A Fine contribution by Douglas Aronin Esq:
Some of you probably read the New York Times regularly, and a few might even be willing to admit it. But for the benefit of those who don't generally see the Times, or who somehow managed to missed the feature story that began on its front page this past Friday, I'd like to call your attention to that story, which is one of the more interesting -- and unexpectedly heartening -- narratives I've seen for a while.
Running under the headline "In Bronx School, Culture Shock, Then Revival", Friday's feature story was largely typical of a journalistic genre that might best be called the school revival story. Written by Elissa Gootman, a Times reporter with extensive experience on the New York education beat, the article had most of the usual elements common to that genre. It started with a school in a dangerous inner city neighborhood, filled with mostly minority students and almost completely dysfunctional. Then there came a new principal who cared a lot, worked very hard and was willing to try unconventional approaches. The heroic principal faced the usual collection of stereotypical naysayers: time-serving teachers, skeptical parents and students used to defying authority with impunity. And as usual, after a significant but relatively brief period of time (about three years in this case), there was noticeable progress in turning the school around.
Friday's feature story about Junior High School 22 in the South Bronx, had all of these usual elements, but it also had another element, one that is decidedly unusual: the heroic principal, Shimon Waronker, is, as the story straightforwardly describes him, "[a] member of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Judaism with a beard, a black hat and a velvet yarmulke."
Far from hiding this unusual twist, as most of us probably would have expected it to do if it ran the feature at all, the Times seemed to go out of its way to highlight that component of the story. The lead focuses, as the leads of such narratives almost always do, on the chaos that pervaded the school before the new principal arrived, but the focus quickly shifts to the rather unlikely identity of its hero. Not only is the cultural disconnect between the principal and the school community a prominent theme of the article, but the Times reinforces that theme by including four pictures -- including one on the front page -- in none of which would Waronker's Orthodoxy have been easy to miss.
The Times article doesn't exactly hide its motivation for focusing on Mr. Waronker's unusual role. Our self-styled newspaper of record, after all, has been a vocal supporter of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's takeover and attempted shakeup of the New York City public school system, and Friday's story notes approvingly that "the Bloomberg administration has put principals at the center of its efforts to overhaul schools." One apparent result of the Times's desire to play cheerleader for the Mayor's educational leadership is that one archetype that gets at least a cameo appearance in most school revival narratives -- the turf-protecting upper level education bureaucrat -- is completely absent from the Times's JHS 22 story.
Another result of the Times's determination to tout the Bloomberg's educational leadership is that the article is unusually direct in stating, in only its fifth paragraph, the moral that the Times wants its readers to draw from the story: "[T]he tale of Mr. Waronker shows that sometimes, the most unlikely of candidates can produce surprising results." Regardless of the Times's motivation for its prominent placement of the story, however, the inescapable fact is that its front-page feature story about JHS 22 depicts a visibly and unmistakably Orthodox Jew putting his heart and soul into the task of improving the education of public school students among whom, it's safe to assume, are few if any Jews and seeing positive results for his efforts.
Waronker's background is highly unusual in ways that presumably made his task easier. He is a native of South America who spoke no English until moving to the United States at the age of 11, and his fluent Spanish no doubt helped him connect to the school's many Hispanic students and parents. His military background -- he is an ROTC graduate with two years of active duty service, including six months studying tactical intelligence -- appears to have provided an appropriate frame of reference for overcoming some of the obstacles he has faced; at one point in the article, he is quoted as referring to his encouragement of student government as "textbook counterinsurgency." (If he ever gets tired of the Bronx, he might be useful in Iraq.)
But the Times story does not shrink from acknowledging the fact that Waronker, for all his obvious uniqueness, is very much, and unabashedly, an Orthodox Jew. (Not surprisingly, the unrelated controversy that has led some Orthodox Jews to question Chabad's Orthodox bona fides appears to be nowhere on the reporter's radar screen.) At one point in the story, Waronker cites an incident involving the late Lubavitcher Rebbe as inspiration. At the article's end, he gestures to one of the classrooms full of students and says "I feel the hand of the Lord here all the time."
The Times reporter may have seen the story of Shimon Waronker, from the classic journalistic perspective, as a man-bites-dog story. Her editors probably see it as an example of the success of the New York City Leadership Academy, which Mayor Bloomberg created to train promising candidates for principal positions and which Waronker attended. Most Times readers will probably view it mostly as an inspiring example of the triumph of hope in an unlikely circumstance.
The story of Shimon Waronker may well be all of those things, but to me at least, it is at its heart something far more important -- an example of Kiddush HaShem (the sanctification of God's name). Shimon Waronker, by his dedication and determination, has created that Kiddush HaShem in the minds and hearts of the school community that he serves. What is truly remarkable, though, is that the scope of Waronker's Kiddush HaShem has now been greatly magnified by the editorial decisions of none other than the New York Times. Waronker's Lubavitch connections aside, perhaps Mashiach is closer than we think.
Douglas Aronin
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