L. H. Grunebaum’s credentials for this parent’s view of Jewish education include three children, some years’ activity as a member of a religious school board, and a long-time interest in Jewish communal affairs.

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As a father I should be pleased with our religious school, and as a member of the Board of Education of our Reform temple I should be proud of it.

Every week, from October to May, three hundred children give up their Sunday morning’s leisure to a modern program of Jewish activities directed by a modern Jewish educator. Bible stories are not merely told, they are acted out. Crayons, drawing, and songbooks are tools of learning, as in other progressive schools. Holidays occasion plays, assemblies, festivals. In the upper grades, Jewish history, Jewish contributions to civilization, Jewish activities and social problems in America receive attention. These various strands of learning are finally woven together by the rabbi in preparation for confirmation, when the adolescents face the problems of religion and Jewish ethics.

Surely such a school can flourish only because the members of our community are proud of their Jewishness and vitally interested in their temple. But visit the synagogue on any Friday evening—which is the only Sabbath service. The temple is filled with—perhaps thirty people! The same is true on Sukkoth, Purim, Pesach, Hanukkah, all those holidays so rich in activity and meaning for our children. The temple is filled only twice a year, on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when, in fact, it overflows.

Is ours an exceptional congregation? Not if we are to judge by the constant lamentations, such as this one from a national periodical: “Empty synagogues are not functioning either for adult Jews or for pupils of schools; Sabbath and festival life are almost nonexistent in the Jewish community.”

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Jewish educators are well aware of the extraordinary discrepancy between what so many parents consider necessary for the education of their children and what they consider necessary for themselves. Indeed, they use the fact as one of their most impressive arguments for the vital necessity of Jewish education. With Jewish religion failing in the home, the Jewish school now becomes the key, to the survival of Judaism. “It is an indisputable fact that second and third generation American Jews—increasingly the largest proportion of the Jewish child population—are devoid of a home background of Jewish experience,” one writer states. Accordingly, it devolves on the educator to supply the “Jewish school of tomorrow,” which will create “an atmosphere of Jewish living” for the child who cannot take on Jewishness “through the subtle influences of the home or of the general community environment.”

But since religiously indifferent parents cannot be trusted to get reluctant youngsters out of bed on Sunday morning just for religion’s sake, educators have found a second, and stronger, argument. Do we not all know that religion has important therapeutic value? What better tonic for mental anguish in an unhappy world? Are not Jewish children doubly endangered, exposed as they are, not only to all the perplexities of the 20th century, but also to the germs of the inferiority complexes that breed in an antagonistic world? Does not social rejection cause heartache in the sensitive youngster and brashness in his tougher brother?

Here American Jewish education has found its prime objective. It seeks to place the child in a healthy and happy Jewish atmosphere, to show him the greatness of his people and its contribution to civilization; it aims, by letting him participate in beautiful customs and holidays, to teach him to take delight in his Jewishness. Let us refrain from inflicting Hebrew drill and dull, old-fashioned learning upon children, say the modern Jewish educators; the job is to make the child, faced with the problems of a minority group, into a healthy, integrated human being, by giving him inner dignity and spiritual assurance.

These child-centered arguments are basically—and quite consciously—different from the traditional Jewish educational aim. The yeshivot, Talmud Torah schools, and other organizations of intensive Jewish education strive for another goal: “If we . . . are actually concerned with the essence of the Jewish people, we must bequeath to them [the coming generation] our ancestral Judaism, in which the faith of Israel and the Torah of Israel have ever been the basic foundations, real and indivisible. The function of Jewish education is to raise a generation of Jews, in other words, to provide them with that spiritual content which makes a Jew out of a human being.” As compared with this, most modern parents bother little about “ancestral Judaism”; they try to bring up well-informed, untroubled boys and girls, informed about their Jewishness and adjusted to it.

Does this explain the riddle of the full Sunday school and the empty synagogue? Only in part, in my opinion.

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What makes those lacking a robust faith, and with at best only a mild predilection for things Jewish, send their children to Jewish schools at all?

If I look around at the members of my family and at my Jewish neighbors, the parents of my children’s friends, it seems to me that perhaps our strongest motivation is the “good Jewishness” of the immediately previous generations. Our generation is a transitional one in a very special sense. Mostly irreligious ourselves, we are the children or at least the grandchildren of devout people. The first and second generation descendants of East European Jews know of a Jewish existence in which civic and religious cultural life were practically identical. And while many, now grown up, have turned their backs entirely on what seems to them a medieval ghetto civilization, others, although thoroughly modernized, still derive satisfaction from celebrating the two great holidays and having their children receive a religious education. The last generation of more “assimilated” Jews is interested in its religion to a greater extent than is usually recognized. Though they live in a Gentile world, Judaism remains a life stream for them, and out of a kind of ancestral piety their children try to honor their parents’ memory by reverentially handing on the tradition.

So it is that many Jewish parents, matured in a naturalistic and sceptical age, still feel a void in their family life. They remember with emotion the lighting of the Sabbath candles and the blessings over the bread, the wine, and the children, and they wish for the festive drama of the Seder table. They have the hope that their children, by participating at school in the beauty of the Jewish holidays, may grow up to celebrate these holidays again in family circles of their own, thus maintaining continuity with a great past.

With other parents, the recently intensified interest in Jewish welfare and political and social problems is the spark. Men and women engrossed in Federation work, Zionism, or the United Jewish Appeal campaigns wish their children to know the meaning of the work their elders are engaged in. Today such activities have become the preoccupations not merely of the “professional” Jew but, in one way or another, of almost every one of us. Concern with the Jewish tragedy in Europe has been accompanied by a deepened concern with anti-Semitism and race hatred here in America. Small wonder that Jews now wish their children to be better informed about their Jewishness and about Jewish problems, more conscious of a Jewish kinship, more protected inwardly from the impact of prejudice.

Such are the needs that have shaped the rather pragmatic approach to Jewish education of recent years, of which the therapeutic argument of the professional educators may be considered one aspect—though increasingly a central one. Its spirit is well summed up in the report of the Commission on New Approaches to American Jewish Education. “We soon agreed that there was great need for our children to be taught the fundamentals of the heritage which, willingly or unwillingly, was theirs; since, being Jews (by the age-old definition that the world would so regard them), it was better for them to be Jews and like it than to be Jews only by social compulsion.”

In addition, there is, I believe, a motive which is not sufficiently recognized by the Jewish educator that may well be playing an increasing role in the revival of religious education—nothing less than a rising interest in religion itself. When so many Jewish parents who were themselves brought up as free-thinking “non-sectarians” today send their children to religious school, this cannot be merely a secular reaction to the contemporary social scene. There has also been a change in the spiritual climate. A search for new universals is on; intellectuals revive old beliefs and seek new faiths to forestall social collapse and ease inner personal stress. When Existentialism and medieval Christianity are featured in Life, something is happening.

In this atmosphere it is natural that “heathen” Jews, feeling their own dissatisfaction, should wonder again about the oldest and purest monotheism, and be prompted to curiosity and inquiry about their own religious tradition.

Undeniably, the generation of convinced agnostics that succeeded the pious Jews before them has lost its self-confidence. A new kind of doubting Jew has arisen, doubting religion, but doubting scepticism as well. The result is that many feel that even for purely intellectual reasons it “may be better” to give one’s child religious education, and let him afterwards choose his own position and affiliation. And indeed some such thinking often reveals itself when the parents explain why they too—“mind you, not that we’re religious,”—have “given in” and are exposing their children to a religious education.

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So far we have not asked the most important question. What effect, actually, does the Sunday school have, not on ourselves, but on our children? Do they really learn the Jewish way of life and become attached to it?

The fact is that the youngsters are indifferent—and their parents dissatisfied. The children—especially as they grow older—ask about Sunday school what the unmathematical child asks about mathematics: what for? To be sure, the younger grades are generally “happy if the play program is good. Some of the children in high school, too, are interested—usually a small minority from homes with a real allegiance to the Jewish group or the Jewish way of life, or others inspired by the personality of an unusual teacher or rabbi. But, in general, the older group is quite apathetic; it feels a negativism that frequently increases after confirmation.

Of course, it may be that the schooling is not good enough or intensive enough. Still, our local religious school is professionally considered as good as effort can organize and money can buy; and if we count the total amount of time of the child’s life that the religious school gets, our school ranks not with the average or the typical, but with the best. Although we may have the child for fewer hours each week than some schools, we keep him for more years. Does not the answer lie elsewhere?

Hopeful parents trying to revive the Jewish tradition must realize that, despite the efforts of Hebraists, Reconstructionists, and Jewish nationalists, young people are no museum in which an old religious civilization, however glorious, can be preserved and continued. Especially when what is taught at school is so at odds with what is heard at home.

Play and entertaining stories satisfy the young child, but the high-school adolescent keeps interested only if what he learns is made relevant to his present life and future career. But once the adolescent begins to ask searching questions, the re-acquired Jewishness of his parents melts under the rays of modernism and scepticism, amid the barrenness of contemporary religious life and feeling, and the utter inability of our well-to-do, middle-class congregations to give reality to “the ideals of prophetic Judaism” in personal or community action. Should it be any wonder that to such children the relevance of religious education seems a deep mystery?

Not that they lack a vital concern with ethical as well as with metaphysical problems. They hotly debate the ethics of the honor system, the justice of punishments in school and at home, the many difficult problems of behavior that arise from friendships of teen-age boys and girls, even the problems of economics and of minority groups. But at Sunday school, the fine and universal precepts of the Bible never touch reality specifically, lack concrete application, and hence have little impact or meaning.

Thoughtful young people are also eager to understand such basic issues as mankind’s role in the whole scheme of the universe: “Whence are we and why are we? Of what scene the actors or spectators?” But Judaism, like the other religions, continues blithely to dodge these issues or offers specious answers, and so most laymen have lost religious certainty. Add to this the prevailing feeling among parents that socialized prayer and holiday observance stand in no relation to the real ethical problems of our lives as individuals and citizens, and youth’s disillusionment is inevitable. How can modern parents ask religion to solve the deeper spiritual questionings of their children when they make it only too obvious that they do not look to it to solve their own?

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This is, of course, not an exclusively Jewish problem. Recently, a group of educators surveyed our colleges and confessed: “The doctrine, the authority, and the certainty [of traditional religious faith] are all now gone or going.” Reform Judaism has dropped its old fighting creed, which made of its earlier rabbis theological crusaders. With it, Reform Judaism has also dropped the religious explanation of the mysteries of the universe and of the enigmas of life: its greatness, heroism, and love, and its “undeserved suffering, unpunished injustice, and hopeless stupidity.” What is left is a bland idealism.

Our temples abhor indoctrination, controversy, political choice, partisanship. They favor harmony and unity. But harmony and unity must be harmony and unity about and in something. We all agree in condemning murder and revenge and in supporting racial equality—at least in theory and in peacetime and up North. But these broad imperatives have no meaning except in concrete social and political situations—which is just where our temples find it expedient to take refuge in hazy generalities that do not satisfy the impatience of youth for straight answers.

Modern Jewish education avoids the problem by eliminating all specifically religious issues in the high school. It limits itself to the tribal material, to the history and role of Jews in America, and to the present status and problems of the Jewish communities all over the world. While children of pre-confirmation age do not have the background to appreciate the relevance of Jewish history and of Jewish political and social problems to their own personal lives in America, high-school seniors and college students find their deeper questioning ignored. In any case, the canvas of Jewish learning has to be covered so thinly in the weekly lesson that the smattering of knowledge acquired remains too superficial to serve any serious later purpose.

So even the therapeutic aim of the religious school is missed. Two or three hours of weekly Sunday school cannot afford “inner support” to the child who comes from a modern home that lacks devotional life, nor can it provide “a Judaism that will help to dignify and give meaning to his life,” a Jewishness that “can become a source of strength and wisdom instead of being considered a’ burden.”

From the proponents of an intensive Jewish education embracing the totality or at least a major portion of the child’s life, this pessimistic judgment will evoke an emphatic “I told you so.” How do you reformers, with your “denatured approach to all human problems,” expect to make something out of nothing?

But is it not a fact that what is offered in Orthodox, Conservative, and parochial education is even further from solving the problem of Jewish youth, accentuating as it does the difficulties of their relations as Americans to other young Americans? It is well known that children enrolled in Conservative schools are all too anxious to join neighboring Reform schools. The Conservative school blames this trend on snobbery—a possibly comforting but superficial explanation.

The fact is that while the idea of a renaissance of Judaism as “a complex living reality” in a multi-cultural American society is a fascinating and romantic wish-dream, it runs counter to the realistic instinct of most young Jews, who seek the quickest cultural and social amalgamation with progressive American culture. We may indulge in regrets over this modernity, but would it not be more constructive to face the facts? Instead of basing Jewish education on the yearning for a by-gone cultural pattern, we would do better to build it on the faith which most young people cherish—even if they pretend a callous cynicism—the faith in a better world, and in the love they feel for an equalitarian America.

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Meanwhile Jewish schools continue to grow. More and more parents feel compelled to send their children and to take an interest themselves. More and more money goes into educational work. Educators and laymen debate the merits of community approach, congregational affiliation, independent schools, Sunday schools, weekday schools, all-day schools, released time, and of Hebrew and Yiddish and English. The American Jewish community, now the largest Jewish group in the world, seems to have awakened to its responsibilities. Jewish education is developing its own organizations, its own status separate from the rabbinate, and its own fulltime professional teachers, full of hope and missionary zeal.

What of the future? Will the present revived interest in religion give a more substantial life to the mere progressive-school liveliness of the schools?

Will the intellectual influence of the yeshivot and other intensive centers of Jewish education provide the content that American Jewry formerly received from European Jewish centers? Will the problem be solved by the fifteen-million-dollar campaign of Conservative Jewry to strengthen its institutions of learning, establish new religious schools, and propagate the faith? Granted the funds, can enough devoted young American Jews be found who are trained in modern educational methods and at the same time possessed of enthusiasm for Judaism?

Will anti-Semitism in America grow or decline? If it grows, will it not automatically force Jews into closer solidarity, strengthen their will to cultural survival? If it lessens, will it not weaken the pragmatic impulse to Jewish education?

I am neither a prophet nor an educational expert—merely a father, and by no means a discouraged one. Looking at our community and its children, I do not find myself in the alarmist frame of mind which inspires blueprinted reconstruction schemes aimed at putting ancient custom in modern dress—“solutions” that might well prove worse than the disease. I am not convinced that the Jewish teen-agers or college students I see come and go through our house, or indeed my own children, are a lost generation. “Poor Jews” by the traditional standard, they seem to my perhaps myopic eyes splendid people. We have every reason to despair if we value Jewish cultural tradition above everything else. We have every reason to be confident if we value humanity.

Nor is this surprising. It confirms what history and personal experience tell us: morality and decency and character, “the acceptance of high ends by mind and will,” do not seem dependent to any great degree upon religious orthodoxy. Though we live in a secular, scientific age devoid of firm religious beliefs and lacking any definite or uniform world view, children seem still to follow the time-honored rules that guided us when we were a more pious people.

Western humanity seems to have absorbed what was ethically and religiously great in the Jewish message. The “cultural amalgam” so greatly feared by the protagonists of a special Jewish religious or nationalist culture is on the way to becoming the universal possession of democratic peoples—if not in practice, at least in theory. Our public education is neutral as far as religion is concerned, but it offers a humanitarian, democratic, spiritual education, however inadequate. If we had to rely only on the little supplementary Jewish education on Sunday mornings or weekday afternoons to produce sensitive and intelligent young people, we should be in a bad Way. Luckily this is not the case. Just as the world has absorbed and preserves some of what was great in ancient civilization without a special Greek Sunday school education, so a special Jewish Sunday school is not necessary to keep the Ten Commandments and monotheism before the world.

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As to the specific disabilities that our children suffer as Jews, we need only heed the lesson of modern sex education: to tell the truth objectively and unemotionally at each stage of the child’s development. As one educator states it, our children must have “the knowledge that would help them to think clearly and react constructively. The Jewish child is both an American and a Jew. He cannot be in conflict about either and be whole. Neither integration nor happiness nor self-respect is possible if he cannot accept his own origin.” His origin is a natural condition, nothing to be proud of as compared to other children, but nothing to be ashamed of either.

A Jewish child can no more escape the obvious difficulties of his minority status than a normal adolescent can escape the emotional difficulties of puberty, even through the most understanding parental or school sex education. Of course, the knowledge acquired on Sunday morning, whether of Biblical history, old festivals, or Jewish history, will help him. But more important are parents who are not neurotic about the “glory” or “calamity” of their Jewishness and who easily and naturally assist their children in any situation, taking in their stride whatever unfortunate Conflicts may arise. The panicky discussions of anti-Semitism one hears in so many Jewish homes these days should never be permitted in the presence of children—even when one’s whole family has had to flee from Europe or was destroyed by Hitler.

Normal children, by and large, are upright, democratic human beings by the time they reach their early teens. At this stage, when the child becomes interested in the problems of society and begins to look at the newspaper headlines, he might go to a school or youth group that deals with Jewish problems and some of the still viable features of Jewish tradition—the Prophets, for instance. (Young children should read Bible stories as they read other great fairy tales and mythological works.) This may not serve the purpose of developing strong loyalties in the children as members of a separate Jewish group. But it will serve to make them acquainted with their ancestry and their own special problems. In addition, the group should devote time to the everyday real problems that the children are puzzled about and interested in. Of course, this group work should not end with the fourteenth year, but should go on to an age level more aware of social, ethical, and political problems. (Perhaps if our schools didn’t start as early as they do, we could avoid the present situation, when so many children leave by the time they are twelve or fourteen.)

In this educational scheme, the school is of secondary importance compared with the clarity and honesty of the parents’ position. Children can be told and made to understand that their parents, while not “believing” Jews, do belong to and are part of the Jewish historic community in general and the Jewish community of their locality in particular. Since there is thus no attempt to build two systems of belief with a yawning gulf between, conflict between parents and children is avoided.

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This is perhaps not the program that American Jews must undertake in order to “carry on the great traditions of Jewish learning and intensify its spiritual energies, so that it may be worthy of the cultural and spiritual trust to which it has become heir.” Our approach will inevitably be deeply resented by all who desire the survival in America of a distinctive, intense Jewish religious culture. We shall be attacked, of course, as “parents on the borderline of assimilation, charity wardens, utter ignoramuses, or guardians of Judaism whose common denominator is the desire to minimize as far as possible the differences between the Jewish and the non-Jewish children and who are therefore contented with a program of Jewish education which is based essentially on remnants of a pale bloodless religion.” On the other hand, I am confident that nothing will really satisfy the need of thousands of American Jewish families except a school that fully recognizes that our spiritual development has carried us forward to a humanitarian deism or naturalism, and that treats theology accordingly. Instead of devoting energy to reviving outworn observances, such a school should address itself to ethical and social teaching with specific and concrete relevance to our children’s lives.,

This defense of the “cultural amalgam” may sound like assimilationism. To my mind, however, the trend toward social “assimilation” is not by any means the major reason for disharmony between the religious school and the modern home. The chief reason is that the evaluation of the survival value of important aspects of Judaism, its holidays, its ritual, its language, its prayers, has changed, for modern Jews, as it has changed for modern adherents of other faiths. To ward off disillusionment and cynicism, we need a truly human education open to the full climate of Western culture, not an artificial hothouse plant.

But I am asking that we do more than merely “water down” the emphasis on traditional Judaism: we must step vigorously forward on new paths. I am bold enough to assert that there is a goal which the Sunday school should set itself beyond the familiar objective of forming proud Jews. Why is it proving impossible to carry the good will, the cooperation, the social-mindedness, and the sacrifice of the war period into peacetime living? Why is so much disillusionment, frustration, indifference, and careerism present today in our society? Something is missing from our social life, something that our young people need but do not get from their present-day education. Here religion and a modern Sunday school might find their real and most urgent experimental task.

What synagogue will undertake this larger task, what temple will broaden itself out from its “purely” Jewish tasks and teach us in terms of this wider horizon? To my mind, it is no answer to say we must do the first—the “Jewish”—job first, and the second only when that is done. That way lies narrowness, or repudiation. We must do both together or we shall succeed in neither.

I challenge the argument that seems to be central to all professional Jewish cultural effort, namely, that Jews are specially and uniquely confused. All men are confused today. There would not be so much search for new banners to follow, so much talk about new values, about “modern man in search of a soul,” nor would there be a turning toward mysticism, if men knew where they stood. Perhaps Jews are somewhat more confused than the rest—some because they have come from a national and religious ghetto civilization to the irreligious climate of American big-city life, some because they have become Jews only since Hitler, others because of anti-Semitism and Jewish disabilities, still others because of our inveterate Jewish intellectualizing. And of course, besides being confused, all Jews are—no denying—“the object of the unfavorable attitude.” (“It is a sombre privilege to be a Jew,” said Santayana.)

Having asserted that the Jews are uniquely confused, the educator then asks what will “give them a feeling of assurance”? His answer is that they must accept themselves as “members of a distinct group of merit and worth.” Granted. But I do not believe that many will find real reassurance in mere group loyalty, in following a path that looks so much to the past. If the content of the group is “barren” today—an observation made by this same Jewish educator—wherein then lies its “merit and worth”?

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We and our children can find real assurance, as well as profound perplexity, only in moral freedom. We can find inner security only when we find our place in a humanity common to all men of good will and as we learn to work in cooperation with other such men on the great common social tasks that face our world. It is toward this central aim that our religious schools must address themselves. Such a program might have the possibilities of interesting children, of helping to create a wholesome group life. If we offered such a program, we might even succeed in attracting the very large group of indifferent parents now hostile to the religious schools, the so-called “unaffiliated.”

Traditionalists and nationalists will not like this program: to the extent that it is successful, they will say accusingly that it will destroy a culture that has survived in its uniqueness for thousands of years. But this blames us for something that is in reality the result of an irresistible historic process. Let us choose to recognize the threat of present-day developments, and let us move to close the gulf that alienates our children from us and from their Judaism.

Still another reproach requires earnest consideration. Are we not contriving as the basis for our group-life a “liberal,” bloodless doctrine of ethical universalism which deprives our group of all individuality and merely increases the uniformity of American life? Perhaps. But man striving for group life to overcome his loneliness inevitably develops richness and distinctiveness in that group life. Such differentiation cannot be “reconstructed” on some past model, nor can it be consciously commanded or planned in advance, as the plant-breeder develops a new variety of flower. Group variety must unfold step by step, and only through experimentation as a community do we discover what is still-born and what will live. No blueprint can help us.

Let us free the creative energies in Jewish community life. Our educational leaders will be surprised at the enthusiastic responsiveness they will find among children—and their parents.

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