I read and thoroughly enjoyed Joe Hirsch’s piece on passion in prayer in the elementary day school classroom. He identifies the symptoms and suggests some creative antidotes to the broken nature of Tefilla Education in the lower grades (which leads to the all-too-familiar problems encountered in middle school and high school tefilla). But I wonder if the root cause, not identified in the piece, is our aims for Tefilla Education at the outset.
If our aims are tefilla literacy, that is, a familiarity and fluency with the “matbe'a tefillaâ€, the text of the siddur, and the halachot of tefilla, then we cannot expect our students to be engaged emotionally and spiritually in tefilla. Neither in the 4th grade, nor in middle school or high school. But if we are trying to achieve the developing and building of connections, to God, the Jewish People, and self, then our focus should be on meaning-making rather than tefilla fluency, which I believe will be more likely achieved on the way anyway, if the child is engaged and emotionally connected to the tefilla text from the outset.
We often feel such pressure to present our first graders with a full adult siddur and allow students to be overwhelmed with too much textual exposure, which can lead to meaningless (even if melodiously enjoyable in younger grades) tefilla sessions. The adage "less is more" may just be the appropriate guiding principle here for the brave tefilla educator. Perhaps we should approach the siddur more as a child’s first book of Jewish philosophy, or as a handbook for relationship building with their Creator, and allow it to function as a guide for us in providing for our student’s spiritual journey.
Daniel Rose, Ph.D.
Director of Educational Projects
Koren Publishers Jerusalem
www.korenpub.com
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/28/2015 12:39PM by mlb.
