Greatest Teacher

The purpose of this blog is to provide something cool for a heated Friday night dinner conversation. Please print and share.

This week, a question for kids, and a question for adults for the Shabbat table.

The kids' question of the week: What makes a great teacher? How can you tell that someone's a great teacher?

The adults' question: How can parents help their kids' teachers become better?

One way would be to share with them the most important book on teaching that most teachers never read:

The First Days of School by Harry and Rosemary Wong.

The greatness of the book is its understanding how setting the right tone on the very first day of school makes all the difference in classroom management. Do your kids/grandkids/nieces/nephews/neighbors a favor and get a copy to each of their teachers.

Another tool that few teachers are aware of but should be is this remarkable new approach to classroom management. You have to see it to get it:

Chris Biffle, the creator:
http://youtu.be/JJw9mzCtWbk

Middle school science teacher implementing:
http://youtu.be/g6NmegdUK-I

HS math teacher using technique:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6WJdsb0dfM

4th grade reading
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xFcUPQ_z_8

1st-grade teacher who is using the technique (modified) to teach math:
http://youtu.be/pIk9qrMZHXM
(Does the method make her a better teacher?)

And Kindergarten:
http://youtu.be/yygIwC3PSvk

Did you know: The Jewish People invented the concept of compulsory public-supported education nearly 2,000 years ago? It had been the responsibility of every parent to teach their own children, but the rabbis observed that orphans were not being educated, so they instituted a new rule - everyone will use and support a new public school system, so that no child will be left behind. Along with this history, the Talmud gives a few rules for how to run a school, including the necessity of evaluating a teacher's effectiveness and making whatever changes needed in order for the children to learn.

Shabbat Shalom

PS - http://bestjewishkidsbooks.com has school supplies and gifts for teachers.

The iPhone app: http://tinyurl.com/amazingcalendarlink
Android version: http://tinyurl.com/amazingandroidcalendar

Talmudic Airplane?

Happy Birthday Lily - may you continue to fly higher and higher!


Astonishingly, the Talmud, completed ca. 500 CE, asks questions about flying towers and flying boxes.

The Talmud (Sanhedrin 106b) asks: “What is the meaning of the verse, ‘…He who counted the towers’ (Isaiah 33:18)?”

Answer: The verse refers to the many questions concerning "a tower flying in the air."

For example: Does passing over a cemetery in a flying tower cause a person to contract ritual impurity like walking though it would?

Another: Is a Cohen/priest (whose holy status means he may not enter a cemetery) permitted to fly over a cemetery in a flying box?

(Excerpted from the Amazing Jewish Fact-a-Day Calendar, http://tinyurl.com/amazingcalendarlink)

First question for your table - What do you think? Did these ancient rabbis foresee the future development of airplanes, or did they just have wild imaginations?

Second question - What's your answer? Should a Cohen be allowed to fly over a cemetery?


Shabbat Shalom

Menschlekeit

What does it mean when someone says, "S/he's a real mensch"?

Here's a story from the Talmud:

Once, while Rebbe (that's the nickname of R. Yehuda HaNasi) was teaching his daily class in rabbinics, he noticed a particularly strong scent of garlic.

Now if you are a garlic lover, the scent of raw garlic can only be described as an aroma.

But if you are not a garlic lover, or if you happen to be pregnant, any scent of garlic (raw or cooked) can only be described as an odor.

While the Talmud does not mention whether or not Rebbe was pregnant at the time, I think it is safe to assume he was not. Nevertheless, he found the garlic smell so strong it was disturbing his concentration.

"Whoever has been eating garlic, please go out," he said.

R. Chiya stood up and left.

Then all the other students stood up and left.

The next day, Rebbe's son R. Shimon ran into R. Chiya. "Aren't you the one who annoyed my father yesterday?"

"God forbid," he answered.

Question for your table: Why did R. Chiya (and then the other students) leave?

If this story speaks to you, then you get one of the 2 messages of Purim: Doing whatever it takes to help anyone in your community who needs help.

Whatever it takes.

That’s being a mensch. Think about it.

If you don't know someone who needs help, or if you want to give anonymously (recommended), find a rabbi who disburses funds. If you can't find a rabbi, try 1-800-823-CHAI.


Shabbat Shalom and Happy Purim

Here is link to a class I gave this week on Purim.

And as promised, here is the second story, followed by a Purim-ready joke...

(As told by Larry Domnitch)

It was Purim, my destination was the South Bronx to read the Megillah (Scroll of Esther) in one of the last remaining Synagogues in the area. While scurrying around my apartment in an attempt to make a hasty departure, I received a phone call from a friend who had discovered an elderly Jewish man who lives alone in a vast housing project in the Bronx's Soundview section. It would be reasonable to presume that this person lives in virtual seclusion and is also detached from the Jewish community. On that day however, he would be reacquainted with the holiday of Purim.

I phoned Bernie (not his real name) and offered to bring him Mishloach Manot - the traditional package of treats. Pleasantly surprised as well as shocked to receive my call, he accepted the offer. I told Bernie that when I finished reading the Megillah, I would stop by. He responded that he anxiously awaited my arrival.

Years of solitude no doubt affects an individual and my call must have prompted Bernie to recollect the memories of the neighborhood's bygone eras, with its shuls, and schools, and holiday celebrations with relatives and friends. Perhaps he was not quite ready to deal with those memories for he called and left this message, "All the Jews have left, there is no one left here anymore." He said with resignation that perhaps it would be better if I did not visit him. However, I had already left and did not receive that message.

Later that afternoon, when I along with a friend arrived at Bernie's apartment, he greeted us graciously but with a subdued enthusiasm. He seemed uneasy, unsure he wanted us there. But with Mishloach Manot in hand, we were there nonetheless.

For about a half-hour, we sat in Bernie's unkempt, cluttered apartment surrounded by old newspapers and memorabilia. We spoke about Israel, the Bronx, the Jewish Patriarchs, Purim, and about whatever else he chose to discuss. I felt like a traveler from afar bringing Bernie news. We were indeed his connection with the Jewish world for that brief time.

How ironic that we lived only a few miles away. Bernie soon became comfortable with our presence, a sure sign that our mission was a success. When it was time to leave, we gave Bernie a Mishloach Manot package, and wished him a Freilichen (joyous) Purim. A greeting he probably had not heard in years.

When I returned home that evening, I heard Bernie's earlier recorded message telling me not to bother bringing him Mishloach Manot. Yet, an additional message followed. In an
enthusiastic tone that told a thousand words, he profusely thanked me for visiting him and for the Mishloach Manot. In an uplifted spirit, he said, "I want to thank you for the Shaloch Manos and most importantly for your presence here today. It's been a long time since I spoke about Yiddishkeit, you brought back the 'pintele Yid' (Jewish spark) in me." He concluded his message with, "Zei Gezunt," (be well) and added in parting "I'll call you when I get a chance." Indeed I have spoken to him since.

That year, the holiday of Purim was brought to Bernie. On that day, Purim was not merely a forgotten memory celebrated elsewhere but something real, a cause for celebration.
There are times when a seemingly small act can have the most profound effect upon another. It was a Purim I will never forget.

*
Q: Why did Adam and Eve have a perfect marriage?
A: He didn't have to hear about all the men she could have married, and she didn't have to hear about the way his mother cooked.

Have a better joke? Leave a comment below!

PPS - Purim-friendly t-shirt seen in Israel:

Out of This World

Imagine a project at Harvard to convene the greatest scholars in every field over a period of several hundred years in order to create an encyclopedia of their collective knowledge. Who wouldn't want to see the final product?

This is the Talmud: a unique collection of wisdom that would surprise experts in any discipline, including law, ethics, psychology and economics. In the realm of cosmology, too, the Talmud makes assertions -- sometimes literal, sometimes metaphoric, and sometimes both.

To give one example, consider the Talmudic estimate of the number and distribution of stars in the universe.

In order to appreciate this passage, bear in mind two things. First, the vast bulk of Talmudic wisdom is claimed to be a transmitted tradition, from Moses to Joshua, to the prophets, to the Elders, to the Great Assembly, and then to a chain of scholars until the completion of the Talmud 1,500 years ago. Hence it is called the Oral Law.

Second, we need to appreciate the limitations of science 1,500 years ago: the telescope was invented in the 16th century, and the number of stars visible to the naked eye is approximately 9,000.

So what did these ancient rabbis say about the number of stars? In Tractate Brachot, page 32b, the Talmud records a tradition, in the name of Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, that there are roughly 10¹⁸ stars in the universe. This number is remarkably big and much closer to the current scientific consensus of 10²² than common sense would allow.

Now, although it is interesting for an ancient people to have such a large estimate, this single coincidence could perhaps be explained as an extremely lucky guess. Never mind that no other ancient people had an estimate anywhere near this order of magnitude, nor did they have a conventional way to write such a number. (I have queried dozens of astronomers and none could identify a single other ancient culture with remotely similar figures.)

However, the Talmud relates more than a raw number. The passage explains that the distribution of stars throughout the cosmos is neither even nor random. Rather, it states that they are clustered in groups of billions of stars (what we call galaxies), which themselves are clustered into groups (what astronomers call galactic clusters), which in turn are in mega-groups (what we call superclusters).

To describe the stars as clustered together, both locally and in clusters of clusters, was far beyond the imagination and the telescopes of scientists until Edwin Hubble's famous photographs of Andromeda in the 1920s. Galactic clusters and superclusters have been described only in the past decade or so. Moreover, the Talmud states categorically that the number of galaxies in a cluster is about 30. Remarkably, astronomers today set the number of galaxies in our own local cluster at about 30!

Further, the Talmud adds that the superclusters consist of about 30 clusters each, and that superclusters are themselves grouped into a bigger pattern of about 30 (megasuperclusters?) of which the universe has a total of about 360. Thus, the Talmud appears consistent with one major theory that the overall structure of the universe is shaped by the rules of fractal mathematics. I've shown this data to numerous astronomers around the world and the consensus are pure astonishment.

Could it be that Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish made an extremely lucky guess? That might be plausible if he had used a number that had symbolic significance in Judaism, such as seven, 10, 18 or 40. What is the significance of the number 30? To my knowledge, there is no spiritual or religious reason for choosing that number. It therefore seems to be exactly what it claims to be: a conscientious oral transmission of a received tradition, rather than simply one person's guesstimate.

Moreover, Rabbi Shimon had a reputation for impeccable honesty; it is unthinkable that he would have invented these numbers or guessed without telling us so. The clear intent of the passage is to convey an oral tradition.

You are now in on the secret of Shavuot: There is something special about the Torah (and rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated!). The Torah is much, much more than a mere "cultural expression" of one tiny group of ancient people, so numerically small that we reminded Mark Twain of a "nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way."

This passage about the stars is a mere five Talmudic lines, itself about as significant as a puff of star dust. But it also hints to the treasures available to those who seek them. Shavuot (Sunday night) is not a bad time to begin. If not now, when?

(See this inspiring film.).

Shabbat Shalom.


Travel/speaking schedule:June 17 – Chicago - “A New Twist on the Old Game of Love” (downtown business lunch)
June 18 - Los Angeles – “How Frustrations are the Key to Successful Dating” (for singles)
June 23 - San Francisco - private meetings
June 24 – Los Angeles - “Jewish Secrets to a Spicy Marriage” (for married men)
June 25 – Los Angeles - “How to help our children get married without interfering (too much)” (for parents)

For details, send an email!

Who Needs It?

Dedicated to Arye ben Chana.
(To dedicate a future Table Talk, send an email.)



I’ll never forget my first encounter with the Talmud.

I had been wandering around the Old City of Jerusalem with my backpack and someone who looked like a rabbi asked me if I needed help finding wherever I was going. I was looking for a place that some Jews I had met in Paris told me about. They called the Such-and-Such Yeshiva. There, they promised me, you can learn the Talmud in English.

“The Yeshiva? You’re here!”

Where I was standing didn’t look anything like a yeshiva, in fact I was in the middle of the street. “All these buildings around you are the yeshiva. By the way, it’s Friday afternoon, do you have plans for Shabbos?”

I didn’t.

The next thing I knew, I was in the back seat of an old white Citroën headed out to the Judean Hills as the sun descended towards the Mediterranean.

My host, I’ll call him Shlomo, it turns out was something of a renaissance man. A wiry, slender man with a long, thin graying beard, he was a combination Talmudic scholar, fix-it-man and guru on organic foods and herbs.

The community was not wealthy. They lived very simply, even by Israeli standards. But they seemed very happy on their bluff with a view of the Dead Sea. It turns out that I happened to arrive for a very special Shabbat, when “the rebbe” was visiting. This was not the famous Lubavitcher rebbe, he was the community rabbi, who was the most angelic person I’d ever met, with the sweetest, softest smile framed by a lush black beard. Friday night during the song “lecha dodi” song, he got everyone dancing outside. It was a divine, timeless moment.

Sunday morning, still radiating the afterglow of that Shabbat, I met Shlomo back at the yeshiva for my introduction to the Talmud.

He unlocked the door to an old building that had arched ceilings and almost no artificial light. Most of the light streamed in through high windows. The small room was lined with unsteady-looking bookshelves, jammed full of ancient Hebrew books of all sizes.

Shlomo pulled a massive volume from a bottom shelf, larger and heavier than any book I’d ever held, and put it in my hands. “Why don’t you put this over there,” he gestured to a reading table. He disappeared and reappeared with two dictionaries, one Hebrew-English and the other Aramaic-English.

For the next three hours Shlomo had me read (without vowels) and look up every word in the first half of the first page, going over it again and again until I could read it on my own. It was like weeding a dandelion field - every step was slow and deliberate. I felt like a baby trying to become a toddler. But Shlomo seemed to have infinite patience for my baby steps and I was determined to figure out this puzzle, which had to do with two people fighting over a object that they both claimed to have found first.

Finally, after this grueling effort at mastering that first section, Shlomo put his hand on the page and looked me in the eye. “Do you know why we learn Torah?”

“That’s a really good question,” I was thinking, “Um, shouldn’t we have discussed this before?” But my actual reply was, “Isn’t it supposed to teach us how to live?”

“Not necessarily. We could learn how to live in other ways. Many people around the world learn how to live without the Torah. We could learn how to live from the animals – from dogs how to be loyal, from beavers how to be industrious...” That image reminded me of King Arthur, who according to legend did exactly that.

The point was, he had a point, and I didn’t have a clue.

“So what’s the reason?”

“The Torah,” he intoned slowly, “Is to teach us how to be holy.”

“Oh....” My voice and thoughts trailed off.

I looked down at the gigantic page of ancient text in front of me. The paper was faded. The corners were worn as if they had been touched by a thousand hands. The air was cool, and in the shaft of sunlight streaming down from behind the bookcase, a fly buzzed.

I wasn’t sure what “holy” meant, or what it had to do with the property dispute that I had been sweating for three hours to decipher. But something told me it might have something to do with that Shabbat “experience”.

Shabbat Shalom



Travel/speaking schedule:
June 17 – Chicago - “A New Twist on the Old Game of Love” (downtown business lunch)
June 18 - Los Angeles – “How Frustrations are the Key to Successful Dating” (for singles)
June 24 – Los Angeles - “Jewish Secrets to a Spicy Marriage” (for married men)
June 25 – Los Angeles - “How to help our children get married without interfering (too much)” (for parents)

For details, send an email!

In Action

In memory of Albert Bitton (Amichai ben Eliyahu), an army medic killed in Baghdad Tuesday by an IED. He graduated from the Ida Crown Jewish Academy (West Rogers Park, Chicago) in 2005 and was looking forward to attending medical school when he completed his duty. Heartfelt condolences to his wife, parents and sisters, and the Jewish community of Chicago. (Incidentally, he is the second graduate from Ida Crown to be killed in Iraq.) Please read more about this exceptional young man here and here is one blogger’s personal memory of Albert.


What’s going on in Iraq?

Have you ever noticed that, by and large, the news media don’t tell us much about Iraqi casualties? Occasionally you hear a personal spotlight about an individual soldier or two, but most of the time the casualties are merely numbers. Here is one site that tries to personalize the fallen.

In contrast, the Israeli news during any kind of attack immediately puts a name and face on each casualty.

Question for your table: What difference does it make for a society whether or not we account for people as numbers or as names?

+ + + +

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may recall my friend Chaplain Captain Andy Shulman, who was the only Jewish chaplain in Iraq (and now has one or two colleagues there).


Andy sends updates and photos every day. Jewish soldiers are coming out of the proverbial woodworks – when they find out that he has a Shabbat program, for example, they want to get involved. The photo on the left is a Havdala ceremony in one of Sadaam's palaces. Knowing that Iraq was the center of Jewish life for centuries (that's where the Talmud was created), makes this scene particularly interesting.

He also has seen his share of hardship. Recently, he was contacted by a Jewish Iraqi woman who is living with her children in fear for her life. Her husband was kidnapped in December of 2006 and she hasn’t heard from him since. All she received was a single phone call saying that “they will slaughter him, and they cursed the Jews.”

No idea if he is dead or alive. She never came forward until now because of fear for her children. But she has asked for the worldwide community to pray for her husband.

If you would like to do so, or to give a nickel of tzedakka in his merit, please have in mind Yaakov Na’eem Eliyahu Sharabani ben Sadiya Avraham.

If you would like to send a care package of kosher food, books or anything else to the Jewish soldiers in Iraq, here is the address:

CHAPLAIN SHULMAN
3rd AVIATION BRIGADE - 3rd ID
4/3 HHC CAB 43408
APO, AE 09322-3408


Our media culture seems to measure greatness by how well someone does – who can run the fastest, make the most money, do the hardest math problems.

What if we measured greatness by how well a person deals with their hurdles and errors? According to that measure, who would be great in your book?

Shabbat Shalom



Travel/speaking schedule:
March 4-6 - California
April 3 - St. Louis
April 7 - Baltimore

For details, send an email.