FRONTAL FREE: The Chanukah History Mystery

Actual photo from my actual classroom.  Actually.

Dave Smolar is co-founder of Kikayon Productions, creating turn-key solutions for Jewish education. Our “TORAH TIME LIVE!” Parashah Play series is now for sale!  From Creation to Mt. Sinai, click on “Our Store” for more!

So I was looking for a fun, open-ended, creative approach to teaching my Hebrew school 5^th graders about Chanukah this year.  I just needed a sign of what to do or where to start, something to fall in my lap.  Wouldn’t you know it, but our synagogue is giving away books from the library.  Every day when I drop off my boy for daycare, I glance at the rack, looking for free literary gold.

And there it was.  Professor Lawrence H. Schiffman’s From Text to Tradition:  a History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism, one of my favorite books from my Jewish History studies in college.  I like the book because it’s so easy to find what you need, everything and anything about Jewish life under and Jewish revolts against the Greeks and the Romans, replete with charts and maps and honesty.  That’s right:  honesty.  It’s a book that tries very quickly to demonstrate to the reader how the period of Hellenization in ancient Israel was real.  Without the Talmudic story of the 8-day miracle, and without the apocryphal Maccabee books – and without using a dreidel or a latke or even the contrast with Christmas as a talking point – the book can teach the honesty, the reality of the story of Chanukah, even to the 10 year old minds of a twice a week, 5^th grade Hebrew school class.

But they need something tangible to make the reality happen.  Sympathy, if not empathy, is not innate in a child and must be learned over time.  When they hit the decade point, they have the tools to begin to feel things and understand things about the world around them, if only from their own perspective.  You need to get an object and put it in their hands, then ask them to relate it to their own lives, or at least have them prove to themselves they can relate.

The mystery of Chanukah to which I refer comes from all directions.  How do you get kids today to relate to events from 2100 years ago?  How do they reconcile their past experiences with the holiday?  How do they dig out from under the media blitzes that hit them from all sides every year just past Thanksgiving?

So I create my own mystery.  For them.

One day in December, I brought out a big world map, threw it on the table, had them gather round, and told them about ancient Israel from Babylon to Greece, then the dissection of the Greek empire following the death of Alexander.  They had in hand from Professor Schiffman the lists of Greek emperors, Ptolemies and Seleucids, that followed Alexander so they could see the links from what they’d learned in grade school history class to the Chanukah story.  I worked them up and ran out of time.

The next time around, I handed them some old Israeli coins I’d found.  I didn’t really look at them before handing them out.  I just placed one in front of each pair of students and told them to identify the value, the monetary unit, the year, and any symbols on the front of the coin.  They’d never heard of any of the units, which gave me a chance to talk about the Israeli economy.  They used their gematria skills to decipher the year.  And we examined all the different symbols – animals [a lion], foods [pomegranates], and flora [wheat and olive branches] – used to establish Jewish connections from Torah to the land of Israel.

And then I enticed them by creating the mystery of the last and grandest of the coins.  They couldn’t figure out what was on the front of the coin.  There was a tree, or a plant, or something like that.  There were very ancient letters.  But one student recognized that the whole decoration was made to look like it had been…stamped there.  They now realized that the front of this modern coin had a replica of an ancient Jewish coin.  I found them a chart of ancient Hebrew on my phone which we used to try to decipher the strange lettering.

Before the next class, I did some online research.  Would you believe that this coin – a 50 shekel bronze piece minted in the mid-80s by Israel, only 2 years before the state’s economy was revamped and the coin itself demonetized – this nearly worthless coin had on it a depiction of a Jewish coin minted during the 4^th year of the first revolt against Rome, the year that Rome starved, raided, pillaged, and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, carrying off the golden menorah?  With this coin, the class felt a tangible connection to the history of Jewish rebellion in the ancient world, even putting the triumph of the Maccabees against the later tragic loss and exile at the hands of the Roman Empire.

With two more classes to go, I brought in heavy decorative foil and some thin wooden 3” discs I’d found at a crafts store for them to make their own coins.  They knew I’d planned the art project as a way of celebrating the coin studies we’d done.  But when I showed up with shiny gold, bronze, pink, and electric blue foil, they thought it was pretty wild.  The foil sheets had adhesive backing, like contact shelf paper, so I cut out foil discs which they stuck on both sides of the coins and, using pencil tips, dug into them their pre-drawn designs.  Of course, I made sure the designs included something written in ancient Hebrew lettering and some Jewish cultural objects.  Some drew menorahs…some drew pickles.  Shiny, blue pickles.

Suffice it to say that the mystery of Chanukah for me entails the annual attempt to engross my class with both the historical context of the holiday and the modern-day cultural celebrations.  In the end, they wrote a play, on their own, which I rehearsed with them for them to perform last night at the synagogue’s latke party.  They took the Chanukah story – including the rebellion, the Seleucid motives, and the Talmudic miracle of the oil – and used it as an archetype which they transported to a not-too-distant-future dystopian Tokyo setting, albeit with a Greek king trying to invade.  It was a little scattered, very funny, and for me, a completely satisfying confirmation that they’d fully absorbed and retained the material. 

With an old college text [now available almost entirely online for free], some random coins collected over my lifetime, and a piece of foil, these kids are ready for the holiday.  Little do they know that our talks about the ancient menorah, the Roman diaspora, and the Arch of Titus will also serve as a segue into our spring semester talks on the history of, and the true reasons for, the founding of the modern state of Israel.  Of course, I’ve no idea what my source of inspiration will be to start things off, what tangible object I’ll put in their hands to get them talking about their own experiences.  But I’m not worried:  I’ll know it when I see it.

FRONTAL FREE: Anglicization

Dave Smolar is co-founder of Kikayon Productions, creating turn-key solutions for Jewish education. Our “TORAH TIME LIVE!” Parashah Play series is now for sale!  From Creation to Mt. Sinai, click on “Our Store” for more!

As a creative Jewish educator, it’s important for me to reach as many people as possible with my work.  As I create “turn-key programs,” i.e. plays and games that parents and teachers simply print out, make some copies, and give to your kids to read and perform, there are a few unique issues I face.  Above all, I want my projects and programs to be inclusive, to make participants feel a part of the Jewish world.  To that end, long ago, I had to decide whether names and terminology I use should be written in Hebrew or transliterated into English.  Ultimately, I thought it safest to transliterate.

Transliteration, writing Hebrew words by sounding them out using English letters, is not all it’s cracked up to be.  For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in an area called Qumran.  To get kids to pronounce it, I’d spell it something like “Koomran”, but no book would ever list it that way.  Using the letter “Q” to represent a hard “K” sound is old school, I know.  But when and who should update the transliteration alphabet?  Isn’t the ultimate goal, really, to get folks to pronounce words properly?  Then again, we’re talking about teaching using standard modern Hebrew, not colloquial, not Ashkenazic drawls or Yiddish accents.   At least, I am.

But when it comes to inclusion, we argue more on a cultural level than anything else.  Imagine I give you a play for kids based on a story in the Torah, and the lead character is Moshe.  If a family grew up in a non-religious household but wanted to start adding more Judaism to their lives – hence the reason they send a kid to Hebrew school – they’ll know who Moses is but might not recognize the name as Moshe. 

If I consistently refer to him as Moshe, in discussions as well as in classroom materials, then the child would possibly go home and start referring to him as Moshe instead of Moses.  And the parents will feel alienated.  They might even feel offended, like I’m presumptuously teaching the Hebrew names as if to say their use of English names wasn’t good enough.  And then they’ll feel betrayed, by the school and the synagogue.  These things do happen, and if and when they come to pass, it works completely against the underlying goal of fostering inclusion and strengthening Jewish identity in the student’s life. 

Still, it’s important for me to use every opportunity I have to teach students Hebrew, in any way, shape, or form.  When I teach Torah straight from the text, especially because I’m using the opportunity also to help boost the students’ Hebrew reading skills, I refer to the names as they appear in the Torah.  And if I’m teaching a moral concept prevalent in Judaism, I’ll introduce it using the Hebrew term, like Tzedakah or Chesed.  I’ll first write it for them in Hebrew as we discuss it.  Then I’ll insist on students reading and pronouncing it themselves. 

In fact, because transliteration becomes a crutch for someone learning and practicing reading Hebrew, I almost never use it in the classroom.  However, I sometimes use it as an exercise where I give students some Hebrew words and have them transliterate them on the board, then ask the rest of the class if and how they’d adjust the letters used.  It’s a great gaming exercise that makes them really think outside the box, besides getting them to function across 2 languages with 2 alphabets!

In my written works, especially the “Torah Time Live!” parashah play series, I’ve been developing a method of offering the students both the Anglicized version and the transliterated version of the names of the folks in the plays and stories.  But in the body of the play, I only use the transliterated Hebrew names.  So students can refer to the chart at the top of the play to make sure they know which person is which, but throughout the play and in subsequent discussions, we use only the Hebrew names.  At some point, I only spell the names out in Hebrew. 

And as time goes on, I take the opportunity to teach the students any origin stories I have regarding the characters’ names.  This furthers the grammar discussion on recognizing shoreshim, root structures of Hebrew words, the bedrock of reading Hebrew.  So teaching the students to refer to Torah characters by their proper Hebrew names not only deepens students’ connection to the Torah, it broadens their understanding of the important of Hebrew in their lives.  And sometimes, it gets them to question and explore their own Hebrew names and take ownership thereof.

FRONTAL FREE: In the Car

Dave Smolar is co-founder of Kikayon Productions, creating turn-key solutions for Jewish education. Our “TORAH TIME LIVE!” Parashah Play series is now for sale!  From Creation to Mt. Sinai, click on “Our Store” for more!

I know I’m preaching to the choir, but I just want to add my voice to the clarion call for teachers to send regular emails to the parents of their students.  It’s possible that, while Hebrew school is in session, the most crucial time of the day occurs when the student is in the car, on the way home.  The parent justifiably asks, “So, how’d it go/what did you learn/what did they teach today?”
  
What comes out of the child’s mouth next, if it’s verbal and above a grunt, could serve to make or break your career, the synagogue, and the Jewish people.  So this week, I’m strongly suggesting sending emails home to the parents, even if it’s quick, friendly, and scant on detail.  Here’s a typical yet nightmarish scenario.

Imagine that, at some point when you’re trying to conduct a nice, provocative conversation in class, a student, either in a bad mood or a sugar low or just wanting to be more active at that moment, will hold against you the fact that you’re not letting them run around outside.  Now, you can’t please everybody 100% all the time, but it’s always possible that you’ll respond to this particular student with annoyance when they keep jumping up or throwing things across the room.  So just in case your seemingly innocuous teaching method rubs them the wrong way, the child is bound to misrepresent that day’s classroom proceedings, even going so far as to misquote you, exaggerate your reactions to them, and generally create more mayhem than they’d imagine and anyone can afford.

There’s another overarching reason to stay in contact with families.  It’s so important for tweeners to feel a part of what’s around them.  As you play to these needs by emphasizing how they’re part of the legacy of the Jewish people, the ultimate goal would be to build empathy within the student.  While sympathy might mean the child feels good or bad for a person or a story or a situation, empathy occurs when the child feels like they’ve actually been through the same thing being discussed.  We recall the traditional sentiment from the Passover seder that we should each feel as if we ourselves had been present at the Revelation at Mt. Sinai.  This is key to everything I do with kids in class and at home.

To that end, you’ll invariably want them to personalize your lessons by sharing something from their own family or background.  You’ll want to tell them to find something that means a lot to them, something with a story attached to it, something unique to their family, something of accomplishment or gravity to them.  And the most effective way to get this to happen is to email parents of your plans, and spread those plans over a month or so, thereby giving students 6-8 days of Hebrew school, 6-8 opportunities to remember to bring in the thing and have their story ready to tell.  Emails will emphasize the creativity in your method and help parents feel a connection to what’s going on in school.

And make yourself approachable by sending emails.  Emails might not be talking to a parent face-to-face, but they are a prime way to connect with parents.  Finding your comfort zone might not be easy in an email, as you’re trying to remain professional while not appearing too stiff.  But an attitude of kindness will always show through in your writing tone.  Coupled with your retelling of the out-of-the-box activity you did and how the kids built on those ideas, your words should endear you to parents and alleviate any concerns.  

So if you don’t already, please start sending out emails on a regular basis.  It will only take ten minutes or so after class, and it’ll improve relations between kids, parents, teachers, and admins.  As you continue to become more creative and allow students to expand on your lessons, emails become a chronicle of classroom activity, a great way to remember what you did that day.  They’ll help you recall the past, connect with the present, and plan for your class’ future.

FRONTAL FREE: Beyond Kitchen Judaism

Dave Smolar is co-founder of Kikayon Productions, creating turn-key solutions for Jewish education. Our “TORAH TIME LIVE!” Parashah Play series is now for sale!  From Creation to Revelation, click on “Our Store” for more!

This post isn’t about keeping kosher.  A long time ago, around the time of the birth of standards for kashrut in the United States and formations of unions of kosher butchers in American metropolises, there emerged the idea of “Kitchen Judaism”.  And while this term means different things to different people, it also evokes different connotations to different people.  Because of this, I’ll tread lightly and try to be clear in my usage.
 

I keep kosher in my own way.  At home, I keep separate milk and meat vessels and only bring kashered meat into the house.  Sometimes I bring unhekshered cheese home.  Sometimes we get pizza and veggies and eat it on paper plates.  And when we go out to eat, we restrict ourselves to eating only dairy and fish, unless we’re at a kosher supervised restaurant.

To some of my friends and family, I’m not strictly kosher enough.  To other relatives, they’ve no idea why I’d restrict myself at all, as life’s too short and is meant to be savored.  But in either case, I’m judged to a certain extent on the basis of my preferred religion-based eating habits. 

And that is what I mean by being defined according to Kitchen Judaism.

So often, the politics of Kitchen Judaism prevail in American Jewry.  For some of us, keeping kosher may be the last vestige of publicized Jewishness.  If I went about my day among strangers and never ate a thing, it’s possible they’d never know I was Jewish.  After years in day school, then public high school with a Jewish population over 90%, it wasn’t until college that I lived with and worked with and sang and celebrated with so many non-Jews.  And every time the topic of food came up, it became clear to many that I was a Jew, defiant in my dietary practice.  From then on, the onus was on them as to how they’d treat me knowing I was Jewish, regardless of whether my level of observance and practice was active or passive.  They knew who I was as defined by my level of kashrut, and things would be forever changed for us all.

As a teacher, I believe the Hebrew school classroom should be a bastion of inclusion and sensitivities, of embracing the differences among Jewish students.  Kitchen Judaism has no real part in Hebrew school, Conservative or Reform or otherwise.  This is not to say that synagogues won’t have policies on food.  Nowadays as we all know, sensitivities to kashrut stand side-by-side in most institutions with tree nut, peanut, pollen, dander, and other allergies, with fears of sickness or anaphylactic shock almost superseding fears of using the wrong fork with the cheese.

To me, the concept of Kitchen Judaism is more than divisive, it’s irrelevant.  I’ve had students who, after a month of lessons about Passover and the Seder and the Exodus story, come to class during the Chol haMo’ed intermediate days of the holiday and whip out a bag of corn chips for snack.  I’ve been to a congregational seder done potluck style, where more than one volunteer brought pasta salad.  I also have a very early memory of going to home of an Orthodox friend for a Sunday dinner where they put fake soy bacon bits on the salad.  That one confused the hell out of me.  But I digress.

My point is that arguments of Kitchen Judaism tend to do little more than alienate us from each other.  Rather than allowing us to learn from each other and explore our traditions, they set us up for disenchantment, with each other, our community, and even our own ways of belief.  But as a “conversation piece,” Kashrut can become wonderful tool for generating discussion among your students.

In fact, everything in life can be used as a springboard for conversation for kids in class, at home, or anywhere I want to teach about being Jewish.  And this is not about relating some object to a story in the Torah or a specific custom that some follow and others don’t.  Try to get away from talking about any one thing.  My goal is always to get the students to talk about themselves, their experiences, observations, and burgeoning beliefs and ideas in what it means to be a Jew.

I had a sixth grade for a while where the shul was near a 7-11.  I’d stop to get a drink to bring with me but sometimes grab something else as a conversation piece.  One time early in the school year, I brought in some aluminum foil.  I got them talking about keeping kosher, then about how you know if something is or is not kosher, and finally talked about hekshers, the symbols put on food packages by organizations certifying the products as kosher.  I pointed out the best-known Orthodox heksher – the “O-U” symbol – was on the roll of foil.  

 

Then I stopped talking and waited.  Within 5 seconds, half the class had their hands up.  Of course the foil is inedible.  So why should something you can’t eat necessitate a symbol used for foods?  The conversation turned away from customs of kashrut to the more esoteric:  why do folks keep kosher; how else do you express your Judaism openly; where do you think kashrut will be or be changed when you’re in high school or college or maybe married with kids?  [Incidentally, these kids would be in their mid-30s now, so maybe I should’ve had them write down their answers.  Idea for another blog post.]

Start a conversation somewhere with something, be it an object, an article, song lyrics, even a piece of liturgy tied to an upcoming holiday.  But then use that something as a means of generating discussion by the students, among the students, one at a time.  Get them to see what they have in common, how they differ, and where their ideas are coming from.  Value each answer on its own merit, reminding the class that these are opinions, life experiences, beyond the scope of anyone’s judgment. 

We’re here to teach and learn, not judge.  And if we can get past the Kitchen Judaism and see the value in our individual traditions, whether they reflect a family history or sense of renewal, these kids will learn not only what it means to be a Jew in the 21^st century but, more importantly, what it means to build a Jewish community in America today.

FRONTAL FREE: That One Kid

Dave Smolar is co-founder of Kikayon Productions, creating turn-key solutions for Jewish education. Our “TORAH TIME LIVE!” Parashah Play series is now for sale!  From Creation to Mt. Sinai, click on “Our Store” for more!

To start off, the plays, musicals, games, and other teaching tools I’ve created generally focus on students in grades 5-9, ages 10-14.  I continue to have the honor to work alongside teachers with far more years in the field than I, as well as battle-worn parents facing all kinds of behavior every day from their kids (and their kids’ friends).  So I know that it’s a universal complaint when a grown-up complains about “that one kid.”  
 

·      “Oh that kid, he won’t sit still.”

·      “She has a comment for everything and can’t keep it to herself.”

·      “Those two:  never EVER put them together.”  Why, I ask?  “Because they’re TROUBLE, that’s why.”

In this posting, I’d like to explore this issue.  To begin with:

a.     every child is a person, different from you and the rest of the class, with their own likes, quirks, and ever-growing bag of ideas and trepidations;

b.     by age 10, it’s age-appropriate for kids to have an instinctual need to participate aloud in groups;

c.     it’s your class or group to lead, not theirs to wrangle or hijack.

I’d imagine the worst case scenario, that as a substitute teacher, you cover a certain class for the first time without being told of a certain student’s special needs, or IEP, or personal issue with their home life.  You’re in the dark.  You don’t know what’s going on with them.  And, no, you cannot hold up the entire lesson just for one student. 

So how do you include them and not marginalize them?  How to do you get that student to focus on what the group is doing?  How do you get them to cheer up and forget about what might be ahead of them at home? 

Please consider the following:

a.     You can’t walk into a room of kids and expect them to behave or respond to you exactly the same way every time.  I had a student who loved sports so much, she’d show up in uniform each week for Hebrew school.  But when I taught the students Israeli dancing (as a fun way to introduce the first Aliyah migration of the 1880s), guess which student was the only one sitting aside?  I didn’t comment or shame her into doing anything because I wanted her in her comfort zone at school.  And she was with us for my introductory talk, so she got the point of the lesson and contributed later on with stories of how her family came to the U.S.

b.     What is age-appropriateness?  Well, the editors of Wikipedia describe activities, reactions, and emotions “appropriate to a child's development of social skills…divided into a number of development stages based upon the child's age.”  Conversely, this means you can’t present kids of a certain age with a lesson approach, critical thinking exercise, graphic art project, dramatic activity, or simple discussion that is either too far below or too far above their age level.  Of course, you can, if you like, but don’t expect any results other than revolt.

c.     When doing a post-mortem on a youth event or Hebrew school class or activity, think back on how the day ended, not how it began.  If you come home from a day of teaching or a synagogue kids’ service or a family holiday event only thinking of how much you’d prepared and how psyched you were for the day…BUT your day ended with students thrown out of class, administrators coming in to see what the noise was about, art supplies everywhere, and kids feeling steamed beyond speech, well, chances are that you lost the entire class earlier in the day than you think. 

Kids really want to express themselves, especially when faced with an adult.  Then more they hear the adult speak, the more they want to confirm to the adult that they, too, have something to say and that they understand the material being presented.  But if they don’t understand or appreciate or relate to the material, things can start to turn the wrong way.

It’s like a switch goes off in the student prompting a defense mechanism against a lesson approach or an activity that makes them nervous or confused.  Students become evasive.  They cut you off mid-sentence.  They fire irrelevant questions at you.  Suddenly, they all have to go to the water fountain, en masse.  They make public service announcements:  “Uh, there’s a smell in here and it’s going to make me throw up EWWWWWW.” 

And finally, we get to “that one kid.”  They have the most adroit toolkit in misdirecting everything around them.  Some are verbal, some are physical, and some are both.  I had a student who always showed up 10-15 minutes late, but when they arrived, they’d barge into the middle of the room, splay their arms into a superhero pose, and announce “I’m here now!”  None of the kids every thought it was funny, but he did it every time.  [By the way, without parental and administrative support, that student will not succeed in school, no matter what you do.]

When children get intimidated by a lesson, they’ll turn against it and invariably turn against the teacher as well.  No matter how much of a buddy you want to be, as the service leader or group facilitator, you’re the adult who’s making them feel less of themselves.  And you’re doing it in class, which is setting them up for embarrassment.  They must act quickly to grab others’ attention, to do something funny or loud or altogether disrespectful. 

So what do you do?  I tend to start broadly each day, giving the students or kids a big open-ended question for them to answer.  And they cannot answer until they’ve time to ruminate.  And better still, if they can, they should write the answer down so at least they don’t feel that others are dominating the discussion and they won’t be heard.

On many fronts, this gives the verbal, non-verbal, disaffected, even the passive student a chance to express themselves.  And the open question – usually something about a moral choice they’ve made or their place in Jewish society – becomes a window into their lives and minds, a Rorschach test that can reveal not only their deep thoughts on the subject at hand but what might otherwise be bothering them that day.  Most of all, on an emotional level, if they need to speak out about something, here’s their chance.  And if they want to stay quiet, that’s fine.  Sometimes, I run into a kid who’s ticked off at another kid in class for some reason, and that conflict emerges, giving us a chance to air grievances openly, honestly, and early in the day.

After discussions like this that can last for anywhere from 5-15 minutes, the class really feels at peace with themselves, knows that they have a voice in the room and a say in what we do, and knows that I respect their opinions.  And to be honest, sometimes “that one kid” says something in the discussion that might be tangential but ends up sending the discussion somewhere I’d not originally intended.  They become the catalyst for the journey of the discussion, and they see their worth in the dialogue.

This is a long post, I know, and I’ll have more to say to expand on these ideas over time.  And you’ll have more to contribute as well.  For now, just assume that any student, any kid might walk in the room having a bad day, brought down by something someone else said, and can’t help carrying those emotions into the room.  Given the opportunity right off the bat to either get it out of their system or just soak up the room, it’ll help them settle, cool off, and get in the game.  Any kid on any day could be “that one kid,” but if you give all the kids an opening, they might just surprise themselves at what they can do.