One of the greatest joys in my job is helping to bring Jewish text and ideas to life for our students. We’ve spent two weeks now learning the story of Ezra and the first public Torah reading. Yesterday we had the amazing opportunity to put the text into action and do our own Torah reading with targum (translation) as part of our tefilah (prayer) service.
After starting off with a few of our regular tefilot, we took a Torah out of the aron (ark). I chanted the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, which sets up the story of Josef, and Beverly translated each verse along the way. Throughout the whole process, every kid participated in the service with a specific job like leading tefilot, opening and closing the aron doors, and undressing and redressing the Torah. Before we put the Torah back in the aron everyone also had the opportunity to look closely at the text inside. Here are some of the questions they came up with while looking at the Torah:
- Why are the letters so fancy – why do some of them have crowns?
- Why are there no vowels in the Torah?
- Are those bandaids? (Noticing small straps of parchment holding the bigger parchment panels together)
- The pages are all yellow. Is it really old?
- How many pages are there in this Torah?
- Why is one side of the scroll bigger than the other?
While the kids reflected that they missed some of the singing and jumping and wiggling that our usual tefilah structure provides, they also concluded that public Torah readings are pretty cool. The experience also pulled out of them tons more excellent questions. Kids huddled with Beverly after tefilah was over to ask more about the Torah and Torah readings as well as the story of Josef. Here are some of those:
- Is that the same Torah as back in the old days (like in the Ezra story)?
- Did you buy these Torahs?
- I wonder how many Torahs are in the world.
- I wonder how many Jewish people are in the world.
- I wonder how many people in the Torah are doing bad things.
- I wonder how the sofrim (Torah makers) make Torahs so they last for so long.
- Where are the Torahs? (What’s the place called where we keep them? Answer: an aron.)
- I wonder how many arons there are in the world.