Family Mitzvah Project Day

We were so happy to reunite with our class at Havurah this week after a long hiatus and before a second long break ensues. It was a special day indeed! For the first hour we had our regular Havurah class, we joined together to sing and welcome each other back into the classroom and we played a game in which we truly got in touch with our emotions as they make themselves evident in our faces and body language. We showed feelings such as Happiness, Surprise, Sadness, Anger, and Confusion first with only our faces, and then with solely our bodies. We realized how difficult it is to isolate one aspect and not automatically find yourself doing the other, too. You should have seen these faces, they were amazing! There is no question we have a class-act of thespian talents in our midst!

As usual, we enjoyed Challah and Juice, and showed off our enunciated utterances of the Shabbat blessings.

Then, we had a conversation about Harmony and Difference, after we read a joyful and heartening book about all of the different children in the world singing a song in unison together. We explained that Judaism is a religion of communities, and therefore we sing the same blessings, and do the same rituals and traditions as many Jews do all over the world!

We played another game in which we acted out animals from our story about the Creation of the World, and the children guessed what each other were. There were sharks, lions, monkeys, bears, zebras, horses, cows, galore!

Finally, we introduced the idea of MITZVAH -- acts of loving kindness and goodness for the world. We invited our parents into the classroom, and after a short slide-show from Brigitte about the Sarah Childcare Center in Tanzania, we began our Mitzvah project of writing letters to our new friends at the Center. We used Swahili phrases such as Mambo Rafiki to speak the language of our friends and added our own images, drawings, and designs to show the children what life is like in NYC at the JCC. We know they are going to be so thrilled to know they have friends here in America and we are surely hoping to get letters and drawings from them, in return.

For the last half hour, we had our usual family sing-along with Paul as we came together in harmony once more! Enjoy the winter days and see you all on February 1st!