I Graduated From Hebrew School Not Knowing Any Hebrew
Baruch atah Adonai
Had I stopped my Jewish education at the age of 13 with Hebrew school as my primary foundation, I probably would have converted to a different religion out of spite. I’m not kidding.
For those of you who did not grow up with this unique diaspora Jewish experience, picture this: you're a kid enrolled in public school, where you are imprisoned 7 hours/day. Then after school, completely against your will, you go to another school attached to a synagogue for an additional 3 hours, 3x/week, where you face the torment of having to read and write prayers in Hebrew while your non-Jewish/non-practicing friends get to go to lacrosse/soccer/violin/theater practice. They're having fun; you're getting yelled at by your Hebrew school teachers, who fit into one of 2 categories: 1) disgruntled Israelis; or 2) elderly members of the congregation who are teaching a class of disinterested kids as their retirement activity.
No matter how much you try to cajole your way out of it, every single time, your parents still make you go because it's part of the Jewish parental social contract that their kids must have the same torturous religious school experience that they had growing up. This goes on 3 times per week (one of them Sunday during prime cartoon-watching hours) for every school year from 1st grade until high school.
So how could it be that, after slogging through Hebrew school 9 hours per week for years, my peers and I graduated without even a basic command of the spoken Hebrew language? It's largely for the same reason that millions of college kids graduate at 22 not knowing any basic history, but there are some explanations specific to the Hebrew school experience:
American Jews tend to epitomize the Bar/Bat Mitzvah above everything else, and the school needs to make sure that they get them to that phase. So, they teach just enough (i.e. how to read the text) to learn the assigned Torah portion. You can imagine how shocked I was when I went to Israel for the first time at the age of 16 and found out that 1) the signs in Hebrew don’t have the vowels, so I couldn’t really read them; and 2) no one there was actually impressed with my ability to recite my Bat Mitzvah haftorah.
Hebrew schools, which are most often attached to synagogues, are depending on the guaranteed yearly tuition revenue that they get from families who are enrolling their kids year after year in preparation for the aforementioned B’nai Mitzvah. Think of it as the “kindergarten-to-B’nai Mitzvah pipeline.”
Teaching a foreign language—any language—conversationally is difficult. A Semitic language that comes with its own unique lettering system requires special effort.
All of the above is emblematic of a fundamental problem with our education system in general: it's about what's convenient for the adults, not what’s best for the kids.
Another thing worth noting is that it was not until around the age of 13 that I began learning Spanish. I’ve since mastered that language and now speak and understand it well. It's a great skill to have for many reasons, not the least of which has been the humanitarian work I’ve done in Central America. Part of me regrets that I had to wait until I was a teenager to start learning it.
Later in high school and college I was fortunate to take some great courses on Hebrew literature (translated into English) and Israeli history. Plus, I had grown up on a steady diet of World War II films that my mom made me watch with her. All of that combined made me want to continue my Jewish education as a lifelong endeavor. But none of it had to do with the study of the Hebrew language itself.
Now that I am an aunt and at least partially responsible for overseeing the Jewish education of the next generation, I've taken a casual interest in current Hebrew school trends. Naturally, I started by perusing the one I went to as a kid. I guess I shouldn't find this shocking, but they’ve greatly reduced the amount of instructional hours they're making the kids sit through today. It’s now once/week (on Sundays), for every grade level. For the students approaching B’nai Mitzvah age, they’re required to do an additional 30 minutes per week of Hebrew instruction. Also, a lot of the programming appears geared towards community service and tikkun olam. Doesn’t sound too bad to me.
I’ve heard our Rabbi complain from the pulpit on multiple occasions about the current state of religious school education nationally. He’s mentioned (to an audience in a sanctuary filled at ~30% capacity) that Hebrew schools around the country are struggling as the number of students has dwindled. Apparently, parents are now prioritizing enrolling their kids in the “fun” activities during the school week, and this is what they have to “compete with.” Plus religious education is supposed to be challenging as opposed to fun, and blah blah blah (it’s normal to zone out after the first 5 min of a sermon).
To any Rabbis who might be reading this: I never found organized sports “fun” in general and would have much preferred reading Jewish literature, studying history, or learning Hebrew as a foreign language to that. I grew up in a household that valued all of the Jewish stuff that the religious school failed to teach. My mom and I watched The Pianist together at the same time every other household on the block was watching the NFL game. The fact that I’m recalling my experience negatively is purely a reflection on the schooling, not on my family’s “priorities.”
In reality, it’s the congregation’s responsibility to adapt to changing times, not the other way around. If a 1x/week (+ 30 minutes of Zoom Hebrew) program has the exact same educational outcome as the one that I had after enduring 3x that amount of class time, I consider it a positive change. Maybe if my own religious school education were more like what these kids are getting now, I would not be recounting it with such disillusionment two decades later.
So that’s my reflection on how forced religious school shaped me into the Hebrew non-speaker I am today. All hope is not lost, however. At the time of this writing, I’ve logged in over 200 days on Hebrew Duolingo. That annoying green owl mascot says I’m doing great, so it must be true.
Until next time…
Toda raba, chaverim sheli! L’hitraot!
My failure to (really) learn Hebrew takes a backseat to the failure of never being told the following -- something I stumbled upon in a book when I was 30+ years old:
In the land of Israel, “the Jews begin to live morally — as the Japanese have done literally — in a house of paper: the Bible....
Here, probably long before the Greeks, they achieved the intellectual feat of composing a connected narrative of history — their own and that of the world — enmeshed in the five books of Moses. Here, a national identity was defined, perhaps for the first time, by articulating a philosophy of history.
And here, the idea of progress was first broached. In its time it was an absolutely sensational idea. Thucydides still thought it was worth writing the history of the Peloponnesian war because its events inevitably would be repeated. The scribes and prophets of Jerusalem challenged the prevailing notion that history necessarily moved in circles, repeating itself again and again. They invented utopia, the possibility of a better world. They enunciated hope on a grand scale. They postulated the possibility of a linear progression toward a better, more worthwhile life.” (from Jerusalem: City of Mirrors, by Amos Elon)
If someone had explained this to me clearly when I was a teenager, I would have been far more enthusiastic about my Jewish education, faith, and practice.
Bingo. You captured precisely both my experience and my feelings on what i considered "after school torture". I did learn to read Hebrew, and I do recall some pretty funny stories and early crushes from the small group of my fellow prisoners, so there were other redeeming benefits.