Jewish Education, Nutshell Version

The purpose of this blog is to get them thinking - yes, thinking! - at the Shabbat table. Please print and share. 
Yesterday I participated in a panel discussion at the US Department of Education.

I was the only panelist.

They have a monthly staff lecture and really wanted to honor Jewish American Heritage Month (who knew? and, incredibly, there's even a competing website). So they worked their network and somehow, rather randomly, came to me.

I was asked a series of questions about Jewish education. The overall goal was to give them a snapshot, framed however I would like.

So here's a great first question for your table:

If you had the opportunity to describe and explain American Jewish education to a group of potentially influential staffers at the DOE, how would you frame it?

Naturally, I began with a biographical note, mentioning my roots in the City of Destiny and making the usual Tacoma, Washington / Takoma Park Maryland joke. They always love that.

I was also asked to describe my professional background. I explained that there are two kinds of rabbis, the pulpit kind and the scholarly kind. Only I didn't use the word "scholarly"; instead, I held up a hefty volume of the Talmud (see above) and explained that this is the thinnest volume on my shelf, and my own "rabbi" badge means that I was tested for a level of competence in this set of books. That's not precise, but it's reasonably accurate.

And it made for great show-and-tell.

And then I gave them a handout that looked like this:

_________________________________________________________________________________________

OCTAE Panel • June 27, 2019

Background to Jewish Education: A Few Selected Dates

50 BCE

135 (Israel), 553 (Rome), 468 (Persia), 1242 (Paris), 1244 (Paris), 1248 (Paris), 1255 (Paris), 1263 (Barcelona), 1299 (Paris), 1309 (Paris), 1315 (Toulouse), 1320 (Bourges), 1322 (Rome), 1426 (Savoy [c] and Cologne), 1510 (Frankfurt, Worms, etc.), 1553 (Barcelona, Venice, Rome, Ferrara, Mantua, Padua, Ravenna, et al.), 1554 (Rome), 1557 (Rome, Poland), 1559 (Milan, Rome, Venice), 1569 (Cremona), 1592 (Rome), 1618 (Seville), 1753 (Rome), 1753 (Ravenna et al.), 1757 (Poland).

1892

© 2019 JSL • A 501(c)3 organization Orders/duplication permissions: 410-400-9820 • info@jsli.org
_________________________________________________________________________________________

2nd Question for your table - can you ID those four sets?

IMHO, anyone who wants to understand much of what we call Jewish education today must understand the significance of these dates and events.

50 CE - approximately when we instituted mandatory universal public school systems.
The 2 columns - the major expulsions of Jews from various countries from 70-1956 CE
The paragraph of dates and places - when Talmudic teaching was outlawed including mass-confiscation of volumes of the Talmud and burning them in public pyres.
1892 - When the Harvard of yeshivas - Volozhin - was closed by its dean rather than comply with the government's attempt to secularize the curriculum.

Ask your table: How did we manage to persevere and thrive despite those 100+ expulsions?

One answer must certainly be "thanks to the Talmud".

You see, when you kick Jews out but they have their Talmud, they stay Jewish. They burned the Talmud when they realized it was their only hope to rip the Judaism out of us.

We are of course grateful to live in a country that has not kicked us out (well, except for that one time) nor attempted to curtail our Jewish education.

One of the points I made that seemed to resonate with many of them is that our word for education is chinuch - same root as Chanukah - and it doesn't literally mean education. You could try asking at your table if anyone knows it's literal meaning.

Answer: preparation.

When we "educate" a person, we are preparing them to become a lifelong learner. Because if you're not continuing to learn, what are you living for?


Shabbat Shalom


Enjoyed this Table Talk? Vote with your fingers!  Like it, forward it....

My name is Alexander and I'm...

The purpose of this blog is to challenge everyone's thinking at the Shabbat table. Please print and share.
In memory of my grandfather Eliezer ben Zelig, whose yahrzeit was this week.
My grandfather was for a time "the" Jewish lawyer in his hometown, the City of Destiny.

Then my father joined him, forming the firm Seinfeld and Seinfeld.

They leased office space in the strategically-located Tacoma Mall Office Building (where there are currently vacancies should anyone be looking for some extra work space). The same building housed the local AM radio station and I remember during Sunday afternooon stops at the office ("to pick up some papers") being fascinated by the radio antennae perched atop the building.

What I did not know at the time - and learned only after my grandfather's death - was that he used to take a work-break and head down to the first-floor cafe. Not to drink coffee, but to play pinball. And sometimes my father would have to go down there after a couple hours and remind him of the time.

First question for your table - Does it sound to you like my grandfather was a pinball addict?

The great Psychiatrist Rabbi Dr. Avraham Twerski, author of over 60 books and founder of Pittsburgh's Gateways rehab clinic, broadens the definition of addiction. We usually think of addiction in terms of harmful behavior, such as drugs or excessive screentime.

I never saw my grandfather play pinball. But I did see him smoke a lot of tobacco, via pipe, and hear him wax poetically about the cultivation and preparation of good tabac. And I also witnessed him kick the habit, on his own - after everyone stopped hounding him about it. Something to think about.

  According to Dr. Twerski's book (click the image above), addictive thinking is part of human nature. We all have the ability and potential to fall into the trap of repeated behaviors that are not necessariy life-threatening but nor are they life-building. (For more of his amazing books, click here.)

Question for your table - what are some examples of addictive thinking that people don't realize are addictions?

Some suggestions:

- Addicted to complaining
- Addicted to criticizing
- Addicted to pessimism
- Addicted to worry
- Addicted to _________

Since addictive thinking is part of human nature, it's not something to feel bad about. But it is perhaps something to work on.

Final question for your table - is each of these examples unique and separate, or is there one or more underlying root causes of all of them?

Shabbat Shalom


Enjoyed this Table Talk? Vote with your fingers!  Like it, forward it....

Stop Wining?

The purpose of this blog is to raise spirits at the Shabbat table. Please print and share. 

Dedicated to Marc and Lily in honor of their anniversary - Mazal tov!

Dedicated also to my grandparents - Sima bas Mordechai Yaakov and Eliezer ben Zelig - whose yahrzeits are tonight and Monday night - both of whom enjoyed lifting a glass for kiddush and l'chaim.

One count-down ended, a new one begins ...

 

Quick - name the one and only food on which you can make a beracha on my behalf even if I'm not going to eat it?

If I've stumped you, read on. This is going to be a bit of a labyrinth today....

Next question for your table:

Who's smarter, Apple or Google?

Does that sound like a loaded question?

Last week's mathematical missive generated a desired result - people wondering how big indeed is 2^613?

It turns out that most calculators - including the one that comes standard with Mac OS - cannot compute 2^613. Mac's maximum is 2^534 - after that, it gives an error: "Not a number"!!!!

(Can anyone explain why Macs are so Macmatically challenged, limited to a measly 160 digits)?

But Google disagrees. Its calculator thinks that 2^535 is indeed a number, and so is 2^613.

Second question for your table: How many digits would you guess the latter answer has?

Answer:

3.399283 x 10^184

That's basically a 3 with 184 zeros after it.

For those who wonder what that looks like:

30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

So why do we care about this again? Well, it's a bit of a carry-over from last week.

This week, let's shrink the numbers down. Like all the way down.

You may have heard of a place called Yerushalayim. Remember that stateless city (according to the birth certificates and passports of my children born there)?

If you've been there, you know that the old city is surrounded by a wall. Inside, there are four "quarters" plus the Temple Mount. The Jewish Quarter is in the SE and is much smaller than the others.

The Christian Quarter is much larger, to the NW.

There are a handful Jews who live there, just as there are a handful of Christians who live in the Jewish Quarter. That's what usually happens in a free country.

However, the idea of Jews actually buying property there is offensive to some, and if they choose to do so, the Washington Post cooperates with their propaganda and brands these Jews "settlers".

Just ponder for a moment the chuzpah behind that - to call a Jew who lives in a certain neighborhood of Jerusalem a settler. Will their children be settler too? How many generations does it take to become a resident? Most of those Christians are Arabs, so they can trace their local ancestry back maybe a few hundred years. Most of us probably had ancestors living there 2,000 years ago. And a few of us want to buy (from willing sellers) and live there, and we're settlers?

Lest this become a soapbox, let's make it a question: When did your family settle where you currently live? When did you stop being settlers?

Believe it or not, this all has something to do with wine.

Wine is super important in Judaism. We use it with almost every ritual. How many can you name that use it?

As you make your list, you'll probably leave out one that most people don't know: giving the bereaved a ceremonial cup of wine.

What is interesting is that the Torah singles out wine as the source of some of the most depraved human behavior.

If so (question for your table), why is it so important for our rituals?

Final question for your table: someone told me today that all of his children enjoy wine, which is a huge contrast to my own children, none of who enjoy wine, unless it's super sweet. Given its Jewish importance, do you think I should worry about that?


Shabbat Shalom

PS - Besides taste, ever wonder about the differences between red and white wine? More than you might expect.
PPS - Figure out answer to the riddle at the top of the page yet?


Enjoyed this Table Talk? Vote with your fingers!  Like it, forward it....

613-Bit Gray

The purpose of this email is to achieve new vistas at the Shabbat table. Please print and share. 
The count-up continues, one more day....


As you can see in this screenshot, my graphics software has two ways to convert a color image into black-and-white:

- 8-bit grayscale
- 16-bit grayscale

And of course the burning question in your mind is what is the difference between 8- and 16-bit grayscale?

According to Google's top-hit, it's a big difference:

8-bit grayscale = 2^8 shades of gray (i.e., 256)
16-bit grayscale = 2^16 shades of gray (i.e, 65,536)

This is an apt metaphor for Torah and answers another question that came up several times this week, which you might want to try at your Shabbat table.

Someone asked me, Why is Shavuot such an little-celebrated holiday?

There are probably many good answers to the question that people at your table will come up with, including the most obvious - if someone did not grow up celebrating it, they are not likely to start later in life.

But it seems to me that there is a much deeper answer that could and should speak to every one of us, whether you are someone who does not usually celebrate Shavuot or even if you do.

Three blocks from us there is an assisted living house with an ever-rotating group of seniors at various levels of health. One of the most lucid and loquatious residents is a centegenarian named Mr. Wolf who landed at D-Day.

As a recent 22-year-old immigrant from Czechoslavakia, he was not drafted, he enlisted. His parents discouraged him, but he insisted: "If I don't go fight those guys, I could never live with myself."

Because he spoke German, he was routinely sent out beyond the front line as a scout. He captured many prisoners before he was wounded in action.

Question for your table: Why was there almost no pacificism in America during WWII?

In my opinion, because our enemies were so clearly evil.

How often do we have a national issue that is so clearly black-and-white?

The epitome of this problem is the abortion debate. It's either 100 percent (a) right or 100 percent wrong. Where's the gray?

The problem with gray is that it requires you to do what Tom Edison rued as the hardest thing in the world. He had posted in his workshop:

A MAN WILL RESORT TO ALMOST ANY EXPEDIENT TO AVOID THE REAL LABOR OF THINKING.

Another American Tom - Mr. Jefferson - had this to say about thinking:

IT IS ALWAYS BETTER TO HAVE NO IDEAS THAN FALSE ONES; TO BELIEVE NOTHING, THAN TO BELIEVE WHAT IS WRONG.

That's Shavuot in a nutshell. It is a celebration - an appreciation - of:

- Membership in the Tribe of the Book - a people whose very word for education - chinuch - means "preparation" - because your entire life should be one of constant learning, and if you're not learning, why are you living?
- Having this great wisdom that gave the world all the major concepts of good and evil that we embrace today.

If you still have lingering doubts, you might enjoy my Galactic Torah article from a few years back.


Shabbat Shalom

and

Chag Sameach
PS - Yes, the image above is clickable, as ususal.

Enjoyed this Table Talk? Vote with your fingers!  Like it, forward it....