Reading the Torah like a Child

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform. And now on YouTube and Substack. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria and a link is included in the show Notes. This week we read a new book of the Torah and are excited to be joined by Ilana Kurshan. Ilana is the author of If All the Seas Were Ink, winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. She has worked in literary publishing both in New York and in Jerusalem as a translator and foreign rights agent, and as the book’s editor of Lilith Magazine. Kurshan is a graduate of Harvard University, summa cum laude in history of science, Something close to My Heart, and Cambridge University with a master’s in Philosophy and English literature. She teaches and studies Torah in the Jerusalem where she lives with her husband and five children. Welcome, Ilana. It’s an absolute pleasure to start the new year with you as our guest.

Ilana Kurshan [00:02:23]:
Thank you so much. It’s so wonderful to be here.

Geoffrey Stern [00:02:27]:
So, you know, every time we have a wonderful author like you, I get to read the book and I absolutely enjoyed it. We’re coming back from New Year’s break and I have to say I was in LA reading Fancy Nancy to my granddaughter. She actually, the book that she got for Hanukkah that she loves has to do with a snowman farting. We’re not gonna get into that. But I know about Fancy Nancy, and I know from my older granddaughter about Amalia Badalia. So it was like meeting new/old friends and bringing them to something that Adam and I love passionately, which is Torah. So why don’t you just spend a few minutes talking about your past and history and what brought you to write this, a wonderful book.

Ilana Kurshan [00:03:15]:
Sure. So, first of all, it’s very nice to be starting a new safer as we start the new secular year and that Sefer Shmote and January 1st often overlap. So it’s nice that it’s nice to have that synchrony. And I always think that when we start reading Sefer Shmot, it’s good preparation, like getting us in the mind already starting to think about Pesach as the next major, you know, in a Torah sense of a chag coming up. So. So it’s nice to be nice to have our head in Shmot. So I wrote my book Children of the Book, basically, because. So I’ll tell you, my. My youngest child, who is five, likes to hear the same books again and again. And, you know, he goes through phases with books where there’ll be a set of a few books that he wants to hear over, such that no sooner have we turned the last page than already he’s asking me to start again and read over from the beginning, and then he’ll, you know, have a few books that we read over and over. And at some point, it occurred to me, as I was reading to my kids, the same book, same picture books over and over, it occurred to me that this idea of reading the same five books over and over is a very Jewish way of reading, because as Jews, we read the five books of Moses again and again every year in synchrony. Right. Starting in the fall with Bereshit and then concluding the following fall when we conclude SeferDevarim. And this is just how we read Torah. We read books. We read these same books again and again. And the reason we’re reading them is not because, you know, we want to find out what’s going to happen at the end. Please don’t give us any spoilers. We need to know. Or because we want to have these books to, like, a Goodreads log and say, like, look how many books I read this year. You know, people are always advertising at the end of the year how many books they read. That’s not why we read Torah. It’s also not why, by the way, it’s also not why we read the prayer book. Like we read the Sidur because we’re trying to forge some sort of connection through the text. Right. It’s not about checking the book off a list. And I think the same is true when we read with children or grandchildren. The point is not getting through the book, finding out what happens, saying, done with that one. No, the point is the connection that’s forged with the child. The experience of rereading, of somehow managing to glean new meaning both in the text, but also in your relationship with the child through that experience of rereading. And what I tried to do in my book was really to explore the connections between the experience of reading with children and the five books of the Chumash. So, yeah, one, one quick example. You know, when as a parent, one of the parents of a newborn, one of the first books you read to your child, like soon as you get back from the hospital, Right. What do you get as your baby gift? You get some kind of black and white book that’s a series of black images on a white background. White images on a black background. Because babies can only see two infants. Newborns can only see two colors, right? They can only see black and white. And these are books, like usually they’re board books so the baby can drool all over it. And I remember reading this book to my firstborn and thinking at the time my son was still, you know, he was up at all hours of the day, all hours of the night, and sleeping through the day because babies don’t have their circadian rhythms adjusted yet. And I remember thinking that as I was reading him this book, I was really teaching him how to separate black, how to distinguish black from white so that his world could sharpen into focus, and how to tell day from night so he could sleep more regularly. Darkness from light. Yeah. And it occurred to me that this was also God’s first act in creating the world, was separating light from darkness. And moreover, as I read to him from the words that, you know, there were no words in this book. But as I pointed to the objects in these black on white illustrations, Bottle bath boat. I realized I was essentially summoning the world into being through language for my child, which is really what God did. Baruch shemar vay olam. That’s how God created the world. And that really launched my exploration of all of these parallels between the texts we read with our children and the experience of reading with our children and the books of the Torah.

Geoffrey Stern [00:07:25]:
Just , Just love it. And I was, you know, thinking about the Haggadah, which is As I said in the intro, the logistwetting book club. And on the one hand, you have to tell your child bayomahu for the purpose at hand, but then it also talks about all the days of your life. And as I was looking at the midrashim, one of them caught my eye. And it says, if you have no one to read it to, you should read it to the Le Briot, the creations. Which almost sounds like the wild things, you know, we are. The idea of reading out loud is. Is the idea of. It’s practical for the moment, but then it transcends the moment and it’s at every age. It’s really quite. And as you say, we read the Torah every week in the synagogue. Reading it out loud. We did a prior episode where we used a scholar to explain all the minutia of Jacob of Yaakov conniving way out of the. To get the birthright, because the audience knew what was going to happen. Like Megilat at Esther. They booed at the right time, they snickered at the right time. We compared it to drama and all of a sudden read it differently. And I think today what we’re going to try to do is read the verses, some verses from the Torah as a children’s story and see also how that affects us. And when I was talking to you by text before, you said, why don’t we talk about the burning bus? So the burning bush is kind of amazing because if you read through it, first of all, one word comes up over and over again. In Exodus 3:1-7, it says, Now Moses was shepherding the flock of Yitro, his father in law, priest of Midian. He led the flock behind. We’ll get to a second what that. What Everett Fox says about that. And then a messenger of God appeared to him, using the Hebrew word that is going to come back over and over again. Vayar malach hashem. And then it says, in a blazing fire, out of a bush, he gazed again using the same word to look. And there was a bush all aflame, yet the bush was not consumed. Moses said, I must turn aside to look at this marvelous sight. Again, the same word, to look. Why doesn’t the bush burn? He asks inquisitively asking a question as our children do. When God saw that he had turned aside to look. So God now notices the reader of the events and is. Is impressed. God called to him out of the bush. Moses, Moses. He answered, here I am. It goes on and continues. And Moses hid his face. He was afraid to look. Things in this story disturbed him. But I would hazard to guess he couldn’t look and he couldn’t look away. And then now God said, I have seen, yes, seen the affliction of my people. So here is the punchline. God says, using it twice. So I think you cannot read this story, and I thank you so much for bringing it to my attention without looking at this idea of the visualization of events and being impressed by what you see. Is that what you had in mind when you. When you said, let’s focus a little bit on this?

Ilana Kurshan [00:10:52]:
Yes, in part. I mean, I think this story is really about stopping to pay attention that you. So often we go through life running from one thing to the next, trying to get things done, be productive, squeeze as much into the day as we can. And the reason that God chooses Moshe based on this story is because Moshe is someone who stops to notice when things are amiss. And this really typifies Moshe. He stops to notice the bush that’s burning but not consumed. What could this be? Asura nav’. Ere. Let me stop and go look and see what’s going on here. Moshe stops. He sees injustice, right? He can’t stand it. When he gets completely riled up. When he sees the Egyptian beating the Hebrew, when he sees one Hebrew beating another. Moshe is a person who notices when things are amiss in the world. And he can’t stand still and ask questions, why is the world like this? Does it have to be this way? Can the world be otherwise? And that is what God is looking for in a. In a messenger, in a redeemer. It’s interesting because I would argue that the rabbis actually remake Avraham in Moshe’s image. Because when they try to figure out why God chooses Abraham, they say, and this is the midrash, Abraham passed a burning building. And he said, why is this building burning? Why isn’t someone paying attention to it? Which is a famous midrash that I think is very much modeled on, you know, we know nothing about Abraham, but let’s take what we know about Moshe and apply that to Abraham. It’s very interesting. But. But yeah, really with Moshe, Moshe is someone who notices. And I think this is something that we really do also when we. When we read, and especially when we read aloud with an auditor, when we read aloud to our children, we pay much closer attention. We’re really. We’re paying attention to our child. We’re paying attention to the text that reading really demands of us. The in art of attention, an ability to really attune our senses to the text. And I think Jews are the best close readers that Midrash. The entire enterprise of Midrash, of commentary on canonical texts, the entire enterprise of midrash is grounded in an art of close reading. What does it mean to notice when something in the text is amiss? Why does it say Achar Hamidbar? Everett Fox picks up on that. It’s unusual. Why that terminology, right? What does it mean to notice the bumps, the inconsistencies, the unusual features of the text and to use those as a starting point for engagement, for dialogue? And that’s what Moshe does, that’s what the rabbis do. And it’s really, I think, what reading does for us. And that reading forces us to slow down, to pay attention. And especially in our rapidly pacing, you know, modern lives, I think there is such a place, you know, we’ve lost, to a large extent, we’ve lost the art of reading as books are meant to be read. Like, I don’t know how many of us has ever sat in an armchair with a pipe, a proverbial pipe, you know, and read for four hours, like by the fireside, the way people used to read Dickens. Like, we don’t read that way anymore in most books. In many books are getting shorter, chapters are getting shorter. People just read differently. We consume texts differently. But if we can reclaim the lost art of deep engagement with text, if we can slow down and stop to notice, I think there are many, many rewards, rewards to be to be gained.

Geoffrey Stern [00:14:32]:
He says fairy tales often portray the heroes going deep into a forest and the lake. So when we’re used to Everett Fox saying words sound like this, and it’s supposed to bring up this association here, he actually goes into a fairytail. And you wonder, Adam, I’m wondering what you think in terms of. The story is almost crafted, not only describing something that is based on looking, but making the reader look in terms of, I’m going down the rabbit hole. I have to be attenuated to these changes. It really changes the whole way you read the text when you start reading it through the eyes of a child who asks the question, the annoying question, what’s with that bush? What’s. What’s different? What do you think, Adam? And now a word from our sponsor. If there’s one thing we value at Madlik Podcast, it’s reading texts and talking about them. That’s why I’m excited to share something I created called VoiceGift Play. It fits in the palm of your hand like a remote control and clips onto any Book. It’s inspired by those old school museum audio guides, but this is personal. Voice Give Play stores up to 10 hours of audio across 999 numbered recordings. You simply enter a number to record a comment, memory or explanation, and enter the same number to play it back. It’s perfect for B’ Nai Mitzvah, practicing their laning, capturing grandpa’s favorite tune, or recording Chad Gad Yah in a voice that matters. Go to voice.gift, that’s http://www.voice.gift and use code MADLIK for 15% off. Thanks. And now back to our podcast.

Adam Mintz [00:16:27]:
So, Elana, so what you said, obviously, and you said it so beautifully, I would just add one little thing. Why this story, which obviously is, you know, is a major story. This is the story where Moses is chosen by God. Moses, who’s going to be the leader. Maybe in order to have vision, in order to be able to see in the future, you have to be able to look in the present very carefully. Someone who just thinks about the future, we kind of, you know, we consider them a luftwe. Right? We consider them that they’re not grounded enough. We don’t take them seriously. The real leader is the one who can have vision for the future because they understand the present. And maybe that’s what I thought in why the word vayar repeats itself so many times here. I don’t know what you think about that.

Ilana Kurshan [00:17:18]:
I love that idea and I think it very much. It overlaps very nicely with the idea that God’s first command to Moshe is . Moshe has to take off his shoes because he has to feel the earth with his feet. He has to be grounded. He has to be present. He has to be there. In fact, it reminds me there is a beautiful poem by the 19th century poet Jared Manley Hopkins, who was devout Christian. And I’m convinced this poem is based on the burning bush scene, although I’ve never heard anyone say it. But he has a poem. The world is charged with the glory of God, nor can foot feel being shod. I’ve skipped a little bit in the middle. But that is to say, because we have our shoes on, we don’t feel that the whole earth is on fire with God, you know, and it’s really like God wants Moshe to be wholly there and to see that the world is infused with divinity, that the whole world is. The whole world is on fire if you pay attention, right? The whole world is on fire with God’s glory, if you pay attention. But yes, very much. That you have to be rooted in this world. Which also links to the idea that. Why does Moshe even get to the bush? Because one of his sheep wanders off, and Moshe, who very much is doing his job, he’s responsible for the sheep. You know, he follows Miz Midrash. He follows the stray sheep and comes to the burning bush. Because Moshe’s doing his job in this world. It’s not because he has a fantastical vision that he follows or he sees something in the sky. No, he’s doing his job of, you know, following, tending to his sheep, which is his job. You know, he’s very much rooted in this world. And yes, I agree. That equipment to be, you know, to be the shepherd of B’ Nai Yisra’ el Katson Hasher in Lehem Roec. Right. Like, that’s the idea. He’s gonna be the shepherd of the children of Israel, so that they should not be like a flock of sheep without a shepherd. He goes from being a shepherd of sheep to a shepherd of people, which involves, on the one hand, being a person who can go up on Sinai and receive the divine gift of the Torah, but also someone who can listen to the people’s complaints and answer their questions and deal with all their problems. So Moshe really has to have a foot in this world. And also you can.

Adam Mintz [00:19:38]:
If you want to jump a little bit, Ilana, you could say maybe that was Moses’s problem when he came down the mountain holding the tablets and he saw the Jews worshiping the golden calf. Maybe he got a little caught up in the moment and he broke the tablets. Maybe had he had a little bit of a better vision if he’d been able to balance what he saw in the moment. You say being grounded, but he wasn’t grounded. He got afraid. He saw them worshiping an idol. He became afraid, and he broke the tablets. And maybe that, you know, was. Maybe that wasn’t the best way to handle it.

Ilana Kurshan [00:20:15]:
Yeah. You know, I write about the. Of course I write about the Golden Calf episode in my book, and I write about it in terms of. Similar to the terms you’re describing, that I was coming home one day from teaching. I was teaching Torah. It happened to be that parsha of the Golden Calf, Parshat Kitisa. And I came home, and we have a rule in my house, or we did at the time, that kids are not allowed to be on electronic devices when parents aren’t home. And I come in the house, and I find my kids are all huddled around the iPad all watching something on the tablet and I get very, very angry because they violated the rule. And I run over to them and I say, what are you doing? I am going to smash this tablet. And then of course, I realized that I have to contain my rage because I don’t want to be like Moshe. I don’t want to smash the T. And, you know, I need to be more forgiving and patient. So. So, yes, I very, very much identify with that story. And I think for me, the tension between screens and between reading is that reading requires us to pay attention on a whole other level. When we don’t have the images fully formed before us in dynamic shape, shifting color, as one does with a video. Say, you know, you really have to do the imaginative work of conjuring those scenes. And this is especially true when children make the transition from picture books to chapter books. You really have to be able to imagine, you know, what is depicted in words, which is really, I think, the challenge of monotheism, right? Everyone around you worships gods of stone and wood that they can see and touch, right? And feel. But you’re being asked, we as Jews are being asked to worship a God who, you know, as Moshe said, says, who should I say, sends me at the burning bush? He says, in our Parsha. But, but, but God, when the people ask me, you know, like, who, who told you? Who told you he’s going to redeem us? Who, who, who sent you to us? God says, Ehiye asher Ehiyey, in this very scene, I will be what I will be. And Moshe’s like, what? You gotta be kidding me. Like I’m supposed to say, I will be what I will be like, tell me you’re the God of the sky, the God of the, the sun. Tell me you’re a cow like the Egyptians worship. What is this? I will be what I will be. And God caters to Moshe and gives him some signs, you know, put your hands in your breast. But I think that’s really God. God making an allowance for Moshe, recognizing that Moshe’s gonna have to talk to people who are not necessarily going to be able to buy into this idea of this invisible abstract God. Like, like, like the, like the, like the non visual books that we read. If you are with me through that analogy.

Geoffrey Stern [00:22:58]:
Yeah, absolutely. So I want to say I really got into the role as I was reading your book. And when it said, take off your shoes, I start thinking of, you got to take off your shoes and start reading on the carpet. You know, you got to get comfortable. It’s in your House. You have many scenes reading in bed, when you wake up and when you go to sleep. It just made me think about everything differently. And I want to get back to this. Reading picture book books and reading images. And I remember once I was. Before I went to Columbia as a philosophy student, I said, I’m going to have to read a lot of books. So I took a speed reading class, and I was terrible. And part of the theory behind speed reading is when we start reading, we go from left to right or right to left, depending on the language. But we stop being able to scan the whole page. And children, according to this theory, see a page differently. They can see the whole page visually. And they were trying to get us to change the way reading. As I said, they were unsuccessful. But what was fascinating to me was his ability to see the whole picture in ways that adults can’t. And you have this little part of the book that talks about the Seven Silly Eaters by Marianne Hoberman. And it’s a wonderful story about everybody as a finicky eater, and they all have their own special foods, until one night they put everything together like a chulent, and they wake up in the morning, and all of a sudden they can eat the food together. But what’s missing from this story? Tell us about your Liav, who noticed a cello at the beginning of the story and the end of the story that you totally missed, and what it said about the book that he understood.

Ilana Kurshan [00:24:41]:
Yeah. Yeah, okay, so I’ll say. So I was reading. This is one of my favorite books, and I think it’s one of the best books, one of the best books to read aloud with children. And if you’re not familiar, I really recommend the Seven Silly Eaters. It was also recently translated into Hebrew in rhyme. It’s a book in rhyme. It’s a delightful book. Anyway, silly means picky in the book, I should say. Anyway, so I read this book many, many, many times with my kids. But it was on one of those many, many rereadings that my daughter Liav, who happens to be a violinist, and maybe this had something to do with it, but she said to me, she said, you know, it’s this book about this. This utterly exhausted mother who has to cook different food for each of her seven children and never gets a moment to herself. And my daughter pointed out that when the book begins, on the opening page of the book, the mother, you see her pregnant with her first child. Over the course of the book, she has these seven children. She’s playing the cello and at the end of. And in the middle of the book, the cello. Throughout the entire book, the cello languishes against a wall. And you see it in every picture. But, of course, the mother doesn’t have a free second to play her cello. She’s busy with her children. But then on the last page, once the children. I won’t spoil the book, but come up with a way, an ingenious way to feed themselves. The mother in the last scene is playing the cello again. And I, as the reader of this book, was very focused on the text. I’m also a very textual person. I’m not a visual person. And I was very. You know, I read this book many, many times, never noticed the role of the cello in the book. And my daughter. It was almost like, you know, I just thought of this now. It was almost like she was listening to a sonata. And she said, did you notice, Ima, that the cello is in there in the beginning? And then it comes. You hear the strains of the cello again in the end. And I was just focused on the whole orchestra and, you know, didn’t notice the cello part, you know, but she pointed that out to me, and it really made me realize, first of all, you know, that one can always get new things out of a book with every rereading, apropos of how we began with rereading Torah. But also that very often the book that you as a parent are reading is not the same as the book your child is hearing that you’re focused on on some aspect of the text. And your child may be focused on a completely different aspect of the text. Like. Like, my son, who went through a phase where he was obsessed with trains and, like. And. Or was trains. And then he went through a car phase anyway, he would notice the vehicles in every book we read. And, like, even, like, this random picture of, like, a toy car in the corner of a kid’s bedroom. But that’s all he would focus on. And I’d be reading the story about the boy and his brother fighting, and he’d be like, you know, how come this car. How come the car is upside down? Do you think he threw it? And I’m like, what are you talking about? You know, all that is to say that I think the things that kids notice are often very different from, you know, what we notice. I’ll tell one more story about that. When my son, My oldest son, who is now 14, but when he was, like, I don’t know, 4 years old or 5 years old, I took him for his annual like, checkup at the pediatrician. And they did some kind of developmental checkup with him where they would show him pictures, and he had to tell a story about what was in the picture to make sure he understood. Cause and effect, I think, was the idea. So the doctor showed him a picture of a boy, you know, who. A boy who’s tripped, and he falls on the ground, and his water. His water bottle spills everywhere. And so there’s a puddle of water from his bottle, and there’s a little stone. You’re supposed to say. And I guess what you’re supposed to say is, oh, the boy tripped over the rock, and so his water spilled. You’re supposed to understand the causality. And my son took one look at this picture and said, oh, the boy thought that you’re supposed to hit the rock to make the water come out, but really he was just supposed to talk to it. And the doctor was like, I have never heard that before. You know, And I was like, this is great. My son is paying attention to different things, and he sees the world through the lights of Torahj. How wonderful. So anyway, I think he kind of failed the developmental test test, but he. But he passed with flying colors in my book.

Geoffrey Stern [00:28:47]:
So that’s an amazing story. You know, I think you could easily read the book of Genesis all about sibling rivalry. It’s not about the Oedipus complex. It’s always about these two siblings, the firstborn, the second born. And then all of a sudden, you get to Exodus, and in the second part of the story, where Moses, as I said in the intro, said, I can’t talk. I’m thick lips, and so forth and so on, all of a sudden he says, oh, but, you know, I have an older brother. And you think back to the beginning of the story where Miriam is involved, and so much of what your book is having five children, you know, that it’s all about what one says, what one thinks, how they’re all different. And I think even that it made me read the story totally differently when I was looking at it from the. Through the lens of a young child and how, you know, you talk about breaking the tablets, and that’s all the kinds of things that kids do that parents who are dealing with kids do. And here we have this sibling rivalry type of thing where one kid realizes that the older child is giving him some tools that he doesn’t have yet, that they can fill in for each other, that they can get along. It just really what I would. I would love if listeners to this Podcast. And I really think that we should all grab your book and read it. What it does is it opens up a whole new way of reading our texts. Not dumbing them down as a child story, but thinking in terms of number one, how they were written. We always talk about telling the story to your children. I don’t know, I normally think of telling it to a 17 year old, not necessarily, necessarily a 4 year old or a 5 year old, but it talks, it teaches us to look at the stories at a more primal level, at a more visual level. I think it’s such an eye opener, literally, that really enriched my read of just the few verses that I read after I took off my shoes, got on the carpet and started looking at the Torah as a picture book. And the only thing that I’ll finish with is grandparents, because I have a feeling that Adam and I, when we think about some of these books, we’re at the stage in our life reading to our kids. And you have one wonderful part where you have one child who’s very proficient in the English and the other who says, I am slow of speech and slow of tongue in her own words. And you enlist your grandparents who live in the States to read with her remotely. And I think if we have, if I have a New Year’s resolution, it’s to read more to my grandkids. But tell us about the way that reading books really kind of not only helped her master her self courage to read, but also brought in the whole family together and created and sustained and complemented those relationships with grandparents.

Ilana Kurshan [00:31:58]:
Yeah, it really did. And I think it goes back to what you said about Moses and Aaron, that, that, you know, they’re both leaders of the Jewish people, but they have very distinctive roles to play and they really have to carve out their own roles. And you know, in the midrash, the rabbis look back to the burning bush as a place where there was initially some confusion about who was gonna have what role. Was Moshe originally supposed to be the high priest? And what, you know, was it because. Was it a punishment for Moshe that he was reluctant to take on this role, that Aaron took on this role? So this is really the site where that, where that individuation really happened, which is interesting. And I think, yes, for my daughters, the reason one of my daughters started reading with my parents is because I have twins and they both read very proficiently in Hebrew from a young age. But reading in English, which was very important to me for reasons that should be apparent if you’ve been listening until now, reading in English was much harder for one of my twins. And I would read every day with her sister, and she just refused because, you know, she felt too threatened by her sister’s proficiency. And I was lamenting this situation to my mother. This was during the pandemic. And my mother said, well, you know, I’m free now. You know, I’m not going into the office. Why don’t you have her call me every morning and we’ll read together? And that was really, really valuable. And it became a regular thing where I would send everyday photocopy. You know, I would photograph with my phone pictures of the next few pages in whatever book they were reading, send them to my mother so that my mother could follow along as my daughter read to her. And what really also made the difference was that this daughter insisted on reading completely different books from her twin. Like, it’s an age when kids read a lot of long series books. And her sister had a series that she loved reading was the Ivy and Bean series, I remember. And my other daughter was like, I’m not reading any of those books. Those are my sister’s books. I won’t read them. Those are her books. You know, it’s like it was in the same way that they had different friends in school, they also really started to individuate in terms of their reading preferences. And that’s only continued to this day. Like, they read very different kinds of books. They have different tastes. One reads more in Hebrew, one reads more in English. Although, ironically, those have reversed from the way it was when they were, you know, whatever it was, eight years old. You know, there are books that I still read aloud to both of them, of course, but when it comes to the books they choose to read individually, they have very, very different tastes. And I think that was also important, yes, in bringing the family together, but also in terms of enabling them to each discover, you know, who she was as an individual independent of her relationship.

Adam Mintz [00:34:40]:
As grandfathers we appreciate that book. We appreciate that story. Sorry. And we know your parents and we love your parents. So that’s also a nice piece to all of this.

Ilana Kurshan [00:34:53]:
Very nice.

Geoffrey Stern [00:34:53]:
So everybody, there will be a link to Children of the Book by Ilana Kurshan in the show notes. I encourage you all to grab a copy and read it. And as much, I encourage you all to read the Torah differently through the eyes of a child once in a while. And more importantly, to read it to the children in your life, whether they’re your kids, whether they’re your grandkids or just a youngster nearby. There is nothing like reading aloud. So, Ilana, thank you so much for joining us. Shabbat Shalom. And everybody enjoy cracking open this new book of Shemot.

Adam Mintz [00:35:30]:
Fantastic. Thank you, Elana.

Ilana Kurshan [00:35:32]:
Thank you both. Thank you.