“A Lifetim e of Learning” - Partnership for Excellence in Jewish ...

and Vitebsk and left it enriched. But thatwas where they were, not who they were.Who they were was the very opposite of thehere-and-now. It was a breathtaking identityspanning time and space, centuries,and continents. Jews were defined by anetwork of relationships stretching backto the biblical past and forward to the messianicfuture, linked in a common destinywith Jews across the globe.Diaspora Jewish identity was and is a matterof the mind, not the senses. It belongsto nurture, not nature. We live throughwhat we learn. If we do not learn what it isto be a Jew, nothing in our environment, exceptantisemitism, will tell us. And antisemitism,while it may remind us that weare Jews, provides no reason for us to wantour children to be Jewish.Their identity was constantly learned andrelearned, enacted and reinforced, andpassed on as a precious gift to the nextgeneration.Testing the HypothesisThe hypothesis is therefore this: that Jewishcontinuity in the diaspora depends onJewish education. This, for our ancestors,was an item of faith. The question is, canwe submit it to critical evaluation? Whatwould constitute testing the conjecture?Let me suggest two criteria: the test of history,and the test of the latest available research.First, history.The Jewish people has survived. But at significantmoments that survival lay in doubt.Catastrophe struck and there was no obviousroute to a secure future. The prophetshad declared that Israel would be an eternalpeople. But there were times when thatseemed desperately unlikely. There weremoments when it might have been otherwise.These critical junctures repay closeattention. What saved the people and faithof Israel from the might-have-been of oblivion?Consider three such moments.The first came in the fifth century B.C.E.Several centuries earlier, the northernJews survived, quite simply, because they devoted their bestenergies to education, their money to schools, their admirationto scholars, their spare hours to study, and their firstconcern to the tuition of their children.kingdom of Israel had been destroyed bythe Assyrians. The population was dispersedand rapidly assimilated into itsneighbouring cultures. Ten of the twelve Israelitetribes disappeared from history. In586 B.C.E. the southern kingdom of Judahtoo was overcome, this time by the Babylonians.The Temple was destroyed and theelite of the people taken into captivity.There they too might have disintegrated asa group, were it not for the insistent messageof the prophets urging that hope wasnot lost.Under Cyrus, king of Persia, a new andmore benign regime took shape and someof the exiles were allowed to return. Eventuallyunder the leadership of Nehemiahthe statesman-governor, and Ezra thepriestly scribe, a Jewish renaissance beganto take shape. But it faced formidable difficulties.On their arrival in Israel the twoleaders found a devastating situation.Those who had remained had lost theiridentity. They had intermarried. The Sabbathwas publicly desecrated. Religiouslaws lay in disuse.The book of Nehemiah describes the eventwhich was to prove to be the turning point.The people gathered in Jerusalem whereEzra, standing on a wooden platform, readto the assembled crowd from the Torah. Agroup of Levites acted as instructors to thepeople, “reading from the Book of the Lawof God, making it clear and giving themeaning so that people could understandwhat was being read.” The population enteredinto a binding agreement to keep theterms of the Torah. The covenant, whichhad been in danger of being forgotten, wasrenewed. A new era of Jewish historybegan. From then on for the next five centuries,though there were crises when significantsegments of the population becameacculturated and Judaism was at risk ofdissolving through Hellenisation, there wasalways a group loyal to Judaic principleswho eventually prevailed.Ezra represented a new kind of Jewishpersonality, one who was to shape the characterof the Jewish people from that time tothis. Not a law-giver or a prophet, a king,or a judge, neither a political nor a militaryleader, Ezra was the prototype of theteacher as hero. Under his influence theancient ideal of a people of the Torah becameinstitutionalised. Public readings andexplanations of the sacred texts becamemore widespread. By the second centuryB.C.E., a system of community-fundedschools had developed. Universal education,the first of its kind in the world, hadbegun.The might-have-been is clear . The twotribes might have gone the way of the otherten. They too were conquered, sent intoexile and exposed to the danger of assimilationinto a larger empire. But they didnot. They remained distinct, intact, a singularpeople. How was the might-have-beenavoided? The lesson of the lost ten tribeshad been learned. If the Jewish people wasto survive, it needed to create a set of institutionsthrough which its character couldbe sustained against the attrition of othercultures. It sought and found the structuresof continuity. Jews discovered a fundamentaltruth, one that has remained itsunique characteristic among religious civilisations.A P U B L I C A T I O N O F Y I T Z H A K R A B I N H I G H S C H O O L“ A L i f e t i m e o f L e a r n i n g ” • P A G E 13