The second of the three Biblical pilgrimage holidays – Shavuot – begins next Tuesday evening.

It was on Shavuot, of course, that a rabble of slaves began the never-ending process of being a people governed by law with one time-transcending mission: to make God’s world as He intended it to be, namely, Heaven-on-earth.

Rabbi Marc D. Angel Founder and Director of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals, brings a number of insights about the holiday in the most recent posting on the institute’s website. I reproduce only one of them because of its potentially magnetic pull especially upon the younger generation of North American Jews.

“Another lesson of the Revelation is that the Torah provides a grand and universal religious vision. A famous Midrash teaches that the Revelation at Sinai was split into 70 languages i.e. contained a message for the 70 nations of the world (understood to refer to all humanity). The Torah is not to be understood or limited as being a narrow message intended for a small sect. The Torah is not to be limited to a reclusive people living in self-contained ghettoes; rather, it is to provide spiritual insight to all humanity. The great 19th century Rabbi Eliyahu Benamozegh stressed Israel’s role as the most universal of religions, a religion that provides the moral framework for civilization a whole.”

Rabbi Eliyahu Benamozegh’s statement is clearly one of the theological anchors for the concept of “tikkun olam (b’malchut Shaddai)” one of the many Judaic prescriptions that compel us to embrace social action in the service of the betterment of the world.

It is through Jewish education that we imbue our children with the spiritual, intellectual, emotional and theological foundation to enable them to understand and then to grasp this life-affirming message of our faith.

We are reminded of this on Shavuot.

And Shavuot reminds us of the irreplaceability of Jewish education if we are to raise children fully aware of the source of their strength as contributing members to the improvement of an increasingly needy world.

Our task is to make it affordable.

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Shabbat shalom. Chag Shavuot samayach.

GAJE

The pattern has been established. And it is devastating.

The Board of Directors of Associated Hebrew Schools (AHS) announced this week that it must downsize its northern GTA branch. The extent of student enrollment cannot justify housing the school in the Atkinson Avenue campus in Thornhill. AHS will begin the somber task of looking for an alternative site for the school.

The AHS announcement is the third GTA day school-related announcement in the past half-year.

In November, Leo Baeck Day School announced it would leave its northern campus. It subsequently sold the building. In March, CHAT announced it would close its northern Kimel campus and consolidate enrollment at the southern Wallenberg Campus.

Now comes the AHS announcement.

Like the resounding blasts of the shofar on Yom Kippur, the latest news must act as a wake-up call to the community. Where are we headed? What will become of the much vaunted activist Jewish community of Greater Toronto in 10 to 20 years if fewer and fewer of our children will receive an essential grounding in identity-building Jewish education? History will correctly judge our generation harshly if under our watch we allowed the broadly diverse Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jewish education system to be so undermined that we merely watched as it dwindled to its extinction, leaving in its footprints haredi or far-right Orthodox schools.

Some people in the community have attempted to explain the recent school closures and downsizing on the basis of demographic differences between the communities of the north and of the south. But the history of Jewish GTA belies this argument. Newly arriving waves of immigrants were always afforded educational opportunities when they wished it. Indeed, in a further sad historical irony, it was always AHS – as the default community elementary school – to which the children of new immigrant families were sent.

What is not in doubt however – over the last decade or more – is that the families of the northern GTA have not been given the possibility to decide on Jewish education for their children on the basis of paying affordable rates of tuition – without submitting to the dignity-denying process of applying for subsidies.

As a community, do we not owe those families – do we not owe all families – that possibility? In fact, until recently, we had always acknowledged that we did.

Some 25 years ago the Board of Jewish Education reminded the Federation of Greater Jewish Toronto that however it restructures the funding of its many communal priorities, its approach to the funding of Jewish education, “should assure the continued existence of a system that guarantees the right of Jewish education to all children whose families seek to provide them with such an education, regardless of the family’s ability to pay.”

Sadly, our community is now reaping the shriveling harvest of a failure to guarantee – in a meaningfully implementable way for average middle class families – the right of Jewish education to all children.

We must find the will to truly restore that guarantee.

We owe that to our grandparents as well as to our grandchildren.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

In the urgent though quite frustrating debate about the future of Jewish Day School education, an argument is occasionally raised that the key factor for declining enrollments is not the cost of tuition, but rather the conclusion by many parents who can readily afford the high tuition that day school education provides insufficient value to their children and to their families.

This response is unpersuasive for the following reasons:

1. While it is true that not all students within a particular school thrive, for reasons that relate both to the student and to the school, this observation applies to every single school irrespective of Jewish affiliation, pedagogical philosophy, as well as to non-denominational private schools and public schools. Not all “micro” issues concerning individual students are easily or even well accommodated in a “macro”-run school. Nevertheless, fair and honest observers conclude that Jewish day schools – across the board – provide excellent education within the parameters of respective funding restrictions.
2. The issue of “value” seldom arises for parents, for families, for whom living a Jewish way of life with the sense of peoplehood and belonging to a historic group central to that way of life. For this group of families – not all Orthodox by the way – the key determinant is affordability.
3. Lack of perceived value in Jewish education among families for whom affordability is not a factor is often a pretext for not seeing value in the need to instill in one’s children and ensure for the future that indispensable feeling of peoplehood.

This then becomes a sad cycle. For, without Jewish education, it is more difficult to instill and inculcate that feeling of purpose and delight that accompanies the feeling of belonging to the Jewish people.

And so, in relation to explaining a family’s educational choices for its children on the perceived lack of “value” of Jewish education, we bring the following to the attention of our readers.

In his response to the essay we published in this space last week by Dr. Barry W. Holtz on desired outcomes of Jewish education, Dr. David Bryfman, the chief innovation officer at The Jewish Education Project, writes “that for Jewish education to be successful, it must be focused on making a positive difference in the lives of Jews today.

“This is foundationally different to Jewish education that has traditionally seen its purpose as making people more Jewish, allowing Jewish institutions to prosper, and making the Jewish community stronger.

“Instead, the significant outcome that Jewish education and engagement should be tackling is that Jewish educational experiences enable people to thrive as human beings in the world today—as human beings, in their various communities, and in the world at large.

“This is not the vision of Jewish education as the transmission of skills and knowledge delivered by an educator that Holtz describes. It is a new paradigm for what matters most in enduring Jewish education today. It includes the relationships we develop, the pride we inculcate, and the positive emotional connections to being Jewish that we enhance. In the language of positive psychologists, Jewish education, if it is to be valuable to people today, must empower individuals to thrive and to flourish. Jewish wisdom has the inherent capacity to inform this new paradigm for Jewish education. Whether Jewish educators, leadership, and communities are willing to accept this new reality will largely impact the future of the Jewish people.”

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“The relationships we develop, the pride we inculcate, and the positive emotional connections to being Jewish” are very much at the heart of the education that takes place within the day schools in the GTA.

Where they are not, and where GAJE can be of assistance, we are determined to help make it so.

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Earlier this week, the government of Saskatchewan invoked the rarely used notwithstanding clause of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to overturn a ruling of the Court of Queen’s Bench that held it was unconstitutional for the Saskatchewan government to pay for the education of non-Catholic students attending Catholic schools.

The government acknowledged that the invocation of the “nothwithstanding” clause was one of last resort. But it considered the circumstances warranted it.

Premier Brad Wall justified the use of the clause in order to protect school choice for parents. “We support school choice, including public, separate and faith-based schools,” said Premier Wall. “We will defend school choice for students and parents. By invoking the notwithstanding clause we are protecting the rights of parents and students to choose the schools that work best for their families, regardless of their religious faith.”

The province’s Minister of Education, Don Morgan, had previously said that the government believes it is important to support a variety of independent schools outside the public and Catholic school systems.

Any notwithstanding clause declaration expires after five years, but it can be re-enacted indefinitely.

We applaud the principled educational funding policy of the government of Saskatchewan. We hope the government of Ontario has taken notice. By comparison, Ontario’s preferential, discriminatory educational funding policies are shameful.

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Recommended outcomes of Jewish education

In an article that canvasses that past three decades of communal mobilization on behalf of Jewish education, that appeared recently in Gleanings: Dialogue on Jewish Education from the Davidson School at the Jewish Theological Seminary – Dr. Barry W. Holtz offers a suggestion about the preferred outcomes of Jewish education.

“First, Jewish learning is an end in itself. Our tradition values education as one of the most essential aspects of being a Jew. About that there is no question, no matter what its impact may be on later Jewish identity. Second, giving young people the best possible Jewish education increases the likelihood that being Jewish will speak to them in their personal lives. It can become a source of values and ideas, some of which will run counter to the weaknesses of the culture in which we live. We want to cultivate those dispositions in the people that we educate, and we believe as educators that Judaism as a religion and Jewish culture in its broadest sense offers a tradition of wisdom and practice that can make a difference in an individual’s life and in bettering the state of the world.

“In order to maintain the continuity of the Jewish people, the only intervention over which we have any control as a community is that of education. We can’t legislate who will marry whom. We can’t dictate where people will live and who their friends will be. But we can work toward the goal that education will have an impact on the lives of learners.”

THE ROLE OF PHILANTHROPY

“Finally, we can wonder about the evolution of Jewish philanthropy in the years ahead. Will Jewish education remain high on the list of philanthropic concerns if it can’t be seen as moving the needle on intermarriage? Will Jewish foundations and local federations still invest in education? Indeed, will community federations— now more than a century old—continue to play a central role in collecting and allocating Jewish charitable dollars? If so, which institutions and programs will be favored with support? We do know that Jewish education will have a role to play in defining the future, even if that future ends up looking very different from the world we live in today. How great a role it will play may depend on what counts as an important outcome to foundations and community funders and their willingness to envision a vital role for Jewish education.”

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It is GAJE’s hope and prayer that community funders will indeed envision and help bring about Jewish education’s vital role for the Jewish permanence of our community.

We are determined to help make it so.

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

The government of Ontario delivered its new budget statement this week announcing its plans to spend some $130 billion in fiscal 2017-2018.

The two key policy areas the government highlighted with specially boosted spending were health and education. According to reports in the press, the government wishes to help ease the burden of health-care costs on families. Thus the province pledged “an additional $7 billion over the next three years for measures designed to boost access to health care, reduce wait times and “enhance patient experience.”

The provincial government said it wishes to reduce class sizes for young students. It therefore committed an additional $1.2 billion in funding for repairs and renewal over the next two years.

It is difficult to quibble with the government’s health and education objective. They are indeed worthy. But we ask ourselves as much in sadness as in anger, given the health and education emphases of the budget, why the Ministry of Education refuses to defray the cost of vital, necessary health support services that non-Catholic, denominational schools incur to enable children with learning disabilities enrolled in their schools? The ministry does defray the cost of health support services for children with the same learning disabilities enrolled in public or Catholic schools. Is it not time for the government to stop differentiating among disabled youngsters? Do they not all deserve to be treated equally?

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We urge families that are able, to enroll their children in Jewish schools.

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Reminders

Yom Hazikaron (Iyar 4) falls on May 1.

Yom Ha’atzma’ut (Iyar 5) falls on May 2.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

With the extensive Pesach holiday period behind us this year, GAJE is moving forward with initiatives in funding and in public advocacy.

The funding committee has held encouraging introductory meetings with federation officials aimed at incorporating reimagined methods for brining new funds into the educational system. We are cautiously moving forward with this initiative.

The advocacy committee is exploring ways to once again place the issue of the provincial government’s discriminatory educational funding policies back onto the public agenda.
We hope there will be new developments to report upon in the near future.

A trilogy of connecting points

Pesach 5777/2017 is over. The celebration and commemoration of the defining collective moment in Jewish history has ended. Until next year.

We now immediately prepare for periods of reflection and commemoration of the trilogy of modern-era, defining moments in our collective Jewish history.

Yom Hashoah v’Hagvurah (Nisan 27) falls on April 24.
Yom Hazikaron (Iyar 4) falls on May 1.
Yom Ha’atzma’ut (Iyar 5) falls on May 2.

These three commemorations are connecting points for our sense of peoplehood. We must teach the essence of these connecting points to our children and our grandchildren through education at home and in school.

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We urge families that are able, to enroll their children in Jewish schools.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

To replace the actual eating of the paschal lamb that took place on the very first Passover night in Goshen, our Sages over the years devised the Seder. It is the paradigmatic teaching moment. Deliberately so. They wanted to convey a sense of renewed relevance and contemporaneity each year for every generation in the retelling of the Exodus from Egypt.

And so we read that it was not our forebears alone whom God redeemed from horrific, dignity-destroying bondage in Egypt. “Even us (sitting at our table, today, some three and half thousand years later) He redeemed, along with our forebears.”

That very explicit statement in the Haggadah, along with other similar explicit and implicit statements in the text, is the proof of our Sages’ intent.

But what of our Sages’ success?

They will only have succeeded in connecting us – each year, indeed every day of each year – in a timeless, invisible cord of shared peoplehood with and responsibility for everybody else sitting around a Seder table throughout the world, if we ourselves feel good about belonging to the Jewish people.

And to feel that way we have to want to belong to the Jewish people and to know what it means to actually do so. That means education – at home and at school. We have to be able to send our children to Jewish schools to instruct, supplement and reinforce what and how they live at home.

If we are to see ourselves as also having left the slavery of Egypt, we must also see ourselves connected to that timeless invisible cord that has tied us to our people for thousands of years. That feeling and that cord must last forever.

Through the education of our children and of their children and of their children forever after, they will.

GAJE wishes the entire community a meaningful, healthy, happy Passover.

Netivot has managed not to raise its tuition for next year.

We urge families to enroll their children in CHAT.

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Shabbat shalom. Chag samayach.

GAJE

Fight for moderation, balance, compassion and inclusiveness. We have celebrated the recent dramatic reduction in next year’s tuition at TanenbaumCHAT because it is evidence of the seriousness with which the community is responding to the crisis of educational affordability. But as we also have written, the generous donation that enabled the 30 percent reduction in tuition must be regarded as only the beginning of the community’s total, creative, out-the-box effort to make Jewish education affordable. Tuition must be dramatically reduced in all the day schools and brought down even further at CHAT.

As a result of the merger of the two CHAT campuses, many Thornhill families have felt unfairly treated and neglected. Indeed, nearly one month after the tuition and merger decision, emotions are still unsettled. One worries about an anger-driven “rupture” in the CHAT parent body. This is profoundly sad and distressing.

Perhaps one way of cooling the anger and of finding a way to resolve differences is to heed the advice of Rabbi Marc D. Angel, the founder of The Institute of Jewish Ideas and Ideals. In preparation for Pesach, Rabbi Angel wrote an article entitled “Ice, Fire, and the Search for the Middle Path: Thoughts as We Approach Pessah.”

In the essay, Rabbi Angel urges us to eschew extreme approaches of either left or right. He urges us to find the “middle” path of moderation, mutual understanding and respect.

“The Jerusalem Talmud (Hagigah 2:1) teaches that the way of Torah is a narrow path. On the right is fire and on the left is icy snow. If one veers from the path, one risks being destroyed by either the fire or the ice. The Torah way of life is balanced, harmonious and sensible. It imbues life with depth, meaning and true happiness. Yet, it is not easy to stay on the path.

“Veering to the left freezes the soul of Judaism… Veering to the right causes one to become embroiled in religious fanaticism, excessive zeal…”

“It is difficult, even uninspiring, to fight for moderation, balance, compassion and inclusiveness. It is so much easier to take extreme positions, where one can argue from the vantage point of ice or fire, rather than to be “lukewarm”.

“All Jews…need to hear a principled and articulate expression of the middle path of Judaism, that veers neither to the right nor to the left…Let us all listen carefully. The future of Judaism and the Jewish people may be at stake.”

Of course, Rabbi Angel wrote specifically about matters of ritual observance. But the principles he has articulated – to fight for moderation, balance, compassion and inclusiveness – are applicable to most crises of life and especially to finding needed compromises and joint solutions to difficult, intra-communal differences.

In Rabbi Angel’s words, we urge affected parties to listen carefully to each other. The future of our community may possibly be at stake.

As all readers of this weekly update know, GAJE is singularly dedicated to bringing as many students as possible into the transformative realm of Jewish education. We have aimed our sights at all forms of Jewish education including formal and informal education, day school, supplementary school, adult lehrhaus and camps. Access to Jewish education is in great part – though not exclusively – a function of affordability. Our first target in the campaign has been day school education because day school education is the most expensive, indeed prohibitively and punitively so, for young families.

We must do our utmost therefore to bring about higher enrollment in our schools.

Toward this end, the first order of urgent communal business is to persuade, convince and plead with as many families as possible to enroll or re-enroll their children at CHAT next year. Higher enrollment will help bring about lower tuition fees and ensure the continued high quality of education in the day schools.

Thus again, we urge families to enroll their children in CHAT.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Passover is less than three weeks away. The centerpiece of the holiday’s ritual, the Seder, was designed as the paradigmatic instrument of education for our children. It is not too soon, therefore, as we prepare for the holiday to think about it in specifically educationally-related terms and to heighten our focus on the affordability of Jewish education.

In this regard, once cannot overstate the importance of the recent reduction in CHAT’s 2017-2018 tuition. It is an example of the bold, creative, generous thinking that must be brought together from diverse sources to make Jewish education affordable in perpetuity.

As we wrote last week however, this dramatic cut in tuition must be but the beginning of the community’s effort to make Jewish education affordable. Tuitions must be dramatically reduced in all the day schools and brought down even further at CHAT.

Thus, the first order of urgent communal business is to persuade, convince and plead with as many families as possible to enroll or re-enroll their children at CHAT next year.

Higher enrollment will encourage other community philanthropists and/or education-oriented community investors to contribute to the community-wide effort of making education more affordable. Higher enrollment will help guarantee the continued high quality of education in the day schools. It may also result in the eventual re-opening of CHAT’s northern branch.

Thus, we again urge families to enroll their children in CHAT.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

An article written by Shawn Evenhaim, a successful businessman, philanthropist and Jewish school activist in California, entitled “Tuition Revolution”, appeared last week on the eJewish Philanthropy website (http://ejewishphilanthropy.com/jewish-day-schools-its-time-for-a-tuition-revolution/).

Evenhaim issues a clarion call to the Jews of North America. “We need to revolutionize the way our Jewish Day schools operate. Now is the time to make the changes necessary to ensure that these schools are accessible…”

The tone of the article is urgent. The substance is compelling.

According to Evenhaim, the necessary changes are twofold: reduce tuition and ensure excellence in education. The tuition reduction at the school, of which he is a director, begins in the 2017-18 school year: up to 11 percent for preschool families and some 43 percent for elementary and middle school families. It should be noted that even after these substantial reductions, the fees at his school are in line with current preschool and elementary/middle school tuitions in the GTA. But the significance of the measure for our purposes is in its drastic departure from past practice, not in the final amount of the tuition. For, the tuition will likely be further reduced in years to come.

“This major reduction will make Jewish Education accessible to many in our community and will eliminate the complicated, time-consuming and sometimes uncomfortable process of applying for financial aid,” Evenhaim wrote.” “As we bring down tuition, we will increase enrollment, and lower our cost-per-pupil.” Thus far, the numbers have proven him to be correct for enrollment has already climbed by 200 percent since the initiative was introduced.

“The bottom line is simple: to make Jewish education an attractive option for more families, it must be both excellent and affordable – one cannot be sacrificed for the other.”

A week before Evenhaim’s article, our community experienced a tuition revolution of its own: CHAT reduced its tuition for 2017-18 by one third, from $28,000 to $18,500.

We view this as only the beginning. It is up to our community to ensure that the revolution continues with deeper, across-the-board cuts in tuition throughout the Jewish educational system.

The first step is to have as many families as possible enroll or re-enroll their children in CHAT. The higher the enrollment at CHAT next year, the more persuasive will be the empirical proof that affordability (and excellence) are the key factors for school enrollment. With a demonstrated higher enrollment, the greater the likelihood that funds will increasingly pour into the system to bring down further the tuition charges at the respective schools.

Of course there is no denying that even $18,500 is itself a mammoth figure for most families to pay as are the current tuitions in the elementary and middle schools. Nor is there any denying that for many of the CHAT north students suddenly displaced from their school, the extra daily commute will be a hardship. We urge and we hope the CHAT administration will help the affected families find a way to surmount the hardship.

As a community we must determine that this massive tuition cut in CHAT tuition is but the beginning of the revolution, not its end.

Thus, again, we urge families to enroll their children in CHAT.

Evenhaim wrote: “For too long, we have been talking about the crisis facing Jewish education. We need to face difficult truths and embrace the need for radical change. The time for action is now.”

We agree.

Two things are certain.
1. We must not point fingers at anyone for imperfect decisions made in good faith that bore a heavy cost. We must, rather, extend a hand to find the more perfect solutions together.
2. And, we must continue the tuition revolution.

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Reminder

Limmud Conference

The annual Limmud Toronto conference takes place this weekend, March 19, at St. Andrews Club & Conference Centre in downtown Toronto. The program includes a number of key sessions that relate to the subject of Jewish education including:

• Jewish Education: Do We Want it? Can We Afford It? – Jeffrey Stutz
• A Viable Alternative to the Financial Crisis in Jewish Education – Sholom Eisenstat

We encourage you to attend the conference. To register, visit limmud.ca.

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Shabbat shalom.

GAJE