Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Davening in the Summer?

Some of you may have seen this article in ejewishphilanthropy.com (I tweeted about it today) titled The Five Lives of a Jewish Day School Grad by Micha Lapidus. He presents one profile of the graduate:
2. Spiritual Life. After davening on a regular basis, living the rhythms of the Jewish calendar, and participating in limmudei kodesh (study of Jewish texts and topics) our graduates should be spiritually connected. While this spiritual connection may take many forms and guises as it necessarily evolves and matures, our graduates should be spiritually vibrant and engaged human beings. While I often wonder whether our students are “connecting” during tefila I have no doubt that they will miss the experience of setting aside time in the middle of their daily routine to pause, reflect, refresh, and connect. Rather than simply “missing” this context for spiritual exploration, our graduates should find new outlets and ways of connecting once they've left our schools.
While I agree mostly with the assessment and direction of the article, it really makes me sad to see such "wonderment" and lack of doubt that students won't continue davening when the school year is over.  Indeed it is nice that students "should be spiritually vibrant" upon matriculation, but how is your school evaluating this?


1 comment:

  1. Wouldn't it be on the kids parent's to make sure there kid was going to shul and davening on a regular basis? How is it on the teacher or
    the school to be responsible?

    ReplyDelete