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…
