This coming Sunday I will leave for Hungary to teach at the Scheiber Sandor Jewish Day School in Budapest. Since this is my third year as a guest teacher in the school, you would think that I would feel completely comfortable there by now, but that is not the case. In fact, I have the same apprehension that I have before the first day of school every year. I know that all will go well, that once I start teaching, the apprehension will slip away, but until I begin to teach, my nervousness will remain.
I think that my apprehension stems from two areas of concern. First, my co-teacher Zsolt has asked that I teach Shirley Jackson’s famous short story “The Lottery” with two tenth grade classes. I have read “The Lottery” several times and I feel that I know the story well, but I have never actually taught it. I worked on a lesson plan and sent it to Zsolt, who responded positively to my ideas, but I have been teaching long enough to know that teaching plans on paper do not always materialize as you think they will. Sometimes a lesson spins off in a different direction and the class is all the better for it. But other times, the lessons fails to excite students as you thought it would and even though you improvise on the spot, you cannot save it. Until you take a lesson into the classroom, you never know exactly how it will work. Additionally, my experience there the past two years has been that the students’ English fluency is varied. Some students will feel as comfortable as my students at Beth Tfiloh are with reading and discussing “The Lottery”, but other students will feel overwhelmed. Those will be the quiet students. Constructing and delivering a lesson that reaches all the students in the room, regardless of their English language skills, is challenging.
In addition to my pedagogic worries, there are my political concerns. Hungary’s prime minister, Victor Orban, has hampered the work of political opposition leaders and journalists and developed a close relationship with Vladimir Putin. In addition, Hungary, which worked with the Nazis to deport its Jewish citizens to concentration camps during the Holocaust and is now trying to whitewash its culpability for its actions during the Holocaust, as illustrated by the controversy surrounding Hungary’s Holocaust Museum. And yet, I am writing this pre-trip blog on Purim, a day celebrating the Jewish people’s escape from the genocidal plans of Haman. While bigotry and demagoguery still exists, the Purim story and my experiences in Hungary during my last two visits demonstrate that the Jewish people have the strength, faith and resilience to outlast any amount of hatred. Though I leave for Hungary with a greater sense of my tenuous position in the world as a Jew than I did on my previous two trips to the Scheiber Sandor School, I take comfort in the idea that the same G-d who watched over the Jews in Persia many centuries ago will safeguard our trip to Hungary.
