“We are ingenious in fund-raising, which is good; we are shipwrecked in raising our children, which is tragic”

Author Date

We are ingenious in fund-raising, which is good; we are shipwrecked in raising our children, which is tragic. We give of our wealth to many good causes; we lose our substance in abandoning our children to fetishism. I wish we would give priority to teaching and inspiring our children to live as Jews.

We may claim to be a success, but in the eyes of Jewish history, we may be regarded as a failure.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, “Existence and Celebration”, in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 23. Originally delivered as “Existence and Celebration” in Montreal to General Assembly of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds (New York: Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds, 1965).

Related posts:

  1. “It is not in our interest to call all informal Jewish experiences experiential Jewish education”
  2. “To feed the hunger for knowledge that exists among American Jews, we need education that doesn’t talk down to people or make them feel like children”
  3. “to be Jewishly educated today, he or she must know the history of the past 300 years”
  4. A Significant Challenge in teaching rabbinic and biblical texts to children and young adults