Birkat Chaverim Blog

These are not such original ideas but they can be a fun holiday toy for a young child in synagogue or wherever. The idea of using a matchbox as a house came from colouredbuttons.com, where she has many lovely ideas in general, but in particular really sweet things out of matchboxes.

I just modified her idea for the holidays and for use with a smaller child who is a bit rough on toys. I did not add many embellishments because they were liable to be chewed or pulled off and I didn’t make them into necklaces. I made a sukkah with a little girl doll (bead, pipe cleaner, part of an old shirt, yarn), and a shul with felt Torah, Torah cover, kiddush cup and synagogue backdrop. This is a really quick project. It could probably be used as an actual matchbox holder for lighting candles for Shabbat and holidays. It is a great project to do with children older than mine, although she had many ideas of what I should put in the box (“Ima make a shofar, make besamim.” “Ima can you make me a house too?”)

I had actually been saving the matchboxes to make into rolling ball games using historic Jewish sites, but I have not gotten around to that yet. Perhaps we’ll do that this year in the doll clothing classes (we do go off topic sometimes.) I will probably add a lulav and etrog to the sukkah and some other items to the synagogue.

The title sounds a bit weird, since everyone knows you are supposed to fast on Yom Kippur, but there are people who do not fast on Yom Kippur such as people who are seriously ill or children under the age of Bar or Bat Mitzvah.

I remember going to shul as a young child, there was often a buffet set out for the children (sandwiches and the like.)  I particularly remember being told by an adult (I don’t remember which adult) that when we were ready to say Birkat Hamazon, we should add Yom HaKippurim in the Yaaleh VYavo addition to the Grace after Meals prayer.

I was thinking about this today, as I gave my toddler lunch and actually discussed this with her. She does not yet know all of Birkat Hamazon up to the inserted section, but she does understand adding prayers for the holidays so it was an appropriate discussion. I also remembered that we actually have this addition in the Bnei Akiva birkon, so I’ve included it as an illustration to this post.

The symbol of the Jewish month of Tishrei is moznayim, libra, scales (see for instance the symbol from the Beit Alpha synagogue to the left.) This symbolizes the judging that occurs on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur.

As a kid I can remember making a scale where we would put mitzvot (commandments/good deeds) on one side of the scale, and on the other side we would put sins. Of course we wanted to work hard so that the good deeds outweighed the bad deeds. I wanted to do something similar with my daughter and I had been thinking about what I could do, when I saw a post on Filth Wizardy on how to make scales from home made materials. I decided that the idea of the hanger scale would be perfect for us. Here’s our version:

Our version uses the containers that mushrooms come in and has a modification in that we (for the moment at least) are not interested in comparing weights of things around the house, but in conceptualizing weighing the good and bad things that we do. I made a bunch of little pictures with mitzvot and sins on them, cut them out and taped them to “sabras” a type of prickley lego toy.

You can see that the bad deeds are things like hitting and biting and that there are fewer bad deeds than good deeds. Good deeds are things like helping parents, putting toys away, prayers etc. When my daughter saw the scale, she was more interested in the fact that the baskets with strings attached made great shopping baskets. I did explain the concepts and we put some deeds in each basket to see what would happen. Then she took over the baskets for shopping. She did, however, bring me one of the sins with a worried expression “Hitting, Ima!” Later maybe we’ll also use this as an actual scale.