DENNIS PRAGER

DENNIS PRAGER A value-free education is the antithesis of theJewish view of education. Whoever denies idolatry is as if he fulfilled the whole Torah," says the Talmud (Hulin 5a)—so important is...

...God is One" means that God is to be the one end in life...
...One such god, especially among Jews, is education...
...It is the secular world with values most Jews embrace that has made education into a false god...
...A value-free education embodies the antithesis of the Jewish view of education...
...But there are also many fine and moral uneducated people...
...Irving Greenberg, "Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire," in Eva Fleischner, ed., Auschvritz: Beginning of a New Era...
...A person with a Ph.D...
...Secular education meets all the criteria of an "other god...
...It is no wonder that we have lost far more Jews to Yale and UCLA than to Jesus...
...For some religious Jews, knowledge of the Torah, Talmud and halachic literature seems to be valued even more than decency...
...And rather than making education a means to God and morality, modern secular society has adopted an ideal—the value-free education...
...Together with Joseph Telushkin, he wrote two books, The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism (Touchstone, 1986) and Why the Jews...
...brilliant Jews in the media who produce garbage for the American mind...
...As a B'nai B'rith study reported, Catholic children who attend Catholic schools are less likely to have anti-Jewish feelings than Catholic students who attend public schools...
...But to become a good person, modern secular education is irrelevant, if not a barrier...
...To become a doctor or lawyer, it is essential...
...Among both religious and secular Jews there is often no higher value...
...The messiah will come when Jewish parents take greater pride and interest in their children's goodness and character than in their brilliance and what college they attend...
...Intellectuals, not high school dropouts, were attracted to the greatest mass murderer in history, Josef Stalin...
...Whoever denies idolatry is as if he fulfilled the whole Torah," says the Talmud (Hulin 5a)—so important is the commandment against idolatry...
...The great lesson of Judaism's ethical monotheism is that any value, even the most noble and uplifting—even morality—when divorced from God can lead to evil...
...The Cambodian Hitler, Pol Pot, was one of the few Cambodians to receive a Western higher education (at the Sorbonne...
...Idolatry is, in fact, a much broader category...
...There is no link between a good secular education and being a decent person...
...They all went to fine colleges...
...Other gods" are anything outside of God, who is regarded as the supreme value...
...that is, Torah learning is supposed to enable the scholar to improve the world...
...brilliant Jewish lawyers for whom law is a game...
...Whether or not my child's school * Peter Merkl, Political Violence under the Swastika (Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1975), p. 503...
...As a child studying in a yeshivah, I learned that derech eretz kadmah ITorah (proper behavior comes before Torah...
...in reality, I saw that scholarship was frequently more revered than simple kindness...
...To make a living and get ahead, education is important...
...A professor is not one iota more likely to be a kind person than a third baseman...
...Everything else is to be a means to God and God's ethical will...
...The Reason For Anti-semitism (Touchstone, 1985...
...Torah learning—scholarship—should be for the sake of elevating a Jew's soul and character...
...is no more likely to be a decent human being than someone with a high school diploma...
...It is primarily for this reason that I am so partial to religious schooling for Jews and Christians...
...The universities of Germany were replete with Nazi sympathizers among both students and faculty...
...In the 20th century, higher education has often meant a particular attraction to evil doctrines...
...While I want my children to learn math and history, I want them first to study religious moral values and to spend their days in a Jewish environment...
...Nevertheless, at least the religious attach learning to God...
...Hoboken: KTAV, 1977), p. 17...
...And blacks at prestigious American universities are more likely to be anti-Semitic, and anti-white, than blacks who never attended college...
...Professor Peter Merkl of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who studied 581 Nazis, found that Germans with a high school education "or even university study" were more likely to be anti-Semitic than those with less education.* Similarly, a study of the make-up of 24 leaders of Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that killed nearly two million Jews prior to the use of the gas chambers, showed that the great majority were highly educated professionals: "One of the most striking things about the Einsatzgruppen leadership makeup is the prevalence of educated people, professionals, especially lawyers, Ph.D.'s...
...has good chemistry labs is much less important to me than whether it has my religious values...
...If Jews understood that people are not basically good—as I explained in my February column—they would be particularly opposed to value-free education...
...The result of making education a supreme value rather than a means to a supreme value is that there is no longer any correlation between education and goodness...
...This should come as sobering news to the tremendous number of parents who view education as the most important value in their children's lives...
...and brilliant Jewish professors who despise everything Jewish...
...Until then, we will have to live with the consequences of worshiping the god of education—brilliant Jewish students who cheat on exams...
...Scholars increase peace in the world," we say in synagogue on Shabbat...
...Unfortunately, scholarship has often been turned into learning for its own sake, not to improve the world but to avoid it...
...Other gods" are any thing, any value that a person lives for that is divorced from God...
...SinceJanuary 1985 Dermis Prager has been writing and publishing Ultimate Issues, his quarterly journal on personal, political and religious issues...
...Of course there are many fine, highly moral academics and other well-educated people...
...This saying cannot refer only to the idolatry of worshiping physical objects, however: If the Talmud were referring only to the worship of physical objects, every Jew in the last 2,000 years would have fulfilled the whole Torah...
...This is not a new problem...
...In either case, it is disassociated from Judaism's ideal of education in service of God and goodness...
...Two religious movements, the chasidic (charismatic) and the musar (ethical), were in large part reactions against the disproportionate stress on learning in Jewish life...
...It is an end in itself...
...Idolatry is the worship of anything other than God—in Hebrew, elohim acherim, literally "other gods...
...The Jewish preoccupation with Harvard, Stanford and other elite colleges is either a worship of prestige and success or a worship of education...
...It is a supreme value, utterly divorced from God...
...brilliant Jews on Wall Street who live for the bottom line...

Vol. 15 • June 1990 • No. 3


 
Developed by
Kanda Sofware
  Kanda Software, Inc.