The Maccabaean

THE problem of Jewish education is one of those large problems that discourage every effort toward their solution by overwhelming us with a sense of the disproportion between the feeble forces we can bring into play and the gigantic obstacles they are intended to remove. But the solution of this question is of such vital importance, it is so absolutely essential to the future of Judaism, that it can no longer be ignored. Howsoever discouraging the present state of Jewish education unquestionably is, nevertheless persistent and well-directed efforts toward improving it must bear some fruit and, in fact, may yield a better harvest than we can now anticipate. For new forces are at work in American Jewry that are revolutionizing our whole point of view—whose full potency can at present only be guessed at, but which permit of the hope that they will revitalize Jewish education. I have especially in mind in this connection the large immigration from eastern Europe, the reminiscence of Jewish nationalism, and the very apparent movement for communal organization.

Before we permit ourselves to be discouraged, we must remember that up to the present time there has been practically no serious discussion of Jewish education, its aims and its methods. The men at the head of our Hebrew schools have concerned themselves almost exclusively with petty questions of expediency. How the necessary funds were to be procured, how the children could be made to "show off" well at confirmation exercises, how this or that refractory boy could best be punished without his father's being of-

fended and withdrawing his support from the institution—these and the like have been up to the present time the chief considerations with those who, by reason of their position as teachers or principals of Hebrew schools, ought to be our Jewish educators. To any Jew who has the welfare of his people or the perpetuation of his people's ideals at heart, but especially to the Zionist, who is looking forward to the national regeneration of Israel, such a state of affairs is intolerable. It is with a view, therefore, to calling attention to some of the phases of the Jewish educational problem, and provoking a discussion of the views and methods of Jewish education, that this paper is written.

I think that at least all Zionists•will agree with me in saying that the function of Jewish education is to give to the children of our people the whole of that Jewish culture to which they have a hereditary claim, to develope in them the love of this culture and to confer upon them the power to transmit it enriched and embellished to the generations yet unborn. But above all, Jewish education must give to the child a religion that is not the mere reflex of that of his gentile neighbors, nor a mere lingering echo from the past and the Orient; a religion that at the same time bears an organic relation to all of Israel's history and to the environment in which he now lives: a religion that will insist on his being a Jew not only within the walls of the synagogue, nor yet in the relative isolation of his own home, but in every public as well as private act of his life.

This is no easy task. Against us are all the forces that lead to assimilation. The public schools, the press, the stage, the literature we read, the act we are