Biblical welcome in Abraham’s tent
“IF YOU have a jumper, take it off, as we are going into the desert,” counselled Rabbi Yaacov Finn, programme manager of the London School of Jewish Studies, “It’s going to be hot.”
As the Year-three boys and girls from Etz Chaim School in Mill Hill donned Arabic dress, he warned, “You don’t want to get sunstroke, so you have to put something on your head.”
The youthful party was not about to step into the Judean heat. The desert had come to Hendon, to the LSJS campus where they were about to enjoy a morning of “immersive education”.
Abraham’s tent stood in the middle of a sand-strewn f loor inside LSJS’s new studio room. A projector blazed a log-fire on the wall. All that was missing was a camel.
Here they re-enacted one of the stories they had been learning in Chumash classes during the year: how Abraham and Sarah welcomed the three strangers into their home.
The children baked matzot on an open fire, churned their own butter and prepared the tent for the mitzvah of hachnasat orchim, welcoming guests. They practised their Hebrew, using words such as kemach, flour, or chemah, butter.
Rabbi Finn said that “schools have Roman or Victorian days where the children go to a museum and have the benefit of a programme of immersive learning. We wanted to do something similar for Jewish studies.”
The LSJS programme has been piloted this summer for 180 children from five Jewish schools. “The children are loving it,” said Liza Feiner, Etz Chaim’s head of Jewish studies, “There’s a lot of attention to detail, it’s really authen- tic. They have been learning about Abraham all year. This is a great opportunity to bring it all to life and it reinforces their Hebrew vocabulary.”
For his outdoor oven, Rabbi Finn had procured a fibreglass firepit from the internet and put an upturned wok on top. A security guard with an umbrella protected the baking flatbreads from some un-Middle-Eastern rain.
“It is a good idea,” said eight-yearold Etz Chaim pupil Eitan Ansher. “It’s quite amazing, except when we had to be in hard labour,” (namely, tidying the tent).
A teacher from one school told Rabbi Finn that the children had been so engrossed that in two hours none had asked to take a toilet break.