PCJE alumna Tova Messer (Cohort 19) wrote this article as a guest blogger on the TalentEd site. TalentEd is an organization that Pardes works with very closely to place novice Judaic studies teachers in day schools…According to Breisheet, when God created the world, the land was “unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water . . .” (Genesis 1:2). As a teacher of Judaic Studies to second and third grades, my inner anthropologist, always a participant-observer, contemplates the balance between order and disorder in the classroom not dissimilar to that described in Breisheet: the seder (order) and routines of our day, upon which children so heavily rely, and the noisy, often messy and chaotic process of learning and growing. That tightrope that teachers walk reminds me of the Torah’s creation story, and the tohu (chaos) from which, according to it, we all arose.
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