Robbins Hebrew Academy

The Rabbinics Project Scholar-in-Residence Creating Leaders The Grade Six Leadership and Ruach Trip As Hebrew teacher Orna Gabay speaks about RHA's new approach to teaching Rabbinics, she can hardly contain her excitement. "The Rabbinics Project is going to inspire students," she says, "and it is going to make Judaism more personal and more relevant." This project is being undertaken in collaboration with the world-renowned Legacy Heritage Instructional Leadership Institute at New York City's William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education. RHA is Toronto's first Jewish elementary day school to welcome a Scholar-in-Residence. "The Project combines the teaching of oral law, prayer, tradition and the holidays so that the connection between the rules we live by and the prayers we recite is more obvious to the children. The Rabbinics Project provides our educators with benchmarks to ensure they are communicating the study of Bible in a clear way, all the while empowering students to ask the big questions. What is the place of t'fillah in their lives? What are their expectations of it? How do the classical language and texts of t'fillah respond to contemporary life? "We want our students to understand why we do things, rather than simply doing them by rote. We want Judaism to bring meaning to their lives," says Gabay. "We got to play survivor games in the woods," says a group of grade 6 students. "We were wolves, deer, porcupines and bunnies, and then some of us were hunters and some of us were poachers." The grade 6 students are speaking about their recent leadership trip that took place at the Mansfield Education Centre, just an hour's drive north of Toronto. "We were given a certain number of life cards, and the challenge was to make it back to the camp without running out of them," says Michael. Kate laughs at the memory. "It was about making it back to camp alive." What looked like a fun game of chase was really an exercise in leadership, collaboration, strategy and ethics. "One of our goals was to teach the students to work together for a shared purpose, based on themes we had explored in the classroom," explains Brett Copeland, Interim Middle School Director. "We looked at the exercise critically from the perspectives of the life of early settlers, ecosystems and our relationship to animals and nature." In other activities, the students created maps to navigate their surroundings, built fires for food and heat, and constructed shelters for protection. At the end of a long day, the kids sat around the campfire, sang songs, told stories and according to Kate, ate chips. While the kids thought the trip was an awesome experience, it's not lost on them that it was also a trip to instill spirit. "A lot of us have known each other for a long time," says Cooper, "but after this trip we weren't just friends any more. We were family." 17

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