Three thousand years of longing...

An amazing story about the
importance of our stories

I have been a lifelong devotee of story telling. At the old CAJE Conference I could sit for hours and listen to so many amazing story tellers - people like Peninnah Schram, Gerald Fierst and Cherie Karo Schwartz  - to name only a few of the many. When I watch a movie or TV show, I am drawn in by good writing - by the story. Even the best actor can fall short when the writing is not up to their level.

In graduate school, my teacher Isa Aron assigned us Kieren Egen's Teaching as Story Telling. Many of my classmates found it a difficult work - I was spellbound. And when my friend, mentor and then boss Joel Grishaver wanted us to create a Torah text for elementary students, we used Egen's work (and Jim Trelease's Read-Aloud Handbook) to guide us. The result was I Can Learn Torah. We were only able to publish the introduction and the first two volumes of what would have been a three volume set. It is still one of my proudest accomplishments in terms of creating curriculum materials. 

It is based on the idea that humans naturally learn through story telling. Sure our experience teaches us most of what we know about our world. Story telling is designed to help us learn to make meaning of our experiences, and those of others. While we often think of the Torah as the source of Jewish law, it is also the primary source of Jewish understanding. It is not for nothing that the first two books are almost entirely narrative!

I attended a session at a CAJE conference (nearly 30 years ago!) taught by the amazing Rafi Zarum. It was called "The Story of Stories." He handed every participant a different edition of the Passover Hagadah. Ron Wolfson once taught me that there were over 3,000 different Haggadot that have been documented.

Now Rafi taught at Mach .8 ~ just under the speed of sound! He told us he was going to walk us through the various parts of the Hagadah and we were to follow along in whatever edition we had, and call out when we found something interesting or different. He also asked us to keep a close watch for the actual text of the Exodus from Egypt as it appears in the Torah.

We learned two things I did not know until that day in Palo Alto.

1. The actual text of the Exodus from Egypt as it appears in the Torah does not typically appear in a Hagadah.
   
   
2. Each part of the seder is either a teaching tool to help the adults better connect themselves and the children present to the story (which the adults are expected to know well enough to tell) or is the story of another seder in history. 

Cave at Beit Guvrin,
from the same era as
the story at B'nai Brak

My favorite example is of the rabbis in B'nai Brak who are so immersed in the discussion of the Exodus that they miss the sunrise. Why tell us this? Because they lived during the Hadrianic persecutions and still held a seder, even though it could lead to their deaths! They missed the sunrise because they were in a secret cave under a courtyard which admitted no light. 

Our stories are how we know who we are and how we got here.

Last week a new film was posted on Amazon Prime - Three Thousand Years of Longing. Go watch it now. I will wait.

I was amazed. This is a story about storytelling. Tilda Swinton narrates and stars as Alithea Binnie. "Her business was story, She was a narratologist, who sought to find the truths common to all the stories of humankind."

She of course is herself apart from her own story. She encounters Idris Elba, a Djinn who loves stories - both telling them and hearing them. "My Djinn told me, when they come together in the realm of the Djinn - they tell each other stories. Stories are like breath to them. They make meaning.

So too with our stories. They teach us to make meaning.

JEDLAB and the Buber: A conversation on I and Thou

December 29, 2014 - Due to some foolishness on my part, the images of the I and Thou Conversation were deleted. Since the Internet is forever, I was able to retrieve them! Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks to Ken Gordon for spotting the problem!

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Long time followers of this blog may know that I was one of fourteen fellows in a program at the Lookstein Center funded by the Jim Joseph Foundation. Our brief was to create online communities of practice. Some of us were more successful than others. Some CoPs are still going strong, others have served their purpose and are but memories.

And then came JEDLAB! There has been a lot written about it and by those involved. It is worth reading some of it. More importantly, it is something you should join. Unlike CAJE of blessed memory or any number of conferences that have grown up in recent years (and may they all thrive and grow), it is an ongoing 24/6 conversation about Jewish education and the things that educators want to talk about, learn and teach one another. I try to check in at least once a day, and occasionally find I have something to say.

To join JEDLAB you need to be on Facebook. That is the central platform on which the community meets. (We do have the JEDLAB test kitchen on Google+ and we love to have ad hoc connections in a variety of places as well). And it is a community, currently 2,220 strong. Some write. Many read. And it crosses all lines: geography, movement, professional setting and methodology, relationship to Halacha, etc. Everybody plays, and no one can so you can't play (Thank you Vivian Gussin Paley). Just click on JEDLAB and ask to join. Or become my friend on FB (if we are not already) and ask me to put you in. Or ask anyone in JEDLAB to do it. It is worth your time. (If you are not on Facebook, you should join just for this. Set privacy settings so the kids from your 3rd grade class can't find you if you prefer.)

Ken Gordon, the founder of JEDLAB proposed a book group on Martin Buber's I and Thou. Not a light undertaking. He opened the conversation in a way that drew me and others in and if you follow, he moderated with a very light touch. Our first 36 hours of conversation is below. I think you will find it interesting and invite you to join in - preferably in FB at JEDLAB. If you comment hear, I will transfer your thoughts - in your name - to the group.

This is hopefully the first stop in a traveling blog carnival. That means that other bloggers in the group will hopefully pick up the thread of the conversation on their blogs in turn. I will put links in the comments section. (Note: Permission was given by the participants in the discussion before I posted this. JEDLAB is a safe place for conversation!)

Please enjoy and join us in JEDLAB! Consider this your present for the last night of Chanukah!

Ira

Since the image above is a .jpg of the Facebook conversation you can watch the video with this link:

http://bit.ly/Quiet_Introverts

Sadly, the Mechon Hadar document is no longer available.