Who Needs Adult Education?

by Leon A. Morris And David B. Starr
Special To The Jewish Week

In the wake of the market meltdown and l’affaire Madoff, the Jewish community faces hard choices about what to do with fewer dollars. Cuts in federal and state aid imperil the community’s traditional support for the poor and vulnerable. Declining philanthropy and shrinking endowments threaten our investments in Jewish life here and in the state of Israel. These tough times require hard thinking about our priorities in funding Jewish education.

The likely response will be “all for the children” — to concentrate on the present and the future by sustaining day schools, supplementary schools, and summer camps, and to regard other ventures, including adult education, as expendable. We believe that this narrow focus on children at the expense of their parents, or adults

more broadly defined, would be a strategic mistake — short-sighted and destined to perpetuate problematic patterns in American Jewish life. Contrary to what one major funder recently told us — that educating adults is “nice” but not central to Jewish continuity — our hopes of transforming Jewish life through learning will falter unless we place adults at the center of Jewish life. Here’s why.
Transforming Jewish life should begin with transforming our assumptions about Jewish life. First among them is the mania for “child-centeredness.” However politically correct it may be, this myopic focus on our children slights the role adults play as leaders and teachers — a claim that we find so obvious we wonder that we need to make it.

The focus on children embodies what went wrong in Jewish modernity: the scarcity of functionally Jewish adults — particularly laity — not just in the public sphere of our institutions but more importantly in the private sphere: the loss of the family and home as generators of Jewish values and behavior and knowledge, owing to the de-emphasizing of adult Jewish learning. To compensate for our failure to maintain a higher standard of Jewish adulthood we misguidedly projected all of our hopes on to our children, a compensatory strategy doomed to fail.

The American Jewish community’s focus on our children and young adults must not slight the role that adults play as leaders and teachers. Adults, not children, lead communities. “Lord of the Flies” models the sociopathic delusion that children can raise themselves, govern themselves, and flourish without adults to guide them. Adults should model for children what is good, what is moral, what is true. Should most of our resources be devoted to children, we would deprive Jewish children of adult role models, exemplars of excellence in Jewish learning, knowledge, commitment.

Historically, the Jewish community intuitively grasped this, insisting that the mitzvah of Talmud Torah [Torah study] applies to children and adults alike. Talmud Torah stood at the center of parenting — it begins with parents who introduce their children to the centrality of learning by example. But Jewish law mandated that adults study not only for the sake of their children, but also for their own sakes. Jewish study is part of the “good life” and not simply a means to an end.

Some dismiss adult learning because it often appeals to an older segment of the population, with greater amounts of leisure time and capital. That too misses the mark. Many of those same adults play crucial roles in the lives of their communities. With adults living longer, aging baby boomers will continue to creatively contribute to the Jewish community for several decades. They will provide leadership for many of our institutions. They will influence and shape the community through their philanthropy. And they will increasingly play a greater role in the lives of their children and grandchildren, given the strains and stresses of working families. Older adults not only consume culture; they transmit it. Have we forgotten the maxim of Marcus Hansen, historian of immigration, who observed that “grandchildren seek to remember what their parents forgot?” Many will enjoy the blessings of living grandparents well into their own adulthoods. Teaching and learning implications abound for these intergenerational bonds of knowledge and memory. Ignoring them would be short-sighted.

To embrace Jewish study as a central Jewish value requires the allocation of communal resources — even in these tough economic times — to reflect this commitment. There needs to be greater support for existing programs which have now fallen prey to reduced annual giving and shrinking endowments. There needs to be a rapid effort for the Jewish community to “catch up” with technology that presents greater (and more efficient) possibilities for Jewish learning in the 21st century. We need a global Jewish university. We need Jewish learning opportunities that use Web 2.0 social networking software. We need to invest in Jewish educational radio and TV.

Adults change the world while changing themselves in the process. If we take seriously the core Jewish value of Talmud Torah, if we believe that Jewishness matters, that it creates communities of purpose, cultures of intellectual and spiritual depth that can build a better world, we must train adults to lead the way in that transformative quest. The economy threatens to undo the gains Jewish life and learning have made. We need to renew our commitment to adult Jewish learning, or we as a people will decline. The choice is ours.

Rabbi Leon A. Morris is the executive director of the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Temple Emanu-El in New York. Rabbi Dr. David B. Starr is vice president of Hebrew College and dean of Me’ah.