Nurturing Faith

Like many heads of Jewish community day schools, I come to my position via a circuitous route, in my case a doctorate in Spanish literature. In my favorite book, Cervantes’ Don Quijote, the self-defined knight of the title makes himself a helmet out of pasteboard. He tests it by slashing it with his sword, destroying it in the process. He then rebuilds it, and rather than testing it, places it confidently on his head, declaring it “a work of the most perfect construction.” Such is the difference between science and faith.

As we have all come to expect, RAVSAK does not shy away from taking on challenging and tricky topics. This issue of HaYidion on faith is yet another example of this. When you look the word up in the dictionary two meanings strike me in particular:

In 1913 a young Jewish student sent a most disturbing letter to his parents about his intentions to convert to Christianity. In this letter, the student, Franz Rosenzweig, expressed his belief in G-d and at the same time related that he was desperately searching for ways to feed his spiritual soul. His parents lived a typical German Jewish lifestyle that included full membership in the local kehillah and temple attendance three times a year. However, the Jewish education that his parents provided left young Franz hungry and frustrated, and this painful letter describes his genuine search for spiritual sustenance.

Many years ago I had a conversation with a fellow Judaic studies teacher that touched on the topic of nurturing faith. She had asked me for some teaching advice and rabbinic sources with which to teach her Tanakh classes. As we were discussing our respective teaching styles, she declared that she felt that it was her mission as a Judaic studies teacher to instill in her students a belief in G-d and in the divinity of the Torah. I did not respond but her comment troubled me for some time afterwards as I considered her words.

Jewish education today is mainly concerned with the transmission of knowledge, the development of ritual skills, the formation and strengthening of Jewish identity and the affirmation of values. It deals little with the nature of religious experience, the development of religious growth, or the field of spirituality in general. It has found this area of religious education difficult to promote in a modem secular society with teachers and parents ambivalent about their own religiosity, let alone about transmitting it to others.

Jeremy graduates from public high school after attending the local community day school that ends at 8th grade. He enters college at a large state university and takes a course in comparative religion. His roommate, Partha, is a smart, friendly young man from an Indian Hindu background. The two have thoughtful discussions late into the night. Jeremy finds himself wondering, “Partha is a great, ethical guy. Why was I taught that all the stuff he believes in is idolatry? Why isn’t his religion as valid as Judaism?” He takes more courses in eastern religious thought and joins a Buddhist meditation group.

High school religious educators face a population whose spiritual development is very much in flux. The high school years, for some students, are the nadir of religious behavior and spiritual receptivity. Our project “Religious Understanding in Adolescent Children” (RUACH), generously supported by the AVI CHAI Foundation, as well as years of experience as psychologists and educators in Jewish schools and communities, has helped us appreciate the nature of adolescent spirituality. A better understanding of adolescent spirituality is particularly important in light of reports that, relative to other religions, American Jewish adolescents ranked lowest in religious vitality and the importance of their religion’s spirituality to their identities.

There are so many ways for us to become more knowledgeable and skillful in nurturing the spiritual lives of children within the community day school environment. In the following reflections I focus mostly on a few of the challenges and opportunities of the middle and high school years.

We live in an age that is thirsty for meaning, and perhaps our greatest challenge as educators is to transmit a sense of meaning to our students. But how can we effectively nurture faith? My sense is that the task has become a cerebral affair, instead of the experience it is meant to be, and that the solution lies not in trying to convince our students of anything, but rather in sharing meaningful, joy-filled Jewish experiences with them.

Jews are very proud of their support of diversity. Chests swell when remembering Abraham Joshua Heschel, of blessed memory, who marched with Martin Luther King. We publish books about our rescue of Jews from the former USSR, Yemen, Iran or Ethiopia. We love Jewish basketball players, Jews from China or from the “lost” Lemba tribes of Zimbabwe.

At the open house for prospective kindergarten families at a pluralistic community day school, a young father asked, “Can you guarantee that my daughter will come out Orthodox at the end of her nine years here? This is very important to my family.” His anxiety is understandable. This young father felt that his daughter’s exposure to multiple expressions of Judaism threatened his family’s religious identity. With so many models of Judaism expressed within the school, something outside of his family’s practice may have a significant impact on his four-year old daughter’s Jewish identity. This article explores the diversity of religious beliefs and practices among community day school teachers and suggests ways that this diversity can support the growth of our students’ religious identity.

In a community formed by anything less than 100% like-minded people, the outcome of tefillah betzibur (communal prayer) is a polite, well-intentioned tangle of different customs, divergent expectations, decidedly real impediments of faith, and a paradoxical hope that everybody in the room will be able to balance equal measures of both individuality and belonging. In the larger Jewish community this is mitigated by a variety of synagogue choices: Reform, Chabad, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Orthodox, or no synagogue at all. Even if a community Jewish day school offers a variety of prayer modalities, however inclusive of the panoply of Jewish expression, the school setting does not allow for the central choice which makes “adult” synagogues work: the choice to attend or not attend. The high hurdle of requirement is all the more intimidating when it is considered with the other significant challenges of a school’s tefillah program.

Children explore ideas and ask questions differently as they move through childhood. This is a maxim that we take to be self-evident when it comes to academic subjects such as math and writing, and educators adjust what they teach and the methods they use accordingly.

How ironic that Jews, who brought the knowledge of G-d to the world, are willing to talk openly about anything and everything—except their relationship with G-d. I have been intensively exploring the challenges of developing a personal relationship with G-d during the last several years. The following reflects a summary of what I have learned during this endeavor. There is good news and bad news.

Over the past two centuries, a new kind of historical study has emerged in the Jewish world. As described elegantly by Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi in his book Zakhor, this new historical study has critically reexamined and reassessed aspects of the Jewish past, in the process often confronting and contradicting many of the traditions sacred to Jewish memory. Like so much else in Jewish life over the ages, this new development has not been self-generated from within the Jewish world; it is the result of the broad tendency in the modern West to investigate anew historical realities and—in the process—to subvert traditional thinking. The more firmly Jews have engaged and absorbed modern Western thinking, the more intense the Jewish commitment to critical historical study has become. Today, there are major centers of Jewish historical scholarship all across North America, in the State of Israel, and in many European countries. The products of this scholarship are diffused far and wide throughout all these settings and regularly involve reassessment of traditional Jewish convictions about the past.

The whole notion of faith has been a difficult one to understand and to define, let alone to teach or to nurture. Since the age of enlightenment (and in other points in the development of Jewish thought) the hitherto assumed notion of faith has been disintegrating. As more and more people question religion, G-d, halakhah, and biblical authorship, the whole concept of faith has lost much of its stronghold. Even defining what faith is becomes challenging: are we assuming that faith is belief in G-d? What if one does not accept the existence of G-d? Is faith a declaration of a belief in personal providence? Even those who accept the idea of G-d may feel uncomfortable stating unequivocally that G-d has a hand in one’s day to day existence. And yet, in looking at the enduring history of the Jewish people, most would agree that faith has been a major ingredient in ensuring the survival of Jews, their traditions and culture.

As a high school Jewish studies teacher, and a subsequent Jewish studies curriculum developer, I have long been troubled by the question of how we educate students towards growth in religiosity, particularly in the area of Jewish belief and practice. Curriculum models have been designed which focus on student attainments in the domains of Jewish studies knowledge and skills. But in the affective domain, for example, educating towards belief and faith in G-d, it is far more difficult both to educate and to measure the impact of our teaching on our students’ lives.

Scientists believe that music is one of the oldest human creations. Apart from the millennia-old flutes and harps that have been discovered among archaeological finds, some anthropologists believe that music was a precursor to speech, that humans used music to communicate moods and even specific information long before there were words to express precise ideas. For a people as connected to the text as we Jews are, that’s a powerful notion, theologically affirmed by the sentiments of Psalm 150 encouraging all manner of music-making in order to praise G-d.

Stories have an unusual capacity to live within us in a way that abstract principles do not. They touch our hearts with messages our minds can only distantly grasp, and create a bridge that allows our most profound ideas to make their way into our lives. I believe this is what the Sages meant when they said that if someone wants to acquire wisdom they should learn halachah, but if they want to fear G-d, to develop the emotional and spiritual capacity to experience the divine, they need to learn aggadah (Avot deRabbi Natan, chapter 29), the parables and stories of the Oral Torah. Faith is nurtured through stories.

How can Jewish educational leaders reach teens who are often distrustful of institutionalized religion and highly individualistic, with contradictory and fluid personal identities? A recent article described a young Jewish girl as “a hetero, eco-feminist, vegan, Jewish, history major.” Another article refers to “Grande Soy Vanilla Latte with Cinnamon, No Foam” Jews.

This column features books, articles and websites, recommended by our authors and people from the RAVSAK network, pertaining to the theme of the current issue of HaYidion for readers who want to investigate the topic in greater depth.