Dear Readers, These columns began on my area of America Online, called:  Judaism Today:  Where Do I Fit?   People anonymously sent me E-Mail, and I began to choose one for a public response in my Jewish E-Mail of the Week column. The column has become quite popular and is now syndicated internationally in many Jewish papers and websites.  I hope you find they help you as you think about the Ethics, Spirituality and Peoplehood components of the Jewish way of Life.  I welcome your comments... see the end of the column. Gil PS  Teachers and others, feel free to copy my columns and forward them or use them as you see fit.  Please see the friendly copyright notice at the end.

Are Jewish Teens Immoral Today?

Dear Gil:

I teach the 9th grade course on Jewish Ethics & Values at my synagogue. We live in interesting times, ethically speaking. Just look at the newspaper. On any given day there are stories about cloning, abortion, debates over the right to die, atrocities in Rwanda and Kosovo, hanky-panky in the White House, etc. The world is getting more and more complicated. How do we decide what's right and what's wrong? How do we help our children become moral individuals?

These are not idle questions. My Sunday School students and I have been talking about stories that have been in the news recently. One concerned a Virginia man who turned himself into the authorities for a crime he had committed nineteen years ago. It seems that he had discovered God in that time. After discussing the matter with his wife, he decided he couldn't in good conscience provide spiritual council to others, including his own children, knowing that he was living a lie himself. I asked my class whether this man did the right thing in turning himself in. More than half said no. The man would have done better devoting himself to good works, they said; nothing would be accomplished by owning up to what he did. Indeed, the prosecutor in charge of the case has said he is wrestling with the very same issues. The parents of the young woman the man murdered, however, see no ambiguity in the matter.

Another case concerned a teenager, a student at Berkeley, who idly stood by and watched as a friend abused and murdered a seven year old girl. (The details are actually much more grizzly than I make it sound.) The parents of the dead child have demanded that the student be expelled from the university. University officials said that reprehensible as the young man's inaction might have been, he broke no laws and thus there are no grounds for expulsion. I asked my class what they thought. Again, half said the boy should not be removed from the school. He should have intervened, they said, but he did not break the law. He earned his place at the university by his good grades, they said, and he should thus be permitted to stay.

The class discussions were much more complicated than these summaries suggest, of course. What troubled me about the students responses to both cases, but particularly the second one, is the lack of any sense of moral obligation, any sense that there might be standards that transcend what is legal. According to German law at the time, what the Nazis did was perfectly legal. No one today, however, would argue that it was right. The same is true for slavery in America 135 years ago.

Are my students morally defective? Absolutely not. They care deeply about right and wrong, and they'd be rightly insulted by any who would suggest otherwise. The problem is, the world out there is not giving them -- indeed, it probably cannot give them -- the tools they need to make meaningful moral distinctions. They are well-versed on what is legal and what is scientifically possible and what is fashionable, but standards of morality seem to be falling through the cracks. Those standards can only come from the home and their religious heritage. I'm talking about teaching our children that there are ethical dimensions to everyday life that law and custom can't address.

When my class discussion moved from questions of law to questions of personal accountability and integrity, the students began to see both of the cases above in a different light. I reminded them that college applications ask about things like community service and the like because they want to know something of an applicant's character. Didn't the bystander's refusal to intervene say something about his character? Then I quoted from the Talmud, where it says that a person who can prevent another from sinning but does not, shares in the sins of that person. Which society would they rather live in, I asked, one in which decisions about whether to help people in distress are judged on what is or isn't legal, or one in which people are simply expected to help? This time the answer was unanimous.

J

Dear J:

Your students, indeed all of us, are lucky you are their teacher. Does Judaism have anything to offer a modern person living in a modern world? Your classes and teachings answer that question with a loud and resounding YES!

So are Jewish teens immoral today? I'd like to offer this question to my readers. What say you readers? Email in your comments to GilMann@aol.com and please let me know how old you are. I hope to follow up with a column containing your comments (anonymously of course.) Thank you!

Gil

A FRIENDLY COPYRIGHT NOTICE © Copyright Gil Mann These columns can be found at www.beingjewish.org.  Not only do I give you permissions to copy these Jewish Email columns...I HOPE YOU WILL and that you share them with others!  All I ask is that you never charge anyone for them and that you also include this little copyright notice.  Thank You!

Thanks,
Gil