Learning from my Abba

What I should be doing now is studying for the bio final I have tomorrow. Instead, I’ve been kicked out of my study center (the dining room table), by my father who is teaching bar mitzvah lessons. So I’m sitting at the kitchen table eavesdropping on what my father is telling his new student. They have just gone through the preliminaries, of who my father is, what a mitzvah is, what it means to become Bar Mitzvah.

Oh, also I should mention that my father usually teaches boys who know nothing about Judaism, who think that Hebrew letters are Greek and who usually cannot understand what they are doing sitting at my dining room table. I am always amazed how these tiny (I’m telling you, these kids are actually getting smaller… it’s not me getting bigger!) boys walk in with no Jewish knowledge and walk out around 9 months later actually anywhere from the entire parsha, to leading a tfila.


The reason I love listening in to my father when he meets a new student are his ground rules. He says there are 3 things they have to have down before he can teach them. The first one is, “ring and walk in”, meaning the kids are always welcome. Always! To tell you the truth we have had some kids come in just to talk to my father, ask him questions and it is always “ring and walk in”. The second rule is that since they are learning for their bar mitzvah, they have to start their lesson with a mitzvah, so there is a tzeddaka box in the middle of the table and a bag of assorted change for them to give.

My father explains them the mitzvah of giving tzedakka and usually after the first lesson, the boys tend to bring their own money wanting to be fully in charge of the mitzvah. Some parents have even told my father that their son saves up a bit each week to give. Finally, the third thing is really the most special. The boys are not allowed to start their lesson without telling my father “one good thing that happened to them this week”. This is a tradition my father has already started with his children on Shabbat when he blesses us. The way he explains it to the boys is the concept of “hakarak hatov”, recognizing the good.

There is a lot I have learned and I continue to learn form my parents, but even though I have heard this introductory speech from my father well over 100 times, it gets me every time. It reminds me to keep prospective on things, so even if I am stressed for my final, there is a lot more going on in the greater scheme of things.
Now I really have to study biology! :o)