The Fallen Buttered Toast Rule

In Yiddish folklore, the real–life Polish town of Chelm was characterized as a legendary community of fools. According to this folkloric tradition, Chelm’s residents were exceedingly proud of their tradition of non–wisdom and convoluted insight into the world’s problems. They viewed themselves as brilliant.

There are many hilarious stories about the backwards logic of Chelm. Writers like Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer were only two of the authors who put these stories to paper.

Even Chelm’s beggars had their own matrix for proper conduct. Shlomo the beggar went every week to solicit money from a wealthy merchant to help feed his family—and each week the merchant gave Shlomo the same amount. One week, however, the merchant gave Shlomo a little less money, saying that business was very bad. Feeling aggrieved, Shlomo responded with the line that has since become famous: “Because you had a bad week, why should I suffer?”

Chelm’s citizens lived with certain basic standards of expected behavior. “The fallen buttered toast rule” was commonly known and generally accepted. When toast was dropped on the floor, it would always fall with the buttered side facing up. One day a woman dropped her toast and it fell with the buttered side facing down. She ran to the Grand Illustrious Council of the Wise Men of Chelm for an explanation as to how this unexpected violation of a rule could happen. After much deliberation, fumbling and arguing, the Council determined that she had obviously buttered the toast on the wrong side. With that stroke of wisdom, the woman and the rest of the town were satisfied and reassured that all was well with the world.

These Chelm stories would be funny if they were confined to fairy tales. But sometimes our current American Jewish leadership acts as if they were members of the Grand Illustrious Council of Wise Men of Chelm.

America is a country where there seems to be an organization promoting every social concern conceivable to mankind. There are groups that monitor the environment, save the whales, rescue pit bulls and save abandoned buildings. The number of non–profit advocacy and charitable organizations ranges in the tens of thousands.

In our Jewish community, too, there is a plethora of specialized organizations. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations represents 50 national Jewish agencies from across the political and religious spectrum. There are Jewish organizations that focus on saving trees in Israel, maintaining water levels in the Sea of Galilee and preserving Jewish cemeteries. Everyone is aware of the myriad local Federations and rabbinic organizations.

All of these organizations are very important and do wonderful and magnificent things on behalf of the Jewish people.

But strange as it might seem, there is not one national Jewish fundraising organization whose sole focus is Jewish kids and ensuring that every Jewish child has the ability, if their family seeks it, to receive a high quality and affordable Jewish education, irrespective of their stream of affiliation or family’s financial resources.

Impossible, some might say. If there is not a national Jewish organization that is solely focused on funding Jewish education for all of our children, then surely the existing national philanthropic Jewish charity chests and Federations or rabbinic organizations have made funding Jewish education their number–one agenda item?

Every year, most organizations hold annual conventions where they discuss the issues most relevant to their constituencies. As inconceivable as it may be, there has not been one national Jewish fundraising organization, either lay or rabbinic, that has dedicated its entire annual general meeting to the crisis of funding Jewish education.

Not one rabbinic organization—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist—has convened its national convention and put communal funding for Jewish day schools at the top of its agenda. These organizations have dealt with other very important issues. One found time in 2005, for example, to pass a resolution that opposed the prominent display of the Confederate flag on the front lawn of the South Carolina state capitol.

Everyone knows that assimilation, intermarriage and general spiritual malaise among the next generation of Jews are dramatically altering the trajectory of Jewish continuity. It is also well known that there is a direct correlation between a child’s Jewish education and his or her subsequent involvement in the Jewish community as an adult. It is also well documented that many Jewish families would love to send their children to Jewish day schools but cannot afford the high tuition.

The answer is clear. Lower the cost of Jewish day schools so that they are universally affordable (or, better yet, free) and many more kids can attend; improve the quality of the educational experience by dramatically increasing salaries for teachers who can then earn a dignified living wage. This will attract more of the best and the brightest to the profession.

All of these suggestions, if implemented, would absolutely reverse the course of the rapid assimilation facing the American Jewish community. Logic, and pure self–preservation, would dictate that every national Jewish philanthropic and rabbinic organization would stop business as usual and hold national emergency meetings to discuss and implement massive funding of Jewish education.

In many ways, we live in a surreal modern–day Chelm and our Jewish leadership is reminiscent of the Grand Illustrious Council of the Wise Men of Chelm.

We shouldn’t be surprised if our contemporary version of the Grand Illustrious Council of Wise Men of Chelm meets in the near future to discuss the problem of exorbitantly high tuitions preventing Jewish kids from receiving day school educations. In all likelihood, the first thing they would do is convene important–sounding committees and blue–ribbon commissions to study the issue. If historical performance forecasts the future, after much self–righteous and tortuous hand–wringing, they would probably publish a very lengthy report with fancy graphs and charts—and then do absolutely nothing. They would probably implement the precedent of the “fallen buttered toast rule” and opine that the reason Jewish kids are prevented from receiving day school educations is that the parents are obviously not working to full capacity and not earning enough money to pay the tuitions.

Chelm is a nice place to hear about in fairy tales. It is an altogether different story in real life. Let’s stop this institutional foolishness and join together to demand that every Jewish child should be entitled to his or her legitimate birthright: communally funded Jewish education.

George D. Hanus is the chairman of the Superfund for Jewish Education and Continuity and the publisher of World Jewish Digest.

© 2007 World Jewish Digest