Elana Sztokman

The following article, published in the current issue of The Journal of Jewish Education, explores the difference between education for Orthodox religiousness and education for spirituality. The article, based on bits of my doctoral research, argues that the dogmatic, linear, “you’re either in or out” approach that characterizes much of Orthodox education, does not leave much room for spirituality. So often, religiousness is instilled as an end product, a monolithic corpus of ideas to be singularly transmitted and subsequently owned by youth. In reality, though, youth are thirsting for opportunities to grapple, question, and wrestle with profound theological and philosophical issues—a process that ultimately leads to a richer religious identity.

Spirituality amid dogma?
Some approaches to educating for religious belief within in a State-Religious school in Israel

I like being religious. But sometimes, I hate the way the rabbis preach things. I like to see what’s written, the Mishna, the Gemara, the Torah…and to do what they tell me. But I hate that the rabbis philosophize all the time. I don’t go to any rabbis or anything, I don’t like all that rubbish…. but I am religious the way I think I should be. (Tamar, 14).

A religious school is, by definition, a space that exists within the context of religious culture, and the religious educator within this culture, has a task unlike those in “standard” schools of educating for religious observance. This task gives the religious educator, the consummate keeper of the faith, a particularly charged presence in schooling, especially vis a vis adolescents: the religious educator is at once the “transmitter” of the faith and simultaneously the address for students’ grappling with spiritual questions and issues. These two roles may at times blend harmoniously, but in certain circumstances may lead in opposing directions. In a state-religious school in Israel, in particular, an Orthodox setting within a public system, this stance of educating for religious observance alongside serving students’ spiritual needs, is fraught with theoretical and philosophical challenges that have yet to be systematically explored.

Orthodox educators are generally cognizant that models of religious education must respond to a rapidly changing contemporary awareness. Rabbi Norman Lamm, for example, (2003), long time dean of the classic modern Orthodox institution Yeshiva University, argues that today, perhaps more than in previous generations, religious education must mediate between educating for knowledge and educating for practice (Lamm, 2003). This approach, while recognizing the increasing importance of student empowerment amid a world of infinite lifestyle choices, leaves out from this dichotomy the role of spirituality. Criticism of this has come from within modern Orthodoxy. Hass (1988), for example, argues that in response to a culture of post-modernism that equalizes ethical and philosophical systems, the “teaching of faith” is a crucial educational response (Hass, 1988). Angel argues that “education for belief” is in fact a sine qua non for “education for practice” (Angel, 2003). Similarly, Wolowelsky, for example, argues that the transmission of the belief system should be a motivational foundation for practice, but that this has not been well developed (Wolowelsky, 2003). Thus, a common theme among religious educational thinking is that contemporary culture confuses students by offering too many (attractive?) choices, and that religious schooling must respond by thinking through a curricular module for educating for belief.

Despite this awareness among Orthodox educators that “times have changed,” much of the thinking on the subject belies an assumption that the correct paradigm for religious education is linear and single-minded. Indeed, an entire genre of religious-Orthodox educational literature views the development of belief as a linear process that starts with “weakness” or perhaps “ignorance” and ideally ends with “strength”, that is, a complete and perfect transmission of the belief system (See for example, Weitzman, 2000). The use metaphors such as “fortification” (hizuk) or “advancement” (hitkadmut) to describe religiousness suggests that religion is on a fixed, linear axis, moving in one direction, towards the goal of being the “strongest” or the “most,” masks more complex processes that youth often experience, processes that demand a more multi-faceted approach from the teachers, especially rabbi-teachers (Rapoport & Garb 1998). Hass (1988), for example, advocates an “education for belief” that creates a space in schools for students to “learn faith” – but his definition of faith retains the idea of faith as a closed body of ideas rather than personal complexity. As Wolowelsky (2003) notes, Orthodox educators are often more concerned with inculcating a normative set of behaviors than with facilitating complex processes of developing a religious belief system. As he astutely observes, “Pesak [religious ruling] and religious counsel are not the same thing” (p. 180). The language of singular, linear halacha-directed action that dominates much of religious education does not suit an education around developing a religious belief system. Thus, contemporary culture has forged particular challenges for religious education, in which what was once implicit and communally taken for granted is now uncertain and debatable.

Moreover, religious education amid global cultures of fluid identity formation, and the dominance of post-modern adherence to multiple truths makes the linear educational model even more archaic and antiquated. The “normative” model of Orthodox Jewish education in which every situation is seen to have one “correct” answer is inadequate for educating around Jewish faith (Rosenak, 1998). In previous generations, much of Jewish educational thinking was linear, aiming to directly and singularly answer the “fundamental need for meaning”. Today, however, in contemporary Jewish culture in which identities are fluid and mobile, the linear paradigm no longer works (Aviram, 1998). Thus, while students are exposed to cultural assumptions that everything is possible and legitimate, religious education remains mired in language of absolute correctness and a definitive end-goal in the process of building a life. In short, Orthodox education lacks a language for dealing with spiritual and religious-philosophical processing among adolescents.

This absence of a complex spiritual-educational educational approach is striking in many Orthodox schools though not unique to them. Philosopher Claire Elise Katz (2004) writes that many schools do not allot space – literally and metaphorically – for philosophical grappling with religious beliefs, or for “those who wish to understand their own religious beliefs more deeply and within the context of larger philosophical questions” (par. 6). Still, in Orthodox settings, the absence of these complex theological discussions takes some striking turns. Orthodox schools seem to merge the culture of exams, rote learning, and classroom order with religiousness, effectively transmitting the message that the process of learning is almost “a game, replete with tricks and strategies necessary to achieve correct answers. The pursuit of knowledge becomes the pursuit of the multiple choice answer that is least likely to be incorrect” (Friedman 2003, p. 113). Thus many day schools have evolved as places where religion is a subject to be treated perhaps the way many others are treated – as a transmission of a monolithic set of correct ideas rather than as a space for the development of a complex personal belief system.

Moreover, the view of religious education as singular, linear transmission rather than the facilitation of a complex belief-wrestling may be a significant contributor to the observed trend of approximately one fourth of all Orthodox youth turning away from religious life (Sheleg, 2000). Shraga Fisherman (1999), a religious psychologist in Israel whose express interest is in preventing those 25% from abandoning religion, presents a model for religious development that assumes that religious identity must undergo a transition from “childish” to “mature”. This entails passing through a phase of “uncertainty,” or “hitlabtut”, in which people are allowed and encouraged to ask questions – on their way to full acceptance of the standard Orthodox belief system. Though accepting a model of “fortification” in which belief is on a higher “level” than disbelief, he nonetheless criticizes educational systems for turning students away from religion by not allowing enough space for that “uncertainty” phase, for not embracing questioning but instead keeping religion a rote, simplistic practice. Fisherman is fairly radical in his suggestion that adolescents should be allowed to question – but the definition of “question” remains dubious if students are expected to emerge with the same set of answers.

The search for an educational model that facilitating students’ complex spiritual navigations is perhaps well suited to begin outside the Jewish community. Philosopher Gareth Matthews (1996), a leading scholar of philosophy in childhood, offers a useful framework for rethinking religious development among Orthodox youth. Matthews may likely support Fisherman’s assessment that students need more room to question philosophical and theological ideas, but he disputes the Piaget-influenced model of linear progression in human development that sees students as capable of handling “hard issues” only when they reach a certain age. Matthews argues that children from a very young age are able to think through “big” issues like God, good and evil, the universe, and self. In fact, he believes that the failure of educators to encourage the “hitlabtut” before the age of eleven leads to a truncating of the child’s imagination, creativity and free-thinking ability. Similarly, Nel Noddings (1993), in her treatise Educating for Intelligent Belief or Unbelief, takes the position that students need to discuss metaphysical and existential questions about life, death, God, and values, across the curriculum.
Noddings, in contrast to Fisherman and other Orthodox educators, clearly does not have agenda for how she would like students to emerge. Whether they adhere to a particular theological worldview is irrelevant to Noddings, as long as they question. In other words, both Matthews and Noddings suggest that allowing even very young children the freedom and space to explore, doubt, question and grapple with questions of meaning and existence is a crucial educational exercise in the development of a sophisticated religious identity.

Still, in Orthodox education, as illustrated by Fisherman’s model of linear progression towards absolute observance, the open questioning of existential issues is often viewed as threatening. Yet, according to Matthews and Noddings, a give-and-take between ideas is essential in the process of religious development. For example, in the context of a discussion about moral development in religious education, Matthews (1990) argues for complexity within religious identity:

For a religious person there is the dimension of understanding how God is related to morality… God is often said to be the source of morality. More specifically, morality is often thought to rest on God’s commands. One objection sometimes lodged against this idea is that it seems to deny moral autonomy to the human individual. A mature religious person needs to work out a response to this objection. (p. 157)

In other words, a mature religious belief system requires philosophical-moral grappling, especially vis a vis questions about the relationship between God and morality. Matthews’ assumption is that a religious person’s encounter with immorality will indeed spur a series of questions about God. He argues that these questions occur even at young ages. “One might suppose that such reflection is beyond the capacity of young children,” he writes, “but that would be wrong.” (p. 160)

Adapting Matthews’ ideas to an Orthodox educational setting presents challenges for the religious educator, whose responsibility, according to Matthews’, involves “the responsibility for moral development that does not belong to the secular teacher….of encouraging development along the specifically religious dimension of moral maturity’ (p. 165). He argues that the best way to encourage such development is by facilitating “reflective discussion with the children themselves on the fascinatingly difficult question of how God is related to morality.” In other words, the religious educator needs to allow space for the difficult questions, and for students to wrestle with the answers.

In short, while observers note trends of dogmatic education occurring in the state religious school system, it seems increasingly clear that open questioning and doubt are a healthy and vital part of religious identity formation. The failure to deal with the profound issues of the universe – such as what is good and evil, where justice, and what humanity is – results in the stifling of the persona, of creativity and of character, and ultimately instils a simplistic religious identity, even among the seemingly most adherent people.

Some religious educators are aware of the need for a complex, facilitative stance in education and advocate such approaches with their students. Asher Friedman (2003), for example, an Orthodox educator in Israel, describes his work around “theological psychology” with a goal of “transformative relationships” (p. 116). As an alternative to the linear, action-oriented approach of teaching halacha, Friedman advocates more facilitative teaching methods that may include “retreat”. “The teacher ultimately must pull away from the student in order to prevent the student from becoming passive and dependent…..[T]he intense love shown by the teacher for his student when he descends to him is crucial for the possibility of growth” (pp.130-131). Thus Friedman deconstructs the metaphor of “fortification” as always moving upwards, and sees the role of the religious educator as making space for students’ wrestling, even if it means moving in the seemingly “opposite” direction of fortification.
The power of the religious educator in teaching towards an absolute belief versus facilitating complex processes is particularly poignant today, when religious Zionist identity among youth is shifting and possibly in crisis. Rabbi Yoel Ben-Nun (2000) believes that national-religious youth is in a crisis of ideology and identity, and that young people are stuck between ultra-religiousness and secularism, in a fading middle ground that lacks focus and direction. It may even be argued, as Sheleg (2000) does, that the growing crisis among religious youth that stems from absence of a thought-through education outlook among those responsible for their spiritual development. Moreover, according to Sheleg, today secularism is a central component of young religious Zionist identities. Religious youth go to pubs, mixed dancing, and mixed swimming and integrate fully in the secular world – e.g., they prefer to serve in “regular” combat units rather than “religious” ones. Schechter (1999) asks whether the fact that religious youth prefer to think of themselves as “modern religious” – and therefore go to pubs while holding volumes of Talmud – illustrate that religious Zionism is “passé.” Kaniel (2000) argues that the crisis today is a result of ideological difficulties that are highlighted in the current era, where the Internet threatens mind overload and where post-modernism robs people of the ability to appreciate the centrality of “Torah” as a stable and central concept. Dov Schwartz (1996) indeed argues that the entire theology of religious Zionism is undergoing fundamental changes in forming a new version of religious identity and belief. What is clear from this stream of writers on the identity of religious youth is that the culture of modern Orthodoxy is shifting, youth are seeking out complexity, and religious educators are struggling to keep up.

This paper, the result of three years of ethnographic research at the state religious Levy Junior High School for Girls (all names and identifying details have been altered to protect the informants) in Israel from 1999-2002, examines theological, philosophical, and political aspects of religious Zionist education and the tensions between indoctrination and resistance. It explores the shifting religious identities of religious adolescent youth in Israel within the context of a state religious educational institution. The emerging portrait provides a valuable glimpse into the different ways in which educators approach religious education, and the implications of these approaches in light of the Matthews’ and Noddings’ insights.

Methodology

This case-study research (Yin, 1984) is based on data collected during three years that I spent in The Levy State Religious Girls’ junior high school where I conducted lengthy, open interviews with students, staff, the principal, and parents (Spradley, 1979), as well as observations of classes and countless informal daily activities in and around the school (van Manen, 1990). I conducted formal interviews with fifty-one girls and twenty-five teachers (with between one and six interviews per informant), as well as ten interviews with the principal, Dr. Sylvia Cohen, six with the assistant principal, and interviews with the school rabbi, school counselor, secretaries, and high school principal. Many of the interviews were conducted as focus group interviews, with anywhere from two to ten participants (Sinagub et al, 1996). I also observed dozens of classes, (audiotaped fifteen for more precise reference), went on school outings, attended school assemblies, meetings, and plays, and sat in on parent-teacher nights and recruitment events. I met with teachers over coffee, exchanged emails with different members of the school community – including parents who had decided not to send their daughters to the school – and went to visit a few students who were living at a group home for disadvantaged youth. The purpose of these methods of collecting data was to conduct a naturalistic enquiry, eliciting narratives that emerge from people’s lives as they are (van Manen, 1990; Lincoln & Guba, 1986).

My interviews were primarily conducted using semi-open interviews (Spradley, 1979), around themes such as school life, friends, teachers, family, lessons, politics, gender issues, ethnicity, and religious life and beliefs for the students, and themes of school life, professional training, students, school culture, politics, gender, religion, ethnicity, religious life, religious beliefs, and family for the teachers. With the principal, interviews were frequent and covered all of these issues as well as issues related to administration, leadership, and school change. Many of the interviews also related to specific events, such as a previous class. Narrative analysis was based on the scholarship of Nita Schechet (2005), among others, in which I searched for meanings that participants make of their lives through symbols, metaphors, binary oppositions, and other narrative ‘fissures’ from which identity becomes visible through text. Schechet also guided me in the textual analysis.

A glimpse of student grappling: A challenging context for religious development
During the years that I was conducting this research, the perceived vulnerability of religious existence took on particular significance with the emergence of the Al-Aksa Intifada in September 2000, as death, fear and war became mainstays of life in Israel. The Intifada brought bombs, shootings, attacks and war into the lives of students at the Levy School, which is located very close to the center of a city that experienced dozens of suicide bombs during the years I was conducting research, and effectively created an atmosphere that highlighted enormous questions about Jews, Arabs, land, nation, history, meaning, and survival. While it can certainly be argued that such events have always been part of life in Israel and that the Intifada perhaps only brought death closer to “home” for many Israelis, the reality is that students were seeing and experiencing these events in much closer proximity and in increasing frequency than ever before.

The physical proximity of violence meant that girls watched, heard, and read about events on an immediate level, and for some, this injected levels of fear, uncertainty, and troubling morality into their lives that may not have existed before. Thus, for students at this school during this time, religious identity development became inextricably entangled with the fighting of a war, literally around the corner from the school.
Fourteen-year old Etti, who was in town during one attack, dramatized the extent of the confrontation.

I was there. I was close to the attack. It was really scary… I know a lot of people who were hurt, lots, and the day after I was just a mess, even a week later, a mess. I was in shock. I wasn’t connected to the world. Because what happened, five minutes before the attack, I saw all my friends in the place of the attack, I said hi to them and then I went back… and then suddenly, attack. When I got there, and I knew all my friends were there, I was really stressed. All night I didn’t sleep. I was watching the news, sitting by the television the whole time. Then in the morning I saw one friend of mine who was wounded talking on the news and then I started to really cry. And my sister was there too, she’s 18, and she really took it hard. She went to a psychologist. She was where the third blast was, the car bomb, and she and her friend were thrown on to a motorcycle, and tons of people were on top of them, and she was taken in an ambulance.

Etti’s adolescent life of going out on Saturday night with her friends was violently disrupted. It is worth noting that her sister ‘went to a psychologist’, to address the emotional impact of the experience. But there is no indication that Etti or her sister had a framework in which to address the spiritual or philosophical impacts.

Merav illustrates the way in which theological and emotional grappling intertwine:

My counselor was killed in the attack on Atsmona, and that was very, very sad for me. A person who I really loved, it really affected me… It’s really harsh, it’s not nice to know that you go out and you have to walk around in fear, like wondering what’s going to happen.

The sense of ‘wondering what’s going to happen’ reflects both an emotional and spiritual fragility. Merav is perhaps ‘wondering’ in the sense of fear for a future trauma, or ‘wondering’ in the philosophical sense of uncertainty about fate, existence, and imminent death. In Matthews’ terms Merav has encountered a question of morality that causes her to wrestle with their belief systems. “After everything we’ve seen with people being killed in attacks,” Merav explained, “it really shakes your belief. Because what is there for me to believe in if this is what He is doing to us?” Interestingly, Merav answers her own question by digging her heels in further. “You see, if God really wants people to die like this then it must be a sign for them, to say to them, to repent, a warning that they don’t understand.” Thus, Merav responds to her questions on her own, internalizing a staunch religious Zionist position, a certain fatalism, and troubling absolutist notions of reward and punishment.
Many girls questioned, doubted, and wrestled with issues that Matthews considers profound.

Moreover, in this Israeli religious Zionist setting, questions about reward and punishment and good and evil conflated with more particularistic narratives that claim that God is protecting the Jews. Attacks on Jews, like land-for-peace exchanges, challenge the historical narrative of linear progress towards redemption. The focus of this paper, then, is to explore the role of the religious educator in students’ religious identity development, and to examine the relationship between students’ theological questions and adult answers that provide absolute narratives about good, evil, history, God and the Jewish people.

Religious educators dealing with terror
Among some staff members, surrounding events indeed brought complexity and wrestling. School counselor Deena, for example, who has a son in the army, serving in Hebron, about which she was very anxious, expressed her own grapplings in the staff room. As she began talking, one day, to nobody in particular, while reading an article about women settlers from Netzarim yelling at soldiers, she said, “Forget about whether they the [settlers] should be there in the first place, but they’re stuck, and the only way for them to get from one place to another is for these soldiers to literally give their souls for them, and this is what they do?” Assistant principal Dana, who lives in Gush Etzion – making her one of “they” that Deena talked about – openly disagreed. “It’s not true what you read,” she said. “We give food to the soldiers every day. And in Ofra, one woman does the soldiers’ laundry twice a week.” Deena replied, “I’m not talking about Ofra. I’m talking about people in the middle of nowhere in Tapuach or Netzarim.” “Yes,” said Dana, “but you want to be like those people who when the three kids were all hurt on the bus, they said, ‘They shouldn’t have been there?’” Dana thus reverted to the original “those people” in the religious Zionist narrative – not settlers, but leftist Israelis. Aliza, who had been standing next to Deena waiting for her attention, nodded in agreement, and then said, “Can I interrupt? I need to talk about a girl.” “Sure,” said Deena, “We’re arguing here just for the fun of it.” Ironically, Aliza came to discuss a girl whose mother does not want her to go on the excursion the next day because she’s scared. “Don’t get involved.” Deena replied. “Don’t get between mother and daughter. Let them sort it out themselves.” Deena thus determined that teachers’ own questioning, personally, professionally, or politically, though emerging from the current crisis and directly impacted on their actions vis a vis the girls, were just “recreational”, not part of any official forum or framework.

While staff members may or may not have struggled with their own religious and theological outlooks, their roles as educators in responding to girls’ developing religious identities held tremendous significance. While Deena herself was stretching her own political identity, struggling with her own tensions as religious woman and mother of a soldier, this story highlights some of the basic dilemmas confronting religious educators during the Intifada. Although she openly challenged some religious Zionist positions, she maintained that the official stance of the school was to “not get involved,” and to let the girls work things out on their own. Bible teacher Temima, by contrast, did not agree with that stance, and actively helped the girls solve their immediate problem, on the spot. One the morning that there was an attack on a bus route leading to the school, Temima spent an hour or two walking with the girls to locate the father of a girl who was missing at his workplace in town (the student eventually resurfaced at school, several hours later, shaken but okay.) Although these two different approaches – intervening versus not intervening– represent two extremes of educational reactions to crisis, the more predominant non-intervention masks the regular, perhaps unintentional constructions that are happening, every day.

Indeed, the language and narrative of terror that dominated school life forged new educational dilemmas. As Mina explained, on the day of one attack, “At first we saw only two injured and then we said, thank God it wasn’t worse. But then someone came in and said ten were injured. But, then, the lesson went on with a calm and accepting feeling.” This tension between halting and continuing as “normal” became the standard question for educators, with some feeling helpless. “It happens a lot that you’re teaching a lesson and suddenly someone comes in and says that this and this shooting and this murder … I don’t get into it. I admit I don’t know how to deal with these kinds of things. I’m not good at it.” With that, as long as students and teachers (and researchers) were able to find some distance, such as “it wasn’t my family” or “it wasn’t my neighborhood,” school life continues as “normal,” thus erecting some form of temporary barrier between the students and the events. Einat expressed what others were probably feeling: “It’s already a routine. What’s so sad is that every day people are dying but that’s our life.” As Edna Lomsky-Feder wrote (1996) about soldiers serving in Lebanon, the situation is one in which the abnormal has become normal. But it also means that those barriers that people work so hard to erect between themselves and painful realities are coming down.
Still, this interesting educational dilemma only refers to the emotional-psychological crisis emerging from the Intifada, one of the aspects of grappling with crisis that has legitimacy in Israeli schooling. Psychological grappling maintains a certain legitimacy in Israeli education, especially following terror attacks, when counselors and social workers are often dispatched to schools on the frontlines. Similarly, political aspects of the crisis have a central place in Israeli education, in which the Arab-Israeli conflict and the history of Israel are fundamental sites for cultural-national construction of identity. In the Levy School, as well, the political aspects of “the situation” was addressed either with direct discussions in class, or in some cases, through a subtler, less directed and perhaps less conscious hidden curriculum.

Against this backdrop, interactions with educators became a pivotal site for students to form a more complex political identity. Four educators are described in the pages that follow and analyzed for their different approaches to religious discussion with students.

Chanit: Reading theology in Bible
Chanit, a tall, imposing 45-year old Bible teacher who covered almost all of her hair with straw hat, wore glasses, dark lipstick, regularly declared in class that “she doesn’t want to get into politics.” Still, according to eighth grade Ziva, who was interviewed together with her best friend, Amy, “she gives all the time examples that have to do with politics,” and have tremendous theological implications. They were studying a text in Kings, for example, in which a king tore his clothes in response to news of death, and Chanit said, “I never saw a Prime Minister stand up and pray … [New York Mayor] Guiliani prayed after the terrorist attack, but never an [Israeli] Prime Minister.” According to Amy, Chanit was trying to say that “everybody has to believe in God or everybody has to pray to Him.” In other words, the religious message was clear, authoritative, and unquestioned, and emerged from an otherwise unsuspecting text.

While the message that people should pray is perhaps fairly innocuous, the ease with which Chanit slipped into more troubling, absolutist theological messages sometimes treaded turbulent waters. Amy reported that Chanit “talks about how we have to kill Amalek and she says it’s the Arabs.” Ziva added that “she said that they said that the Arabs are Amalek and the Plishtim [Philistines] and we had to kill the Plishtim so now we have to kill the Arabs.” Thus, Chanit, according to these reports, is a constructing a narrative that crosses time and place, in which stories interlope and intertwine – from Exodus to Kings to the World Trade Center bombing, to the Intifada. Chanit is building here a religious Zionist narrative about the primacy of absolute belief, about divinely directed courses of history, about non-separation of religion and state, about the purity of religious people, and about Arabs as evil, ancient enemies of modern Israel. Reading into her narrative, if indeed the Arabs are Amalek, she is actually implying here, by deduction, that God has commanded the Jews to kill Arabs – a claim similar to those vociferously denied by religious Zionist leadership in the wake of the Rabin assassination. Chanit is taking an antiquated text – one that is read but has not been enforced in 3000 years – that venerates the annihilation of entire people, and giving it presence in a contemporary violent conflict, and thus gives weight to the idea of annihilating the Palestinians as a divinely inspired and sacred act. Although Chanit may not have spelled it out in so many words, this is how at least two girls in the class heard and internalized her message.

For Chanit, religious knowledge is not something to be questioned but accepted obediently. Chanit also provides is a prime example of the merger between religious absolutism and the school practice of testing that form a culture that pre-empts student questioning. In a late-summer staff meeting in August 2000, Chanit was the strongest proponent of regular in-class testing. “We need to have a quiz on Shmuel every week”, she declared, a practice of hers she often described to me with pride. While administrators were trying to encourage a structure of only two tests per semester, Chanit objected: “Two aren’t enough for me.” Noddings (1992) sees an inverse correlation between testing and freethinking. Testing disciplines, a central driving force in the entire schooling enterprise, is often hailed because in places where teachers were encouraged to break issues and ideas down into bite-sized, chewable pieces that will later be on tests, schools reported high rates of student “passing.” But Noddings argues that “To identify problems, define them, solve them, generalize from them – requires freedom from narrow constraints. It is a different sort of learning entirely” (p. 6). Indeed, the ability to deconstruct the strict theological narratives that Chanit expresses requires skills not developed through rote learning for tests.

Moreover, Chanit not only expresses the need for testing and rote learning, turning complex ideas into chunks of words to be read and memorized, she also places prime value on obedience. The assumptions revolve around the idea that the teacher’s control of student, subject matter, and words exchanged, is the supreme value. Student resistance is the direct result of attempts at control and enforced obedience. For Noddings, the centrality of obedience preempts students’ ability to question ideas. The emphasis on testing and obedience “fail[s] to consider that students might not want to do the things so carefully stated by their teachers… that students might have pressing cares and interests not addressed by the subject matter presented in schools” (Noddings, 1992:7). In other words, Chanit is working hard to transmit her monolithic corpus of religious beliefs into the minds of the students, and in the process ignores the students themselves.

Rav Itay: Religiousness as obedience
The issue of religiousness as obedience emerged in the same pre-school all-day staff meeting, when teachers debated the Rabbi’s suggestion that classes spent the first ten minutes of third period (after the morning break) saying the Grace After Meals together. Chanit objected, saying distrustfully of the girls that, “they’ll say they didn’t eat. Either do it organized or don’t do it at all.” Rav Itay, the 31-year old school rabbi, then asked the teachers, “Do girls come and say I have to say the Grace After Meals?” Chanit replied sharply, “We are not Zvia!” Here, Chanit’s reference was to the difference between girls who choose to practice when they are not forced to, presumably at Zvia, and girls who need to be “organized” by the staff in order to practice, like the “lax” Levy girls.
The Levy School is neither a “Zvia” nor a state school. The population is meant to be “religious” but not “haredi”. The school, in the classic religious Zionist dichotomy, occupies that symbolic place in Israeli society that is perhaps a shadow of other, more dominant communities. This shadow community is in a state of flux and movement. As if standing in the middle of a see-saw, trying to keep balance, girls in this school waver between competing pulls towards the secular world and the haredi world. They are pulled between cultures and ideologies around religion, and navigate the manifold constructions in different ways.

I had many discussions with Rav Itay about his educational ideas and relationships with the girls. In discussing the developing religious identities of the students, I asked him if girls had come to him with questions, and he said yes.

Girls come to me, especially because of the situation [Intifada] in our country, and they ask and talk about this issue. And we pray, we read Psalms. There are attacks, what can you do…We’re not a rescue service. What can we, as good people, do? It’s more to pray, to say Psalms, to try and to make more merits for the Israel people, if it’s by doing good deeds, that’s how I as a private person can help make the situation better.

For Rav Itay, the proper response to girls’ theological questions is to have them recite Psalms. His office is not a place that facilitates personal processes about morality and religion. He reported that once in a class discussion about the Intifada, one girl said that her father sends letters to the Prime Minister. The rabbi asked her, “Do you think it helps?” The girl responded that she thinks it does help, even though he’s only one person. The rabbi then said, “in that case, all the more so our prayers that we send to the Holy one Blessed be He can help in our struggle, because it is one more prayer, one more good deed, one more help, one more chapter of Psalms … Of course we’re small, but our actions can really reach big things.” In other words, for Itay, there is only one theological response to the Intifada: prayer.

Indeed, when I asked Itay about his conversations with the girls, his response reflected indoctrination, not dialogue.

A few times I’ve had to talk to girls about religious topics, about prayer, about belief in God. In private conversations, it’s been, was the world created by accident, or what’s the purpose of the mitzvoth, or like are the mitzvoth already irrelevant to us…

About the question of whether the world was created by accident, there’s a lovely analogy, to a watch. You tell them about a watch that was created by accident, nobody believes that there could be such a watch. So of course the conclusion is that if a watch can’t be created by accident, so certainly not a whole world with all that it has in it. Also about mitzvoth. What I always tell them is that like a washing machine that has instructions and whoever does not correctly use the instructions, so the machine can break down, so too our world has a creator with commandments, that is the instruction manual, how to use it. And a person who follows instructions, so it works, and a person who doesn’t, so it gets ruined.

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