Ghosts in the classroom: A Yom Kippur message

There are ghosts in our classrooms.  Listen closely, and you can hear the generational echoes reverberating. 

The grandfather of a second grader struggling with math was a renowned professor at MIT. The child who dances at the Kotel on his eighth grade class trip remembers his grandmother’s stories of Theresienstadt. The nephew of a great composer plays in our school orchestra at the Israel festival. A first generation American learns that his daughter was accepted to the city’s most elite high school. The mother who chose Judaism listens to her son proficiently lead the Pesach Seder. The first grade teacher who struggled to read as a child helps her class unlocks the magic code of words and sounds. The ghosts are there, and our students feel their presence.  

Likewise, Yom Kippur is a sort of reckoning with our individual and communal ghosts. Sociologist Mircae Eliade researched religions’ understanding of sacred space and time and found that holy days are often an opportunity for us in the present to relive sacred moments experienced by our ancestors in the past. This is one reason that Yom Kippur’s confessional, the Vidui, is in the plural: it’s a communal acknowledgement of our mutual sins and the sins of those before us. We chant it together, we establish a spiritual connection with the past, and we hear the echoes of ghosts. 

In the educational landscape, those echoes are ever present, especially in the encounters between parents and teachers. As parents and teachers, our conversations are, as Sara Lawrence Lightfoot writes in The Essential Conversation, “shared by [our] own autobiographical stories and by the broader cultural and historical narratives that inform [our] identities, [our] values and [our] sense of place in the world.” (My daughter’s kindergarten teacher and I recently sat down to discuss my daughter. Thirty seconds into the meeting we found ourselves discussing our own childhoods and our conscious efforts not to project this narrative onto our children. And then we laughed, acknowledging the futility of this effort. Our autobiographies, of course, become intertwined with theirs.) 

The challenge is to acknowledge and honor the echoes of the ghosts while working collaboratively—parents, teachers and students—to build a better understanding of each other in the present. Jewish day school is, by design, an arena in which social and cultural dramas are played out and worked through. At our school, students practice democracy and citizenship; they grapple with the opportunities and challenges of being part of a culturally, economically, and religiously diverse community; and, they weigh the competing priorities of their families and the community as a whole. 

And while Yom Kippur is our annual reckoning with ghosts, the other effect of the plural Vidui and Al Chet is a reflection on the present community: the idea that we stand as one to share in each others’ shortcomings, failures, challenges and deepest desire to return to our true and best selves.

May the New Year and Yom Kippur bring you closer to the wisdom of our ancestors as well as to those around you in the present. If you ever need a little inspiration, stop by our school and listen to the ghosts of our collective past and the joyful voices of our hopeful future.

Gmar Hatimah Tovah.

SARAH SHULKIND, ED.D  HEAD OF SCHOOL, SINAI AKIBA ACADEMY