On day three of our visit to the Scheiber Sandor Gimnaziyum I had the class that I had been dreading since I first saw my schedule. I was assigned to a 5th grade Hebrew language class. Now keep in mind that in the Scheiber school grade 7 is an immersive year of language with an intense focus on English and Hebrew. That accounts, at least in part, for the pretty decent overall English skills of the student I had met with so far from grades 8-13. But 5th grade will be students who’s English fluency is somewhere between nonexistent and not very good. In essence I was asked to teach Hebrew, a language that I am not native in, to students with whom I share no common language. So I was concerned.
I got to the classroom early so I could get myself and the room ready. I washed the chalkboard, learned the names of a few students, and figured out which of the early arrivals might be my translation helper. (Typically in each class there is a student or two that has pretty good English because they have an American parent of they had lived someplace previously where people speak English, like Israel, for example. Not kidding.) Class started and I began.
Two minutes of class pass and a teacher from the next room says (In Hebrew) that her kids really want to come also, and will it be ok if we put the two classes together. No problem I tell her. Really, I think, what could go wrong?
My plan was to do a Shabbat lesson and review so Shabbat vocabulary and maybe explain the reasons for some of the things that are Shabbat-y. Although I had educational goals for the lesson, my main goal for the lesson was really an affective one – the students will feel that Shabbat is a positive thing. I started out by explaining to the students, with exaggerated pantomime that I am a very talented artist. I told them that I can draw anything and they are very lucky to have me as a teacher. I asked them to call out anything and I will draw it on the board. Someone said a word that sounded like shluyflykla (which is more or less how everything in Hungarian sounds to me) and another student translated –dog. So quickly drew my best dog, essentially a salami shape with sticks coming out of its bottom and a circle on the top edge. The kids laughed and we has some banter back and forth. Soon told them that I was going to draw some Shabbat things on the board and they would have to guess what they were. Soon the board was filled with silly, terrible drawings, Hebrew and Hungarian words and every kid was focused on trying to figure out how an awkward bumpy line was a challah. In the end we played a game. When the bell rang, the kids begged me to finish the game, no one was ready to leave and the kids finished with, “Todah Rabbah, rebbe.”
Each class I met I introduced myself as Rabbi Soskil, a novelty for them because the school is more of a “call teachers by the first name” kind of place. To me, it’s important to instill in students a sense of kavod HaTorah – respect for Torah and Torah teachers, and in my culture that meant being makpid (demanding? Not sure how to translate) that they use the title Rabbi when addressing me. But I also wrote “rebbe” on the board next to my name and I taught the students that this is an informal way to address someone that is your Torah teacher and it shows that you have a warm relationship with that person, but in a respectful way. By the end of our third day students would see me in the hall and say, “Hi, rebbe!” That was just the best.
There are a lot of reasons that our kids at BT have gotten a better hand than the kids that are at Scheiber. By and large the students in Budapest are worse off financially, there is a much higher incidence of divorce here than in the states, there is greater access to robust athletics and arts programming at BT, smoking and alcohol consumption are much more common place in Hungary than in our little niche of the world, meaning that many more health problems will be part of the future of these children in their adult life. But one thing that our kids and the Hungarian kids have in common is that they are ready to learn. They are ready to be inspired. They want teachers who can help them think deeply about Torah and understand how it matters to them. They want to be challenged and inspired and they want to feel the safety of structure and the reassurance of clear expectations. I think they want a rebbe.
