I don't think you're going to guess where this posting is going from the title, but hey, it's early in the morning and I needed to get your attention somehow.
Our local paper has a regular daily feature entitled "Today in History." They give you all kinds of historical facts that you may never have known or certainly forgotten by now. July 24 was an interesting date in history. Did you know that in 1929, on this date, President Hoover proclaimed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced war as an instrument of foreign policy? Strange--does the Bush Administration know about this? In 1866, Tennessee became the first state to be readmitted to the Union after the Civil War, thus beginning the healing of the great breach.
But what prompted this posting is a section of the "Today in History" feature that is called "Today's Birthdays." Of the 16 people chosen to be important enough to have their birthdays mentioned, 15 are actors, directors or singers; the sixteenth person is one Mark Racicot. Know who he is? Come on, give a guess. Give up? He is the former Republican national chairman. All 16 people are still among the living.
Okay, someone tell me why, with the plethora of people, living and dead, who have made great contributions to this country, the only people deemed important enough to have their birthdays noted are basically "Hollywood-ites"? What does that say about the people we venerate in this country? What does this say about us?
Whatever else we do or don't say about the frum Jewish world, we basically have our priorities straight. Those whose birth dates or death dates we remember are/were people of substance, people who contributed to the Jewish nation in some real and fundamental way. Many are/were noted scholars. Many are/were leaders of our people in the finest sense of that word. And many are/were people whose knowledge and skills added not only to the frum world but to the world in general. Frum "heroes" aren't the darlings of the tabloid trade.
Some of our American youngsters would not be able to locate Paris, France on a map, but they sure know who Paris Hilton is. That is a sad postscript on American education and American values. At least when it comes to the "heroes" we frum Jews venerate, they are something more than a (maybe) pretty face or a buff body. It's nice to know we are doing something right.
12 comments:
On the first day of class in the history classes I teach in high school I gave my students a list of names to go home and do some brief research on so they could identify the people and their major contributions. I got all kinds of complaints--These are old, dead people being the major one. Add in "white" and you got the full complaint. So I immediately replaced that list with one of younger & older, living, mixed race people. Know what? The complaints were the same. So I immediately took out a list that had only young "personalities" on it and everyone had the list completed in about 5 minutes in class. Between Brad and Warren Buffett, between Brittany and Bill Gates, everyone knew about the former and few about the latter.
Yes, frum Jews know about our famous people of history for the most part, but those who are American don't know much more about the famous people of American history then the rest of the Americans do. Even yeshiva kids on the right know the name Brad Pitt, and have no idea who Jonas Salk was.
Why worry about their finding Paris on a map? Some of them can't find NY or NJ on a map and they live there. Kids today have no sense of geography. My daughter's teacher was discussing current events with the class and realized that the kids didn't really know where Iraq was. A few said that it was near Iran but they didn't know where Iran was either. It's in the middle east was the closest a few kids came.
I went out and bought a world map and put it up in the kitchen. Locating countries is now part of meal time in our house.
Yeshiva kids collect Rebbi cards. Some of them also collect baseball cards. Secular kids only collect baseball cards, no rebbi cards. Being frum expands who you have to look up to and I'd agree that it probably offers 'better' choices of who to turn into a hero.
years ago we used to claim as our own any Jews who contributed something worthwhile to society. So Einstein was one of ours. It seems to me though that the trend, certainly on the right, is to separate out Jews from religious Jews and to teach our kids only about the religious Jews. Could be why yeshiva kids don't know who Jonas Salk was--Jewish but not frum. Okay, that is still marginally better then having kids who think that actors are people they should idolize, but a whole lot of people get left out in that space between Brad Pitt and Rabbi Akiva.
Amen, Sara.
"At least when it comes to the "heroes" we frum Jews venerate, they are something more than a (maybe) pretty face or a buff body. It's nice to know we are doing something right."
Some Americans even elect their leaders based on a "pretty face or a buff body"! Sad.
Mark
Sara, you are so right. I once compiled a list of famous Jewish people that I wanted to include in teaching a junior high history class in a yeshiva. The list was based on accomplishment not level of frumkeit. I gave out the list without asking anyone if I could do it and I almost started a world war. By the time the limudei kodesh principals finished removing those people who they objected to there was virtually no one left on the list.
I wish these schools would understand that Jewish and frum are not the same word. You first have to be Jewish in order to get to frumkeit. You don't have to be frum in order to be Jewish.
By the way, thanks to the list's basically being banned, when I asked the students if they could name a famous Jewish scientist/doctor, the answer I got was the Rambam. It seemed that he was the only one they had ever heard of.
make knowing about "good" famous people in America and the rest of the world a profitable venture and more people might find out about them. When we were kids Topps packaged baseball cards in a bubble gum package. Everyone bought the gum and collected and traded the cards. Substitute people who actually did something useful and worthwhile for those players and you might spread the word that there is something in life besides sports and movie actors.
As long as we make knowing things a nerdy/geeky thing to do we're going to have people who worship public personalities whose biceps' sizes and bust sizes are larger then their IQs.
Yes, the frum people we teach our kids about are worthwhile knowing about, but they are not the only worthwhile people to know about.
"President Hoover proclaimed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced war as an instrument of foreign policy? Strange--does the Bush Administration know about this?"
I hope you realize the Kellog-Briand pact was made official before WWII. Following your logic, nations of the world should've just kept appeasing Hitler and Mousalini inorder to avoid war. Now imagine what the world would be like today if we continued to pave the road for Italy ang Germany's power hunger.
I hope you're not suggesting that a pact broken by the 65 nations who signed it should still be kept today. On top of that the pact itself was a meaningless gesture to promote peace (after the Great War).
Rather than putting President Bush down you should be thankful that he actually knows his history and learns from it, otherwise we'd be giving in to modern day Nazis, Muslim radicals.
Lady e, the Kellogg-Briand Pact did not abolish going to war, it said that war was not an acceptable instrument of foreign policy, and that war should be a last resort, not a first option. No one argues that WWII was required given the Nazis. And the war accomplished its mission of stopping the German/Fascist juggernaut. Now just what is it that the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars were begun for? What have they accomplished? See any end in sight? Ever wonder why the things so obvious to many of the military leaders over there seem to escape the leadership over here?
Fortunately in the US you can't be squirreled away to some detention camp if you say you think the President is inept and incompetent. He is not a student of history, nor a student of anything much else. He can't get an English sentence out of his mouth without mangling it. His idea of diplomacy is to rub the back of a foreign prime minister in public. But hey, he sure knows how to screw us while making sure his friends get all the cream they can. Talk about having elected a pretty face with a void in the brain department. Dubya is one president I have no interest in knowing the birthday of in future years.
"Now just what is it that the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars were begun for?"
michelle: are you serious? Does the date sep 11th ring a bell? Ya know the day 2 big buildings, aka twin towers or world trade center, had a little collision and went KABOOM! I don't suppose you remember. As far as i'm concerned supporters of terrorists and terrorists themselves deserve to be watched so that thousands of lives are not lost! Seems kinda obvious to me.
Lady E, apparently the sarcasm didn't come across in the "Now just what is it that the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars were begun for?" But if I take your statement correctly "As far as i'm concerned supporters of terrorists and terrorists themselves deserve to be watched so that thousands of lives are not lost!" coming in the context of using war as diplomacy, then the US should, by all rights, be at war with at least 2 dozen countries right now, if not more. If the purpose of war in Iraq is to watch and observe terrorists then why aren't we at war with, at a minimum, Libya, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, and at least part of Pakistan. We know that terrorists are functioning all over Europe and in some cases getting aid and succor from our allies, so maybe we need to go to war with France also. Right now the war in Iraq is functioning just about as well as the Vietnam war did.
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