Because It Came To Mind

Lunch so far today has been apples and cheese. This may sound strange (this is an understatement- it Will sound strange) to many of you, but apples and cheese in combination are intrinsically linked in my mind with one of my very first conversational Hebrew teachers. Scott allowed my sister and I as well as my mother to join her adult-ed conversational Hebrew class at the shul I now attend when I'm home- which is not the shul my family belonged to then (or now). She taught out of a book with no English except in the glossary, to people who did not have the practice learning languages that way, and at the same time taught us some of the origins of the letters, and encouraged us to incorporate our small Hebrew vocabularies into the rest of our lives- Scott Is the reason why I often enough call my mother Ima and my father Aba even though our family uses almost no Hebrew at all otherwise. She is also the teacher who helped me pick the (very eccentric) way I spell my name in Hebrew.

Scott's dedication to her students was really remarkable. Our class started out with 8ish people I think, and they dropped out one by one until it was just my family, and then just Mom and I- and then just me. And she kept on teaching, and when things felt like they were going to fast, she cut back to repetitive questions and answers, adding one word at a time until I got them. And one of her questions was "את אוהבת לאכול תפוח עם גבינה" and I answered it time and time again.

At the beginning of the second semester, after everyone but Mom and I had dropped out, she was supposed to start teaching liturgical Hebrew instead. So I kept coming, and a few more people came, and we translated "VeShamru"- something that very much became a major push for me to investigate observance. The difference between "the people of Israel shall guard the Sabbath, to make the Sabbath" and the translation in Gates of Prayer "the people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath" (probably paraphrased) was so sharp, and the original was so much more potent and powerful and involving that I couldn't neglect it. And as people stopped coming to that class, she shifted back to conversational Hebrew, and just kept on teaching.

During that year, Mom was really impressed with her teaching, and suggested that she might want to also teach at the shul where we belonged, in the Hebrew school. And she did, and she took a class full of the less skilled kids, who were really below their grade level- and she was just as fiercely devoted to them as she was to me, or possibly more so. I was a teacher's aide that next year, and while we didn't interact much on that level, I heard the stories about how much she stood up for those kids, in a way that few teachers in that Hebrew school would think to do.

I remember one day Mom telling me that Scott wore a wig- I had never noticed- and wondering why. we found out about a year and a half later, when there was an announcement made at shul, after she'd been out for a couple of weeks, that she had died of cancer- Leukemia. She'd never wanted her students to know, and she kept teaching, putting off the nausea from the meds as just feeling a little under the weather. She was an incredible model of teaching Hebrew and Torah for the love of it and the love of teaching. That is not to say that she was the most educated Jew out there- she wasn't. I was told a story last year that was incredibly typical of Scott- she learned that there should be a blue thread in one's tzitzit- so she took a blue marker to hers. But she was very, very genuine about her teaching, and her Torah. The world lost someone very special when she died. I will never eat an apple and a piece of cheese without thinking of her memory, and well, this is the story behind why I still refuse to spell my name in the way my Hebrew teachers want.

Because It Came To Mind

Lunch so far today has been apples and cheese. This may sound strange (this is an understatement- it Will sound strange) to many of you, but apples and cheese in combination are intrinsically linked in my mind with one of my very first conversational Hebrew teachers. Scott allowed my sister and I as well as my mother to join her adult-ed conversational Hebrew class at the shul I now attend when I'm home- which is not the shul my family belonged to then (or now). She taught out of a book with no English except in the glossary, to people who did not have the practice learning languages that way, and at the same time taught us some of the origins of the letters, and encouraged us to incorporate our small Hebrew vocabularies into the rest of our lives- Scott Is the reason why I often enough call my mother Ima and my father Aba even though our family uses almost no Hebrew at all otherwise. She is also the teacher who helped me pick the (very eccentric) way I spell my name in Hebrew.

Scott's dedication to her students was really remarkable. Our class started out with 8ish people I think, and they dropped out one by one until it was just my family, and then just Mom and I- and then just me. And she kept on teaching, and when things felt like they were going to fast, she cut back to repetitive questions and answers, adding one word at a time until I got them. And one of her questions was "את אוהבת לאכול תפוח עם גבינה" and I answered it time and time again.

At the beginning of the second semester, after everyone but Mom and I had dropped out, she was supposed to start teaching liturgical Hebrew instead. So I kept coming, and a few more people came, and we translated "VeShamru"- something that very much became a major push for me to investigate observance. The difference between "the people of Israel shall guard the Sabbath, to make the Sabbath" and the translation in Gates of Prayer "the people of Israel shall keep the Sabbath" (probably paraphrased) was so sharp, and the original was so much more potent and powerful and involving that I couldn't neglect it. And as people stopped coming to that class, she shifted back to conversational Hebrew, and just kept on teaching.

During that year, Mom was really impressed with her teaching, and suggested that she might want to also teach at the shul where we belonged, in the Hebrew school. And she did, and she took a class full of the less skilled kids, who were really below their grade level- and she was just as fiercely devoted to them as she was to me, or possibly more so. I was a teacher's aide that next year, and while we didn't interact much on that level, I heard the stories about how much she stood up for those kids, in a way that few teachers in that Hebrew school would think to do.

I remember one day Mom telling me that Scott wore a wig- I had never noticed- and wondering why. we found out about a year and a half later, when there was an announcement made at shul, after she'd been out for a couple of weeks, that she had died of cancer- Leukemia. She'd never wanted her students to know, and she kept teaching, putting off the nausea from the meds as just feeling a little under the weather. She was an incredible model of teaching Hebrew and Torah for the love of it and the love of teaching. That is not to say that she was the most educated Jew out there- she wasn't. I was told a story last year that was incredibly typical of Scott- she learned that there should be a blue thread in one's tzitzit- so she took a blue marker to hers. But she was very, very genuine about her teaching, and her Torah. The world lost someone very special when she died. I will never eat an apple and a piece of cheese without thinking of her memory, and well, this is the story behind why I still refuse to spell my name in the way my Hebrew teachers want.