Who Will Teach Our Children?

Who will teach our children Torah?

I do not ask that as a complaint, or at least I am trying not to. I ask it as the most stubborn, practical question that lands on my desk, usually in late spring (but really throughout the year), when a beloved Judaics teacher tells me she is moving closer to family, or we are growing and need to add someone to our staff, and I realize that finding the next Jewish Studies teacher is not going to be like finding the next math teacher (not that finding a math teacher is so easy).

I have been a school leader for the better part of three decades, and Head of School at Bornblum Jewish Community School since 2018, and I can tell you that the market for a great Judaics teacher in a small Jewish community is not a market. It is a search party. You are not choosing among applicants; you are hoping one exists, within driving distance of a city that most of the Jewish professional world could not find on a map (and being in Memphis, I say that with love). The candidate must know the material deeply, love children genuinely, hold a room, honor a range of observance under one roof, and be willing to live in a community whose entire Jewish population would fit inside half a square mile in New York City. That person is rare everywhere. In a small community, that person is a miracle.

So here is what happens, quietly, in day schools like mine all over the country. The best candidate we can find, sometimes the only candidate we can find, brings his love of Torah and his love of Israel from Israel itself. And that is a gift, full stop. That is also where the puzzle begins, and I want to be clear: the puzzle is not a political one; I stay far away from those. It is a puzzle of time, of money, and of a certain quiet irony.

Consider the choices, because a head of school in my seat must. There is the R-1, the religious worker visa, and the J-1, the exchange visitor visa. Both can be wonderful. Both are also temporary by design, good for a set number of years, assuming a teacher qualifies in the first place. So, you welcome someone extraordinary, your students fall in love with her, and the calendar is already counting down to the year she has to leave. And she rarely comes alone. What about a spouse? A spouse needs work authorization too, a whole separate question with its own answer, and “come teach in Memphis, but your husband cannot legally work” is not a sentence that lands well over coffee (I have learned to have that conversation gently).

Then there is the permanent path, the green card, which arrives with its own name only a form could love: PERM. It solves the clock. But sit with what it actually asks. You recruited this teacher precisely because she carries a love of Israel into your classrooms, and the permanent path quietly asks her to become an American, to build her life here and, by definition, not there. There is something tender and strange about that. We import the love of Israel by asking someone to stop living in it.

And none of this is a one-time line item on a budget. Often, the best way to bring in the very best is through Shlichim, emissaries sent from Israel, usually for three to five years. And while it is possible to pay an outside organization to manage the visa requirements, there is always another step. That is not a salary and a handshake. It is housing, and a car, and flights, and more, every single year, layered on top of compensation that is already high because the talent is so scarce. It is not three thousand dollars a year of extra costs. It is much more than that, each year, and it is worth every bit of it, which is exactly why it keeps me up at night.

I want to be careful here, because this is not a complaint about the teachers, and it is certainly not a complaint about Israelis coming to strengthen American Jewish education. That is one of the quiet blessings of my job and why I have remained in it year after year. It is, however, an observation about a pipeline. We ask our small-community schools to deliver a serious Jewish education, and the people best equipped to help us do it often live an ocean away, with the added degree of difficulty that entails.

And yet. (There is always an “and yet,” or I would have found a different line of work.) The reason we do all of it, the searching, the waiting, the housing and the paperwork, is that when it works, it really works. A child in Memphis learns to chant Torah from someone who grew up hearing it in Modi’in. A student masters Hebrew and speaks with an Israeli accent (and a southern twang). A family that could have chosen anywhere spends a few precious years making a small Southern Jewish community larger and leaves it more Jewish and connected to Israel than they found it. That is not a transaction. That is a kind of klita, absorption, the old word for taking someone in and helping them belong, running in a direction we do not celebrate often enough: not toward Israel, but out from it, into the small diaspora communities that need those teachers most.

I do not have the fix. I wish I did; no chatbot has solved it for me either, and believe me, I have asked Claude in countless different ways. But I know the people who could help carry it: the foundations, the networks, and the movement institutions that already invest so generously in Jewish education. The next great investment in day schools may not be a building or a curriculum. It may be the teachers themselves, and a smarter, kinder path for training them (locally), bringing them (from Israel, or more specifically to smaller communities) and keeping them (for years to come).

Because the question is not going away. Who will teach our children Torah? In our small communities, the honest answer, more and more, is: someone we first have to find across an ocean, then work hard to welcome and to keep. Our Jewish day schools are the places where the next generation learns that it belongs to this story. The least we can do is make sure the people who teach them that story are able to stay long enough to finish the chapter.