Alive and Wrestling
Dear friends,
I walk into a classroom at the Cobble Hill branch of our Hebrew school and find 9 eleven and twelve year olds singing Hineh Ma Tov. They continue with Shma, VeAhavta, Mi Khamocha, and the Amidah, ending with Oseh Shalom. None of them knew all these prayers a few months back. Several of them began the year with no knowledge of Hebrew, close to no knowledge of prayer, and a slight understanding of what this faith is that they belong to. To see them all, through their jaded pre-teen skepticism sing together, then read Hebrew and chant Torah trop amazes me. When a conversation emerges about whether a non-binary person should wear a kipah or not, I know that the deeper lesson has sunk in: this tradition is theirs to shape. They own it for themselves, and instead of ditching it because of its problematic history they have taken on its reframing in relation to what has been passed down to them.
The fourth-grade class is busy working on a collective mural. This year’s theme was the Year of the Storytellers, in which students were introduced to stories and storytellers from different periods in Jewish history, in an attempt to give them a sense of the freedom with which our people have played with the Torah and the tradition. They learned about different forms of storytelling and different layers of Torah study: the simple meaning, the hinted meaning, the studied meaning and the secret meaning. The Fourth graders have spent much of the year making comics of their own midrashim, their takes on biblical stories. When I walk in they are working on their final project: a comic strip depicting many different options to understand the story of Jacob wrestling the angel.
Their drawings offer answers to several questions: Was he asleep? Was it a dream? Did someone really come, or was it an internal struggle? If someone came – who was it? If it was internal – what was he struggling with? Some of their depictions come from rabbinic sources, others from their own imaginations. There are depictions of Jacob wrestling with himself, with a snake, with Death and with his brother. This is the work of Torah study. Cracking it open with the help of questions, empathy and imagination.
The younger kids faced the story on a simpler level, but their life-sized painting also ended up looking like some nighttime depiction of two people either wrestling or hugging. Our small group of special needs students created a song about how Jacob felt in that moment before he goes to meet his brother Esau, whom he feared still wanted to kill him. Listen to the beautiful song by Yotam Ben-Or, Koby and Jacob HERE.
The sixth and seventh graders took the notion of wrestling to a more personal level. They were tasked with taking photographs that depict their struggles with being Jewish, with the tradition and with the interplay between their secular lives and their faith world. Sol offered a photo of him playing a Christian hymn on the violin. Sebastian took a shot of a Kyrie Irving Jersey. Roni took one of Jewish objects in her home, including menorahs, a Yarzheit candle and a Jewish cookbook. Others shared photos they took during our spring tour of the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
To end our year, we gathered with parents and grandparents on the eve of Shavuot to sing and read Torah. Our guiding question came from a six-year-old: Why do we even need the Torah? Kids of varying ages responded with answers about our history, about the importance of structure and laws, about storytelling and imagination, about connection with our ancestors. Am Yisrael Chai, I thought to myself: The people of Israel live!
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha