FRONTAL FREE: Coddling

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!

Sometimes, someone I work with will overhear a classroom activity I’m doing with my 5^th or 6^th grade and peek in.  In fact, they might just listen in from nearby.  And sometimes I hear about it later, from them, or my principal, or feedback from a parent.

Of course, there’s always going to be a disconnect when someone partially observes your class or group session or meeting out of context.  Imagine you’re at work in the middle of an icebreaker where folks have names and facts of other people at the meeting put on a sticker and stuck to their back, and they must learn what’s on their back from having other people read the sticker, then they have to find the person who’s mentioned in the sticker and meet them and confirm the info…you get the gist. 

NOW imagine someone with no idea what’s going on suddenly entering the room.  They’re confused.  They’re out of place.  And maybe they simply write off what they’re seeing as a bunch of people screwing off at work instead of taking things seriously.  Considering that an icebreaker has many benefits to it, not the least of which is improving employee morale and boosting team bonding, what the person peeking in has to say about the activity, and how they couch what they’ve seen when complaining about it to someone else, can become altogether destructive to the office.

For me, this perfectly sums up the occasional unfortunate turn of events when a parent or shul officer happens to be near my classroom when my students are engaged in an energetic and even silly game.  If my students are tired and I want to build their energy and enthusiasm and focus, all I need to do is play a game, any game, that gets them on their feet.  Doesn’t have to be complicated at all.  Could be something as simple as having 2 teams of kids try to walk across the room by laying Hebrew flash cards on the ground in a path and telling them they can only move ahead after they’ve read a card.

While many teachers I’ve met will complain about having to teach grades 5-7 Hebrew school students, from what I’ve heard, the complaints seem to revolve around the fact that this age of students doesn’t like to sit still and be told what to think.  And if you think that you’re not necessarily telling them what to think, well, the kids are reacting to and rebelling against a passive and frontal style of teaching, having the teacher stand in front of the group and talk while the kids passively sit and presumably absorb the information.  You, dear Reader, might know by now that the theme of my blog, and what permeates my teaching efforts and educational products, is the clarion call to frontal free pedagogy.

I’m hoping and praying for a day when someone walks by and sees or overhears my class doing something fun, whether it be loud or silly or both, and rather than unfairly judge me and the group as flaky or irreverent, they assume that we’re find new and exciting way of making Judaism come alive.  I am not coddling the students by doing a fun activity, or a food-making activity, or an outdoor dance activity, or a play or songs or improv or artwork or anything else.  I don’t do an activity without a lesson attached, without a tangible takeaway, without assessment and follow-up and a depth of understanding for my students. 

My biggest mistake over the years has been not overindulging but under-indulging students in creative approaches to learning.  The truth is that Hebrew is more fun when you can keep the kids on their feet, and the kids who seem the mouthiest become the best leaders in the class, sometimes taking the reins on a project or activity and improving upon it.  So if you come by my class some time, and you see a kid whom others have written off for bad behavior, and that kid is now leading a class activity…and the activity addresses and explores something within our curriculum…and the kids are wearing masks or making funny noises or building something elaborate and cartoonish…please don’t judge.  Because the next time we have class, they enter the room laughing, they’re open with their opinions in discussion, and they remember and understand the material we explored during that activity.  And that is how we not only teach but inspire these students as they’re flung headfirst into the age of the b’nai mitzvah.

FRONTAL FREE: A Fallacy of Empathy

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!

My goal in teaching children is to teach Empathy.  And Empathy cannot be taught.  If Empathy can be defined as the human being’s inherent capacity for reaching into their own experience in order to connect with another’s tragic loss or inspiring achievement, then lording over a group of teens or toddlers or seniors, and dictating how they should feel, isn’t the course of action.  And yet for me, teaching Empathy is the most important aspect of Jewish education.  So out of necessity, I’ve tried to develop a teaching style that somehow, even indirectly, reaches this goal.

Unless you’re teaching students in a daily, formal pedagogic setting, I argue that you must create lesson plans that get the kids out of their seats.  By acting out scenes or walking through their lessons, kids begin to internalize the material you’re trying to convey, creating their own sense memory which then helps them somehow attach and associate their own personal experiences to the lesson.  I repeat this idea to myself every time I see their eyes wander, squint, and gradually migrate to the clock on the wall above me in the classroom…and if they actually get to the point of asking “When’s recess?” before I’ve transitioned them into something active and fun, I know I’m behind the 8-ball and should’ve been moving faster in my lesson and paid better attention.

That being said, all of us are now experiencing what appears to be a ramp up of anti-Semitism in the United States.  If it’s possible for me to face and address the course of recent human events without emotion or personal opinion, I’d like to be true to my blog and this company of Kikayon Productions by talking about Empathy.  And I’d like to explore how these nefarious times we live in can be used constructively to build sensitivity in the next generation.  Experiential learning helps kids take the subject matter we teach and find connections to their own lives, helping them build those emotional and synaptic bridges that lead to a deeper, more personal understanding of why their Jewish identity and heritage should mean so much to them.

I write this in the wake of at least 16 bomb threats called in today alone to Jewish community centers and day schools in multiple states across the country, on the heels of numerous similar incidents that have occurred just since the beginning of 2017.  And I insist that we need to use the awful events of today as teachable moments.  We should imply to students the gravity of the situation without dictating to them how they should feel and react.  We must trust in them that, once the kids are in the right frame of mind, their minds will accept what we explain to them is going on around them. 

And then what?  Which kids will feel righteous anger?  Which will feel pity for those communities affected?  Which will feel mercy for the lost souls committing these crimes? 

I don’t know.  You won’t know.  But I’m not afraid.  I’m not afraid of the perpetrators of these crimes, I’m not afraid to live in my community as a Jew in my own respect, and I’m not afraid of opening discussions, and dialogue, and creative outlets and outward responses with a group of ten-year-olds. 

And I have no agenda.  I want to see what happens, what they do, what they come up with.  Maybe the greater good in the room will lead to discussion.  Maybe it will lead to their wanting to write letters of support, or raise money for a cause, or plan a trip to somewhere to support a silenced minority in our community, who knows.  But any one of these elements arising from a quieted room will mark the burgeoning and blossoming of Empathy in our children, in their hearts, in their minds, and in their collective conscience. 

 

We have a golden opportunity now to make a true “gam zu l’tova”, find a Jewish silver lining from the recent ravages of anti-Semitism, whether brutal or subtle.  Give your kids an article about what’s going on.  Have them read one paragraph. 

Say to them, “Circle a location you recognize.” “Tell me if you’ve heard about this from your friends.” “Do you think it could happen here?  Because it’s happening…right…now.” 

This isn’t about kids today being hyper and sugared up and disrespectful to the extent that the only way to teach them is to play a game.  To me, this is about the empiric need, in our community and society in general, to help our Jewish children find and grow their sense of Empathy.  When they truly feel for the characters or events or Torah stories at hand or in the world around them, they will automatically become sensitive to the material and take it personally.  No lecture, no arm-twisting, nothing more needed.  And once you as a teacher, leader, or parent, realize they’ve crossed that line, you can do as I do.  Stare at them, stand up before them, and simply ask them:

“So…what do we do now?”

FRONTAL FREE: What’s Your Point?

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’m sure it would be paradise to kids if, at any given moment, they could face a grownup who’s addressing them, look the adult in the eye and say, “What right do you have to tell me what to do/think?”  Then again, they only respond that way when they feel cornered, whether it be physically, emotionally, functionally, etc.  While this makes things difficult when trying to teach kids anything, the paradigm also implies a destructive situation, where adults expect the kids to be voluntary, gentle sponges, ready to sit there and absorb whatever information we throw at them.

Imagine sitting in a room with a message to deliver to the person walking in.  You have no idea where that person was before walking in.  You don’t know what they’re thinking, pondering, worrying about.  And they have an instinctual coping mechanism of associating people with other people, as a means of seeking familiarity with a situation and, therefore, a comfort level in anything that comes at them and their capacity to handle it. 

So, here comes a kid – maybe your student, maybe it’s your own kid, maybe even your kid’s new friend – and you don’t know how to approach them in order to teach your lesson or communicate your message.  At this point, sure, I calm down and observe them, maybe asking some open, innocuous question to gauge their response, mood, attitude du jour.  But then I try to ask myself the same question, the mantra I roll back over repeatedly throughout my time with the kids.

What is my point?

In Jewish education, if you’re truly trying to reach and influence and instruct and educate a Jewish child, you really should figure out what the point is of what you’re doing.  For me, honing in on that purpose, that underlying goal of Jewish education, involves am examination of the philosophy of the institution I’m in, be it a synagogue, school, camp, etc., or even the family of the child I’m teaching, especially if I’m tutoring one-on-one.  Then I consider how often the kid received any Jewish education during the week as well as their exposure to it at home.  This is why I occasionally have class discussions on traditions and legacy and customs and holiday celebrations:  not to test the kids but to ask what do they do, where do they go, what do they make or eat or create to celebrate any holiday?

My point certainly changes over time, not so much evolving as morphing to fit the needs of the children and the situation at hand.  Honestly, if it’s raining outside and I’d planned a day of games for the kids, no matter what I say, they still might feel like dragging their feet or complaining about broken pencil tips even when I tell them I have fun things to do with prizes and open rules and – they don’t care if they don’t care.  If they’re not in the mood for learning, then my point is to get them in that mood, get them to where I want their attitude to be before launching into anything else. 

The other day, I had a student who reads Hebrew well but flat out refused to read, at all, shutting down and clamming up even though she’d just spent 10 minutes before class loudly chatting with friends.  Guess what?  My priorities changed, right then and there, to getting her and the others onto the same page before moving on.  So, remembering that the kid LOVES mythology, I asked her to read the translation of the line of prayer I wanted her to read, then used it as a launching pad into talking about metaphor. 

The line I wanted her to read, which four other kids had just read aloud before I got to her, talks about G-d’s house.  I asked her what it could mean for a god to have a house.  She demurred.  Another kid jumped and said it could refer to a temple of worship, and I responded by confirming that it might specifically have meant the Temple in Jerusalem.  What else, I said.  Another mentioned that G-d’s house might be the world, since G-d built the world to suit His plan, then that’s like building your own personal home or space. 

With all that said, I circled back to the kid in question and asked her not about the prayer itself, just to make sure she didn’t shut down again, but now that she was listening to her friends, I asked generically about a god having a house.  She said, it could refer to Olympus.  I responded, devil’s advocate, that Olympus was the mountain that the pantheon lived on.  She argued back, no, Olympus was the name of Zeus’ palace.  I asked if it was his or if all the gods shared, and she said it was his palace, but the gods all met there.  I led her into a tangent arguing about gods versus Titans, who was who, who won, which god represented what, if Prometheus was a god or a mortal, what was a demigod like Perseus, and she loved it. 

And she didn’t read a thing in Hebrew that day.  What she did, though, was get engaged in conversation, not isolate herself, hear her colleagues involved both in that conversation and in the Hebrew reading so as to normalize it all in her eyes, then bound off to recess in the building auditorium, where she and her friends sat with notebooks and pencils and proceeded to write out the names and attributes of every single Greek divinity they could remember.  I tried to contribute and was cut down each time, either for coming up with someone they’d already written down or coming up with a name that didn’t belong on the list. 

What’s the point, indeed.  That table, the writing of the names of mythological creatures, that was only mildly related to the context of the prayer that, frankly, I wasn’t interested in discussing but, rather, just wanted the kids to try reading the first 3-4 lines.  Something that should’ve taken 10 minutes at most ended up taking 30 minutes of time, in which the kids got a solid context, from me and each other, of the meaning of the words.  I used that talk to get into translation, which I then used to break down longer words on the board, which led to repeat discussion of Hebrew roots and morphology, etc. etc. etc. 

We were supposed to practice the prayer.  And we did.  But we also discussed and learned why the prayer was there, what it meant, and what the kids might be thinking of while reciting or singing it.  And we reinforced their reading skills along the way by doing more than just reading it over and over.  If you read the same word, you’ll memorize the word, and good for you, until I show you the same word but with a prefix or suffix on it.  If you’re a kid and you read until you memorize, or you sing or chant something into rote memory, you aren’t learning a thing about reading Hebrew, and you’re truly cheating yourself out of the opportunity. 

But that’s what I did, then what they did, and what we did, and what happened for the first part of class.  That’s not delving into the point of what we did, or I did that day.  So what was the point, and how can it be universalized to fit an overall mantra on teaching the next generation of Jewish souls?

The point, the mantra, was that I wanted to spot the kid in that group who was having the toughest time and find a reasonable, relevant, but respectful way to get her back into our good graces.  Yes, I stopped the reading activity.  But then we together broadened the activity into something more meaningful before I ultimately did bring the activity back to having kids practice reading the Hebrew.  Again, whatever happened, happened, but my intention was to do what I could to get that kid back on track with what the class was doing overall.

In fact, while the mantra might be “each kid is their own person and has a right to be included in the class,” the broader goal I have almost every time I enter the classroom is to have the children leave the classroom at the end of that day with a smile on their face about Hebrew school.  Their lasting impression should be of a place of fun and philosophy, offering ideas but asking for their input, where everyone’s ideas are valid and experiences valued.  They feel how wonderful it is to celebrate their Jewishness, creating and developing their own Judaisms ahead of their b’nai mitzvah.

And at the end of a really good day, I can’t get them to leave.

FRONTAL FREE: The Flag of the Snowflake

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!

In my classroom, I keep a copy of the page from the ship's manifest that recorded when the oldest of my father's uncles arrived at Ellis Island. Like so many other things in the room, this too becomes a conversation piece. Often when I teach about the ever-tightening US immigration quotas in the years leading up to the creation of the state of Israel, I use this document as a tool for unpacking my own family's history and travails in the Holy Land pre-1948. 

As the years slip by me, I'm increasingly fascinated by my recent ancestors' footsteps around the world. But simultaneously, I must remind myself that each student or program participant I encounter has their own story about how their family survived as Jews to this day. And as we hear these various stories and map them out, the stories grow stronger as their connections to each other become real, intersecting through countries and journeys, and enhancing our collective Jewish identity. 

These Jewish kids are snowflakes. Each is a delicate but unique mix of heritage, secularism, modern tech, and personal Judaism.  Each is influenced by all aspects of the world around them, both the passive elements that envelop them and the active elements that are often so forcefully thrown at them.  

Young women and men approaching b’nai mitzvah often face their first true identity crisis.  They feel a need to figure out and concatenate the wide-sweeping pieces that make up who they are as people, as Americans, as Jews.  And as it is for grownups too, their search for identity can lead to an inner revolt and a demand for individuality, raising the flag of the snowflake while declaring that they are their own person and cannot and will not be told who they are or how they should live.

This is why outreach, inclusion, and empathy are so crucial in our approaches to teaching them what it means to be a Jew.  They need to feel us trying new techniques in the classroom and at home, with games or puzzles or songs or anything that gets them up and moving.  They need to see us bringing them into a larger circle of the Jewish community, with synagogue activities or youth group events, anything to help them visualize that they are part of something that’s not only a horizontal timeline of Jewish history and legacy but a vertical connection to communities around the world and Jewish kids just like them. 

And above all, they need to feel us empathizing with them, in their world and in their minds, relating to them on a level that’s beyond adult and kid, involving them in discussions and planning holiday celebrations and creating new and novel liturgy, until they gradually feel the pull, the deep-seated responsibility, the personal need to take ownership of their Jewish heritage and contribute to their home, or school, or shul, or community. 

My ultimate goal is to teach them to be empathetic towards the Jewish people.  But as empathy cannot be taught directly, it must be seeded and nurtured, inspired and cultured.  And then, one day, you find them teaching you, and they’re ready for the world.

FRONTAL FREE: The Fragility of 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 Mt. Sinai, click on “Our Store” for more!

Before I begin a teaching session, I look around the room. Maybe I'm in a classroom, or running a junior congregation, or just chatting with my kid's classmates or friends. And I often start off by asking them an open question, where they could really come up with any response. 

And then, I listen. 

I listen because I need to know everything I can about them. Where do their traditions come from? What do they do at home to be Jewish? Would they rank their Jewish identity ahead of their nationality, their school, or even their gender?

One evening when I was a student in Hebrew high school, a teacher pointed out to us that the term "Judaism" shouldn't really refer to our religion, per se. A "Judaism," by definition, would be an act you perform or behavior you display that demonstrates that you are Jewish, that defines your Jewishness. So when I'm engaging a group of Jewish tweeners nowadays, I prompt them to discuss their Judaism, their collective body of thoughts, opinions, knowledge, and traditions that make up their religion, culture, and personal dogma. 

The fragility of Judaism lies in the personalized legitimacy of the child's Judaism. At some point, it's only natural for someone, at any age, to question the validity, source, or true meaning of a custom or a text. The individual thinks about a "Judaism," wondering where it came from, how it started, what it really means, if it's meaningful to them, and if they should keep it up. 

But if they drop traditions entirely, so goes the Jewish people. 

As I continue this blog’s theme of “frontal free” teaching, I emphasize the value in not standing in front of the kids and telling them what they should know or believe.  As kids approach the traditional age of b’nai mitzvah, they begin to evolve in more thoughtful beings, instinctually wanting to think things through for themselves.  At some point, most of the 10 year olds I’ve encountered will even push back against any approach to tell them something rather than demonstrate something.

Lest you, the parent or educator, risk pushing them away, I’ve come to value the need to engross them in the material you’re trying to communicate.  Give them a context for the lesson, a taste of the material, then hand it over to them for them to explore themselves, at their pace, in their own way.  Without leveraging them, or intimidating them, or, dare I say, guilting them, you must find a way for them to approach the lessons themselves. 

Each year, I have preteen students who are agnostic, some with attention issues, some with lots of personal experience in Israel compared to the others.  So how do I teach them deeper understandings of Jewish ethics, or the value of learning Torah stories, or an overview of Israeli history?  Well, it’s always hard, but the hard part for me is letting go:  sitting back and letting them drive.  Give them the material but let them create a project around it; let the more experienced kids mentor the others; and have them do something active and on their feet to demonstrate their learning and understanding of the lessons. 

In the end, when they’re given the reins of their own education, they come to respect you, the institution of learning, and the value of finding their own personal Judaisms within the curriculum.  Their connections to tradition strengthen, thereby shoring up that fragility.  It’s my hope that through non-frontal, creative, experiential learning, we’ll imbue the next generation with the impetus to further their education and pass along their legacy of leadership and learning to the next generation.

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.