When I was 8 years old, in the summer of 1971, I went with my parents to the Torah Umesorah Conference, an annual gathering for Jewish educators held at the old Pioneer Hotel in the Catskills.
My father, a rabbi/educator, was in his element, with lots of people there like him: rabbis and their wives, little rabbis and big ones, filled with life-gladness and the absoluteness that their calling sometimes conferred on them. These were principals and teachers who loosely belonged to the then-nascent Jewish day school movement.
