Rabbi Scott Bolton
At Pesach we sit around a table, at our homes, and read a book together. So why aren’t we doing it all the time?!
A student told me that his Mom was so excited about reading his book with him that “he couldn’t believe it!” In between basketball, hanging-out with friends, texting and syncing new purchases on iTunes, he is now making time to read with his parents.
We have to connect with our kids through books, magazines, newspapers and Jewish texts, even as our children grow and mature during their upper elementary, middle school and high school years. Family reading time can be powerful. In our home, we pick family books and only read them aloud, together. At our school, I love to see groups of students in the hallways, at tables, at their desks, some with teachers, others without, talking about characters’ habits, moral issues or someone’s life story.
On a curricular level, we are extremely conscious about varying the genres of literature we are reading at different points in a student’s school experience. May I encourage the same level of literature planning for home?
Making family reading time allows vocabulary to expand. Laconic moments contemplating characters and phrasing, sentence structures or soliloquies can be compelling. Reading together and understanding stories or poems or individual verses from books of our Tanakh are values we share with Jews from throughout the ages. [Family art that stems from visual contemplations of sacred or everyday texts offers yet another way to create meaning, if you would like to take the art of conversation further!]
Finding moments to “enter” texts together has been one form of togetherness for Jews, at least since the time of Ezra and Nechemiah in the 6th Century C.E. One reason that we have public readings of the Torah, to this day, at our synagogues, is to further develop understandings of our Torah – its vocabulary, literary features and how to derive personal meaning from the greatest story ever told. Beyond that, we are challenged to find connections to our lives and at other times to bring our lives and times to the Torah itself.
We talk a great deal in our school, as educators, about what we are reading. I like to ask children what reading is exciting them. As parents, we can ask our kids: what books are keeping you up at night, with that booklight of yours!? I talk with my rabbis about where to find sources. I think that we could turn to librarians more often with hopes for finding the right material. How about journeying into the stacks again and again, as families!
According to mystical texts, we must seek and find the meaning in the white spaces between the black letters of Torah. So it is with the books we read with our kids and the haggadah at Pesach. We can start with the exact words of the stories we read. These are only points of departure, for us to explore and build upon. Reading together means exploring moral questions, decision-making, how to research further and developing lines of inquiry. We can gain insights into humanity and our own character traits and souls.
One of the best memories of my time together with my own father, of blessed memory, was sitting and reading the newspaper together, aloud, over breakfast, when I was in 8th grade. My mother noticed I loved the paper, and she would chime into our conversations. Soon I had three different papers daily to read with my family. We used the short block daily approach. Now, with my own kids, my wife and I use part of Shabbat afternoon or time in the car to read and talk. It is creating amazing portals of discovery!
In our tradition, Torah study and the study of worldly wisdom, in print – Talmud Torah – is equated to all righteous action, because it leads to great acts of justice and mercy. Creating blocks of time and space for family reading may seem far-fetched for some in our busy world. To me, it is one of the central messages of Passover. A family that reads together, and a school that makes reading a great variety of genres, carefully and critically, is a family of lifelong learners.