On January 2, 2007, a colleague teaching at a Jewish day school reported the following interchange with a student:
"Why are we here today when everybody else is celebrating Henry Ford's birthday?"
For those of you who are confused by the comment, January 2 was designated as a national day of memorial, not a birthday; and it was for Gerald Ford, not Henry Ford. It is ironic too, that Henry Ford would get that type of favorable expression in a Jewish day school considering Henry Ford's record of anti-Semitism. Among other things, Henry Ford was responsible for publishing the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in the Dearborn Independent, referred to by many as "The Ford International Weekly."
For those of you who are shaking your heads in disbelief, I can only commend you to the segment titled, "Jay Walking," a regular feature, on NBC's "Tonight Show."
Years ago, there were those who believed that we Jews were somehow superior to non-Jews because we were disproportionately represented in the highest academic circles and among Nobel Prize winners. The fact is, most of us were motivated by our parents and grandparents who realized that academic success was a key to fiscal success in our lives. In our society today, I believe that a lot of Jewish families have forgotten this and while we are still doing well, we are no longer at the top of the heap academically.
How many of us grow up saying, "I am me. I am not my mother or my father." And then we grow up and reach our 40's, 50's or 60's we realize how much we really are like our parents.
My hypothesis remains: If we Jews gained or ever had an academic edge, we got it from the values of our parents; as much if not more than from the genetics of our parents. Our tradition tells us, "lo am ha-a-rets cha-sid, an ignoramus can not be religious." There in lies our edge. The spiritual aspects of Judaism required learning not blind faith. The importance of learning in the life of a young Jew was a multi-dimensional mix of secular and religious; and both received equal importance in the lives of the next generation. I suspect this point is forgotten, because 1) it is hard, if not impossible, to quantify; 2) our public schools (rightly so) do not teach the spiritual; and 3) too many families place religious education on the periphery of things "that are really important."
The human is a complex mixture of the physical and the spiritual. Both deserve and demand our constant attention.
Joshua L. Segal
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