preparing children for spirituality

INSIGHTS FROM PRACTICE

Mary HessAssociate Editor

Preparing Children for SpiritualityLaurence Scheindlin

The Warwick RE Project: An Interpretive Approachto Religious Education

Robert Jackson

Choosing a Religious Secondary School: Parental ConsiderationsDavid Taub and Mati Ronen

PREPARING CHILDREN FOR SPIRITUALITY

Laurence ScheindlinSinai Akiba Academy

Abstract

The development of a rich inner life is a prerequisite for spirituality.There are things we can do with elementary-age children to pre-pare them for adult spiritual life. First, we need to help them valuetheir inner lives. We need to build on children's early experiences ofwonder. We need to help them develop a language for articulatingfeelings. We need to determine whether we can foster spiritual ex-periences among school-age children. And we need to develop chil-dren's aesthetic and interpersonal sensitivity. This essay focuses onthe first four of these objectives in order to provide a framework forpractical efforts in the classroom.

Working at cross-purposes with parents brings no satisfaction toany educator. Although this unfortunate reality has in the past been astaple of Jewish religious education, in recent years we have begun tohear many parents—religiously observant and not—talk about theimportance of spirituality.

I believe that this is more than California guru-ism. These parentsoften evince both serious-mindedness and thoughtfulness. Sometimesthey use the word spirituality, and sometimes they don't. Sometimesthey talk about "values" in the unfocused way that has been popular-ized in the last few years. Sometimes they point to situations towardwhich they would like to see their children develop sensitivity. Some-times they just seem particularly responsive to school activities thatI view as being in the domain of the spiritual. I therefore think wehave an opportunity that previous generations of American Jewisheducators did not have.

When I think of my formative spiritual experiences, I invariablythink of Rosh Chodesh bentshn (the prayer for the new month) as itwas sung by the cantor of my teenage years. This and similar experi-

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LAURENCE SCHEINDLIN 191

ences nurtured a sense that, despite the audacious artificiality ofmany American synagogues, in shul (synagogue) more than anywhereelse I was somehow closer to the things that really underpinned hie—at least, in the right shul. Once I had absorbed that experience in theright shul, so long as I had a siddur in my hand I was still in its pres-ence, even when I was in the wrong shul.

My experience was not unique. I believe that many who receivedtheir religious initiation, as I did, in American Jewish summer campsand youth groups recall that these environments opened a door ofinner experience. Speaking from a personal and subjective perspec-tive, it •seems that if we can find ways to touch the inner lives of ourstudents, we may open for them the door to a kind of thinking andfeeling that will persist.

In an essay in one of the Melton Institute's curriculum publica-tions on prayer, Burt Jacobson approvingly quotes a selection by EdithHunter, a Protestant religious educator who lived in the earlier part ofthis century.

A group of children once walked into a room where a meet-ing was to take place. It was an early spring morning, and an enor-mous vase of lilacs had been placed on a table at the front of theroom. The children entered, it was apparent, with eyes that did notsee the lilacs, and with noses that did not smell them.

The adult in charge, noticing these, said, "Did you realize thatthe lilacs opened this week? Have you stopped and really looked atthem? Have you taken a deep, deep smell of them?" She walked overand inhaled their fragrance deeply.

"Did you ever stop to think that you can only see the lilacs openabout seventy-five times in your whole life? You have only one chancea year. I have already used up quite a few of my chances."

The effect of the few remarks on the group was startling. Manyof the children spontaneously came forward to see and smell thelilacs. They acted as though they truly felt that here was somethingthat they had better not miss. (Hunter 1956,47-48)

Jacobson comments that "for a moment a window was opened forthese youngsters by a sensitive teacher."

I cite this example because this teacher accomplished at least twoof the things I believe are necessary to prepare children for spiritualexperiences. These are the things I want to focus on:

First and foremost, we must help children value their inner lives.Second, we need to build on children's curiosity and their early ex-

periences of wonder.

192 PREPARING CHILDREN FOR SPIRITUALITY

Third, we need to help children develop a language for articulat-ing feelings.

Fourth and fifth, we need to develop children's' aesthetic sensi-tivity and interpersonal sensitivity.

— •*- —

These seem to me necessary steps in preparing children forspirituality, whether or not one believes that fully developed spiritualexperiences are accessible to children. In general, Jewish religiondoes not emphasize personal experience, and, in Jewish education,this seems to be supported by a general assumption that young chil-dren do not have profound religious experience. Yet there is evidenceto the contrary. In his book Solitude, the psychoanalyst Anthony Storrpoints out that many creative adults have provided accounts of numi-nous childhood experiences (1988,17). For example, he tells of some-one who wrote of a time when as a child in an outdoor, pastoralsetting, he "felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by thatname. I had no need for words. It and I were one." A number of un-related studies support Storr's contention, concluding that many chil-dren reported "personal experiences of the immediate presence ofGod" (Havighurst and Keating 1971,692, who summarize three stud-ies; see also Laski 1963, cited favorably by Storr; see also Greenacre1956). When Edward Robinson analyzed responses to Alister Hardy'sinvitation to write about individual experiences, which asked personsif they had ever "felt that their lives have in any way been affected bysome power beyond themselves," he discovered that 600 of the 4,000responses—15 percent—referred to childhood experiences (Robin-son 1977).

Certainly this data raises questions of definition; for example, whatdoes "immediate presence" mean to the people who reported theseexperiences? We can be sure that many different registers of expe-rience are alluded to. Nevertheless, the above offers prima facie evi-dence of activity often thought to be beyond children. This havingbeen said, it can confidently be asserted'that if these findings wereof surprise to others, they would be disconcerting to many Jews, whoare uncomfortable discussing personal experiences with the divinity.This discomfort, founded as it is on theological grounds, results in anunfortunate impoverishment of accessible role models for religiouslymotivated inwardness.

LAURENCE SCHEINDL1N 193

We therefore need to talk explicitly about what we can do to pre-pare elementary children for spiritual experiences, if not in childhoodthen in adulthood. The five points to which this essay is devoted arenecessary steps along the way of developing the necessary sensitivities.

— •#• —

The teacher described in the above episode managed to accom-plish at least the first two points. It is true that some of the conceptsshe used might have been difficult for these (apparently) young chil-dren. Yet Jacobson does seem to believe that this lesson gave thechildren an opportunity to glimpse some important things. He doesnot spell them out, but they seem to include the beauty of the lilacs;the regularity and consistency of nature; and something almost inde-finable about the transitoriness of life (the flowers die, my teacher istalking about dying). More than that, their teacher, whom they seemto have cared for, also let them glimpse her feelings in the face of thesefacts of life: how precious she found the blossoming of flowers; thecalm, tinged with sadness, with which she could speak of life's transi-toriness.

Above all, I think it was the exposure of her feelings which madethis simple lesson successful. By encouraging them to value the expe-rience of the world around them in such a concrete activity as smell-ing flowers, this teacher indirectly encouraged her children to begintaking their inner lives seriously.

Valuing the inner life is what Robert Henri (1923, 79), an Ameri-can artist who died in 1929, described:

The art student that should be, and is so rare, is the one whoselife is spent in the love and culture of his personal sensations, thecherishing of his emotions, never undervaluing them, the pleasure ofexclaiming them to others, and an eager search for their clearest ex-pression.

I quote this not because it describes spiritual experience, but be-cause it offers an apt description of what is necessary in order to ini-tiate the development of spirituality in our children. I do not mean toequate the inner life with spirituality, but only to say that a rich innerlife is an absolute prerequisite for spirituality.

Spirituality entails reaching from inside oneself to something tran-scendent. The inner life is, therefore, a necessary but not sufficientcondition for spirituality. Henri's statement outlines the elements of


developing an inner life: In order to introduce children to the spiritualworld we need to help them first to cherish their emotions, to valuethem, to take pleasure in searching for how to express them. Lest I bemisunderstood, I feel compelled to state that I am riot suggesting thatwe become amateur psychologists, with children delving into thesources of their psychological makeup. The point is rather that chil-dren should learn to identify and appreciate their emotional responsesto the physical and social world in ways that I will try to point to below.

From the perspective of spirituality, the inner life becomes valu-able as it establishes connections with the surrounding world. Thisbrings me to the second step—building on children's curiosity andearly experiences of wonder. This is more than a matter of effectiveteaching techniques or learning by discovery. Curiosity is essential tothat sensitivity which is a prerequisite for adult religious experience; itis a stepping stone to yirat shamayim (fear of heaven), which, as Hes-chel says, "in Judaism . . . is almost equivalent to the word 'religion'"(1959,77).

The senses of awe, mystery, and wonder are, obviously, complexemotional responses to a complex universe. Understanding theseemotions is elusive even to us—adults and religious educators. How-ever, since spiritual awe (yirat shamayim) is a complex emotional ex-perience, it must be preceded by simpler emotions from the samefamily of feelings. Anyone who experiences awe must already have ex-perienced the more common feelings we know as amazement, curi-osity, and wonder: I mean the genuine childlike variety of amazementat unusual objects or events; simple curiosity at how things work; andwonder, in the way that children express a delightful combinationof confusion and pleasure toward things they do not understand butwhich they enjoy.

Our children can and do experience curiosity, amazement, andwonder. We need to structure learning opportunities in which theseemotions may arise. This is not terribly difficult in and of itself, espe-cially in science and nature study. The key, I think, is what we do whenthese emotions arise.


This brings me to my third point. Our children need to hear avocabulary that describes emotional experience. And they need todevelop and use a language for describing their own emotional ex-perience.

I am not talking about heavy-handed, reverential directives fromthe teacher about how amazing nature is. What I have in mind isthe use of lessons in natural phenomena as opportunities to encour-age students to explore their emotional reactions—be they surprise,amazement, curiosity, boredom, disgust, or whatever. This can happenin social-studies instruction, literature-based reading programs, aswell as in study of prayer or Bible. Instruction needs to acknowledgeand explore students' emotional responses, just as students exploreand analyze texts. Students need to identify simple emotions, to com-pare and contrast them, and to think about other events which stirredsimilar feelings, in order to get to understand and discriminate be-tween one feeling or reaction and another. Students need to discussand write about their inner experience, and as they develop a languagefor expressing their inner experience come to realize that that experi-ence is worthy of attention and nurture.

Entering into a great writer's descriptions expands our capacity toexperience. Good literature makes inner experiences available to usby giving us a language which richly describes that experience (Peters1972; Hepburn 1972). This is one reason why carefully chosen storiescan be such important tools in enabling children to develop sensitivity.

At this point I want to give an example of how a text lesson can helpstudents explore emotional responses and develop a language for innerexperience. I will use the teaching of a prayer, in this case the blessing"who welcomes repentance" (harotzebitshuva) from the daily amida:

Our Father, bring us back to Your Torah;Our King, draw us near to Your service;Lead us back, truly repentant before You.Praised are You, O Lord, who welcomes repentance.

I might start the lesson with a story which has a thematic connec-tion with the prayer, such as "The Offspring's Answer" or 'The RoosterWho Would Be King" from Pennina Schram's wonderful collection ofJewish stories (1987, 451-56; 291-96), and then move back to the


prayer itself. I would ask the students to think of a time when they didsomething really bad. "You knew you'd done something really wrong.Your parents were really upset." Then I would ask:

What did that feel like?

What did you want your parents to do? ("Not be angry" or "accept myapology" are the usual answers.)

What did you want your parents not to do? (Punish me.)

At that moment, how did you feel toward your parents? (Typical answersare "angry," or "I felt stupid.")

Did you feel close to your parents at that moment or did you feel likethey were distant? (Let kids talk about that. Sometimes children talkabout feeling surprisingly close; sometimes about feeling the opposite;sometimes about wanting to bridge the gap.)

How did it end? Were you punished? Did you apologize? Was it ac-cepted?

When it was all over what did you do? What did your parents do? (Usu-ally there is talk of some hugging and kissing.)

How did you feel then? (What usually comes out is kids describing acombination of feeling a little sad and a little happy, an absence of ten-sion, and ease with parents again.)

I can then say: "Doesn't that feel like a magical moment—when you'renot angry and they're not? And you feel close to each other again?That's part of what's involved in repentance—it's a little magical."

With upper elementary students I would then take this a step fur-ther: 'The person who wrote this prayer is about to say Tm sorry' or istrying to say 'I'm sorry.' Let's see how he feels: close or distant."

What words in the prayer have to do with distance or closeness? (Bringus back, draw us near, lead us back.)

So where does the person who wrote the prayer feel he is right now?Close or distant? (Since he wants to get close, he must start out feelingdistant. Or he feels close, but wants to get closer.)

What does he want? (To get close to God, Torah.)

What do you think might causeWhat might he have done? Did he

How do you think he was feeling?

What do you think might cause someone to write a prayer like this?What might he have done? Did he do anything serious?

LAUBENCE SCHEINDLIN 197

Do you think he got what he wanted? (That is, for God to welcome hisrepentance.)

This shifts the focus from intellectual analysis of the meaningof the text to its emotional content. The focus is on helping kids de-fine some of their feelings, to compare them, to see what makes themarise, and to find words for them. We can then go on to analyze thetext, break it up into its component parts, compare the verbs andnouns, discuss historical background, and so on.

Perhaps the best introduction to my fourth point—developingaesthetic sensitivity as an entree to spiritual sensitivity—is a furtherquotation from Robert Henri:

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when weseem to see beyond the usual—become clairvoyant. We reach theninto reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Suchare the moments of our greatest wisdom. . . . Few are capable ofholding themselves in [this] state of listening to their own song....Yet we live in the memory of these songs... and it is the desire to ex-press these intimate sensations, this song from within, which moti-vates the masters of all art. (1923,44-45)

Henri's vocabulary is useful. Initiating students into spiritualitymeans creating the conditions in which they may experience momentsof seeing beyond the usual and reaching into reality, moments whichare accompanied by happiness and a sense of wisdom.

One of the roles of ritual is to create these same conditions. This isin part the reason Judaism insists on regular observance of ritual.Poetry, good music, and art can be explored in school not just as occa-sional ways to enhance a school service, but as ways of providing entryto the inner life and of reaching beyond the self. Using elements fromthe arts to help create such an environment may, if only becauseof time constraints, limit the number of prayers which we can recitewith children in school each morning. While such a limitation may notprepare children for traditional Jewish reality—daily prayer is repeti-tive and potentially monotonous—school may not be die best place toengage this particular struggle.

Instruction in the arts offers an opportunity for children to de-velop the sensitivities necessary to spirituality. Even in secular schoolsart instruction often does not go far beyond the technical aspects of


performance. It is for the worse that Jewish day schools often giveshort shrift to the arts, and that aesthetic sensitivity is in such shortsupply in Jewish educational and even synagogue circles. Heschel,after all, was exploring the sources of spirituality when he wrote,"The perception of beauty may be the beginning of the experience ofthe sublime [and] . . . the sense of the sublime must be regardedas the root of man's creative activities in art, thought, and noble living"(1959,37).

Since spirituality is an act of reaching beyond the self, it is self-evident that one of our jobs in attempting to teach kedushah (holi-ness) is to exhibit it in interpersonal relations with our students andwith each other. Developing interpersonal sensitivity is, therefore, anadditional necessary step. Exhibiting holiness in our school relationsdoes not translate into looking lovingly into each others' eyes andhugging while singing eliyahu hanavi, or having children write sen-tence completions such as: "I think Mikey is special because . . ." Itdoes translate into the practical interchanges which take place every-day in classrooms and school offices. This is an area in which, Ibelieve, Jewish day schools as a group already excel. How to get thisto happen routinely at the board level is a relevant question, whichrequires study in its own right.

Exhibiting holiness in our relationships in school entails more thanfairness and even more than kindness. It means making the attempt toreach beyond the self, to understand what is important to the otherperson, and to act with concern for that. As Max Kadushin used thecoinage "normal mysticism" as a description of the spiritual posture ofJewish prayer, so we might speak of "normal holiness" as the posturewe hope to achieve in everyday life in school.

Acting with concern denotes sensitivity but does not discounttoughness, in appropriate measure, from teacher to student and fromadministrator to teacher. Holding others accountable to high butachievable standards is often an act of concern, as is the attempt torecognize students' and teachers' potentials, interests, and desires forpersonal growth.

Schools often focus on correcting deficiencies of children who are"at risk." But it is as important to look routinely, as Howard Gardnerhas said, for children "at promise"—actively seeking to identify a


child's unique strengths and talents, and trying to build on them.These are subtle issues, and difficult to act upon successfully, but eventhe attempt to achieve these goals can help create an atmosphere ofeveryday kedushah.

— •«•. —

I start from the assumption that the experience of the sublimeis an essential element of Jewish religious life, and one for whichwe need to prepare our students. I am not convinced that even ourelementary-school students are incapable of such awareness.

In order to foster this type of experience we need to develop sensi-tivity in the ways I have described. By bringing together a growingself-awareness of children's emotional responses, by using evocativestories, and by planning evocative activities we can create an environ-ment conducive to spiritual experience, at least for some children. Inthis context, simple relaxation techniques can be legitimate tools inhelping children gain access to their feelings, no matter whether theimmediate content of the lesson is science, art, or literature, secularor religious. Likewise, basic meditation techniques can help create amental state conducive to prayer. We should also consider the possibleuses of quiet to encourage this type of sensitivity, which as Storr hassaid "requires time, passivity, and preferably solitude" (1988,26).

Much of Jewish education, especially in afternoon Hebrew schools,is designed to market religion, rather than to promote a religiousunderstanding of life. The worthy goals often are to make sure thatkids grow up with strong Jewish identities so that they will remainJews, identify with Israel, join synagogues, be able to participate inritual, and read Hebrew.

But the Jewish day school is uniquely able to teach Judaism as away of understanding life. Without self-promotion we can let thoselessons work on the child's growing capacity to comprehend the world.Doing this will most effectively ensure that Judaism will be truly alivewithin them, and that they will want to live as Jews.

As I reflect on my own growing-up, and realize to what extent myfirst spiritual experiences have remained the basis for my more de-veloped experiences, I realize how important our efforts are with ourstudents. Just as the experience of listening to the prayer for the newmonth will always remain for me a paradigm of spiritual experience,we stand a chance of serving in that role for our students. I hope that


I am right. If I am, then with thought and effort on our parts our stu-dents can have before them in the words of the prayer for the newmonth, a life filled with awe of Heaven and fear of sin.

Laurence Scheindlin is headmaster of Sinai Akiba Academy in Los Angeles.

REFERENCESDeardon, R. E, ed. 1972. Education and reason. Vol. 3. London: Roudedge and Kegan.Greenacre, P. 1956. Experiences of awe in childhood. Pp. 9-30 in Psychoanalytic study of

the child, vol. 2. New York: International University Press.Havighust, R., and Barry Keating. 1971. The religion of youth. Pp. 686-723 in Research

on religious development, edited by M. Strommen. New York: Hawthorn Books.Henri, R. 1923. The art spirit. New York: Harper and Row.Hepburn, R. W. 1972. The arts and the education of feeling and emotion. Pp. 94-110 in

Deardon 1972.Heschel, A. J. 1959. God in search of man. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.Hunter, E. 1956. Conversations with children. New York: Beacon Press. Quoted in B. Ja-

cobson, Teaching the traditional liturgy (New York: Melton Research Institute, 1971).Laski, M. 1963. Ecstasy. London: Cresset Press.Peters, R. E 1972. The education of the emotions. Pp. 76-93 in Deardon 1972.Robinson, E. 1977. The original vision: A study of the religious experience of childhood.

Oxford: Manchester College. Quoted in J. Berryman, Teaching as presence, ReligiousEducation 85 (fall 1990): 510-11.

Schram, P. 1987. Jewish stories one generation tells another. Northvale, N.J.: JasonArsonson.

Storr, A. 1988. Solitude. New York: Ballantine.

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