THE IMPORTANCE OF NOTHING

Considering all the classes and activities our kids are exposed to and involved in, we should be in awe. The dance classes, music lessons, team sports, visual and performing arts instruction, etc. have become a part of a routine smorgasbord of activities to keep them active, growing and tasting what the future may hold for them. We are giving them just about everything there is possible to give in an environment where they are free and safe to test their talents and explore their interests. In stark contrast is my own rather dull childhood, unadorned by an abundance of extracurricular activities or structured programming. I remember my father being home for dinner each night and helping me with Hebrew reading. The reading wasn’t half as important as the two of us just being together. What we had back then is precisely what our kids don’t have: free time. And I wonder if that isn’t a form of deprivation.

What in times past would have counted as free time has today been chomped away by the homework dragon. Our kids are doing a lot of homework, probably too much. Part of this sad state of affairs involves a political intrusion into education in which government sets academic standards that schools must meet. The schools in turn compel teachers to shelve their own creativity in favor of teaching to the test. I cannot remember a time when so many teachers have expressed disillusionment with a profession they entered into out of love. Knowing their students’ performance will determine their own professional fate, and paycheck, they pile homework assignments on the kids, further diminishing everyone’s free time. I cannot remember a time when parents and kids have felt so overwhelmed. There are serious questions in pedagogic circles whether homework assignments work, whether it actually helps children improve academically. (For studies questioning the efficacy of homework, see the citations at the end of this article). And as schools become more focused on standardized tests, they become less focused on the talents, passions, aptitudes and interests of the individual students. No wonder we give them so much structured programming in the after-school hours.

Recently, our Plainview parents, teachers and administrators responded by creating a homework-free night, when the school would cancel all extracurricular programming and pledge to give the kids a night off. The reviews, not surprisingly, were quite good. The program directly addressed a critical need in our lives—free time to just be with the family with no deadline hanging over our heads. Now that we are walking in the right direction, we need to take this journey a few more miles down the road.

Politicians really do have a tough job, and I have great sympathy for them, given the pressures they face. But when it comes to education, I stand with those who have degrees in pedagogy and experience in the classroom. Standardized testing has provided certain benefits, but not nearly as many as intended. That’s probably because it forces square kids into round holes. Let’s wrest academic oversight from the hands of politicians and place it back into communities and schools, where it belongs. Educators need some breathing room to wield their craft creatively. When that creativity is crushed in the interest of standardized testing, we hurt teachers, and we ultimately shortchange our kids.

Moreover, let’s remember the original homework-free program: Shabbat. Shabbat is an obligation-free, deadline-free, extracurricular-activity-free 24 hours (really 25). The fact is that in our hectic , frenzied work lives, we are not going to ask our teachers, or our managers, for a night off due to exhaustion We are being asked to work 24/7, if not 25/8. We need something stronger than all these people telling us what to do and we’ve got that in Shabbat.

Here’s a good rule for your family: On Friday night, 6:00 PM, everyone is expected at home. No homework, no business, no bills. Light Shabbat candles as a family and for as long as they burn, just be together. You don’t need a fancy Shabbat dinner. You can as easily recite Kiddush and hamotzi and eat pizza. The sanctity of this time revolved around the idea that no one could interfere with it—not a boss, not a teacher, no one. It’s a time to hang out with family, to relax, to throw work worries out the window. It’s sacred; it’s inviolable.

Over the years, as people drifted away from Shabbat holiness, their vulnerability to outside forces that wanted to keep them running and doing and occupied increased dramatically. They were stripped of the power to say, “No.” And so here we are today, exhausted, spent, overwhelmed. If that is the kind of behavior we are modeling for our kids, shame on us.

More than ever we all need a very important something: nothing. There is no better place to begin than by creating sacred time on Shabbat.

CITATIONS QUESTIONING THE EFFICACY OF HOMEWORK

The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning by Kralovec and Buell, 2000; The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It, Bennett and Kalish, 2006; The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, Kohn, 2006.

 

SELECTIVE MEMORY—REMEMBERING THE SHOAH, HONESTLY

For many years, I have told the story of how the Czech Torah scrolls came to be distributed to so many hundreds of synagogues around the world. The story goes like this. The Nazis, gloating over their continued success in making Europe Judenrein (German for: Jew-Free), devised a plan to memorialize their genocidal efforts. They sought to gather the ritual items of synagogues throughout Czechoslovakia with the intent of someday displaying these items in a Museum of an Extinct Race. So they gathered these ritual items, including hundreds of sifrei Torah (i.e., Torah scrolls), but their plans would be defeated along with their defeat in World War II. Following the war, these Torah scrolls were then distributed to willing Jewish communities throughout the world for display, a sobering testimony to the Nazi downfall so starkly contrasted with the survival of the scrolls. And we have one of those scrolls.

It’s a great story. It’s also false. I didn’t know it was false until recently. Many of my colleagues have told the same story, innocently, but the time has come to correct the record. And now the truth. In the middle of World War II, when Czechoslovakian Jews sensed the future growing bleaker and bleaker, the Jewish Museum in Prague asked Jewish communities throughout Czechoslovakia to transfer their ritual items to the museum for cataloguing and safekeeping. The Jews willingly transferred those items to the museum thinking Prague safe. Prague was safe, but the little Jewish communities throughout Czechoslovakia were not. The Jews were murdered on the spot or transferred to death camps, but the ritual items survived the war. The scrolls represent the prescience of the Jewish community acting to safeguard its most cherished possessions. And that’s why we at Midway, like so many others, have a Czech Torah scroll on display today.

It could very well be that a Nazi official here or there, spying these ritual items, thought of a Museum of an Extinct Race, but the genesis of this precious legacy was not the nefarious plan of some Nazi thug. Our story must change to fit the facts. We gain nothing in promoting fantasies. To the contrary, how we remember the Shoah will speak volumes about who we are as a people. Do we willingly perpetuate falsehood or do we demand of our memories honesty? I would hope the latter is the value by which we conduct our lives.

In viewing our new Shoah Memorial, designed by the talented Jewish artist, Jeanette Kuvin Oren, you will see a tribute to the Jews of Horovice (pronounced: ho-ro-VEECH-ay), the one-time guardians of this sefer Torah. They gathered in synagogue for semahot—B’nai Mitzvah and weddings—and they celebrated holidays and Shabbat. Some may have been observant and some less so. Some may have been very bright and entrepreneurial while others may have been more modestly endowed. They were people like you and me but for the way their lives came to an abrupt and cruel end. We remember them for who they were and connect our lives to theirs by assuming guardianship of their Torah.

We remember that although this Horovice Torah is pasul, that is, unfit for ritual use, we have a special obligation as a community to maintain the kashrut of our sifrei Torah, and as such, we have assigned a second Torah, this one kosher, in the memorial ark to be used during services on those occasions when we remember our families and friends who perished in the Shoah. And on the special mantle designed for this Torah is the design of a kiddush cup brimming with fields of flowers and grain. The kiddush cup is taken from the design of the Horovice synagogue, today a church, which features a ceremonial chalice above the main entrance. This design directly connects our Horovice Torah with the synagogue of its provenance. And the fields of flowers and grain—this is a symbol of the promise of Israel, a land of beauty and growth, a safe haven for the Jewish people. Israel is a story that does not stand as a sequel to the Shoah, but one that is not disconnected from it either. When we view our Shoah memorial, and we choose to remember Medinat Yisrael, the State of Israel, we resist the inclination to be engulfed by sorrow, and choose rather to remember the greatest symbol of Jewish autonomy and power today. This is a thought that should strengthen and empower us. And this is a memory that is far from fantasy, but based on fact. It is honest to say that we no longer are a powerless people, the hapless victims of an immoral force. To the contrary, we have become a formidable force in the Mid-East and as such, restored our fate to our own hands, to the extent that anyone’s fate lies in their own hands.

So there are all sorts of things we need to remember. We need to remember the truth. Were we direct survivors of the Shoah, knowing the terrible end our relatives and friends suffered, we would want to remember. We would have to remember. To forget their lives would be to subject them to a second death, and perhaps one more terrible than the first. We may not be direct survivors of the Shoah, but our Jewish identities are inextricably tied to those who are. Were we actual survivors, we would converse with each other using the lingua franca of European Jewry: Yiddish. And knowing what happened to us as a people, we would say to each other: Gedenkt, the Yiddish word for “Remember!” Gedenkt, we say, both the tragedies and the miracles. And we will remember them as honestly as possible.