Students inspire us too!

Give Back:

This weeks task to give back was an interesting one, when I was thinking about being kind to people and letting people go ahead, my first thought was about those crazy drivers who think where they are going and what they have to do is more important than anything else in the world. I hadn’t decided what I was going to do on my task when I got to work Friday night for Shabbat at Hillel and then during services a student of mine gave a drash that couldn’t have been any more perfect for this weeks assignment. He talked about a Romanian man who had known tragedy since childhood. He was 76 years old; he had lived through the holocaust and after the holocaust moved to Israel. Liviu Librescu eventually became a teacher at Virginia Tech and died holding a door closed while his 22 student’s were able to escape from the gunman during the Virginia Tech shooting. The reason I thought the drash related to our task this week so well was because my student talked about the connection between this man and Simchat Torah. The end of Deuteronomy is about Moses stepping back and watching his people enter the land of Israel and beginning of Genesis is about God making man and woman, creating the Garden of Eden and then getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden. His point wasn’t about this man being like Moses or Adam and Eve, but his point was that God may have taken us out of the Garden, but that God handed us another wonderful garden to live in and the gift is really us making the world we live in a better one by giving to other people. Liviu gave his life in order to give his student’s a chance to escape. Being able to step back this Shabbat and think about what kind of impact I can make on other people by giving back or stepping up was a really valuable moment that I hope made an impact on the students who also heard the drash this Shabbat.