Last fall, I started teaching Hebrew school at a synagogue off campus. Repeatedly throughout the course of that whole first year of teaching, I found myself having to step back and reevaluate key things about my religion.
In December, my kids traipsed into the synagogue building after school dragging slush in on oversized snow boots and bundled up to their noses in fleecy scarves. They hung their hats in the back of our classroom, and we studied the Amidah, one of the central prayers in a standard Jewish service. Beyond teaching them how to read the Hebrew letters in the siddur and when to sit, stand, and bow, I grappled with how to make prayer meaningful for these fifth graders who could barely sound out the words on the page, let alone understand their meaning. How could the Amidah be relevant when it sometimes just sounds like gibberish? How could something be both spiritual and yet so technical at the same time? In planning these lessons, I was forced to take a step back and rethink my own process of praying (I still don’t understand every word of the Hebrew, and the prayers in Aramaic I don’t understand at all, so what’s the point, then?). Beyond just the process, what was the point of praying at all? What was I really trying to accomplish every Friday night and Saturday morning at services?
Another incident: one afternoon in February, I drew a spectrum of the branches of Judaism on the whiteboard, then called for volunteers to fill in the blanks and walk us through what they had written. After a few minutes of passing the expo marker back and forth and hopping up on chairs to reach the top of the board, one kid walked confidently up to the front of the room and announced, “Conservative Jews (our branch) are the best because,” motioning to the Orthodox end of the spectrum, “these guys are crazy and don’t treat women equally, and these guys,” gesturing to the Reform/Reconstructionist side of the spectrum, “are basically not even Jewish anymore. Like they probably don’t even believe in G-d!”
“David, you can’t say things like that!” I instinctively blurted. I found myself immediately backpedaling, trying to correct for this bias I wasn’t even conscious I had. And yet here were my kids, parroting it back to me in a larger-than-life, caricatured form.
Again and again throughout the year, my kids brought up more and more holes and inconsistencies—some small, and others not so small—that I had developed in my view of my religion. With ten year olds, no question is off-limits, and no subject is taboo. Lots of times, I found that the conversations that came up with my fifth graders in Hebrew school were infinitely more honest and probing than any conversation I had with my Jewish peers on campus.
Going into this first year of teaching I thought that my view of religion, my relationship with G-d, and my practice of ritual were all things I was supposed to have figured out already. I was the teacher, I told myself. Instead, my kids taught me that none of these things are static. A big part of being a person of any faith is being ready and open to adjust and tweak your beliefs. As we continue this year in Interfaith, I look forward to seeing what kinds of things will come up now that the questions I am asking and being asked come from people of all kinds of religious and non-religious backgrounds completely different from my own.
Have you ever had an experience where explaining your faith or worldview made you reframe or reevaluate what you actually believe?
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