Being an Orthodox Jewish Girl in a Non-Jewish School

I was talking to a friend of mine who is in this position at the moment and it reminded me of my own experiences as the same. I thought I'd stick some of our chatter online in case there are teenagers surfing the web and quaero mihi similes.

Floor Wax Min HaTorah Minayin? An Experiment in Teaching Sefer Yishaya

My boarding-housemates and I used to play a game we called Min HaTorah Minayin. The sink is leaking? A leak min haTorah minayin, where do we find a leak in the Torah? (I found the leak, in parshas Noach). We're waxing the floor? Floor wax min haTorah minayin? That one stumped us. Floor wax min haTorah minayin?

Maybe a month later, as I was looking up a reference in Tanach, the page fell open to a verse in which Iyov (Job) reminisces about the days when he had his steps buttered.

I found it! I found it! Floor wax min haTorah!

Silly; but from that discovery I began to read more of the page, and really fell in love with the book of Iyov for the first time.

I thought my students might have a similar experience, so one day when we needed some space between units, I gave them a...

Sefer Yishaya (Isaiah) Scavenger Hunt

Can you find...

Something dripping?

A spice?

Glue or riveting?

Sargon, king of Assyria?

A piece of furniture?

A contractor's tools?

A song by Chizkiyahu (Hezekiah)?

Fish?

An insect?

A very personal description of the navi?

Eggs?

A musical instrument?

A line from Lecha Dodi?

A long list of jewelry?

Fire?

An agricultural tool?

A horse?

An extremely unusual name for a child?

A curtain?

A tail?

The shiras hakerem? (a song about a vineyard)

Bears?

Daylight savings?

The Leviathan?

A list of ten animals in two consecutive psukim (verses)?

A mountain?

Camels?

The land Rus came from?

A tear in something?

Something wearing out?

A pasuk from Aleinu?

A wall?

An island?

Rosh Chodesh?

Clay?

Oil?

A chasan and kallah (bride and groom)?

A color?

Something bubbling?

Sapphires?

100 years?

A paved street?

A rodent?

Bread?

Shabbos?

Figs?

Copper?

Water?

Three kinds of birds? (not necessarily in the same verse)

The moon?

A word or phrase repeated?

Beis Yaakov lechu v'nelcha b'or Hashem?

Boats?

Yotzer or uvorei choshech oseh shalom uvorei ra?

Jerusalem?

A song lyric?

A textile or textile fibre?

Deer?

The defeat of an army?

Cream?

A hill?

An alcoholic beverage?

Something that makes you, personally, happy?

Tongs?

The capitol of Syria?

Something (not a person) singing?

A mashal of childbirth?

Shaavtem mayim b'sason mimayenei hayeshua?

A reptile?

A night watchman?

Five kinds of trees? (not necessarily in the same verse)

Nachamu nachamu ami?

A pasuk from davening?

The name Yishayahu (Isaiah)?

I decided to err on the side of light and fun, but they didn't relate to it as expected; so if I were to do this again I would get heavier and have them look for certain messages and themes and ideas and feelings, with just a sprinkling of interesting superficialities.

However, it worked for an adult who came in as I was drawing up the list – he thought that this cutesy list looked like a good time, pulled out a navi to help me find objects, and got thoroughly sidetracked into just reading the navi: “Oh, this is beautiful! Ooh, I have to learn more Navi. Oh, wow, you have to read this.” – which is the reaction I was hoping for in my students. So I guess superficial scavenger hunts are better for adults.

Experiments in Teaching Medieval Jewish History, Part III: Islamic Spain and North Africa

The Chosen Path is an ideal textbook. But our school doesn't have it, so I made my own.

Some sources I liked, some of which I shared with the girls:

-Pictures of Islamic architecture from this place and time. Walking through one of those buildings with all the arches is like turning a kaleidoscope. I have seen the architecture of the Alhambra occasionally attributed to Shmuel haNaggid; at any rate, he seems to have been responsible for the building or restoration of much of it.

-There is a nice painting which imagines the court of Abd ar-Rahman III.

-Correspondence between Chisdai ibn Shaprut and the King of Kuzar. I made a mini-unit on Jews in out-of-the-way places – Yemen, India, China, Kurdistan, Kuzar – which I'm not sure I would do again. Most people just stick Kuzar into the unit on Spain, although Chisdai ibn Shaprut accomplished a great many more important things than this correspondence.

-Picture of Kuzari coin found in Viking plunder. (If you search for "Khazar coin" you can find a clearer picture.) I saw this in the Viking museum in Stockholm. Coins from Islamic lands have printed on them, in Arabic, the Islamic declaration of faith; this one, which was minted or re-minted in the kingdom of Kuzar, has one word different, so it says, “There is no god but G-d, and Moses is His prophet.”

-Shemuel HaNaggid by R' Asher Lehmann is a fun introduction to this era. I used the chapter entitled Cordoba.

-There is a wonderful handout floating around Neve that shows the seven “binyanim” of Hebrew grammar as seven multi-story buildings on a street, with good examples.

-Zemiros – Dror Yikra is by Dunash ibn Labrat; Ki Eshmera Shabbos, Tzam'a l'cha Nafshi, and that one with all the “kor”s in it for Shabbos Chanuka are by R' Avraham Ibn Ezra; Yom Shabbason (yona matza) is by R' Yehuda haLevi.

-Other poems by R' Shmuel HaNaggid, R' Yehuda haLevi, R' Shlomo ibn Gvirol, R' Moshe ibn Ezra (Nafshi ivisicha balaila). They can't go through life without having read Tzion halo tishali, which is kinna #36 on Tisha b'Av. (They said one of their previous teachers had them recite it every day.) The general favorite of the piyutim I gave them was Shachar avakeshcha by R' Shlomo ibn Gvirol. They also liked Elokai mishknosecha and Shalom l'cha yom hashevi'i by R' Yehuda haLevi. I had them pick some to write pastiches. I thought they would appreciate a piece of R' Shlomo ibn Gvirol's Ani ha'ish, which I remember liking as a high schooler; but it didn't grab them as it did me.

-Abu Ishaq's poetic attack on R' Shmuel haNaggid. Do I want to link to this? It's extremely nasty and does not deserve to be linked to. Here it is.

-Doubles: Poem in praise of R' Shmuel haNaggid by R' Yehuda haLevi. Part of a poem to R' Moshe ibn Ezra by R' Yehuda haLevi. Poetic correspondence between R' Avraham ibn Ezra and Rabbeinu Tam.

-The Ibn Ezra also has a poem about chess.

-The Kuzari, by R' Yehuda haLevi – paragraphs 11-43 in the first section. Before I gave it to them I asked them to answer, in writing, “What is Judaism?” – the Chaver's answer is very interesting (he comes from a completely different angle than the Emunos veDeos).

-Rif and Rabbeinu Chananel – I couldn't find what I really wanted, but there are lots of mussary Rabbeinu Chananels. (Also, somewhere he discusses a recent invention called a table fork.)

-Ri Migash – according to Rabbi Geometry, the most famous Ri Migash is on Bava Basra 45a.

-Chovos HaLevavos – I couldn't pick just one piece to give them :) Rabbi Geometry says that the most famous perek is Shaar HaBechina, and that people don't learn the first one.

If I had a different sort of class I would have taped arches all over the walls and had them come in costume one day and recline around* eating oranges and reciting piyutim, both original and from the sourcebook. I didn't think it would fly with this group.

*actually, I am not sure what people, let alone the Jews, sat on in Islamic Spain.

Experiments in Teaching Medieval Jewish History, Part II: Bavel (from 750)

The Chosen Path is an ideal textbook. But our school doesn't have it, so I made my own.

Here are some sources I liked (whether or not I shared them with the girls).
NB I have no idea what sort of sites I'm linking to here or whether they follow copyright law - I found all these sources in my house; I just looked up these links so the Gentle Reader can see them too.

-There's a very enlightening passage from the Meiri's introduction to Pirkei Avos about why the gaonim didn't write much.

-The Baghdad part of the Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela.

-The Installation of the Exilarch – Nosson haBavli

-The first voyage of Sinbad the Sailor and what I take to be its original source – the Gemara is a powerful mashal explaining Jewish history in galus. As for its peculiar appearance in Sinbad, well, I think this is  interesting even if no one else does.

-Story about R' Achai Gaon – in The Carlebach Haggadah. Since I didn't have time to find anything in the She'iltos itself.

-Story about R' Saadia Gaon – that one about doing teshuva every day for yesterday's understanding of Hashem.

-R' Saadia Gaon's ten explanations for shofar (these are included in The Book of Our Heritage, pp. 31-33)

-I gave them a random piece of Emunos ve'Deos – part 5 from the hakdama, about how knowledge works, and part 6 from same, about the relation of mesora to knowledge. I call this random because I did not go through the Emunos ve'Deos to get a sense of it before picking these out.

-I also gave them a piyut by R' Saadia Gaon and had them write the next stanza. They all read their compositions aloud in class – it was rather a magic moment.

-Letter from Yitzchak bar Dorbolo  - amusing example of the shu”tim that got sent to the gaonim in Bavel.

-R' Sherira Gaon's letter describing Torah study in Bavel and asking for people to continue sending shu”tim and financial support. I don't know if this was part of the Iggeres or some other correspondence.

-I'm still looking for something by R' Hai Gaon. All I could find in my house was a poem.

-I don't think I have sufficient excuse to give them part of Tennyson's poem about Haroun al-Raschid...

-Maxfield Parrish's painting of medieval Arab pirates. Silly, but I love the colors. [they are not quite true in the link.]

-There are a lot of great passages on the Islamic lands in Bernard Lewis' anthology A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History. Random House, Inc., 2001. I found some poetic treatises on government (I love that the Persians, Moors, &c. cannot write about the driest of political science without putting their thoughts into rhyme or fairy tales about owls) and descriptions of the markets where pirates sold their captives.

-The Pact of Omar. Why people share this when they get to Spain, instead of back in Bavel (which was also under Muslim rule), I have not figured out.

-Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted is a very clear summary of Islamic history from Mohammed to the present. I didn't give the girls any passages from it, but I did draw on what I learned from reading it.

-Here's my theory on why people became Karaites.

Experiments in Teaching Medieval Jewish History: Connect the Dots

So, if I were writing a textbook, I would make a nice tidy outline for each chapter.

But, under the circumstances - and given that each era of history is such an interesting bundle of people and places and ideas all interacting with each other - I wrote the terms for each unit all over a piece of paper, and told the girls, “connect the dots”.

The non-linear thinkers love it, the linear thinkers hate it, but in practice they all take their notes on this paper.

~~Update.
As an experiment, I gave a list of the exact same terms, in the exact same non-order, but left-aligned on the paper.
The lights went on for the linear thinkers. They said they realize now, retroactively, how well they understand everything, now that they see it in a nice straight line.
So, I learned something.

Experiments in Teaching Medieval Jewish History: Apples to Apples, al-Andalus Edition

I made a card game, similar to “Apples-to-Apples”, as a review for the final. Each card has a noun on it. That could be a place (Kairouan, Granada), a person (R' Yehuda ibn Chiyuj, Kahina), a group (Visigoths, Berbers), a sefer, a thing (Grammar, “Not writing sefarim”), or something unrelated to the course (the name of a girl in the class, the lyrics to the national anthem). Each player draws five cards, which she holds in a fan so that only she can see them; one more is turned over in the center; every player except the “judge” (players take turns being the judge, one per round) submits to the judge the card in her hand that she thinks is most closely connected to the card in the center. When all players have made their submissions, the judge lays out the submissions on the table for all to see and decides which is, in her opinion, the most closely connected. Each submitter has to argue her case. The player to whom the judge awards the round takes the card from the center; she who collects the most wins the game.

In other words, it's Apples-to-Apples, except that there is only one kind of card (fulfilling the role of both the red and green cards), and that you have to justify your submission (which means that your identity is not a secret). IMNSHO it is a much better game this way.

Thus, if the card in the middle says “Beauty”, one girl might submit “Greek culture,” because of its emphasis on beauty, one “R' Yehuda haLevi,” because he wrote beautiful piyutim, one “Elisheva Ploni,” because she thinks her classmate is beautiful, one “Cordoba,” because she thinks it sounds like a beautiful place, and one “Reconquista,” because she doesn't know what any of the cards in her hand are about, which means she has some studying to do...

There was much giggling, much learning, and much clamor to keep going after the class ended, which was nice.

This game works particularly well with this unit because there is so much variety but also so much overlap: everyone was a grammarian, a physician, a paytan, a diplomat...