“Study them with love, for they will be your links to life”

The death last Shabbat of Elie Wiesel was a severe blow to all. He died after a long illness in his 88th year. His life came, sadly, to its natural end. His quiet passing was a poignant, tender contrast to the brutal murders of millions and millions of people whose lives were cut short by the perpetrators of the Shoah and then by the many oppressors and persecutors of human beings afterward.

Wiesel knew he could never make sense of what happened to the Jews of Europe. He did not try to. Rather, he struggled constantly to make sense of his own life. And he was an unrelenting torment to modern day oppressors even as he reminded the world of the evil committed by the Nazis.

Despite everything he experienced and saw during the dark years of the Shoah, he never let go of his deep sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Indeed, he was one of the world’s great explicators of Jewish life, Jewish history and the Jewish people.

In the first volume of his autobiography, Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea, (Alfred A. Knopf, Canada, 1995), Wiesel recounts the surge of excitement he felt at the introduction to his formal Jewish education.

“With time, study became a true adventure for me. My first teacher, the Batizer Rebbe, a sweet old man with a snow-white beard that devoured his face, pointed to the 22 holy letters of the Hebrew alphabet and said, “Here, children, are the beginning and the end of all things. Thousands upon thousands of works have been written and will be written with these letters. Look at them and study them with love, for they will be your links to life. And to eternity.

“It was with the 22 letters of the aleph-bet that God created the world,” said the teacher. “Take care of them and they will take care of you. They will go with you everywhere. They will make you laugh and cry. Or rather, they will cry when you cry and laugh when you laugh, and if you are worthy of it, they will allow you into hidden sanctuaries where all becomes…” All becomes what? Dust? Truth? Life? It was a sentence he never finished.”

Wiesel, of course, refers to the Hebrew letters metaphorically as well as literally. They represent the vast, illimitable richness and depth of Jewish learning. “Study them (Jewish learning) with love,” Wiesel has his teacher saying. “For they (Jewish learning) will be your links to life and to eternity.”

It is painful to contemplate how many among our younger generations have read any of Wiesel’s many works. How many among our younger generations know who he was?

We share Wiesel’s observations about the power and the possibilities inherent in Jewish learning. And that is why we are determined to make it affordable to all.

•••

GAJE hopes to enlist the help of as many rabbis as possible to speak from their pulpits during the upcoming High Holidays about the need to make Jewish education affordable. We ask our GAJE members to join in our recruitment effort. Please speak to your rabbi. Ask him or her to join the cause. It is not too soon.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

We do not see ourselves as grasshoppers

This week’s Torah portion, Shelach, holds an especially strong message for us.

When the twelve scouts whom Moshe had sent ahead to the land of Canaan returned to the camp, the majority gave a negative report of what they had seen. Their report far exceeded Moshe’s instructions to them for the reconnaissance. The effect of their report was to disheartening so many of their co-religionists.

Perhaps the most egregious excess in their report and certainly the most psychologically revealing if not also damaging was the following: “In our own eyes, we seemed like grasshoppers; and thus we appeared to them.” (Numbers 13:33)

Faced with what they considered to be a daunting, impossible task, the ten returning scouts cringed. They went far beyond reasonable doubt and concern for the success of their ultimate mission. They considered themselves inferior and incapable of any, let alone meaningful, action. They thought of themselves as grasshoppers! They saw themselves as insignificant, insubstantial and of no ultimate account. When they surrendered so completely to their self-doubts and fears, they demonstrated to Moshe that they were ill suited and incapable of accepting the large responsibilities and difficult tasks that lay ahead of them.

We do not see ourselves as grasshoppers. Despite the enormity of the task ahead of us, we are up to it. We will not back away. We acknowledge the difficulties ahead. They may even be giant difficulties. But we will defeat them.

That is the only course consistent with Jewish history. And that is our course.

•••

– Due to its importance, we repeat the important public service announcement that appeared in last week’s update. –

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA) has asked GAJE to assist in calling the public’s attention to an effort by CIJA to secure additional support from the federal government for security infrastructure program (SIP) for our various Jewish Day schools in the community. Specifically, CIJA is asking members of the public to make their voices heard to the federal government calling for more funds to be expended to help defray the cost of the security measures our schools must undertake.

SIP currently covers up to 50% of the costs for institutions to upgrade their exterior security measures. But as we know, alas, the need for Jewish schools and other institutions in the community to maintain security vigilance is ongoing. There is a constant need to modernize and expand the security program to further lessen the financial burden on the schools.

Please see GAJE’s Facebook page for full information from CIJA on this matter.

CIJA has launched an Action Alert on this matter. Individuals can find information regarding emailing the Minister of Public Safety at http://www.cija.ca/sip/.

We urge you to act. Every bid of statutory aid to the parents helps to ultimately abate the cost of tuition to parents.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

This is a very sweet time of year for most of our children.

The end of this week marks the end of the school year for most children attending Jewish schools. At whatever stage in their school careers and to whichever grade they are advancing, our children are to be commended.

School is not always pleasant. But it is always necessary. The school year is long and always tiring. At all stages and in all grades, school holds soaring rewards and painful disappointments. Self-confidence climbs; sometimes it tumbles.

We do not underestimate the achievement of our children as they complete yet another school year. Crossing the invisible border from one grade to the next is a significant milestone for each child. It should be celebrated and heralded with emphatic love by each family.

Nor do we underestimate the profoundly important contribution of our teachers, administrators and all school staff in guiding our children in guiding our children through the triumphs and the travails of ten long months of classroom discovery. We thank them and commend them all.

But as one school year draws to a close, the next one is already being planned. Tuitions have already been established for the coming year. And as many administrators have already heard from some parents, the cost is too high for them to bear. The cumulative financial pressure is too onerous; the stresses upon their family now too near the breaking point. These parents worry for the overall emotional, social and financial health of their family.

As a community, we should also worry for these families. We must endeavor with all our might to keep the children of these families in Jewish schools. Their dignity is our dignity. Their children are all of our children.

Some years ago, Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has eloquently explained why the obligation falls upon us all.

“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.”

Making Jewish education affordable knows no quick fix or easy solution. But there is a fix. There is a solution. We will find it. In Rabbi Sacks’ words, we will defend our civilization.

•••

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA) has asked GAJE to assist in calling the public’s attention to an effort by CIJA to secure additional support from the federal government for security infrastructure program (SIP) for our various Jewish Day schools in the community. Specifically, CIJA is asking members of the public to make their voices heard to the federal government calling for more funds to be expended to help defray the cost of the security measures our schools must undertake.

SIP currently covers up to 50% of the costs for institutions to upgrade their exterior security measures. But as we know, alas, the need for Jewish schools and other institutions in the community to maintain security vigilance is ongoing. There is a constant need to modernize and expand the security program to further lessen the financial burden on the schools.

CIJA has asked individuals to email the Minister of Public Safety and their MPs. You can do this directly from the CIJA website, at http://www.cija.ca/sip.

We urge you to act. Every bit of statutory aid to the parents helps to ultimately abate the cost of tuition to parents.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Tuition Cap Pilot Project Launched

We wish to draw GAJE members’ attention to an important announcement made this week by the UJA Federation’s Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Education. The centre has introduced a pilot program for the 2016-17 school year at The Leo Baeck Day School, North Campus and Associated Hebrew Schools in York Region. The program is dedicated to increasing access to day schools by making the tuition costs affordable.

The essence of the project is to offer a cap on tuition to families seeking day school education at these two campuses. The program is aimed at young families just now contemplating day school education for their families. Thus, eligibility for the cap on tuition is limited to families whose oldest child is entering SK in the fall of 2016.

The heart of the program will cap tuition for a family, irrespective of the number of children in that family attending the school, around 12% – 16% of gross family income, depending upon the income, for the entire time the family’s children are in elementary school (SK-8).

The full details of the pilot program are available at cjetoronto.com/cap.

We commend the Centre for launching this initiative. It marks a paradigm shift in the community’s thinking about helping to bring more students into the day school system. We need more such shifting in our approaches to making Jewish education affordable.

GAJE might differ with some of the details of the project, especially the amount of the cap. But our differences are differences of details and not of principle. We commend the initiative. It is an exploratory first step. It expresses both a determination to find solutions to the problem of affordability and the hope that young families who live in the York Region near the two participating schools will apply and sign on to the project.

Spaces at the schools are limited. We therefore urge interested families to act quickly.

•••

GAJE congratulates Adam Minsky. Minsky, a young veteran of communal work, was appointed last week the incoming President and CEO of UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. Minsky has a proven track record of service and commitment to our community and to Jews wherever they live around the world. GAJE will assist Minsky and the Federation in whichever way we can to finally make Jewish education affordable to all who wish it for their families.

The crisis of affordability can be solved if we only resolve to do so.

And we will.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

On Saturday night, seven weeks will have elapsed from the holiday of Pesach. That means, of course, the arrival and celebration of the festival of Shavuot.

Assembled at the foot of Mount Sinai, the Children of Israel – an undisciplined, uneducated large rabble of men and women, recently liberated from their slavery in Egypt – were about to receive the Torah. They would personally enter into a Covenant with God and commit all future generations to that Covenant as well. That Covenant would alter the course of humankind for all time. The mission of the Jews to bring human perfection into the world would become the high star above guiding us and lighting our way. Ethical monotheism would become the uncompromisable belief system against which all human behaviour would be measured.

The renowned scholar, teacher, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, has described that covenant with great clarity and eloquence.

“Jewry is a community devoted to the realization of perfection in human history. The Jewish people came into being to teach the world the concept and promise of redemption and thus to be a blessing to the nations. It maintains its distinctive existence to offer a community model of how to live and work toward that perfect goal and to work alongside the rest of the world to achieve it. Without this commitment, the children of Israel would have remained a family or a tribe. Once Jewish existence was pledged to carry the values, then in addition to being born into Judaism [or by adopting the religion], they could connect and take on responsibility for Jewish fate in order to realize these values. Thus, Jewry opened up from being a family to being a community. [Our emphasis]

“Sharing values is not enough. There must be a commitment to realize them, to pass them on, to be responsible until they are fulfilled. “

Thus, Rabbi Greenberg has succinctly explained how Jewish particularism enhances, broadens and improves humanitarian universalism.

Without Jewish education, alas, future generations whose embrace of the Covenant was promised at Sinai on Shavuot some 3,600 years ago, will not know how to fulfill that promise.

The community – as defined by Rabbi Greenberg – must ensure that the promise is kept. “To recognize that the other is part of my community is to recognize that I need the other for the sake of my own fulfillment. In helping the other,” Rabbi Greenberg wrote, “I invest in myself. Thus community leads to help even as help creates the community.”

•••

GAJE believes that making Jewish education affordable is the task, the obligation, of the entire community.

If we are to preserve and enhance the sense of Jewish community for all time to come, as Rabbi Greenberg envisions, we have no choice. We must make Jewish education affordable.

Shabbat shalom and Chag Shavuot samayach.

GAJE

In February of 1996 – 20 years and four months ago – the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto published the report of its Commission on Jewish Education. The commission had been struck some four years earlier in March 1992. It was part of a broad “mobilization” within the organized Jewish world of North America to assess the state of the delivery of formal Jewish establish within respective local communities. The Report of the Commission on Jewish Education in North America, called A Time to Act, was the tripwire for local studies.

Some two decades have elapsed since then.

The key statement of hope and purpose was succinctly articulated in the letter of presentation to the UJA Federation’s Board of Governors. The diverse members of the commission were of the view “that our community, Am Yisroel, can only survive if its members are Jewish because of knowledge and commitment not merely as a result of an accident of birth.”

But the report acknowledged a worrisome reality then that has evolved since then into a full-blown, dire threat to the viability of diverse, creatively rich and fulfilling Jewish communal life in the near future.

“Declining UJA campaigns and the resultant limitation on funds available for education, combined with rising tuition fees and lower family incomes, have placed significant pressure on the educational system and widened the gap between funds available and funds needed. Despite the limitation on financial resources, the educational system must continue to ensure and enhance the quality of education, to maintain access to Jewish education for school aged children while improving accessibility beyond childhood and to generally enrich educational opportunities for all members of the community.”

Despite the best intentions and myriad efforts of the individuals who labored two decades ago to resolve the issues that lay at the heart of their worries, those issues remain. Today they menace the future of the community in far larger dimension of worry and threat.

•••

It has fallen to us – the next generation – to finally, permanently find a way to ensure the affordability of and accessibility to a Jewish educational system that is excellent and accountable and once again the diadem in the crown of the Jewish community.

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

The Funding Committee is working on a set of newly imagined funding proposals. It is hoped that the target date for presenting them to the public will be in the early autumn.

•••

In his column this month in The Canadian Jewish News, Daniel Held, Executive Director, Julia and Henry Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Education, pleaded for a new approach, more invigorated and comprehensive approach for “maximizing both the depth and breadth of impact of Jewish education on our community.”

Specifically, he urged community leaders and activists, not only educators, to try to convince the parents of the increasing numbers of families who are uncertain about whether they will continue with their children’s Jewish education after Grade Eight, or even start formal Jewish education for their children. Or as Held elegantly wrote, “Whereas once a child’s Jewish journey was somewhat prescribed, today parents and children are undecided, waiting to be convinced of the extent to which they will engage in Jewish educational experiences.”

Held minced no words. We must be quite vocal in proclaiming the individual and collective importance of Jewish education, identity and affiliation.

“The leadership of schools, camps, synagogues, and other Jewish organizations must concentrate not only on ensuring the highest quality (and affordability) of the programs they offer, but also on articulating the value proposition they offer to an increasingly discerning consumer and shouting it from the rooftops.”) (Our emphasis)

We agree entirely with Held. In our view, however, the highest, most daunting hurdle for the majority of the vacillating, uncommitted, “maybe” families to surmount is cost of tuition. Making the key Jewish educational experience affordable is the pre-eminent challenge to the leadership.

In this regard, it is fortuitous to note that Held’s plea to the leadership of the community found a resonant echo this week in the words of Rabbi Marc D. Angel, the head of The Institute of Jewish Ideas and Ideals.

In recalling the character of a friend who had passed away, Rabbi Angel defined somewhat the type of individual who we believe will succeed in fulfilling Held’s hope.

“Religious leadership needs to be in the hands of those…who see the long view of Jewish history and destiny, who are tirelessly and selflessly committed to serving God and humanity with love, kindness, compassion, wisdom and moral courage. Great leadership is the gift of few special individuals who have a trans-generational view, who draw strength from the wisdom of the past and who keep focused on the needs of their generation and the generations yet to come.”

The leadership that Held seeks and that Rabbi Angel partially describes is emerging anew in our community, the inheritors of the generous, visionary founding generations of men and women who understood the central, core importance of Jewish education as the guarantor of a Jewish tomorrow.

Jewish education will become affordable and with it, the vitality of Jewish continuity will become assured.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

The CIJA Task Force on the Affordability of Jewish Education met last week. As a member of the task force, GAJE tries to contribute to its work and monitor the task force’s progress.

The following is a brief summary of the meeting.

• Discussions with federal government officials are ongoing on possible security infrastructure funding for the schools. The Task Force plans a three-pronged approach that will include attempting to conscript Jewish federations across the country to make representations on the subject to respective local officials.
• The group discussed the possibility of building a wide faith-based coalition of other communities to lobby the provincial government for payments for health support services from provincial government for all children with disabilities. The task force intends to emphasize that the issue is one of fairness for students with special needs.
• CIJA members intend to discuss education-related matters with the Premier and other members of the government during the Premier’s business mission to Israel.
• Questions were raised about the pace of progress and the mounting frustration with the fact that there seem to be no positive results to report to the community. CIJA acknowledged and shares the frustration and reiterated their objective to solve the affordability crisis. The task force’s approach however is one of incremental achievements.
• The next task force meeting is expected to be held before the end of June.

•••

Last month, the CJN published an article by Rabbi Lee Buckman, head of school at TanenbaumCHAT, urging students and their parents not to regard the completion of Grade 8 in a Jewish school as sufficient formal Jewish education.

Rabbi Buckman pointed to three specific reasons for the importance of a Jewish high school education:

1. It plays a vital role in solidifying a teenager’s Jewish identity.
2. The big, complex questions are discussed and debated.
3. It prepares students to feel comfortable in their own Jewish skin when they face the “real world” outside the Jewish bubble.

Rabbi Buckman wrote “Every day… I see firsthand the path to passionate and committed Jewish adulthood being shaped – each student strengthening a Jewish future for all of us.”

Rabbi Buckman acknowledged “there are a lot of understandable reasons for why parents may not choose Jewish high school for their child. ‘Knowing enough’ however, is not one of them.”

We agree with Rabbi Buckman when he urges the continuation of formal Jewish education past Grade 8. But we also acknowledge that one of those “understandable reasons” to which he refers for parents choosing not to send their children to Jewish high school is: the cost of the education.

That is precisely why GAJE formed.

We are dedicated to making Jewish education affordable. And, as we have affirmed over and over again, though it may take some time, we will succeed. Failure is simply not an option.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

As reported last week, the GAJE committees are continuing with their respective tasks.

The CIJA Task Force on the Affordability of Jewish Education met today. As you know, GAJE is a member of the CIJA committee. Next week we will provide a report of this meeting.

•••

Early in this week’s Torah Portion, Kedoshim, we read a compelling command from God to the Jewish people as related by Moshe.

“Be holy,” God says, “because I, the Lord your God, am holy.”

Holiness, we quickly learn, is determined by how we behave rather than by who we are. There is no automatic status of holiness. Holiness does not attach to us by virtue of our lineage or our ancestry. Holiness attaches to us by virtue of our behaviour toward our fellow human beings.

For us to better understand what is expected of us in order to behave in a holy manner, the Torah then provides a set of examples of the types of behaviour that fall within the “holiness” category. One of the key prototypical examples is “you shall not insult a deaf individual or place a stumbling block before an individual who is crippled.” (It is not difficult to see the straight line between this mandatory injunction and modern human rights legislation.)

It is in this spirit of holiness-through-action that we pursue our objective of making Jewish education affordable for every family that seeks such education for their children. The cost of a Jewish education should be within reach of the young families that comprise our community. Helping them helps us all. It helps secure a confidant, knowledgeable, thriving Jewish community for all times.

Is that not also an act of holiness?

It must be.

•••

Shabbat shalom.

GAJE

Back to work.

The Funding committee is refining and organizing a series of new funding options to present to the public.

The Marketing committee is working on the details of a community event to be held, it is hoped, in the autumn.

The Political and Legal Action committee is proceeding with two items on its agenda.

Full reports on the committees’ work will be submitted in due course.

•••

Last month, Elliot Abrams, the former American diplomat and currently a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote a thoughtful, if provocative essay in Mosaic Magazine, “If American Jews and Israel are Drifting Apart, What’s the Reason?”

The essay evoked considerable response and especially interesting elucidatory support by three scholars, Daniel Gordis, Martin Kramer and Jack Wertheimer, each of whom echoed Abrams’ thesis but for different reasons.

Subsequently, in response to the responders, Abrams suggested that there was a path that offered a way to mitigate if not entirely avoid the looming divide between the two largest Jewish communities in the world. That path, Abrams wrote was Jewish education.

Abrams wrote specifically about the Jewish community in the United States. But the Jews of Canada should take his observations to heart as well. For our ethnic-religious situation might soon mirror that of our American co-religionists.

“But [full integration into American society] is now a fact, and staring the American non-Orthodox in the face is the prospect of Jewish assimilation leading to Jewish extinction. That being the reality, is it possible that day schools might be re-examined?

“One critical barrier here, even for the moderately affluent, is financial: on top of the other burdens of engaged Jewish life—synagogue dues, summer camps, kosher food, and so forth—day schools are an expensive proposition. Especially in localities boasting excellent public schools, they may seem either beyond reach or unnecessary, or both. And here, to make things worse, the organized community’s priorities are upside-down. Rather than making sure that a day-school education is affordable and available to all who want it—as Jack Wertheimer has tirelessly advocated—Jewish agencies have not only undervalued the relative worth of such an education but have often led the fight against extending any help at all to religious schools in general, even in the form of vouchers, tuition tax credits, or other tax breaks that are clearly constitutional.

“The day-school movement in America is one of the proven secrets of continuing Orthodox strength and solidarity. As Wertheimer has written, a day-school education ‘greatly increases the chances of children learning the skills necessary for participation in religious life, for living active Jewish lives, and for identifying strongly with other Jews.’ One can only hope that non-Orthodox Jews and Jewish organizations seeking to survive in America will reconsider its benefits and relax their visceral and ideological opposition to communal and other forms of support for non-public schools.

“Whether or not they do, however, I join my three respondents in fearing the near-irreversibility of the underlying trends contributing to the weakening of the American Jewish community. All the more reason, then, to keep front and center in one’s consciousness the single key fact of modern Jewish existence: for the first time in 2,000 years there is a Jewish state, it is growing and thriving, and it is becoming the center of world Jewish life. Would we want it otherwise? American Jews today may be declining in strength and centrality, but they are also witness to and can actively participate in the miracle of the Jewish state. In Daniel Gordis’s words, Israel is ‘the Jewish people’s last remaining hope.’ It is also something more: something, in Martin Kramer’s words, that we should always regard just as a hundred generations of Jews before us would have done—with “pure wonder.”

•••

With the commemoration of Yom Hashoah v’Hagvurah this week, we have entered a uniquely poignant period of collective history that inspires profound feelings of peoplehood. Next week we commemorate Yom Hazicaron. Then, as evening falls on Yom Hazicaron, we switch emotional gears to celebrate Israel’s 68th Yom Ha’atzma’ut.

When the day arrives that Jewish education is affordable in perpetuity, we will then see that these feelings of Jewish peoplehood will also be assured in perpetuity.

Shabbat shalom.

We urge you to commemorate Yom Hazicaron and to celebrate Yom Ha’atzma’ut!

GAJE