What Will Come of Jewish Education When Educators Have Ceded Their Authority?

I’m grateful to my three respondents for expanding the American civic scope (Ian Lindquist, Jason Bedrick) and elevating the Jewish sights (Rabbi David Fohrman) of my original essay. Their responses invite further reflection on two key questions. First, do my ideas about “the Jewish schools of the future” have any broader significance for American education or American culture in general? And second, what is the purpose of Jewish education itself, or as Rabbi Fohrman frames it, what is the proper object of Jewish love? What makes Judaism itself worthy of such love, especially against the post-everything grain of postmodern American culture? And how do parents and teachers awaken and deepen such love in their children and students? How do we help them fall in love with the Hebrew Bible and its ways, which we elders know (from revelation illuminated by tradition and experience) to be worthy of such erotic attachment?

The idea that Jews are the cultural canary in the coal mine—that as go the Jews, so goes America and the West—seems true again today in the arena of American education. If committed Jews fail to pass down their way of life to the next generation, will American Christians or other faith communities fare any better? Jews are a small people, with distinctive traditions, in a large country; our awareness of the so-called “crisis of continuity” may be further advanced than that of other, much larger faith communities, like American Catholics and Evangelicals. But our problems are now their problems. Our challenge is now their challenge. The Christian crisis of continuity is today very real.

But I would go one step further: America itself is now facing a crisis of continuity. This seems painfully obvious. Just watch the news—with cities ablaze, monuments falling, anger raging at this so-called land of injustice—and we see the great potential unraveling of our American inheritance. The only viable—and authentic—American answer to the “great awokening” is a great awakening. And that means rebuilding civic and religious life in America, school by school, community by community, using every public-policy tool and technological innovation at our disposal.