Project Parashat Pinchas

Parashat Pinchas begins with the zealous act of Pinchas stabbing people for sexual misconduct. Clearly this is not appropriate to teach to children. I wonder at what age it becomes appropriate to teach everything in the Torah. The Torah then continues with Moshe taking a census of the people in each tribe. After explaining censuses to the girls, I asked how many people there are in our family. "Five!" they answered quickly. "But what about your grandparents. And cousins..." They had a go at counting the number of people in various families, counting in English and Hebrew.
"Abba said there are three sisters in the parasha who are really special, just like us!" Cohava interrupted the counting.
"There were five sisters..."
"No, just three! Me, Gabi & Ruti!" Cohava yelped.
"Okay, well up until now in the Torah, and in the world, only men and boys got to be in charge of land," I began to explain.
"That's not fair!" Gabi shouted.
"That is what these sisters were saying. They didn't have any brothers and they wanted to have a share of the land in Israel. They went to Moshe to ask if they could have some land."
"And Moshe said, 'Yes!'" Cohava announced.
"Actually, Moshe said he didn't know. So he asked Hashem. And Hashem said, 'Yes'."
I must say the girls were not wowed by the story of bnot Tzlofchad. I suppose you have to know the lack of women's rights to appreciate how groundbreaking these five women were.
The rest of the parasha outlines the special mussaf sacrifices given for each of the holidays. There is only one other parasha that describes all of the chagim so I thought now would be a good opportunity to review.
"The rest of the parasha talks about the special korbanot for each holiday. Do we still do korbanot?" I asked the girls.
"No cuz, there is no beit hamikdash." Cohava supplied.
"Right, so instead we do other special things for each holiday." Cohava got a notebook and started to write a list of each special day and what is done. I was pleased with the results of how much they know. I went on a google and chinuch search to find images of everything the girls described. I also included plain text because Cohava and Gabi enjoy letter recognition and reading. I arranged the images on three pages.

I printed each page twice and then gave it to the girls to color. When they were finished we laminated each of the six pages and cut three of them into squares. And then the game begins. The squares are laid out and each player turns over one square, hoping the image is on their card. The first one with a filled card wins! I forget the name of the game, but you get the idea. Print, color, and play! 

Shabbat Shalom!

 

This week's post is dedicated to Devorah bat Dina. May she have a speedy recovery. Please pray for her recuperation.