Welcome or welcome back!  I hope you had a great summer.  Judaism has always viewed education in general, and Jewish education in particular, as essential and integral to one’s continued growth and development.  It is not only concerned with the acquisition of knowledge, but with one’s love of Jewish texts, ideas and study. As we begin the school year, I bring the wise words about the importance of education from Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.

“The word Torah means teaching.  God reveals Himself to mankind not in the storm, the wind, the sun, the rain, but in the voice that teaches, the words that instruct.  The covenant is contained in a text comprehensible not only to kings and their attendant priests, but to every member of the nation, so that each becomes party to its terms and each must give his or her consent before the covenant is binding.  The heroes of Israel – Abraham, Moses, the prophets, scribes, and sages – are not kings, emperors or warriors but educators; and not just guardians of esoteric wisdom but teachers of the people, meaning everyone. The central institutions of the Jewish people – the family, the Temple, the Sabbath, festival rituals, and later the synagogue – all became educational in character, contexts of learning.

Above all, the key experience of Judaism, from Mosaic times to today, is studying the Torah.  This is more than a spiritual and intellectual activity, though it is both. For us, scholarship, study, regular engagement with Judaism’s texts, is a political event of the highest magnitude.  Every Jew is an equal citizen of the republic of faith because every Jew has access to its constitutional document, the Torah, and Is literate in its provisions. As Josephus was able to write with a sense of wonder nineteen hundred years ago, “Should any one of our nation be asked about our laws, he will repeat them as readily as his own name.  The result of our thorough education in our laws from the very dawn of intelligence is that they are, as it were, engraved upon our souls.” A free society – that precarious balance between the conflicting principles of liberty and order – exists not through the rule of law alone, but through a system of education that allows every individual to internalize the law and thus become its master, not its slave.  Liberty is not just a society of laws but a society of lawyers, citizens articulate in their own law, each a guardian of justice. No other society has seen things this way. No other faith has made education its supreme religious experience.” 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, A Letter in the Scroll, pg.135