Our fourth and final installment of our Eli Talks summer series. It’s been a great partnership!
This piece is in a way the lightest of the four, and in another way completely radical and riveting. I have been thinking about its message since viewing it back in May (ages ago).
Eli Talks’ director Miriam Brosseau says:
For a long time this was the most-viewed talk in the ELI catalog, and with good reason. Sam Glassenberg is an engaging, enthusiastic guy with a solid idea and a cute kid. But it wasn’t just that. This is a talk that ruffled a few feathers. (Here’s one response. And here’s one more.)
The heart of the argument was often this question: should Jewish life be a for-profit venture?
Oscar Wilde has a great quote, “Nowadays people know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” What is the relationship between cost and value? How should that relationship play out when we’re talking about something as important as Jewish continuity, or Jewish education? And ultimately how sustainable is either the non-profit or the for-profit approach? (For more on the “cost of free,” check out this talk by Dr. David Bryfman.)
For me, this is a question that comes down to lining up your strategy and your goals. What do we want to accomplish, and how can we be true to who we are and stick to the principles that guide us along the way? Whichever path we take – whether for-profit, non-profit, or something else completely – we need to ask and honestly answer: does the method fit the message?
OOTOB’s Ruchi Koval says:
There’s a long-standing debate in modern Jewish education: should we charge fees for Jewish education, or pay kids to learn?
Your instinctive response might be emotionally driven, so take a sec here and think this through. Traditional day school costs money, while supplemental education is usually also rewarded with college credits or other incentives.
If the most important goal is to get our kids to love learning (see Judaism, Unbearable Lightness) then shamelessly bribing them to motivate that initial foray is an awesome idea. But why does it feel somewhat slimy to pay kids to learn Torah?
People usually value things they have paid for, as opposed to things they get for free. Personal investment and all that. But why does it feel ethically wrong to charge money to learn Torah?
So we’re stuck between a rock and hard place, both ethically, and in terms of evidence-based success.
This talk touches briefly on that theme. It brashly challenges standard trends in education. Tell me what you think.
"But why does it feel somewhat slimy to pay kids to learn Torah?" Isn't it the whole difference between an emotional involvement and a professional one? We expect financial gratification from tasks we accomplish as a job, but not for passions.
So it seems normal to remunerate someone who learns Torah as a job (say, a rabbi – because it's his profession, and his knowledge is profitable to the community), but if you want your kids to love Torah – and that's the way you expressed it – then by definition it excludes financial gain. Would it come to your mind to expect pay for loving your kids? Or would you pay a young man to date the woman you want him to marry?
What about motivating your kids to do other things, like chores, summer homework?
It's fine to pay kids to motivate them to do chores like that, in my opinion (though maybe not the homework). But if you pay them to study Torah, it makes Torah (and by extension all learning) into a chore! And then once they leave home and don't have the incentive anymore, will they return of their own accord?
I suppose you could make that argument with anything you motivate kids to do when they are younger. The idea is that as they get older, they recognize its inherent value on their own.
1. On this sort of money vs. value thing I really have to defer to Marx (family name originally "Mordecai", btw). We live in a world where money becomes the universal medium of exchange and has the capacity to turn things into their opposite–a weak person is strong if s/he has money; an unattractive person is attractive if s/he has money, etc. Money even gets mixed up with values, which would seem to be another realm from money but isn't–which seems to be this speaker's point. You can make money AND spread/teach Jewishness, and he actually tries to honor the difference between money-value and Jewish-value but also points to how if we can get them to converge everyone "wins".
But it feels weird to not keep values "pure" and distinct from money. But in a capitalist world, is that even possible?
2. This speaker cares about design and applying it to Jewish stuff. Good. The Jewish-design world seems, from my small exposure, to be REALLY lacking in artistry and good design. The illustrations in every Jewish book, Haggadah, kids' Jewish object, and so on are all DORKY to the extreme and totally uninspiring and unattractive. I'm embarrassed by the dorky, cheap Jewish kids' paraphernalia. There are some extremely cool Menorah designs out there, however. But what is with the cheesy drawings?? It is as if someone said, "this is an educational product, so it should look like textbooks from 1957". Corny "symbols" of flames, dreidels, and worst of all the people are really badly drawn, just like cheap cut-out figures. Maybe Os have access to better-designed products that I don't know about, or don't have drawings at all because the kids don't get specialized products like Haggadahs?
If there were cool-looking Jewish kids' products, my kids would want them and I would be more likely to buy them. Kids are design-savvy even if they don't know it. They see that those images and designs are weird, nostalgic copies of things from mid 20th-century. Matzo packages are ugly and uninspired and I don't think those designs have changed in decades. There IS design, though, that went into those packages, it's just cheap and bad. I don't get it.
So, Jewish-topic video games would give a little "cool" to Jewish history. I'm fine with that. It's a way in, and the ways in for kids via other Jewish products are terrible. (I realize that for Ruchi and Os the "way in" is not by way of products at all, but if you want to reach out, reach out with something that looks more appealing.)
Just realized I never responded to your thoughtful comment. I agree with you about Jewish kids' stuff being stuck in the middle ages. In Orthodox books, the clothing people wear is super nerdy and not relatable. Part of the issue is that people need these products and even if there's not much edgy competition, they don't have a choice. Kind of like why kosher restaurants, at least in communities with smaller kosher populations, aren't very competitive in terms of ambience and service (the food, interestingly, is usually delicious). And I love what you said about money. I actually think that with tithing and the interest rules and all that, the Torah's balance is really remarkable.