How to Teach Our Generation

by Dovid Zaklikowski for Hasidic Archives

In the summer of 1952, Rabbi Yisroel Jacobson, head of Lubavitch’s Beth Rivkah girls’ school in New York, was looking for someone to teach in and run the small educational department of the school’s middle division. He was introduced to Mr. Tzvi Meir Steinmetz by an acquaintance from Debrecen. As the two men spoke, Rabbi Jacobson realized that the clean-shaven man before him was a Torah scholar with a warm chasidic soul, a knowledge of philosophy, with a knack for explaining deep ideas in simple words. He was also Hungarian, as the families of many potential students were. 

Rabbi Jacobson offered him the job on the spot. But Mr. Steinmetz had just taken a part-time teaching job at the Yeshivah of Flatbush, a Zionist school where the Judaic curriculum was taught in modern Hebrew, and his pay there was almost equal to what Beth Rivkah was offering. If he would be permitted to keep both positions, he told Rabbi Jacobson, he would happily accept the offer. 

His first task upon accepting the position was to meet with the Rebbe. Decades later, he recalled the encounter with some embarrassment, noting that he was not aware that Hasidim considered it disrespectful to sit in the Rebbe’s presence. “He told me to sit, and I sat. We discussed problems of education, and I was deeply impressed by the Rebbe’s approach and views. I was fascinated by the passion and excitement, and the many innovations of the Rebbe.”

Mr. Steinmetz had already developed his own views on how a Judaic education should be organized, “Currently schools jump into…extrapolation and novel approaches in the Talmudic text when they are much younger and do not have a good all-encompassing knowledge.”

The Rebbe listened intently to all that he had to say, Mr. Steinmetz recalled, and then said, “However, in the end most educators did not listen to this, and that is in fact not the way to follow on the ground.”

Mr. Steinmetz described his relationship with Dr. Breuer, and the philosophy of Torah im Derech Eretz, strict Torah observance and engagement with the modern world. The Rebbe dismissed the idea out of hand, as he had done on several occasions, as not being applicable to the current generation. It would never be part of the curriculum at Beth Rivkah, he told Mr. Steinmetz. “Here the students are unsophisticated. Tell them a slogan and they will follow it.”

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