Jewish Education 101

What if I told you that in Jewish education, not asking questions is the real scandal? Welcome to a tradition where challenging your teacher is encouraged, your curiosity is holy, and "Why?" is basically a spiritual practice. This isn’t your grandma’s Hebrew school (unless your grandma was a rabbinic rockstar). Buckle up — things are about to get delightfully argumentative.
#JewishEducation #QuestionEverything #Curiosity #Tradition #Education #Learning #Debate #Wisdom

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is education so important in Jewish culture? For thousands of years,
Jewish people have put a huge emphasis on how we
educate our children. For Jewish people, education was about learning
the tora. Every different person is entitled to have a
different interpretation. When you get five Jews around the table
discussing Jewish law, you're going to have twenty different opinions.

(00:21):
People will have many opinions, even contradicting themselves, and this
is okay. Jewish people believe that part of Jewish law
is not knowing, is actually debating what the true meaning is.
Is that the process of arguing, of listening to the
other people, of coming up with reasons that they may
not what they think may not be true, is part
of understanding the meaning of the texts. So you'll actually

(00:44):
look at the twel mood the Book of Jewish Law,
and you'll read through it. And the book is only
so big, right, there's so much law there, but the
commentary from all the different scholars is much larger than
the actual book. So at the essence, Jewish culture is
about expressing and baiting ideas, and this is what is
at the core of Jewish learning. This is what makes

(01:04):
Jewish people so naturally interested in new ideas because we
don't believe the world is fixed. We don't even believe
the law of God is fixed. And there's one meaning
we believe that we can interpret it, we can discover it,
we can change it. It's up to us as human beings.
That is the power of Jewish education. Great education is
about allowing people to explore and experiment, allowing people to question.

(01:29):
Our educational system usually says there's a right answer and
a wrong answer. This is the answer, memorize it, copy it,
and repeat it. And if you do that on enough
exams you score highly. But that's not thinking, that's not
coming up with new ideas. That's just copying. We need
to teach people to innovate, to experiment, to think for themselves,
to solve problems. If you really want your kids to

(01:51):
become critical, independent thinkers, you want to teach them not
to accept what they're taught, but to question what they're taught.
You can actually question our kids. Think for yourself, come
up with your own answers. Why do you think this
is true? I can tell you why I think it's true,
but that doesn't make it true. That's only what I
believe and it's only true if you want to believe it.
We're encouraged to question me, to have their own opinions,

(02:14):
to tell their dad, no, I don't see the world
the same way. When you're educating your kids, get your
kids to think for themselves. The greatest education for kids
is to make them question everything. If you really want
your kids to learn, you need to empower them to
think for themselves. If you really want your kids to
be creative, you need to let them question everything they do.

(02:34):
If you really want your kids to think for themselves,
you need to let them know that you're not always right.