It is that thankfully, annually recurring time of the year when most of our youngsters can contemplate a break from the grind and the routine of school. Summertime looms imminently for most children with the sweet promise of freer roaming through time and space. At least until September.
GAJE has used this space – because of the time of year – to commend, celebrate and thank everyone involved in the intricate, delicate-sturdy, immensely vital, superstructure of community education. The September-to-June discipline is not easy. We ought to acknowledge this.
• Our children, first and foremost. It is they, with egos and senses of self on the line, who pass through months of constant subtle and overt testing and evaluation,
• Teachers, school administrators, staff and volunteers. They design, run and maintain the educational superstructures of their respective schools and communities.
• Community professionals and philanthropists. They are the supportive backbone trying to ensure that the structures stand securely in perpetuity.
• Parents, grandparents and empathetic friends. They affirm, reinforce and embody the lessons their children learn every day, even as the parents – in most cases – bear the many-sided burdens of the heavy cost of sending their children to Jewish schools.
If it is true that “it takes a village to raise a child”, it is also true, if not also more emphatically so, that it takes a community to (Jewishly) educate a child. The late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks eloquently explained why this is so and how it came to be. (We have reproduced this statement in the past. It is that important.)
“For Jews, education is not just what we know. It’s who we are. No people ever cared for education more. Our ancestors were the first to make education a religious command, and the first to create a compulsory universal system of schooling – eighteen centuries before Britain… the Egyptians built pyramids, the Greeks built temples, and the Romans built amphitheaters, Jews built schools. They knew that to defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education. So, Jews became the people whose heroes were teachers, whose citadels were schools, and whose passion was study and the life of the mind.”
To defend, refine and perpetuate Jewish “civilization”, each generation of parents teaches their children how to live meaningful Jewish lives. Wherever Jews settled around the globe during the millennia, the community elders – leaders, sages, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and ordinary folk – ensured that a school would be built even before a synagogue was. The reason for this was obvious to most, but considered so important that it was enshrined in the 16th century, in the Shulchan Aruch (the settled code of Halachah). Jewish law required each community to ensure the presence of teachers in their midst because “the world exists only through the breath of school children.”
Exactly ten years ago this week in The Canadian Jewish News, the following observation was noted on the subject of the “breath of school children”, i.e., their voices, conversations, ideas, songs, squeals of laughter, or sobs of sadness.
“At a Grade One ceremony at the Associated Hebrew Schools in Toronto, headmaster Dr. Mark Smiley told a story about Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who, when asked what God sees when He looks in the mirror, answered that God sees the hopes, aspirations, prayers and possibilities of children.
We can surmise that Rabbi Heschel was telling us that it is for the sake of our children – of all children – that God created a world that they might embrace, cherish and strive always to protect. For one another and for all mankind. It is for this reason that we educate our children in the hope that they, in time, will choose to educate their own children for the same purpose.
And so, GAJE congratulates, commends, and thanks everyone involved in educating our children. Especially our children. May the summer be safe, happy and restorative for all of you.
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If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit for fairness in educational funding, please click here.
For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com
Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of underwriting the costs of the lawsuit.
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Shabbat shalom
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education (GAJE)
June 23, 2023
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education 