Dear Shalom,
I am glad that my friend David Derovan cited R. Eliezer Berkovits’ 1970 article, “Jewish Education in a World Adrift†(Tradition 11:3 1970) as an important reference point in the ongoing discussion of the nature of Jewish education. When R. Berkovits states, “Education’s concern is (should be?) with the character, the personality, the soul of the child and youth,†I think that few if any would disagree.
But Jewish education has a “practicum,†i.e., one must translate the theory into practice, and in this regard, R. Berkovits’ essay while an important “table setter,†does not drill down to the specifics of what such education would comprise and how schools and educators are to go about translating these ideas into specific actions and activities.
One could say that keeping things general is just as well because it will allow for each community, and school for that matter, to devise its own approach to this challenge, a “bottom-up†rather than “top-down†approach. But the mitigating factor that will discourage such self-conscious meaningful acts of “translation†are the pressures brought to bear on a dual-curriculum school where double the subject matter must be taught over the course of the same number of years, and that is consumer-driven in terms of perceived prestige and acceptances to the leading universities and Israeli institutions. Therefore, a middle position would encourage Jewish thought-leaders to be more specific about how they think that Jewish education could be made more pointed in addressing the issues of “character, personality and soul,†and thereby hopefully inspiring individual schools (and synagogues—I would posit that the morning Derasha, regular Shiurim and adult education are also arms of “Jewish educationâ€) to use such suggestions in developing their own specific responses to the issues that someone like R. Berkovits raises.
Over the course of my career, I have written a number of papers (I believe that central to this discussion is “Jewish Education for Jewish Commitment†[
rayanotyaakov.files.wordpress.com] ) that appear on my website (https://rayanotyaakov.wordpress.com/publications ), and recently a book, The Great Principle of the Torah (Kodesh Press, 2016), that attempts to identify and analyze key Jewish values that, in my opinion, should inform all Jewish Torah learning.
Yaakov Bieler
Silver Spring, MD
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/29/2016 08:48PM by mlb.
