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Documents About R. Soloveitchik's View on Halachah Education

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Outline: An Orthodox Perspective on Colloquium on Jewish Education and Jewish Identity (1975)

I. Relation of Jewish Identity and Jewish Education. Jewish Identity does not necessarily derive exclusively from Jewish Education. But it can not flourish or thrive in a free society without it. In this sense, Jewish Education is more important now, under conditions of freedom, than it ever was in the Ghetto. II. A) The Zohar teaches the famous triad: The Holy One, Israel, and Torah are one. Rav Kook interprets this as unity approachable by one of three avenues, like a wheel with three spokes.
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Outline

Talk to Day School P.T.A. of Yeshivah Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik (1959)

Story of the eleventh speaker with one man left in audience – who says, "I am the twelfth speaker." 2) Story of minister and suspender buttons and cough drops. One of the functions of a P.T.A. is that every member become a missionary to friends and neighbors who have young children, bearing to them the noble message of the day school movement. We must each be super-salesmen. Every idea goes through three stages – a) when it is ridiculed and ignored, b) when it is fought, c) when it vanquishes. We are now in the second stage. We have come to be respected and resisted. Therefore, in order to fulfill this function properly, we must know how to answer the skeptic – as our rabbis commanded us. This training in how to meet the questioning challenger has two purposes – a) so as to convince the person you are encountering, and b) for chizuk, for strengthening your own convictions. There are generally three main arguments presented against the day school system of education. 1) Value-free education. "I want my child to choose by himself." The enormity of this fallacy makes it almost impossible to meet the question head-on. Abdication of parental responsibility would never be tolerated with regard to general education – or hygiene, or morality. In Jewish tradition, freedom of choice is meaningless in a state of ignorance. Only a person who knows the facts can make an intelligent choice. Otherwise what may seem to be a free choice is really merely the result of being abutted by ignorance and prejudice. 2) "I don't want my child to be a rabbi." To a layman that argument may not be too offensive, but it always rubs a rabbi the wrong way. Parents generally take attitudes of "my best friends are rabbis." a) Colleague in Boston put in bulletin a fictitious letter by parent to principal of schools complaining that she didn’t want her child to learn how to brush his teeth in hygiene class because "I don’t want to make a dentist out of my child." b) This is a statement based upon a p…
Jewish Education

Correspondence

Letter to R. Soloveitchik about Opening a Pre-School (1953)

לכבוד מורי ורבי הרה"ג וכו' שליט"א, שליט"א, הנני מעיז להיות בין חומסי עתותיו בשאלת הלכה למעשה. אך זכותי לעשות כן מצאתי בדבריו המלהיבים שדבר אלינו רק אתמול לרגלי חג הסמיכה, באמרו עלינו, תלמידיו ומעריציו, להגיש אליו כל השאלות החמורות ולהביא לפניו את כל דבר קשה. השאלה איננה מן השאלות אשר תשובותיהן נמצאות בש"ע, אלא מסוג הבעיות של public relations, ובכן פתרונה נעלם ממני עוד יותר. מרגע הראשון שראיתי תחת השפעת רומע"כ, למדתי להעריך את המפעל של רנין ישיבות – בתי-ספר כל יומיים – כהדרך העיקרי להרבצת התורה.
Jewish Education