It Takes A Moral Community:
Thoughts about School Violence and Jewish Day Schools
By Leonard Saxe
Even with a little time, it is difficult to think clearly about the horror of what happened in Littleton, Colorado, where two high school boys went beyond playing computer games to wreak deadly havoc on fellow students and teachers. The tragedy is mind-numbing and my thoughts are frequently interrupted by images of my own son.
My son attends a Jewish Day School. The Littleton tragedy makes me feel blessed that fate and family situation enable my son to have a full-time secular and religious education. It is not that I think he is better off for being educated exclusively with Jewish children or that chosenness as Jews gives us special dispensation from being affected by violence. Rather, my son's Jewish school does what the American education should be doing, but appears not to be doing very well.
The school my son goes to is part of a new breed of comprehensive Jewish schools rooted in the liberal tradition. It integrates religious and secular studies, just as in one's life Judaism is part of everything one does. I would like to think that he is learning about the world, not factoid by factoid, but in terms of how knowledge relates to what it means to be human.
What has consistently impressed me is how my son's education is infused with meaning. In kindergarten, he learned to add by counting tzedakkah (moral) heroes. In second grade, as Hanukkah gelt (gift money), he got a check from his teachers that he could send to a charity that he had to choose. And in fourth grade, he learned to read Bereisheit (Genesis) and to integrate the story of our ancestors with his life in the present.
What my son has learned at his day school is that he is part of something larger than himself. Study of torah and daily prayer are constant reminders of how he is a part, not all, of humanity and that the essence of life consists of acts of love and kindness. Tikkum olam (repairing the world) permeates every bit of the curriculum.
I had an inkling about how the curriculum affected him after a previous tragedy--the Kentucky school killings. My son had overheard a news story about the event. His reaction was to tell me that "If I should die, please tell people that I gave tzedakkah (charity) and did good things". No parent wants a young child to think about death, but if that is unavoidable, I am proud that he can think of his life in such positive terms.
By profession, I am a research psychologist, and questions about what motivates children are not only personal anxieties. It is part of my job to understand how children think and how we can make this a safer and better world for them. We need to go beyond thinking about better ways to identify troubled children and keep weapons out of their reach. Those are important steps, but they do not solve the problem.
To avoid another Littleton, as adults, we need to be more a part of our children's lives. In a book last year that received widespread attention, Judith Harris promoted the view that children's peers are all powerful and that parents have little influence on personality development. Sadly, the recent tragedy supports her view. But, even if it is the case--although I believe her argument is exaggerated--it means that adults have to work harder to influence and be part of the lives of teenagers.
We must find ways to inject adults into our children's lives--not as security guards and parole officers, but as educators, mentors and role models. A new intimacy must be developed between children and adults--where developing adults can test their ideas about who they want to be in adult space that is safe.
And that brings me back to religion and to Jewish day school education. Wisdom from the Pirke Avot (Ethics of Our Fathers) suggests that we should "say little, but do much". As adults we need to show children how our lives and theirs can be fulfilling and how the connections among us are important. It is probably a job that cannot be done only by parents. Each of us--teachers, rabbis, doctors, lawyers, and business people--needs to be a role model for all the children we come in contact with.
Jewish tradition provides a formula for reminding us-adults, young adults and children--about how to separate the important from the unimportant in life and move outside the egocentricity that modern life seems to breed. Adults ideally provide kids with a point of continuity with a tradition that goes back millennia and provides a richness that values of the present do not. As adults we can embody tradition and, thereby, provide role models for our children.
The Jewish day school my son attends seems to have the worked out a modern way to implement the formula--a framework based on tradition that brings lots of adults into intimate contact with children. It insures that the words go with the behavior. Day schools are perhaps not a universal solution, but there is a lot to learn from the model. We need to raise a generation that truly believes that the world stands on three things: truth, justice, and peace.
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