Ever since our family started homeschooling with Waldorf I’ve been striving to make the curriculum our own — I want to understand the theory and philosophy behind the Waldorf curriculum well enough to be able to riff off of it — to teach content not from the viewpoint of northern Europe, as Rudolf Steiner did, but centered in my own continent, and my own family.
If the victors of history are the ones who claim the power to write or tell history as it comes down to us, they may tell a story that erases, devalues, and undermines the peoples they have subjugated. We (all of us) internalize the beliefs that this story is the correct one, the good one, the important one. We all help to erase, devalue, and undermine the other stories. And other ways of thinking and knowing.
Just as efforts are needed to decolonize the history curriculum of so many peoples, the Jewish story has also been erased and perverted in many ways. Dara Horn describes so well how we as Jews have been gaslighted throughout history to believe that our persecutions were deserved, didn’t happen at all, or in the end, serve the greater purpose of making our non-Jewish “rescuers” feel good about themselves. And in fact, when Ancient Rome is viewed as a colonizing power, a new side of the story emerges.
For three years I have participated in Sacramento Waldorf School’s teacher development offerings which gave me a strong foundation in Waldorf pedagogy. As my final project I applied all that I have learned — and documented a block I taught to my children that expresses our voices, our history, our point of view, our way of thinking. And for me that way is Jewish! The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans, followed by the Rabbis’ redaction of Talmud and creation of rabbinic Judaism, and later the Persecutions of the Crusades . . . all time periods that are foundational in Waldorf classrooms and can use some re-telling.
I want to share this project as widely as I can for three purposes:
- To make it easier for everyone to teach about Jewish history, for the benefit of both Jewish and non-Jewish children;
- To share an example of how our teaching can draw deeply from our own biography and lead us towards fulfilling our own karma and that of our students;
- To encourage teachers and parents to decolonize the curriculum by sharing our own voices, as well as by lifting up the diversity of voices in our community, our nation, our world.
So, here we go! First I’d like to share some of my own story, and why teaching Jewish history and literature matter to me.
Aside from developmental and curricular reasons, I have a personal reason for teaching this history. Today, when antisemitic incidents in the US, which include violent attacks, are at their highest ever recorded (CNN), it is imperative that we connect the dots between the past and the present. It may be hard to understand the immediacy of this seemingly ancient history, but for many people of Jewish ancestry today it can still live strongly in us as part of who we are. Our ancestors lived with Torah and Talmud in their lives for so many generations, they became enmeshed in our culture, in the way we think and speak. Even for those who no longer have ties to religious tradition, the stories of our past and the content and style of Talmud live on in our modern culture.
In my own early life, Jewish learning came by oral transmission, through stories, practically a Talmudic experience. I gleaned fragments of European Jewish lore from my dad, grandparents, neighbors, friends, and, later, rabbis. Family voices contained cadences I recognize in modern Hebrew speakers. An explanation would easily run over into a lively narrative, reenacting characters, jumping from topic to peripherally-related topic. Life lessons abounded: how to punch an anti-Semite out cold, how to slip out of a blind date with a Nazi sympathizer, how to run for your life from a Cossack soldier, and the power of telling these stories of bravery. Importantly, how to safely assimilate into American culture and outwardly seem less Jewish. Elders shared with me snippets of our history, tracing the path of our Diaspora from the Exodus story, to our Roman conquerors, the persecutions of the Crusades, and to the late 19th century Pogroms in Eastern Europe. And the Holocaust. Stories were told in midrashic fashion, like commentary: one person starts the story, another interrupts to make corrections and add detail. Many were told in the exaggerated, tall tale style I recognize in Talmud. All told with clear life lessons and literary flourishes. All with the misty and dreamy quality of folklore. They were beautiful, terrifying, moving, and deep, told from the heart. The stories portrayed a broad but blurry panorama, however, and precise historical details were left out. Timelines, specifics, actual dates and places, order of exact events, all were left quite vague.
For this reason, I grew up with many unanswered questions. Underscoring them all: are our stories really true? If other non-Jewish people don’t know our history, don’t tell stories of our persecution, don’t acknowledge antisemitism, can the stories be real? Is antisemitism real? Is my own heartfelt experience true? This is why it is a necessity for me now to study the historical past in detail, and to pass on a clearer and crisper picture to my children, while at the same time validating the authenticity of oral culture.
In fact, most significantly, we pass more than stories from generation to generation. While histories of the past may be told with a flourish, many Jewish families today hold silence about traumas they actually lived through themselves, and this can increase the traumatic effect for the next generation (Firestone, Ch 1). For my generation today, wherever in the world our grandparents lived, they lived in a time when mass killings of Jewish people were part of current events. Many of our grandparents fled genocide and persecution in countries around the world. Others fought in related wars. Research tells us that the effects of traumas like these may be passed on from parent to child and live on with us for generations (APA, 2019). Jewish history is real, is living in our bodies, and is relevant to each one of us. But, while Jewish culture and genetics may transmit the emotional content of our stories, precise details are left out. We need to uncover the past and tell these histories in order to heal (Firestone, Ch 2).
I want to underline here: all of this is the context for a Jewish child being taught European history today. This is why ancient history is so present for us. When Jewish history is glossed over by a teacher presenting Ancient Rome or the Crusades, when historical figures who perpetrated mass killings of our ancestors are presented as leaders, statesmen, and victors, our own experience is denied. When repeated in the classroom from a young age, this denial could have a crushing effect on our self-esteem and on our sense of safety in school. Supporting this point, but in reverse, a recent study showed that ethnic studies classes, including histories of historically under-represented students’ own ancestry, helped those students improve academic performance overall (Stanford News, 2021).
Next, here is a summary of the teaching material itself. Why I chose this moment in history, how it fits into the trajectory of the Waldorf history curriculum for children of this specific age.
In the year 70 CE, the Second Temple stood in Jerusalem: an architectural treasure and the link between heaven and earth for the people of Israel. In that year, the Roman Emperor sent a vast and highly-organized professional army, consisting of four legions, to crush a simple provincial rebellion. The resulting stampede led to the unplanned razing to the ground of the Temple of Jerusalem. The people of Israel lost their central site of worship, the very core of their tradition and identity, and, after a second expulsion 60 years later, their homes and livelihoods. A small band of sages who survived the siege, in an act of cultural preservation, re-stabilization, and rebirth, compiled an oral document containing ancestral wisdom, ethics, laws, stories, guidelines for daily life, and even humor. It comes down to us today as a document called Talmud. Their method of connecting with the divine utterly destroyed, the sages detailed the ways that this connection could still be made in all of the intricacies of ordinary life. They created a new Judaism without the Temple, the foundation for what we have today, and in so doing they reimagined this story of destruction as one of resilience.
This story of destruction and rebirth into new capacities paints a picture that is relatable to a young person entering puberty. Childhood’s natural connection to the spiritual world is gone, along with the security of unquestioningly following adult authority. The body becomes chaos, the old way of experiencing the world is burned up in a crucible, and a new conscious and thinking mind is born. Similarly, Talmud reflects the birth of a tradition of thinking—including questioning, discussion, and disagreement—called commentary. The rabbinic tradition trained students to think and to discuss, but within set limits bounded by laws handed down through a direct chain originating with the divine word. Talmud provided firm ethical parameters defined by a clear authority, also needed by middle schoolers as they develop a thinking mind but not yet mature executive function.
For developmental reasons, children around the age of 13 can benefit from learning this history. The birth of rabbinic Judaism during late antiquity marked a great transition for the Israelite people from a society that followed the direct and hierarchical authority of their God, to a new society led by wise human beings interpreting the commands of this God using intellectual powers. The Temple sacrifices and annual ritual cycle had provided direct sensory experience and a concrete picture of how the Priests should fulfill the will of their God. The new Judaism that emerged relied on laws, concepts, and oral language, with few physical rituals and almost no material content at all, aside from Torah scrolls containing written words. Rudolf Steiner described the change in human development during this historical time period as the transition from the Sentient Soul to the Intellectual or Mind Soul period (Lindenberg 38-39); developments in Jewish as well as Ancient Greek and Roman cultures exemplify this transition in a typical way (43). This change in humanity was reflected in individual human beings at the time as “the emergence of independence and inwardness in soul-life,” (38). In children of today, we see this stage of growth mirrored in their inner development from ages 12-14, as their brains and bodies grow and change, and their emotional lives and thinking capacities transform.
If you’d like the full details, I hope you will read the full project! Everything is there for you to create this block yourself – a detailed bibliography, outlines, suggested projects and assignments, readings, even historical novels to include. And of course the rationale from a Waldorf perspective, in great detail 🙂 If you use any of my suggestions I’d love to know – please keep in touch!
Chigüiri-cosas 