Israel's Birthday

Have a real tallit and a real Israeli flag side by side on the floor before they come in. Say nothing about them and wait for somebody to notice.

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

• What can have a birthday?
• What is the same about a tallit and a flag?
• What do people do at a party?

A four-year-old cannot hold a country. They can hold a piece of cloth they have seen on a grown-up's shoulders. The whole lesson at this age is that the flag came from the tallit — somebody looked at a prayer shawl and made it into a flag for a whole country. That is true, it is concrete, and it is enough. Do not add the history; it arrives in Grade 3 and again in Grade 6.

• Yisrael — Israel
• Degel — flag
• Yom huledet — birthday

“Is Israel far?”

Very far — you would fly all night to get there and wake up in the morning and still be flying. “Have you been?” Answer honestly, including if the answer is no.

• Children can name Israel as a place where many Jewish people live.
• Children can spot the stripes shared by the tallit and the flag.
• Children can make and carry their own flag.

Some families in the room will have been to Israel and some will never be able to afford to go. Do not let going become the marker of a proper Jewish family — talk about the place, not about visiting it.

Folktale. Honi and the Carob Tree (Talmud) — Honi plants a tree he will never sit under, because somebody once planted one for him.

Changemaker. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda — decided Hebrew should be a language people talk in again, not only pray in, and raised his son speaking nothing else so there would be one child in the world who did.

I wonder what else has a birthday that is not a person?

“We learned that Israel has a birthday, and that its flag has stripes like a tallit. Try at home: find your tallit and let your child look at the stripes.”