20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Education

Education Janet Aviad I n his seminal work on the history of Greek culture and education , Werner jaeger stated that "since the basis of education is a general consciousness of the values which govern human life, its history is affected by changes current within the community. When these are stable, education is firmly based; when they are displaced or destroyed, the educational process is weakened until it becomes inoperative . This occurs whenever tradition is violently overthrown or suffers internal collapse." 1 jewish education today reflects the internal and external upheavals that have occurred within jewish society during the past three centuries. Emancipation, secularization, the Holocaust, and the building of new jewish communities in Israel and in the Diaspora are events and processes that have changed and mirror changes in every aspect of jewish life. Specifically, jewish education flounders today, attempting to respond to the challenges of life in a modern open society where formations of Jewish culture and identity are constantly emerging and changing. Every community seeks to preserve and transmit its fundamental values through education, thereby ensuring its own continuity. Biblical society 156 EDUCATION consciously emphasized the critical role of education. Knowledge of the covenant experience and the ritual and ethical obligations deriving from it, upon which the unity of the Hebrew tribes was based, had to be conveyed from generation to generation. Therefore, fathers were commanded to teach the divine law to their children (Deut. 6:7), and family and communal rituals were the occasion for instruction in sacred history (Ex. 12:26-27; Lev. 23:43). Following the destruction of the First Temple and the exile to Babylonia in 586 B.C.E., however, educational functions were quickened and deepened in a way peculiar to Jewish society. The conditions of exilic life forced the Jews to organize themselves as a religious community and to depend upon education for their very survival. It was at this time that the disparate oral traditions recording the relationship of God and his people were gathered and canonized. This sanctified Torah became the foundation of Jewish life everywhere, according meaning to the events that befell the chosen people and defining a ritual framework that both ordered the life of the exiles and preserved their distinct identity. Only through intense loyalty to the ritual framework and to the religious ideas that gave it significance could exilic life be maintained. Instruction in the Torah, therefore, was indispensable, and study, talmud torah, necessarily assumed the highest place in the hierarchy of Jewish values. An educational system developed whose purpose was the transmission of those truths, perceived as absolute, that defined the vocation of the individual and the community in exile. Further, the educational system provided the structure of initiation and training in the law incumbent upon members of a minority group determined to maintain boundaries between itself and the surrounding culture. Education in the proscriptions and prescriptions of the Torah culture was the key to whatever social control the Jewish community exercised over its members. TaImud torah became a distinct and powerful form of religious experience for the Jews. Study was more than a search for knowledge-it was an act of devotion and a form of prayer. The sanctity of God's presence was said to reside among those who studied together (M. Avot 3:3). Indeed, study was a form of imitatio Dei, and those who exemplified the ideal of total dedication to study were accorded the highest status in Jewish society. The sage was Judaism's religious virtuoso, the model of intellectual, ethical, and spiritual excellence. Men of the Torah, engaged in study as a way of drawing near to God, represented the central religious experience of Judaism, and constituted an intellectual elite upon whose authority and charisma traditional Jewish society rested. EDUCATION 157 The study hall itself, the bet midrash, was viewed as a sacred space. Prayer and study were interwoven: either the study hall was located contiguous to a synagogue or the same space served both activities. All male adults were obligated to spend some time in study. Universal elementary education was established from the first century C.E. Any settlement where twenty-five children lived was required to provide a teacher and supervision over the education of the children (BT BB 21a). The elementary school was designed to convey the fundamental traditions of Jewish culture through the study of the Pentateuch and its most widely accepted commentary...