The Scandal Of Jewish Illiteracy

Imagine the scene: You buy a car for 250,000 dollars!! That's a CAR!:) Business must be awfully good these days. You pay the salesmen [who is now going to Hawaii] and try to drive home. You put the keys in the ignition and .... nothing. Doesn't move. You try again and the car moves a little bit. You keep trying and after 45 minutes you arrive home. The problem is that you live a five minute WALK from the car dealership. You return [by bicycle] and demand [with a smile] a refund. They refuse. "Too late, sir. You already paid. We are really sorry. No refunds." Something tells me that you are not going to buy from this dealership again and will raise QUITE a ruckus.

That was only a mashal. I am talking about Jewish day school education. After TWELVE YEARS of Jewish Studies that costs in excess of 250,000 dollars most of the students are NOT JEWISHLY LITERATE. They cannot READ HEBREW correctly without vowels. With vowels they read with the proficiency that a second grader reads English. They also cannot comprehend what they are reading. They don't know Tanach or halacha and certainly not gemara. IS ANYBODY TALKING ABOUT THIS?? It is in my mind the biggest scandal around. Most scandals involve one or a handful of errant people. This scandal is preserving the illiteracy of tens of thousands of children and as time progresses more and more. In the last 25 years that I have been involved in education, I have seen very few exceptions to this rule. Almost no kid can translate the siddur. If you don't believe me, pick out random passages and ask the average high school kid to translate them. פנות צבאיו קדושים רוממי ש-די. Ask.

A problem that arises in the wake of this situation is that kids don't want to learn or daven because they don't understand what they are doing. Then they find other sources of amusement. BIG PROBLEM.

This problem is perpetuated when they go to Israel for the year. The shiur Rebbi gives them a complex gemara shiur when THE KIDS CAN'T EVEN TRANSLATE THE MODEH ANI much less read a gemara. It is like I go into my son's third grade classroom and start lecturing on advanced calculus. HEEEEEELLLLOOOOOO - Start with addition and subtraction. This baffles my mind and I know it is going on as we speak. I used to ask the boys what they learned in shiur and 99 out of a hundred times I got a fuzzy answer: "Biiiiig machlokes!" "What is the Machlokes?" "You know, Ktzos- Nesivos". "Of course. What do they argue about?" "Yeush" "What is their argument?" "It's really complicated. There is a tosfos." "What does tosfos say?" "It was a long tosfos". "What does the gemara say?" He gives me a blank look. What does it matter what the gemara says when you learn a complex machlokes achronim [which of course is based on the tosfos which is based on the gemara]. [When I would ask the Rebbi what he said, he understood, so at least SOMEBODY got something out of it].

After a year or two in Israel the kids come home AND STILL CAN'T READ. They are then thrown into a shiur [if they are still learning in a yeshiva] where the Rebbi starts presenting them complexities which they have to memorize for the test. Ninety nine percent [or close to that] of the students will not continue learning this way after they leave yeshiva, so what's the point? Those who continue learning will learn simple gemara-rashi which they will continue to have trouble reading. Is our goal to finance Artscroll??!!

I once wanted to start a program in a yeshiva to learn "gemara" without all of the fancy stuff and was told that only the weak students would be allowed to join. Strong students are advanced beyond that. What is fascinating is that many of the students on the top shiurim of yeshivos [I talk of the "Modern" one's] CAN'T READ. A wonder. I promise that I am not making this up. [I thought I would do something about it with a new yeshiva but that is history, BARUCH HASHEM. Why have something new when there are so many inadequacies with the old:)].

A very minute percentage of day school graduate become talmidei chachomim. A very large percentage stop learning seriously somewhere in their early twenties.

And it's our fault....

Is anyone listening??

[PS - If it sounds like this bothers me - it does].