It’s not that I agree with everything he says. But I do
agree with his overall thesis, which complements the views of another
Conservative religious official, Rabbi Steven Abraham, whose views I
recently discussed in a similarly positive vein.
Freedman’s point is
the following:
The most urgent job of Jewish education right now is not fighting antisemitism directly. It is making sure our children are not first introduced to their own history, their own people and their own homeland by those who mean them harm. It is making sure they can explain themselves to themselves before someone else does it for them.
That is the strongest case I know for Jewish day schools right now, stronger than the continuity argument, stronger than the safety argument, though both are real. Continuity is a downstream effect. Safety is a separate and urgent project. This is the existential one. Who gets to a child’s sense of self first?
The continuity data is solid on its own terms. A 2025 study of Jewish college students found that 81 percent of day school alumni said being Jewish was very important to them, compared to 35 percent of students who didn’t attend day school. But that number describes an outcome, not the mechanism. The mechanism is actually simple and direct. A child who has already engaged with the real Jewish story, in depth, from people who love them, is much harder to indoctrinate into someone else’s version of it.
How true.
Although, in my view, the most important job of a Jewish
education is to teach Jews how to be Jewish by virtue of its defining
characteristics: knowledge and observance of, Jewish law. The importance of
Freedman’s point, however, cannot be overstated.
The lack of a Jewish education explains a lot about
organizations like Jews for Justice in Palestine and other
such anti-Israel organizations. Without any knowledge of their own history,
their own people, and their own homeland, it becomes much easier to buy the
arguments made by our enemies under the guise of anti-Zionism or
anti-colonialsm.
It becomes easier to reject the idea that the Zionist
pioneers who saw Israel as the Jewish homeland were justified in seeking a mass
return to it; that Israel was part of our heritage as Jews; and that we had
every right to encourage mass immigration to the land and develop it—all while
attempting to live there as a people in peace and harmony with the indigenous
Arabs who lived there at the time.
Without that essential knowledge, it becomes much easier to
buy into the notion that the Jews had no connection to the land and were simply
another group of Europeans interested in colonizing a foreign land and
subjugating its people.
That kind of indoctrination by a left-leaning, anti-Jewish
ideology becomes a lot easier when there is no Jewish education of any kind.
And that helps explain the astounding statistic that 65 percent of Jews do not
consider being Jewish important to them.
If Judaism doesn’t matter to you, then all you see in Israel
are victims (Palestinians) and victimizers (Israelis) - who supposedly
perpetuate colonialist policies through a system of brutal apartheid.
This is how you get a Bernie Sanders, whose Jewish education
was probably nonexistent, becoming a man who values socialism more than Judaism
by orders of magnitude…
To continue reading - and/or to comment on this post - click on this link: substack. You must subscribe to receive new posts. It's easy and it's free.
