Reflections of a Day School Graduate, One Year Out

by Amram Altzman for newvoices.com

I've written before on my day school education and its different aspects, critiquing how it taught me (or perhaps should have taught me) to look at my history and my past; I’ve also offered what can perhaps be best described as a back-handed compliment to my Jewish education. Now, as someone who has been out of the pre-college Jewish educational world for almost a year, I have begun to think about the lasting impact that my twelve years of elementary and secondary Jewish education has had on me.

One the one hand, my back-handed compliment still stands: in high school especially, I was incredibly cynical, especially when it came to studying rabbinic legal texts. To a certain extent, I still am, even if I’ve elected to continue studying those very same texts as part of my higher education at the Jewish Theological Seminary. In high school, however, I found it difficult to relate to the texts that I was reading — partially because the intricacies of how to build a sukkah and whether or not it can be built in the public domain, or who is guilty of murder in the case when a baby is thrown off a roof and lands on a person carrying a sword and dies, were not relevant to my life. Interesting to ponder and debate though these legal issues may have been, they had little effect on my day-to-day interactions and realities as a Jew.

Instead, one of the most formative years for my Jewish education, and, especially my seven years of elementary and secondary Talmud education, was in eleventh grade, when I had a teacher who took the tractate we were studying, connected it to Enlightenment thinkers and biblical and contemporary texts, and forced us to synthesize those texts in a way we had not been asked to do before. For the first time, I felt that the Jewish texts weren’t talking down to me, but talking to me. This was the first time studying Jewish texts meant something to me. The rabbis of the sixth century CE were not only in conversation amongst themselves, but with me and with Søren Kierkegaard and Immanuel Kant and with rabbinic commentators. It was then that I truly felt that the texts I was studying were Not In Heaven — not in the sense that they were immutable and everlasting, but in the sense that they mattered to me and had implications for me today.

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