Back to School: Jewish Day School in the Lives of Adult Jews

4. The School as Shul: Jewish Day Schools as Places of Worship, Study, and Assembly, for Parents

4 The School as Shul jewish day schools as places of worship, study, and assembly, for parents As we discussed in the last chapter, the symbolic frame refers to that social realm within which culture is built. It is where, through ritual, ceremony, and story, groups, organizations, and societies find shared purpose and meaning. For Jews, the two institutions that, more than any others, have performed these culture-building roles are the family and the synagogue . The family, according to Goodkind (1994), has “throughout Jewish history . . . been the center from which all else emanates: Jewish education, involvement with the community, religious celebrations and observance, and Jewish identity and continuity” (vii). The synagogue, in Schorsch’s graphic image, “is the bedrock institution of the total Jewish community. . . . While its ritual is a bridge to the divine, it is also a force for cohesion and the language of social values” (cited by Wertheimer 2005). In the next chapter we explore the intersection between families and the school, examining how within their own homes DJDS families adopt, adapt, and reject what their children learn at school. In this chapter we take up a set of sociological lenses more typically employed to study “synagogue life” to examine to what extent there are parallels to the synagogue’s functions within the symbolic frame of school life, that is, within the ways parents find meaning and purpose inside their children’s school. 89 Historically, the synagogue has been identified as performing three primary sociological functions: (1) as a site for social fellowship , indicated by the etymological root of the Greek word synagogue , meaning “place of assembly” (Kaufman 1999); (2) as an educational institution, symbolized by the vernacular Yiddish term shul, literally meaning “school” (Heilman 1976); and (3) as a place of religious worship, the synagogue’s original function in the ancient world, according to Levine (1987). In modern times, with the emergence of what Kaplan called the “synagogue center,” these elements have merged, with synagogues taking on the role of multifunctional institutions, trying to attract as much of the Jewish marketplace as possible (Sklare [1955] 1972). Nevertheless, despite this recent fusion of roles, the long-term vitality of these institutions still seems to depend on how well they can serve the discrete religious, educational, and social needs of their members. In this chapter we take up the themes revealed by earlier chapters to develop a thesis about the ways in which DJDS exhibits the three functions traditionally performed by the synagogue as bet kenesset (house of meeting), bet midrash (house of study), and bet tephilah (house of prayer). In general sociological terms this line of inquiry can be situated within literature that examines how Jews construct and negotiate their identities in alternative ways, that is to say, outside the traditional locale of the synagogue. Davidman (2003), for example, engaged this theme of identity “beyond the synagogue walls” in her examination of American Jews who are unaffiliated with a synagogue yet take their Jewish identities seriously and exert significant effort in creating and maintaining their Jewishness. Prell (1989) also looked beyond the traditional synagogue in her ethnographic study of a Los Angeles havurah, an alternative, informal, egalitarian prayer group that placed special focus on individual experience and meaning. Grant (2001) studied how adult Jewish identities come to be reworked within the context of adult educational trips to Israel. Schwartz (1988), meanwhile , stayed closer to home to explore how the family seder night serves as a site for the construction and negotiation of complex Jewish identities. Our chapter, along with these earlier studies, implicitly asks the question of whether institutions other than the traditional 90 Chapter 4 synagogue can successfully connect with adults inclined to look for and find Jewish meaning as an extension of the personal, intimate sphere. This question, we suggest, has become especially pertinent given the fact that synagogue membership has significantly decreased in the United States from the postwar period (when 60 percent of Jews claimed membership) to a level today of 46 percent (Wertheimer 2005). In empirical terms, instead of returning to the interview data from which we previously drew, we present a series of vignettes derived from field-site observations at the school. Through these ethnographic portraits of the school we attempt to make explicit how the behaviors and outcomes identified in previous chapters can be directly attributed to the school serving for parents as...