I had an interesting conversation with a parent of a high-schooler this afternoon. For the sake of presenting the case, we’ll call the parent Sarah and the child Yitzchak.
According to Sarah, Yitzchak’s Rosh Yeshiva is directly telling Yitzchak where to go in Israel next year, undermining Sarah’s attempts to help guide Yitzchak. Sarah would be more comfortable if the Rosh Yeshiva would include, in his counsel, the idea of parental input.
My thoughts:
1) Most educators have personal agenda - and all committed educators have personal agenda.
2) There is no reason to compel educators to hand carte blanche to a parental agenda.
3) Parents have an obligation to check out an educator’s agenda in advance.
First: I think it’s important to recognize that committed educators (as opposed to the hopefully-few educators who just couldn’t find other jobs) have an agenda. That’s why they go into education; they believe in their right and their obligation to promote certain ideals to our children. If they didn’t believe in doing that, they wouldn’t put up with our hooligan offspring in the first place.
I had a 7th grade rebbe at HALB in the 80's who used to tell us to ask our parents to send us to Telz in Cleveland for high school, so that they would end up compromising by sending us to Chafetz Chaim. (The push didn’t work on me; I went to MTA.) I had rebbeim in later years who promoted learning full time, and I had rebbeim who promoted kiruv, and I had rebbeim who promoted Torah Im Derech Eretz. They all promoted the ideals they had entered chinuch in order to promote.
Second: It is possible that a yeshiva’s agenda might actually include promoting strong parent-child relationships, and particularly surrounding Torah study - but parents should recognize that this is not necessarily the case.
Educators often feel that they have a better sense of what children need, because they are more objective than parents and because they are often better-educated than parents.
Further, educators may view themselves as just one piece in the puzzle of influences. They may say, “Why should we promote the parents’ agenda? That’s the job of the parents!”
Third: I believe that an educator has the right to maintain an agenda - but I also believe that parents are obligated to inquire about the agenda before enrolling their children, and to receive an honest answer.
If the agenda is to support parental decisions, wonderful. If the agenda is to direct matters based upon the rebbe’s perception of the child’s needs, also wonderful. The parent should decide on the goal for his child’s education, evaluate the yeshiva’s agenda, and then make a decision.
The problem, of course, begins when the agenda is hidden, when yeshiva administrators wish to attract students from homes built on other ideals, and they do it by concealing the agenda behind flowery talk and thin assurances that they will never push the children away from their parents’ ideals.
Some justify this ideological bait-and-switch by titling it ‘kiruv,’ but so far as I am aware, אין אומרים לאדם חטא בשביל שתזכה חבירך, we don’t say to sin in order to benefit another person, and lying counts as sinning. Lying in order to bring someone else closer to Torah is inappropriate, from a halachic perspective.
I don’t know how Sarah will handle Yitzchak’s future, but I can say one thing: I hope that Sarah will use whatever influence she can exert to ensure that the agenda of the destination yeshiva in Israel includes a strong parent-child connection.
Showing posts with label Jewish community: Yeshiva. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jewish community: Yeshiva. Show all posts
Monday, March 17, 2008
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
The Salvation Sprouts: Davening in Yeshiva Day Schools
My older son, who is 8 years old, davens beautifully in Hebrew, but he doesn’t comprehend much of what he is saying. I've been encouraging him to read along the English translation rather than the Hebrew. The English is often too unvernacularish for easy understanding, but it’s better than a total lack of comprehension.
So last week my son was working with some half-plant, half-human figures he had created, and he named them Mr. and Mrs. Salvation Sprout. He had read in his Artscroll Siddur about how salvation sprouts, and he was inspired by their high-minded English to nickname these the Salvation Sprouts.
That incident aside, I am disappointed at how little time many yeshiva day schools spend on teaching children the meaning of davening. I don’t mean the “How To” or when to bow and when to stand and when to sit and how to say the words, I mean the meaning, the sense that Dovid haMelech is talking to me in Psukei d’Zimra, the stern commitment that comes with Shma, the impassioned plea of the Shmoneh Esreih, the gloriously anthemesque Aleinu l’Shabeiach.
There are many reasons why schools don’t spend a lot of time in this: Kids are often too immature to grasp the concepts. It takes a lot of creativity to do this right. There is so much else to teach. The teachers themselves have a hard time with their own kavvanah. No one has yet developed a neat, standardized, Tal Am-esque curriculum for teaching davening.
But it is so necessary. Of all the Judaic lessons our children will learn, how many will be as important, on a daily basis, as davening? Perhaps some basic halachah, but that’s it.
We want our sons to put on tefillin, to daven with kavvanah, to enjoy sitting in shul.
We want our daughters to feel connection in davening, whether we are on the part of the spectrum that sends them to shul or we are on the part of the spectrum that doesn’t encourage female shul attendance.
How’s that going to happen if we don’t teach them to feel the davening?
Perhaps the schools think the parents will teach it, but that’s unlikely. And the result is generation after generation of children who grow up thinking Psukei d’Zimra is twenty repetitive paragraphs of “Praise Gd for this, Praise Gd for that,” who can sing every word of Shma but can’t translate it, who feel Shmoneh Esreih is boring, who live for the days when we skip Tachanun.
One of the reasons kids “flip out” in Israel and come back with a low tolerance for their hometown shuls is that they remember what it was like to grow up in those shuls. They remember that they felt weak or no connections to the davening. They remember people talking. And they contrast that experience with the way they saw davening in yeshiva, they contrast it with the small bits of kavvanah they picked up here and there in Israel, and they don’t want to go back to the schmoozing and the rote recitation.
If we would teach them better in the first place, they would have fonder shul experiences to remember, and they wouldn’t need to fear returning home.
We can do better than this. And if we want our children to love shul, we had better do it.
So last week my son was working with some half-plant, half-human figures he had created, and he named them Mr. and Mrs. Salvation Sprout. He had read in his Artscroll Siddur about how salvation sprouts, and he was inspired by their high-minded English to nickname these the Salvation Sprouts.
That incident aside, I am disappointed at how little time many yeshiva day schools spend on teaching children the meaning of davening. I don’t mean the “How To” or when to bow and when to stand and when to sit and how to say the words, I mean the meaning, the sense that Dovid haMelech is talking to me in Psukei d’Zimra, the stern commitment that comes with Shma, the impassioned plea of the Shmoneh Esreih, the gloriously anthemesque Aleinu l’Shabeiach.
There are many reasons why schools don’t spend a lot of time in this: Kids are often too immature to grasp the concepts. It takes a lot of creativity to do this right. There is so much else to teach. The teachers themselves have a hard time with their own kavvanah. No one has yet developed a neat, standardized, Tal Am-esque curriculum for teaching davening.
But it is so necessary. Of all the Judaic lessons our children will learn, how many will be as important, on a daily basis, as davening? Perhaps some basic halachah, but that’s it.
We want our sons to put on tefillin, to daven with kavvanah, to enjoy sitting in shul.
We want our daughters to feel connection in davening, whether we are on the part of the spectrum that sends them to shul or we are on the part of the spectrum that doesn’t encourage female shul attendance.
How’s that going to happen if we don’t teach them to feel the davening?
Perhaps the schools think the parents will teach it, but that’s unlikely. And the result is generation after generation of children who grow up thinking Psukei d’Zimra is twenty repetitive paragraphs of “Praise Gd for this, Praise Gd for that,” who can sing every word of Shma but can’t translate it, who feel Shmoneh Esreih is boring, who live for the days when we skip Tachanun.
One of the reasons kids “flip out” in Israel and come back with a low tolerance for their hometown shuls is that they remember what it was like to grow up in those shuls. They remember that they felt weak or no connections to the davening. They remember people talking. And they contrast that experience with the way they saw davening in yeshiva, they contrast it with the small bits of kavvanah they picked up here and there in Israel, and they don’t want to go back to the schmoozing and the rote recitation.
If we would teach them better in the first place, they would have fonder shul experiences to remember, and they wouldn’t need to fear returning home.
We can do better than this. And if we want our children to love shul, we had better do it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
