I was floored. I hadn’t been expecting that answer, and what was worse than the words was the way he had said them
I walked into the shiur room with a mix of excitement and nerves. It was the summer of 2023, and I was working in Hillel Torah and Travel Camp in Pittsburgh. I was slotted to work double duty; not only was I going to be assistant head counselor, but due to staff shortages, I was also going to be a learning rebbi for the sixth through eighth graders.
The group was the biggest in camp, with more than 20 boys, and featured a dizzying range of learning levels: The eighth grader headed that fall for a top-tier yeshivah sat next to a sixth grader whose parents weren’t religious and couldn’t read Hebrew. Suffice it to say I had my work cut out for me.
We started off learning perek HaShoel, focusing less on the text and more on capturing the ideas and lomdus in an interesting way to draw in more of the campers.
The day before Shivah Asar B’Tammuz, I asked them what they knew about it.
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