Friday Letter

Friday Letter Archive | Friday Letter Alerts

Friday, October 24, 2008
25 Tishrei 5769

Shabbat Bereshit
Candle lighting 5:44 p.m.
Havdalah 6:38 p.m.

Upcoming Events:

Sun. Oct. 26^th – PA Sponsored FAMILY MATH DAY. 11:30

– 2:30 at the Jericho campus. Pre-registration

required.

Thurs. Oct. 30^th – Picture Day – Please send your child to school

dressed for the occasion. See attached flyer.

Thurs. Oct. 30^th – SSDS Pep Rally – at 2:45 p.m. the entire school

will gather for a Pep Rally to cheer on our 5^th grade

Boys’ and Girls’ Soccer teams. Join us as we

introduce all the players and cheer them on to

victory. Please stay for the double header soccer

games, against Buckley Day School.

Fri. Oct. 31^st – Kabbalat Shabbat. K-5 Special guest clergy,

Rabbi Rank and Cantor Bensimhom from the

Midway Jewish Center. All parents invited, this

Friday and all Fridays at 8:15 a.m.

Sun. Nov. 2^nd – Change your clocks. At 2:00 a.m. move your

clocks back 1 hour. Take this opportunity to

change the batteries in your smoke detectors.

Tues. Nov. 4^th – Election Day – SCHOOL CLOSED for

students. Professional Development Day for

teachers.

Fri. Nov. 7^th – Deadline to Register for Parent-Teacher

Conferences – To be held on Thursday evening,

Dec. 4^th and Friday morning, Dec. 5^th. To sign

up for an appointment, please see attached form.

Tues. Nov. 11^th – Veteran’s Day – SCHOOL OPEN. For must

districts, there will be no district transportation

on Tuesday, November 11^th in observance of

Veteran’s Day. Some private transportation

providers will provide bussing as usual. Please

check with your transportation provider, and if

necessary, make arrangements to drive your child

to school on Tuesday, November 11^th.

Tues. Nov. 11^th – Pre-School Program at Solomon Schechter –

Felt Songs – Special program for little ones and

their parents. Please invite your friends, neighbors

and fellow congregants to join us. See attached

flyer.

Dear Schechter Elementary School community,

When I first looked at the academic calendar for this, my first year as principal at the elementary school, I was grateful to see that we would have a full month of school before the Tishrei holidays began. Children would get to know their teachers and classmates, routines would be determined and solidified, and serious learning would take place right from the get-go. Indeed, all these things came to pass, but little did I imagine the impact that 4 weeks of mid-week Haggim (holidays) would have on blowing those routines to bits!! The start and stop, on and off effect of the second four weeks of school has been fascinating to behold, but I hope no one takes offense when I say: it is good for the children to finally return to a five-day work-week!

Celebrating Hoshana Rabbah. This school-week began on Monday, with the celebration of Hoshana Rabbah, one of the more obscure of Jewish holidays, the last day of Hol HaMoed Sukkot, celebrated right before the double holiday of Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. Though we are accustomed to think of the Book of Life opening on Rosh Hashanah and being sealed on Yom Kippur, giving us but 10 days of repentance to make good on all the ways we missed the mark during the previous year, it turns out that we get a little extra time. According to the tradition, there is a “deadline extension,” and that in fact, the gates of heaven remain open just a crack until the end of Hol HoMoed Sukkot. Therefore, Hoshana Rabbah offers us a last chance to appeal to God to forgive us for our sins. Symbolically, it is also the last day of the dry season in the land of Israel, and the next day, on Sh’mini Atzeret, the Cantor of each congregation chants the annual prayer for Geshem, or rain. I guess you can say that Geshem is the Jewish version of “the rain dance.”

The tactile highlight of the Hoshana Rabbah service is the “beating of the willows,” when the Arava (willow) branches are removed from the lulav, and beaten against a hard surface until their leaves fall off. The two-fold symbolism is: 1) just as the leaves fall away from the branch, so we hope that our last sins fall away from us; and 2) the sound created by beating the dry willow branches re-creates the sound of a rain storm. What a wonderful, multi-sensory opportunity to share with children! So on Monday morning, during morning assembly, the entire school marched seven times around the gymnasium, chanting the traditional hoshanot, carrying the lulav and etrog for the last time this season, and parading Torah scrolls. Then each child was handed their own willow branch (freshly cut from the willow tree of Drs. Jay and Ellen Steinberg – thanks Steinbergs for allowing me to give your willow tree a trim for a good cause!) and told to close their mouths tight and smack the willow branch against their floor with all their might!! How else could we get the leaves to fall off while also hearing the ensuing rainstorm? Well, I will admit that peels of laughter and delight escaped from many children’s lips, so it was at times a little hard to hear the rainstorm. But I can assure you that every child used their strong muscles to smack and beat their willow branch against the floor. It turns out that it is pretty hard to get freshly cut willow branches to part with their beloved leaves!

I feel confident that every single child and teacher in the elementary school enjoyed our celebration of Hoshana Rabbah and will long remember this kooky Jewish ritual with a smile. They will also remember eating lunch in the school’s beautiful Sukkah, which was decorated by kindergarten, first and second grade, under the guidance of Mrs. Teri Fields, and donated a few years ago by Dalia Lisker and Ariel Jurmann. Believe it or not, thanks to the Jurmann family, the Sukkah is so big that 95 children were able to simultaneously eat lunch inside!

Sign up for Parent Teacher Conferences – The fall parent teacher conferences will be held on Thursday evening, December 4^th and Friday evening, December 5^th. Sign-up forms were distributed in September, but if you did not already hand it in, complete the attached form and return to the office by Friday, November 7^th. Requests for times will be given in the order they were received.

B’Hatzlacha to Sergeant Eric S. Tobkes – I know you all join me in wishing Godspeed to the son of our science teacher who will be deploying to Basra, Iraq, on Monday, October 27^th. As a career, Eric Tobkes is a police officer, but he will be serving in Iraq as a Sergeant First Class in the Military Police Reserves. We wish safety and good health to Eric, son of Mr. Greg Tobkes.

Elementary School Choir – back by popular demand, the Choir, under the musical direction of Mrs. Elana Stern, will begin next week. Rehearsals will take place during the last period of the day every other week, with an increased rehearsal schedule before performances. A letter and permission slip will be sent home via backpack on Monday, October 27^th. Rehearsals begin on Tuesday.

Looking forward to seeing many of you on Sunday at Family Math Day. Have a wonderful Shabbat and weekend!

Shabbat Shalom,

Dr. Cindy Dolgin
Elementary School Principal

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DVAR TORAH – PARSHAT BEREISHIT

Most of my students know that I am an avid youtube enthusiast. As one of the best procrastination activities ever devised, I have spent countless hours watching assorted clips from Broadway shows, how-to videos and political satires. So it was only a matter of time before I stumbled across dozens of videos concerning themselves with the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator built by the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland and known by really smart people as the LHC. This has been an immensely big project. Hundreds of universities and many thousands of scientists have been involved in this almost unimaginable experiment to recreate the conditions under which the Big Bang—the moment scientists describe as the birth of the universe— occurred. The CERN website describes the experiment as follows:

The LHC picks up protons and sends them in opposite directions around a magnetic field 27 kilometers in circumference at almost the speed of light. That’s 50,000 times around the ring in a second. Then the magnetic fields are lined up making the protons smash into each other head-on producing a shower of quarks and other fundamental subatomic particles. The resulting concentration of energy is, in effect, the recreation of the universe as it was around a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

(There was some concern that the entire universe might inadvertently disappear after being sucked through a black hole created by this experiment, but that apparently has not happened.)

With the holidays finally behind us, we look forward to another beginning this Shabbat as we read Parshat Bereishit’s account of the origins of the universe and the creation of humanity. Despite the controversy surrounding the experiments in the LHC, I can hardly blame the scientists involved. We human beings are, as God created us, a fundamentally curious species. (The story of Eve and the apple, also in this week’s parashah, makes that abundantly clear.) But we humans have also perfected the art of standing on our own shoulders. In just a few hundred thousand years, we have gone from smashing rocks as a way of creating tools to smashing protons in order to watch particles writhe into existence just as it happened right after the very beginning of time some 13-14,000 million years ago. As I watched one Large Hadron Collider video after another, I found myself most amused by a scientist who noted that the attempts to understand the origin of the universe raised more questions than it answered. Brian Cox of the University of Manchester narrated one such video and noted: “We know that mass can turn into energy but we don’t know how that happens.”

Professor Cox doesn’t know lots of other things as well. “We know that a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, matter didn’t exist in the form of neutrons and protons but in a completely different state.” Why?

“We know that gravity was extremely important back in those earliest times but we don’t know how exactly it worked”

Try as we might to probe and conquer our universe, even the most noted physicists on this planet admit that there are worlds of knowledge and understanding beyond us. For fundamentalists, any scientific probing that appears to have no basis in the text of the Bible is troubling, even perhaps sacrilegious. But what I take from this week’s parshah is God’s permission to be curious and feel challenged by what we don’t know and to feel called upon always to learn more how things work in this world. The midrash (at Genesis Rabbah 1:10) tells us the Torah begins with the letter Bet to remind us to look forward rather than backward. (The idea is that the letter Bet is open on the left, thus facing forward towards the rest of the text.) What that means to me is that there is no conflict between the Torah’s lesson in this week’s parashah and science. The great task of humankind is to investigate and learn, to research and to discover more and more about this world in which we live. To suppose that scientific research, such as the kind untaken at CERN, is in conflict with the existence of God is to miss the Torah’s point altogether - which is that God made this world, then made humankind able to reason, to think, and to discover. Learning more can only lead to more questions and thus to a renewed sense of awe at the majesty—the inscrutable majesty—of creation.

(For a fun explanation about the LHC go to: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM)

Joan Cohen teaches Bible and drama in the high school.

PDF files

Chesed Corner
Picture Day Information
Parent Teacher Conference Form
Auditions for the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights
Community Story Telling