It was the last day of my career teaching religious school at Congregation Eretz Yisrael, but I didn’t know it yet.
Credit: Creative Commons / surlygirl.
When I arrived at my classroom that morning, two Israeli teenagers, a young man and woman, were standing outside my room, looking uncertain. I recognized them as the shin-shinim: Israeli students who come to the United States after high school, delaying their entry into the Israel Defense Forces for a year. Under the aegis of the Jewish Agency for Israel, these young people act as cultural ambassadors, linking American Jewish communities to Israel.
I took a deep breath and forced a smile. “Are you coming to my class?” I asked.
The young man, strongly built with close cropped hair, nodded affirmatively. The young woman smiled hesitantly, flicking a hank of long, curly hair behind her. The shin-shinim come in pairs, invariably a young man and woman. I wondered for a second why this is, whether they are supposed to represent the possible procreation of the nation of Israel, before suppressing a sigh and inviting them in. I imagined my careful lesson plan flying out the window of our basement classroom.
This was the third, surprise version of today’s class. My first plan had been to conclude a brief, five-week unit about the founding of Israel and the resulting displacement of Palestinians with a visit from a different guest speaker. Raja, a Palestinian American friend of mine, was going to come talk about her family’s struggle to hold onto their ancestral lands in the West Bank. My students were excited about this visit, partly because they welcomed any departure from regular class time, and partly because of how engaged they were in our lessons. Particularly if they suspect that something has been deliberately kept from them, eleven year olds love to learn new stories. This one caught their interest, big time.
When I first started teaching Sunday school two years ago, two different shin-shinim came to my third grade class. They did a slide show about their lives in Israel: their houses, their friends, the horses the young woman liked to ride. The Israelis were charming, and the third graders were fascinated. The madricha, or teaching assistant, for that class, herself a high school senior, wondered about their impending military service. “Aren’t you scared?” she asked.
“Yes,” the young man answered. It hit me then that, although my students were trained to identify Israel as important to their Jewish identity from gan – kindergarten – on, they knew little about the situation there. Here we were, talking to two young people whose lives were about to be transformed by the experience of military conflict, who were very likely to make life or death decisions involving themselves and their young comrades-in-arms. But we had not spoken a syllable about that.
The shin-shinim do what I imagine the program was intended for: they create a special relationship in the religious school kids’ imaginations between their lives as American Jews and the nation of Israel. But they do this devoid of any broader context about contemporary Israel, about the Middle East, about the vexed history of this region to which our curriculum insistently connects our children. There are never any Palestinian or Muslim visitors on Sunday mornings; never any scheduled activities involving Yiddish or Ladino, the rich languages and cultures of thousands of years of Jewish diaspora.
The shin-shinim are a component of a pervasive but ill-explained Zionism that infuses the Reform Jewish approach to religious education but is never addressed directly. The kids pick up on it without really understanding what it means. Once, during a free art session, Rex, who loves to draw and is fascinated by Asian history, drew an intricate dragon battle scene. When he looked up at me and remembered where he was, he went back to his drawing and added an Israeli flag at the top of it.
Two years ago, when the temple Education Coordinator first asked me if I would consider teaching Sunday school, I said right away that I didn’t think I could hold up a pro-Israel political line in the classroom. I have long been critical of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, and have since become involved in founding a local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.
“Oh,” she responded. “That’s all right. We just want the kids to know about Israel, to have a special relationship with the place.”
I agreed to teach Sunday school at Congregation Eretz Yisrael because I believe that Jewish history, our hermeneutic tradition of wrestling with the Torah, as well as our social justice teachings of tikkun olam, or mending the world, have much to offer our children. And, since I believed then and now that American Jews do have a special relationship with Israel, mostly because of the ways we are called on to support militarism in the Middle East in the name of Jewish safety, I thought that my views about Israel could at least cohabit with those of the congregation.
When I started teaching at Eretz Yisrael, I didn’t fully appreciate the vast distance between our definitions of the relationship between American Jews and Israel. More importantly, I didn’t understand how vigorously the boundaries of what can and cannot be said about Israel are policed. The Education Coordinator’s blithe inclusiveness that day may have been motivated by her desperation to staff the religious school, or by a fatal misunderstanding of who I was and what I had said. Perhaps she assumed that, as a member of Congregation Eretz Yisrael, I shared its pervasive and loosely defined Zionism.
I was initially hired because of a glut of third graders: an unusually large religious school class for Congregation Eretz Yisrael. Because of this demographic phenomenon and because many of the parents requested that their kids continue to have me as their teacher, I was able to stay with my class from third through fifth grade. I got to watch them grow up a little and form friendships; we had inside jokes referencing things that had happened in our classroom over time; they all knew where I kept my shoebox of “stale candy” to use as a goad or reward.
Over the three years I taught at Congregation Eretz Yisrael, I continued to be struck by the combination of inchoate commitment to Israel as a central component of Jewish identity and almost complete lack of information about the contemporary situation or history of the place. This combination emanated from the formal education our students received as well as what they overheard or were told by the adults in their lives. Each year, religious school faculty and students were urged to march in the local Jewish community’s Yom Ha’atzmaut – Israeli Independence Day – celebration. Congregation Eretz Yisrael held an “Israel Day” festival around the same time featuring music, food and dance. In the congregation as well as at home and at school, our students overheard talk, often anxious talk, about politics, about terrorism and national security.
This combination of commitment, anxiety, and very limited knowledge sometimes led my students to misunderstandings. For example: the Torah strand of the fifth grade curriculum focused on Nevi’im: the book of Prophets. As part of this curriculum, my madrich, Ezra, and I brought in examples of contemporary individuals that might be considered prophetic. One day, we talked about Malala Yousafzai: a young woman who, we agreed, professes a vision, suffered for her beliefs, and claims divine inspiration: all hallmarks of being a prophet. She reminded my students of some of the biblical prophets we were studying. During our discussion, Gabriel wondered about this example. He commented that, unlike prophets, Muslims “blow babies up on balconies,” and espouse violence.
I knew that Gabriel and his family attended services regularly, and that sometimes the rabbi’s sermons referenced recent events in the Middle East. Gabriel’s comment made me see how confusing the scraps of information an eleven year old might glean from this might be. Wrestling with this over the next couple of weeks, I decided to do some very basic teaching about the recent history of the state of Israel. I discussed my decision with the current Education Coordinator, Sue, and with the Rabbi.
I wanted to anchor my students’ understanding of Israel as a Jewish state, and provide some historic context for the existence of the modern nation. So our unit began with two weeks of learning activities around the founding of the state of Israel and the Shoah. Sue then made a presentation about her recent trip to Israel, where she had met with some peace activists.
In the fourth week, I introduced the term nakba: the Arabic word for disaster, which is how Palestinians refer to the founding of Israel in 1948. Using materials from the Nakba Education Project, I showed a brief video about historical ruins in Israel and the ways that memories of formerly Palestinian villages are erased and forgotten.
At the end of this class, I asked the students what they thought so far. Michaela, a contemplative girl who I know has visited Israel at least once with her family, raised her hand. When I called on her she said: “I wish that these stories you are telling us weren’t true. But if they are, I think we should know about them.”
That afternoon, after Sunday school, I sent the parents an email explaining what we had discussed in class. The email included a link to the video; I encouraged them to watch it with their kids.
Later that week, the mother of one of my students, the head of the congregation’s Israel Committee, wrote a long, emotional email addressed to the Rabbi, Sue, and me. She talked about how offended she was to hear “our beloved homeland” criticized by an instructor who was clearly informed by “Arab propaganda.”
This upset Sue, who asked that I desist from “pushing it” by talking further about the nakba. Even though I had discussed this unit with both her and the rabbi, as well as several of the parents of my students previous to embarking on it, Sue found new qualms after receiving the letter. She wondered why I had started the unit in 1948, instead of giving the students a firm background in “Jewish claims to the land.” I had done this intentionally, because I wanted my students to see how Israel both provided a homeland for Jewish refugees and caused Palestinian displacement and loss. The question of originary claims to the land seemed far less important to me than the historical trajectories that create the current conflict there.
I did not want to subject Raja to the emotional climate being created around my short unit. She and I agreed that she would visit my class another time. I knew that my students would be disappointed to miss this visit, so I tried to concoct an interesting alternative for the following class. Ezra found some Israeli-Palestinian musical collaborations to play in class. I prepared a slide show with some images of Jewish and Palestinian towns and dwellings, to help my students imagine what life looked like there. Armed with these not-as-good-as-Raja solutions, I was ready for class on Sunday.
I had managed to avoid visits from the shin-shinim all that year. I did not want to confuse my students with ill-explained and unbalanced Israel advocacy. But I let them into my classroom that day both because I suspected that Sue had sent them as a kind of rear-guard action, and because I was trying to split the difference between what I wanted to do with the unit on Israel and what I was realizing was possible in context of Congregation Eretz Yisrael.
I explained to the shin-shinim that we had been learning about the history of Israel, and asked if they could tell about what they learned in school about the founding of the modern nation. They talked about the Jewish diaspora prior to 1948 and about the military struggle Israel faced in its early days. After about half an hour, they left to talk to another classroom. I wrote some of the words they used on the board, and worked with my students on understanding what the shin-shinim had told us. Although the religious school year was set to end in a couple of weeks, I imagined that we were starting a conversation we could continue next year.
Later that week, Sue emailed me and asked if I could stop by the synagogue some time during the week, so we could discuss my teaching for next year. We arranged to meet on Tuesday afternoon, when I had to drop off my daughter for Hebrew school. When I pressed her for specifics about what she wanted to talk about, she repeated the same thing verbatim about next year. Clearly, I was in some kind of trouble.
Sure enough, Sue told me on Tuesday that there was no place for me in Sunday school at Eretz Yisrael next year. I asked why this was the case: I was not the last to be hired, and I am an experienced and popular instructor. But Sue gave no explanation, only advised me that I was not being fired. She said that there was a dip in enrollment for next year, that the decision was made for “programmatic reasons” and had absolutely nothing to do with my teaching about Israel, or with my teaching at all.
I had one more conversation with Sue, more than one with the rabbi, and several with members of the Eretz Yisrael community. The official position on my dismissal remained: that it was in no way political, and not even a firing. But at the end of the day, my departure meant there would be no one teaching about the history of Israel and the nakba at the religious school next year.
When I was about my students’ age, at a similar, Reform Jewish religious school, the class was assigned to read about the founding of the state of Israel. The next week, I came in with questions, as did the son of our rabbi. “It seems like the Arabs might have a point,” he said, mildly.
I have never forgotten how fast our teacher shut us both down. It was clear that she would tolerate only one response to the subject. That incident affected me; it helped me see that there was a world outside the one being narrated to me in Sunday school. I recalled this incident when I was working on the unit for my class, hoping that I could provide my students with similar perspective.
After I was fired, one Sunday of religious school remained. The last day of religious school always concludes with a congregation-wide picnic; the time before that is festive and low on educational content. I told my students that I was not going to be returning to teach there the following year. I asked them to think a little bit about the past three years, and tell me what their favorite thing they learned was.
The students recalled the “creepy puppet video” relating the story of Purim that I had found on YouTube. We talked about how we had given the Prophet Ezekiel a “Z: no one should hear about this until after they are 40” rating because of how terrifying his prophecies were. Brandon, an antic and intelligent boy, said that before we talked about Israel he didn’t know that the nation had a history outside of the Bible. Then Gabriel raised his hand and suggested that since I wasn’t going to be needing it anymore, we should eat all the stale candy. So we did.
Raja told me that she cried all night after I told her I had been fired or “not hired back.” She said it made her realize how far we have to go to making peace between Jews – American Jews – and Palestinians.
I was shaken, too. The precarious balancing act between my increasing engagement in Palestine solidarity work and my commitment to Congregation Eretz Yisrael was directly challenged by my dismissal from Sunday school, whatever the official cause and term.
I continue to try to straddle these contradictory impulses; I am still a member of the congregation, and will be at least until my youngest child is bat mitzvah in a year and a half. I am also still co-coordinator of our local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. I try to insist that this contradictory stance is and should be possible.
But something has broken inside me, and it is harder for me to believe that these is a place for me and people like me in congregations like Eretz Yisrael. I argued strenuously all spring to get my teaching job back. In July, I was rewarded with a provisional offer to teach in the evening teen education program, with the understanding that I would not take up the issue of Israel again. I turned it down.
Maybe, like it did for Raja, my last day of Sunday school made me realize the long way that we have to travel toward peace in the Middle East, and even toward open dialogue in the American Jewish community. The existence of this chasm contradicts everything that I think is best in Judaism: the way we are impelled to wrestle with the Torah, rather than receiving it as a given truth; the way that identifying with those most oppressed has been central to our history. I think of how the stories of the prophets spoke to my fifth-grade class about the importance of finding the truth and of working for justice.
Thank you for your concise review of the muzzling of free and objective expression of controversy in a Jewish Sunday school. I can understand your sadness at the personal loss of your position as well as your disillusionment at the loss of the traditional Jewish approach to understanding events with fairness and concern, even when controversial.
The threat to Judaism is the possible loss of its legitimacy in evaluating and encouraging righteousness both in Israel and elsewhere.
A few years ago, President Abbas acknowledged the terrible mistake the Arab world and Palestinians made in rejecting the 1947 partition plan. Don’t let truth hit you in the backside as the school shuts down your tainted take on history
Israel rejected the plan as well, so neither the colonizers nor those colonized agreed.
You be wrong my friend, dead wrong. A Jew returning to his homeland is not a colonizer. We don’t need to be teaching children the history of Israel from the eyes of a self hating Jew
What gives a Jew whose family has never lived in Israel the moral right to appropriate land from a non-Jew whose family has lived and worked on that piece of land for hundreds of years?
Tens of thousands of Arabs migrated to Palestine as the British developed it and increased economic opportunity. BTW Arafat, the father of the PLO was born …in Cairo
It’s axiomatic that the pro-Israel and pro-right voices have to resort to nastiness and vitriol in expressing themselves. Why am I not surprised. Sad.
I found this story very moving, and, sadly, quite recognizable.
I have spent a lot of hours in a jewish elementary school in Europe recently (the Netherlands).
To be clear, i have not witnessed lessons in the higher grades.
But i found the general lack of information about realities of Israeli history and present astounding.
It starts with maps that not only do not show any borders, but even deny the existence of cities and people outside of Israel proper. Well, having visited Israel this can hardly be surprising.
I cannot blame a 7 year old for saying that ..’the arabs are bad’. And i value very much the way the teacher reacted to this saying ‘.one may never say something like that’.
The role of the shin-shinim, as you describe, only adds to the mystification. At purim, they played the story from the book of Esther to the kids. Haman was dressed as an Arab. Though some colleagues admitted to the fact that this is not an accurate representation, and some even admitted it was not the best idea, no one seemed to feel a need to address this, talk about it with the shin-shinim, let alone protest. Someone even explained to me that this is just how a proportion of Israelis see Arabs, as an epiphany of evil and arch enemy to the jewish people.
Well, this is just an ‘innocent’ example (although it still stirs my blood).
But you are so right. If anyone is entitled to proper education about Israel, it is these kids. And if anyone should insist on this, it should be the parents.
Sadly, there is a long way to go.
Do you really want kids to know the truth about the current Arab world with all the sectarian fighting ab brutal massacres? One cannot blame Israel on the current bloodshed in Iraq, Syria and Libya.
Maybe you’ll also get tossed out of UW Milwaukee and you can follow Steven Salaita in Beirut. Then you could then find a side job teaching Sunday school there.
As I stated in an earlier reply, it’s axiomatic that the pro-Israel and pro-right voices have to resort to nastiness and vitriol in expressing themselves. Why am I not surprised. Sad.
Damn, being pro israel is so out of vogue. Are you looking forward to the 8 million citizens being exterminated? Free Tibet!
There is no such thing as a self-hating Jew, or any other nationality or religion. The hiding of history indicates that there is something not-quite-right about knowing it. Ultimately, truth will out.
No one is hiding history, just revising it to fit a narrative. That is typical of a Tikkunistas. It was a war of survival. Most of this displaced, left on their now. There is no return, just like the Jews forced out of Arab countries. The part ion of Palestine is hardly unique. India was partitioned and millions of Hindus and Muslims fled east and west. Do we hear about a refugee problem today.. But there is one little state that has to be demonized for surviving when the other side wanted them erased from the globe. One calls it a double standard.
Here’s a double standard for you Fred (not that that’s your name):
Is the West Bank a part of Israel? Yes or no.
Yes: Then Israel breaks the Geneva Conventions every single day by imposing a separate – and deeply racist – military legal system on the inhabitants according to their ethnicity.
No: Then Israel has no right to impose anything at all on the people who live there, and violent resistance is explicitly provided-for under international law. It also follows that Israel can never be said to be ‘defending itself’ against that resistance movement because it is indisputably the aggressor.
Look around the bloody Middle East at the moment and tell me how bad things are in the West Bank. Come on now. There is no stable for solid governing authority to hand the West Bank to. The moment it’s turned over to the PA, Hamas or ISIS will step right inbandvtake control. See Gaza. Would you want them as neighbors? As for Gaza. It was handed back and Hamas as only brought absolute misery. Instead of using concrete to build infrastructure, they built tunnels to launch raids into Israel. Instead of using money to provide services, they built thousands of rockets to launch at civilians. The UN keeps Gaza running while Hamas plays war. Nice try, light weight
The attentive reader will have noticed that Fred did not answer Colin’s simple yes-now question.
David,, you might notice that Colin is OK with suicide bombers and aiming rockets at civilians:
“and violent resistance is explicitly provided-for under international law”
I really think Colin ought to read the geneva Convention first. The West Bank was NEVER sovereign Palestinian territory. Jordan annexed it in 1952 after it took contra in 1948. Pickig up a history book always helps as well.
BTW, shooting down rockets shot form Gaza is considered defending ones self.
JVP infiltration alert .
Regrettably, the writer of this article erases context and history to create a mendacious narrative regarding historical events. After 2000 years of persecution in the diaspora culminating in the Holocaust it should be understandable that a Jewish school would wish to create a positive space for Jewish students acknowledging Israel and its accomplishments even while it is surrounded by countries intent on its destruction and elimination.
Rachel, you dear person. Your story is brave, measured, compassionate and in a dignified way defiant of cruelty and denial. Well done. Rupert
I am just sorry it took so long to get rid of this teacher poisoning the minds of young students with her hateful propaganda and self righteous indignation used to further her own biased agenda.
As a non-Jew I at least can’t be called a self-hating Jew. The refusal to have open debate on the Israel-Palestinian situation, not to mention mainstream Jewish refusal to let anyone with an opinion that differs from their stance to speak seems to be counter to any view of fairness or democracy. There is no point in continually bringing up the ages of the Sunday school class when these methods apply to all ages. It seems that in the last few years these conditions have gotten much worse. I don’t think it can possibly lead to a good outcome.
Open debate is one ting, dismissing the right for a jewish state is another. JVP anne supported of BDS seem to support those ideas. Debate has to be even handed, not finger pointing at Israel as the oppressor of poor Palestinian. Never forget that they have played a huge part in the current state of affairs.
Fred, I haven’t been aware of anyone dismissing the right for a Jewish state. I don’t think following the area’s history back as far as possible can be hurtful to either side, but instead give people a starting point so they have a clear view. Don’t forget that at one time Christians thought they had sole claim to the area.
Then are quite blind to the BDS movement that pretty much advocates the dismantling if Israel as jewish state.
I so relate to this article. The true shame is that the most earnest and spiritual Jews are the ones who also wrestle with this issue — and how could they not, when they learn the truth. When I realized what was really going on in Israel (way back in 1976), it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had been raised to be an ardent zionist and was considering making aliyah. In a lightning flash, I realized that I had been told only half of a very complex truth. I felt betrayed by years of very deep Jewish education — I attended one of the 1st day schools, summer camps, summers in Israel, the whole nine yards. I was so affected by this realization that I never went back to Israel again… too painful. I left any involvement in the Jewish community for many years and only rejoined when I had children… but they are grown now and I have become alienated once again. It is rare to find congregations that accommodate a spiritual viewpoint and a balanced attitude about Israel. I feel that Judaism may eventually bifurcate around this issue. It is like poison in the well.
You people just don’t know the facts. Fred and Avigal are correct in most of what they are saying. I don’t know them from Adam, but they are correct! My family was chased out of Hebron in 1929. Just look up the Hebron massacre. They were there since the 14th century. Where is my right of return (to Hebron,) where no jews currently live? Is it my Nakba? I don’t need the right of return. But they do? I just need to know we have a country that will defend our people. One country. Because we can’t rely on anyone else other than ourselves. Because history has shown to repeat itself. Israel is one of the safest places in the middle east and best places to live for an Arab!