My Day Or On Teaching Shemot - Part III

Today I taught 5 periods. It was a mostly break-less and fulfilling day. In addition to the teaching I had an intense guidance meeting with one student and less intense yet also important meetings with three others. Also, I appeared in a colleague's classroom as Holden Caulfield reciting a monologue of his. After the acting with the script via the book, I took questions in character. Then I took questions as myself. The kids' questions were bright and there was an excitement in the air. Sometimes it all comes together and I love my job, my life. I also spent a period helping a student plan his informative speech assignment (for my class) on Jews in boxing. Cinderella Man did a disservice by making Max Baer seem evil. In real life he was not the ruthless killer they make him out to be in that film (see this artful article about the posthumous libel and how it eats his son alive.) I was going to bus it all the way home and was blessed instead with a ride to the second bus from a dear former student of eight years ago - who is now a dear colleague. As I hit the block perpendicular to mine after walking home from the GWB terminal I bumped into a dear friend who is in my neighborhood for TLN via YU. It was a rejuvenating treat to see him and to converse. He told me a beautiful idea: The Gemorah says that if you think you're watching someone's silver for them and it gets lost and it turns out that it was really gold you are only responsible for fines as if it were gold. The reasoning behind this ruling is that since you thought you were watching silver you did a lesser level of watching, and it's not your fault - had you known you were guarding gold you'd have used a higher level of supervision. Rabbi Berel Wein says that The Jewish People think that we're silver and fail to realize that we're gold. Only after experiencing great loss do we realize how valuable we are and are woken up to realize that we need to take better care of ourselves as a nation. This is a sad reality that often applied to us as individuals as well as in a communal way. Let's name it The Got Till It's Gome Syndrome. Speaking of naming things today I taught my students the principal of the conservation of biblical characters. It was in the syllabus and so I went for it. We were discussing Shifra and Puah and how some say they were Jews and some say they were Egyptians. The Abarbanel goes out of the box and says that Shifra and Puah were titles and that all of the midwives in Egypt worked in pairs - one worked with mother and one with child. Many of us were blessed as children to be told almost in our mother's milk that Shifra and Puah were Yocheved and Miriam. That's where the conservation theory came in; the idea is that it's better to accumulate a lot of facts about main characters rather than have a lot of mysterious minor players we know little about. No one complained about this theory (or questioned where it came from). One student did question the Abarbanel. She said she didn't like it because by making Shuifra and Pua into positions rather than people it takes away from the greatness of these two individuals, a greatness that the Torah stresses and that we have had stressed in our Torah learning since we were toddlers. I said that they are still individuals, that's not diminished - and yet I heard her point and hopefully let her know so. The midwives not only don't kill the babies but they also keep them alive. And once again, a word that appears repeatedly in this early part of the story in one form or another (vayirbu) is used to tell us that despite Paroh's best efforts to diminish them the Jews kept multiplying. I'm closing this post; no pauses, no paragraphs, old school blogging.