<HTML>I would like to offer a hesitant, and incomplete suggestion in answer to
Stuart Zweiter's question regarding the "crisis" in Jewish Leadership
(Lookjed Digest 57).
I agree wholeheartedly with Stuart that the issue in question has reached
"crisis" proportions and I take no comfort that this very question is
raised by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch in his monumental work _Torah im
Derech Eretz_ where Hirsch himself acknowledges the difficulty and
importance of this question in his introduction.
My answer, unfortunately, speaks of the world of today.
Unless enough money is invested into the salaries of teachers, lay-leaders
and principals, with the exceptions of the dedicated, altruistic,
"teachers-by-calling-who-don't-mind-driving-second-hand-cars" (all present
and future readers and contributors to this list excluded), I do not
believe that the teaching profession will ever attract the role models and
brains that we all agree it so desperately needs.
Of course, if Rabbi Hirsch identified this problem, and we still have
Jewish Schools today, one would have to argue that we will always have
Jewish Schools and we will always be faced with this problem. This, of
course, is another, albeit not comforting reality.
Without being flippant I would argue that the material rewards for
teaching need to be concomitant with the rewards that the people who
should be in teaching are earning elsewhere in the world.
Yours at the chalkface
Frank Samuels
Principal : Yeshiva College of South Africa</HTML>
