MLK Day Reflections

Dear Friends of JHSC:

This past week, the Jewish world began reading the Exodus story during public Torah readings. It is incredibly fitting that on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the Jewish collective memory is focused on Moses and Israel's exodus from slavery.

Dr. King frequently equated African-Americans with the Israelites, and slave-owners with Pharaoh. Many people, including Dr. King himself, likened himself to Moses, and spoke often of the African-American's entry into the "Promised Land".

I'd like to reflect upon some of the character traits that both Moses and Dr. King had, and how we can raise our own children to be like the two leaders.

This past Shabbat, we read three stories one after the other about Moses saving oppressed individuals. In the first story, Moses walks out of the Egyptian palace, goes into a field and sees an Egyptian hitting a Jew. Moses defends the Jew, killing the Egyptian in the process.

The very next day, Moses walks out from the palace and witnesses another conflict, but this time between two Israelites. Moshe instinctively intervenes and confronts the aggressor.

And immediately after that story, Moses intervenes a third time. Unlike the first two incidents, in this story the oppressed bears no familial or national relationship to Moses whatsoever. In this third encounter, the oppressed come from a foreign nation; some Midianite women at a well are being bullied by other Midianites. Yet, Moses rescues them as well.

The motif of these three stories is Moses' aggressive commitment to helping the oppressed. The Torah presents Moses as one who naturally helps those in need, regardless of who they are.

Similarly, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an iconic leader in the advancement of civil rights. While America is certainly still an imperfect country, nonetheless Dr. King almost singlehandedly expanded American values to include the vision of a colorblind society, and worked tirelessly to end racial segregation and discrimination. Dr. King and Moses are cut from the same moral cloth, and are men of intense moral character.

One of the commonalities between these two towering figures is that they exemplified the rabbinic dictum (Ethics of our Fathers 2:6) that when one is in a place where there is no mensch, strive to be one. These two mensches also show a truly amazing capacity for risk-taking, for standing up in the face of immorality, and making responsible decisions when many other people around them are not.

Here's the question: how do we educate our children to be like Moses and Dr. King? 

Teaching content and skills (like reading, writing, and arithmetic) are a critical and foundational aspect of schooling, of course. But we need to also teach critical thinking skills and divergent ways of thinking, because the content and skills we teach today may be obsolete tomorrow. Former US Secretary of Education Richard Riley is quoted as saying, "We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't yet been invented, in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet." How can we prepare our students to be successful in a world that will almost certainly be radically different than what we know today?

One skill we need to teach our students, besides being thoughtful and creative thinkers, is the skill of being a risk-taker. This is a skill that propels us into the future. We need to teach our students not to be frightened of being wrong. If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.

By the time students get to college--middle school, even--most students have lost that capacity of being a risk-taker. They have become frightened of being wrong; we tend to stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

Of course another skill we need to be teaching our students is how to be an ethical person and make responsible decisions. That it's not enough to be an A+ student--you have to also be an A+ human being.

Knowledgeable, Thoughtful, and Responsible. If you take the first letters of each of those words, the K from knowledgeable, the T from thoughtful, and the R from responsible, it spells Keter. Keter is the Hebrew word for crown. Every single one of our students at the Jewish High School of Connecticut wears that crown, and graduates knowledgeable, thoughtful, and responsible. They graduate not only fully prepared for college, but for life.

Benjamin Franklin said that there are three sorts of people in this world: those who are immovable, those who are movable and those who move.

There will always be those who will be stuck in their own paradigm, stuck in the old ways of doing things, who won't be able to understand the change, and won't be able to participate.

Then there are the majority of people who stand at the threshold and can see the movement but need to be helped to understand it, who are movable.

But the real change agents are those who are the movers, like Moses and Dr. King. And that is the goal of the Jewish High School of Connecticut: we're about getting together the right group of visionary people who are ready to move us into the future.

JHSC is made up of those trailblazers and risk-takers, and the leaders of today and tomorrow. I applaud our pioneering families and supporters for being those movers, and for living in the mold of Moses and Dr. King.

May you have a meaningful Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Rabbi Yonatan Yussman, EdD
Head of School
Jewish High School of Connecticut

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