Why Jewish Education is Lost on the Young, Maybe

I will admit, without embarrassment, that I led a charmed life as a child. I didn't worry about money or whether there would be food or shelter in the coming days. I confidently expected transportation to be readily available from my parents to my private Jewish school, and also that they would shuttle me back and forth from dance class... So it comes as little surprise that my first introduction to the concepts of a loan, mortgage, lien, contracts and other legal categories was in Talmud class. I think perhaps a degree in law would have been a helpful background to studying Talmudic law, but actually, just basic exposure to these categories with life experience would have sufficed.


I recall a Jewish philosophy class in high school where we were looking at Maimonides' 13 principles of faith, and our teacher gave us buy-in as to which principles of these 13 we should explore more deeply in class? I chose God's oneness, and I thought this was an obvious choice, but my teacher was clearly surprised by my choice. Thinking back to this experience, I imagine that monotheism is not something that troubles youth on a regular basis, so she couldn't imagine why a high school student would want to discuss this topic, but the truth is that I never really understood monotheism until I learned about polytheistic religions. What did it mean that God was one? I later explored this idea in Chassidic thought as well, which could have been a different avenue of study (chassidut was absent from my Jewish education), but I think that some knowledge about other religions (present day as well as ancient) needs to be understood before one can really appreciate the character of Jewish monotheism.


My hobby in high school was going to shul to daven. I went every day, sometimes two or three times. Davening was a passion of mine. So I thought a lot about the prayers in the siddur. In prayer, we ask God for redemption a lot. I did not know what redemption meant. Why do we keep asking for it? What do we need saving from? Clearly, this question can be answered on both personal as well as national and global levels. But I think as a teenager, upon first considering this concept, I could not make heads or tales out of the need for redemption because I had never really suffered. I had few troubles in my life, and no one ever explained to me that I ought to ask God for help with my 10-year-old fight with my best friend. [This belongs in its own rant about prayer education, and how it needs to be done on a one-on-one, personal level, but that's besides the point.] I think that these prayers are written by grown-ups, for grown-ups, and until one encounters real difficulties- experiences real loss, a person cannot get a real handle on the meaning of redemption.


So we talk about this a lot- the Bible stories aren't for kids, either-- that is clearly true as well. But I think that there is an argument to be made that Rav Soloveitchik describes in Halakhic Man. The person who looks at a body of water and thinks immediately of mikvaot and ma'ayanot, and turns to the legal definitions and minutia about these halachik categories has a framework of Jewish law overseeing all of his or her experiences in the world. Certainly, our laid out chronology, where we first learn of these concepts and experience them after, lends itself to this experience. Is this a benefit to a person? I am not sure. Do we want our children to first experience the world on its own merits, independent of external structures and categories? Or are we happy to structure their thoughts and frameworks with Jewish law and text? I am curious to hear what people think about this.