A Sweet Start to the New Year

At the very start of each of our first two weekday sessions, all our 5th and 6th grade students met up in the Social Hall for the first of seven cooking sessions led by Karen.

Traditionally, Jews all over the world help usher in the new year with a festive meal, including foods symbolizing the wish for a prosperous and sweet year to come. It's not surprising then, that the first recipe our 5th and 6th graders prepared under Karen's tutelage was honey cake.

This year, Karen prepared a poster sharing important cooking skills, which she shared with the students.

Before dividing up into groups around each small table, we watched Karen model the poster skills, as she assembled the ingredients for the honey cake into the mixing bowl.

Then it was time for each group to make the cake batter. Four students were assigned to each table, and immediately set about adding in the dry ingredients - flour and sugar were on the table; the baking soda and baking powder were on Karen's table up front.

The tricky part was making sure that the measured amount of the ingredient reached the mixing bowl without too much spillage!

Checking and re-checking the ingredients list was very important!

Add in the half cup of sugar - you wouldn't want to forget the sugar!

Measuring the half teaspoon of baking power obviously requires teamwork.

So does adding in the vanilla.

Pouring the honey into the measuring cup is a 2-man, 3-hand affair here.

Then comes the stirring (why does the opening scene of the 3 witches in "MacBeth" come to mind?).

In this case, stirring the batter involves one stirrer and two supervisors. We guaranty the quality of this cake!

More supervision; and making sure no ingredient has been omitted.

Finally, the stirred batter is poured into a floured pan, and V-E-R-Y carefully carried to the oven in the kitchen.

Since this was a fairly simple recipe which took only about half an hour to prepare of our allotted 45 minute cooking session, we had about 20 minutes for hafsaka (recess) once the last tables had been cleared.  

Over the summer, a Gaga pit was built in time for Camp Kefli, and it proved to be very popular. It was so popular, in fact, that it filled very quickly with almost all the students on both days.

 And the students "threw" themselves into the game, with all the energy they could muster!

For those students who decided not to play Gaga, we had jump ropes, sidewalk chalk, and balls available to play with. 

At 4:43, it was time to put away the balls and jump ropes and head down to tefillah in the Beit Knesset, where Rabbi Greninger led us in our first weekday tefillah (prayer service). This was the first time our third graders participated in our weekday tefillah session, so Rabbi Greninger assured them and other new students that though they might not know all the words and melodies of our prayers to start, they would learn them over the course of the year and be able to recite them as well as the "veterans" in the group.

Finally, after tefillah, we went to our Edot classroom, and had a chance to share and discuss our ideas of how you can tell if someone is Jewish and what it means to be Jewish.

I started the discussion by asking each student to say his or her first name (not nickname) out loud. As they said the name, I wrote it on the whiteboard in a particular column which wasn't labeled at first. Once all the names, including mine, were on the board, I asked everyone to try to discern the pattern I used to decide which column each name should go under. Hands went up, and after a few suggestions a few students suddenly realized that the names in each column came from the same place in the world - derived from the language spoken there. The longest column contained Hebrew names, mostly coming from the Torah. My name is a Yiddish one from Poland, and other names were originally German, Welsh, Gaelic (both Irish and Scottish), Latin and Greek.

At this point, I pointed out that we were all sitting in a classroom in JQuest, and wondered why all our names weren't under the "Hebrew" column. Very quickly, we determined that Jews have borrowed names from all over the world because Jews have lived all over the world and still do. If that's the case, I asked, how can you tell if someone is Jewish?

For over half an hour, until the dismissal bell rang, we created more columns on the board. First, a column labeled "Jewish" under which we made a long list of how we can tell if someone is Jewish - they might be in a synagogue, or wearing a Jewish star or other Jewish symbol, or might have Jewish symbols on their houses. They might be wearing a tallit with tzitzit or a kippa or have peyos (curled side locks); they might be speaking Hebrew or Yiddish, reciting Jewish prayers, or maybe they're living in Israel. The list went on and on, 'til I ran out of room on the board. Then I started 4 more columns labeled, "French," "Catholic," "Spanish," and "Muslim." For each column, the students shared how you could tell someone belonged to that group. Finally, I asked them to look over the columns to see if we had written the same thing under each column. I circled those items, and it turned out that items relating to language, land, laws, and history were common to the "Jewish,"
"French" and "Spanish" columns. Our discussion following this activity determined that just like the French and Spanish, Jews are a group of people we call a "nation" because the definition of a nation is a group of people who have four things in common: they speak the same language, have a common history, follow the same laws and live in the same land.

At the end, I shared that the Jewish nation is the oldest surviving nation on Earth, perhaps as old as 3,500 years. Even after being exiled by the Romans about 2,000 years ago (the final of several exiles in ancient times), we maintained our national identity (as all nations must) by teaching each successive generation our language, laws and history (thus we read the Torah, which contains our earliest history and our laws, every week as a community, and study the Torah individually and together) and, while in exile, we always remembered our land - Israel - in our prayers and during our holidays ("Next year in Jerusalem.").

Just before the bell rang, I asked the students what they expected we would be learning at JQuest, and they agreed that we'd be learning what good Jewish citizens should know: Hebrew, Jewish history, Jewish laws and information about the State of Israel. And, indeed, we shall.