Daniel Marom

The search for excellence in early childhood education that is being undertaken by major institutions in the North American Jewish community is a very encouraging development. This search reflects a commitment to creating a sound basis for a strong and lasting Jewish identity by emphasizing Jewish education at the earliest stages of development. This approach assumes that such an investment is more likely to lead to a lasting Jewish identity than those that meet the learner only in adolescence or adulthood.

It is also the first step in a strategy that seeks to advance the field of early childhood Jewish education as a whole. Having defined excellence, these institutions hope to "bottle and mass produce it" by developing a small number of programs and expanding it from there to programs across North America.

This approach combines the best of elements in North American Jewish life: American pragmatism with Jewish values, philanthropic leadership with professional expertise, planned intervention with a sense of urgency and passion.

Yet, impressive as this approach seems to be, I think it is important to point out one of its stark vulnerabilities: its success depends heavily on the quality of its definition of excellence. If this definition is flawed or misguided, the outcome will be early childhood Jewish education that is not excellent, or even worse, education that leads learners and parents to say "if this is what the Jewish community calls excellence, I must look elsewhere to find a way of living and learning that reaches my own standards."

There are no guaranteed ways of getting around this vulnerability. No matter what one defines as excellence, there can be no advance evidence that certifies it as such and even if there were, the opportunities for distortion in the translation to actual practice are infinite. Many great ideas in education have been undermined by the very people who believed in these ideas and gave their lives to realizing them.

Yet, having no guarantee does not mean that there is nothing we can do to lessen the vulnerability of this approach. In what follows, I want to suggest a number of considerations that can contribute to the development of a more rigorous, and thereby more effective, definition of excellence in early childhood Jewish education.

The first consideration is to ask how early childhood Jewish education came to be in a state of needing massive change. Without this understanding, we might not be sufficiently aware of the obstacles that stand in our way. Our desire to improve the situation might lead us to be unsophisticated about the true nature of the challenge.

The search for excellence in early childhood Jewish education would seem to suggest that it has always been a neglected and underdeveloped field in Jewish life. That is simply not the case. To the contrary, its importance was recognized very early in Jewish history.

Within the central Shema Yisrael section of the Bible is the directive ve-shinantan levanekha (to inculcate the laws of the Torah in children), well known for its pioneering insistence on universal education. Given this early stipulation, it should be no surprise that by the time of the rabbis there were clear laws regarding Jewish education at the earliest years.

We are familiar with the emphasis in the Passover seder on encouraging and responding to children’s questions. There are also lesser-known laws and norms for teaching halakhic practice at the earliest ages, such as the first words that parents should teach their children, the behaviors of community members in the synagogue and on the street in order to present an appropriate model of imitation for toddlers, guidelines for leaving certain questions that children ask unanswered.[1]

These guidelines and laws were developed and debated in Jewish law and lore over centuries. While it is true that a great deal of emphasis has been placed on the elite scholars who emerged from the later stages of Jewish learning, early childhood Jewish education was considered in such detail because the beginning of Jewish learning is aimed at all Jews.[2]

This emphasis on early childhood education did not always dissipate when Jews moved away from Jewish tradition. A case in point is Zionist education. It is hard to underestimate the role of early childhood Jewish education in the Zionist revolution. Without it, the reestablishment of the Hebrew language as a living vernacular would not have happened.

So important was this effort that the greatest intellectual and cultural leaders of Zionism gave much of their energies and talents to it – and this, again, despite the fact that most of them had moved from away from traditional Judaism in their own lives.

The most notable example is the national poet H. N. Bialik, who, at the climax of his career, turned his energies toward the development of Zionist education. His rhymes and legends for very young children are well known and used even today. One very famous example, called na’ad ned ("The Teeter-Totter"), is about teeter tottering between heaven and earth.[3]

Following his lead, some of the Zionist movement's greatest musicians – such as Levin Kipnis – wrote many tunes to songs that are still sung in early childhood programs today. (Naomi Shemer of blessed memory was the latest in this strand of Zionist music educators).[4] Similarly, the movement’s great authors wrote stories for little children. Isaac Schweiger, for instance, wrote Simlat haShabbat shel Hanaleh about a little girl who helps an old coalminer carry his weight just in time for the Sabbath. Shalom Asch's HaTzadik haKafri describes a little country boy who participates in the religious fervor of the Rosh Hashanah services through whistling.

The most important step was to train kindergarten educators to teach Hebrew. This was a massive effort. In the beginning, they were sent to study the ideas and methods of Friedrich Froebel and others in Germany. The works of John Dewey also had a strong impact on kibbutz early childhood education. The initial group of teachers became the models and trainers of many others. Historians such as Shlomo Haramati have studied these wonderful educators and the model programs they developed.[5]

So how did early childhood education fall so low in the priorities of the North American Jewish community? I would argue that there was a conscious decision to relegate the Jewish element to a secondary status in the identity of North American Jews. Jewish children were inducted first and foremost to general society and this orientation remained the central reference for their development through to adulthood.

The role of Jewish education was to maintain an active Jewish element in the learner's identity. The Jewish supplement could be administered in supplementary educational programs given at various stages and settings in the Jewish learner's lifetime - in synagogues, informal educational programs, adult education, and higher education.[6]

Under these conditions, the definition of a good early childhood education became whatever launched the Jewish learner more effectively into the public educational system. "Early childhood Jewish education" gave way to the best early childhood general education that Jews could make available to their children. "Best" was defined based on what North American society at the time embraced, whether it was based on Piagetian development, Bank Street College of Education child-centeredness, the Harvard Project Zero's theory of multiple intelligences, or Italy's Regio Emilia.

Where early childhood Jewish education did continue, it meant adding some Jewish content to these programs, usually emphasizing Jewish holidays, some Hebrew language and a smattering of Jewish lore. This approach continues to govern many programs of early childhood Jewish education.

There were and are exceptions to this trend – particularly among Jews more identified with traditional Judaism or those with rigorous ideologies of liberal Judaism. The day school setting, for instance, expresses the commitments of such Jews to a more comprehensive Jewish education – one that emphasizes general education but incorporates it within a larger Jewish identity.

Yet, it is not always clear whether even these programs differ greatly from what I have suggested is the reigning ideology of North American Jewish education. Often, Jewish parents choose a day school early childhood program for their children because it offers a better general education than other local programs – not necessarily because they are in search of a more comprehensive Jewish identity.

The current desire to enhance early childhood Jewish education will not overcome this problem if it is not accompanied by an explicit and publicly declared decision in favor of the long term goal of establishing a stronger Jewish element in the identity of Jewish learners.

If the search for excellence is not driven by this aim, if it does not advocate for this goal among parents, policymakers and educators, the definition for excellence that will win out is whatever general society and public education define as excellent. We will again be in a self-defeating situation that communicates to the learner that what really counts is what goes on in general society.

Ironically, general society and education are rethinking their own priorities in terms which justify a stronger emphasis on the particular cultural element of learners. This is not only an expression of liberal politics which recognize the rights of cultural groups to a multicultural definition of North American society. It also flows from the recognition that public education has overemphasized the cognitive elements in human identity at the expense of moral, spiritual, aesthetic and social elements. Some current theories of education even emphasize the critical role of culture in cognitive development.[7]

One might argue, then, that these are very opportune times to invest in a Jewishly enhanced early childhood education. What seemed limiting and narrow by past generations might now be encouraged by general society.

Yet, even where an orientation to early childhood Jewish education as a means for strengthening Jewish identity is a given, a second challenge exists for the current search for excellence. The acuteness of this challenge emerged starkly in the findings of Tufts University researches who were commissioned by CAJE to help arrive at a definition of excellence.

The team reported that, although it could identify commitment to the development of Jewish identity as a predominant theme among those involved in leading programs in early childhood education, "very little was said about what Jewish identity might look like."[8] The few comments that were made consisted of slogans – such as feeling positive about being Jewish or being at home with Jewish holidays – but they did not indicate what the actual content of that positive feeling was or what it was about the holidays that the learners would be at home with. Consequently, the report suggests that excellence necessitates being guided by a clear vision of Jewish education:

There is widespread agreement over the importance of Jewish identity, but discussions of early childhood education do not attempt to define it. A clear vision is essential to effective Jewish education. There needs to be a better understanding of what constitutes a Jewish identity if educators are to instill it. American Jewish identity reflects the enormous complexity within American Jewish life. Each early childhood program, therefore, faces the challenge of defining its own vision, and the type of Jewish identity it seeks to cultivate.[9]

This outcome presents a serious challenge because it is very hard to make a deep and lasting Jewish impact on the learner without a clear conception of what it is that makes being Jewish meaningful. The need for a clear guiding philosophical vision of education holds for education at all ages and within all communities, but it is especially true for early childhood because inducting young learners into a culture requires working with the core and foundational elements of that culture to launch the learner on a lifelong process of embodying the culture’s ideals. More than any other stage, early childhood calls the bluff of education that is devoid of a clear vision.

I experienced this challenge, when, after finishing my Ph.D. in education, I decided that it was time for me to try teaching in a kindergarten. The first lesson that I took away from this experience is that it is more complex than any educating I had ever undertaken. So many things were going on at the same time, the children's responses were so hard to read, the pace and rhythm of activities was so intense – it seemed to me harder to be a kindergarten educator than a brain surgeon.

On the other hand, the training course I took for kindergarten educators did not begin to address the complexities of this field at a level equal to the task. I came into the course expecting to do some deep deliberating about how to teach kids about God. What could I do to enable them to understand who God is, to encounter God, to include God in their lives? I myself began looking for an answer by reading the midrashic stories about Abraham's discovery of God in a world where nobody taught him about it.

Instead, what I was given in this course – and what I have been told is characteristic of much early childhood educator training – was a supermarket of activities to do with the children. I could not understand why virtually all of the other participants had brought tape recorders to the course. The leader told us to stand up and arrange ourselves in a circle, to put on wings she had made for the activity, to pretend we were bees swarming around the room, and to sing along with her. She explained simply that this was an activity to do with children on Rosh Hashanah in relation to eating honey and apples.

The other participants, experienced in this kind of training, knew exactly what was happening. After we finished swarming around and singing, they recorded what they experienced in this activity into their tape recorders so they could remember it along with all the other activities they would undergo in the next few hours and use them in their kindergartens. I stood there dumbfounded, asking myself what does this have to do with educating about God?

In response to these kinds of challenges, the Mandel Foundation has initiated a long term project dedicated to the development of alternative visions of Jewish education. This project convened leading scholars in the Jewish world and enabled them to work with each other and with groups of educators in order to develop their visions.

The outcome of this project is a volume entitled Visions of Jewish Education, edited by Seymour Fox, Israel Scheffler and myself, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. Fox founded the initiative on the basis of his many decades of work in the area of educational vision, and I co-directed it with him. We were privileged as well to get the input of Scheffler, who then directed the Philosophy of Education Research Center at Harvard University. Other scholars who participated in the project included the late Isadore Twersky, halakhist and Maimonides scholar, Menachem Brinker, secularist and scholar of modern Hebrew literature, the Biblical scholar and spiritualist Moshe Greenberg, the Reform scholar and historian Michael Meyer, and the philosopher of Jewish education Michael Rosenak, who has focused on community-wide vision.[10]

All of the scholars in the group recognized the significance of early childhood education, and many identified it as a fundamental component in their visions of Jewish education. They agreed that it is indispensable for the development of a strong and lasting Jewish identity, that it is harder to develop such an identity when one begins at later stages, and that any education limited to one stage of development rather than to a process of lifelong learning would be weak in its long-term impact.[11]

Yet the scholars posited very different approaches. I would like to demonstrate this diversity by referring to the visions of Professors Twersky and Meyer. For Twersky, who based his ideas on the philosophy of Maimonides, the defining factor of the educated Jew is halakhic practice infused with deep understanding of the law. When such an education is successful, the learner undertakes each halakhic practice as an expression of the love of God. That is, s/he understands the religious, moral and/or historical purpose of the halakhic practice and undertakes it in a way that enables him/her to attain that purpose.[12]

One might imagine two situations to clarify this ideal. The first is one we all know, that of teaching children to wash their hands properly after having been in the bathroom. Because they don’t understand the relationship of this act to the value of hygiene (not to mention the relationship of hygiene to better social relations among human beings), it becomes routinized, perfunctory, ritualistic in a bad sense. This is what Twersky was working against. The equivalent of what Twersky is aspiring to would be that the child does understand this connection, and as a result washes thoroughly and carefully.

Now we can picture the second scenario, learning to play a sonata. First the learner must master the technical aspects of the sonata through repeated practice. Eventually there comes a moment where the mastery is so great that the learner can introduce nuances into a rendition based on personal interpretation of the piece.[13]

To return to Twersky, then, the practice of the mitzvah of mezuzah, for example, is not in treating the mezuzah as an amulet or a religious relic. Rather, it is an act of restoring and renewing consciousness of God in one's entry into each and every new situation.[14]

But what can this concept mean at the level of early childhood education when children do not know how to read and are not capable of understanding many of the ideas behind halakhic practice? For Twersky, early childhood education is about induction through mimesis. That is, parents and members of the community model the life of halacha for the child and invite him or her to participate through imitation.

This process begins with the very first words parents are instructed to teach their children – Torah tzivah lanu Moshe – Moses has commanded us to live according to the Torah (Deut. 33:4). The point is not only teaching the words but also inviting the child to take up a place in the great chain of Jewish tradition. The parent explains to the child that they are part of something greater, that there is a higher authority.[15]

According to Twersky, the pedagogy for modeling the practice of halacha is not a simple one. Modeling involves more than showing external behavior, because halacha includes understanding and feeling as well. One must also embody the love of God that comes with the practice of each halakha. In modeling the practice of tzedakah, for example, it is not enough to be seen putting money in a charity box. The parent or community member must also demonstrate the active search to help the needy person become autonomous and to make him or her happy. I recall studying Twersky's conception with a group of educators who observed that most of their learners have never even seen a poor person.

It is important to point out that Twersky sees this process of education by mimesis continuing until the learner is capable of reading. The capacity to read opens the way to a different stage in the halakhic learner's growth. Through reading the child begins a very long and demanding process of encountering Jewish tradition on its own terms rather than through the imitation of elders. Indeed, the aim of Jewish text study is to liberate learners from the mimesis of early childhood and give them tools to experience halakhic practice with individual understanding and religious feeling.

To be sure, Twersky's conception calls for ongoing practice of halakha throughout the development of the learner. There is no suspension of halakhic practice while understanding seeps in. As in the sonata example, the movement is towards the development and expression of the learner's own subjective understanding and feeling into the autonomous practice of the mitzvot.

Like Twersky, Michael Meyer emphasizes the need to induct the child into Judaism without assuming his or her capacity to understand or accept its meaning. This is striking given the Reform ideal of religious autonomy – an ideal that emphasizes the learner's choice rather than habituation. The lessons of two hundred years of Reform education have taught Meyer that religious autonomy is an ideal that needs to be achieved, not one that can be assumed. The child must be brought into the circle of Jewish life in a way that enables him or her to enter into the later stages of Jewish learning with a positive emotional orientation toward being Jewish, a sense of love for Jewish educators, Jewish lore and Jewish practices.[16]

Meyer does not stipulate the particulars of this process of induction. He aims to liberate the early childhood educator from feeling that he or she must work with the autonomy of the learner at this stage of development and obliges him or her to transmit an unambivalent sense that all things Jewish are good.

This process will not work unless the emotional foundation developed in early childhood is solid. Anything less will enable the complications of the later stages to become a basis for the rejection of Judaism. For Meyer early childhood education must involve more than smatterings of Jewishness coupled with a smile. The learner needs to have experienced the induction to Judaism on a wide and comprehensive basis. It must be a harmonious experience of the world leading him or her to see the world through Jewish eyes.

We can learn a little more about what to do at this stage by looking at Meyer’s vision for the continuation of this process. In later stages, Meyer wants to lead the learner towards a religious autonomy that is different from Twersky’s. He does this by actively subverting the learner’s exclusive dependence on nostalgia. He wants to expose the learner to the contexts in which Jewish life was generated, the conflicts and contradictions that emerged as it was transmitted from generation to generation, and the various solutions Jews have offered to these problems. Meyer's aim is for this process to invite the learner to make his or her own choices about how to continue being Jewish. The loss of early innocence creates the basis and incentive for developing a more mature and sophisticated adult Jewish identity.

Thus, what we have here are two different visions for Jewish education. For both the aim is religious autonomy, only for Twersky that means continued practice of halakha throughout life with the introduction of subjective understanding and feeling, whereas for Meyer it means making choices as to which halakhot to practice, how and why. Twersky tries to enable his version of religious autonomy by moving from induction to text, Meyer by moving from induction to context.

Twersky critiqued Meyer's approach by insisting that only consistent, uniform practice of halakha will ensure lasting Jewish identity. No matter how strong the early induction, he argued, the complications introduced at the later stages will undermine its clarity, subvert its authority, and lead one to associate things Jewish with emotional immaturity.

Meyer claimed that Twersky's approach undermines Jewish identity because it will condition it upon accepting or rejecting halakha as it is transmitted, not as it grows. The adult learner will arrive at the conclusion that halakhic education is rigged: "I have autonomy only inasmuch as I continue to do exactly what I was told to do as a child."

The aim of Visions of Jewish Education is not to convince readers to adopt the educational visions of Twersky, Meyer or the other scholars. It seeks rather to illustrate what it looks like to approach Jewish education with a vision and to enable those involved with Jewish education to develop their own visions. The Visions of Jewish Education Project, which I direct at the Mandel Foundation, is designed to further help people to develop their visions of Jewish education, be guided by them in their work, and constantly rearticulate them as they evaluate their effectiveness over time.[17]

We are often asked whether it is possible to adopt aspects of various visions and combine them into a single eclectic conception. The danger in this approach lies in creating a mishmash without coherence. To be everything to everybody is to be nothing to anybody. It is, however, possible to make disciplined connections between various facets of different visions and thereby to preserve a guiding and compelling logic.

This was a possibility I discovered while teaching in kindergarten. The kindergarten belonged to the municipality of Tel Aviv and was situated in a part of the city comprised mostly of successful secular Jews. The kindergarten was unique in that it was run in cooperation with the Reform Beit Daniel Center for Progressive Judaism. Beit Daniel had its own kindergarten as well, offering a full Reform program. In the public municipal kindergarten, Beit Daniel was given responsibility for the Jewish curriculum, pending parental approval.

The deal struck between the municipality, Beit Daniel and the parents intrigued me. I saw in it hope for linking in the agenda of progressive Judaism with the context of Jewish public education in Israel. But what could be the guiding vision in such a program? My sense was that the municipality and the parents would be open to an approach that emphasized the connection between language and identity. They could not accept blessings or prayer in the classroom, but they could agree to foster a deeper Jewish cultural basis for their children's everyday Hebrew language.

This approach was very much in line with the vision posited by Moshe Greenberg in Visions of Jewish Education. For Greenberg, Jewish text study offers the learner an opportunity for spiritual development. Learning Jewish texts for their own sake allows learners to understand the importance of activities that do not have worldly outcomes and engage in issues of ultimate concern.

My assumption was that the spiritual personality as Greenberg defines it is formed from the early stages of development through language acquisition. Words need to become not only tools for managing in the world but vessels that carry the learner to the domain of the invisible, the abstract, the world of meanings. Many of the words from Jewish texts provide a basis for teaching language in this way, so I decided to develop a curriculum called milat ha-shavua (the word of the week, just as we have parashat ha-shavua, the weekly Torah portion).

We learned words such as Elohim, Torah, tov ve-ra (good and evil), ayekah (God's question to Adam in Eden: "where are you?"), Shabbat, am segulah (chosen people), shalom. With Shabbat, for example, we counted the numerical equivalents of each day of the week and discovered that the seventh day was not called, as it logically should have been, yom ha-shevi'i, but Shabbat. Why? We then engaged in activities that deepened the understanding of the meaning of the word Shabbat, such as its connection to the story of creation, the sense it carries of refraining from regular activity, and of cherishing the good things we are given. We learned, through photos, to differentiate activities related to regular days, yemai hol (such as a photo of construction workers on their site), and to Shabbat (parents and children sitting in the park and looking at the landscape together). We learned Simlat Hashabbat shel Hanaleh, the early Zionist story mentioned above.

At the same time, I felt that there was something missing in this approach. It put all the emphasis on words without giving the words a context within Jewish life. I needed to add an element of induction to Jewish tradition into the curriculum, very much like that of Twersky's emphasis on transmitting the values of Torah tzivah lanu Moshe – to extend the invitation to the learner to become part of Jewish tradition. I felt that there was no contradiction between this and Greenberg's approach at the early childhood level, because their conceptions of religious education only really begin to diverge at the stage when children are able to read Jewish texts.

I decided to introduce the unit by bringing a small Torah scroll into the classroom and placing it on the teacher's seat in front of the children. I sat between the children and the Torah scroll as the interlocutor between the two. I presented the Torah scroll as a great gift from God to our grandparents' grandparents' grandparents all the way back to thousands of years ago and I claimed that it had in it gifts for the children that were much more valuable than anything they could find at the best toy store or on prime time television. The gifts were "words."

This theme remained with us throughout the unit, with the Torah scroll sitting in the teacher's seat each class, and the learners' work being collated into a special folder called tik Torah (Torah file). Parents were included in some of these activities as well. At the end of the year, we had a party in which each student was given their folder to take home and keep until their bar or bat mitzvah when it should be reopened. I remember drinking le-hayyim over grape juice with each child as we parted ways. They gulped the juice down, shook my hand and happily took their tik Torah with them.

I was very confused about what went on in the kindergarten room during my classes. Early childhood education was new to me, and very daunting. I did not know how to read the children's responses, how long they could sustain concentration, if I was going over their heads, what their associations meant. I shared my frustration with the kindergarten teacher and she told me that she had no doubt that the curriculum was succeeding with the learners.

Sensing my skepticism, she decided to call one of the children from the group into our conversation. She chose him randomly. "Tell me," she asked him, "do you remember any of the words of the week we have been learning?" He proceeded to list all of them. "Which one do you like the most?" He answered "Elohim" and ran off to play.

[1] For an overview of halakhic sources on education, including during the early stages of development, which demonstrates the vast number of resources in traditional literature for this subject, see "Hinukh," in Entzyclopedia Talmudit, vol. 16, pp. 161-191.

[2] See Shaul Shtampfer, "Heder Study, Knowledge of Torah, and the Maintenance of Social Stratification in Traditional East European Jewish Society" in Studies in Jewish Education 3 (1988), pp. 271-289.

[3] H.N. Bialik, Poems and Songs for Children (Hebrew), (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1997).

[4] See Natan Shachar, "The Eretz Israeli Song, 1920-1950: Sociomusical and Musical Aspects" (Hebrew), (Ph.D. thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1989).

[5] Shlomo Haramati, The Role of the Hebrew Teacher in Reviving the Hebrew Language 1882-1914 (Hebrew), (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass, 1979), pp. 206-234.

[6] On the Jewish preference of public over parochial education in America see Lloyd P. Gartner, "Jewish Education in the United States," in M. Sklare, ed., American Jews: A Reader (New York, Behrman House, 1983), pp. 365-392.

[7] See, for example, Barbara Rogoff, The Cultural Nature of Human Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

[8] Defining Excellence in Early Childhood Jewish Education, written by The Center for Applied Child Development Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development Tufts University, Medford Massachusetts, February 2004, p. 36.

[9] Ibid, p. 57.

[10] For a summary of the visions that appear in the book, see the chapter entitled "Six Visions: An Overview" on pages 19-43. On Seymour Fox's work see, for example, Vision at the Heart: Lessons from Camp Ramah on the Power of Ideas in Shaping Educational Institutions, Monographs from the Mandel Institute series, #5 (Jerusalem: Mandel Institute, 2000). For anthologies of Israel Scheffler’s essays see The Language of Education (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1960) and Reason and Teaching (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993). Fox and Scheffler have also published a joint paper on the need for vision in Jewish education, Jewish Education and Continuity: Prospects and Limitations, Monographs from the Mandel Institute series, #1 (Jerusalem: Mandel Institute, 2000).

[11] For references to early childhood education in Visions, see pages 23, 31, 39,201, and 259-262. The Visions of Jewish Education Project hopes to make available other related materials that were not published in the book. See http://www.mandelfoundation.org/mli/visions.

[12] Twersky chose the Maimonidean term hergel for this central principle of halakhic education. For more on hergel, see pp.82-83.

[13] I am grateful to Seymour Fox for suggesting the sonata metaphor in relation to Twerksy’s notion of halakhic education on the basis of comments made to him by Joseph Schwab on this topic.

[14] See Visions, pp. 84-85, based on Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Mezuzah, 5:4 and 6:13.

[15] See Visions, p. 88, based on Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Talmud Torah, 1:6.

[16] Meyer's vision appears in Visions, pp. 149-177. A summary appears on pages 28-31. The section dealing with drawing the child into the Jewish circle appears on pages 154-155. For further discussion of this point see David Ellenson's response to Meyer's paper, "Autonomy and Norms in Reform Judaism" in CCAR Journal, 46:2 (Spring 1999), pp. 21-28.

[17] The project website can be found at http://www.mandelfoundation.org/mli/visions.