Finding the Good in Students
by Joel Lurie Grishaver
In Pirke Avot, 1:15 we find this famous text. Shammai says: “Make of thy Torah study a fixed practice; say little and do much; and greet all people with a cheerful countenance.”
Category Archives: Torah
On Teaching: Teaching as Intrepretation Reply
Teaching as Intrepretation
by Joel Lurie Grishaver
One of my favorite texts of all times is Rashi’s comments on the first verse of the Torah.
Art transforms תורה דברי Divrei Torah Reply
Debi Mishael
Lana stands nervously in front of the ארון הקודש Aaron HaKodesh. She is in between her grandparents preparing to have pre-Bat Mitzvah pictures taken but I can see something building in her eyes and in her body language.
Creating Torah Citizens 2
How Our School Develops a Community of Torah Readers
by Debi Rowe
In my synagogue’s Torah School, our students do not memorize their bar or bat mitzvah Torah portion from a recording. All of them know trop.
You might assume that this means our students must spend hours and hours of extra time preparing for the b’nai mitzvah ceremonies, or that we must dedicate a huge amount of curricular time and energy to training these students. But that’s not the case. Our students all know trop because our students all read Torah not just at their b’nai mitzvah services, but several times every year.
For the past five years, students in our midweek Hebrew classes have been reading Torah as part of our regular Thursday minhah or ma’ariv worship service.
Did God Create the Dinosaurs? Reply
by Joel Lurie Grishaver
[cross-posted to the Gris Mill]
I was doing a workshop on “teaching God” to about sixty San Diego teachers. We get to the point in the conversation where I ask them to bring into our discussion questions about God that their students have asked them. And the winner was, a third grade teacher who had a student ask, “Did God Create the Dinosaurs?” Teachers frequently bring up this question when I do God workshops. They get asked it all the time (especially by precocious eight-year-olds), and they’re not sure that they know the right answer to give.
It is not as simple a question as it might seem. What it represents is a testing of two information sources. For an eight-year-old, dinosaurs are the heart of scientific reality. It is what they buy at science museums and read about in science books. Dinosaurs are a symbol of history that has been reconstructed from bones and fossils and clues. They are the end result of the scientific method, the C.S.I. of history. On the other hand, the Bible (Torah) is God’s truth. In the reality experienced by most eight-year-olds, the Torah is not yet a metaphor. It is literal. The distinction between it being a book of truth rather than a book of history (science) is not yet comprehensible.
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