The following is an excerpt from an article by Yardena Gerwin that was published by KidSpirit Online on September 14, 2015. Yardena initially developed this essay as a participant in the Interfaith Center of New York’s Learning Together youth fellowship program, working with a diverse group of New York high school students to explore the role of religion in city schools. Yardena is an incoming junior at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School, a pluralistic Jewish day school. She is the co-president of her school’s Interfaith Club and a Teen Advisor for Girl Up, a campaign of the United Nations Foundation. She spent two years living in Israel but now lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her parents and sisters.
Yardena Gerwin
Three hundred forty-five years ago Roger Williams declared, “forced worship stinks in God’s nostrils.”
Williams was a 17th-century English Protestant theologian and a proponent of religious freedom. He pioneered the separation of church and state, a crucial social innovation in 1640 that now poses a unique challenge to modern parochial schools. Schooling is mandatory for every child in the nation, but prayer is not. Yet parochial schools must somehow coerce students into praying. This would be an achievable goal if every student agreed that prayer is critical and there was a school-wide consensus on how to pray, but that often isn’t the case. Schools are faced with the impossible task of imparting the value of praying, specifically the importance of daily prayer. In this situation schools often fall into a survival mode, using their administrative power to force students and teachers to show up in a room and recite words without facing the question of meaning head on. This allows students to passively disengage and choose powerlessness regarding the shortcomings of their prayer services without getting involved or feeling personally responsible to make a change.
I attend a pluralistic Jewish day school, which nobly tries to engage all students in daily prayer. Though the school is unyielding on prayer being mandatory, they try to make services inclusive by offering multiple options for prayer. I, for example, participate in the “creative expression” service. We only recite the basic prayers, leaving time for less structured activities such as art, music or documentaries. But the truth is that the significant reduction in the number of separate prayers to recite does not seem to encourage creative worship in the majority of the students who attend the service with me.
The girl sitting next to me is one of the few with her prayer book open; it’s carefully angled to conceal that she is texting on her iPhone. Some students across from me are discussing what they did over the weekend, while a few others grasp onto index cards, trying to cram for our next vocab quiz. Certainly none of the students have a sole agenda to sabotage any type of prayer that enters the room; they just don’t see the relevance of the prayer service forced upon them each morning.
