Ahz mah (So what)

There is a passage from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities that I copied into my notebook and saved when I was a teenager. I have returned to it often over the years, especially when driving through cities and towns: “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!” This may at first seem a depressing image, pointing as it does to our existential aloneness even among those closest to us. But I hear in it as well the possibility of empathy and caring. That each one of us is “a profound secret and mystery to every other” means that we have something essential in common! Please know tha...

Our fifth grade students were recently discussing the mensch value of shmirat ha-guf , caring for the body. They together generated these two "wow" and "thanks" prayers: For Our Eyes Praise to you, Adonai our God Sovereign of the Universe! We thank you for our vision in life. Without it we wouldn’t be whole. If we didn’t have eyes, we would have dents in our heads! All our nerves work with your wisdom. Blessed are you, Adonai our God, who gives us the ability to see. For Our Hair Praise to you, Adonai our God Sovereign of the Universe Who took the time to sculpt tiny perfect holes in our sweet little heads so our hair could grow. Thank you for making the holes just the right size. We will take care of our hair by cutting it and showering. Praise to you, Adonai, who makes our hair grow.

I found a great book in the public library with stories about mensch-like pro-baseball players. It's called "The Good Guys of Baseball." The book is out of print, so we ordered up used copies of the paperback edition for the younger kids to read this semester. When the books arrived, we discovered that the paperback edition has two new chapters, plus a new cover featuring two smiling men in baseball uniforms. Not being a sports fan myself, I did not recognize them (and truth be told, neither did I bother to find out who they were!). Last week, one of the children pointed to the cover and shouted: "Hey, this is supposed to be the GOOD guys of baseball -- but these two guys took steroids!" Oh dear. Sure enough, David confirmed that indeed, these two guys who were featured on the cover and in the additional chapter had fallen from grace not long after the paperback edition had been published. How would you discuss this situation with a child? Are these two men ...

Last week, our children discussed the challenges and opportunities new Jewish immigrants faced when it came to their dietary habits. Would they maintain the traditional laws of kashrut? Would they maintain their mothers' time-honored recipes from the old country? Or would the powerful allure of "being American" trump tradition? The children learned how well-meaning Americans (including Jews who had immigrated a generation earlier) sought to influence immigrant eating habits through influencing the children in public school. Social welfare, or coercion -- what do you think?  Oh, and about that gefilte fish... I want to recommend a touching story called The Carp in the Bathtub by Barbara Cohen.

How would you answer this question: What do a sukkah , a turn-of-the-century tenement slum, and a home in the Boston suburbs all have in common? Recently, our temple children were exploring comparisons between the sukkah mentioned in Torah, immigrant living conditions at the turn of the 20th century, and the children’s own sense of security in their homes. David and I shared with them some ancient rabbinic musings about the sukkah, in which it was suggested that God’s protective presence (symbolized by the “cloud of glory” which accompanied the Israelites in the desert) was the real shelter. To give a sense of the sort of protective presence being suggested by the rabbis, we posed to the children this question: Do you feel differently being in your home when a parent is home versus when you are home alone? The younger children all spoke of feeling a greater sense of security and safety when there was a parent in the house. Many of the older children expressed a sense of freedom and...