Adventures in Mama-Land

My mother recently spent two Shabboses (Shabbatot) with us here in Israel.  In her honour, I actually put together two divrei Torah.  This is the first, which I said over at a kiddush we also made in her honour.  Sorry it’s too late for this year – I was too busy visiting to post! ----- So my mother is here visiting Israel, and I actually felt more like talking about last week’s parsha instead of this week’s, because of a line we mentioned in our shiur that says so much about motherhood: כח וַיֶּאֱהַב יִצְחָק אֶת עֵשָׂו כִּי צַיִד בְּפִיו וְרִבְקָה אֹהֶבֶת אֶת יַעֲקֹב: "Isaac loved Esav because he ate his game; but Rebecca loved Jacob." (Genesis 25:28) The actual Hebrew of this verse reads that Rebecca "loves" Jacob, in the present tense. According to Rabbi Isaiah HaLevi Horowitz, we can understand this verse according to a teaching of our sages in Chapters of the Fathers (5:16). "Any love that is dependent on something will vanish when that thing vanish...

Based on a “ladder” idea for Vayeitzei that I saw in Mommzy’s Montessori-based booklet of parsha ideas for Bereishis, I came up with this craft concept very, VERY quickly to occupy my kids and a friend who happened to come over last Friday for a 6-hour playdate (it wasn’t as gruelling as it sounds – I promise!). I borrowed a picture of Yaakov sleeping from this PDF of parsha colouring pages at Aish.com (I didn’t bother printing the rest of the picture, just used a PDF-to-JPG program to strip out that page, then used a paint program to cut out Yaakov, then used Word to paste three Yaakovs on one page so all three would fit on a single piece of paper.  Okay, that sounds like a LOT of work when I type it all out like that.  Trust me – it took about 2 minutes or less. The kids all enjoyed building the ladders and cutting out stars from yellow construction paper.  Gavriel Zev drew an alien above Yaakov’s head – that’s what he’s dreaming about.  Naomi Rivka wanted to...

Update:  I made up a game to go along with this dodecahedron!  More details here . A bit late for Vayeitzei, but since we’ll keep reading about the adventures of the twelve shevatim over the next few weeks, I figured something like this could come in handy for dice games, just tossing around… or whatever. What’s a dodecahedron?  It’s basically a 12-sided “die” (singular of dice).  (if you ever played D&D, you’ll know it as a D12!) I was inspired by this “twelve days of Xmas” dodecahedron project for sale at CurrClick. As soon as I saw it, I wondered, “what do WE learn about that comes in 12s???”  Since we’ve just finished learning Parshas Vayeitzei, which includes the birth of 11 out of the 12 shevatim (tribes), it didn’t take long to figure out.  (the fact that it took any time at all is kind of puzzling!) Hebrew grammar note:  the word for “tribe” in the singular = שֵׁבֶט = shevet; in the plural = שְׁבָטִים = shevatim.  HOWEVER, it is ...