“Watson, come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.” -Arthur Conan Doyle
Why do Hebrew Schools survive?
It’s hard to think of a more widespread yet disliked feature of Jewish life than the afternoon Hebrew School. Like synagogue membership, while enrollment continues to shrink, part-time Jewish education remains the default for far more families than camps, day schools, or any other setting.
However, in Jewish organizational life, we react to this choice with some combination of benign resignation, passive aggressiveness, and outright derision.1 I’ve lost count of how many different catch-all solutions people offer to save the Jewish people, but I cannot remember the last time someone suggested pouring millions of dollars into Hebrew Schools.
The Internet notices our ambivalence.2
While researching this issue, I Googled “Hebrew School success” and “Hebrew Schools successful.” Hilarity ensued; it was as if Google could not find anyone on the internet who wanted to argue that Hebrew Schools are successful. And when I asked Google’s AI, “Are Hebrew Schools successful?” This was the opening to its response: “Hebrew schools, including both part-time supplemental schools and full-time Jewish day schools, have a mixed record of success.”
Yikes.
So if Hebrew School is so broken—if nearly everyone agrees it fails to deliver—why hasn’t it disappeared?
This brings us to this week’s big idea.
Shepard Tone
To understand the dichotomy between Hebrew school’s persistence alongside its largely ignored/derided place in the Jewish communal landscape, several Moneyball concepts could be helpful (explanations are in the footnotes):
The options are endless, in part because the gap between the reality of Hebrew School’s persistence alongside its derision is enormous. But there is another reason, the Shepard Tone.
The Shepard Tone, sometimes called “pitch circularity,” is an auditory illusion that creates the impression of a sound that endlessly rises (or falls) in pitch, but never actually reaches a higher or lower pitch; it’s the auditory version of looking at a rotating barbershop pole. Roger N. Shepard is the first person to identify this illusion in his 1964 article, “Circularity in Judgments of Relative Pitch.” Here is a sample of how the pitch sounds:
Shepard argues that “by appropriately exaggerating…tonality, one might be able to bring about a breakdown of transitivty in judgments of relative pitch.”9 Now, in English: Given the right mixture of sound, a person could feel like volume is going way up, way down, etc., when, in fact, nothing is changing.
I first learned about the Shepard Tone when Nate Silver used it to describe the current moment in American politics. Silver argues that politics today feels like “a perpetually escalating crisis,”10 where every day brings some new catastrophe, sparking shock and awe. But if every day is a crisis, are we actually living in a crisis, or a new normal?
Silver is discussing very different events, but his application of the concept is to illustrate how certain narratives can become so common that “people become disoriented and…[are] unable to agree on exactly what constitutes a distraction from what.”11 And worse, “the normies tune out” because they want “to turned the damned sound off.”12
Returning to the original question, one possibility is that the handwringing around Hebrew Schools is a kind of Shepard Tone for questions we don’t want to ask because we won’t like the answers:
Why is it so hard to get people to care more about Judaism?
Why isn’t every Jew as committed as I am?
Why must my income be dependent on people sending their children to Hebrew School?
These kinds of questions evoke awkward silence.
And all the while, the most significant number of North American Jews repeatedly make the same choice, spending a few thousand dollars a year to send their children for 2-6 hours a week to receive a Jewish education. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s just what it is.
However, the endless debate within the Jewish institutional world over how broken and in need of “reinvention” Hebrew Schools are may come at a high cost. This negative narrative discourages the kind of significant investment—tens of millions of dollars—that could improve the experience for the many Jewish children who rely on them, and the families who continue to choose them. While organizations like Jewish Kids Groups and JASA are doing essential work to reimagine Hebrew School within current constraints, their resources are a mere fraction of what is invested in other Jewish institutions, which, while amazing, still reach far fewer children than Hebrew Schools.
In the end, our narratives about Hebrew School may be nothing more than noise, and noise is expensive.
Judaism in Transition
One of the reasons I love applying economics to Jewish life is that it helps me filter out the kind of noise described above. And while I always remind readers that I’m a novice, I wish more books explored these questions with the polish that only comes from an actual expert viewing things through this lens. Fortunately, I read Carmel Chiswick’s Judaism in Transition—and you should too.
Chiswick is both an economist and an active participant in Jewish life, who analyzes “how economic incentives affect decisions about time and money” in Jewish settings.13 She opens by reminding readers that we would do well to focus less on the grand narratives that insiders develop about Jewish choices and instead think about the individual Jew as an economic agent:
“...ultimately the individual Jew who decides how much Judaism contributes to his or her well-being, how much time and effort to devote to Jewish observance, and how important this is when selecting a marriage partner.”14
You can imagine why I love this framing—it’s another version of the “sovereign self”—and why others might loathe it. And that’s OK. But whether or not we like that choice, it’s the truth. And our strategies must reflect it.
Chiswick argues that the growth of non-Orthodox Jewish expressions in mid-20th-century America came precisely because “they provided time-saving (and thus cheaper) alternatives for religious expression.”15 A typical family sending children to Hebrew School is juggling extracurricular activities, childcare needs, and other demands; the part-time synagogue model—attending a few hours a week—bundles after-school care, enrichment, and Jewish education into one efficient package.
At first glance, this might seem to confirm the worry that Jews aren’t willing to commit enough resources to Jewish life. But that’s not Chiswick’s point. Instead, Hebrew School is a highly effective model for an economically thriving North American Jewish community, precisely because it “adapts Jewish observance to the freedom and abundance of secular opportunities.”16 And this isn’t new. Chiswick notes that throughout Jewish history, each generation has faced “the same basic problem of how to preserve Judaism’s Great Tradition for future generations,”17 with economic incentives naturally shaping how Jewish communities addressed that problem.
Returning to Hebrew Schools: Every generation of Jewish elites—the most committed Jews—worried about whether the majority of Jews would sustain Judaism for the future. And in every era, the free market produced models that met the needs, time constraints, and spending priorities of ordinary Jews. In North America, that model became the Hebrew School. Maybe someday life’s patterns will change enough to give rise to something new. But for now, this model—flaws and all—persists because it fits what the majority of Jewish consumers want.
What might we change if our communal priorities finally respected that choice and we strategized accordingly?
Economics of Religion
A lecture in seven parts…
135
The number of grant makers currently experimenting with Grant Guardian, a tool that will use artificial intelligence to automate many of the tasks required for reviewing nonprofit grants.
What I Read This Week
What Happens When Your Career Quits on You?: Annie Duke is back! And in a time of great economic anxiety and professional transitions, this article provided an excellent analysis of how to approach career transitions through Duke’s focus on decision education.
Why Your Brain Hates Other People: I haven’t focused enough on Robert Sapolsky's work. However, we will return to him in future issues. In the meantime, this article was a fantastic read.
The Costs of Ideological Medicine: I will remain unapologetic that RFK Jr. is a one-man public health threat. That said, I’m glad that Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution reposted this column from Megan McArdle, which describes some of the lessons on bad process that contributed to the fact that we have a total quack making meritless decisions.
Infinite Connect Four: In high school, a friend somehow managed to get everyone in the school obsessed with playing him in Connect Four. I’m still amazed. This article was a walk down memory lane.
LifeWise Academy: The ACLU member in me hates this story. But the outreach obsessive in me admires the creativity in breaking down logistical barriers to engage more kids.
To boot, we refuse to call it Hebrew School!
People send their children to Mormon School, Greek School, etc., but for some reason, we want to use any possible other name to describe this.
For better or worse, the consumers made the choice: it’s Hebrew School.
Here’s something hilarious:
Now, when you Google “Hebrew Schools and successful” or “Hebrew Schools and success,” you know what is the first result?
This article!
And before you assume this is me bragging, it highlights how little our community values Hebrew Schools, such that I could write an article for a mediocre newsletter, and that post becomes the top result on Google in no time at all.
Participation Bias: What do we mean when we say that Hebrew School doesn’t “work”? Does this reflect the experience of the people who make this choice? We might be making poor assumptions due to skewed participation.
Reference Group Neglect: The individuals who reinforce the narrative that Hebrew schools are ineffective are often professionals and lay leaders who devote their time and money to strengthening Jewish life. By definition, these individuals are those who invest more time and money in Jewish life.
Willingness to Pay: Ultimately, this may reveal more about the cost of Jewish day school than anything about Hebrew Schools. In the United States, day school tuition costs anywhere between 10 and 20 times more than Hebrew School tuition. No amount of evangelizing the benefits of day school can overcome that price point.
(And by the way, in Canada, Jewish day school enrollment is higher in part because tuition is much less.)
Stated and Revealed Preferences: Get over it! If a plurality of Jews are choosing that this is the amount of money they are willing to spend on Jewish education, then we need to stop pearl-clutching and make the time they are eager to spend amazing. We have decades of data revealing their preference.
As the Talmud says, “Go and see what the people are doing” (Bavli Berakhot 45a). We looked and saw what the people are doing. Many, many times.
Peak-End Theory: My personal favorite. Perhaps nothing is “wrong” with Hebrew School. Still, since most programs end when a child is 12-13 years old, those children tend to remember the whole experience negatively because the end of the experience coincides with the onset of middle school and puberty, during which every experience can be negatively tainted due to the developmental changes that occur. Perhaps what we are doing is very good or even great, but do participants ever remember it that way?
Superforecasters: We already have reason to believe that the people asked to make predictions about Jewish life (including me!) are bad at predicting the future.
So why should we be surprised that the narrative and reality are misaligned?
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 22.
Ibid., 200-202.
Ibid.