Rosh Hashanah

As September arrives, planning for Rosh Hashanah moves quickly in many Jewish early childhood programs. Apples. Honey. Shofar. Round challah.

Soon we move toward Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Simchat Torah, often looking for connections among their themes and symbols.

What if we also searched for the ideas that travel between the holidays?

From Holidays to Ideas

Consider the ideas children might encounter across the Jewish year.

Rosh Hashanah can raise questions about beginnings, change, cycles, and return. What does it mean to begin again?

Yom Kippur invites thinking about relationships, reflection, repair, and return. What happens when something goes wrong between people? Can relationships be repaired?

Sukkot offers possibilities around shelter, gathering, belonging, nature, and change. What makes a place feel like shelter? What makes a place feel like home?

Simchat Torah brings us to stories, cycles, endings, and beginnings. When we return to the same story, is the story different, or are we?

As the year continues, Hanukkah invites investigations of light, darkness, change, and time. Tu Bishvat opens questions about growth, interdependence, and what happens beyond our sight. Purim raises ideas about identity, perspective, and what is hidden or revealed. Passover creates possibilities for exploring journeys, memory, freedom, family, and what people carry with them.

These ideas do not belong to only one holiday.

Shelter at Sukkot may return as home and belonging during Passover. Beginnings at Rosh Hashanah may resurface during Simchat Torah. Light explored during Hanukkah may reappear months later through shadows beneath a tree at Tu Bishvat.

Planning for Continuity

This changes the question we ask when planning:

What is already alive in children's thinking, and where might it travel next?

Learning does not follow a direct route. Children linger, wander, pause, return, reconsider, and sometimes discover something entirely unexpected.

Perhaps our Jewish curriculum can make space for that movement.

The holiday passes. Materials change. Seasons move forward.

The question can remain.

And when children return to it, they bring new experiences, memories, and possibilities.

To continue exploring children's thinking, continuity, and revisiting, I invite you to read Chronicles of Children's Thinking on Substack.

Miriam Belogovsky Playful Transformation, LLC

School is starting or has only just begun.  Everything is new. We don’t know the children.  We don’t know the parents or guardians.  We don’t have a sense of the group yet.  AND WE HAVE TO TEACH ROSH HA-SHANAH AND YOM KIPPUR RIGHT AWAY!!

Wait. Stop and smell the honey.

Remember what we know about learners, young and old.

• Our priorities in the beginning are to help our students to become comfortable in the classroom and to begin building a classroom community.
• A curriculum has to be meaningful and developmentally and chronologically appropriate.
• Confusing children is never a good idea. What is learned when stories, songs, activities, projects, etc. are all jumbled on top of one another?
• If a child won’t “learn” what we are teaching, why are we teaching it?
• The world will not end if a child does not make a New Year’s card this year.

Rabbi Tarfon taught: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but you are not free to desist from it either” (Pirkei Avot 2:16).

Rather than a crisis, the high holidays and the start of the year arriving so close together is an opportunity to examine our teaching. What is our vision? What are our goals? Are we a closet teacher? A closet teacher has a box in the closet for each holiday and a predetermined plan that is the same year after year. Thinking outside the box literally can be refreshing and restorative.

So Rosh ha-Shanah is right after the start of school?  That’s great!  The question for us as educators has always centered on what we want the children to know about Rosh ha-Shanah (and the holidays that follow). What is important for students of any age to know this year? What is possible given the limited number of classroom days in September? What is reasonable? And most importantly, what is the focus?

First, it is important to embrace the fact that this will not be the last time our students learn about Rosh ha-Shanah (RH). Instead of anxiously listing everything you could do, consider the essential elements of what we want our students to remember about RH as they continue to build their own knowledge and connections this year. Remember, less is more.  Choose a narrower focus. Reflect on one theme. And then, do less. Do it well. Do it with deeper meaning.

To begin, consider The New Year and what “new” means. Everything is new to our younger learners right now, isn’t it? They are wondering about what will happen this year. How can we provide the most meaningful introduction as they begin this journey with us? 

Here are a few themes to get you started:

• Sweetness. Why are we eating honey and hallah with raisins and honey cake? How is the concept of “sweet” relevant to the sensory experience of a learner?
• The birthday of world. Why does the world have a birthday? How old is the world? What present does it want? What are Jewish “gifts” we should offer the world?
• New things (shofar, round hallah, Torahs dressed in white). Who is the shofar calling? Why is the hallah round? What is the symbolism of Torahs and clergy dressed in white?
• Celebration. Something important is happening in our family and in our community. How are we all a part of it? Why do we come together to celebrate?

Necessity is the mother of invention. The calendar this year is not a cause for panic but an opportunity to take the lessons of the New Year to heart. We are called to self-examination, a heshbon nefesh. Being a Jewish educator is a part of who we are. Our students deserve the same consideration and self-reflection that we give to the rest of ourselves at this time.

Shanah Tovah,

Idie Benjamin, Program Specialist/Career Advisor, Westchester, NY

Dale Sides Cooperman, Director, Congregation Albert, Albuquerque, NM