By Sam Segal, writer, Ithaca, New York
February 1995 – As a Jewish survivor of six years of enforced school prayer, I am here to testify that it works. Reformers shouldn’t merely tolerate it; nor should they stop at endorsing a timid, amoral moment of silence. They should bring the Bible back into the classroom and read it – out loud.
When I attended Teaneck, New Jersey’s Longfellow Elementary School from 1945 to 1951, the day began with a student volunteer, or the teacher, reading five verses from the Old Testament, after which we all said the Lord’s Prayer. The selection suited Christians and the small Jewish contingent; I guess no one worried about atheists or Muslims. I never volunteered, but I loved to listen. Passages from the psalms, especially, still roll around in my mind.
It’s not that I was devout. I went to Jewish Sunday school and after-school Hebrew classes, but neither was a devotion. So it wasn’t that school prayer let me practice my religion; it was better than that: The words and cadences of the King James Bible were soothing and inspiring and, though their meaning was a little elusive, they were my favorite part of the school day. It was like walking into a splendid but empty cathedral in a foreign city.
“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness: Come before his presence with singing. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise.” I couldn’t grasp what the “noise” was, nor picture the Lord’s “courts.” But I sat back in anticipation whenever that psalm was announced as the day’s subject.
Or the 23rd Psalm. Is it decent to deny children the chance to hear: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me”? Or: “How goodly are thy tents, oh Jacob, and thy tabernacles, oh Israel”?
Ah, but we were innocent then. Educators assumed that we shared a common heritage and gladly promoted it. During Brotherhood Week (if it exists, the name has surely been revised), we sang the lyrics: “George Washington liked good roast beef; Chaim Solomon liked fish; but when Uncle Sam served liberty, they both enjoyed the dish.” And we were moved by the short film in which Frank Sinatra threw his arms around kids of different flavors and sang “The House I Live In.”
Our town fathers weren’t sociologically advanced enough to worry whether every ethnic group got equal time. Similarly, with our common moral heritage, they were insensitive to the crippling effect that an infidel might suffer if he had to hear the words: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
But we had no ACLU to protect us. So, once given their opening – let us be frank –the proto-Religious Right thrust beyond the first minutes of the school day. On special holidays, religious songs were sung. At Christmas assemblies, everyone – regardless of race, religion, sexual proclivity or bell-curve location – was forced to hear “Silent Night.” At Thanksgiving, after performing plays in which English settlers were allowed to appear morally equal to Indians, we sang songs that actually averred: “God, our maker, doth provide for our wants to be supplied.”
School prayer and such songs are not only good; they are necessary.
They may not lower cholesterol, but they will elevate young minds and spirits. In an age when even grown-ups seem awestruck by the genie in the ever-shrinking microchip, it is crucial that children have a brush with real grandeur and mystery. A peanut-sized computer won’t fundamentally change human life any more than television did. Nothing better puts man in his place than the words and posture of devotion – and no one needs to know that more than the children of an age so proud of its reason, and its freedom.
My own children were deprived: At Thanksgiving, they sang of “a turkey tom and a turkey mom”; at Christmas, they sang jingles, sprinkling merriment in precisely equal measure for Christmas and Chanukah.
Of course, there are other avenues to the spirit. Parents, above all, must show the way. But if schools can help children get there, they ought to jump at the chance. They are often, and rightly, criticized for poor teaching of history, writing and science. Here’s something they can’t go wrong on: Just read the psalms and sing the songs, and kids will get it.
Of course, we are more sensitive than the rubes of almost 50 years ago. We feel bound by the Supreme Court’s misconstruction of the First Amendment. We do worry about the atheists and Muslims.
We shouldn’t even pause. The chasm to fear is not between religions but between piety and arrogance. Any religion must welcome a turn toward piety. Any atheist is free to stare
or mumble. 
