Kitah Vav Update

Hi all! I hope that you have a peaceful, meaningful, and amazing food laden holiday weekend.  May your family be kind, the shopping lines be short, your patience be endless, your meal be delicious, and may your children not complain about their food touching or appearing too mushy.  My son is 15.  We STILL have that argument.  Sometimes the peas roll into the mashed potato. The. Horror.

 We’ve had an action packed week at CSZ.  On the last Sunday we met had our Kashrut lesson.  In case your child told you that I was wearing a giraffe pj costume, he/she was telling the truth. We read the same 8 lines we have been working on in religious education and the kids had to find out what was odd about them.  Now we have studied these lines inside and out, but it was not until today that the kids noticed that Abraham serves his guests milk and meat at the same meal.  Ask your kids how the rabbis reconcile this conundrum?!  Answers: 1) The Torah is not in chronological order, hence the kosher laws were NOT given after this narrative (ok, but…) and 2) Abraham was SUCH a good host, that naturally he waited 8 hours between the milk and the meat dishes. (ok… but?!)  and often, in Judaism we are left with more questions.  But I like that we are allowed to question.  I explained to the kids that our religion ENCOURAGES us to question that which does not make sense. To wrestle with it…

The kids then looked up popular food items online, and they searched for the symbols on the boxes. They were super surprised at what was kosher and what was not.  The kids also loved using their phones for “legal” Rel Ed searches. They broke up into groups according to their specific animals. Each kid had an animal mask on. Ok: The BEST part of my day was watching 17 6^th graders all put on a foam animal mask meant for a toddler, with ZERO complaint. In fact, there was a palpable sense of enthusiasm when they knew they could dress up.  And that, my friends, is pretty cool.  It is also worth noting that nobody thought it was odd that I was wearing a one piece giraffe costume. Apparently my regular work garb is not quite as professional as I thought?!  Who knew J?

 We talked about the importance of kashrut, whether we identified with it, how we felt about it, whether we would be willing to try it.  As a woman who has kept kosher for a long period of time, and also not kept kosher for an equally long period of time, it was good to talk openly and honestly.

 We then looked at images of ironic kosher foods: Christmas Fruity Pebbles, Baconaise,  Bacon Flavored Lays Potato Chips, and discussed how one could come up with some false assumptions based upon that packaging.  In our next lesson we will discuss the kosher industry and how kosher foods have taken on a life of their own outside of the Jewish world.