Teaching the Love of Learning

This month we will celebrate Education Shabbat, honoring all of our teachers, and bestowing special recognition upon two educators who have touched the lives of many generations of students: Frances Liss and Arthur Tirsun.

Frances has been launching our littlest students on the path to Jewish knowledge for four decades. And when our students gathered to pay tribute to Mr. T. last fall, their faces told the story of a man who had touched their lives, infecting them with his own passion for learning.

Jewish education is different from secular education in many respects. One of the most obvious and one that we often speak about is that Jewish education teaches values which guide us throughout all aspects of our lives. Our Judaism helps us make difficult decisions, informs our relationships, asks us to distinguish the sacred from the mundane, and supports us through both joyful and dark times.

But there is another way in which religious and secular education differ that is often overlooked, but I think it is equally important. In Jewish education, there are no final exams. There is no curriculum that must be mastered in a prescribed sequence. While some skills need to be acquired in order to delve deeply into certain aspects of learning -- for instance a knowledge of Hebrew will lead to a deeper understanding of biblical commentary -- the process of learning is far more important than the knowledge gained. The ceremonies that recognize milestones in Jewish education == bar and bat mitzvah, confirmation, anshei mitzvah, and even ordination or investiture -- are merely markers along the endless path of Jewish learning. Success is not measured by the quantity of material mastered but by the desire to learn more.

On Monday and Wednesday afternoons, I walk the halls of our Hebrew School. I drop into classrooms, usually agenda-less, to field questions or pose challenges on any topic related to Judaism. Sometimes I will elaborate on a part of the lesson the students are currently studying. Sometimes I will introduce a layer of learning I know is too advanced just to whet their appetite to the possibilities ahead. (And more often than not, when I do give them a glimpse into more advanced topics, the students are relentless in their attempt to grasp them even if they are still out of reach.) And sometimes we just play ask-the-cantor. The questions are usually amazing, from deep theological issues to detailed grammar questions to challenging real-life dilemmas.
And yes, ask-the-cantor often turns into stump-the-cantor a situation I find simultaneously embarrassing and fulfilling. Nothing makes me happier than realizing that my students and I are engaged on this journey of learning together.

During the last half hour of Hebrew School, I have a portion of the classes for tfillah. We do more than simply pray the evening service; we study the liturgy and explore what it means to pray. I ask the students to wrestle with some very basic but difficult questions: what does it mean to pray? why do we pray? how does prayer relate to their lives? how can they make prayer personally relevant? These would be challenging questions for most adults, and I am proud of the sincere effort made by our children to tackle them. And I'd bet you'd be shocked at some of the profound and sophisticated answers they often come up with.

Adults are a little trickier. Adults think that they are supposed to know so much, and they become easily unnerved when they realize they are in over their heads. And yet I persist. (I am an equal-opportunity challenger.) As our anshei mitzvah students our adult bar and bat mitzvah class begin to master Hebrew, I enjoy taking a passage from the Torah or the prayer book and showing them that they are actually familiar with more of the words than they realize. Although I occasionally get the deer-in-the-headlights look, many join in this passion for learning and are eager to learn more.
That's what its all about: the excitement to learn more. I'm never nearly as concerned about what people know as I am about their thirst to learn more. When teachers can instill the love of learning, we have truly given them a great Jewish education.

L’shalom,
Andrew Bernard
Cantor