I was sitting in a sidewalk café as I watched five Minneapolis Jewish Day School students aged 6 to 12 run past. They dashed into a shop, followed shortly by the father of two of the children. A couple of minutes later the children scampered out of the store and ran on down the block to their next destination. The father joined the mother of the other three children and followed slowly.
This scene might have been unusual in Minneapolis, but consider that it took place in downtown Jerusalem, just a few blocks from the Ben Yehudah Street mall. Certainly, this image runs counter to the view most of us have of Israel at the present moment. Despite media portrayals, the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are bustling with activity and a sense of vibrancy that we associate with earlier days.
As I contemplated this scene, I considered the gifts that these children, participants in a congregational Family Mission to Israel in June, had been given by their parents. By experiencing everyday life as well as historical sites, they were seeing Israel both as land whose rich past informs our identity and as a living, vibrant country in which they could play in parks, dash down streets, or swim in the Mediterranean Sea. In addition, they were discovering in a country half-way around the world, the global interconnectedness of our lives. There were familiar foods and new ones as well as access to options that are only kosher in Israel. There were recognizable signs in a land dominated by Hebrew. They could hear familiar popular tunes--and familiar Israeli folk tunes. In short, the students were making their first steps as citizens of the larger Jewish world.
Over the course of the next several days, my thoughts focused on the gifts we provide for our children. There are countless smaller ways to provide gifts that achieve the same goals as those just described and summertime offers us many such opportunities. Some children are offered the gift of camp to explore specialized interests. If the camp is away from home, the children gain the independence of living with groups of their peers. Perhaps, the summer offered an extended time for a family vacation to discover the close company of parents and siblings as well as share the adventures of exploring new terrain. Hopefully, this summer also offered children the gift of unscheduled time, time simply to be lazy, read a book, create one’s own entertainment, move at a self-determined pace.
Families enrolled in our schools have each made a determination to offer their child(ren) the gift of a Jewish day school education. That choice, certainly deeply appreciated by us, comes with a reciprocal responsibility to provide a quality experience for families. Given the significance of the opportunity parents have chosen what are some of the gifts we as educators should be offering?
As a Jewish day school educator, I feel a great responsibility to provide for and share quality experiences with families -- academically, socially, emotionally, religiously, spiritually and as members of a global society. Some of the many gifts that I believe a Jewish day school education offers include:
As the longer, slower days of summer become the fast-paced, over-stimulating days of the start of a school year, it is my hope that each of us continues to find the time to consider the wide array of gifts - small and large - we do and can offer our students, families, schools, and communities.
CAT, RAVSAK’s online, highly participatory middle school program in Jewish history, will have four new schools taking part in the fall:
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