Arbeit Macht Frei in 6.5 weeks or less

By Other

This summer I will be working on a six and a half week trip to Israel. The participants are Conservative Jewish High school students, and I will be guiding them around the land of Israel. We will discuss history, argue politics and study religion. If I do my job right, they will come out of the program with lots of knowledge and maybe their world-view will be just a little different. In addition to being a tour guide, I am an educator and I love my job. It often reminds me of what I am doing here in Israel as I watch young people make the same discoveries about this land that I made when I was their age.

At the end of the summer, however, I am always saddened to see a group leave, knowing that they are returning to the US, where they will once again be taught that it is ok to be fat, dumb and lazy. Where they will learn that they should not fight for good, rather sit on their couch and consume. That they should worry more about Paris Hilton and Dawson Leary than an unjustified war in Iraq, dependence on foreign oil and the alarming rate at which the world’s climate is changing. Where they are taught that they can be as ignorant as they want and still rise to the top leadership role in the land.

This summer, I have decided, things are going to be very different. Thanks to the forward-thinking policy of Birthright, I have been shown a way around this problem. If you haven’t heard, last week Birthright decided not to allow a woman to participate on its 10-day free trip to Israel because of her plan to visit the Palestinian Territories after the program. This summer, I will follow the example set by Birthright. I have decided that any participant on my six and a half week trip who plans to return to the United States afterwards will not be allowed to attend. Regrettably, this means that there will be approximately a 98% drop in the number of participants on my trip. However, I feel that it is extremely important that what I teach them this summer is not undone by the American reality.

Not unlike that of Birthright’s program, the one with which I work is meant to teach young people about their connection to Israel and Judaism. America - which is a Christian country and is not Israel - inherently undermines the connections I construct between the youth in my charge to Judaism and Israel. While in America these impressionable youth are indoctrinated with the nationalistic idea that they are Americans. While there might be some truth in this, I do not want them to hear this. I do not want them participating in any debates as to whether they are American-Jews or Jewish-Americans. As far as they are concerned, when they take their leave of me, they are Jews with an eye towards aliyah. When they complete my program they will be singing “ain le eretz acheret,” which means, “I have no other land [than Israel].”

As an educator, I expect my lessons to have a lasting impression upon my students. Thanks to Birthright, I have learnt that it is possible to achieve my own goals by making it impossible for my students to view their world via a perspective other than what I choose to give them. Sure, I hope that the lessons that I teach my students this summer will be a more complex than what their peers are given by Birthright, which is to say a simplified ethnocentric world view that does not stand up to scrutiny. However, why take the risk. If putting blinders on our kids and giving them an incomplete, narrow world-view is the only way to educate them for them to emerge as pre-programmed propagandists, then this is the direction that Jewish Education must take. Thank you Birthright for being the trailblazer that you have become in the world of Jewish education.

”Those who can’t teach, teach gym. Those who can’t teach gym, teach Jewish education” – Henrietta Szold, founder of Hadassah