Before Jacob relocated to Egypt, he sent his son Judah ahead lehorot lefanav Goshna, “to show the way before him to Goshen”. Rashi invokes the Midrash that explains that Judah was tasked with establishing a place of hora’ah (from lehorot), a place of teaching, a Jewish school.
 
According to this reading, Jacob believed that Jewish education was the basis of any sustainable Jewish community. A Jewish community needs to be more than just burial grounds and prayer halls.

Rabbi Shabbetai Bass wrote in the 17th century in his Sifte Hahamim, that there is a further illusion to the Midrash in the verse. The word horot usually includes the Hebrew letter vav twice; however, in this instance only the first vav appears. What remains are the letters vav, heh, resh, and tav, which together spell the word “Torah”.

I mention this second allusion, because Rabbi Bass was personally concerned with Jewish education. He visited Amsterdam’s Portuguese community in the 1670s as part of an attempt to catalogue all of Europe’s Jewish libraries. Coming from Poland, what he discovered in Amsterdam inspired him. He visited the community’s yeshivah Etz Haim and wrote the following about it in his book Sifte Yishenim:

“I visited the schools of the Sephardim a number of times. There I saw children of the giants, small children as tiny as grasshoppers, and kids who have become he-goats, but all were in my eyes like giants because of their great expertise in Torah, grammar, poetry, and clear Hebrew speech. Happy is the eye which has seen all this!”

Rabbi Bass was particularly impressed by the school’s progressive learning model. Students were divided into six levels and, as they progressed from level to level, they were introduced to new subjects and skills. He even advocated that the Ashkenazi yeshivot back in his native Poland adopt the methodology of Amsterdam’s Sephardim.

The backbone of any Jewish community is the Jewish education that it provides to its children. Our schools’ pedagogy and curricula must be innovative, exciting and modern, while rooted in and inspired by our rich tradition. 

alom Morris