Posted on January 10, 2018
The sounds of Hebrew are bouncing off the wall of the Second Grade classroom as we continue to learn new letters and vowels. We have recently introduced, ל,ת,ח,ו,ב-Vet, Vav, Chet, Tav(with a dot in the middle) and Lamed. Ask your kids about the tricks for remembering the letters are, I like that the Vav has a vertical back and that it’s colored violet. We also learned a new vowel, the Sheva. When it comes in the middle of a word it is silent, acting as a “stop sign” to end the syllable. I continue to be impressed at the enthusiasm the class has for learning, and the effort they put into our classroom work!
In our Torah studies we heard the story of the Tower of Babel and decided that our text was from the Torah. The students were puzzled as to why God was displeased that the people were working together trying to build a tower to the heavens. Most of us thought that God would have been happy that people were able to collaborate and be successful in such an impressive engineering feat. Only when they heard the Midrash, the stories that have been told to try to explain God’s displeasure did it come together. We learned that the Rabbi’s taught that the Tower became so important that the builders lost sense of the worth of individual human life, that if someone was killed or hurt during the construction that the work went on without a second thought.
On Sunday, in preparation for MLK Day we read the book As Good AS Anybody by Richard Michelson. The book tells a bit about the childhoods of Martin Luther King Jr. in the American South and Abraham Joshua Heschel in Europe as the Nazi’s came to power. We read about the discrimination that both men faced, their shared passion for fighting against bigotry and the remarkable friendship between the two. We discussed the Jewish idea that humans are created in God’s image and the need to respect everyone. We also discussed the courage it takes to stand up for one’s beliefs.