4th Grade – Nitzavim: You can do it!
As we near the end of the Torah, and the end of Moses’s life, Nitzavim has Moses’s big “You can do it!” speech to the People of Israel. In this portion, Moses reassures us that keeping our promises to God isn’t too baffling or complicated for us to succeed at it. We don’t have to climb up mountains to make good choices in the heavens. We don’t have to swim across the sea to make good choices, either. Nope! Our good choices are already very close to us, they’re already in our mouths and our hearts.
Our 4th Grade scholars explored lovely ways that we can make good choices, immediately. What good choices can we make with our mouths, and with our hearts? And, if our mouths and hearts can make such a positive impact on the world, how can we choose to use the rest of our body parts to make the world better, too?
For Saturday Parsha class, students took this discussion one step further, by creating portraits, in which students invented good choices that they can already make, with each part of themselves. Their examples included defending people with their words, holding doors for people with their arms, petting and caring for animals with their hands, dancing with their legs to cheer people up, and many feet to march in protests! And many, many other excellent examples, as well.
Of interesting note: one class went on a beautiful tangent to discuss issues of justice: what happens when somebody is making really bad choices in our community (such as terribly polluting our environment, and purposely injuring others)? How do we address this situation — can we get the troublemaker to do community service to help fix the problems they caused, can anyone help get the person to stop making those bad choices? How can we protect our community from the impact of this misbehavior? Can the person who is making bad choices be reformed, or, must they be removed from the community, for our protection — and, how do we find out whether they can be reformed or not? Students engaged on a deep level with these issues of justice, imagining a merciful but fair system to protect our community (complete with mandatory therapy, and plans dealing with repeated infractions). The students’ system would not unduly harm the troublemaker (who is still a member of our community, after all!) but would also seek to protect everyone else from the impacts of that person’s bad choices. It was awesome. We decided that this class was just like the people of Israel, who, after wandering landless in the wilderness, were preparing to legally govern our own community in the Promised Land, and creating systems to do so.
Anyway. Even if your child did not have that particular tangent in class, it gives us some excellent discussion questions for this particularly justice-minded age group. We all have the freedom to choose what choices to make. What good choices have we made recently? When somebody in our community makes a really terrible or harmful choice, what can our community do about it? Should our system be mainly punitive (punishing the wrongdoer), or mainly restorative (fixing the impact of the wrongdoing)? Can the wrongdoer learn to make better choices, and if so, who might help them learn?
Students were also quite curious to know why Moses didn’t get to keep leading the People of Israel all the way into the Promised Land. (There are some great stories out there trying to explain it! Feel free to look up some together, for fun, if you’d like — but for this class, we’re going with the idea that different leaders are needed for different tasks. More on that next week, in Vayelech.)
Announcements
Registration includes round trip bus transportation from CBE, all meals and linens. The bus will leave from CBE on Friday at 3:30 pm and return around 2:00pm on Sunday.
Once registration is under way, watch your inbox for event specific information like a packing list and other important updates. We are happy to write an excused absence for a religious event if necessary to facilitate arriving to the bus by 3:30. Please contact Haley Breskin at hbreskin@cbebk.org with all questions regarding the retreat.
