You Can’t Teach a Child to Be a Mensch

When I begin studying a Torah portion with a B’nei Mitzvah student, I usually tell them that we probably aren’t going to find “the” answer. We start with curiosity. What catches your attention? What seems strange? What doesn’t make sense? Then we start digging.

It can get messy. We may follow an idea and discover that it doesn’t work. We may find a commentary I love and another I don’t find convincing. Sometimes we finish a lesson with a pretty good interpretation and return the following week only to find a better one. Eventually, a student will ask a question and discover that a rabbi living hundreds of years ago, in a completely different part of the world, noticed the same problem. At that moment, Jewish tradition stops looking like an answer key and starts looking like a conversation.

The commentators who came before us deserve to be taken seriously. So do the words of the Torah itself. Our questions should come from an earnest place, not from a desire to make the text say whatever we want. But taking an earlier answer seriously does not require accepting it. The tradition has preserved generations of encounters with Torah. Their encounters don’t replace ours. They allow us to enter the conversation.

Only recently have I realized that something else is happening in those lessons. The student is learning patience, because the first answer may not be the best one; humility, because someone who lived eight hundred years ago may have noticed something we missed; respect for tradition, because before rejecting an interpretation we have to understand it; confidence, because respecting an authority does not require surrendering our own judgment; and intellectual honesty, because sometimes the interpretation we hoped would work simply doesn’t fit the words in front of us. I never announced that we were having a lesson about patience, humility or respect. Those qualities were being exercised through the encounter itself.

That has made me reconsider one of the most common descriptions of a rabbi or Jewish educator: the role model. Rabbis should try to live lives worth respecting, and our behavior teaches whether we intend it to or not. But “role model” can quietly turn imitation into the goal: Here is what a committed Jew looks like. Here is how a spiritual person prays. Become more like this. A teacher’s example can be powerful, but the teacher should not become the destination.

That distinction is especially important for rabbis. If our job is to embody an ideal, there is pressure to perform it, to be patient, certain, inspired and spiritually composed. Eventually, we can become very good at playing “the rabbi.” Martin Buber offers a different model.

In his essay “The Education of Character,” Buber argues that character cannot simply be transferred from one person to another. Teaching someone about courage is not the same as making that person courageous. Nor is presenting yourself as a courageous person and hoping the student becomes like you. For Buber, character develops through encounter. The educator brings knowledge, conviction and experience. The student brings a self that cannot simply be replaced by the educator’s preferred version of who that student should become.

Buber means something more demanding than “be yourself.” He is interested in an integrated person: someone increasingly able to bring belief, values, judgment and action together and respond to life as a whole human being. That helped me understand what was happening with my B’nei Mitzvah students. I wasn’t teaching them an interpretation to imitate. I was inviting them into an encounter with Torah.

There are boundaries to that encounter. Torah cannot simply mean whatever we want it to mean. The text has integrity. The tradition has integrity. But the student has integrity too. In one model, the student disappears into the tradition. In the opposite model, the tradition disappears into the student, becoming little more than confirmation of what the student already believes. Neither is much of an encounter.

I recently saw the same principle in a very different setting. I was sitting with a family in hospice when someone asked why I had become a rabbi. I answered that I may not have all the answers, but I can sit with people in the questions. That seemed to provide more comfort than an attempt to explain what they were going through.

There was no answer I could offer that would resolve the reality facing that family. I could bring what I knew, what Jewish tradition had to offer and what I had learned from sitting with other families. But I could not stand outside their experience and explain it to them. The work was not so different from sitting across the table from a thirteen-year-old with a Torah portion. The rabbi’s task is not always to supply the Jewish answer. Sometimes it is to know Judaism well enough to help another person enter into a serious encounter with it.

The same limitation applies when we speak about God. No rabbi can give another person a relationship with God. We can introduce people to paths Jews have taken: prayer, Torah, mitzvot, music, community, silence, wonder and even argument. We can say honestly which paths have spoken to us. But we cannot know which will become someone else’s.

Jewish tradition itself contains remarkably different religious personalities. Abraham argues with God. Jacob wrestles. Job protests. The Psalmist can praise God and accuse God of absence. Encounter with God did not turn them into the same person. It required each of them to respond as themselves.

This is why I have become skeptical of the idea that we can teach a child to be a mensch. Of course we can teach behavior, Jewish texts, practices, history and values. We can insist that children treat other people decently. But character is not another item on the curriculum.

Nor should the alternative be a Judaism that simply validates the person we already are. If Torah can never contradict me, inconvenience me or make me reconsider something, then I am not really encountering Torah. I am encountering myself.

Jewish education has a harder task. We cannot decide in advance exactly who another person should become. We can give them serious encounters with Torah, tradition, other people and God, while leaving enough room for them to respond as themselves. The goal is not a copy of the teacher or a Judaism that merely confirms the student. It is a person changed by Judaism without being erased by it.

We cannot know in advance exactly what kind of Jew will emerge. That is not a failure of the education. It may be the point.