eight years time served

Recently, a Facebook friend asked me about my elementary school. "What was it like" were the exact words. WIth no context, that would seem pretty open-ended. But she was asking because it had come up that I went to a yeshiva day school. Specifically, an Orthodox yeshiva day school. So my interlocutor's interest was presumably in how it differed from public schools.

Certainly there are different types of yeshivas, and I can't as easily speak to those with which I had no experience. The ones I went to are what one might call "Modern Orthodox," though even that is not a well-defined term. At any rate, the two yeshivas I attended were Yeshiva Dov Revel (for grades one through four) and The Yeshiva of Central Queens (for grades five through eight). The two are somewhat similar, so I generally won't make an effort to distinguish between them.

At these schools, the day is split between "Hebrew" and "English." I put the languages in quotes because the former really means "all religious subjects" and the latter really means "all secular subjects." Typically, the morning would be devoted to Hebrew and the afternoon devoted to English -- though I recall one specific time when it was reversed. In the early grades each class had one Hebrew teacher and one English teacher, and they stayed in the same classroom. In later grades (seven and eight, IIRC, but I could be wrong) there was more specialization, and classes moved around for different subjects. In the later grades there was also optional religious classes on Thursday nights and Sunday mornings.

It may seem obvious to note that, with only half a day devoted to the secular subjects, students weren't getting as much time for them as their public school counterparts. To some extent that is true, though our school days were longer in order to partially offset the difference. We started earlier than the public schools and ended later. Except for on Fridays. Fridays were abbreviated because we had to get home in time to prepare for the Sabbath. This was especially true during the winter, when sundown (and therefore the Sabbath) arrived early in the day.

But aside from the Hebrew half of the day, religion still informed the English half. My sixth grade class put on a production of Oliver! for our play. And I remember that we had to change a couple of lines from "Food, Glorious Food," which is the opening number. The song's references to "hot sausage and mustard" and "peas, pudding and saveloys" were replaced with "hamburgers and mustard" and "peas, pudding and sauerkraut." We were not to even sing about nonkosher foods.

And, speaking of food, I don't remember ever having a spelling bee. But I remember brakhah bees. A brakhah is a blessing -- in this context, a blessing said before eating food. There are five basic brakhot to be said before eating, with the precise brakhah determined by the food(s) being eaten. In a spelling bee, the contestant is given a word and has to spell it. In a brakhah bee, the contestant is given a food and has to identify the prayer said before eating it:

Judge: bananas
Contestant 1: ha'adamah
Judge: egg salad
Contestant 2: sh'hacol
etc..

In this mix, I was kind of an odd man out. It was assumed that we were all living in orthodox households, but I wasn't. In orthodox households, kids had already gotten some exposure to the Hebrew language before they started first grade. They were used to Orthodox prayer services. And they had parents who were familiar with the Hebrew topics and could help them with the religious homework. My parents didn't come from Orthodox backgrounds, and had minimal knowledge of Hebrew. In fact, they sent my sister and me to yeshiva because they wanted us to have the religious education that they hadn't gotten. But that put us behind the eight ball. My classmates, by and large, came in with more knowledge of the subjects and they had parents who could help them more.

As well, I was culturally out of step. Because my family wasn't Orthodox, I was getting a very different message at home than I was in school. My parents tried to work around the difference, but it sometimes bit me in the butt -- often because I didn't know when and how to keep my yap shut. My parents' line to me about religiosity was something along the lines of different people have different opinions about God, no one knows for sure who's right, and all forms of religious practice are equally valid. That was decidedly not the opinion of the teachers and administrators. I remember one time when a teacher told us that Orthodoxy was the only correct way to practice, and I contradicted him. Suffice to say that didn't go over well. Boys had to wear yarmulkes (small skullcaps) and tzitzit (fringed garments worn under the shirt), which were new to me when I started. Yarmulkes were too visible to forget. But I would often forget to wear the tzitzit, and would get in trouble if I was caught. "I forgot" wasn't an acceptable excuse. Wearing tzitzit was expected to be second nature. You wouldn't forget to put on pants before going out, so why would you forget to wear tzitzit?

Another issue was my friends outside of school. My neighborhood wasn't particularly Jewish, and it certainly wasn't Orthodox. It's important to remember that, within the Orthodox world, religion is ever-present. You wear a head-covering which reminds you of God. You have prayers in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening. You pray before you eat and after you eat. And after you use the bathroom. But in my milieu, the religiosity that was supposed to permeate my entire life would necessarily take a break on weekends and during the summer. Well, not during the whole summer, since I did go to an Orthodox summer camp for several years. But that's another matter.

After the eight grade I went to a public high school. That decision was met by my teachers with disapproval, but I was adamant. And I was free.

Looking back, I know that I wasn't the only kid in the class from a nonOrthodox background. But at the time it sure seemed as if I was. And I never felt as if I fit in.