What Is a Value?

Ask: “What makes someone a good friend?” Collect every answer without correcting any. Then name what they have just done — they have listed middot, values.

Children wonder and discover; you facilitate more than you lecture.

• What is a value?
• Where do we learn what matters?
• Which values already live in you?

A middah (plural middot) is a character value — courage, kindness, welcoming, hope. Judaism has always taught middot through story rather than through rules: we do not tell children to be brave, we tell them about Nachshon stepping into the sea. This opening session does something specific and important — it establishes that values are not being handed to children from outside. They are being NAMED in what children already do. That framing carries the entire year.

• Middah — a character value
• Middot — values (more than one)
• Sipur — story

“Who decides what a value is?”

Our stories and our people have been deciding together for thousands of years — and we are still adding to the list.

“What if I do not have any values yet?”

You already do. We are just going to learn their names.

• Children can say what a middah is in their own words.
• Children can name one value they already have.
• Children understand that our stories teach values.

Accept every answer in the opening list, including the surprising ones. A child whose idea of a good friend is “someone who lets me be quiet” has said something true, and the room should treat it that way.

Folktale. Hillel and the Stranger (Talmud) — asked to explain the whole Torah standing on one foot, Hillel answers: what is hateful to you, do not do to another. The rest is commentary — go and learn.

Changemaker. Ruth Bader Ginsburg — kept a verse on her wall, tzedek tzedek tirdof, “justice, justice shall you pursue”, and spent her life doing it.

I wonder which value you would want people to notice in you?

“We began our year of values. Ask your child what a middah is. Try at home: each name one value you saw in someone else today.”