genome. Leibowitz, on the other hand, would hew to a halachic definition of Jewish identity.

As I study Leibowitz, I ask myself why I can't simply write him off as a religious fundamentalist. There is something very fundamentalist about the idea that God gave us laws and that we need to follow them absolutely, but there is something to this argument. If we are not Jews because of our unique relationship with God, then why are we Jews?

There are two general answers to this question. Some suggest that we are Jews because the anti-Semites won't let us assimilate completely. They see Judaism as racial (genetic) and therefore inescapable. Others see Judaism as values-based, that we Jews have unique values.

No one should be forced to accept Jewish identity because it cannot be escaped, so many of my educator colleagues view Judaism as a set of "Jewish" values.

At Solel, parents and students sometimes ask why we do what they see as a repetition of the public schools' "character education." This question implies that the values that shape a citizen are synonymous with the values that shape a Jew. And I would agree that this assumption is largely correct. But I would suggest that Judaism is not just about values but also about the path to inculcating those values. That's why Jewish education is so important.

At Solel's Religious School we explore the Reform Jewish path to the values we share with most human beings. As England's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explains, "no one civilization encompasses all the spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions of mankind." But as Jews, we live our "spiritual, ethical and artistic expressions" through Jewish paths and these require Jewish education.

Coming to Religious School at Solel is not redundant because we are not simply teaching the values that our students learn in public school. At Solel, we teach the Jewish path to these values. It's one thing to appreciate labor and the beautiful world with which we have been blessed, and another to rest on Shabbat to live that appreciation. We don't just reflect on the hardships of our past, we do a Passover seder as if we were slaves in Egypt. And we don't just speak to God from our hearts, we pray-in the language of Torah-prayers that have come to us over generations. This is what religious education at Solel is about, and it is the path that we choose to define us as Jews.