Little Wolf's World

I ususally don't check Cross-Currents, and when I do rarely find anything I want to read, I often find the articles there to be annoying actually.

Having made the disclaimer the article that I linked to above was quite interesting and made a good point. It deals with the Jews for Jesus moving in to Baltimore for their annual targeting mission. Cleveland is one of the other big targets of these overly agressive messianic missionaries. And while I have a major problem with them that is not what I really wanted to take about.

The real reason for the post at Cross-Currents is what I really wanted to address and that is Jewish Education. Let me start my discussion by saying I did not have the opportunity to go to a day school, and I regret ths to this day. I have struggled to learn what I have, and plan to continue my struggle to learn much more. I would really like to say that in my opinion ALL Jewish children should go to day school. The problem today is that too many Jewish parents want their children to have a 'secular' education. To be exposed to a wide variety of people and cultures. I like this idea to, except what it does is leave our young people vulnerable religious concepts that are outside the realm of OUR religion. From personal experience, I was always in the Holiday(Christmas) program in grade school, where I did the portion on Hanukkah to make it a 'multi-cultural' celebration. It was still a Christmas program even with my portion. In High School I was in the band (Alto Sax for anyone who cares) and we always had our Christmas Program that included a variety of caroles. (At least they didn't try to make it a 'multi-cultural' program by including Hanukkah song.

I did attend Hebrew/Sunday school, this consisted of about 2 hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays and 2 hours on Sunday. 6 hours a week, to teach me the intricacies of a beautiful and complicated religion. It is neither enough to create a fully educated functional Jewish adult or someone with enough information to fend off a determined missionary. Luckily, I did always ask questions and learned things on my own, even before adulthood.

Trust me when I say, that the education of our children in our religion is very important. At some point, in our society today, they will need to be able to understand what they believe or they will be taught that what they believe is wrong and not have sufficient information to fend this off. Perhaps a problem that we have is that to many Jews see secular society as THE answer, but they are deluding themselves. To I feel that everyone should be Orthodox, well that is a whole other discussion.

I have one other point, also from a personal perspective. If you are sending you children to a secular/public school, and that school has little in the way of a Jewish population, how would you feel about your son/daughter-in-law being goyish, because that is the likelihood. And again I don't think that is what anyone wants.