Editorial: Missing on Fifth Avenue
Issue of May 28, 2010 / 15 Sivan 5770
The Salute to Israel parade this year was as nice as it’s ever been. Music, marching, flags, smiling adults, cheering kids — even an unexpectedly sunny day. And the crowds lining Fifth Avenue from 57th to 74th Streets were very respectable, seemingly on the high end of normal, and perhaps were even bolstered by the shortened parade route imposed by the city as a cost-saving measure. By some estimates around a million people attended, in all. But someone was missing. Many someones, actually. And it would be wonderful if in 2011 they showed up too.
We can understand why, unless Moshiach comes first, the Arab protesters will be there next year. We can even understand why the Neturei Karta lunatics will be there to get their warped point across. (One 13-year-old girl we spoke with mentioned that the thing she absolutely loves best about marching in the parade each year is passing the protestors at 57th Street, and cheering loudly with her friends as they pass in an effort to drown them out.)
What we have trouble understanding, however, is why schools that are philosophically ‘on the fence’ about the secular state of Israel, or even outright opposed (because the secular government doesn’t live up to their standard of perfection in whatever way), wouldn’t show up anyway. Because it’s not about the parade. It’s really, absolutely not. It’s about sending a message to the world that G-d gave us this land, and that He said so Himself, in the Torah that governs our lives. But even more importantly than sending that message to the world, it’s about sending that message to our children.
In our view, protestations about bitul Torah — time lost from learning — or similar excuses miss the point. It’s a valid concern that can be met by learning a Mishna or three, or ten, on the bus to Manhattan. Furthermore, the leadup to the parade would be an excellent opportunity for schools to showcase a theme and curriculum involving hilchot (laws of) Eretz Yisrael. But show up to the parade. Send that message to the world and to your children. And if a yeshiva won’t commit to attending en masse, then take your kids out of school for the day, for a field trip to Manhattan, and go to the parade anyway. If enough people did that the schools would get the message.
But what we find even more confusing is the completely mixed message sent by some schools that profess to support Israel but fail to make parade attendance absolutely mandatory. Those schools seem content with a paltry turnout, meandering somewhat sadly up Fifth Avenue, sandwiched between floats and marching bands. If they want to show that they’re serious about supporting Israel, they ought to send the message to their students that they’re serious about the parade too. They could take a lesson from the Rambam School in Baltimore. We don’t know if parade participation there was mandatory, or begining with what grade, but they had a dynamite turnout you might have seen halfway through the line of march — and they had to ride a bus for hours before even setting foot on Fifth Avenue.
For that matter, schools could take a page from the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County playbook, to name just one school that had stellar attendance at the parade (there were others, too, of course, including HAFTR). Observing the really impressive sea of blue t-shirts that characterized HANC’s long, slow march up Fifth — it seemed to take 6 or 7 minutes for the entire institution to pass by — someone joked that a business dispute over the school’s lucrative t-shirt contract could have sparked a war between two small eastern European countries.
It’s not only book smarts that we need to teach our kids. We all know they need to learn about real life too. And publicly supporting Israel — or Eretz Yisroel, take your pick — is all about that.
