Egypt in Our Time

Exploring the Educational Crisis Affecting Our Yeshivos

Reading Time: About 16 Minutes

As Passover approaches, it’s time to reflect on what application the Egyptian exile has on our time. As members of the Jewish nation, it behooves us to understand how we got tricked into working for Pharoah,  who were the ones who never got subjected to Pharoah’s slavery, and how we ultimately went free.

Egyptian brutality didn’t begin on day one. It was an elaborate scheme which is spelled out by many midrashim. The chief worry of the Egyptian ruling class was the incredible proliferation of the Jewish nation. Today we might call it “overpopulation.” Pharoah’s counselors prescribed an antidote. They informed Pharoah that hard labor would cause the fertility rate to drop precipitously. Although the intent was always to reduce the Jewish population, this goal was not stated outright.

At the onset, Pharaoh himself showed up to a worksite and engaged in labor. The people were cajoled into joining him and were offered good pay to boot. Which good citizen would not join the king of the land hosting them and display their hakaras hatov? In a slow series of events, the façade was eventually dropped, and the Jews were conned into working as slaves.

One tribe, however, shunned the labor from the onset. Right from the get-go, when almost all the Jews joined Pharoah in building, the tribe of Levi wouldn’t budge from their learning. “We are the Rabbis of the Jewish people,” they exclaimed to the Egyptian officials. “We don’t have time for manual labor.” With that simple argument, the tribe of Levi was left alone and was never subjugated to the ensuing slavery.

The Egyptian exile was the root of all the subsequent exiles. Hence the Israelites’ triumphs and failings in Egypt must be studied as a guiding lesson to carry us through our time.

We are all very much troubled by the recent regulations released by the New York State Education Department. The regulations claim a pathway to make private schools “substantially equivalent” to public schools. While The new requirements for Yeshivos fill pages, there is precious little space dedicated to establishing the baseline of required instruction in public school. The entire statute reads as follows:

“[P]ublic day schools shall provide for instruction in at least the twelve common school branches of arithmetic, reading, spelling, writing, the English language, geography, United States history, civics, hygiene, physical training, the history of New York state and science.”

As an example of the unequivalency being touted as “equivalent,” Social Studies isn’t required in public schools, but would be mandated in Yeshivos under the new law. This would make perfect sense as “The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.” A “quality” that the enlightened members of the NYS Board of Regents believe that we are lacking.

The Anschluss 

The precise method of how the government wishes to gain control over the classroom is detailed in the newly proposed regulations. The three methods relevant for yeshivos are:

1. if the school is registered to take Regents examinations,

2. if the school is accredited, and lastly

3. if the school doesn’t satisfy the other conditions, their curriculum would be under the direct scrutiny of the Local School Authority (LSA).

A review of all three methods would have dreadful results. We will attempt to highlight some aspects of the pitfalls one at a time.

The Danger of Regents

At the onset, it must be understood that yeshivos that incorporate Regents exams into their curriculum satisfy the new regulations not because of the graciousness of the education department. It is only because the education department knows that these children will necessarily be exposed to and inculcated with the information posed to them throughout the curriculum and in the exam. The way things stand now, the Regents exams aren’t your father’s classical achievement test, or even their Earth Science Regents. It’s no longer possible to just skip certain parts of the curriculum and leave some test questions blank. The current Regents, particularly Living Environment and Language Arts, have been weaponized with modern day wokeisms to the extreme. These themes have been incorporated as part and parcel to every segment of the curriculum.. Living Environment for example, focuses primarily on three topic areas. Reproduction, Genetics (and human manipulation of), and Conservation. Succinctly, it’s a modern-day Greek reincarnation of the human ability to rule and control the planet. I recommend that any parent that truly cares about his child’s education, look at some of the previous Regents Exams before deciding that exposure to the Regents curriculum is right for them.  The indoctrination is incredible.

However, it isn’t only the Regents exams (and courses) that are problematic. Nearly every school is required to provide standardized testing every year. The school, in turn, collects reimbursement as part of Mandated Services Aid. Although the state only recognizes Regents accreditation as a substantially equivalent substitute, the truth is that these standardized tests are every bit just as troubling as the Regents Exams.

(Fun Fact: Did you know that Mandated Services Aid will reimburse for in-school immunizations?)

Indoctrination through testing is rooted in the propaganda of emergent Nazi Germany circa 1935. As an example, a math question to German children in schools where Jewish children were limited to 1.5% by 1935 and banned from education altogether by 1939, reads as follows.

The Jews are aliens in Germany – in 1933 there were 66,060,000 inhabitants in the German Reich, of whom 499,682 were Jews. What is the percent of aliens? 

It was deemed important, indeed necessary, to sow the seed of anti-Semitic propaganda early into young, fertile Aryan minds. Clearly, this was just the beginning.

To transpose this to the subject at hand, I’ll present one random sample taken from an elementary school test:  (Source: https://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/Science/621/ils-v202-exam.pdf)

The message is clear. Humans have an inverse relationship with the environment. (Remember Pharaoh’s concern?) The greater the population, the less trees we have. And all this is based on “data” and “your knowledge of science.”  It’s all black and white and was even graphed out by the child himself. It’s not indoctrination. It’s the child’s own conclusion. Lest the point wasn’t driven home enough, the test goes on to hammer this point deep into the consciousness of the child’s mind as follows:

“Tests” in Language Arts is even more of an insidious topic. The power of indoctrination through stories is enormous and its method of operation is multi-pronged. A story gets people into a reverie. In such a trance-like state, they automatically become more suggestable. Second, a story has the power to insert subtle ideas and bypass the normal mental filters that people have. There are many other strengths of relaying concepts in stories, which is one reason why we have been relating stories of sages and righteous men throughout history.

When the story becomes a test, the already loaded arsenal becomes deadly. Agendas are woven into “a story” and then they are quizzed to make sure they “understood” the message correctly.  English Language Arts (ELA) Tests given to children as young as third grade suffer heavily from this intrusion on the purity of our chinuch. These tales inject ideas that are the antithesis to our beliefs deep into the recesses of our children’s subconscious minds in a place where only stories have the ability to reach.

As an exercise, read the story below (click on the image to see the whole story) and reflect if this would be something that you would be comfortable having your child read. Please note: I have only selected one story, but there are many more. You can review some of the past tests online for more of the same.

Here is one of many questions that the child is required to answer after reading the passage:

Let us pause here in order to reflect upon the question. While several quanta removed from the implications of the Reich’s insidious mathematics test, the coercive subtext is the same. It was set, apparently, by teachers trained in science and psychology. It was set for children whose futures depend upon providing answers that will allow them to pass the exam, i.e., by expressing views consistent with those of the State. It is intended to embed opinion.

The students’ required reading is substantially pushing an agenda that is anathema to our beliefs. And yet, in order to gain marks, the students are required to endorse the beliefs of their examiners or fail on the question, regardless of what their understanding of the true state of affairs is.

The very fact that the children know they will be questioned on the subject matter of the passage forces them to internalize it deeper than a cursory glance would provide. Forcing them to actually answer the questions “correctly” is nothing less than a travesty.

“Corporate government” is heavily invested in propaganda, many of the techniques of which are a legacy of the Third Reich. It is difficult to believe that it was not influential in setting this curriculum. Yet we willfully give this out to our children because the state reimburses for it.

The Department of Education may have many shortcomings, but they are no fools. They realize that although their tests are maliciously designed, these yearly tests, whose marks bear no consequence, would not be enough to change the character of our schools. It would only be with Regents Exams and the full year of curriculum that  it entails that would give them the ability to successfully alter the mindset of our feeble youth. Many scorn at the idea that the OTD problem could possibly have anything to do with the secular agenda within the English Departments. Those scoffers are woefully ignorant about the depths of psychology being foisted upon us as a community.

Accredited or Discredited?

Another “acceptable” benchmark of equivalency would be if the institution is accredited. From the chatter in news articles, it’s apparent that many are viewing this as a possible acceptable workaround to the new regulations. 

It isn’t that simple, though. Aside from rigorous curriculum mandates, in order to receive accreditation “all members of the faculty shall have demonstrated by training, earned degrees, scholarship, experience, and by classroom performance or other evidence of teaching potential, their competence to offer the courses and discharge the other academic responsibilities which are assigned to them.”

Institutions are advised to fill out this form, which makes it readily apparent what the qualifications of the teachers are:

It goes without saying that teachers who are not infused with Torah values, but instead indoctrinated with the very curriculums that we are opposed to, have the ability to instill untold spiritual damage in our children.

Gatekeeper or Jail Guard?

The last acceptable method would simply allow the entire curriculum to be reviewed and governed by the Local School Authority. This would give the LSA full control of the curriculum. Although there is a cursory statement in the introduction to the regulations that the LSA’ should be sensitive to the culture and beliefs of the schools that they govern, a careful reading of the law (§130.9) makes it evident that it was written in horribly bad faith. The regulations were written in a true “gotcha” fashion, unearthing every regulation relevant to teaching requirements from various statutes and regulations. More intriguing is the fact that the new regulations require instruction in patriotism and citizenship from §801(1), and continue with requirements from the entire Chapter 16, but they fail to mention mandated instruction on a topic that this country was founded on, even though it is mentioned in the very same sentence. The new regulation skips the requirement of teaching “the role of religious tolerance in this country,… with particular attention to the study of the inhumanity of genocide… [and] the Holocaust. This omission alone makes it amply clear that the newly proposed regulation is a hate crime directed on Jewish schools. If it was truly about more instruction for all private schools, there’s no doubt that religious tolerance would be required as well. But the way it stands now, they seek to limit religion and in fact cannot tolerate the freedom of religion. 

Summary of (un)acceptable “Substantial Equivalent” Modalities

In a nutshell, the acceptable criteria that allows a school to be considered “substantially equivalent” is either if the state has control over the students or the teachers. Either way, it would be a win for them and a devastating loss for us.

How We Got Here

Learning from his ancestors in Egypt, when the Health Department attempted to gain access to R’ Yitzchok Zev HaLevi Soloveitchik’s yeshiva in Brisk, he turned them away by the door. However, many in the States strain to recall events that took place so long ago in Egypt and therefore took another approach.

In the past few decades, we have created a culture of grants and funding for Jewish schools. These grants put us in the impossible position of both advocating for Yiddishkeit while at the same time begging for their favor.

While almost all government grants to schools are by definition “non-sectarian” (meaning, cannot be used for religious purposes), perhaps none are as egregious as the establishing of UPK in Jewish Schools. 

When Universal Pre-Kindergarten (UPK) was rolled out in 2015, it was gratuitously integrated by a large swath of yeshivas, chedarim and schools within the frum community. The reason?

Money.

Lots of it!

Yeshivas were more infatuated with gaining access to these funds than questioning at what cost it would come in terms of Yiddishkeit. As I meticulously detailed in these articles, claiming to incorporate UPK in yeshivas is a grave chillul Hashem. Actual incorporation of UPK amounts to nothing less than shmad. UPK regulations do not allow for davening except for during a break, and even then only in a room separate from the classroom. This would be just one of the very many grievous infractions that we are violating only in order to gain a “free” preschool.

The fact that UPK is a de facto public school wasn’t lost on the State Education Department. As a matter of fact, it was their trial. Just as Pharaoh has done millennia ago, we find that later oppressors used the same tools again. And we fell for it.

They began by paying us to incorporate public schools within our Yeshivos. Schools in which Brochos are not allowed to be encouraged. Classrooms that are mandated to incorporate “diversity.” Rooms that cannot be adorned with Shofars, Matzos and sukkas. Instead, seasons, colors, and evolution of butterflies must be displayed.

Want even more money? Take a look at the bait that NYC dangled in front of school administrators this year:

For every child enrolled in UPK, the school will receive $7,000 per year. But if the teacher is certified, the school receives an additional $3,000 per child!

What’s the chance that a school that already has sold its children for petty cash will pass up on another $54,000 per year of revenue? A certified teacher means that the teacher has been infused with the values that the state wants. These “values” will then be instilled in our children through osmosis. Using a certified teacher isn’t a mere formality, and calling attention to it isn’t “the sky is falling” hysterics. In interviews with teachers on the field, certified teachers regularly incorporate their foreign ideas into the classroom.

The Reaction

One statement released to address the current crises reads in part:

“…we remain deeply concerned about the impact these regulations may have on many yeshivas across New York State. Most dismayingly, and despite numerous entreaties by Agudath Israel and other advocates for the yeshiva community, nowhere in the proposed regulations is there any mention of the need to take into account the educational value of religious studies in determining substantial equivalency. Yeshiva students devote long hours to the study of the Chumash, Mishnah, Talmud and various other religious texts – a course of study that is well known to be a rigorous academic discipline of the highest order. For a yeshiva to be judged on the quality of its educational program without taking into account these religious studies would make a cruel mockery of the review process. By ignoring this essential component of yeshiva education, the proposed new regulations may result in yeshivas having to make major changes to their school day schedules to be deemed substantially equivalent. This is entirely unacceptable.”

However, in their statement, they beg for continued engagement with the Education Department.

“We will continue to engage the SED and Board of Regents as the regulatory process moves forward, in the hope that any new regulations will fully respect the unique nature and essential role of yeshiva education.”

They neglect to state the obvious. We have no need to “work” or “engage with” the Education Department because our values are non-negotiable. We need to challenge the notion that we have to be “substantially equivalent” to public schools on its face. We do not squabble if Chumash and Talmud study provide us the tools that the secularists in government claim we need. Unlike a recent letter penned by Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, the Satmar Rebbe, addressed to the Education Department, the above statement is one of an apologist. We don’t need to express regret for our traditions. We need to double down. The Rebbe’s letter reads in part:

“Unfortunately, the guidelines as they are proposed are contrary to our traditions. We reviewed the proposed guidelines with great interest, and we cannot agree to them because we will no longer be able to provide the education that our parent body is expecting from our education institutions. Should we attempt to adapt the proposed guidelines, our parent body will revolt and create their own education system providing them what they’re looking for.”

But is it Too Late?

It's immeasurable what a statement it would have been if no Jewish schools would have adopted UPK in the onset. It’s quite likely that there would have been no impetus to heave these regulations in our way to begin with. The tribe of Levi didn’t need lawsuits to be left alone by the Egyptians. They just walked away and were never molested by their overlords. We however, have allowed - nay, invited the Education Department into our classrooms. Now it may be too late. Once the Jews were sucked in, it took the greatest miracles to release them from their bondage. Let us be frank. The current way the regulations are written seeks to label any child who attends a school not deemed equivalent to a public school as truant. Parents who insist on sending to such schools may be threatened with loss of guardianship over their children. The New York State Education Department is out for the kill.

What Can we do?

1. We must Remember that miracles are possible from the most unlikely places.

2. Askanim are recommending that we submit letters to the Education Department.

3. We must immediately cease and desist from maintaining UPK classrooms.

4. Although it may seem counterintuitive, we must halt all Regents Courses in our Yeshivos and Schools. While it satisfies the substantial equivalent clause, it serves their purpose and weakens us both from a legal perspective, but more so from Hashkafic perspective.

5. Furthermore, we must uproot the secular mindset from ourselves as much as possible to show Hashem that we don’t want the good and evil to coincide.

6. Ultimately we must pray in earnest to Hashem to extradite us and not only bring a miracle to release us from the current predicament, but from the entire exile.

May we merit to see those miracles in our day.

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