Tuesday, August 9, 2022

A Fresh Perspective on Learning Hebrew

Chadron, Nebraska is not exactly a hotspot of Judaism.  Tucked away in the northeast corner of the state, a couple of hours due south from Mount Rushmore, this town of roughly 5,000 people is a slice of small-town America - and miles and miles away from even the nearest Chabad, let alone a full-fledged Jewish community.  And so you can understand why the following encounter took me so much by surprise.

My wife and I stayed in a beautiful Holiday Inn Express in Chadron on a recent road trip, and after an early morning davening, I walked over to the breakfast area to get a drink.  Breakfast had yet to begin, and the hotel staffer charged with setting up, a lovely woman named Melissa, noticed the letters on my tallis bag.

"Do you speak Hebrew?" she inquired.

"In fact, I do."

"Aleikem Shalom!" she replied brightly, if hesitantly.

Recovering quickly from my shock, I responded "Shalom Aleichem - do you speak Hebrew?"  Again, I am barely expecting anyone to have seen an Orthodox Jew before, let alone speak Hebrew.

"I'm learning, although some of the vowels still give me problems."

"That's wonderful!", said I. "If I may ask, what inspired you to do so?"

"To get closer to god," she replied...

...and that response struck me like a bolt of lightening.  We would continue our conversation an hour or two later when I can back down for breakfast, and it was clear that Melissa was a woman of faith and conviction, who was determined to do what she could to bolster her own personal practice of religion (albeit a different religion from my own).

Our conversation got me thinking - how much discussion do we have in Jewish Day Schools about teaching Hebrew?  Beyond simply explicit Ivrit instruction, the place of Hebrew language in our instruction of other Judaic subjects, subjects where the original text is in Hebrew, is and has been a hot topic on and off for decades.  Ivrit B'Ivrit, having Hebrew being the spoken language in the classroom of Judaic subjects, is an approach whose time seems to have mostly passed (with a few notable exceptions), but even having Hebrew be the language of written work is often a struggle.  There are a myriad of explanations and justifications as to why introducing more Hebrew into the Chumash or Gemara classroom is difficult - ostensibly for the students, but sometimes for the teachers as well - but I wonder if we ever stop for a moment and consider Melissa's message:

Knowing Hebrew allows us to come closer to God.

Hebrew is the language of the Tanach, of the Mishna, of the Siddur.  It is the language through which God spoke and continues to speak to His people.  It is lashon ha-kodesh, the holy tongue, and we believe that it earns that appellation not only because of what it is used for, but because of its inherent qualities of purity.  The better we and our students know Hebrew, the more opportunities we all have to access the divine and to continually come closer to him. 

When framed in this way, it becomes harder to justify avoiding Hebrew in our teaching.  Yes, it can be a challenge, for us as much as for our students.  And, yes, real questions still have to be asked about the trade-offs involved in introducing more Hebrew to an English-speaking population.  However, we also have to think about what our goals are in our teaching and what helps us move closer to achieving those goals.  Melissa, working in a Holiday Inn in a small town in Middle America, is spending her evenings making the effort to bring herself closer to god.  Surely we can at least ask ourselves if we are doing the same.

Thursday, August 4, 2022

Vin Scully, Master Teacher

Vin Scully, the great broadcaster for the Los Angeles Dodgers for almost 70 years, passed away on Tuesday night.  It has be said without exaggeration that Scully was an American icon, whose soothing voice was the soundtrack for summer evenings for three generations of baseball fans.  He was a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was described by at least one writer as the only person about whom no one had anything negative to say on Twitter.

What was it that made Scully so unique?  What was it about the way that he called balls and strikes and home runs that made him so different, so much better, and so much more memorable than the thousands of others who have done the same job over the past seven decades?  Scully did not merely report or describe the action on the field; rather, he taught it to us as only a master teacher could, and, as such, there is much about his style that every teacher can learn from.  

In what ways was Scully a master teacher?  I offer four suggestions.

1) He told us why the game mattered.  Every teacher dreads the question of "why do we have to know this?"  Sometimes, the answer is easy ("you need to know math so you can do your taxes"), and other times our answers seem, even to us, to be more contrived ("you have to learn about the Gilded Era because those who fail to learn history yadda yadda yadda").  Vin found a lesson for life in moments big and small.  

Perhaps his most significant call was when Hank Aaron took over the all-time home run record from Babe Ruth.  This was a big deal - the greatest sports star of the 20th century had held the most famous sports record of all, and now someone had come and claimed that throne from him.  But Scully went further, telling his audience, "A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol."  The moment wasn't just about baseball - it was about racism, and our ability as a nation to overcome it, and as such it was a moment that everyone, baseball fan or not, could and should care about.  Master teacher that he was, he provided a big view of the moment and thus allowed his listeners to connect and to want to tune in more.

2) He was eloquent.  Much has been written about Scully's choice of words and his ability to come up with the perfect phrase in the moment.  Legendary broadcaster Bob Costas commented that it would be impossible for someone to script their words to call the final inning of a perfect game, and yet Scully's call of the last three outs of Sandy Koufax's perfect game in 1965 is held up as an example of broadcasting perfection - and was done on the spot.  This was neither by design not by accident.  Scully was a lifelong learner who, like the best communicators in any field, had read and absorbed widely and deeply from a wide range of authors, broadcasters, and public figures.  He was able to draw on this vast reservoir of the best that language has to offer on a moment's notice, a skill that the best classroom teachers can certainly relate to.  Our commitment to our own development does not end when we begin teaching - it continues forever and our students benefit immensely from it.

3) He knew when to yield the floor.  In the biggest moments, after Aaron's home run and Kirk Gibson's World Series home run in 1988, Scully went silent and allowed the noise of the crowd to make the moment.  He knew that nothing he could say would have a bigger impact than the roar of the home crowd, and he pulled back so that his viewers could feel what everyone in the stadium was feeling.  Broadcasters, like teachers, have the constant temptation to dominate the stage and it is the rare breed in either field who can sense when someone else should be allowed to provide meaning, insight, or emotion.  We sometimes accomplish so much more when we seem to be doing the least.

4) He was a cheerleader.  Vin used to say that his interest in baseball began when he saw a score posted from game 2 of the 1936 World Series, which the Giants lost to the Yankees by a score of 18-4.  He felt so bad for the Giants that he immediately became a Giants fan, and a baseball fan.  For 70 years, his main role was rooting for the players on the field - for his Dodgers, of course, but really for all of the players.  He took a genuine interest in each and every one of them, learning and telling their stories, meeting them and sharing advice, and just generally being happy for their success.  The millions and millions of people who tuned in to listen to him sensed that they were listening to someone genuinely selfless, and that drew us closer to him, made us want to hear him tell us more about the men on the field.  We connect with those people that exude a sense of caring, and if that is true about a sportscaster that we never have and likely never will meet, it is certainly true of the people who walk in front of our classrooms every day.  Our students know which teachers care for them and which teachers are just checking boxes and marking papers (and time).  Vin's magnetism - and hopefully ours - was in his always reminding us that it wasn't about him - which ironically made him the one that we wanted to tune in to.