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Last spring, students in one Jewish high school razzed students from my children’s Jewish day school who were considering attending that school— and who were debating whether to continue their Jewish educations at all. Some older students pawed the kids, and made sexually suggestive comments. I realize these things happen—although the local private high schools that court Jewish day school grads so effectively would never countenance such behavior. The great outrage occurred when the Jewish high school administrators did nothing—then lambasted me when I criticized their moral failure.
This incident is sadly typical. Too many Jewish schools from across the religious spectrum are value-free zones—distinguished for academic intensity more than moral excellence, instilling careerism more than nurturing menshlichkeit. Too many students produced by this system are rude, snobbish, materialistic, judgmental—while those who are protective of Jewish education keep quiet. All too often spendthrift materialists set the tone in dress, manners, morals, and bar mitzvah styles.
The social pressure comes from those with goods, not those who do good. In New York, when one middle-class day school parent complained that her kids could not compete in the fancy birthday party sweepstakes, the principal condescendingly celebrated "our school’s diversity," in welcoming poor people, too. In Montreal, when Sephardic kids called Ashkenazic kids "Poles," one school administrator told concerned parents, "It’s a tough world, kids have to deal." In the Southwest, another administrator dismissed requests for more values education by warning, "we won’t have time to teach Bible"—as if the two were not inextricably connected. Once, when I raised this issue, one senior at a New Jersey Jewish high school said, with that world-weary sigh of teens explaining the obvious: "You don’t understand, it’s all about getting into the right college."
I understand but disagree. From Boston to Los Angeles, when my friends and I talk schools, we use the hated J-word—JAP -- which the politically correct have banned, without attacking the underlying problem. We ask "how Jappy" each school is—not being sexist, for we mean Jewish-American Princes as well as Princesses. And all too often, someone reports to me, as one Manhattanite did, that in choosing a Jewish day school over a lovely neighborhood private school, he and his wife feared they were sacrificing their daughter’s moral education—for a Jewish education.
Counter-examples abound, of course. Some schools paper their walls with mitzvah posters. Some require students to call sick friends, to teach "bikur cholim," the obligation to visit the sick. Many have raised funds to aid terror victims, among other acts of chesed, compassion. Some administrators even understand that to discipline outrageous behavior they must actually cancel classes and interrupt the college-preparation process to tackle the more pressing moral issue.
Moreover, administrators often complain that valiant educators are routinely stymied by selfish parents, spoiled children, and a seductive popular culture that ravages young souls and deifies Britney Spears. People trying to raise their children to be good as well as do good are salmon swimming upstream in our culture. How can the Chafetz Chaim, the great moralist, compete with Justin Timberlake?
But how can we give up, either? The problem has worsened as skyrocketing day school tuitions risk making Jewish schools the playgrounds of the wealthy—with a few "diversity" cases thrown in for variety. It is not surprising that too many of our schools suffer from affluenza, the spiritual influenza of the affluent. Our schools struggle with an addiction to careerism and materialism because these are the quintessential modern American vices.
Jewish schools must be a bulwark against these forces; Jewish education should be a spiritual oasis, where we master the wisdom of our sages to create moral pathways and anchors. We need to begin judging our schools not by how many admissions to Harvard they generate, but how many mensches they create. We need to judge graduates, not by how many goods they accumulate, but how much good they accomplish.
In the 1840s, Rabbi Israel Salanter injected Musar, ethical teaching and conduct, into the text-obsessed, minutiae-driven Lithuanian yeshivas. We need a new cross-denominational Musar movement to revitalize some of our Gap-obsessed, career-driven Jewish schools and help save us from ourselves.
Gil Troy is a professor of history at McGill University, and the author, most recently, of "Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity,
and the Challenges of Today" (Gefen Books, $14.95).
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