By Donald H. Harrison
LA JOLLA, California — Soille San Diego Hebrew Day School and the San Diego Center for Jewish Culture teamed up Thursday evening, Jan. 29, to teach Jewish ethics.
Not to the students of the Orthodox day school; the 7th and 8th graders had already had their opportunity to chew on this particular kind of “Jewish Food for Thought.”
These lessons at the Lawrence Family JCC were for the parents, grandparents and other adult mentors of the students. Through the magic of video, and some cartooned storyboards, their teacher was Hanan Harchol, a young animator. According to Rabbi Simcha Weiser, Soille’s headmaster, Harchol had grown up secular because his parents had turned away from Jewish observance after surviving the Holocaust. However, sometimes that which parents try to steer children away from is what the children ultimately will embrace, Weiser noted. In Harchol’s case, it was Jewish texts and the lessons that may be extrapolated from them in modern society.
The reception was held on multiple levels, both physically and intellectually. Attendees started with appetizers and schmoozing in the Astor Judaica Library on the second floor, where a quartet of four French hornists –Liesl Hansen, R.B. Anthony, Erika Wilsen, and Scott Miller — played softly. The crowd then meandered into an adjacent multipurpose room for the showing of a video about Harchol’s work, returned to the library to taste kosher wines provided by Andrew Breskin of Liquid Kosher, and finally trooped downstairs to the Gotthelf Art Gallery where some of Harchol’s drawings and animations will remain on display through the San Diego Jewish Film Festival, Feb. 5-15.
The storyboards and animated videos feature a cartoon version of Harchol dealing with common issues and emotions: envy, faith, forgiveness, gratitude, humility, love and fear, and repentance. The traveling exhibit was curated by Laura Kruger of the museum of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City.
The animator not only draws the images, but he also provides the voices of the three characters, with Yiddish inflections for the parents. In one short video lesson, the boy Harchol is still angry at a classmate for some offense, in fact he’s been angry for a long time. His father asks whether the boy is charging the classmate rent. For what? “Living in your head rent-free.” The young man decides perhaps it is time to forgive the classmate, to push the matter out of his mind, and to move on.
Rabbi Weiser said with the world filled with stories of nations battling with each other, it’s natural that children will think about how they can “win” an argument with a peer. The job of Hebrew Day School, he said, is to draw on Jewish sources, as well as those from other traditions, to teach students to act with kindness to each other. He paraphrased the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that darkness never pushes aside darkness, only light can do that.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. Your comment may be posted in the space provided below or sent to donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com