V’Shenantam L’vanecha – Teach Your Children Well: A Sermon with Sheldon Low for Family Services (9/4/15)
Tue, September 8, 2015
Set the stage:
Perlin: Raise your hand if you are a teacher? Hum. I expected every hand to go up. Yes, some of you are professional teachers and for that we are eternally grateful. But, God made every person, even a newborn baby a teacher. My son, Jonah, has a new baby girl, named Miriam, and he and his wife are very excited about teaching her everything. She reads books and listens to music. In fact, this past Shabbat, I babysat for Miriam and they said she likes music. She is only 10 weeks old. So I put my iPod on Shuffle and within a short time discovered her two favorite kinds of music: 1920’s Jazz and Sheldon Low. My granddaughter clearly is a genius!
Babies learn and babies teach …and ask your parents how much they have learned about love and life since you were born. Your parents and your teachers, the members of your family and your Temple family, teach you all the time. Sometimes we teach when we don’t know it. If you see that someone is kind over and over again, you learn to be kind. If you come to services on Shabbat or light candles, drink wine/grape juice and eat challah at home, then God has taught your family well to rest one day a week and make Shabbat special.
ThIs year, we are going to spend even more time learning Jewish values – in the classrooms of our religious school and from the rabbis at services – this year’s theme is “Living a Values-Driven Life. Whatever we do this year, we are connecting it to a Jewish value. Rabbi Rappaport asked all the teachers to send her the piece of Torah that is most important to us. I knew right away: V’shenantam L’vanecha from the V’ahavta. One way we show love for God and live the Shema is to teach children, not just our own, but the children of others. That is why going to Sunday school and Hebrew school is such a gift. Having a religious school enables all the members of our temple, with or without children, to fulfill this mitvah. This value.
Sometimes we teach by talking. And other times, we can teach the same message in another way… by doing or by singing.
Sing: V’Shenantam
School starts on Tuesday and then we have Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. And after that, this year, we will start religious school. I know you know what fruit we eat for Rosh Hashanah to begin the year. (Apples and Honey) Well, did you know that whenever a child began religious studies, the teacher in the Jewish school would pour a little honey on his slate… before paper or iPads. Don’t pour honey on an iPad. This was to teach the children that learning is sweet. Beginnings are sweet.
Sing: Sweet Like Honey
Let me tell you a story about how I know we are all teachers and how important it is to be a good teacher. Jewish tradition teaches us that we must teach every lesson as if the entire world depended on it. For as long as there have been Jews, we have prayed for a perfect world. Not a world without homework or tests. No, a world that is peaceful for every child; where every child can learn and grow in health and safety.
Jews tell stories that someday a Messiah will come who will bring that kind of perfect peace to the world – no hate, no bullying, no violence, no fighting. We pray for that a lot. Legend has it that in some classroom, somewhere, before the Messiah comes, the Messiah will be a child in a religious school classroom taught by some religious school teacher and going home to parents who are teachers, and living in a community of teachers. So, everyone must teach every child, as if God has sent that child to us to make our world a better place.
Every child is precious here at TBS and we try to teach each one with loving care, to the best of that child’s potential. We partner with parents to teach children well. Jordan’s parents are both educators, master counselors and teachers, and they brought him here so that he could be in our classrooms and we are so grateful. He might be the next Messiah…or he might just be the next great and caring Jewish adult. Who knows? In the meantime, we teach values and Torah to him and he goes out and shares that with his classmates and teammates and the world.
Teaching children is a very important value here at TBS. And teaching children is a very important value for your teachers who will be in your classrooms this school year in public school. I hope you appreciate your teachers. And I hope the adults in your life teach you well.
Sing: Teach Your Children Well
Once upon a time, when I started religious school, my teacher didn’t know that I would be a rabbi. Just like Albert Einstein’s teachers didn’t know he would grow up to be one of the smartest people who ever lived, when they told his parents he wasn’t a good student. Jonas Salk was a great scientist, but his science teacher didn’t know how many lives he would save with his vaccine invention. And I am sure that when little Golda Mabovitch was learning about Israel in her synagogue and from her parents in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that none of them imagined that she would be the Prime Minister of Israel from 1956-66 and one of the first female leaders of a modern country .
What all of those people had in common, myself included, is that from generation to generation, Jews have lived the value of V’shenantam l’vanecha – “and you shall teach your children.” L’dor vador, from generation to generation, we pass down our values, we bring our children to temple, we teach young and old the Torah, so that we can make a better world. And because of that, we are still here.
I don’t know if the Messiah will be in our school this year. But, I do know that we will work very hard to teach every child and every adult learner, as if God sent that person to learn here. And it is a thrill for me that some of the children who grew up here are now raising there children here. L’dor vador. From generation to generation. We teach. Keep teaching. Keep learning.
Sing: L’dor Vador