“No Child Left Behind”

Rosh Hashanah 5766/2005
Rabbi Judith Schindler

This past spring, a parent in our congregation asked her second grade daughter what she wanted to be when she grew up and the little girl responded, “I think I would like to be the Pope. It has never been a woman and never been someone Jewish.”

We teach our children that with learning and hard work nothing is beyond their reach.

In our Torah this morning, Abraham finds himself in a dilemma. God calls him to sacrifice his son. He wonders how in the world he will convince Sarah to let Isaac go. According to the midrash, he creates a compelling case: “Sarah, I would like to take our son Isaac on a trip so that I can educate him about God.” And with this Sarah agrees.

From our first Jewish mother until today, Jewish parents will go to the greatest of lengths to educate their children. Parents of our congregation take on second jobs and sign burdensome loans to pay for secondary and college tuition.

Statistics show that from a secular perspective we have succeeded in our education goal. A 2001 National Jewish Population Study revealed that Jews are more highly educated than the general population. As Jews, we are almost two times more likely than the general population to earn a college degree and we are four times more likely to hold a graduate degree¹.

Our commitment as Jews to education has enriched the world with Nobel Laureates. We are more than well represented among the great thinkers of the world, and among the leaders in justice, business, academics and politics of American life.

Yet these days of awe are not for arrogance, they are for addressing our weaknesses, for honestly assessing our selves and our souls. As we have faithfully followed our tradition’s mandate to teach our children, we have failed to teach all children, leaving many in our society at an extreme disadvantage. And we have failed in learning about our own faith. We have enjoyed the fruits of our tradition, bringing the values of Judaism into our lives, all the while failing to tend to the tree of Torah.

Let us address first our failure to educate all.

Hurricane Katrina and Rita were indeed devastating. But what was equally painful to watch were the socioeconomic gaps that became glaringly obvious in the wake of the storm. As waters flooded the city of New Orleans and I witnessed on television, stranded victims struggling to hold on to life, my sense of shock and disbelief quickly became commingled with guilt. The majority of those who suffered most were the under-educated, the poor and the homeless -- those with the most limited means.

In Deuteronomy, the story is told of an archenemy of our people named Amalek who attacked us, as Israelites, in the desert when we were famished and weary. He killed all the stragglers in the rear.

Surprisingly, one Chassidic rebbe condemns not our enemy Amalek but us. Had we, the Children of Israel, not forgotten about the slower ones in back, but instead brought them closer binding them to the community, the Amalekites would have not succeed in their attack. The Torah therefore teaches us to remember Amalek – to remember not his evil but our failure to care for those who fell behind and to bring them closer.

We cannot control the whims of nature, but we can control how we respond to those at the bottom of our socioeconomic ladder. It is our job, to prevent the poorest from being left to drown, even metaphorically. Our poor here in Charlotte have also fallen behind. Our tradition teaches that our future as a society depends not only on how we educate our own children, but on how well we educate all children.

While Hurricane Katrina and Rita washed the “things” in people’s live away, the knowledge and skills earned through education and hard work remained. As business and industry have opened their doors to hire people: they seek individuals with education and experience first.

Education is the best means we have of breaking the cycle of poverty, despair, and crime. Even the authors of the Midrash acknowledged, “Lack of learning results in poverty.”

Several years ago I heard that, Yeshiva University had developed a respectable rowing team. To break into the big time, the crew of Yeshiva challenged the team of Harvard to a 400-meter race down the Chares River in Boston. The big day finally came and Harvard beat Yeshiva by 300 meters. Since it was only a 400-meter race, losing by 300 meters was a colossal defeat for Yeshiva. The coach of the Yeshiva team was so disheartened, he sent a member of his crew to watch a practice session of the Harvard team the next day. The young man went and came back very excited. He told his coach, “Harvard does the exact opposite of what we do.”

The bewildered coach asked, “How’s that?”

The student answered, “At Harvard, six people row and only one person screams.”

As Jews we all like to lead. As Jews we all like to express loudly how we think things should go. As Jews we need to use our gifts of shouting and leading to make sure that the neediest of our city have the same educational opportunities we would demand for our own children. For the reality is, even here in Charlotte, 13% percent of our African American students did not pass their end of year exams. 20,000 of our state’s High School kids dropped out of school last year, and this year 15% of our Mecklenburg County’s public school teachers did not return to our school system.

Whether we have children in our public or private schools, whether we have grown children or no children at all, it is our religious obligation to be an advocate as a congregation for all our city’s children. As our sages warned long ago, poor education will lead a community to become poor.

With respect to our mandate as liberal Jews to improve our schools, Rabbi Eric Yoffe, the head of our Reform movement wrote: “The public schools were the ladder that we used to climb from poverty to affluence in American life… The public schools take the poor, the handicapped, the abused and the foster children, the Christian, and the Muslim, the Roman Catholic and the Jew. They do more of God’s work in a day than most institutions do in a lifetime.”

Without education, staying afloat in our society is hard. On this day of celebrating the world’s birth, as we look out at the world, let us also look inward at ourselves. As liberal Jews, we set secular education as one of our highest goals, all the while squandering the valuable teachings of our faith. We have failed to embrace our most important legacy of Jewish learning. We have silenced the voices of thousands of years of Jewish sages and their wisdom. Just as lack of education will jeopardize a city, so will a lack of Jewish education jeopardize our faith.

When Dr. James Tabor of UNCC spoke here this summer on the Dead Sea Scrolls, he shared one of the stories that his students love to hear. “Tell us the story of the woman and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” they repeatedly asked him. And he would. He would tell of the time when a woman came up to him and said, “Oh, the Dead Sea Scrolls, I am so glad that they found them.”

“Have you ever read them?’ Dr. Tabor asked.

“No,” the woman responded, “I am just so thankful they are found.”

“It is sort of like the Bible,” Dr. Tabor added. “People are thankful that we have it, but haven’t read it to know.”

If we do not educate ourselves as Jews, we too, will be pulled away from our spiritual home by the whirlwinds of the world. We will have nothing to anchor us against the storms of life.

Rabbi Hanan Alexander wrote with respect to contemporary Jewish illiteracy, “Ignorance is not bliss – it’s death… Statistics about assimilation and Jewish illiteracy veil the simpler reality that large sectors of the Jewish population now lead lives essentially empty of Jewish content – even in Israel. In many families, parents know almost nothing about Jewish culture, history, religion or ways of thinking and behaving. They have nothing substantive to pass on to their children.”

As Jews, we are called the “people of the book” because throughout our history we have carried with us our sacred scrolls and holy texts, passing them from one generation to the next in the desert, in ghettos, in concentration camps, and in freedom. Yet the book by which we are known has become largely unknown to most of us.

Today is a day for putting past excuses aside. “We’re too busy. We’re too tired. We have no time.” As a professional team we have created an adult educational program that will meet you where you are. This year we are introducing our Ladders of Learning program and there is a rung on the ladder for each and every one of you. Seven is a number of holiness and there are seven rungs of this ladder for you to climb.

Rung one is a Taste of Judaism class. Rung two is our Introduction to Judaism course. Rung three is our conversion class. Rung four is our Anshei Mitzvah class – a two-year educational journey for Adult B’nei Mitzvah.

Rung five is our Achievement Certificate in Torah class, which enables you to study with a partner at home or on-line for just one-hour each week and join us at Beth El for a monthly lecture. In two years’ years time you will have studied the entire Torah.

Rung six is our Scholars Institute where you can study Midrash, Talmud, Mishneh Torah and more with a group of friends every other week with Rabbi Barras.

And finally the seventh rung is to become a teacher of Torah. On this rung you will work with the clergy on lessons plans, and sharing the teachings of Judaism with the countless churches, senior homes, and school communities who request our talks each and every year.

Without education, we are adrift. No child of our city should be left behind in secular learning and we should not leave ourselves behind in religious learning.

My father, Rabbi Alexander Schindler, grew up in Germany and his mother would not let him play with other kids after school out of fear that they would beat him up because he was Jewish. So instead, he was tutored every afternoon by a variety of Jewish professors who had lost their jobs because of their religion.

Though my father became a refugee from Nazi Germany in 1938, he was able to succeed so greatly in life because he was strongly grounded in both Jewish and secular learning. If we give our children both, both Jewish knowledge and secular training, they will not only achieve academic heights, but they will use their wisdom to bring others along and to make the world a better place.
There were two boys who often got into trouble. The mother brought the younger boy to the church near their home to see if the priest could talk some sense into her son.

“Where is God?” The Priest began.

The little boy was silent.

Again the Priest asked, “Son, where is God?” The boy looked down giving an unknowing look.

And when the Priest asked a third time, “Son, where is God?” The boy jumped out of his seat, ran home and up the stairs to his brother’s room. He slammed the door and shouted in fear, “God is missing and they think we had something to do with it.”

God was missing in our country’s immediate response to the storm and we did have something to do with it. For we let those who are most in need fall behind. Let us find God in our fight for educational equity for all children and let us find God in our continued study of our faith.

The Talmud teaches, “None of us are poor but those of us who are without knowledge.” May our lives in this New Year of 5766 be rich with learning and with teaching. May our lives be rich with healing and with health. And may our lives, in this new year, be rich with meaning and with peace.

Amen.