Tamar's life felt all wrong. Did the Sorting Sheitel make a mistake?
—Albus Dumbledore
I always avoid checking my watch in front of my students. A YIN isn’t supposed to have a Versace watch, even as a gift from her chassan. Instead, I glance over my eighth-graders’ heads to the clock on the white wall behind them and clap a cubic zirconia–adorned hand to my mouth.
“My goodness, I didn’t realize how late it was. The Sorting is starting in ten minutes!”
The girls have been avidly focused on my dissection of a Rashi-Ramban machlokes, but at the word “sorting” they all jump up. The annual Sorting is the major social event of the city, and all of the girls’ educational institutions, elementary and high school, gather for it. (The boys have their own separate Sorting ceremony.)
This year, it’s Shaarei Bnos Chochmah’s turn to host, and we’ve been getting ready for it for weeks. As I lead my class through the hall, I note the fresh wall hangings — pictures of rabbanim, deep philosophical quotations, essays by the younger students, and research papers by the older ones. Our intellectual prowess is on full exhibition for our less academically inclined guests. Secretly, I think it’s a bit too in-your-face, but I suppose we have to show off somehow. We certainly aren’t going to win any bragging contests for our buffet table.
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