The importance of Education

As we are about to start the new school year and it being Erev Shabbos I thought I would post so words of Torah on the importance of education. This is taken from the "Diary of a Chief Rabbi" by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.
Shabbat Shalom and see Y'all next Week

Rabbi Greenblatt

The Real Battleground of Survival is Education
Diary of a Chief Rabbi

I had a lovely experience the other day, opening a new computer centre at one of our Jewish primary schools. It's fascinating to see how children take to the new technology, entranced by its almost magical possibilities. Already they had created a school website to which many of the children had contributed. They understood how it could be accessed by their friends in other schools - even by people halfway across the world.

We are living through a revolution, one of the most profound in history, and our children are the first to enjoy it. There are, of course, great dangers in the Internet and we must guard against them. But there are also huge opportunities and we should understand them. There is a spiritual dimension to communication technology, and even a Hanukkah connection. To understand them we need historical perspective.

The most profound transformations in society take place when there are changes in the way we record and transmit information. We can track one of these through the history of Europe after the invention of printing in the fifteenth century by Johann Gutenberg. The result was a vast democratisation of knowledge which led eventually to the Reformation, the development of science, the birth of the Enlightenment and the emergence of the modern nation state - all made possible by the spread of literacy and the increased availability of books. It was fascinating to see the Sunday Times last week rightly identifying Gutenberg as the man of the millennium.

The first great revolution took place between five and six thousand years ago with the invention of writing - cuneiform in Mesopotamia, hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. To that moment we can date the birth of civilisation. For the first time knowledge became cumulative. One generation could hand on its wisdom to the next. People were no longer limited by memory alone. The start of written records was an axial moment in the history of mankind.

But it was the second revolution, some two thousand years later, that had truly epoch-making significance, namely the invention of the alphabet in Canaan at around the time of the patriarchs. Both cuneiform and hieroglyphics involved too many characters to be mastered by more than a small section of the population. Mesopotamia and Egypt were hierarchical societies and could not have been otherwise. The vast majority of people, unable to read or write, had no chance of reaching their full potential as human beings. They were a workforce, nothing more or less, often employed by rulers as forced labour for grandiose building projects such as the Babylonian ziggurats and the Egyptian temples and pyramids. The Torah contains scathing critiques of both in its narratives, of the Tower of Babel and the enslavement of the Israelites in Egypt.

We do not know who first invented the alphabet. It may have been the Phoenicians, the Canaanites, or one of several other peoples who occupied the narrow strip of land that is today the State of Israel. But this we know: that the first alphabets were semitic. Indeed the word alphabet itself derives ultimately from the first two letters of the Hebrew script, aleph and bet.

There can be no doubt that our ancestors were the first to fully understand the radical implications of the new technology. An alphabet that involves a symbol set of a mere twenty-two letters can be mastered by everyone. For the first time the prospect opened up of a truly egalitarian society, one in which every human individual could reach his or her true potential through direct access to knowledge. The prophet Isaiah put it beautifully: "And all your children shall be learned of God, and great shall be the peace of your children." The birth of the book gave rise to the people of the Book.

Judaism became the first - and still the greatest - civilisation predicated on education, study and the life of the mind. Which takes us to Hanukkah. The word Hanukkah means "dedication" and refers to the cleansing of the Temple by the Maccabees. But it also derives from the Hebrew word Hinnukh which means "education", and reminds us that one of the results of the Maccabees' victory was an enormous intensification of Jewish learning, culminating in the world's first system of universal schooling. The encounter with Greek culture taught Jews the vital lesson that the real battleground of Jewish survival was not military but educational. That was the only way they would resist assimilation. It still is.

The rededication of the Temple lasted not much more than two centuries. It was then destroyed by the Romans and has still not yet been rebuilt. But the rededication of the Jewish people, through education, Jewish schools and a life of learning has lasted from that day to this. The ultimate lesson of Hanukkah, as it is of Judaism as a whole, is this. Military victories are temporary. Spiritual victories are not. It takes an army to defend a country. But it takes schools to defend an identity. Jews eventually lost their country. But they never lost their knowledge of who they were and why. That is how they were able to survive two thousand years of exile and eventually return and rebuild our land.

On Hanukkah our ancestors dedicated a building, but they did more. They dedicated a hundred generations of Jewish children through Hinnukh, Jewish education. "Call them not your children but your builders," said the sages - reminding us that we should care more about builders than buildings. In the past few days, opening a new Jewish primary school in Pinner and a new computer centre in a Jewish school in Southgate, I saw the builders of our future and knew that the Hannukah lights in Anglo-Jewry will continue to burn, and grow.

Published in London Jewish News & Jewish Telegraph December 1999