Parashat Hashavua: Tazria-Metzora
The rabbis use Parashat Tazria-Metzora as an opportunity to teach about lashon ha ra – literally, bad speech – gossiping and speaking ill about others. What is the connection? They understand the word מצורה (the one who has a skin disease) as a container for other words – מוציא שם רע (bringing out someone else’s bad name). As I like to put it in Lower School, one word or one thing can be hiding inside of another.
Over the past few years, it has been painful to see how antisemitism has been brought out into the open from places it may have been hiding (or hiding in plain sight, depending on how you see things). As our 5th grade students prepared for Yom HaShoah this year, they read first hand accounts from their own families and from the Heschel archives of what antisemitism looked like when it came out of hiding in the 1930s in Europe. They learned about family members who were only able to hide thanks to their blond hair and blue eyes and Polish farmers who refused to help their neighbors hide.
But our students also learned some different lessons about the meaning of hiding. They learned about the tremendous bravery of Jews who hid in the forests and fought with the partisans. They learned about people who risked their lives to hide Jewish families. They learned about members of their own families who discovered resources hidden within themselves they may never have known existed — family members who were resourceful and courageous on the spot in deadly situations, and family members who found the strength to endure unimaginable circumstances.
I like to think that through this process, our students also learned something about the holy sparks, in Heschel’s words, that are hiding inside of each one of them. As they came together to study these first-hand accounts, their comments and questions showed maturity beyond their 5th grade years. When they listened to Dina Wizmur tell her grandmother’s story on Yom HaShoah, the quiet in the room was what I can only describe as יראה – the quiet awe that they instinctively knew this story deserves. And as some of our 5th grade students performed their family monologues for 4th, 5th and 6th graders, we saw sides of them we had never seen before.
It felt like a sacred honor to be a part of bringing these stories out into the open, especially because I have such confidence that our students will not carry them into the future, where they will continue to share them.
Rabbi Anne Ebersman
EC/LS Director of Jewish Life/Director of Hesed (Community Service) and Tzedek (Social Responsibility)
