As the song says, "Teach your children well . . ."
Published 2:39 pm, Wednesday, August 22, 2012
The new academic year at Temple Sholom for our supplemental religious school is just around the corner.
Like many other houses of worship here in our community, we take great pride in our religious school, in our teachers and students, and in the values that we instill in our young people through a combination of formal (classroom) and informal (social, creative) education.
The Torah is very specific with regard to what it is we are to teach our children and what the legacy of our community must be in every generation.
Our Divine charge is to "teach our children diligently," and we want to do everything in our power to ensure positive continuity of Jewish and societal values and ethics.
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The vision of our temple's educational mission is that our students' education must succeed in effectively and meaningfully shaping a strong Jewish identity, instilling Jewish literacy, inspiring Jewish commitment and in forging a lifelong desire to be connected to Jewish communal life.
To successfully implement this vision, we utilize our sacred Jewish texts and Hebrew language so as to teach Jewish values, history and traditions.
We seek to teach within these curricular spheres in a way that works effectively for each child.
This requires each individual child to be assessed, so that we may figure out how best to teach them, and our Jewish educational process must then be geared to actively succeed in creating this meaningful and productive Jewish learning experience.
Beyond the individual Jewish educational experience, we must make sure that we are succeeding in building Jewish community. Just as in many other synagogues, churches and houses of worship, our religious school is not a separate "silo" operating within the congregation -- it's a vital organ.
As part of our communal body, our school works with our other departmental "organs" (Youth department, Programming, Ritual, Social Action, Membership, etc.) to create numerous learning/social experiences that will reinforce positive Jewish identity and build our children's commitment to life-long Jewish learning.
As we move forward with our educational mission and mandate, we need to make sure we continue to evolve, always with the Biblical charge remaining the same: "Educate your children according to their ways." (Proverbs)
It is within this Divine charge that we have understood for more than 2,000 years the need to educate our children according to their unique nature and their particular needs.
From my earliest Jewish educational experiences as both a student and a teacher, I know the truth that Jewish education must be inexorably tied to experiential learning, both within formal and informal methods. And, most importantly, the learning needs to be relevant to how our children actually lead their Jewish lives -- and not a "pretense" of what Conservative Judaism aimed to be 50 years ago.
Conservative Judaism for the 21st century requires each family unit to figure out how they can meaningfully "conserve" their Jewish traditions while balancing their modern secular lives.
It's because of this that Jewish education requires us to focus on what is really important about being Jewish -- and never to lose the bigger picture. It is this emphasis on what to learn that needs to be anchored always in Jewish family and communal life.
Our children will move on to new homes and communities as adults, and they need to know how to meaningfully engage within their faith and sacred heritage, and always in the context of formal Jewish affiliation.
As we continue together as a community in pursuit of educational excellence, our hope is that together we may continue to "teach our children diligently," with values, ethics and the modeling of human decency and goodness as the lights that lead us, ever-inspiring us and our children to grow and flourish in a meaningful way.
Rabbi Mitchell M. Hurvitz is senior rabbi at Temple Sholom of Greenwich, co-founder of the Sholom Center for Interfaith Learning and Fellowship and a Ppast president of the Greenwich Fellowship of Clergy. For an archive of past Greenwich Citizen Columns, please visit www.templesholom.com