Day School Funding if Done According to Jewish Tradition

A condensed version of this appears in Day School Tuition Should be Based on Income  (in the Forward).

 The Problem:

It is the time of year for my local Jewish paper to publish its annual article on how day school tuition is rising faster than inflation again this year (and kudos to them for keeping the issue alive). This year’s article included a quote from our only co-educational Jewish high school (also the largest in North America). Though years ago I attended that school, due to rising costs, (and the fact that we will have already paid 9 years of tuition at days school per kid by the time they reach there), I am not going to send my children to it. (The cultural effects of the concomitant polarization of the student body into many have-a-lots and a few have-nots, without  many have-somes due to these costs is also a factor.)  In the article, the Director of Education of that school asserts that

 … no child is turned away on financial grounds – assuming families are prepared to supply the requested documentation, including income tax forms, and that “parents are prepared to allocate an appropriate place for [tuition] in their family budget.”

Of course neither the school nor the Federation that funds 30% of the subsidies will make public their criteria for what an “appropriate place in the family budget”are. I do know that if you own your own home you will not qualify for any subsidy. Day school tuition for having another child in kindergarten is not taken into account. People have been asked to borrow against or spend their retirement savings. People struggle and give up many, many things that their friends and neighbors and certainly their colleagues at work take for granted to send their kids to day school ( new clothes, vacations that don’t involve camping or visiting friends and relatives, extra-curricular activities etc.) It is disrespectful to cast families who cannot make those often heart-wrenching sacrifices as basically not valuing Jewish education enough, which is what this terminology does. (Thanks to the CJN for publishing my letter  saying this).

It is sad demographic fact that the cost of day school is a big factor in the decision to have additional children (where are the alarm bells for those worried about continuity issues?). One example is written up in Day School Tuition as Birth Control (see also this piece by Sam Glaser or this by Michael Freund). From the standpoint of Jewish values it is not right that parents go through the difficulties described bravely by Debra Nussbaum Cohen in her Sisterhood article Sending My Children to Day School: It Shouldn’t be So Hard (see also one from the Forward by Shira Dicker , one by Shira Hirschman Weiss and from The Jewish Week on the OU perspective). Moreover it seems wrong that some parents have to go through the annual huge paperwork  and invasive  loss of privacy  to fill out their applications  and often feelings of shame, while others do not. (Forms are long and include questions like: how much a month do you spend on groceries? household supplies? childcare? home maintenance? heating?)

In another quote the same high school Director of Education noted in my local paper, that “tuition at TanenbaumCHAT has always been less expensive than at other private high schools”. Day schools should not be compared to other private schools. Other private schools are luxuries that predominantly wealthy or very upper middle class parents provide for their children because they desire services, facilities or attention beyond what is available in a public school setting and sometimes also desire is also to shield their children from interacting with kids who have higher needs and possibly more behaviour issues due to their socioeconomic status (whom public schools are obliged to educate). Because of the tuition structures and demographics, Jewish day schools tend to be better than average public schools. The primary purpose of day schools, though, is to provide a Jewish education to children. If there is a conflict between spending money on making sure that more children can afford to go and offering luxuries beyond what parents can expect from an above-average public school, then it is the education of more children that should win out.

The Proposal – Fair Share Tuition:

The problem is that day school is expensive, the primary cost being administrators and teacher’s salary and benefits. Like many jobs that serve the Jewish community, these are already not the best financial option for those who work in them, so there is no room to lower costs there. Most teachers themselves cannot afford the tuition for their kids without help (or a spouse with a higher paying job).

If there is a community need for educating as many Jewish children as possible, which should be the mandate of Jewish day schools, and the cost is large and beyond or almost beyond the reach of many then the financing model needs to be re-thought. While communities used to fund tuition subsidies at a higher rate than they do now, and there are many important steps being taken in planned giving and  super funds and other forms of community fundraising, a more fundamental change of approach is needed (in addition to increased overall funding from major Jewish community institutions). A chance remark by a friend lead me to think of this seriously. After a fundraising session for my daughter’s school she said,”If every parent paid the same percentage of their income that I am paying in tuition, we wouldn’t have to do this fundraising.” And why not? Not only is this method, income-based fees, used by most developed countries in the world to fund their public education systems (called  taxes), income-based fees are also used by many synagogues to determine dues. This funding method, discussed by the synagogue  and rabbinic arms of the Conservative, Reform and Reconstuctionist movements, is called Fair Share dues. Fair Share Dues are either based on a flat percentage of income, calculated from tax forms usually via the honours system (people usually do not submit their forms) or a sliding/progressive scale of income percentages. Below is a not-at-all-comprehensive list of some of these synagogues and their dues policies that I found in a quick web search. There are many more. An (old) report from the Reconstructionst movement suggest that there is no loss to financial security for synagogues who adopted Fair Share dues policies.

 If everyone had to fill out some form of financial disclosure, the process would become much less invasive as people would not stand for it. This would benefit everyone.

Moreover a Fair Share Tuition policy  fits with a long tradition in Judaism on how the community needs should be supported. When dealing with the question with the question of how much we are obligated to give, biblical and  rabbinic sources often quote percentages as opposed to specific amounts.  The Torah mentions several times when one is required to give a tenth (a ma’aser or a tithe) of one’s harvest to the Levites (Numbers 18:21-26; Leviticus 27:30-33 ; Deuteronomy 14:22–27) and also to the poor (Deuteronomy 26:12–15). The rabbis of the Talmud and later writings echo this (e.g. A person should give up to 1/5 (20%) of his possessions. That is praiseworthy.One-tenth (10%) is average. Shulchan Aruh, Yoreh Deah 249:7).

Perhaps surprisingly, Fair Share Tuition is actually advocated for in the  Shulchan Aruch, (Code of Jewish Law). Importantly, as noted by Yossi Prager of the Avi Chai Foundation the funding of Jewish education appears in the Shulchan Aruch not in Hilchot Tzedakah, the laws on giving charity, but in Hilchot Shutfim, the section that lists all of the communal services funded through kehillah (communal) taxes (e.g., gates to protect the city and the establishment of a synagogue).

The Shulchan Aruch says:

In a place in which the residents of a city establish among them a teacher, and the fathers of [all] the children cannot afford tuition, and the community will have to pay, the tax is levied based on financial means. Rema, Shulchan Aruch, (Choshen Mishpat 163:3) 

Prager points out from a review of rabbinic texts and historical Jewish communal practice until quite recently, that “the conclusion is inescapable: in the Jewish worldview, Jewish education is not a consumer good, like detergent, but a communal obligation.” It should be viewed,  as a “communal obligation independent of voluntary tzedakah”.

What are the downsides of such a policy? Making everyone supply even minimal financial information will turn some people off. (But of course we are already losing people who qualify for subsidies but choose not to apply or attend because of the invasive process). Also parents who currently make charitable donations to schools might see those donations become their income-based tuition payments and they would lose the kavod  (honour) of donating.

Even if day schools don’t adopt such a policy, it would be good to at least see them explain why they don’t.

Appendix: Shuls (Conservative, Reform, Orthodox,  Renewal, Reconsructionist and Independent) that use Fair Share Dues Policies

(from a quick web search there are many more)

‘Religion Is Actually Spirituality’: An Exchange

https://forward.com/opinion/121266/religion-is-actually-spirituality-an-exchan/

From The Forward Dec. 2009

Alan Krinsky, Aurora Mendelsohn and Jay MichaelsonDecember 17, 2009

Last month, our Jay Michaelson, in a column titled “Religion is Actually Spirituality,” argued that “even the most diehard, hyper-rational, Lithuanian Orthodox, High Reform, or otherwise non- or anti-spiritual religionists perform religious acts because they want to feel a certain way. In other words, religion is a form of spirituality.”

Michaelson’s take on the relationship between religion and spirituality drew spirited retorts from readers Aurora Mendelsohn, a Toronto biostatistician, and Alan Krinsky, a monthly columnist for the Jewish Voice & Herald in Providence, R.I.

Their critiques are published below, as is Michaelson’s response.

---

Aurora Mendelsohn writes:

I was raised in and have been consistently active in alternative Jewish communities that embrace innovation and seek to make ritual and worship more spiritual and relevant. That’s one reason I was surprised to find myself disagreeing so strongly with Jay Michaelson’s framing of religion and spirituality.

In his column, Michaelson suggested that a dichotomy between religion and spirituality is a false one. All religion, he argues, is a form of spirituality, which he defines as performing rituals or practices to achieve a desired mind-state.

While it is undeniable that all religion has a spiritual aspect to it, I would counter that its main purpose is not achieving desired mind-states. In my view, the purposes of Judaism are to enable people to behave ethically; to make the world a better place through our actions; to nurture community; to create meaning and sanctity in our ordinary daily lives; and to provide access to a wisdom literature and modes of thought that connect us with people past and present who struggled to answer the questions of what “a better place” or “behave ethically” means. Spirituality is a part of achieving those goals, no doubt, but it is not the primary purpose.

Michaelson defines achieving a desired mind-state to include everything from a feeling of grandeur to a mental stance of moral responsibility. The key, he writes, is that a transformation to a new mind-state has to do something to the experiencer.

Using achievement of desirable mind-states as an explanation for why religion is practiced is problematic for two reasons.

First, if a desire to achieve a particular mind-state is the explanation for our behavior and all choices can be defined this way, then what is the use of such an explanation? If it can cover everything we chose to do (from watching a movie to composting), then it really does not explain anything at all.

Second, there is an important qualitative difference between doing something to elicit a feeling of joy, well-being or calmness (davening, mediating…) and doing something one might not enjoy at all (breaking bad news to a loved one, cleaning the bodily fluids of children, disabled adults or of the dead before burial…) because one believes it is the right thing to do. This is true even if the latter type of act elicits a mind-state of thinking of yourself as a person who acts morally. Acting morally has an effect beyond one’s own mental state; most often there are other people who are affected by what you do.

The mind-states Michaelson attributes to secular Judaism (integrity, ethics, authenticity) and to the spiritually dead synagogues he rightly decries (community, a sense of tradition) differ qualitatively from those he attributes to modern spiritual Judaism (inspiration, joy or introspection). The former, for the most part, seem either other-directed or at least framed in the context of the self as part of a group. The latter are inner-directed.

But inner-directedness alone, for its own sake, is not the focus of Judaism. Judaism has historically been more interested in deeds, not thoughts, creeds or specific mind-states. Almost never in the traditional literature are we told to think a certain way. Rather, we are instructed to behave a certain way. We are not commanded to love our parents (because that is not always possible), only to honor them.

Of course, it is often hard to behave as we wish we would and as we know we should when presented with challenges in the messy, day-to-day, real world. That is where cultivating inner-directness plays an important role in religious life. When we are in tune with our own thoughts and feelings, when we know the situations where we are likely to falter, we are more able to behave justly and compassionately.

To be meaningful, the cultivation of mind-states through spiritual practice has to ultimately serve the greater goals of ethical behavior and repairing the world. If a spiritual practice does not make me a better parent, spouse and friend, or a better champion of justice, then what is the point of it? The question is not what is Judaism doing for me, but what is Judaism helping me do?

---

Alan Krinsky writes:

Jay Michaelson argues against what he calls the “dichotomy” between religion and spirituality. He explains that “even the most diehard, hyper-rational, Lithuanian Orthodox, High Reform, or otherwise non- or anti-spiritual religionists perform religious acts because they want to feel a certain way. In other words, religion is a form of spirituality.” For Michaelson, the relevant question is thus: “What, exactly, are you getting out of your Jewish life?”

Michaelson, however, misses a critical, fundamental difference between religion and spirituality. Spirituality is primarily about what I get out of my life. It’s about me and about fulfilling my needs. If something does not please me, I reject it. If a practice no longer meets my needs, I jettison it. The search for spirituality, understandably, responds to a deep human longing, but does so in terms of individual meaning. It is focused on me, and not focused on God or on community. This, of course, does not mean that many quite spiritual individuals are not involved in their communities and engaged in helping others — but in the end, the only religious or spiritual commitment is to oneself.

Religion, by contrast, requires commitment and makes demands on us. After all, the word mitzvah, contrary to popular phrasing, does not mean a “good deed.” Rather, its root is commanding and being commanded. Judaism, among many other religions, is a religion of obligation. And even though, in the modern world, we choose it, and even though we can leave it, the experience for the adherent is one of commitment and obligation and service to God. Even when we fall short of expectations, as we realize every year by Yom Kippur, we do so within the context of a binding covenant.

A mitzvah is a commandment, not a nice thing to do if I feel like it, or if it brings meaning to my life. Judaism places us in a framework, obligates us, requires our commitment, and nonetheless challenges us, asks us to be creative, at times to overcome our inclinations, to become better than we were before, better individuals and better members of our communities, to fulfill our potential, to leave the world a better place than it was upon our entrance.

Michaelson is not incorrect when he points out that religious adherents would not stick with it if they were not getting something out of it. But this turns all of us into pursuers of our own self-interest. Or masochists, if we continue to perform mitzvot we do not find personally meaningful. Well, if all altruism can be reduced to self-interest, then I am not sure we are any longer saying anything very interesting or meaningful.

Whatever the self-interest or selfishness, religious commitment remains quite different from spiritual allegiance. It is Michaelson’s very framing of the entire problem in terms of what each of us gets out of it that causes him to fail to see the important, striking difference between religion and spirituality.

What do I get out of it? The search for spirituality does ask this question; this is its central, guiding question. But not so religion. Religion does ask what we get out of it, but this is one of many questions, and far from the most important one.

---

Jay Michaelson responds:

In my essay, I claimed that religious practices — perhaps “ritual practices” might be a better term — are performed to bring about certain mind-states (fulfillment, doing the right thing, inspiration, hope), despite protestations to the contrary, and that they are thus not so different from spirituality, which aims to do the same thing.

Now, when I speak of “practices” here, I refer primarily to what Jewish tradition calls acts bein adam l’makom, between a person and God, rather than bein adam l’havero, between a person and other people. Of course, both are religious in some sense, but only the former, I suggest, is particularly religious — only religious.

With regard to such acts, neither of the critiques printed here seems to shake my central claim. A bein adam l’makomreligious practice may, as Aurora Mendelsohn states, “create meaning and sanctity in our ordinary daily lives.” Our awareness of these qualities, however, is entirely subjective, and entirely in the mind. Especially with terms such as “meaning” and “sanctity,” which have no objective referent, the only way we experience such — what, qualities? realities? — is through our minds, and indeed, the terms are more projections of certain mind-states (feeling meaningful, feeling holy) than anything else.

Now, if bein adam l’havero religious practice causes us “to behave ethically,” then indeed, there are yardsticks outside the individual mind: an action’s effects on other people. (Indeed, this is a crucial distinction between Judaism, which generally holds that ethical action is evaluated by its objective effects, and some other religious traditions, which prioritize intention. “Love your enemy” is a lovely sentiment, but as we have seen, it can be coupled with barbaric acts.)

Yet even for acts bein adam l’havero, I think if we look closely enough, then we’ll see that to the extent that an ethical act is impelled by specifically religious motivations — “fear of heaven,” for example — it is still subject to my claim that it, too, is about cultivating a certain mind-state. For example, suppose I decide not to cheat on my taxes. Many motivations may be in play: fear of punishment, the categorical imperative and, perhaps, some specifically religious ones, such as a desire not to compromise my human dignity, or even a desire not to offend God. These latter motivations are, I claim, about cultivating mind-states. Stealing feels icky in the mind. And while that may not be one’s sole or even primary motivation not to do so, it is no less “spiritual” than chanting mantras or bowing during prayer.

One common 21st-century move, which Mendelsohn repeats, is to reduce bein adam l’makom to bein adam l’havero: that “the cultivation of mind-states through spiritual practice has to ultimately serve the greater goals of ethical behavior and repairing the world.” This is neither a Jewish ideal, nor how most religious people, I think, lead their lives. Ethical behavior is indeed half of the ideal of kedushah, or holiness, but living a life of closeness to God (however that is understood) is the other half. Of course, each feeds the other. But to reduce one to the other is an error of history and of religious psychology.

At the other extreme, Alan Krinsky’s claim that religion “requires commitment and makes demands on us” does have deep traditional roots. This is what Jews and other religionists have been saying for millennia. But saying something does not make it so. In the 21st century, we are indeed free to take on these commitments and recognize the importance of these demands… or not. We are postmodern individuals, like it or not, and there are reasons why we take on such obligations.

Indeed, Krinsky seems to agree with my experiential understanding of religion when he writes that “the experience for the adherent is one of commitment and obligation and service to God.” Exactly so! This is precisely my point: that even an experience of obligation is an experience. Krinsky’s understanding of the commandments is indeed grounded in Jewish tradition, but he makes my point for me. No matter how traditional the feeling may be, it’s still a feeling, and is not different in kind from spirituality.

Krinsky and Mendelsohn both suggest that, if I’m right that religion is really spirituality, then everything has been reduced to preference and selfishness. Well, not quite. As I tried to suggest in the original essay, understanding the aims of a religious/ritual practice can help us pursue those aims more effectively; if we know what we’re trying to do, we can do it better. A functional approach to religion undermines the false claim of privilege and power that Krinsky repeats: that religion is somehow different in kind from, and better than, spirituality. And, of course, if we see commonalities across religious and spiritual lines, we might be less likely to attack those whose approaches differ from our own.

That’s not nothing — it’s a very useful loosening of some of the constrictions religion can bring about in the mind. Have you ever noticed the tightness, the piety of tone and supposedly righteous indignation, that defenders of a particular religious view often express? Do we really think this is good for the world? Wouldn’t it be useful, when a religious belief is threatened, to notice that these emotions are triggered, rather than be manipulated by them? And wouldn’t it be relaxing to admit that we do what we do because we want to — rather than cling desperately to ever farther-fetched myths of obligation and recompense?

To me, each incremental release from such clinging is a step toward liberation, toward peace, even toward God.

But Bubbe and Zaide Were Hippies

My first op-ed for the Forward. (But Bubbe and Zaide Were Hippies)

On a Friday night at shul, the children gathered to hear the rabbi tell an after-dinner story. His style was so engaging that they were riveted to the dialogue between a little boy and his Bubbie depicting how faith and song magically hid her from the Cossacks in the shtetl. Part of me settled comfortably in to the warmth and familiarity of the story, but part of me felt disconnected. My husband and I were expecting our first child, and I had just started to think of my own parents as a Bubbie and a Zaidy. But my parents were born in the 1940s in North America; they had never been to a shtetl. Looking at the very young children around the rabbi, and doing some quick arithmetic, I was sure that none of them had grandparents born in the shtetl either.

When I was a child I got the idea from many books and school and summer camp programs like ‘shtetl wedding’ that most Jewish grandparents came from the shtetl. My father even joked that when I was born, he was surprised that his parents, born in North America, didn’t develop Yiddish accents like his own grandparents and all the bubbies and zaidies he knew as a child. For a while I thought I was unusual, having four North-American-born grandparents (though the children of immigrants all). But this was more common than I thought. I estimate in my day school kindergarten class 28 years ago, only a slim majority of the grandparents came from Eastern Europe.

The generation which came from the shtetl made ground-breaking contributions to the labor movement, lifted their children into the educated middle class, and struggled to maintain faith when faced with modernity. Because of this important and identity-shaping role, I was willing to overlook that the stories of my childhood reflected the experiences of my parent’s generation more accurately than my own. But now, for my daughter’s sake and to honor my parents who were also part of an identity-shaping generation, I cannot help but ask, “Where is the Jewish children’s book entitled Bubbie and Zaidy were Hippies?”

The most meaningful experience of faith for today’s Bubbies and Zaidies is unlikely to be being saved from physical attack; it is more likely to be the first time they prayed outside at sunrise following and all-night Shavuot study session. How lovely the illustration of this could be: Zaidy, 30 years younger, in his in jeans and rainbow-colored tallit, the sun rising in soft watercolors. Maybe the most meaningful Jewish moment for Bubbie was when she first saw the Torah up close, for her first aliyah, which she had as an adult. Their sense of community with other Jews was forged not in lantsmanschaften but in havurah-based, pot-luck Shabbat dinners. These settings and situations can exude warmth and evoke the transformative power of spirituality and community as effectively as stories from eastern Europe- and perhaps do a better job because they map more easily on to the real life experiences of today’s children.

Our children can be inspired by stories about young Jewish men and women, now in their sixties, who left their quiet lives to register voters in Mississippi and Alabama, and how these experiences shaped their Jewish identities (When Zaidy marched with Dr. King). Given that Dr. Joachim Prinz, a founding chairman of the March on Washington, as well as president of the American Jewish Congress, was a zaidy ten times over when he died twenty years ago, these stories are long overdue.

The distance in time from my great-grandparents’ arrival in North America to my parents’ birth in the 1940s is the less than time from 1940s to the present. The Jewish experience changed radically from the early 1900s to the mid-1940s. But it has changed equally radically since then. While for European immigrants one could either be a modern “free-thinker” or a religious Jew, it was the spiritual struggle of the next two generations that tried to define how one could be both. Hearing stories about the shtetl teaches our children about an important time in Jewish history and about the strength and value of faith. Hearing stories about the lives of their modern grandparents will give them the framework to maintain that faith in the nuanced world of today’s Judaism, where practicing at all is an active choice we make and where we have many rich and varied options of how to do so.