Was my child the only black-and-white thinker in the class who would be devastated when a gold-laden structure failed to descend from Heaven?
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I never liked mitzvah-brick charts. Was it the oversimplification? The way they reduced 2000 years of estrangement — and the ultimate renewal of a glorious spiritual epicenter — to a numbers game? To a camel-colored oaktag on the wall? I wasn’t sure.
When five-year-old Dahlia came home from school bright-eyed cheerfully outlining her solution to the exile problem (“we just need to do a few more mitzvos lay a few more bricks!”) the feelings of unease resurfaced.
Was my child the only black-and-white thinker in the class who would be devastated when a gold-laden structure failed to descend from Heaven?
I understood the rationale. Brick metaphors are a good way to concretize the abstract to empower kids to remedy centuries of sorrow in a practical way.
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