One day in the first century, BCE, a young Jewish man left his home in Babylonia, present day Iraq, and made the perilous five hundred mile journey to the holy city of Jerusalem in the land of Israel. Each day, he would pay the entrance fee to the guard posted at the door of the great academy of Bible study, so he could sit at the feet of the great teachers. One time, being a poor laborer, he had no money, and when he sought entrance to the school, the guard refused to let him in because he could not pay him. Undeterred as a devoted student of God’s word, he climbed onto the roof and lay down, pressing his ear against the skylight, in order to listen in on the spirited conversations taking place below. He became so engrossed in the discussions about sacred matters taking place that he took no notice of the snow falling on him. Soon, the young man fell asleep, and he began to freeze. As morning approached down below, two of the great sages interrupted their argument when they realized that the room they were in was not becoming light enough as the sun rose. Looking up, they caught the young man’s silhouette pressed against the skylight. Rushing to the roof, they brushed him off, dragged him inside the school, helped him to thaw by the fire, and then listened to him tell his story. The young man became the legendary Rabbi Hillel, one of the greatest sages of Jewish tradition, who was known for his patience, compassion, love and willingness to teach all people, rich and poor.
What if Hillel had died on that roof? Almost as bad, what if Hillel had despondently walked away from his education and his community, having concluded that he would never again be able to afford the fee for instruction being demanded? Not only Jewish tradition but Western culture as well would have been impoverished. It is, in fact, possible that Jesus was paraphrasing an earlier teaching of Rabbi Hillel’s when he famously declared, “Do to others what you wish to have them do to you.”
Well before there were arguments in state legislatures about education budgets, and well before America created a public school system, ancient traditions like Judaism were advocating for free and equal access to learning for all members of the community. Though originally women were mostly excluded from this learning process, and an elite cadre of full time scholars gradually developed in Jewish society, that basic impulse toward educational egalitarianism helped break down barriers of class, status, and academic achievement; the Jewish community has since become renowned for its emphasis on universal access to an education. This is partly rooted in Judaism’s passionate commitment to teaching all of its members to fulfill the Jewish religious mission of witnessing God’s presence in the world.
While the parallels between ancient Jewish and contemporary American efforts to keep education free and fully accessible are not exact, they are instructive. Underlying them both is the recognition that no citizen of a society should be denied a quality education due to a lack of personal or communal funds. The wellbeing of the individual and society at large is far too dependent upon communally provided education for us to risk playing fast and loose with educational funding. In American society, our public schools can certainly do their jobs much better with the money that they are given. However slashing budgets, placing onerous demands upon teachers, and deepening inequities between rich and poor school districts are not the ways in which to foster those improvements. In this season of budget arguments and numbers crunching, I hope our leaders will remember that education is more than a personal right, it is a sacred communal obligation. No one should ever be barred from entering the schoolhouse doors.
Dan Ornstein is rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY.
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