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5 The Promise of Jewish Education Train up a child in the way he should go and even when he is old he will not depart from it. —Talmud: Kiddushin 29a What then does God do in the fourth quarter?—He sits and instructs the school children, as it is said, Whom shall one teach knowledge, and whom shall one make to understand the message? Them that are weaned from the milk. — Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Avodah Zarah, 3b (see also Isaiah 28:9) In his biography of Emmanuel Levinas, Salomon Malka opens the chapter on Levinas’s years as the director of École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO) with the following quote: After Auschwitz, I had the impression that in taking on the directorship of the École Normale Israélite Orientale I was responding to a historical calling. It was my little secret . . . Probably the naïveté of a young man. I am still mindful and proud of it today.1 His confession echoes Theodor Adorno’s warning twenty years earlier in his 1966 radio interview published as “Education after Auschwitz.” Responding to the atrocities of the Holocaust, Adorno opens the essay with the declaration that “the premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again.”2 Barbarism is not something that poses merely a threat of a relapse. Adorno insists Auschwitz was the relapse. He describes the only meaningful education as “an education directed toward critical self-reflection.” And, like Levinas, he implores us to turn our attention to young children: “Since according to the findings of depth psychology, all personalities, even those who commit atrocities in later life, are formed in early childhood, education seeking to prevent the repetition must concentrate upon early childhood.”3 Yet, while Adorno and Levinas share the same concerns and indeed while both recognize the necessity of focusing on the way we educate our young children if we are going to prevent another Auschwitz, their respective views of education and what education should do differ. Adorno’s interest lies in creating an environment that cultivates individuals who can resist authoritarian think- The Promise of Jewish Education 105 ing. Resistance to authoritarian thinking, however, will not by itself mitigate the danger that he fears. Although the critical thinking that Adorno advocates may help someone resist authoritarian thinking, critical thinking alone will not help someone become a person who resists authoritarian rule. Levinas focuses his attention on cultivating a subjectivity that will not only prevent the conditions that create a murderous self in the first place but who will also respond accordingly if such conditions are created. Adorno’s prescription, though it is necessary, is not sufficient.4 Reviving Jewish Education The concern Levinas communicates in the essays collected in Difficult Freedom is strikingly similar to the concerns Rosenzweig voiced in his essays on Jewish education.5 Although there is much scholarship documenting the connections between Levinas and Rosenzweig, this scholarship focuses primarily on the role Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption played as an inspiration for the themes that guide Levinas’s analyses in Totality and Infinity.6 I have not yet encountered scholarship that explores the connections between Levinas’s essays on Jewish education and the concerns that motivate those essays and Rosenzweig’s writings in this same area. This is not to say that Rosenzweig’s essays influenced Levinas. I do not know that they did nor have I found any indication that they did. It is nonetheless striking that Rosenzweig’s concerns, expressed well before World War II and Nazi Germany, parallel those expressed by Levinas. Their conclusions, however, are very different, and thus it is worth taking a brief look at Rosenzweig’s essays on Jewish education. In his 1917 letter to Hermann Cohen, titled “It is Time: Concerning the Study of Judaism,” Rosenzweig explains that the problem with Jewish education is religious schooling as it is manifested in the “largest and most influential sections of our intelligentsia” (On Jewish Learning [hereafter OJL], 28). They have received “their religious instruction from a few years of ‘religious classes,’ and some High Holiday sermons,” thus indicating that Judaism—and its corresponding education —has been reduced to a series of tasks rather than being practiced as an organic part of one’s life. We see this concern most clearly when Rosenzweig contrasts the difficulty of developing Jewish religious instruction from that facing Christian religious instruction. He points out that [w]e are not concerned with creating an emotional center of this world...

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