The decision to send the three of us kids to Solomon Schechter was, I'm told, a difficult one. My mother, a daughter of Holocaust refugees and a staunch Zionist, pushed for us to attend. My father, who came from a more typical American Jewish background, worried we'd emerge from such an education glassy-eyed, alien to him.

 

The result of this argument was a provisional agreement to try out the school for a year... a trial period that ultimately turned into a total of 27 combined years of Schechter education for the three of us kids.

 

These were the wild-west years of day-school education—an age of wide collars, bellbottoms, and here and there a startup Solomon Schechter. The regulated, pristine day schools of today were still a dot on the far horizon. The teachers were a remarkably dedicated and quite uneven lot: the best and, in one case, the worst I've since encountered. We had teachers who were brilliant, politically daring, ahead of their times; the former nun who was going to get algebra into our heads whether we liked it or not; the eighth-grade English teacher who gave the best creative writing class I would have until college. There were, among the faculty, larger-than-life characters—the grizzled Hebrew teacher who'd fought in the Irgun, and the younger Israeli teacher who was rumored to have saved Moshe Dayan's other eye. They might not have been politically correct, but were memorable and had a sense of mission—they had to, to join the faculty of a day school still in its infancy.

 

What all those years of Schechter left me with was a depth of education that I'm not sure is attainable in other ways. Recently I found myself explaining it to a friend this way: I may have done all my homework in the French classes I took in high school, but my French is finite. If you ask me a word in French, I either know it or I don't—that is, either it was on a vocabulary list I memorized or it wasn't...and if it wasn't, then there's no point in me wracking my brain, because it's just not in there.

 

In contrast, my knowledge of Hebrew is a well fed from multiple springs. How many Israeli songs did I learn as a child at Schechter, in how many Hebrew plays did I memorize lines? If I don't know a word in Hebrew, give me an hour. There's a good chance it will bubble up.

 

I graduated from Solomon Schechter without knowing that ribs were pork, or what it was like to play on an organized sports team. I casually asked a Christian classmate, that first year of public high school, what day Christmas would fall on that year. But I soon got a remedial education in the wide world. I attended a large semi-urban high school—a glorious mix of everything and everyone. Eight hundred kids in my grade, gangs and knife fights and serious sports teams and vocational classes alongside the A.P. courses... in short, a relief from the by-that-time-confining environment of my tiny day school.

 

Though I pursued some Jewish studies in high school and college, my Schechter years would prove the most important part of my Jewish education. And somewhere in there, quietly, a spark had been struck. The thing that caught might not have been what my teachers expected—I became neither a religious Jew nor a particularly reverent one. But I became a devoted, argumentative, passionate one.

 

I write about Jews and Jewish history. I'm fascinated by our stories and how they shape us. I've chosen, often, to point my efforts outward—that is, to use my focus on Jewish subject matter to build bridges with non-Jews, taking on a joint research project with a West Indian writer or working on collaborative projects with a Jordanian scholar, an evangelical Christian writer, etc. While I'm an active Jew—I sing with a choir that focuses on Jewish music, I'm a member of a congregation—I break plenty of rules. I'm quite comfortable with this. I know what rules I'm breaking, I know why I'm breaking them and don't feel compelled to pretend to anyone that I'm not breaking them... and I also have dear friends who are quite observant. One of the greatest gifts of my Schechter education, I think, is that I'm at ease in both religious and non-religious crowds, and am fairly hard to intimidate as a Jew. It's not that I think I know anywhere near as much as people who've devoted themselves to serious Judaic study. But I know the basics and I know that I have a seat at the table.

 

In the end, I think my father ended up with three children whose worldviews he recognized, even if our education was markedly different from his.

 

Six years ago, as an old Schechter classmate and I sat talking with our infant daughters in our arms, the conversation turned to whether, when the time came, we'd send our children to Jewish day schools. We both lived in areas with good public schools, and if it had been a choice between public school and some regular secular private school, both of us would have chosen public school without a second thought—and with a great sigh of financial relief. Still, we both said we hoped to send our kids to Jewish day school.

 

As my friend said to me on that day six years ago, he wanted his daughter to have the same education—and so the same freedom to choose and shape her own identity—that he himself had. That she should be an apikores, he said, but never an am ha'aretz. A heretic, maybe... but if so, then a heretic on purpose, and not out of ignorance. That's a credo I can live by, as I pick and choose my own observances and watch my two kids—one currently in day school, the other still in pre-school—begin to do the same.