I have been lurking in the shadows reading the varied volleys regarding tefilah in our schools and the realities we are experiencing as we endeavor to try to teach tefilah to our charges at all different ages.
It is not for naught that the Talmud teaches us that Tefilah is one of the things that needs regular chizuk. I apologize for the soapbox I am about to stand on.
Among my many pet peeves is the difficulty educators seem to have with the reality that tefilah does not matter to kids. As any educator should know, a student (adult or adolescent) is motivated at the very core by the question "What's in it for me?"
And we can pontificate and teach kids that tefilah is for the individual or for God or for both and it does not really matter. Because the student needs to feel that tefilah speaks to the mitpalel. If tefilah does not speak to the child then it does not matter what we do, because it will not matter to the child. And be very careful about continuing the naive approach that motivate many along the lines of no atheists in foxhole's because if you have one student who actually is a critical thinker and has experienced tragedy then that student, if you are lucky, will simply and quietly dismiss you as a fool, rather than challenge you to an unanswerable duel where by definition you will lose in the eyes of his peers, your students.
In the younger years, children are moldable and desire to please their role models. Regular tefilah attendance by children alongside their parents with specific skills to make tefilah functional is what is needed. Then as the students progress through elementary school and into middle school, the students need to continue to go to shul regularly to continue the training/obedience and then also begin to explore tefilah as literature. Why do students return from the year in Israel dedicated to daven, because they have been in a community where tefilah bizmana and be'tzibur is the expected norm. But why do some students after a year back on college stay dedicated to tefilah and some not is the question to answer. I had a three year stint as the Orthodox rabbi at a university with a significant Day School population. Yet we struggled with a daily minyan in those days. Almost all of the students who did not go to minyan had not grownup with tefilah as a value in their otherwise shomer mitzvot house. Many of those who did attend minyan regularly came from families where this was a value. But those who did attend regularly and did not grown up with the value identified a key component. Teflah for them was an accomplishment and had meaning for them. We need to help students construct meaning in the tefilot.
Why do kids read or not read? because the literature appeals to them. And as any English teacher can tell you, the best books are those that the students connect with, not those that had no meaning despite all the lectures and lessons because those books get kids to read more. And even when the teacher lectures about the meaning, it does not last because the student has not connected with the theme or the deep ideas. The best learning is constructivist. Why not apply that to tefilah?
Most be'ur tefilah classes or programs consist of the old format of teacher lecturing about the meaning. But that will fail as that method fails for any subject. And for those 2 -5 minute insights into tefilah- what subject of equal gravitas that we want the kids to carry with them into adulthood is taught like that?!
What is needed is the creation of a curriculum which will cause the student to learn the prayers fluently, develop the skills as we do in literature to understand and appreciate the context and deeper meaning of the texts and then find one tefilah that the students can connect with. Then as the universal themes that are addressed in tefilah become apparent to the students, they will develop an appreciation for tefilah. But this works only if they have had the obedeince to regular tefilah and the ease of reading them even without understanding them imbued at an earlier age. And now as they mature they can appreciate tefilah. Then the feeling of accomplishment achieved by attending minyan even when it is difficult to do so continues because it is transferring from pleasing the authority figure to pleasing God and themselves.
So I see two aspects to tefilah education:
Obedience and pleasing the authority figure at a young age which eventually should transfer to pleasing God at an later stage (that is the model of transference from kibud Horim to yirat Hashem);
Skill acquisition so that tefilah is not a foreign language to them both in mechanical decoding and the techniques to understand a piece of literature in its original.
Then with some siyata dishmaya, the appreciation that tefilah can have meaning will come later in life but can only come if tefilah is fluent and comprehensible and make one a mitpalel.
Tzvi
