Rabbi Ari Leubitz is the Associate Rabbi of Bnai-David Judea and serves on the faculty of Shalhevet High School in Los Angeles. Yossi Kastan is the Executive Director of a not-for-profit educational organization and serves on the faculty of Shalhevet High School in Los Angeles.

Our Jewish day schools expect the highest standards of ethical conduct from our graduates. To achieve this foundational objective, we aim to engage every student in a moral code, which we know as the Torah. Toward this end we offer a wide range of Judaic subjects to meet the diversity of our students’ religious interests and backgrounds, emphasize the integration of Judaic and secular concepts in order to assure that our content is relevant and meaningful, and allocate significant resources to Shabbatonim, Rosh Hodesh events and holiday happenings to create communities of purpose. A core principle in all that we do is to foster students who engage in Torah study and internalize Jewish values, and thus become ethical citizens in their own right.

The problem with this approach is that empirical research in the psychology and sociology of religion indicates that religiosity – or even practice – does not automatically manifest itself into ethical behavior. This is true irrespective of whether religiosity is defined in terms of the tenets of a specific religion or in more general terms of an individual’s overall religiousness (Batson, Schoenrade, & Ventis, 1993; Hood, Spilka, Hunsberger & Gorsuch, 1996). Mandating our students to give charity, offering Judaic courses, or even cross-curricular integration may lead our students to grow in religious faith or practice, but will not necessarily lead to the ethical results we aspire to inculcate in them. As an example, “in several studies no difference between religious and nonreligious persons regarding behavior such as dishonesty or cheating has been found” (Smith, Wheeler, & Diener, 1975), and Hood et al. observed that “we are left to ponder why religion does not have a significant impact in reducing cheating behavior” (1996: 341).

How, then, can we achieve our mission? How can we ensure that we are actively providing our students with the knowledge and skills set in a way that will truly impact their moral and ethical actions in a positive way?

Role Identity and Role Expectations

Role expectations are developed in the social interactions among people. These interactions involve behavioral expectations in the form of social roles. For example, individuals occupy positions in various social structures (spouse, parent, employee, teacher, student, friend, and so forth), and these positions incorporate role expectations. The set of roles associated with a position, when internalized over time by an individual, constitutes a component of that person’s identity (Burke, 1980; Burke & Tully, 1977). This role set generates a sense of self-identity as a particular kind of person (spouse, parent, teacher, student, friend, etc.).

An individual’s self-identity is typically multifaceted, and thus occupies multiple social positions. The role expectations and corresponding self-identity can conflict with each other. In other words, a role expectation someone faces as a parent may be incompatible with role expectations that person faces as an employee. Even in the absence of direct conflict, questions arise as to how people will allocate resources among different identities.

These questions can be answered by considering the individual’s identity salience, the individual’s relationship to a particular role identity or role expectation. Identity salience is typically measured by examining rankings of self-descriptions (Stryker & Serpe, 1982). The more salient an identity, the more likely it will be activated in social situations, and the more likely that behavior will be guided by the role expectations associated with that identity (Zahn, 1970). This is because failure to behave in conformity to a highly salient self-identity is likely to generate strong levels of cognitive dissonance and emotional discomfort (Festinger, 1957; Wimberley, 1989).

Therefore, beyond the apparent ties to a set of religious beliefs and practices, we also must consider the degree to which religion constitutes a central component of one’s self-identity (Davidson & Knudsen, 1977; Putney & Middleton, 1961). When religion is a critical component of one’s self-identity, departures from religious role expectations should generate higher levels of cognitive and emotional discomfort for the individual. This will lead to efforts in reducing the cognitive dissonance by bringing the behavior into line with religious role expectations, namely moral action and ethical behavior.

Practical Application for Jewish Day Schools

As Jewish educators, our aim is that our students appreciate and internalize the impact that our values and texts can impart onto their moral development. The manner in which we achieve this goal is two-fold. First, our students must understand the value of having an all-encompassing moral system to guide them with daily decisions. Once students value having rules to live by, the second step is Jewish identity salience. A high Jewish identity salience is achieved when our students value Judaism or the Torah as a unique and relevant moral system as a part of who they are as human beings and citizens of the world.

To help students value a system of morals and ethics, we can use Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development. Kohlberg (1981, 1985; Kohlberg & Kramer, 1969) – using Piaget’s theories of cognitive and moral development as a starting point – developed a model of moral development with six stages. In the earlier stages, people make decisions based on reward and punishment or depending on what is in it for them. Our goal is to draw our students to higher moral reasoning stages where they subscribe to shared norms and care about others’ expectations of them, where society’s laws become inherently important, and eventually where decisions are made based on what’s best for the greater good and/or based on universal principles.

Different students are at different stages of the moral development scale. For the most part, students in school are still at the earlier stages, concerned with their own well being, and some even concerned with other’s expectations of them. Few are at a stage of their moral development where they are ready to accept a prevalent or all-encompassing moral code. Through the Kohlberg model and the use of moral dilemmas we can interpret the students’ current ethical decisions, introduce them to other views and values, and foster the desire in them to reach for higher levels of moral reasoning.

Once our students recognize the value of a moral system, we are ready for the second step: allowing our students to consider their Judaism as an essential ingredient of their own moral code and consider it a part of their very being. This must be done with great caution. When Jewish law is presented as mandates or dogmas, it forces our students to become defensive about their views and values, isolating them from the richness of our tradition. Students will refrain from identifying with Judaism, as they may feel that Judaism doesn’t identify with them. This is where the teacher’s role is crucial. The teacher must identify the ethical and moral dilemmas that our students wrestle with on a daily basis. Once identified, the teacher, as a facilitator, must transform the classroom into a venue where students represent their positions and are confronted with opposing positions and values.

The essential component of this process is that we must validate the student’s point of view, as long as it is not grossly antithetical to Torah (i.e. murder, sexual immorality, idolatry, etc.) In a Judaic class, we must find a validating point of view, as opposed to handing down a final decision. In other words, as opposed to the teacher simply telling students what something ought to mean, the teacher should solicit input from each student about a text’s value, or how it might create meaning in their personal lives and minds. Once they respond, the teacher, when warranted, needs to find a way to validate each student by showing that there is a Jewish view or commentary that agrees with each of them, at least partly.

In secular studies classes, it is just as important to validate each student when discussing society, politics, history, literature, etc. Once again, first we must solicit the students’ opinions. Once the views are expressed, we can demonstrate to them that our tradition shares their view or expression of the world. Our students must appreciate that our tradition is rich and can deepen their appreciation of medicine, music, politics, and various other things in which students find interest.

Students already have their general viewpoints and can articulate a rationale for their position. If we can harness that rationale to demonstrate that their views are inherently Jewish ones, perhaps we can help them realize their Jewish identity to be highly salient.

Our aim is not to expand the students’ immediate religious actions. We are more concerned with their understanding the process of moral development. We want them to consider other views and opinions, and appreciate that Judaism is a moral code that is sensitive to the unique challenges we face on a daily basis. The hope is that they will in turn want to identify with Judaism. Once they have that Jewish role identity, the students will be more receptive to the details of the role expectations that come with that identity. When our students are ready to accept a more universal moral code into their lives, it is then that our students may use that Jewish identity and role expectations to drive their decision-making and make positive ethical choices.

References

Batson, C.D., Schoenrade, P., & Ventis, W.L. (1993). Religion and the individual: A social-psychological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Burke, P. J. (1980). The self: Measurement requirements from an interactionist perspective. Social Psychological Quarterly, 43: 18-29.

Burke, P. J., & Tully, J. C. (1977). The measurement of role identity. Social Forces 55: 881-897.

Davidson, J. D., & Knudsen, D. D. (1977). A new approach to religious commitment. Sociological Focus, 10: 151-173.

Festinger, L. A. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Hood, R.W., Jr., Spilka, B., Hunsberger, B., & Gorsuch, R. (1996). The psychology of religion: An empirical approach. New York: Guilford Press.

Putney, S., & Middleton, R. (1961). Dimensions and correlates of religious ideologies. Social Forces 39: 285-290.

Smith, R. E., Wheeler, G., & Diener, E. (1975). Faith without works: Jesus people, resistance to temptation, and altruism. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 5: 320-330.

Stryker, S., & Serpe, R. T. (1982). Commitment, identity salience, and role behavior: Theory and research example. In W. Ickes & E. S. Knowles (Eds.), Personality, roles and social behavior: 199-218. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Weaver, G., & Agle, B. (2002). Religiosity and Ethical Behavior in Organizations: A Symbolic Interactionist Perspective. Academy of Management Review 27(1), 77-97.

Wimberley, D. W. (1989). Religion and role-identity: A structural symbolic interactionist conceptualization of religiosity. Sociological Quarterly 30: 125-142.

Zahn, G. C. (1970). The commitment dimension. Sociological Analysis 31: 203-208.