Catching Up

After 2 snow days, I'm trying to get everything finished that I had planned for the last weeks of December in half the time.

Today we read about King Solomon and the Holy Temple. We read a poem describing the holiness of the Kodesh Kodashim, the Holy of Holies, which stood in the heart of the Temple. We talked about what it means for a place to be holy in our day and age, and what places are holy to each of us. Students either wrote about or illustrated a place that they consider to be holy.

We're about halfway through the Ashrei, and overall about halfway through the Torah service.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for latkes, and especially to those who helped put the event together at the last minute.

King David, Hanukkah

Last week we read the story of David and Batsheva. We see some of the less noble sides of the King, as he takes a fancy to a woman he spies bathing, gets her pregnant, and sends her husband off to the front lines of a battle in order to marry her himself. Students wrote divrei torah (plural of dvar torah!) in which they retold the highlights of the story, identified a lesson, and related it to their own lives. These essays, and many others, are in your students folders, which I hope to send home today. For those of you able to come to our Hanukkah gathering, you'll get a chance to look at the work with your child while munching on delicious latkes.

On Sunday our Tzedek lesson looked at begging, and whether there is a Jewish approach towards giving to panhandlers. We talked about the complexity of the issue, and students studied traditional texts to craft responses to the following questions: How should I behave towards a beggar? Am I obligated to give something? What if I'm afraid they'll use the money for something like drugs or alcohol?

As a reminder, we are gathering in the social hall at 4:45. Thanks to Jane and Leslie for making this happen!

What's New

This week we began to study the Ashrei. We looked at the structure of the prayer (an alphabetic acrostic) and I challenged students to write their own prayers in English, following the same structure. These were a lot of fun, and some are quite beautiful. I'll be posting them on our bulletin board this week.

In our Prophets book, we're up to the period of the Kings who ruled Israel. We've read about Saul, the first King, and his successor, David. On Thursday the students drew comic strips of the story of David and Goliath. These too will be up on the bulletin board.

We've also begun a new read aloud - The King of Mulberry Street:

From Booklist
Gr. 6-9. Drawing on her grandfather's experience, Napoli dramatizes a seldom-told bit of American history in this story of Italian Jewish young people in the 1890s. Beniamino, who lives in Napoli, is only nine years old when his beloved, poverty-stricken Mama bribes someone to hide him away on a cargo ship to America. His lively, immediate first-person narrative recalls the trauma of separation and the brutal struggle on the New York streets, where, renamed "Dom," he makes two Italian friends, and they start a business selling sandwiches. He keeps his Jewish identity secret, even as he tries to follow kosher rules. Always his dream is to return home. The characters are drawn with depth, especially the three kids, and the unsentimental story is honest about the grinding poverty and the prejudice among various immigrant groups. Most moving is the story of letting go, as Dom confronts the fact that Mama sent him away, and America is now his home. Connect this with Mary Auch's Ashes of Roses (2002), about Irish kids left alone in New York. Hazel Rochman