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Another two cents on the matter of ethics in Jewish day schools. I
agree with Jack Bieler's comments to a great deal, that "yemei iyun" are of
limited value, and that models of ethical and menschlichkeit behavior are
far more critical. My own eyes were opened, sadly, during a Shabbaton last
year in which a very successful Friday night program dealing with ethics
and interpersonal behavior was followed, less than an hour later, by an
exceedingly cruel game in which the "strategy" (such as it was) was to
shock someone else into silence by saying something cruel (and usually
true) about that person. I believe that ethics should be inserted into the
curriculum, but on a constant and understated basis, not necessarily as a
unit which draws attention to the fact that we are now studying how to be
good boys and girls. Teenagers, in particular, might get drawn into
interesting and stimulating discussions on ethical topics, but they also
tend to leave such discussions in the classroom and forget about them on
the ballfield or in the lunchroom, etc. Extra-curricular activities can be
a far more effective tool for instilling an ethical sense into kids. But
even here, we must not expect an easy correlation between involvement in
hesed projects and other ethical behavior. In my experience, students can
participate in such activities for a variety of reasons, most of them good
ones, some of them less than ideal. But very few students participate out
of a sense of personal responsibility for taking care of some part of the
world that they live in. Encouraging students to take responsibility for
the world outside of themselves is no mean feat with teenagers, to be sure,
but over time, the projects that they are already involved in, whether
bikur cholim, tsedakah, other types of gemilut hasadim, or something inside
of their own schools, can transform from projects that make them feel good
about themselves for doing something nice to projects over which they have
ownership and responsibility for the results and the goals, and not just
the effort. At this point, ethics becomes internalized, and not just part
of an interesting classroom discussion. The culture of the school could
also do its part in demonstrating the importance of menshlech behavior and
gemilut hesed by explicitly recognizing the efforts of extraordinary
students in this area and creating a sort of prestige to this kind of
"extra-curricular" activity. While this might take away a little of the
li-shma from the students, the gain in proclaiming the priorities and
values of the school would far outweigh the loss.
Joshua Levisohn
Akiba Hebrew Academy</HTML>
