Parshas Ki Tavo
Friday, August 27th 2010 @ 2:42 PM
bs”d
What an exciting time, as we gear up for a new year of homeschooling! I am impressed by what I have read on many of the homeschool lists, to see how many families are so organized, and exhibit such zrizus (alacrity) in getting going. Let’s face it, as homeschoolers, we are not bound by the ring of the bell, or the honk of the schoolbus horn, so we really have to create our own internal motivation to get going. Yasher koach to those of you who have gotten the ball rolling already.
Registration for the new year of classes in Room613 has begun! I am kicking things off with a week or so of Open House/Orientation/Classes, beginning Monday, September 13th, which all are invited to attend, at no cost. Come and go as you please, meet other students, and see what virtual learning is all about. Simply get in touch with me, and I will send you a link to the virtual classroom. The new schedule of classes will be posted shortly on the site. And please stop by our bookstore for your homeschooling book needs. If you need something you don't see, just ask, as I can usually get anything.
Some new things in Room613 this year include; classes for those living in Israel, on Israel time (for English speakers). Also, Ivrit classes with our own Morah Nicolette, a savta who not only resides in Israel, but started one of the first Montessori schools in Israel.
Although I have returned from Eretz Yisrael, my mind and heart are still there. The Baal Shem Tov (whose birthday is this Shabbos) teaches that where a person’s thoughts are, they are. In some very real ways, I do feel as if I am living in Israel. It makes for a strange, sometimes pleasant, sort of cognitive dissonance.
I noticed an interesting difference between one particular experience in Israel, and the same experience here in chutz l’Aretz. As I wrote about in my blog, I visited a doctor’s office in Jerusalem. There are many quirky differences from this experience in Israel versus in America, as anyone who has done this knows. For example, the patients themselves were calling in the next patient as they left the doctor’s office! More strikingly, most male patients (and doctors) are wearing kipot, and many are learning from seforim while they wait for the doctor.
So, while waiting in the waiting room for a doctor in Israel, one is struck by what a Jewish experience it becomes. The fellow next to me was learning Mishnayos. I was touched. I took out a sefer, and felt right at home, and in my environment. Although the moment stood out in my mind, it also felt like the most natural thing in the world.
The other day, I visited my eye doctor here in Boston. As I sat in the waiting room, I took out a sefer to recite the daily tehillim, etc. Everyone in the waiting room was watching tv. And I was surely the only one with a kipah on! Patients were called in by nurses, and order was the name of the game.
As anyone knows who has been in this situation, reciting words of Torah out loud, albeit quietly, takes on a whole new feeling. Sometimes (disapproving?) looks are cast your way; who knows what people are really thinking? Some may approve, even identify, but some may indeed feel resentful. How would I feel, I sometimes think, if I were a secular person, or perhaps even somewhat religious, if it were a Moslem sitting mumbling words of the Koran to themself? (lehavdil) It can be a very fine line between a kiddush haShem and the opposite (G-d forbid).
There is another teaching from the Besht, that G-d is revealed in this world through a bracha and a verse of tehillim. Engaging in either one of these activities is, by it's definition, a kiddush haShem, and reveals G-d’s presence in the physical world. But can the context change this profound effect?
There is yet another teaching, oft quoted in Chassidus, that the physical word has been waiting thousands of years for one to sit in a certain spot and recite a blessing. It elevates both the person, and their portion in the world.
So, I ask you, as I have been asking myself; taking all these factors into account, where does the blessing and verse of tehillim make more of an impact? In the doctor’s office in Jerusalem, or the doctor's office in Boston, MA? I don’t know the answer, but I am interested in your thoughts.
Yosef Resnick
