…when Hercules had to do battle with him, Antaeus could be defeated only when his contact with his origin was broken. Then, of course, there is Oedipus, whose name means “lame foot,” indicating a problematic contact with the earth…in education our link with the origins of life is not only a contact with the sacred texts that lie at the origin of truth in life, but also with those human beings who have newly entered life, with children…for the learned men of Wannsee, children were primary targets for extermination…in the Midrash on Psalms we are told that at Sinai God asked “the sucklings and the embryos: ‘Will you be sureties for your fathers, so that if I give them the Torah they will live by it, but that if they do not, you will be forfeited because of them?’ They replied: ‘Yes’”…thus we see what, according to Jewish tradition, is at stake in our adherence to the sacred texts that underlie the highest in higher education. And we see what was lost in the miscarriage of education manifested at Wannsee.
–David Patterson