Rabbi Hawkeye

In my piece on archery and Judaism for Tablet, I quoted Rabbi Barry Dov Lerner, an archery instructor who is also a rabbi and was a locus of fascination and a little fear when I was a camper at Camp Ramah in New England. He had lots of fascinating insights into how physical activity can teach Jewish values, and I didn’t have room for them in the Tablet story, so I thought, in the words of our sage Jon Stewart, “Let’s throw all this up on the web.”  Here’s what he said:

On the first day of camp at Camp Ramah in Palmer I would go in the marp [short for mirpaah, infirmary] to introduce myself and inform the camp doctor, “If it’s a cut or string burn the kids come to the marp; if the arrow is in the hand or leg we bring them to the marp; if it’s in the head or chest we go to the hospital…but we’ll let you know when we’re leaving.” It was fun to see the doctors go into a panic. In all my years of teaching we had one kid with a feather cut when the arrow left the bow.

The kids wanted me to be a badass and an Errol Flynn. They had no clue I was a rabbi. I used concepts that related to other parts of camp – Hebrew, tfilah [prayer], responsibility, and if they didn’t listen I’d kill them.

Kids could earn patches from the Archery Association to put on t-shirts: I made a milon [dictionary] patch. So if you were totally spastic you could still earn a patch in Hebrew vocabulary for kashatut [archery].

Every activity should be turned into an opportunity for Hebrew instruction and Jewish values. I’d say, “You’re standing on the shooting line. Silence is critical. It’s like saying the amidah [silent prayer] — you do it individually, quietly and respectfully, and then you put your bow down and stand quietly or sit where you are until everyone has had the chance to shoot.”

This sport is about discipline and intellect. It’s about meditation. You have to remove from your head anything except an image of where and how your body is relating to a target.

There was a tall tree with hawks nesting in it in [a far off part of the camp]. I’d have the kids sit and watch the hawks. I taught them to track deer. Deer would enter the pasture as we sat. And the kids were in absolute awe. And I said, “That’s what I want you to feel. When you are shooting in the field as ancient Jews did you are part of nature and you have to understand it and you have to respect it.”

Once a kid asked me to hit a Coke can. I put an arrow through it lengthwise. Kids went WHOA! It was stupid; I stripped the fletching! But the legend grew in the time it took to close up the field and walk to lunch – by the time I’d gotten to the dining hall I’d tossed a sixpack in the air and shot all the cans before they hit the ground.

Studying archery can incorporate architecture and history – the bet hamikdash [ancient temple] was in part a citadel and fortress. The windows were shaped to be arrow slits, maximizing range and direction of arrows from the inside out but keeping the people inside safe. It was a defensive architectural design. There is a haftarah with David and Jonathan in which Jonathan says “I’m going to fire three arrows,” as a signal to David. Why three? Because when you aim, your eye is on the same angle as the point of the arrow. The three arrows will land in a group, consistent. We have a 3000-year-old textual history of how you sight with a bow! Two arrows is insufficient; four is overkill.

I purchased antique 3,000-year-old arrow points and once a summer I’d attach them to an arrow and shoot them to show they were still functional.

I also teach calligraphy – kids not only learn to write, but how ink is made, how a pen and quill are cut, how a reed works. I teach that way about bows and arrows too. I taught them to re-fledge their own arrows and make a bowstring. You earn the right to gather more skill the further along you go. Little kids just shoot and learn the basics, but the more you study, the more you learn that it is an artisan-based craft.

The kids slept at night when I was on shmira [guard duty] at camp instead of goofing around, because the legend was that I stalked the camp with a  bow and arrow. My son Avi told the other kids that the reason we went to Palmer was that I shot and killed a kid so we had to change camps.

I think that everything should have a focus. Everything can be tied to Judaism, and if you don’t understand that you have the wrong teacher.

If I were running camps I wouldn’t make kids sit in classrooms and be bored to death. I’d hire specialists and have them do things. Doing things can be another entry point for engaging people.

]]> http://marjorieingall.com/more-from-my-interview-with-the-archer-rabbi/feed/ 0 http://marjorieingall.com/code-name-verity-is-all-that/ http://marjorieingall.com/code-name-verity-is-all-that/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 18:46:41 +0000 marjorieingall http://marjorieingall.com/?p=2964

So I’m coming up with a list of future column topics for Tablet, and I can’t remember what I’ve written about and what I haven’t, so I’m googling “Marjorie Ingall” and “Tablet magazine” and “books about death,” and hello, I discover that my review of Code Name Verity for this coming Sunday’s New York Times Book Review is online! You may have gathered from my last few NYTBR reviews that I am a tough room. I am polite (more polite than I am on Goodreads, on my blog or in Tablet, anyway) but I have really only been utterly blown away by one book I’ve reviewed for the Times. Until now.

But don’t just take my word for it. It got starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly, The Horn Book, and I think other places but I am too busy to Google right now because I have to take Maxie to get a haircut and there’s gonna be sobbing and it’s too early to drink. But oh, look, best review of Code Name Verity ever. Just read this one instead of mine. I AM FEELING ALL THE FEELINGS.

and

But I’m also seeing a smidgen of this.

Artemis. Who I forgot to mention.

One of my favorite not-written-by-me Tablet column headlines was I Am Charlotte’s Tsimmes. Which got literary and nutball points, but didn’t actually tell you much about the story you were about to read. (It was a social history of American Jewish women as told through Hadassah regional cookbooks.) The headline for this week’s column, It’s Fun for a Girl and a Bow, is amusing AND tells you something about the story you’re about to read: a mash-up of archery, feminism, pop cult and Lag B’Omer! Go, Wayne.

Thanks to Daddytypes for the pointer.

This video is so funny and so sad on multiple levels: I’m sorry Adam Yauch died so young. And I’m sorry and glad for the passage of time. Once Busytown was beloved unto me, then it went away for years, then it came back, and now it is gone away again. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I egged the chicken then I ate his leg.

Joan Crawford used to read to Christina when not beating her with a coat hanger. I rest my case.

I amuse myself mightily.

My daughter has been raving about the poems of Valerie Worth and was shocked that I did not know who she was. (Jo reminded me that Worth’s poems are in Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog, which we both adored. But I forget. I am old.) Today Josie brought home All the Small Poems and Fourteen More, a collection of all four of Worth’s collections of “small poems.” They really are all that. This last one resonated the most with me, embroiled as I am in a battle to save our school’s library.

book

Such a

Bountiful

Box of

Tricks:

Packed

With the

Five senses,

The seven

Seas, the

Earth’s

Four winds

And corners,

All fitted

Exactly in.

This heroic chicken cannot save our children from testing madness.

Whee, another fun post to add to my litany about how stupid the questions on standardized tests are! Daniel Pinkwater (author of a bunch of funny books for kids including The Hoboken Chicken Emergency and Beautiful Yetta: The Yiddish Chicken – the latter was named the #1 Jewish Picture book of 2010 in Tablet Magazine, you may recall) has an entertaining and pathetic essay in the New York Daily News about how a chunk from one of his novels was taken out of context, rewritten into gibberish and turned into an incoherent source of questions for the New York State Eighth Grade English Language Arts test. Not a single line of what was attributed to Pinkwater was actually written by Pinkwater, though the (I don’t know what to call it — semi-coherent narrative? nonsense essayette? drug-addled story-esque item?) thing had his name on it.

The mini-story was a retelling of the Tortoise and the Hare, with the tortoise replaced by a pineapple. The pineapple challenges the rabbit to a race, the animals all debate whether the pineapple is messing with them what with its lack of limbs, the rabbit wins and the animals all band together to eat the pineapple. The test questions: Why did the animals eat the pineapple? Which animal was the wisest? Buh? 

The testers took a deliberately silly piece, made it not-deliberately sillier, and then asked completely unanswerable questions about it. I have pointed out similar asking-unanswerable-questions issues in my blog in the past.

Pinkwater found out about the Big #2 Pencil Splot when distressed children started writing to him to ask him what the answer was, or to inform him that his story was idiotic. After the brouhaha, Pinkwater reconsidered his decision to sell his work to testing companies to make hamburger out of, and the state opted not to count the answers to the Pineapple Question in the kids’ total scores. (By the way, the answers are that the animals ate the pineapple because they were annoyed, and that the owl was the wisest animal. Ironically, as the Daily News points out, NYC Schools Chancellor Dennis Wolcott is allergic to pineapple.)

Again: I reiterate that I do not think the entire notion of standardized testing is bad. I think it’s a fine factor to add in to other elements that together make a picture of how a child is learning. But tests today are being wildly misused — they are too frequent; they have too much impact on the lives of students, teachers and schools, all of whom can be punished severely for perceived lack of awesomeness on tests; and they are taking time away from meaningful learning. When people defend testing as a necessary evil, I have to keep reiterating that if the tests were decent tests, they might have an argument, but THE TESTS ARE OFTEN SEMI-LITERATE. Here are a couple of examples from my daughter’s third-grade ELA practice book a couple of years ago. I am a magna cum laude Harvard grad with two degrees in reading-and-writing heavy disciplines and I am not sure I answered some of those questions correctly. Why? Because they are EXCEEDINGLY STUPIDLY WRITTEN.

If only shamans, phantoms and brave kids could save civilization from this. Or maybe if there were a magic pretzel…

As you may have heard, thanks to difficult economic times, the Neighborhood School Library is on the chopping block. Some creative parents and kids are doing their best to save it.

Bonus: Lemonade for literacy!

Manicures for More Mo Willems!

Remember, you can donate on the school web site. Or attend the May 13th literary evening with Gloria Steinem, Gail Collins and Lizz Winstead at McNally-Jackson Books, $25 at the door, plus McNally-Jackson is generously donating all book sales during the event to the TNS PTA.