I will never forget watching my elementary school principal pick food out of the trash and thinking I hope he doesn’t find my lunch. I was a picky eater (I still am) and the principal was a Holocaust survivor.
He was a principal that did not use classroom management techniques to get our attention because he did not need to. He had a short, white beard, a limp from an injury he sustained shortly before liberation, a steely stare and a commanding voice with a strong accent. If he so much as looked at you, you immediately became quiet. When he walked into the room, you did not have to be told to stand up out of respect.
And, as a man who nearly starved to death at Auschwitz, he did not tolerate wasting food.
He would walk up to the microphone with a half-eaten sandwich in hand and demand, “Whose is this”? The guilty party would walk to the front of the room on shaky legs and retrieve their sandwich along with a strict admonishment not to waste food. And after being called out like that, you learned your lesson: you did not waste food.
Kids aren’t like that anymore. Neither are principals.
In the eight years between the time I graduated elementary school to the time I entered the classroom as a teacher, it seemed things had changed. Teachers were no longer “always right”. And kids were no longer afraid of teachers, principals or parents.
Perhaps it was the advancement of technology–cell phones barely existed when I was in 8th grade; when I walked into my first 8th grade classroom as a teacher, nearly every student had one. When I was in school, if you dared use chutzpa in front of a a teacher, you sweated all day, knowing the teacher would call your parents and that you would be in hot water when you got home. Now, when every kid has a cell phone in school, they can often call their parents to complain about the “unfair teacher” so that by the time the teacher can get near a phone at the end of the school day to discuss the child’s inappropriate behavior, the parent has already called the principal to complain about the teacher. Accountability is no longer a word that is stressed in homes and schools, and it seems that the plague of self-entitlement has resulted in its stead. And this is not the fault of our children and students, but rather the fault lies with us- the parents and educators.
One of the lead stories this morning is “100 Jewish Teens Kicked Off Plane” and the article goes on to explain how 100 (or 101) Jewish students from the Orthodox Yeshiva of Flatbush (a great school and my mother’s alma mater) were kicked off a flight on their way to a school trip, due to “rowdy behavior.” When you look at other articles, it appears there are different accounts of what actually happened on that flight and whether or not the decision of the airline was warranted. Whatever actually took place, it is clear that some of those students were not acting appropriately on the flight. By all accounts, some did not put their phones away on when they were asked to and had to be told to sit down. I would argue that this behavior is typical of a group of teens flying on a school trip. I don’t think it has anything to do with the fact that they are Jewish.
However, anyone who read this news story probably had the same thought I had: what a chillul Hashem– a desecration of God’s name. And for me, it brought to mind a memory of Rabbi Friedman.
Before every school trip, from first grade to when I was in sixth grade when he retired, Rabbi Friedman got onto the school bus before we departed and gave us the same speech. “You are Jewish boys and girls. Everywhere you go, people will know that you are Jews. They will be watching you to see how you behave. You have the choice to make a Kiddush Hashem or to make a Chillul Hashem” and then giving us no choice but to obey, he fixed us with his steely glance and said, “Make sure you make a Kiddush Hashem.”