Summer Woolly Mammoth Moon
I’m neck deep, ok maybe in over my head, in lesson planning, something I’ve not done before. I realized though that I did do a lot of educating over my twelve years at the MIA and I do have good facilitator, process skills. Even so, I’m having to learn about a key moment of Jewish development, the b’nai mitzvah, oddly, a marker of the very same transition Ruth is in right now. There’s as much culture as theology here, a cultural milieu with which I have little familiarity. But I’m picking it up.
Yesterday I finally got an organizational handle on what I was doing. That’s the moment when a lot of study and thinking begins to sort itself out into recognizable components. In this instance it was a religious school year long calendar, each class for which Alan and I are responsible indicated by date. In other columns there are holidays that occur in a particular month, September, for example, has Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and Sukkot; middah of the month, for example, again, September is hitlamdut or curiosity; a column with one of Maimonides 13 articles of faith for each month. There are also Hebrew letters for each class day, a progression throughout the year that will follow the kabbalist’s tree of life and links to the parsha (Torah portion) for each week.
With these elements identified lesson planning will be easier because content can be plucked from any of the columns to enhance a particular class. There’s another move in the process, integrating the b’nai mitzvah curriculum developed by a national organization called Moving Traditions with those classes for which Alan and I have to develop our own lesson plans. Once how we do that is decided and dates for the b’nai mitzvah classes show up on the calendar, we should be able to move fairly quickly to a plan for the year.
I love this stuff, the pulling together of disparate complexities into one whole. This is a big challenge and I like that, too. Not to mention that I really enjoy the people at Beth Evergreen.
