It is a unique, self-directed, personal assessment and then, re-calibration if or as required, that the Torah established for us at the start of the seventh month of the Jewish calendar year.
The first day of the month: Rosh Hashana. The tenth day: Yom Kippur. The fifteenth: Succot. Revelry for sybarites are not part of the program. Rather, prayers, liturgical poetry, traditional ritual and family-centred culinary enjoyments and permanent recurring remembrances are.
Individual and collective memory are the river on which Jewish peoplehood flows – forever.
What is taught in school is reinforced in the home. What is lived at home has been learned in school. That is, and will always be – the self-perpetuating, integrated gear of the wheel of Jewish life.
The smooth functioning of that gear is very much on display with the Tishrei trilogy of holidays – usually at or near the very start of the school year.
David Zalik, the co-founder of the Zalik Foundation, has written an op-ed on the essential role of Jewish day school education in helping launch our children onto a life-long path of self-confidence, goodness and purpose.
The essay is impressive and important. It was published this week by eJP (https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/jewish-day-schools-are-a-bubble-and-that-is-the-point/?utm_source=cio)
We reproduce only a few short excerpts.
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“…Let’s turn to the only outstanding question that matters: What is actually best for your child, not only their college prospects?
“Children flourish when they’re known by caring adults, surrounded by stable friendships, rooted in a community and given a clear sense of who they are and where they belong — the very conditions Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, argues modern childhood has been quietly stripping away. It’s increasingly where developmental psychology has landed.
“Jewish day schools didn’t set out to become well-designed environments for raising children in the 21st century. They simply held onto what children need most while much of the culture let it go. These schools work because they provide three things that have become scarce in modern childhood: children who are known, children who belong and children who grow up with a clear sense of who they are.
“A day school lifts that burden (of being the “other” in public school.). The holidays are everyone’s holidays, the calendar is theirs, the rhythm of the place is their own. Your child isn’t the different one here — they’re home. They get to spend their formative years not performing or defending an identity, but just living, with all the attention that frees up for friendship, curiosity, and joy. For a lot of children, that’s the difference between enduring school and loving it.
“There’s a deeper form of belonging here, too, that most children today grow up without: the felt sense of being part of something older and larger than themselves — a people, a story, a chain that runs back hundreds of generations. It’s one of the quieter losses of modern childhood, hard to name until you meet a child who has it. A day school hands a child that inheritance early, as a birthright, rather than leaving it as something they might go looking for later, if they ever do.
“Most (secular) schools teach children what to think about and how to score well. Few teach them how to be a person. Day schools build ethics into the day itself, not as a poster on the wall but as something students spend years discussing and practicing. They come out having absorbed a simple, unfashionable idea: that a life is measured not only by what you achieve, but by what you owe other people.
“A child who knows what they believe and has somewhere they unmistakably belong, moves through the world differently. That’s the kind of confidence that doesn’t crack under pressure.
“The child who first knows exactly who they are is the one who can later walk into a room full of difference and engage it without fear and without dissolving into it. Security isn’t the opposite of openness. It’s the precondition for it.”
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Helping our children learn and understand who they are, as knowledgeable, caring Jews on this earth, is the Jewish schools first task. And the Jewish home’s eternal embrace.
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If you wish to contribute to GAJE’s lawsuit to achieve fairness in educational funding, please click here. Charitable receipts for donations for income tax purposes will be issued by Mizrachi Canada. Your donations will be used for the sole purpose of helping to underwrite the costs of the lawsuit. For further information, please contact Israel Mida at: imida1818@gmail.com Thank you, in advance, for considering doing so.
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Shabbat shalom
Gmar chatimah tovah
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education
September 18, 2026
Grassroots for Affordable Jewish Education 