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MODES OF MOVEMENT INTO TEFILLAH: Mixing the modes! Sibling rivalry in Genesis and the human puzzle game

Recently I completed a residency at Heritage Academy, a Jewish day school in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. I came to work at first with the Judaic staff on bringing movement into their curriculum. I ended up not only working with the staff, but also with the middle school students finding ways to embody (and thereby enhance and re-member) their tefillah, or prayer.

MODES OF MOVEMENT INTO TEFILLAH

Three distinct modes of how movement and text, in this case the text of tefillah, were used with the middle school with varying levels of success. The three are: wordplay, the essence, and personalizing question. Full descriptions of these individual modes are in earlier blogs. In this lesson we mixed essence and personalizing.

MIXING THE MODES!
Lesson 4:
Modes: Personalizing and Essence
Text/prayer: The sibling rivalry stories in Genesis
Players: middle school day students

1. Talk about the sets of siblings that are mentioned in Genesis most often.
a. Cain and Abel, Yitzhak and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers
2. What do these sets of brothers have in common? What is different?
3. Personalizing: What kinds of relationship do the students have with their siblings? Are they alike? Are they opposite? Take Jacob and Esau – how are they alike? How opposite? Do they ever reconcile? When?
4. Essence: the metaphor of opposites needing each other to grow, or to move to their rightful place in the Torah, how opposites “attract”.
5. The human puzzle game is a favorite among children of all ages. Have one student make a shape that is interesting. Here, we asked one of them to make a shape like he/she was Jacob. What would be some of the characteristics of his stance, his arm/hand gestures, etc.
6. Then, ask another student to put him/herself in the empty spaces, the negative spaces (art term) of the student being Jacob. They are to try to fill in at least two negative spaces. This will look like interlocking puzzle pieces.
7. Then ask the Jacob person to leave, and let the second person stay still.
8. See what the not-Jacob space looks like, the opposite of Jacob…. Or is it? Is our not-self a reflection of our self and therefore part of us? Are we also our opposites? Sometimes, the second person will look a lot like what Esau might have looked – bigger, rounder, more “earthy”.
9. Continue to find opposites in the human puzzle. You can keep working with the actual Torah characters, and try to learn something about them, or just keep on doing the puzzle game, and learn something about what it means to embrace your opposite, or to know that you and your opposite are related.
10. Ask the students how doing this game relates to their own siblings at home?
11. Heritage student answers: My brother completes me, We have more in common than I thought, when we are together – we are one…

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MODES OF MOVEMENT INTO TEFILLAH: part three / personalizing with Havdallah

Recently I completed a residency at Heritage Academy, a Jewish day school in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. I came to work at first with the Judaic staff on bringing movement into their curriculum. I ended up not only working with the staff, but also with the middle school students finding ways to embody (and thereby enhance and re-member) their tefillah, or prayer.

MODES OF MOVEMENT INTO TEFILLAH

Three distinct modes of how movement and text, in this case the text of tefillah, were used with the middle school with varying levels of success. The three are: wordplay, the essence, and personalizing question.

PERSONALIZING
Personalizing the prayer or text is another way for young people to understand meaning. (Especially middle school students!) Find a question about their lives that relates to the text, and they will very soon find meaning! And, then find movement that corresponds to that meaning. This may look mimetic at first, but with learning how to exaggerate movement by manipulating time, space, and quality, the movement will look more like a dance.

Lesson 3A:
Text/prayer: Havdallah
Population: Middle school day students

1. Read the full havdallah prayers in English and Hebrew.
2. Find a key question that relates to the theme of havdallah, such as, separation, or separation between something special, and something ordinary, or normal.
3. The question given to the students was: what do you feel and what do you do when you have to leave something or someone special? (Like leaving Shabbat, for instance…)
4. Answers were: hugs, waving, sadness, looking deep into someone’s eyes, and moving away quickly to not get too emotional.
5. Put the movement they created, or help them find movement for the emotions (e-motion!) they discovered and put it in an order that they like.
6. Recite the prayer while doing the movement, and then just do the movement to the humming (lalaing) of the Havdallah service. Do the movements in silence and see what that looks and feels like.
7. Talk about separation, and why it is helpful to create a ritual around separation. Why do we do havdallah? How does it make Shabbat, and how does it start the week? Talk about other separation rituals in Judaism.

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MODES OF MOVEMENT INTO TEFILLAH: part two / essence with Elohai N’shama

Recently I completed a residency at Heritage Academy, a Jewish day school in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. I came to work at first with the Judaic staff on bringing movement into their curriculum. I ended up not only working with the staff, but also with the middle school students finding ways to embody (and thereby enhance and re-member) their tefillah, or prayer.

MODES OF MOVEMENT INTO TEFILLAH

Three distinct modes of how movement and text, in this case the text of tefillah, were used with the middle school with varying levels of success. The three are: wordplay, the essence, and personalizing question.

ESSENCE
The essence, or essential metaphor of the text, is another way into the text where movement can be beneficial. In looking at a text, often an image comes to mind that is either described or alluded to in the text. This image, or metaphor, can be put into action with movement. The student then can really understand, or stand under, the meaning in new ways.

Lesson 2:
Mode: Essence
Text/Prayer: Elohai N’shama
Population: middle school students in Jewish day school
.

1. Read the Elohai N’shama prayer in Hebrew and in English
2. Discuss the meaning of neshama, and how it relates to neshima, spirit and breath
3. Relate it to the pasook from Bereshit (line from Genesis) in the creation story that talks about HaShem breathing spirit into man through man’s nostrils. Talk to the students about what we breathe in and what we breathe out. Discuss how what we breathe out also helps co-create or maintain life (trees), as well as what we breathe in.
4. Focus on the act of breath as an act of giving life spirit to oneself, and to the world, of being a co-creator.
5. The essence, or essential metaphor chosen here is one of the cycle of breath as a cycle of life, sustaining creation. The prayer also talks about HaShem taking our breath away in death, and eventually restoring souls to the dead.
6. Find, with the students, ways to make the metaphor physical.
a. This might start with something literal and possibly giggle-producing such as mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (just enacting without doing for real or real touching).
b. This might move to cycles of life, making circles with arms while breathing and connecting the circular motion to another’s circular motion in the group, and end with either a full circle connected or turning away and disconnected in death, and then re-connected in eternal life…
c. The group may wish to enact a full life cycle, using breath to create the changes and transitions.
d. Allow creativity to flow: what is it to both give and receive breath or spirit? What is it to know our own very physical interdependence with the world around us? How can they create a physical metaphor from this?
e. This movement metaphor need not be slow or precious; speed it up, make it active, do it all in complete silence (a good way to focus the students) but keep it fun!
7. Perform the movement metaphor or metaphors while reciting the prayer.
8. Use the recording of some of the beautiful melodies that have been created for this prayer…
9. Ask the students in what ways did they understand the prayer better, or in what ways did they find the connection between breath and life.

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MODES OF MOVEMENT INTO TEFILLAH: part one / wordplay with Asher Yatzar

Recently I completed a residency at Heritage Academy, a Jewish day school in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. I first came to work only with the Judaic staff on bringing movement into their curriculum. I ended up not only working with the staff, but also with the middle school students finding ways to embody (and thereby enhance and re-member) their tefillah, or prayer.

MODES OF MOVEMENT INTO TEFILLAH

Three distinct modes of how movement and text, in this case the text of tefillah, were used with the middle school with varying levels of success. The three are: wordplay, the essence, and personalizing question. These are modes I have worked with in any situation using text and movement.

With the Asher Yatzar prayer, the one Jews say after going to the bathroom… yes, way… we used wordplay.

Wordplay
Wordplay is quite simple and literal. Find, or have the students find, key words in the text. These could be action words, (verbs), descriptors (adjectives), or just the main words that are repeated or have import in the context of the text. Using just these words, make either hand gestures (if students are sitting down), or body shapes, or even movements that describe these words. The students can do this in pairs, solo, or in small groups. Or, as we did in Asher Yatzar, we started as soloists, moved to pairs, and then worked with the whole group. Once the gestures or movements are made, then perform the movements while saying, singing, or having someone in the group say or sing the prayer.

Lesson 1A:
Mode: Wordplay
Text/Prayer: Asher Yatzar
Players: middle school students in Jewish day school

The Asher Yatzar prayer is one of Judaism’s most basic, literally. It is said every time one uses the toilet, right after washing the hands and leaving the bathroom. It is basic in that it deals with an act that is so basic, and is said in gratitude to HaShem for first making us in such wisdom, making us perfectly so that if one opening was closed, or a closing was opened, and they shouldn’t be, we wouldn’t be able to stand before HaShem in gratitude. Or to stand at all.

There were a few students in this class that didn’t know the prayer, or when or why it was said. The lesson plan was, and can be, the following:

1. Explain the prayer.
a. Write down various organs they couldn’t live without. (heart, brain, etc.)
b. Write down actions that if they didn’t do, they wouldn’t survive. (eat, sleep, go to the bathroom…)

2. Look at the prayer and choose most important words for the class.

3. This class chose openings and cavities, and blocks or closings.

4. Make a gesture with just your hands that shows both an opening and a closing at the same time.

5. Now choose a partner, and make a gesture with your arms and hands together that shows both an opening and closing at the same time.

6. Now see if the whole group can make a shape that is both and opening and closing.

7. Rehearse all three shapes and transitions from one to the other.

8. Recite the prayer, as a group, while first doing the solo, then duets, then the group. Recite the prayer first in English, then in Hebrew.

9. Decide as a group which gesture will be performed where in the prayer, which works as a solo, as a duet, as the group gesture? This may change the order: perhaps students want to start off as a group, and then become soloists, to signify standing alone before HaShem, or they might find key words that the gestures align with, such as Haloolim Haloolim with the duet gesture, to show how many of the cavities or openings are possible…

10. Decide as a group what the final pose should be. Perhaps it is whatever pose was the third one, or perhaps all stand Laamod lefanecha, standing before HaShem, and the rest of the prayer is recited standing still.

11. Ask the students if they understood the prayer in a different way.

a. Some of the Heritage students did not know the prayer, so they said they had learned a lot.
b. Some were more conscious of the meaning of the prayer, as normally they are taught it in Hebrew, and are focused on the words more than the meaning.
Some had stories to share about illness and being grateful when an illness is over: this has direct correlation to the Asher Yatzar prayer.

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