Stark’s death, at 62, interrupted an encore performance in a Jewish career that began in the 1970s, when as a Brandeis University graduate student he worked summers at the Kallah youth camp run by the B’nai B’rith youth wing, now known as BBYO. He went on to teach at Schechter—always Tanakh, colleagues said, and always in the middle-school grades—and then, in the 1990s, traveled to the countries of the former Soviet Union to run Jewish outreach programs. Over the years, Stark, who never married and had no children, mentored hundreds, if not thousands, of young people, many of whom are now rabbis, teachers, or professionals in their thirties and forties working for major Jewish institutions across the country—people who have infused contemporary Jewish life with the legacy of Stark’s lessons.

Meanwhile, Stark’s death has turned what was meant to bridge generations of Jewish students at Boston’s Schechter school into a moment for those he influenced to gather in mourning. Tonight, many will return to their alma mater for a memorial service, capping a week of informal outpourings on Facebook, where many had reconnected with their old teacher, and in long email chains recounting Stark’s love of jokes and puns.

“He would ask us what the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet was—tough,” wrote Josh Blumenthal, a Schechter student who went on to work in Jewish education. “Twenty-eight years later, I can still recite tzedek, tzedek, tirdof.”

Stark, who wasn’t religious, came to Jewish teaching through his love of language and performance. “He was a zealot for Jewish learning and ideas, the arts, and Jewish peoplehood,” said Stark’s cousin, Scott Lasensky, also a former BBYO camper who now works for the United States mission to the United Nations. “He didn’t see them as any different, because he came from a family where love of the arts, Tanakh, and the stage were interwoven.”

Stark grew up in Freehold, N.J., and went to high school with Bruce Springsteen. At home, Stark spoke Yiddish with his father, Sidney, who was born in Estonia and came to the United States as a teenager in 1924, and his mother, Ida, who was born in Brooklyn but grew up speaking Yiddish with her Belarussian parents as a girl in Sioux City, Iowa. As a child in the 1960s, Stark attended the Kallah youth camps, where future luminaries like Elie Wiesel were featured as speaking guests years before they became famous. He became a staff member in the 1970s while pursuing his doctorate in biblical texts and ancient Semitic languages at Brandeis University and eventually became director of the BBYO summer youth programs, from 1984 to 1989, while teaching during the year at Schechter.

“It was a real dream come true for Peter,” said Robin Minkoff, who worked for Stark at the camp. “He was very romantic about the founding of Kallah and wanted the teens coming through in the 1980s to have the same experience the kids coming through in the ‘60s had.” That meant inviting guests like Aaron Lansky, who went on to win a MacArthur genius grant for his work preserving Yiddish books, and Marvin Tokayer, a rabbi and scholar who preserved the history of Jewish refugees in Asia. “Peter was a real Renaissance man, knowledgeable about every subject you could imagine, and I think he wanted us to be also,” said Marc Blattner, a former camper who is now the executive of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland. “He taught teenagers about the global Jewish world and what people were doing, to say, ‘Don’t think your bubble is the world, it’s larger than that and you need to connect to it.’ ”

Others recalled Stark—who acted in or directed more than three dozen light-opera productions with local companies over the years—making his charges act out scenes from the texts they were learning. “He thought we needed to understand what it felt like,” said Nadine Greenfield-Binstock, who now works for the American Jewish Committee in Washington.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stark began traveling across Eastern Europe for B’nai B’rith and other Jewish organizations to run outreach programs in cities like Vilna, Riga, and Birobidzhan. He left Schechter in 1992 to become principal of the Hebrew High program in Worcester and began taking students on annual trips to Lithuania, where he put on day camps modeled on those he had run for American teenagers. “He felt he’d tackled the Jewish youth in America and wanted to do what he could to help Jewish kids elsewhere,” Blattner said.

“He had no kids, and still he had so many kids,” said another former student, Ilya Fuchs.
Fuchs, a Soviet émigré who is now a lawyer in Boston, was among those who encouraged Stark to return to teaching last year, after a decade-long hiatus working as an Internet consultant and caring for his ailing parents in New Jersey.

In recent years, Stark was in ill health, overweight and suffering with a bad back, and initially he resisted. “Then out of the blue he says, ‘Write me a recommendation,’ ” Fuchs said. “He wrote me a recommendation for high school, a recommendation for college, and a recommendation for law school, so last month I wound up writing him a recommendation to get back into teaching.”

The head of the Schechter school, Arnold Zar-Kessler, quickly welcomed Stark back to his old position, initially filling in for another teacher who is on sabbatical. Zar-Kessler, whose own daughter was among Stark’s pupils in the 1980s, said he wanted the school’s current students, some of them the children of people Stark had once taught, to experience Stark’s teaching style—one that balanced intellectual rigor with delight in the subject matter. “He never lost his curiosity, and he was successful with the brightest kids, the ones who reach adolescence and get disenchanted with the texts,” Zar-Kessler told me. “His first class was to have been the next day, and the irony is painful.”

At the store on the west side of Los Angeles, where we live, I tried to talk Ezra out of the velvet yarmulke. The clerk, whose yarmulke said Shlomo and whose name probably was Shlomo, helped me try. But on the topic of a yarmulke that says a name that isn’t his, Ezra was irrational. He didn’t yet understand that letters signify words, which signify identity. On the topic of velvet being an impractical fabric, he was unmoved. Ezra wanted this yarmulke because that is the kind they wear at his school, which is run by Chabad, the ultra-Orthodox movement. Yet we are Modern Orthodox, not Hasidic, and the yarmulkes men wear in our Modern Orthodox community, the yarmulkes my husband wears, are crocheted.

The kind of yarmulke men wear in an Orthodox community signifies the type of observance they undertake, not by law but by tradition. To me, woven yarmulkes like my husband’s mostly signify that we are Zionists; they also indicate that we identify as Modern Orthodox, that we are constantly straddling the tension over what it means to be a religious Jew in the larger secular world. Velvet yarmulkes are favored by more right-wing, ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose religious practice is led by a central rebbe. Though many of these Jews are missionary in their approach, they are also mostly insular, dressing in a certain fashion and eschewing much of the modern world. If you aren’t religious, you might see the velvet and the woven simply as yarmulkes; but to us, they are often indications of great differences.

To me, Ezra’s longing for the velvet yarmulke pointed to the hold his school has over him and how the lessons it sometimes imparts conflict with the lessons I try to impart. As an Orthodox woman who largely objects to the sexism inherent in the tradition, I am braced for the ideologies Ezra and his brother could bring home as they grow older. But I wasn’t braced for Yosef Yitzchak’s yarmulke.

It foreshadowed other conflicts I’ve known were coming. We’d always planned on sending our boys to an Orthodox day school, the kind I’d gone to in New York, after they finish nursery school. These kinds of day schools are familiar to me: Boys lead prayer, there are co-ed classes until kids are separated around age 10, children undertake Torah-related art projects, like cardboard Noah’s Arks and clay Sinais, and the school day ends long after it gets dark, except on Fridays, when dismissal is long before that. Boys in these schools learn that they are considered superior: They recite a prayer thanking God they are not slaves, then they recite one thanking God that they were not created as women.

(In grade school, I remember, we girls would then recite a prayer that comes almost as an apology: “Thank you, God, for creating me as I am.” Which is not the same thing as thanking God for not creating you a man, or thanking God for creating you as a woman. It is a sentence of resignation, not pride.)

As white men, my boys probably won’t need any help to feel privileged or entitled. Why do they need to assert that privilege out loud in prayer? To what extent are ancient prayers like this at the root of inequality, as much as reflections of it? Though the obligation to utter this particular prayer is tenuous, it still remains in morning services around the world. Increasingly, other staple practices of Orthodoxy—allowing only boys to lead services or to become rabbis, teaching boys and not girls Talmud, and even the insistence that girls wear skirts—are being challenged by some Orthodox Jews. When I looked at Ezra in his yarmulke, I wondered: If he can’t be counted on to follow our example by wearing what we want him to wear at age 3, how can we count on him to dismiss these retrograde religious practices at 10?

I have to face the fact many Orthodox schools are going to teach my boys things I don’t want them to learn and that I can’t count on my kids to be revolutionary in their thinking, to disregard that which is unfair or outdated. And though these are problems I have with Orthodoxy on the whole, I go to a progressive synagogue where these issues are addressed often. And the things I don’t like about Orthodoxy, I don’t allow into my home. My kids will see that, but can that compete with what they’re being taught nine hours a day? I am vexed by contradictory questions: What is the message I send my son if I allow people to teach him that girls are not allowed to chant Torah, when I don’t believe this is mandated in the Torah? Am I teaching him to disregard teachers’ authority? I believe the laws of public and women-led prayer are due for an overhaul. I believe women should be rabbis—and I believe the confines of Orthodoxy allow for these innovations. But am I living these beliefs if I tell my boys what I think and then send them to a school that insists otherwise?

How do you decide what school to send your kids to? When there is no institution that matches your values completely, do you give up on the religious values, or do you give up on your own values? These are the questions Yosef Yitzchak’s yarmulke brought up for me.

For now, we have opted to send Ezra to a public school next year. The decision was based on a different kind of value: financial responsibility. As much as religion is something we cherish, so is the lesson that our children should not spend what they don’t have.

As it turned out, as quickly as Ezra started wearing his new yarmulke, he stopped. A few weeks after his third birthday, he wouldn’t wear it to shul, to school, or anywhere. He took it off and has refused to wear another one since. He just turned 4, and his head, for the most part, remains bare.

I should have known from the beginning that the control I think I have over my child, the influence I think his teachers have, is all an illusion. Maybe school doesn’t matter as much as I think it does. Ezra will grow up, with God’s help, and his head-covering will not be subject to my opinion anymore. I will teach him now what I want him to know and hope that he makes decisions that are right, hope that he doesn’t dismiss our values. He will survive what we teach him; he will figure out what we don’t. We pour our love and knowledge and ethic into him, and we watch with wide eyes to see what comes out slowly over a lifetime. He is as God made him.

“Ulpana High school, Where settler girls go to become ‘real men’ ”

That was the headline I read. You think of settler girls and you think “Little House on the Prairie” or the Jewish equivalent of the Girls Madrassas I’ve been to in Pakistan: Learn your religion, learn how to be a good wife, then have 10 children. But the girls in this story were getting all that and a little extra. Instead of afterschool sports they did afterschool fight-the-state. When civil administrators showed up to enforce a settlement building freeze, the girls blocked the road, whipped mud at them, sat on their jeeps. When 100 riot police showed up, the girls lay down on the wet road, climbed into garbage bins, and hurled trash. Only after a 5-hour battle were the administrators able to deliver their pieces of official paper—building-freeze orders.

The article was from 2009, but I wanted to know more. I called Rav Gadi Ben Zimra, the founder of the school, and reached him. He passed me to his wife, Nurit, the co-founder. She passed me to a neighbor involved with the school who spoke better English—and who could vet me. Her name was Mina Browdy and she told me that she was thrilled that we wanted to come do a piece on their school, meet Gadi and Nurit, hang out with the girls. And of course we could stay there. Ten days? Wonderful. I booked a ticket, as did my friend, the photographer Gillian Laub.

Then two days before the flight, Mina emailed me:

Shalom Elizabeth,

We thank you for your interest to come and write an article about Ulpanat Levona but we reconsidered the idea and decided not to go along with it.

Thank you! Our beloved teacher Rut Fogel Hy”d was murdered with her husband and three children, a three month old baby that was slaughtered cruelly by the wild animals that some of you think are able to make peace.

All the best
Mina Browdy

We decided to go anyway.

***

Tapuach, red poppies in bloom, a sharp wind. The settlement sits atop a hillside above Highway 60 on the West Bank. Established by Kahanists and Yemenites, Tapuach is now home to an assortment of new Israelis—Kazakhs, Russians, Peruvians. It was the Friday before Purim and Moriya was sitting on a blue couch in the front yard of her family’s ranch house across from the town playground, painting her fingernails purple. A few years ago, Gillian had met Moriya, who of course knew of Ma’ale Levona. Her younger sister Roni was a student there. Moriya had been too homesick to stick it out—Ma’ale Levona is a boarding school—but she considers herself almost an honorary graduate. Her Facebook friends are nearly all Ma’ale Levona girls.

Moriya, who is 19, was wearing blue balloon pants, a turquoise-and-silver nose ring, and a silver Star of David around her neck emblazoned with Meir Kahane’s famous emblem—a thumb rising out of a tight fist. Roni is 14. Her nail polish was blue, and she was wearing a Snoopy T-shirt and a wooden pendant etched with the Hebrew words: “Kahane was right.” They’re fighters, these girls, each in their different way. “We called him after Benjamin Zeev Chai,” said Moriya of her 6-year-old brother. Benjamin Kahane, the son of Meir Kahane who was killed, was her father’s best friend, she said. A lot of her father’s friends were killed, she said, as she handed Benjy a candy. One of them is still in prison for killing a Palestinian.

“I was depressed all this week. I can’t smile,” she said. It had been only seven days since the murder of the Fogel family, who lived down the road. The mother, Ruthi, was Roni’s teacher. As Tamar, the Fogels’ 12-year-old daughter, told reporters, around midnight she came home from a Bnei Akiva youth meeting to find her mother Ruthi lying in a pool of blood and her home the site of a massacre—her mother, father, two younger brothers, and 3-month-old sister all slaughtered with knives. Two of her younger brothers survived.

“This week was crazy,” Moriya told me taking me inside to the living room to see her Facebook page on the family computer. “Look my friend writes: ‘Don’t be sad. Don’t give the thugs what they want.’ ”

Then Roni said that the day after the murder, everyone in Tapuach went down to the junction and threw rocks at Arabs. “We all wanted revenge. We just won’t cry and feel sorry for ourselves. We will do something about it. You know? If someone comes to kill you, then you kill them first, says the Torah.” Tapuach was notorious for “price tag” vengeance—which is nothing new in outlying settlements where Jewish vigilantes have been known to take the law into their hands. What was new to me was the vigorous and organized participation of adolescent girls.

Roni took note of details about the murder, including the fact that her teacher Ruthi had tried to fight off the killers, while her husband appeared more gentle, and died holding the baby in his arms. The murders had hit all the girls hard. The school is a tight-knit place, the faculty and students like an extended family. “My Ulpana is special,” said Roni. Another girl at the house laughed: “Every girl thinks their Ulpana is special,” she said. “Not like Ma’ale Levona,” said Roni cheekily. Her peers at Ofra—a more sober, academically rigorous Ulpana—were “geeks, nerds,” she said, and then laughed in that way only teenage girls can laugh at the Other.

Moriya proudly pulled up a photograph of Roni and the gang at a junction holding up signs against the Israeli army for dismantling an illegal outpost. Then she noticed that one of the girls had posted the Channel 2 news segment on Tamar Fogel. “Oh my god I want to see that. Look: Tamar asks Bibi to free Jonathan Pollard.” The reporter showed a clip of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visiting Tamar at her grandmother’s home, and exclaiming in his most resonant voice, “We know who the enemy is.”

In the clip, Tamar is seen alternately sobbing into her grandmother’s arms and raging back at Bibi—angry not just at her loss, but at the official hypocrisies. “What will happen if you do something?” she asked the prime minister. “Your America will be angry? America will do something to you?” When the prime minister tells her, “They murder. We build,” she challenged him. Tamar Fogel knew from experience that building can be undone. She and her family were evacuated from Gush Katif in Gaza in 2005; she told the prime minister that he is making a war between brothers. “They’re Obama’s poodle,” scoffed Moriya about her government.

At the end of the clip Moriya and Roni were frozen. They were proud of Tamar. With her resolve, poise, and tragedy, Tamar would undoubtedly become a symbol of their generation’s heroism, and another chapter in the settlers’ self-made biblical narrative.

If I’d had a movie camera, I’d just have you watch and listen to these girls for hours. You’d be fascinated, stupefied, shocked, bored—but you’d keep watching. I want you to see just what I saw, not the facts we’re used to—the ones about the Jews from Queens or Brooklyn or Minneapolis who upped and flew to the calling of Zion. We’ve heard from them enough and we think we know just what they’re going to say. But when they enacted whatever romance of pioneering, frontiering, and longing for collective meaning it was that brought them here, they created facts on the ground. Not houses and trailers; they can be bulldozed. They spawned boys and girls, 10 to each family on average.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” a psychiatrist and playwright from Jerusalem asked me, of such girls. “Pure faith mixed with youth. It’s the most erotic thing.” They are a generation of girls born on the land known as the illegal settlements who did not arrive with ideology and hope like their parents. They just sprouted there.

They say it takes one generation to found a new language. These girls are a new language, believing that they belong to the land on which they were born, and sponsored by the government they despise, which pays for their roads and electricity. I wondered how this new generation will affect the narrative of struggle not only between Israelis and Palestinians, but also among Israelis themselves.

And I loathe myself for worrying. I have a kid who doesn’t want to be less than perfect. I see it as my job to get her to chill. I don’t want her to pick up on my anxiety. But I am plenty anxious.

I am also a hypocrite. I was so freaking self-congratulatory about her admission to a lovely, warm, diverse, progressive, mixed-age-classroom-having elementary school in our neighborhood. Admission was by lottery, and her admission was by no means assured. So, I’d had her do giftedness testing, in case we needed more options. She spent a year in a middling public pre-K program, where she was punched in the face by a 5-year-old and where an inexperienced classroom teacher had a temper tantrum so severe I watched her kick a door, repeatedly, as hard as she could. When I talked to the school’s parent coordinator about the chaos in the classroom, she blamed other kids in the class. By name.

In any case, Josie was admitted to the lovely little progressive school, so I had the delicious luxury of not having to send her back to the unimpressive school and getting to turn down the gifted program. I used to joke about being the only Jewish mother who didn’t want her kid in a G&T program. “No G&T unless it includes Bombay Sapphire!” I’d joke. Reading some of my early columns, I want to travel back in time to punch myself in the face.

Because if Josie hadn’t gotten in to this school, which I know is an unusual, special place, she’d be in a gifted program.

You see, I had two choices: the gifted program, or a lovely progressive school in another district that she could have attended if I’d lied about where we lived. Tons of New Yorkers do that. An administrator at that school encouraged me to get a friend in that neighborhood to put my name on her ConEd bill to “prove” I lived there. “We’ll never check,” the administrator assured me. “We want families like yours! If we didn’t admit kids from Brooklyn and the East Village we’d have no economic diversity at all!” I decided I wasn’t up for the moral lesson of telling a 5-year-old that rules are for other people, or the reminders that she shouldn’t tell her classmates where she lived lest someone else’s mommy rat us out to the Department of Education. Such manipulation and deception don’t seem very Jewish. So, if Jo hadn’t been admitted, by sheer luck, to her wonderful school, well, I most likely would have sent her to the gifted program. So, I can shut up with mystical fake-chill I don’t-care-about-test-scores self. And believe me, other parents, I really do have sympathy for the hard decisions you have to make as well.

Is it not clear that this system is broken? Test scores are a moronic way to dictate the future of 4-year-olds. I remember a friend’s child, a very bright, very cat-obsessed little girl, who bombed her Stanford-Binet test—the standard intelligence test for children—for Hunter College Elementary because the psychologist administering the test had a home office with a cat closed in the bedroom. The cat yowled to be let out during the entire test, and instead of thinking about triangles and cause-and-effect, the child could only think KITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYKITTYKITTY. Tests for four-year olds privilege savvy, well-connected parents with plenty of books and plenty of disposable income. Some very smart little kids simply can’t sit still for a two-hour test, or have separation anxiety or shyness around strange adults. One study found that only 45 percent of the kids who scored 130 or higher on the Stanford-Binet would do so again if tested on another day. That is not surprising.

But here’s the thing: Josie isn’t 4 anymore. We have to decide what happens next. There is a progressive public middle school in my district that doesn’t require a minimum test score, but it’s so popular there is no guarantee she’ll be admitted. So the question returns: Do we also apply for gifted programs? I am embarrassed of how quickly I looked at her standardized test scores when they were available online, and how quickly I looked to see if her scores were high enough for the possibility. I don’t want to be this person.

As I’ve discussed elsewhere, people who think standardized tests are a necessary evil, and that they measure what they’re supposed to measure, are not looking at the actual standardized tests our kids are taking. They are crap. On the English sections there are questions that are semi-coherent. There are huge problems with scoring and with tests being used for purposes for which they weren’t devised. If you read Todd Farley’s Making the Grade: Adventures in the Standardized Testing Industry, written by a guy who both constructed and graded tests (sometimes while massively hung over), it will curl your hair. Then we have the issue of schools being financially rewarded or punished for higher test scores, leading teachers and principals to change the kids scores—to cheat. And most distressingly of all, schools are teaching to the tests, sacrificing deep, wide-ranging, multidisciplinary, multifaceted education to train kids how to fill in little bubbles.

And you know whose responsibility it is to fix this? The Jews. We’re the ones who are better-educated than most Americans; we’re the ones whose parents and grandparents and great-grandparents came to this country and relied on public education to learn the language and climb the ladder toward the American Dream. Using our privilege to gain a place in a decent program within a broken system doesn’t let us off the hook. (And now that you’ve asked, yes, I do ponder my decision not to send the kids to Jewish Day School—all the time. But that’s another column.) All our school systems should emphasize good citizenship, multilevel instructional approaches, appreciation of diversity in all its forms, empathy, collaboration, individualized education, and professional development to help teachers teach to different levels in one classroom and handle discipline and classroom management. Because that could help all students.

But my kid is really good at filling in the little bubbles. And that’s what I’m angsting about as school starts this year.

What does testing-induced gut-hork have to do with Jewish parenting, you may ask? Well, I think putting kids through this kind of torture for exceedingly pointless reasons is antithetical to our values.

Here’s why. Standardized tests are no longer being used for the purposes for which they were designed. They aren’t being used to give an overall picture of a school, to trigger teacher development and training, or to help principals concretely support struggling classes. A single test can now determine the fate of a student and can trigger huge sanctions against a school or financial rewards for individual teachers and principals whose students do well. And all this can induce people to cheat—a most un-Jewish value.

Messing with the tests to improve kids’ scores artificially seems to be a very real problem. Last week, the Washington Post reported that nearly 4,000 schoolteachers and parents have signed a petition urging federal officials to investigate possible cheating on standardized tests during the reign of Michelle A. Rhee, the former D.C. schools chancellor. In March, a USA Today investigation found that from 2008 through 2010, there were unusually high rates of answer changes—penciled-in bubbles being erased and re-filled-in differently—at 103 D.C. schools. At one school, more than 80 percent of the classrooms had tests flagged by McGraw-Hill, the testmaker, for unusual answer-changing tendencies.

Let’s look at the Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, which Rhee frequently pointed to as proof of the success of her sweeping reforms (which basically amounted to an ever-increasing emphasis on testing and huge rates of firing teachers and principals in large part because of their test scores). Rhee called Noyes one of the “shining stars” of D.C.’s educational system. In 2006, only 10 percent of the school’s students scored “proficient” or “advanced” in math; two years later, 58 percent were at that level. Awesome! The reading test gains were similar. Rhee made sure the staff was rewarded for their fabulosity: In 2008 and again in 2010, each teacher received an $8,000 bonus, and the principal received $10,000.

Yet according to USA Today, Noyes’ scoring irregularities were legion. On the 2009 reading test, for instance, seventh-graders in one classroom had almost 13 wrong-to-right erasures on their answer sheets; the average in D.C. was less than one. “The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians,” the paper reported. A former D.C. principal told the paper that Rhee informed her and her colleagues that they were expected to increase scores by at least 10 percentage points every year.

As educational historian (and recent Daily Show guest) Diane Ravitch points out in her brilliant (and easy-to-read, non-jargon-y, and deeply depressing) book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, we should always be suspicious of humungous differences in data from year to year. Real, meaningful change doesn’t happen by leaps and bounds; it happens incrementally.

Ravitch’s perspective is fascinating, because she is someone who has truly had a turnaround—done teshuvah, in fact—on her earlier views on testing. Her book is a very public mea culpa. She’s a former United States assistant secretary of Education who was appointed by George H.W. Bush and was formerly aligned with conservative thinkers on accountability and school choice. “First she angered the Marxist historians, and later the fans of progressive education and the multiculturalists,” Jeffrey E. Mirel, a professor of education at the University of Michigan, told the New York Times last year. “But she’s always defended public schools and a robust traditional curriculum, because she believes they’ve been a ladder of social mobility.”

Indeed, that’s the role public schools have always served for American Jews. Ravitch tells a story in her book about how she didn’t get into a private school in her Texas hometown because, according to her parents, the headmistress didn’t like Jews. After that, her parents were big supporters of public education. Ravitch writes that she initially applauded No Child Left Behind and other testing-driven initiatives, but when she looked at the results and at the actual outcomes (high test scores don’t actually indicate knowledge and learning; the new accountability policies don’t involve helping teachers teach better and principals administer better) she changed her mind.

“Accountability, now a shibboleth that everyone applauds, had become mechanistic and even antithetical to good education,” Ravitch writes. “Testing, I realized with dismay, had become a central preoccupation in the schools and was not just a measure but an end in itself. I came to believe that accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools as states and districts strived to meet unrealistic targets.”

Ravitch says she’s too essentially conservative to embrace an agenda driven by speculation and uncertain results. And it was that (very Jewish!) conservatism about values, traditions, and the need to protect communities that made her change her tune and publicly break with her former allies. But Ravitch’s conservativism is the kind that squares with both American and Jewish values, struggling, as it does, with the notion of the individual versus the community and the question of whether America truly is a meritocracy.

As Jews, we dig community. Al tifrosh min hatzibur, we’re told: Do not separate yourself from the community. Our prayers are written overwhelmingly in the first person plural. But standardized testing is the furthest thing from communitarian. Wealthy families buy tutoring. Upper-middle-class kids come into school with the huge advantage of being read to more often at home. Testing enforces existing divisions and even increases them. And being Jewish means you shouldn’t just worry about your kids; you should be concerned about everyone’s kids. That means working to improve all schools—yes, even if your kid goes to Jewish Day School—in meaningful ways, because that’s part of the responsibility of living in a democracy.

And no one’s kids should be barfing from anxiety at the age of 8.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

Here, according to the Good Book, is how one might go about combating the scourge of affliction: The kohen, or priest, “shall take two live, clean birds, a cedar stick, a strip of crimson [wool], and hyssop. The kohen shall order, and one shall slaughter the one bird into an earthenware vessel, over spring water. [As for] the live bird, he shall take it, and then the cedar stick, the strip of crimson, and the hyssop, and, along with the live bird, he shall dip them into the blood of the slaughtered bird, over the spring water. He shall then sprinkle seven times upon the person being cleansed from tzara’ath [leprosy], and he shall cleanse him. He shall then send away the live bird into the field.”

We, alas, are no longer blessed with the priesthood and its purifying rituals, and a cedar stick, a strip of crimson wool, and two live, clean birds make for a very strange Amazon wish list. But the spirit of inclusion, that steely and central tenet of Judaism that strives never to leave anyone unattended and uncared for, is far from vanished. This week, I found it with a philanthropist in Boston and a musician in Tel Aviv, each working in his own way to reach out to the needy and forgotten.

The first is Jay Ruderman. A former assistant district attorney in northern Massachusetts, deputy director of AIPAC, and liaison between the Israel Defense Forces and Diaspora Jews, Ruderman is no stranger to the mechanics of mobilizing large organizations. Now the president of his own family’s charitable foundation, he searched for a cause that could unite many disparate institutions in one drive toward a reachable goal, an undertaking no less daunting than trying to cure leprosy with some hyssop and earthenware. Numbers suggested the path: Studying census data in Israel and the United States, he was struck by the stratospheric number of children with special needs, nearly 18 percent of the population in Israel and 14 percent in the United States.

“Every family has someone that they’re close to that has some form of disability or special needs,” Ruderman said in a recent interview. But not every Jewish community, he soon learned, had the means or the know-how to provide the sort of care these children needed. Funding programs in Boston and in Israel, Ruderman set out to solve the problem, focusing, he said, on “models of inclusion that allow children with special needs to be able to come in to school and get individual counseling but also feel included in the school and the community.”

This, he soon learned, was a tall order that required the sort of community-wide effort that no one foundation, well-meaning and well-funded as it may be, could provide. Last fall, Ruderman convened a daylong conference in New York, gathering together such institutional Jewish leviathans as the Jewish Federations of North America and the Jewish Funders Network as well as a host of private investors. This, he believed, was the only way problems would get solved.

“In the Jewish community, we tend to work on projects in silos,” he said. “But the age of the macher putting down money and saying ‘this is my project and I own it’ is over. Such an attitude is great for the funder, but not so great for societal change. I think the sophisticated funder is interested in seeing how to affect societal change and maximize impact.”

The joint push worked: A trial effort in Boston has put together a team of more than 40 professionals—from speech pathologists to music therapists—trained volunteers, and awarded funds to enable 14 day schools—representing all shades of Jewish religious affiliation—to offer an immersive and inclusive education to students with special needs who would not otherwise be able to get a Jewish education.

While Ruderman’s achievements are inspiring, one needn’t necessarily be a resourceful and experienced philanthropist to reach out to those usually untouched and unaided by society. My friend Eldar Baruch is living proof.

A kind and wonderful man, Baruch is a lawyer and a musician who lives in Tel Aviv. Like everyone who lives in Tel Aviv, he frequently comes across the men and women who build the city’s towers and wash its dishes and care for its elderly, the undocumented workers from Nigeria and Romania and the Philippines and elsewhere who fuel Tel Aviv’s economy with their sweat. Most Tel Avivis walk right by these foreign workers, maybe nod politely. Most Tel Avivis, even those who oppose the government’s recent measures to deport these unlucky laborers, never really bother to think about them as human beings with joys and sorrows and thirsts just like everyone else. Most Tel Avivis avoid like the plague the southern slums surrounding Tel Aviv’s old Central Bus Station, a blighted and ugly beehive of small and dank apartments to which the foreigners disappear at night in fear of the watchful police.

Reflecting on the neighborhood recently, Baruch sounded indignant. There was nothing there, he said, except “emptiness, junkies, poor women, torn bodies and souls. It’s a ghetto, three blocks from Rothschild Avenue, the most beautiful part of Tel Aviv.”

Together with a group of activists and artists, he decided on the most direct, most beautifully simple, most personal form of political action, taking cellos and keyboards and guitars, drums and paintbrushes and spray cans, to the sad neighborhood. There, Baruch and his friends played music and painted, danced and sang and partied, inviting the men and women and children in the streets to join them for a few hours of sanity and joy. For many, it was the first taste of live music or art in many years. More important, it was a taste, all too rare, of what life—normal, ordinary, wonderful life—was really all about. They intend to repeat the initiative again this Shabbat, and, hopefully, on many Shabbats to come.

Ruderman and Baruch, of course, are far from the sacred status bestowed on the priests of old. But in their refusal to deny anyone the dignity all mankind deserves, they are doing the Lord’s work.

I had been raised to fear debt. My mother had made the mistake of cosigning credit card applications with my father when they were married. They divorced when I was 8, he left Brooklyn for Florida, and my mother got stuck with his bills when he was unable to pay them. My mother, a New York City public school teacher, raised me and my sister alone. Throughout my elementary-school years, our dinners were constantly interrupted by calls from my father’s creditors. Now I almost always pay off my monthly credit-card balances in full and carefully budget for all expenditures. Yet no amount of frugality could decrease the amount I owned to the educational-loan company. As the end of my most recent renewal approached, there was only one place I knew I could turn—my nuptial fund.

By all rights, this money should have already been spent. In the Orthodox community where I grew up, girls my age are married, in which case they are called women. I recently attended my 10-year high-school reunion, and I could count the number of singles on one hand. (And a few of the unattached were divorcees.) The rest of my former classmates had already begun constructing a bayis ne’eman b’Yisroel, a faithful home in Israel, as we had been taught to do in our all-girls yeshiva. I still lived in a studio apartment.

So, the money my mother had set aside for my wedding was still there. That she was able to squirrel away a small yet significant sum of money to pay for the hoped-for ceremony and party on her public servant’s salary and eventually, pension, was impressive and a sign of how much my marrying mattered to her.

I only knew about the money because my mother, in the tradition of older folk, likes to speak about her will. She turned 70 in August, but she has been engaged in this sort of talk since I was in grade school. When I was little and used to light the Sabbath candles with her on Friday night, she’d point to the two brass candlesticks and say, “These will be yours in 120 years.” (Since Moses died at the age of 120, many traditional Jews believe that he set a life-span precedent and people cannot live beyond this age.)

The first time she brought up the wedding money, I was 15, and we were in the car driving to school. “I need to speak to Shloimie,” she said. Shloimie is her nephew and a lawyer and is therefore the family repository of legal advice. “I need to add a clause to my will so there will be money so you can have a wedding as nice as Lisa’s.” My older sister, nearly eight years my senior, had just gotten married, and the affair, while hardly posh, was attended by 200 friends and family.

“Uh-huh,” I answered nonchalantly as I stared out the window. I didn’t like what she was implying—that she wouldn’t be around for my wedding as she had been for my sister’s.

Since then, my mother has brought up the wedding clause many times. I usually brush off her mention of final arrangements by saying, “You’ll be annoying the crap out of me for many years to come.” This makes her chuckle.

Yet knowledge of it is burrowed deep in my mind. I’ve often wondered: How much money had she set aside? Could I ask for some of it?

This past summer, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fund. Why did I have to wait until I got married? What if I never got married? If the point of this money was to increase my happiness by giving me the wedding of my dreams—well, I had other ideas about what would make me happy. I kept repeating these arguments to myself until I almost believed them.

The truth was that I didn’t actually want to give up my wedding. Although I’ve never been the type to fantasize about a dress or flower arrangements, I always thought I’d have a wedding. And I thought it would’ve happened by now. Even as I dropped the trappings of Orthodox observance, I didn’t completely let go of getting married altogether.

I entered my late 20s still single and without a significant relationship under my belt. I might never get married, I realized, and there is nothing I can do about it. My career, on the other hand, is something I can make happen. Even in today’s dismal media marketplace, I can network, hustle, and work several jobs into the wee hours of the morning. But I couldn’t force the universe to introduce me to the right man, and I couldn’t force that man to tolerate me. When I thought about where the money would have the greatest impact on my life, I decided that funding my education and career was a sounder bet than a wedding that might never take place.

Last summer, I asked my mother to meet me in my neighborhood. After my mother parked her car in front of my building, we walked to a local café. It was a muggy August day; I was going slow, but my mother was moving even slower. I realized, as I had been realizing many times over the last few years just how old my mother was getting. If at 15, I nonchalantly believed my mother would be at my wedding, I wasn’t as confident at 27.

At a popular hipster hangout we settled into the lumpy couch with our coffees and desserts. I sat silently for a few minutes, staring at artwork on the walls. I was suddenly nervous. I hadn’t planned how to broach the subject. There hadn’t seemed a point to rehearsing.

Finally, I simply asked. It’s hard for me to remember my exact words, but I muttered something about money and a wedding, and said, “I’d like to pay off my school debt.”

Her face fell. “You’re not going to get married?” she asked me, her lower lip quivering.

I tried to reassure her, even though I too was uncertain. I looked down at my dry scone, wondering why I had even bothered ordering it.

I tried to remember all the reasons I had decided to bring this up. I began speaking: It was a good financial decision for her, I said. Costs are only going up. It’s better to pay for a “wedding” in 2010 than in 2012 or 2015. Also, my mother has always been supportive of my career goals. She understood that by alleviating some of the financial burdens caused by my education debt, I could spend more time writing. And finally as a woman who married late herself—at 31, which was and still is ancient in the Orthodox Jewish community—only to get divorced 18 years later, I think she recognized that the wedding is, in the end, just a party. It can make you happy for just one night whereas student loans can make you unhappy for decades. (In that respect, education debt is like a bad marriage.)

As I finished stating my case, she nodded slowly. I wasn’t sure if she agreed with my points or was acquiescing to my request. She gradually conceded that a big, fancy wedding didn’t fit my personality profile. “I always saw you getting married barefoot on a beach somewhere anyway,” she said, brightening up.

We entered final negotiations in the café. The number we settled on was based on the amount she paid for my sister, nearly eight years my senior, to get married, adjusted for inflation since she wed in 1998. I was insistent on this point since I had been fooled as a child when the discussion was about my mother’s contribution to my college tuition. “I will pay just as much for you to go to college as I did for your sister,” she had said. This seemed perfectly fair and generous to a 7th grader. It wasn’t until I was a senior in high school that I realized that I got the raw end of the deal. “But tuitions are much higher now than when Lisa was in college,” I told my mother.

“That was our deal,” she would remind me, shaking her head.

Despite my shrewdness this time around, my mother still low-balled me. “I’m keeping a few thousand dollars,” she said, writing a figure on the napkin. “Because when you do get married, I still want to throw you a small party.”

I almost objected to this change but then thought better of it. She didn’t owe me the money. She finished raising me a long time ago, and all of it was a gift. I kissed my mother on the cheek. I liked that she was still planning my wedding, that she was holding out hope that I will eventually find love with a kind and supportive man, even if I don’t believe it will happen for me. Her faith restored a little of my own. As I walked home, I envisioned professional success, a steadier income, and monetary solubility. Maybe, I thought, I will get to use some of this money for my own wedding. Maybe.

As the story begins, the Tabernacle is completed, and Moses delivers a thorough account of the artisans who toiled on its construction, the fabrics and metals used, the monies paid. At first read, this exhaustive list of men and materials can come off as yet another paean to the great leader’s glory: Having asked the people to sacrifice some of their wealth and most of their precious goods to build the Lord’s dwelling, Moses—responsible and fair and civic-minded—takes the time to inform his charges just what he had done with their resources. In so doing, Moses sets a precedent of transparency, accountability, and other staples of governance on which we moderns living in democratic societies frequently insist.

The story, however, is more complex than that. To understand its intricacies, we must abandon Moses for a moment and look instead at other great yet largely unheralded leaders, our very own teachers.

In recent weeks, the plight of educators made national news from Wisconsin to New York. In the swirl of discussion, one term seemed to hover above controversy: accountability. To best educate our children, goes the logic, we need great teachers, and the only way to identify and incentivize these great teachers is by holding them—and the institutions in which they teach—accountable, rewarding those whose students do well on standardized tests and punishing those whose students falter. This has been a key feature of President Barack Obama’s educational policy, which aggressively promotes the remuneration of successful teachers—one key program, Race to the Top, awards $4.35 billion to schools with demonstrably effective educators—and which heavily depends on hard data, mainly test results, to quantify success.

This may sound very sensible. After all, most of us who work for a living are required, regularly and repeatedly, to undergo professional evaluations. We are rewarded for terrific performance and penalized if we fall short of expectations. But apply the same cool logic to teachers, and disaster is likely to ensue.

Writing last year in the Los Angeles Times, Diane Ravitch, perhaps our sharpest scholar of education history and policy, made this point eloquently. “The Obama education reform plan,” she wrote, “is an aggressive version of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind, under which many schools have narrowed their curriculum to the tested subjects of reading and math. This poor substitute for a well-rounded education, which includes subjects such as the arts, history, geography, civics, science and foreign language, hits low-income children the hardest, since they are the most likely to attend the kind of ‘failing school’ that drills kids relentlessly on the basics. Emphasis on test scores already compels teachers to focus on test preparation. Holding teachers personally and exclusively accountable for test scores—a key feature of Race to the Top—will make this situation even worse. Test scores will determine salary, tenure, bonuses and sanctions, as teachers and schools compete with each other, survival-of-the-fittest style.”

As an assistant professor at New York University, I spend a lot of my time in classrooms, and although education policy is not my field of expertise, Ravitch’s point is one that I deeply feel to be true. If my livelihood depended on metrics, I would most likely concentrate intensely on making sure my students meet the required criteria, which would mean narrowing my scope of interest and theirs to a given set of precise, measurable particulars. Even if that were the case—and I’m extremely fortunate to report that it is not—and even if I were especially adept at my job, I could still fail: As anyone who has ever spent more than a minute or two with a student knows, the tiles that make up each individual’s mind are laid not only by teachers but, primarily, by parents, friends, the media, the environment, and a host of other factors entirely beyond our control. To place the blame for failure—or the laurels of success—on one person isn’t accountability; it’s cruelty.

Unfortunately, even the most progressive-minded among us too often engage in this sort of Manichean thinking. Last February, to name but one prominent example, a school board in Rhode Island voted to fire all the teachers of one struggling high school. Obama hailed the decision. “If a school continues to fail year after year after year and doesn’t show signs of improvement,” he said, “then there has got to be a sense of accountability.”

But as this week’s parasha proves, accountability means accounting, the breaking down of a process to facts and figures. It’s easy to do when one’s business is selling corn, say, or buying land, when all that’s required are bottom lines. But when one’s business is the broadening and bettering of young minds, we need much more. Just what more? For answers, we may turn to those too many nations that surpass ours in comparative international rankings and realize that what Japan, Finland, Holland, and other nations boasting excellent educational systems have in common is not a system revolving around punishments and rewards but rather one devoted to setting clear standards and goals and promoting a well-rounded education focused on the liberal arts and sciences. When fourth-graders in Houston, therefore, stress out about improving their math and reading test scores, their peers in Hong Kong study Picasso’s work and visit a local artist’s studio. One needn’t be an expert on educational policy to guess which method makes for a better education.

And yet we adhere to the ghost dance of accountability, insisting that the world can be broken down to numbers. But it cannot, at least not those slivers of the world that are holy and that still matter. The Good Lord, I suspect, knows it, too. As Moses finishes reading his account, the spirit of God materializes above the Tabernacle. The Creator, of course, could have chosen whatever form he wished, but all that transparency and accountability, all those clear and concrete figures, apparently have given the Almighty the creeps. When he appears above the dwelling the Israelites had built for him, he appears as a cloud.

Something else is different for my kids this year: They’ll both be in inclusion classes. “Inclusion” is when students with special educational needs spend all or most of their class time with non-disabled students. My kids’ public school is starting “collaborative team teaching” classes for the first time—that’s when a special-education teacher and a general-education teacher work together with one class that combines both populations.

Maxie is one of the kids with special needs. She has motor, speech, and other challenges. Josie, on the other hand, could read young-adult novels in second grade and scores sky-high in standard measures of achievement. I think they’re both brilliant (and beautiful and hilarious, and here, let me show you our vacation slides), but they learn in very different ways. And I think this model of education is going to work beautifully for both of them.

There’s been a seismic shift in the way public schools approach kids with special needs in New York City. In the past, most were shunted off to self-contained special-ed classes. Kids with less severe learning issues were helped using a “pull out, push in” model, in which a learning specialist takes the kid out of class for a while or shadows them in the classroom, quietly helping. This method, of course, means that a kid misses out on a lot of classroom life. Maxie had pull-out-push-in assistance last year. I predict that collaborative team teaching will help her feel a greater sense of community.

Private schools have historically been a lot less interested in kids with special needs. Many still counsel out kids who need extra help or tell parents to pay for specialists’ services on their own, and if the kid can’t keep up, too bad. Sadly, this has also described Jewish day schools and synagogue Hebrew schools.

I recently chatted with Dori Frumin Kirshner, the executive director of Matan (the name means “gift”), an organization that supports Jewish communities in educating children with special learning needs.

“The Orthodox have always taken on responsibility for educating all Jews,” she told me. “But Conservative, Reform, unaffiliated, and non-denominational institutions—well, the going attitude was, ‘Sorry, we can’t handle that. Bye. It’s not you; it’s us.’ The latent message, of course, was, ‘It’s you.’ ”

Things are slowly changing. More Jewish organizations are calling Matan for help, and a number of Jewish day schools are trying to be more embracing of kids with learning differences. “There’s a big difference from 10 years ago,” Kirshner said. “But it still takes time, attitude change, and advocacy. Clergy, early-childhood, and educational directors, the president of the shul, they need to step up more and take the full responsibility off parents’ shoulders. This is everyone’s bag. It’s a health and human services issue, an educational issue, and a cultural issue—because there are so many kids out there with no entry points to the beauty of Jewish culture.”

Inclusion, Kirshner said, was a policy equal in importance to the civil rights movement. “You don’t have to be from the South or African-American to feel in your kishkes that it’s wrong to leave children separate,” she said. “I feel strongly—just as my mom, a white Jew who grew up in Shreveport and marched and got arrested for civil rights felt—this is wrong. It’s wrong to tell people there’s no room for them at the Jewish communal table. They have to start adding other chairs.”

Of course, inclusion—in both secular and Jewish settings—isn’t easy. It takes teachers who recognize different learning styles and plan for them. It calls for professional development for teachers—general and special educators alike—to help work out how best to foster cooperative learning and peer tutoring. It requires smaller class sizes.

And most of all, it needs a schoolwide commitment to true diversity and community. “There’s a social benefit to discovering that everyone has strengths,” said my kids’ principal. “It’s important to be able to work with different kinds of people, to care for people who are different from you, and to see school—and life—as more than just a rat race and a competition. We had a kid with autism in one class who had an incredible instinct for spelling and grammar. He was the best grammarian in the class, and kids really gravitated to him for that and then found other commonalities.”

My kids’ school has a leg up in introducing inclusion classes because it already has mixed-age classrooms. Teachers are accustomed to multilevel instructional approaches and individualized education. Maxie will be in a 1st-2nd grade inclusion class, and Josie will be in a 4th-5th grade inclusion class. I hope collaborative team teaching will help Maxie with her special needs and help Josie with hers (namely impatience, hyper-competitiveness, bossiness).

My mom, a professor of Jewish education, laughs at how many parents, when considering Jewish day schools for their kids, only want to know what high schools or colleges the graduates get into. (Of course, this is true at non-Jewish schools too.) It can be a lot harder to convince competitive upper-middle-class parents that inclusive education can be good for their precious, advanced little flower.

But it really can be. Even “gifted” kids can benefit. “Done well, inclusive education taps into the depth a kid is capable of,” my girls’ principal said. “Many gifted programs simply offer accelerated learning from a grade level or two up. But keeping curriculum across the grades open and wide-ranging means that every kid can reach the heights he or she is capable of.” One kid may be just learning spelling, while another is writing a novel, and good teachers help both. “There’s a saying,” says the principal: “Good special-ed teaching is good teaching.”

Too often, unfortunately, “gifted” education brings to mind the following story: A guy runs to his rabbi yelling, “Rabbi! Rabbi! I learned the whole Torah by heart!” The rabbi replies, “And how much of it penetrated your heart?” In other words, it’s not only the acquisition of knowledge we should be concerned with. It’s g’milut chasadim, too—kindness, mutual support, and solidarity.

There are times when inclusion isn’t appropriate. “Learning Hebrew or tfilot can work better in a self-contained setting,” said Kirshner. “For instance, if a kid has serious ADHD or Tourette’s in addition to a spectrum disorder. And sometimes parents of kids in mainstreamed classes will tell me no one ever invites them for a play date. A self-contained class can be a meaningful social setting.”

Gifted kids are special-needs kids too; they also benefit from special enrichment. But, Kirshner warns, “ ‘gifted education’ shouldn’t universally be the way your kid learns.” Inclusivity, done right, is beneficial to all students. And, as I said, it’s not easy.

But I’m confident that Josie and Maxie’s school is ready. Pairs of special-ed and general-ed teachers have spent the summer doing professional development and learning the most effective classroom set-up, structures, and pedagogy. I’m hopeful. And as Kirshner puts it, “We’re all gonna have a special need sometime. We may lose our hearing; we may break a leg. By engendering the values of inclusion, the fact that we all have something to contribute, we create a better world.”

Many of them are in for a nasty surprise. While test scores have been steadily climbing for years, a change in the exam—it was deemed too easy and altered for this year—put an end to the educational euphoria. Whereas last year, for example, 86.4 percent of students in grades three to eight were found to be proficient in mathematics, only 61 percent earned the distinction this year. Things are even worse when it comes to language arts, with the numbers diving from 77.4 percent to just above the 50 percent mark.

The dramatic dip leaves much for parents, teachers, and education experts to discuss, and it’s quite possible that other, better solutions could be devised to heal the wounded system. But there’s another, darker layer to this discussion, one that forces us to reconcile our desire to advance every child with the innate understanding most of us share that, humans being what they are, some children would inevitably be left behind.

This has as much to do with supply and demand as it does with teaching and learning: Even if the Board of Education offered its students thoughtful curricula, handsomely compensated teachers, and a magical amulet that could drown out the distractions and derisions of the environment at large, society would still channel the lion’s share of the happy graduates to jobs that pay little and demean much.

And yet we continue to soothe our children with promises and platitudes, telling them, in the language of every commencement speech ever delivered, that if they work hard and believe in themselves, there’s no limit to how far they can go. This, after all, is the American dream. But when the children grow up and discover that hard work is more likely to lead to exhaustion than it is to success, when their self-confidence curdles, when they are forced by their mortgages and dental bills and credit card debt to abandon their aspirations and come to terms with life being not much more than a series of small triumphs in an arid desert of responsibilities and routines—when they realize all that, they seethe.

Is there, then, a better vision? A subtler promise? A different dream, one that bypasses the inevitable heartbreak that comes with waking up? Isaiah seems to think so. This week’s haftorah, the fourth in a series of seven haftarot of consolation following Tisha B’Av, begins on a strange note. Aware that the people are no longer willing to heed the words of the prophets, God himself speaks through Isaiah. “I, yea I am He Who consoles you,” he thunders, and he goes on to reassure his chosen people that their salvation is at hand. Still, even God can’t help but sneak in a chiding word.

“Therefore,” he says, “hearken now to this, you poor one, and who is drunk but not from wine.” One needn’t apply a spiritual breathalyzer to decipher God’s metaphor of inebriation; the poor one who is drunk but not from wine, we can assume, is he who lacks faith, he who succumbs to doubt and despair, he who trusts in his own might but not in God’s.

Curiously, the Lord’s promise does little to comfort human beings on their own terms. It does not lull or coax. Instead, it does what the Department of Education recently did in New York—namely, apply higher standards: To the people bothered by their earthly present, God speaks of a divine future, otherworldly and hard to understand. And like the Department of Education, God isn’t interested in quick fixes. What he suggests instead is an arduous journey—“Shake yourselves from the dust,” he urges his people, “arise”—that requires tremendous effort.

In return, God offers only redemption. But if you follow this argument—Judaism’s majestic call for self-reliance—to its logical end, you’ll see that redemption really only comes to those who redeem themselves. No celestial trophies are on offer here, no rewards for good behavior. Only this: Be good and the world will become a bit better. And that’s all the reward we can ask for. That’s salvation.

Educators would do well to adopt a similar approach. Rather than obsess over test scores and promise students the skies, they should pursue a more sober and more sustainable goal. They should tell students that there would most likely be no golden gates at journey’s end, no fulfilling job or stellar salary. And they should tell them to work hard regardless, and have faith nonetheless, because working hard and having faith are the very things that make one’s life better. It may not be much, but, more often than not, it’s all that we’ve got.

There are no exact figures on how many recent American immigrants commute, but according to Nefesh B’Nefesh, an organization that oversees North American aliyah, the trend has risen in recent years. The group estimates that some 20 to 30 percent of the more than 16,000 Americans of working age who moved to Israel in the past five years are commuters. In cities like Raanana and Modiin, which are home to large Modern Orthodox American communities, there is a critical mass of such families.

“For me I don’t think there could have been any other route to aliyah,” said Danny Block, 46, a dentist who maintains his practice in Forest Hills, Queens and has done so for the past four years, though he says this is not a permanent situation. “The point is to live in Israel. I’m not doing it because I’m nuts.”

Among the “ultra-commuters,” as Block calls his tribe, are doctors, lawyers, real-estate brokers, school principals, and small-business owners who work all over the country, from Los Angeles to Baltimore. In their 30s and 40s, most had always planned to make aliyah, feeling an emotional pull to be part of a Jewish state, but got around to moving only after starting families and establishing themselves professionally.

Many of these commuters, though, took steps to pull up stakes and move to Israel only when their children were small, when they foresaw the looming cost of Jewish day-school tuition in the United States; it can reach up to $30,000 a year. In Israel, on the other hand, Jewish education is free, or close to it. A public-school track caters to the Modern Orthodox, providing instruction in both secular and religious studies. Semi-private schools and yeshivas receive some public funding; tuition at such schools costs roughly $1,200 a year.

Even with the relatively high cost of flying and the expense of maintaining two households, the math still adds up in favor of commuting, the families say. Some of the commuters are in frequent-flyer programs and get free trips. Some live with roommates or crash with family members to keep costs down while they are in the United States.

In addition to their financial rationales for moving, these commuting families understood that it would be harder to make aliyah when their children were older and had already established strong social networks. Yet keeping jobs in the States seemed to make sense to them.

Salaries are significantly lower in Israel. “The joke is whatever you make in the United States, take off a zero,” said David Gichton, 47, an anesthesiologist from Baltimore who made aliyah last summer. Physicians, for example, who make up a significant number of the commuting population, estimate that many of them, particularly specialists, who can command $200,000 to $300,000 salaries in the United States would make about a third of that in Israel. A family doctor earning about $100,000 in the United States could expect about half as much.

“Some look at the prospect of starting over again professionally and don’t know whether they can do it,” said Joy Epstein, a social worker who is the clinical supervisor for social services at Nefesh B’Nefesh. Commuters may also be reluctant to give up their work in the States because of the challenge of making their way professionally in a foreign language.

The women in such households seek each other out. There are “commuting wives” groups where participants discuss the challenges of starting new lives in Israel and taking care of their families while their husbands are abroad. Some spend holiday and Shabbat meals together when their spouses are away and trade pieces of advice when they feel overwhelmed by their stints as single moms.

“There is a very big support system,” said Esther Morris, 43, and a mother of five living in Raanana, a city near Tel Aviv. “It’s become a lifestyle,” Morris made aliyah in 2004 from Boca Raton, Florida. Her husband, a physician, used to fly back there two weeks of every month. Recently he left his practice and began work as an American company’s medical director, which has allowed him to commute less frequently and spend more time in Israel.

In Hashmonim, a settlement just inside the West Bank, roughly half the families come from the United States and other English-speaking countries. Gigi Tover, who made aliyah six years ago from Los Angeles, figures about a third to even one half of those have a commuting spouse.

She, like her husband, is an accountant, but she took both a salary cut and position cut when she started working at an Israeli firm while her husband commuted back to California.

Her husband, meantime, “continues with his regular contacts and a salary much higher than the one he would have in Israel. We are doing this not only for economic reasons but also for the sake of his career and job satisfaction,” said Tover. “But I hope this is not the 21st-century version of aliyah. I would love Israel to have the type of economy that can sustain its citizens. I just don’t understand how Israelis live on the average income here.” The median yearly household income is $37,000. In the United States it is just over $50,000.

The Tovers have six children, who range in age from 7 to 23, and the prospect of a free Jewish education in Israel was a relief. “Day school was a big consideration, of course,” as was the cost of college education, which averages $3,000 a year in Israel. But the Tovers also considered “the plain values of living here,” she said, referring to what she sees as the “superficial values that pervade American Jewry.”

But despite the strain of travel and intermittent parental absence, many commuting families speak of the unexpected benefits for of their situation. When the commuting parent is home, he is often not working at all and is therefore more available to his children and wife. “When I’m home I’m with the kids all afternoon, which was not the case when we lived in the United States,” said David Gichton, who has four sons and commutes to Baltimore one week a month.

Like so many similar commuters, Gichton would eventually like to work more locally. “That’s the hope, but the reality of the situation is that you have to pay to put food on the table,” he said.

Dina Kraft is journalist based in Tel Avivl. She contributes to the New York Times, the JTA, and the Sunday Telegraph and blogs on Israeli politics and culture for the Faster Times.

Jewish school. Non-Jewish school that reflects the makeup of the world we live in. Both are worth yearning for. Both teach values that are completely legitimate. And “both” is exactly what I can’t have. They’re mutually contradictory. (My mom once insisted that Jewish schools can be diverse and got annoyed when I said that “diversity” doesn’t mean a couple of gay parents and a Chinese girl named Shoshana, but I stand by that statement.)

I feel genuine grief for the fact that my girls can’t speak Hebrew as well as I did at their age. I quake at the idea that it’s my responsibility to teach them the prayers and songs I loved as a kid. If I’d sent them to Senesh, they wouldn’t even have to deal with the stuff I loathed in my own day-school education: a lack of historicity, disrespect for alternate points of view, anti-feminism. They’d be in smaller classes, with all the pedagogical yumminess that entails. I waffle endlessly and luxuriantly in the possibility that I’ve made the wrong choice.

And then a day like Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday rolls around, and all my ambivalence falls away.

Let’s look at how Maxie’s class, a combined pre-K and kindergarten, celebrates the holiday. They build a bus out of chairs, and each kid is assigned a shape: rectangle or circle. First the rectangles all have to sit at the back of the bus, and when they protest that this is not fair, or complain to a circle at the front of the bus, they are told that, nyah nyah, these are the rules. Then a little rectangle playing Rosa Parks refuses to move. And the rectangle police come. You know the story. Then everyone switches roles: the circles have to sit at the back, and the rectangles sit in front.

The next day, Maxie’s teacher Laurie tells them the actual story of the Montgomery bus boycott. “It’s important that we do the role-playing first, before we talk about the historical event,” she told me, “because I don’t want kids to feel ‘If I’m white, I’m the permanent bad guy, and if I’m black, I’m the permanent underdog.’” Laurie stresses that people from all over supported the Freedom Fighters. She talks about how the bus strike was really hard. It was rainy. It was cold. But eventually the mayor said that it was costing the city too much money, and he changed the law.

Laurie tells the story through the lens of saying no to unfairness, an idea that resonates with very young kids. “Most of them feel pretty powerless in the world,” she pointed out. “They can’t make their own breakfast. They can’t get dressed and go out by themselves.”

The message that people of all races can work together—a message that is reinforced by the actual fact of kids of all races learning together—is one I cling to. Maxie’s class really is a gorgeous mosaic (Inside Schools says that the school’s study body is 31 percent white, 22 percent black, 29 percent Latino, and 16 percent Asian), and the point is that they’re not just talking about unity and racial harmony; they’re embodying it. The notion that we can move beyond the pain of our respective pasts and create a just and united world is right there in the classroom.

Sometimes white parents (almost never black ones, educators say) insist that kids can’t see skin color. They tell teachers they don’t want their kids to learn about painful historical events or even talk about difference, because “everyone’s equal” and “under the skin, we’re all the same.” But research shows that no kids are colorblind. And a 2007 study of 17,000 families with kindergartners, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found that nonwhite parents are about three times more likely to discuss race than white parents; 75 percent of the latter never, or almost never, talk about race. When we don’t talk about race, we give kids the message that it’s a shameful subject.

Oh, and then there’s the fact that all too often Jewish parents act like we have the monopoly on suffering. Who has room for another group’s inequities when we had the Holocaust? Game, set, match.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s not a suffering competition. We Jewish moms and dads might choose to reinforce the message that people of different backgrounds can work together by reading As Good as Anybody: Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Amazing March Toward Freedom with our kids. Richard Michelson and Raul Colon’s book talks about the similarities between these two great men and how they marched together in 1965, before Mommy or Daddy were even born. But the book doesn’t minimize difference. That’s important.

And to me, Maxie’s school truly embodies Heschel’s values. As Heschel says in the book, “God did not make a world with just one color flower. We are all made in God’s image.”

Indeed. But a book is one thing; an entire school is another. I see the lessons my kid is learning not just from the curriculum but from the hidden curriculum, a term I’ve learned since starting this column. At moments like these, I feel OK with all the stuff she’s not getting.

So, nu, I’ll do more of the heavy lifting to ensure that she gets her Jew on at home. I’ll supplement what she learns in Hebrew school. I’ll send her to Jewish camps, where she will make lanyards and swap spit with other Jews and sing Halleluyah until her ears bleed. On days like today, the tradeoff feels worth it.

This morning, Maxie told me, “Today I want to play Rosa Parks.” Go for it, kid.

“And what did you do?” I asked Josie.

“On the way back from lunch I told Girl Y, ‘Just ignore Girl X,’” Josie told me. “I said, ‘She’s so mean she’ll only get meaner and scarier if you react to her.”

Was that a good answer? Should Josie have intervened in the bullying, telling the Mean Girl to cut it out? Should she have asked the Mean Girl’s best friend what, exactly, was so funny? Should she have engaged a teacher or lunch monitor, thus gaining a reputation as a meddlesome tattling geek? How should teachers, administrators and parents deal with teasing and taunting that happens outside the classroom setting?

I have no clue.

There’s no question that kids can be breathtakingly cruel. According to “Hostile Hallways: Bullying, Teasing, and Sexual Harassment in School,” a 2001 American Association for University Women (AAUW) report based on a national survey of 2,064 public school students, eight in 10 students have experienced some form of harassment in their school lives. But hey, just listen to Josie, sharing a typical sneer from the elementary-school world:

So I wondered: Is there a way to foster bullying-prevention in a Jewish context? Apparently, yes. In 2006, through funding from the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York, Professor Shira Epstein at the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary launched the “Addressing Evaded Issues in Jewish Education” program. (“Evaded curriculum,” a term coined by the AAUW in 1992, means topics students grapple with constantly in their daily lives – gender, body image, bullying and more – that aren’t usually addressed at all in the classroom.) Epstein has also written a curriculum for Jewish Women International (JWI) called “Strong Girls, Healthy Relationships: A Conversation on Dating, Friendship, and Self-Esteem.”

“Bullying is a reality,” says Epstein. “But we need to talk about the whys of bullying. We can’t just be reactionary, talking about punishment. We need to look at the larger culture that fosters bullying. The hard work comes in mindfully creating a culture in which we can be supportive of each other. How do we help girls think about what it means to build sisterhood?”

In Evaded Issues’ online resource guide, Epstein writes about the way one Jewish Day School, Hannah Senesh Community Day School in Brooklyn, addressed subtle forms of bullying – teasing, cliques and exclusionary practices – in school. The head of the school chose to use the Bullyproof curriculum, produced by the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women.

“Although Bullyproof is a secular curriculum,” Epstein writes, “the work carries a Jewish theme, the relationship beyn adam l’havero, between two people.” The school worked to make the curriculum explicitly Jewish by culling Judaic texts for stories, quotes, and examples of bullying and what we can learn from them. The younger grades looked at illustrations from Torah and Pirke Avot (Sayings of our Fathers); older grades looked at the Nevi’im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings) as well as Talmudic texts. Did the program make bullying disappear? No, but former head of school Susan Weintrob says that it did make teachers act more quickly when they saw bullying in action. “It is one thing to recognize bullying,” Weintrob remarked, “but it is another to know how to deal with it.”

In her work, Epstein uses the stories of Sarai and Haggar to talk about shifting power balances. “Sarai was mean to Hagar because she suddenly felt low in status and was trying to get her power back!” Epstein points out. “She needed someone else to feel low so she could feel high. We want girls to understand that status isn’t static. It moves quickly.” Epstein also uses the story of Vashti as a way to explore statuses, incorporating movement and visual drama so that kids can feel emotions and power shifts in their own bodies. “In one session we portrayed Vashti as a beggar on the ground and everyone was ignoring her. One girl said, ‘She was up here and now she’s down low’ – she used her body to show how it must have felt for Vashti.”  The story of Amnon and Tamar illustrates issues of “having your voice silenced, and how to be a supportive friend.” The girls can use all these stories to reflect on their own emotions and experiences. Epstein laughs ruefully, “Unfortunately, a lot of our texts show deviousness and power plays! But that means they can provide a learning experience: How do we shift to a language of partnership, equality, support, friendship?”

And we parents, sadly, can be hindrances rather than helpers. At Hannah Senesh, Weintrob noted, teachers were excited to incorporate the program, but parents weren’t. Unfortunately, that makes sense to me. Pondering my kid being bullied, being a bully, or (perhaps worst of all) being a follower – the girl who laughs when her Queen Bee friend teases the kid with the speech impediment – makes me shut down like a garage door. Ack! Let’s talk about what you learned in math class instead! “It’s hard for adults to think about what it was like to be young,” notes Epstein. “It touches on a lot of our own issues we haven’t completely worked through from our pasts and makes us uncomfortable.” Indeed, my mom reminds me of how I wept my way through junior high, where I was at the periphery of the popular circle and sometimes got snubbed. I don’t want to explore my unresolved childhood crap! But this ostrich-y tendency also lets us excuse our kids’ bad behavior, or rush to blame other kids and/or their over-reactive helicopter parents when our own kid is cruel.

A further complication: society sends wildly mixed messages about female anger. Girls are supposed to be sugar-and-spice, and the stereotype is that girls turn anger inward (they cut their own skin, they experience depression and eating disorders at greater rates than boys do). But is that true? Why do we so love hearing stories and seeing Lohan movies about Mean Girls if girls either a) aren’t as mean as boys or b) turn their anger on themselves rather than others? It’s all so confusing! The upshot: It’s not productive to blame girls for being cruel when they’re growing up in a culture that so frequently disempowers and devalues them.

So nu, what do we do? Lyn Mikel Brown, a professor of Education at Colby College and author of Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls’ Anger (Harvard University Press, 1998) and Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls (New York University Press, 2003), offers parents and educators 10 ways to move beyond typical bullying-prevention efforts. Many dovetail with Epstein’s suggestions: Stop demonizing kids, consider the culture that bullying takes root in, let kids feel themselves to be potential leaders who can build their own coalitions, don’t issue top-down dictates.

Does it really matter whether boys or girls are meaner? I‘ll let Josie have the final word.

University President Jehuda Reinharz Resigns [The Justice]

Argues Adam Gaynor, “Jewish education is almost always based upon the needs and desires of adults rather than kids…. Adult fears about Jewish continuity also lead to the misguided notion that Jewish learning can only happen in exclusively Jewish environments,” despite the fact that “most American Jews choose to live, work and play in multicultural communities.” This isolation tells kids that “a fundamental rift exists between their Jewish selves and the rest of who they are and what they experience. This dichotomy is false.”

Gaynor’s organization, The Curriculum Initiative, is trying to meet teens on their own terms, with projects such as a boarding school seder held in partnership with a gay student group. But would the “multicultural” brand of Jewish education Gaynor advocates be safe from the de-cool-ifying effect of parental pressure? Or is this yet another attempt by adults to turn something kids are already doing into something Jewish in order to reassure themselves of continuity?

Jewish Education Should Be Multicultural, Like Us [JTA]

Judge Dismisses Lawrence Parents’ School Lawsuit [Newsday]
Earlier: Secular L.I. Parents Sue Orthodox-Run School Board

The suit claims that the board’s recent decision to shut down the district’s newest elementary school in the face of falling enrollment—allegedly with the ulterior motive of cherry-picking the best facility to sell or lease to a yeshiva—amounts to the backdoor establishment of religion, in violation of the First Amendment. It’s the latest flare-up in long-running tensions between Orthodox residents, on one hand, and secular Jews and non-Jewish residents, on the other, who are steadily being crowded out of the community. (Previous iterations have included vicious budget fights and contract disputes.) Lawyers for the school board dismiss the accusations and insist the public will “not only be aware, but they will participate in the process.” Which, of course, means the entire public, not just those who use the public schools.

First Amendment Suit Filed in Woodmere School Closure [Newsday]

Israel Bans ‘Catastrophe’ Term From Arab Schools [Reuters]

Oregon Law Is Too Strict on Teachers’ Religious Garb [The Oregonian]
Sikhs reject ‘Gaping Hole’ in Oregon Discrimination Bill [World Sikh News]

Firearms Rights: Jewish High Schoolers Debate with Gun-Rights Champion [Salt Lake Tribune]

Saeed is expected to run in the next general election for a parliamentary seat previously held by Mohammed Sarwar, Britain’s first Muslim MP. He has come in for criticism as a kind of Trojan Muslim who conceals his support for a restored Islamic caliphate behind his neatly trimmed beard and natty ties. But in an interview with London-based altmuslim, he says all he wanted was the freedom to have state-supported parochial schools—something Orthodox Jews, as it happens, also enthusiastically support, along, he noted, with people who speak Gaelic.

Muslims in Europe: The Scottish Example [altmuslim]
Related: Boneheads and Ballots

My daughter Josie, seven, is hyper-competitive. She feels everything way too intensely. She’s a voracious reader. She struggles endlessly with moral questions. When she’s angry, she narrows her eyes into little slits and a vein throbs in her jaw. I understand her completely—and she has the power to drive me completely nuts—because she’s exactly like me.

My daughter Maxine, four, is completely Other to me. I adore her, but she’s a visitor from a foreign country. When Josie and I were her age, we sat in piles of books, flipping pages happily. Maxine, on the other hand, is all about the imaginative play. She often asks to play “the kitten game”—she’s a kitten I have to find on the street and take home. Today, I asked her what her kitten name was, and she mewed, “Rosie of the Lakes of Roses and Water Lilies.” Her favorite doll is named “Isabel Montina,” pronounced with a Spanish accent. When she’s feeling crabby, she scowls like a cartoon and says, “I’m feeling very pudnacious today.”

Maxine started talking later than her sister did, but once she started, she never stopped. Words flow from her in a gurgling rush. She can be challenging to understand—syllables crash and collide in her excitement to expel all the concepts whirling inside her. She jabbers at neighbors. She jabbers at homeless people on St. Marks Place. (“Oh my goodness, you sure lost a lot of teeth!” she told one crusty gentleman, happy for his surely-impending tooth fairy visit.) She jabbers at our cat, Yoyo. When she’s alone, she yammers to herself. Last year, during potty training, I listened outside the bathroom as she babbled, “When you are three you have to go to the potty and you have to wait for someone to wipe you. You can’t just pull up your pants and your panties and go! Mommy can wipe you, Daddy can wipe you, maybe Jojo can wipe you, but Yoyo can’t wipe you because Yoyo doesn’t have hands.”

As Maxie struggles to get her stories out, her face goes through animated, eyebrows-lifted, open-mouthed expressions. Sometimes she sings to herself instead of speaking. One of her earliest compositions:

I’M A TODDLER AND I’M NOT WEARING PAAAAAAAAAAAAAANTS!
I‘M A TODDLER AND I’M NOT WEARING PAAAAAAAAAAAAAANTS!

Josie has always craved independence, while Maxine just wants to cuddle. When I see that the crossing guard is at the corner, I let Josie have her fondest desire—to run ahead and experience the heady joy of crossing the street without me. Last week, watching Josie take off at a dead run, Maxine slipped her hand into mine. “I will never not want to hold your hand,” she told me. “It is one of my joys.” Maxine’s storms blow over quickly; Josie holds a grudge. (So do I.) When my children’s lovely babysitter was teasing Max recently, Maxine blurted, “Shut up!” and immediately blanched. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but sometimes words pop into my brain and then they have to come out my mouth or I feel like I’m swallowing flies.”

My girls are very different from one another, but not as different as Biblical siblings, who always seem to exist in counterpoint to one another: Jacob and Esau, Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Leah and Rachel. (All I ask is that one of my daughters not grow up to be dubbed “the homely weepy one.”) Real life doesn’t operate in antitheses. My girls are similar-looking, as opposed to the genetic opposites so many Torah sibs seem to be. I don’t think either of them is planning on killing the other with a rock. They seem to have an innate understanding of each other’s blessings and trials.

Both my girls had a wonderful pre-K teacher, Laurie. Last week, on Maxie’s last day of school, Laurie gave me a letter detailing Maxie’s love of numbers and patterns, her joy in words, her ability to create complex repeating designs that sometimes slip into narrative illustrations. Once Maxine created a pattern around the border of a picture, then drew her grandmother inside. “This is a pattern of my grandma dancing,” she explained.

But Maxine is easily exhausted. She has a much harder time socially than her sister. She finds it difficult to approach other kids. (Once she’s in, she’s mostly OK, and has a couple of close buddies she plays easily with.) She has trouble writing and using scissors. She prefers painting to using markers—the flow of a brush frees her to express herself more easily. Next year in school, she’ll get help from an occupational therapist for speech and motor issues.

I wasn’t surprised to learn this; Laurie had kept us posted throughout the school year of Maxine’s challenges, and Josie had warned us that Maxine was frequently isolated on the playground. What did surprise me was my own reaction to the information that Maxine would be getting extra assistance. Despite my stratospheric standards for myself, I didn’t feel any embarrassment or inadequacy for having a kid who isn’t an academic rock star on every level. I was thrilled that Maxie was in a school that doesn’t stigmatize learning differences. And I was confident that she’d be helped in a way that doesn’t shame her, and doesn’t diminish her general joy and exuberance in the way she approaches the world. Both my kids, with such different learning styles, are thriving at this school, and Laurie was a genius teacher for both of them. When I ponder how different they are, and how they face such different challenges—Josie’s competitiveness and temper; Maxine’s social and physical difficulties—I see the truth in the ditty we tell our kids about presents is true: “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.”

I can’t imagine either of them being anything other than who they are. This is a great lesson for a control freak to learn. I worry about Maxine’s frustration, but I don’t wish for a moment that she were different from who she is. Then she wouldn’t be Maxie, my huggy, hilarious little nutball, my poetic visitor from Elsewhere.