Mark Gottlieb on Jewish Education
The Tikvah Podcast
Tikvah
4.6 • 620 Ratings
🗓️ 13 July 2017
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As he looked out at the Western world of the 1960s and ‘70s, Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits saw a society whose value system had collapsed. Relativism, boredom, and permissiveness were all around him. But this void could be filled, argued Rabbi Berkovits, by a sophisticated Judaism that sought to rear the next generation in the best of the Jewish ethical tradition. “Jewish Education in a World Adrift” is a clarion call for a morally confident Judaism that can speak to the human soul in a nihilistic age.
In this podcast, Jonathan Silver is joined by veteran educator and Tikvah Fund Senior Director Rabbi Mark Gottlieb to think through this powerful essay. They discuss Berkovits’s bold halachic philosophy, the circumstances that moved him to tackle this issue, and the future of Jewish education. At a time of promise and peril for Jewish pedagogy, their conversation is as timely as ever.
Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, as well as Ich Grolle Nicht, by Ron Meixsell and Wahneta Meixsell.
Rabbi Gottlieb teaches in and directs Tikvah’s programs for high school students and the yeshiva community. Learn more about these programs here and here.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Tikva podcast of Great Jewish Essays and Ideas. |
| 0:11.6 | I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. |
| 0:13.7 | If you like listening to our podcast, I invite you to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher, |
| 0:18.2 | and I hope you'll leave us a rating and a review. |
| 0:20.1 | If you want to learn more |
| 0:21.2 | about Tikva and our work, you can visit our website, tikfafund.org, follow us on Twitter at |
| 0:26.8 | Tikva Fund, or like us on Facebook. My guest today is cherished colleague, teacher, and friend, |
| 0:32.7 | Rabbi Mark Gottlieb, senior director of the Tikva Fund and executive director of the Tikva Summer Institute at |
| 0:38.6 | Yale University. Rabbi Gottlieb is an accomplished educator, having served as head of school at |
| 0:44.0 | Yeshiva University High School for Boys and principal of the Maimonides School in Brooklyn, |
| 0:48.7 | Massachusetts. Few people I know think more deeply about the art and discipline of education. And it's a real pleasure |
| 0:55.7 | to welcome him to this conversation. Rabbi Gottlieb, welcome. Thank you so much, John. Good morning. |
| 1:01.0 | Among other things, Rabbi Gottlieb is on the editorial committee of tradition, the Journal of Orthodox |
| 1:05.4 | Jewish Thought, that today's essay is drawn from. Years ago in the pages of tradition, Rabbi Eliezer Berkovitz wrote an |
| 1:12.2 | essay called Jewish Education in a World Adrift. That piece is the focus of this conversation, |
| 1:17.7 | and the essay makes the argument that the intellectual and moral environment of the West has |
| 1:22.6 | undergone a transformation, that the transformation is worrying for the future and fate of our |
| 1:27.4 | civilization, and that this transformation calls on for the future and fate of our civilization, |
| 1:28.4 | and that this transformation calls on Jewish educators to see their own work in a new light, |
| 1:33.6 | with greater urgency, and with a renewed mission for forming the minds and characters of their |
| 1:38.2 | students. |
| 1:38.9 | Rabbi Gottlie, before we jump into the essay itself, I thought it might be useful for our listeners |
... |
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