Preparing Our Students
August 20, 2008
It is with pride and gratitude for the thoughtful and dedicated work of our Religious School Committee that I present to you the new mission statement of our Religious School. Expect to be seeing these words a lot around here. They pack a lot of meaning in a little space.
The Samuel and Bernice Shapiro Religious School of Temple Emanu-El is dedicated to preparing our students to live and engage Jewish tradition in an inclusive community of life-long learning.
I’ve heard it said that a mission statement doesn’t really mean anything—that it’s just a bunch of words. While I understand that mission statements can sound slick or generic, in Jewish tradition there’s no such thing as “just a bunch of words.”
After all, God created the entire universe with nothing but the power of words. The collection of words contained in the Torah has molded and sustained our people for thousands of years.
What did our great rabbis and teachers do with these words? They studied them, reflected on them, cross-referenced them, drew new meanings from them. The words of our mission statement are new, but the ideas are as old as the Torah itself. And so, following in the tradition of Rashi and Rambam, I offer a commentary to our Religious School Mission Statement:
Preparing our students
What does it mean to prepare our students, our children, our future, for the rest of their lives? What are the obligations of a Jewish parent, a Jewish teacher, to our young people? (It is said that a teacher of Torah becomes as a parent to her students, and that every parent is also a teacher of his child.)
The Talmud teaches: “A father is obligated to do the following for his son: to circumcise him, to redeem him if he is a first born, to teach him Torah, to find him a wife, and to teach him a trade. Others say: teaching him how to swim as well” (Kiddushin 29a).
Today we understand this text as a directive to all parents, both mothers and fathers, to attend in a holistic way to the upbringing of all their children, sons and daughters. Our obligations to our children, the children of our community, encompass not only their spiritual and intellectual needs, but their emotional, physical, and practical needs as well.
As a Religious School, we are concerned for our children’s well-being in all of these dimensions. We are concerned that our children know an alef from a tav, and Sukkot from Shavuot; and we also teach them how to put on a tallit, or lead a Pesach (Passover) Seder; and we also want them to know that they have friends at the synagogue—that the Jewish community is a safe and friendly place for them. We want our students to feel that Judaism offers practical tools for dealing with difficult questions; and we also want them to feel that Judaism offers spiritual answers to our questions that have no words.
Our students are our children. We are all teachers, and all parents (spiritually, intellectually, or emotionally, if not biologically). Our obligation as a community, as a school, to prepare our children for their whole lives, for the rest of their lives, encompasses every aspect of their being. This is our mission.
To be continued…
Preparations — Then and Now
August 20, 2008
What tasks need to be done by the community in anticipation of the New Year? In ancient times as well as our own, the weeks leading up to the major, festive seasons were filled with the bustling activities of preparation. So we read in the Mishnah: (Shekalim 1:1)
On the first of Adar [i.e., the last Hebrew month of the calendar year] they make proclamations regarding the shekel tax and kilayim [the prohibition of forbidden vegetable mixtures as proscribed by the Torah]. On the fifteenth [of Adar] they read the Megillah in [walled] cities, and begin to repair the roads, plazas, and mikva’ot [ritual baths], and attend to all public works, and mark the graves, and send forth inspectors regarding kilayim.”
Just what were these preparations all about, and why were they so necessary every year? First, the Torah (in Exodus 30:12) commands the collection of a half-shekel tax from every male over the age twenty. While in its biblical setting, this may have been a one-time duty, later generations required its collection every year by the first of Nisan (the first month of the year) for the maintenance of the Temple and to pay for the daily sacrifices that were offered there on behalf of the nation. So one month prior to the due date, the government reminded people to pay the tax.
The leadership also called upon farmers to inspect their fields to remove forbidden mixtures (called kilayim) that might have grown together over the winter. By the time Purim arrived (in the middle of Adar) the rainy season was over, and only a month remained until the first holiday of the New Year, Passover, when Jerusalem would be filled with pilgrims making their way to observe the festival. Thus, it was important to clear the paths and plazas that would be used by pilgrims, and help them remain ritually pure by refilling ritual baths and refreshing the markers that indicated the presence of a grave. (Accidentally stepping on a grave would render a person impure and thus unable to enter the Temple or eat the Paschal Lamb.)
Unlike the days when the Temple yet stood in Jerusalem as recalled by our Mishnah passage, the springtime festival of Passover in the first month is no longer the time of primary gathering of the masses of Jewish men and women. Rather, in our era it is in the 7th month of the Jewish calendar, the month of Tishrei, when the community gathers in the largest assemblies of the year for the observance of the Days of Awe — Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, followed by Sukkot and Simchat Torah. But just like our ancestors, the need for preparation in the weeks leading up to our major gathering is equally vital. There’s a lot to do in anticipation of the New Year, and it involves a communal effort on behalf of dozens of devoted Temple volunteers, leadership, professional and support staff.
In many ways, though, we have many of the same or similar tasks to complete. Reminders were sent for collection of “taxes”, which are for us the annual tzedakah donations of membership dues to the synagogue in order to maintain the cornerstone institution of our Jewish community. We likewise see to the completion of necessary construction projects to keep up the physical structure of our house of worship, which this year includes completion of the extension of our air conditioning system and the construction of our new, lower bima in the Sanctuary. Fortunately, the local town governments take pretty good care maintaining our roads to assure safe and direct access for our worshippers, but we’ve likewise done our part by completing the re-sealing and re-lining of our parking lots.
Like our forbearers, we’ve seen to the cleaning and maintenance of our communal burial grounds, not so much out of concern for the possibility of rendering one ritually impure (a designation which is no longer particularly relevant to most contemporary, Reform Jews), but in order to honor the resting places of our departed dear ones, and in preparation for our annual Cemetery Memorial Service during the upcoming festival season. In addition, our Religious School text books are ordered, teaching faculty hired, and classes arranged in anticipation of the start of a new year of Jewish learning. And the list goes on and on as another full year of communal, social, educational, and inspirational occasions and activities lie ahead.
But not only do we as a communal institution have significant preparation to do in these weeks before the New Year, but as individuals we do as well. And that reality is likewise a challenge for us all. How, then, are YOU preparing for the Days of Awe and the New Year ahead? How are YOU getting ready — today and tomorrow — in order to assure that the observance of our High Holydays will be a time of meaning, change, beauty, joy and significance in YOUR life and in lives of your dear ones?
Indeed, there is much to be done even before our gathering, and clearly that’s the way it’s been for thousands of years.
Links 8/3/08
August 3, 2008
