Zecher litziyat Mitzrayim

In the first session of the Crash Course in Jewish History, I said that the ultra-condensed version of the course would be, “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!”

While that’s supposed to be a joke, it represents the extent to which Passover exemplifies the Jewish view of history. We tend to see every event in our history as following that pattern.

In Jewish thought and in Jewish prayer, Passover is even more than our story of survival and liberation. For example, although we teach young children that Shabbat is the weekly remembrance of God’s resting after creating the world, the kiddush for Friday night states that Shabbat is zecher litziyat Mitzrayim, the remembrance of going-out from Egypt.

Many of the instructions in the Torah also tie themselves to the Exodus. Deuteronomy 18:17 tells us, “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless,” and verse 18 adds, “Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and that the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment.” The passage continues with the well-known instructions to leave overlooked and fallen crops in our fields and orchards for the poor to gather, and concludes by reiterating, “Always remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment.”

Therefore. Does this mean that we are obligated to carry out these commandments because of our history as slaves in Egypt, or that we are given these commandments to help us remember that we were once slaves?

Or does it matter? The traditional idea is that observing ritual mitzvot helps us to observe ethical mitzvot, but it’s a two-way street. On one hand, the ritual of the Passover seder should strengthen our resolve to help the poor and oppressed. On the other hand, we celebrate Passover only once a year, but our fellow human beings need our help year-round.

Thus, whenever we help someone who is poor, ill, or oppressed, we should understand it as fulfilling commandments of the Torah, commandments associated with Passover.

This has been on my mind recently because of the B’tzelem Elohim (In the Likeness of God) curriculum that our eighth- and ninth-graders are following. The curriculum leads the students to create and carry out community-service projects, but it begins with study of texts from the Torah and later writings about our obligations to help others and, in particular, the best ways of doing so.

Students find these texts difficult and perhaps unnecessary, because the duty to help others seems self-evident. That it does demonstrates how thoroughly some of these instructions from the Torah have become central to Jewish life and, to a great extent, to American life. Nevertheless, we should be mindful that, when we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, or work to liberate the oppressed, it is a holy act—a remembrance of our going-out from Egypt.

Torah and Evolution, part 2

Today was Evolution Shabbat in many synagogues, and tomorrow will be Evolution Sunday in churches. Evolution Weekend is the weekend nearest Charles Darwin's birthday (Feb. 12). The Evolution Weekend web site states:

Evolution Weekend is an opportunity for serious discussion and reflection on the relationship between religion and science. One important goal is to elevate the quality of the discussion on this critical topic - to move beyond sound bites. A second critical goal is to demonstrate that religious people from many faiths and locations understand that evolution is sound science and poses no problems for their faith. Finally, as with The Clergy Letters themselves, which have now been signed by more than 13,000 members of the clergy in the United States, Evolution Weekend makes it clear that those claiming that people must choose between religion and science are creating a false dichotomy.

It's an outgrowth of the Clergy Letter Project, in which (as of Friday) 467 rabbis and more than 12,000 Christian clergy had subscribed to letters opposing attempts on any religious grounds to limit the teaching of evolution in public-school science classes.

I had the privilege of speaking about it this morning at Congregation Shomray Hadath. In truth, the idea of opposing the teaching of evolution on the grounds of a conflict with Torah is just about unknown in Judaism, even in Orthodox circles: almost no Jewish adults in North America reject science. A problem does occur from time to time in science classes in Orthodox day schools, but it largely reflects the immaturity of the students.

I said that, in workshops for teachers, I sometimes ask participants to write down the answers to two questions:

1. Do you believe that we should teach the creation story in Genesis, chapter 1, to children?
2. Do you believe that it represents scientific truth?

As a rule, everyone answers "yes" to #1 and "no" to #2, and most do not see any problem with the split.

Religious Jews who "believe in" both evolution and Torah deal with it in various ways:

• Some see Torah and science as occupying different spheres of knowledge. They try to keep them separate and generally manage to ignore any apparent conflict.
• Some see the apparent conflict as demonstrating the limits of human knowledge, an approach dating back to Maimonides, who taught that if science and religion appear to conflict, it is only because our understanding of them is as yet insufficient.
• Many, probably the largest number in the liberal streams of Judaism, interpret parts of the Torah as metaphor and myth. This is the approach that Reform rabbis took in the Pittsburgh Platform (1885), which states, "We hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism, the Bible reflecting the primitive ideas of its own age, and at times clothing its conception of divine Providence and Justice dealing with men in miraculous narratives."

In reality, it is not necessary for anyone to "believe in" either evolution or Torah. The theory of evolution is either correct or it is not, regardless of what any of us believes. (Opponents sometimes want schools to teach that it is "only a theory," but any scientist will say that it is the theory that best describes the data that exist.)

Similarly, Torah exists regardless of whether one "believes in" it and regardless of what anyone believes about it. The question for us is what we make of it.

Zealots might say that the bulk of American Jewry is able to cope with the difference between the creation story in Genesis 1 and what science tells us because most of us do not believe very much in God or Torah to begin with. I disagree with this, and side with the scholars who wryly observe that true faith does not require ratification by a committee of biologists.

It is easier for Jews than for Protestants because faith is really not central to Judaism as most of us know it. We do not have any concept of "justification by faith alone" (in that terminology, Judaism emphasizes justification by works), nor do we have any mandatory confession of faith. And we are not preoccupied with salvation; even on Yom Kippur, no rabbi calls out, "Come forward and be saved!"

The most elegant response is the one presented by Rev. Michael Dowd in his book Thank God for Evolution, about which I've written before. He argues that the Bible and science are not in conflict at all, but are telling the same story. They use different language; he calls them "day language" (the language of science and mundane reality) and "night language" (the language of dreams, poetry, and myth).

They also have different goals. The creation stories in Genesis (chapters 1 and 2) orient us, the People of Israel, to our place and role in the world, and it should come as no surprise that nations who view their places and roles differently should have different creation stories. We want to teach the story from chapter 1 to children because it depicts a universe in which God is control and has a plan, and the plan works as it should. Chapter 2 is less orderly; there's a lot of blundering. It explains to adults why the world in which we live is such a mess.We are seeing a continued and growing attack on the teaching of science in public schools, by political conservatives and religious fundamentalists who lobby state education departments, especially that of Texas—if a textbook cannot achieve adoption by the Texas authorities, it will probably never be published—to weaken the teaching of evolution. These demands include warning students that it is only a theory and presenting other theories, regardless of the fact that the other theories have no scientific support and amount to the teaching of religion.

Sometimes I even imagine a time in the future when we will need to send our students to Jewish day schools, not only in order to teach them Hebrew, Jewish life, and Jewish history, but also to teach them science. (And to protect them from fundamentalist Christian indoctrination in the guise of science.)

The version of the Clergy Letter for rabbis is here, and the list of rabbis who have signed it follows the letter.

It takes a shtetl

It takes a shtetl to raise a Jewish child.

No, that’s not quite right. Although the shtetl experience had significant effects on Jewish thought, it is not central to Jewish life today.

Few of us would willingly trade the freedoms of twenty-first-century America for the forced closeness of an isolated village in eastern Europe. But it does take a community to raise a Jewish child. This is not to say that one can’t be Jewish in isolation, such as when required by schooling, work, or military service. What it means is that to be a Jew is to be part of a worldwide Jewish community that cannot be defined by either religion or ethnicity alone.

Thus, not all Jews are religious, nor are all religious Jews religious in the same way. Our religious practices show a range of ethnic and philosophical differences. Nor are our ethnic customs all the same. Think about Jewish food: what is Jewish food? Sefardim such as Moroccan Jews knew nothing about bagels until they saw them in Ashkenazi bakeries in Israel or North America, but they eat rice during Passover. There are Jews who don’t like gefilte fish!

About a decade ago I taught an eighth-grade class on Jewish family history. The idea was that family history was the gateway to more general Jewish history. Jewish food was one illustration: whatever we think of as “Jewish food” is the typical food of the region of the world from which our families came, perhaps adapted to make it kosher. (Russian borscht might contain both meat and sour cream; in French cooking, à la juive, Jewish style, means fried in oil instead of pork fat.) By the late 1990s this was lost on students, because family food had become either mainstream American food, or the latest foodie craze—that year, Thai. So if family food is Jewish food, Thai food was Jewish.

Furthermore, our Jewish community, especially in America, is becoming progressively more diverse. It includes Jews by birth who are religious and who are not religious, and Jews by choice and other family members who participate voluntarily in the life of the community.

Young children do not think in global terms, and identification with a worldwide community is not automatic. For a very young child, the world is defined by home and family, and gradually expands to include the neighborhood, the school, and the temple or synagogue. As it expands, the child learns to be part of a community that is one step larger than the family, but still familiar and safe.

As the child matures, the connections of those communities to larger ones can become meaningful. This meaning develops through the family’s participation in their Jewish community.

Once children are of school age, religious school (Hebrew school) is the most obvious manifestation of Jewish community, because children spend three to five hours a week in Hebrew school. But school is not the only form of Jewish community, and it’s a somewhat artificial one, focused on specific kinds of learning. School can’t represent all the facets of a Jewish community. For example, the tzedakah component of our school curriculum can’t convey the experience of those who work together at the Community Kitchen on the first Thursday of every month. Our prayer curriculum doesn’t convey the bonding that occurs during a worship service. School parties don’t fully represent the experience of social events in our two congregations.

So I encourage the families of our religious-school children to participate as fully in the life of the Jewish community as they are able. That includes not only worship services—our most frequent community event—but also mitzvah projects, book discussions, social events, concerts and films, or even fund raising, and to bring their children whenever it’s feasible.

The forgotten sister

Parashat Vayishlach begins with another familiar episode, that in which Jacob wrestles with an angel.

Really? The Torah text does not say that his opponent is an angel. It says merely “a man.” Admittedly, God’s messengers (melachim) appear in Genesis as ordinary humans, so the version that used to be taught routinely is not automatically ruled out.

Jacob appears to think that the being is a demon, and only as the episode ends and his name is changed to Israel does he change his mind. The name that Jacob/Israel gives the place, Peniel, can be translated as “face of God,” somewhat suggesting that he actually believes that it was God rather than a messenger. It is thinkable that there may have been multiple versions of this story and that God appeared directly in some of them.

The story is troublesome in several ways, and not only because of the identity of the “man.” A different account of the changing of Jacob’s name appears in chapter 35, where God does appear directly. Because of Jacob’s obvious anxiety about the impending reunion with Esau, whom he tries to propitiate with lavish gifts, some commentators have suggested a reading in which the man is Jacob himself, a reflection of his internal struggle.

The episode immediately following the reunion with Esau is, however, even more troubling. In brief, Jacob parts from Esau and arrives at the city of Shechem. The son of the local chief—confusingly, the son is also called Shechem—rapes her, then announces that he wishes to marry her. (According to Deuteronomic law, he would be compelled to marry her and forbidden to divorce her, and would have to pay damages to her father.) The chief proposes that there be general free trade and intermarriage between the peoples of Israel and Shechem. Dinah’s brothers agree on the condition that the men of Shechem all be circumcised. While the men of Shechem are in pain, the brothers kill them all.

Dinah is never mentioned again, not even as an “ancestress.” It is all too easy to imagine that, since Shechem had been killed, that she never married.

Feminists have rightly objected to this story, not only because Dinah is the victim of rape, but also because she appears only as a victim. There are many instances in the Bible of women who make only one appearance, but the text gives more indication of the character and personality of every other woman than it does of Dinah.

Thus, feminist critics ask why this tale is included. As Rabbi Plaut observes, the mere fact that it happened (if it did) is not sufficient: the Torah surely omits many episodes in the lives of the Patriarchs.

One reason for its inclusion may be that it prefigures the massacres of various Canaanite peoples that are described in Joshua and Judges. The anachronistic statement that the brothers were angry because Shechem had committed an “outrage in Israel” (34:7) suggests that this might be a later addition. If this is the case, its purpose would be to justify aggression against the Canaanite tribes by showing not just that they were idolators in the time of the Israelite conquest, but that they had always done evil, even against our ancestors.

The story of Dinah is omitted from most Bible textbooks. Should we consider teaching it?
In most settings the answer will be no, and not only because the subject matter is unsuitable for young children. Even in high-school classes, where we might well choose to teach an episode such as the rape of Tamar, we would have to consider carefully what we hoped to accomplish. It’s never sufficient to teach just the facts of a section of Torah; we should always focus on the meaning that we believe students should draw from it.

In this case, we must reject the surface meaning, because the Torah seems to approve of the brothers’ actions, even the deception, and Jacob, who has some experience with both sides of deception, offers only a practical objection, not a moral one. The underlying meaning seems to have to do with the relationships between Israelites and Canaanites, so we should choose to place it in the Joshua–Judges context.

The child who does not know how to ask

Tractate Avot of the Mishnah specifies this curriculum for Jewish students (boys only):

• At the age of 5, a boy studies mikra (Scripture).
• At the age of 10, Mishnah.
• At the age of 13 he becomes a bar mitzvah.
• At the age of 15, he begins to study Gemara.
• At 18 he marries.
• At 20 (if not destined to become a scholar) he should get a job.

Although modern society disagrees with much of this—the lack of equivalent education for girls, the absence of secular learning, the assumption that studying the Talmud is the goal of all Jewish education—elements of it are still present in Jewish schools.

For example, we certainly teach stories from the Tanakh in kindergarten and first grade, and many Jewish day schools introduce the Mishnah in the fifth grade.

In general, however, religious-school curricula reflect modern beliefs about education. Many of these stem from the pragmatism of John Dewey in the early twentieth century, attempting to balance what students need to learn with what students want to learn.

Considering what students might want to learn is a relative novelty in education, secular as well as Jewish. For centuries, Jewish education followed an entirely prescriptive model in which the goals were mastery of halachah—Jewish law—in order to observe it fully, and, for those capable of more advanced learning, study of the Talmud. In other words, the yeshiva curriculum.

Secular education in the nineteenth century was equally prescriptive. While the goal for a child of the aristocracy might have been to become a learned gentleman or a refined lady, the goal for children of the masses was to acquire of useful skills—basic mathematics, grammar, and penmanship—that had immediate commercial utility. Think of Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens’s Hard Times.

With these models, considering what students wanted to learn was an innovation. Actually, recognizing that what students needed to learn and what they wanted to learn might not be identical was the innovation. It embodied the understanding that children are not miniature adults, and that their interests and capacities change as they grow.

About a decade ago, I taught a fifth-grade Hebrew class in which there seemed to be only one topic that students really wanted to study: Pokémon. Pokémon was almost a mania all over the country then, but it is not central to Jewish learning. While a few teachers attempted to use Pokémon to illustrate Jewish values, most felt that it glorified violence and materialism and was, at best, irrelevant to Judaism. (On the other hand, Saudi Arabia banned Pokémon in 2001 because of claims that it had Zionist content.)


Accordingly, students’ interests cannot be the sole criterion. In familiar Jewish terms, students are often like the fourth child in the Passover seder, the child who does not know how to ask. For example, until students have been exposed to Jewish ethics, they are likely to be content with the ethics of secular society. Students who have never attended Shabbat services probably won’t ask to learn the prayers of those services.

Thus, our consideration of students’ interests must be broad, not narrow. For example, we know that young students both need and want to learn how to understand the world around them, and that somewhat older students want to learn how to deal with questions of ethics and morality. By choosing topics that address these concerns, we attempt to draw students into Jewish learning, even if they did not yet know how to ask.

Role models

Abe Golos spoke about Michael Vick at Shomray Hadath on Shabbat Nachamu. I think he planned to continue by speaking about Jewish law on the treatment of animals, but other aspects of the topic engaged the congregation, and after he opened the floor to discussion he never got to that – everyone had an opinion.

The starting point was pro football's decision to allow Vick to play again, if a team wants to sign him up. Opinions were all over the place: some felt that since Vick had served his sentence, he should be allowed to resume his career; others felt that his sentence was too light, or that an example needed to be set.

The subtext of a lot of this discussion is that our society considers professional athletes to be role models for young people. To the extent that this encourages budding athletes to set high goals and to do what is needed to achieve them, it's a good thing. The problem is that it also encourages us to excuse bad behavior because of the athlete's success on the playing field.

Thus, some who wanted to let Michael Vick play again thought that it was necessary to validate his efforts to achieve football stardom. That is, if we don't let him play, it discourages younger athletes from striving for the success he had achieved.

A variation of this argument is that Vick – or any other bad-acting player – is so important to the game that we have to let him play. To my mind, this is not only untrue on the surface, but it wildly overstates the importance of the game itself. This is not Samson vs. the Philistines.

I may have a jaundiced view of this because, when I was in high school, the district was so short of funds that it considered discontinuing team sports. (I'm sure that they would have discontinued math and English instead, if the state law had allowed it.) I remember that my father was initially shocked, and then bemused, by the strength of feeling about it, especially the argument that team sports built character. For the next seven years (until he died) he regularly clipped articles from the local newspaper about former athletes from my high school who had been convicted of felonies, and sent the articles to me when I was at college and in graduate school. My graduating class's 10th reunion ought to have been held at the state penitentiary; more people would have been able to attend.

Role models... one of the strangest things I've experienced in job interviews is the suggestion that a synagogue or temple's education director must be a role model for the students. I'm not completely sure what we're supposed to be modeling – if it's devotion to Torah study or Jewish intellectual life, or to Jewish religious life overall, there was no sign of it in the interviews.

In fact, many of the parents' worst fear is probably that their son or daughter might take the education director seriously as a role model and decide to become a Jewish educator him/herself. What contemporary parent wants a child to become a Hebrew-school principal?

By choosing to become an educator, or even a rabbi or cantor, the professional all but takes himself or herself out of consideration as a role model for Jewish living. Of course I attend Shabbat services, wear a tallit, keep kosher, study Torah, and so forth: all those things are presumed to be part of my job. In essence, they're part and parcel of an identity that most people would never adopt for themselves.

I have usually answered that I think other people in the congregation are better role models. From a congregation of which I used to be a member, I might cite the Navy commander who, although he had minimal Jewish education as a child, has become very well-educated in Judaism. Since he was at sea for about six months out of every year, this came about almost entirely through his independent study. Or I might cite his wife, a Jew by choice, who took on most of the responsibility for the Jewish education of their child.

Or, moving from education to everyday ethics, I might think of the woman in the same congregation who said casually that she avoided spending time in a certain environment because "there's too much lashon hara there."

That kind of answer doesn't play well. In fact, I've come to feel that one sign that a job might be worth having is that no one asks any questions about the educator as Jewish role model.

Fish story

What did you learn in Hebrew school that you still remember? Or, if you did not attend Hebrew school as a child, what do you remember from any grade of elementary school?

One of my classmates from public school claims to remember nothing except that women in Tierra del Fuego bite the heads off the fish that they catch—not the most useful information to have readily available. I suspect, although I am not certain, that he does remember some genuinely useful things, such as the multiplication table.

What this reveals is that, in general, we remember best those things that we use regularly, and those that made a striking impression on us at the time. Sometimes the impression came from the sheer strangeness of the information (women bite the heads off fish) and was not necessarily what our teacher hoped to impart.

Schools of education teach that any school has three curricula: the explicit curriculum, the implied curriculum, and the actual curriculum. The explicit curriculum is the one designed by the director, curriculum committee, and school board. It comprises the choice of subjects to be taught, the stated learning objectives, the textbooks that are adopted, and the teaching methods that are recommended. It’s what we mean by curriculum when we’re not more specific.

The implied curriculum is unstated, but equally real. It consists of everything that students learn from the environment—for example, whether Hebrew school is more like school, camp, a play group, or something else. Some elements of the implied curriculum, such as the condition of the building, may not be in the control of the principal and teachers at all.

The implied curriculum also includes the message conveyed by what is taught or not taught. For example, I once had the opportunity to revise the curriculum of a school in which every grade studied two things: the Jewish holidays, and Israel. The high emphasis on holidays and Israel— and the absence of some other topics, such as Torah—probably taught students (a) that Jewish observance mattered a lot, (b) that real Jewish life existed only in Israel, and (c) that there really wasn’t that much to learn. They studied holidays and Israel in the first grade; after that, they kept getting the same material (from their point of view) over and over again.

The actual curriculum is, of course, what the students actually learn. Some of the actual curriculum comes from the explicit curriculum, but not necessarily with the intended emphasis (the fish weren’t really the point of the Tierra del Fuego unit). Some of the actual curriculum comes from choices made by the teacher, and some is inadvertent.

In any case, what we hope students will retain from school are the principles and ideas that a curriculum attempts to embody. Information and skills that receive constant use will be retained anyway. Facts that are not used constantly can be looked up, and skills can be re-learned. It’s the major ideas that matter most.

Recently I attended a seminar at the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland on Understanding by Design, a movement that builds curricula around “enduring understandings”: the ideas that have value in all settings and in all stages of life. Although a lesson built on Understanding by Design principles teaches the same facts and skills as any other lesson on the topic, it’s constructed to convey a central idea that transcends the information.

A third-grade class, for example, might take a short field trip to the sanctuary and learn the Hebrew names of the artifacts. The students might learn that the cover of a sefer Torah (Torah scroll) is a me’il (robe) and that the ornaments are rimmonim (pomegranates) or a keter (crown). They may or may not remember any of the terms, since most of us don’t talk about those things, especially in Hebrew, every day.

The enduring understanding that we might want students to gain from a visit to the sanctuary is different. What we’d most want them to learn is that the sanctuary is a holy place where Jews meet (the Hebrew name is beit k’nesset, house of assembly) to communicate with God and with one another. That’s an idea that is valuable throughout life, even if we forget the names of the artifacts.