The Sinai Schools

It is a pleasure to write about the Sinai Schools every year.

In part, that’s because there are so many facets to Sinai. It works on dispelling stigma — that’s perhaps a quixotic goal, but one well worth working toward.

It works on providing an individually tailored education for each one of its students — that’s an ideal toward which all schools should aspire, even though that one clearly is impossible.

It works toward seeing every student as unique, a never-before-seen and never-to-be-seen-again combination of history and characteristics and genes and experiences and biology and demographics.

That’s something we all can do.

It’s interesting to think of all the day schools in our coverage areas. North Jersey is packed with them; there are fewer in MetroWest, but still more than in most other comparably sized federation catchment areas.

I haven’t visited all of the schools, but I have been to a fair number of them, and what is most striking about all of the ones I’ve seen is how loving and child-centered they are.

Elementary schools encourage students’ self-confidence and curiosity. High schools seem to work at helping students think critically and also explore their own talents, not only in sports but also in the arts. Even middle schools, whose students generally are at the necessary part of their development where they’re at times actively unpleasant both to adults and to each other, seem geared to help those preteens and young teens navigate their internal changes as steadily and peaceably as possible.

The teachers and administrators in these schools keep abreast of educational developments in the outside world, using the ones that work for them, adapting others to make them fit. When it comes to education, they’re married neither to change for change’s sake nor to tradition for, you guessed it, tradition’s sake.

Because they’re Jewish schools, they also all seem not only to provide a beachhead against possible antisemitism in the outside world — a beachhead perhaps less necessary in heavily Jewish northern New Jersey than in many other places — but a place where Judaism can be practiced joyfully and publicly, and Jewishness is seen as a source not only of pride but also of joy.

Of course those schools aren’t perfect — they’re human institutions, so they can’t be, and even if human perfection were possible, it wouldn’t be kids who’d attain it. But they’re very good, they’re loving, they’re smart, and they’re working at it.

Which brings us back to Sinai, whose work with neurodivergent students — many of whom go on to lead entirely mainstream lives, and others who live lives that are significantly more independent and happier than they otherwise would have been — shows all of us how to find value in others, and in ourselves, how to accept people as they are, how to help without patronizing, and generally what a difference love and care and expertise make.

We hope that Sinai, like the schools in which it is embedded, and like the other schools that our communities’ kids go to, learn, flourish, and grow, and we hope that Sinai continues to enjoy the support that’s allowed it to keep growing, learning, and helping the kids it enrolls.

Learn more about the Sinai Schools at sinaischools.org.

—JP

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