Simchat Torah

On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, I introduced the students to the Torah. During our Hebrew Through Movement session, they became familiar with vocabulary relating to the Torah (sefer Torah, yad shel torah), and immediately after our tefillah time with Rabbi Greninger, I read a book to the students about the laws and customs a scribe must follow when copying a Torah, called "A Torah is Written".

The final holiday of the Hebrew month of Tishrei is Simchat Torah (celebrated by Reform Jews following the 7th day of Sukkot). This year, the celebration of what is essentially the constitution of the Jewish People and its earliest history text fell on Wednesday evening, and it was my hope that before the students joined the rest of the congregation in celebrating the holiday, they would have enough information to appreciate the skill and patience a scribe must have to copy a "sefer Torah" (a Torah scroll). In just one or two years, the students will be chanting from the Torah on the bimah as they achieve an important milestone in their Jewish lives by becoming Bar/Bat Mitzvah. As they learn to read each letter and word and line of their parashot (Torah portions) on the scroll itself, I hope they can appreciate the love and joy and pride in our heritage, transmitted through the ages through the pens of the scribes.

We reviewed previous holiday vocabulary first - Josh, leet'ko'a ba'shofar. (Josh, blow the shofar.)

Lee'tol lulav v'etrog. (Shake lulav and etrog.)

Then we practiced Simchat Torah vocabulary I had just introduced - Gabe, l'hareem sefer Torah me'al ha'rosh. (Gabe, lift up a Torah scroll over the head.)

And finally, we put all the Simchat Torah vocabulary I had introduced together with new basic Hebrew vocabulary I also introduced this week: sefer Torah gadol, sefer Torah katan, yad shel Torah gadol, yad shel Torah katan, l'hatzbee'a, and leen'go'a. (a big Torah scroll, a small Torah scroll, a big Torah pointer, a small Torah pointer, point to, and touch.)

Immediately following our hafsaka (recess), which unfortunately had to be held indoors on Wednesday due to the poor air quality resulting from the fires raging in the counties north of us, I read from "A Torah is Written."

The students seemed to be fascinated by the process of copying a sefer Torah: learning how the skin of the kosher animal is soaked for 9 days in lime water, then stretched on a rack before being sanded for a smooth surface...

...how gall nuts (from the Kermes Oak) are ground and added into the ink mixture to give the ink a shiny gloss, and how the scribe must continually make new ink - just 2 teaspoons at a time. And what really took their breaths away, was when I read how a scribe must go through the process of proofreading each letter and word of the entire Torah he has just copied with the aid of another learned scribe THREE TIMES before the separate parchment pieces can be sewn together to create a sefer Torah that is fit for the community for which it was copied.

This coming Sunday I will formally introduce to the students the first edah (Jewish Diaspora community) we will be studying this year - the Beta Yisrael (House of Israel) of Ethiopia.

Thanks to the novel I've been reading aloud to them ("The Storyteller's Beads"), they will already be familiar with where and in what conditions the members of the Beta Yisrael were living in the year 1984, when this novel takes place. They know how the non-Jewish tribes of Ethiopia felt about the "falasha" (aliens) which is what they called the Beta Yisrael, and how these superstitious tribes believed that the Beta Yisrael were "sons of the buda" (the evil spirit) and could morph into hyenas at night and poison food by just looking at it.

And we've been learning Amharic vocabulary as well, spoken by the Beta Yisrael and all other Ethiopians. And here everyone thought we would only be learning Hebrew in our Edot class! In a few weeks, we'll be learning Amharic phrases as well as individual words. Stay tuned!