One April school day, outside Atlanta, in the band room of the North Springs Charter School of Arts and Sciences, 30 members of the school’s Jewish Culture Club sat waiting beside a table stacked high with $400 worth of pizza. They periodically glanced at the door. They only had 30 minutes, and the rabbi was late.
Suddenly the doors swung open. David Silverman hustled to the front of the room, smiling genially. “Sorry!” he said. “Traffic.” The change in the room was immediate; the students leaned forward, rapt. Silverman launched into an off-the-cuff lecture—a series of musings about the importance of cyclical change in life. “There is a cycle I want to submit to you exists in the Jewish people and exists in nature,” he said. “Inspiration. Hard work. Accomplishment. Inspiration: exodus from Egypt. Hard work: seven weeks in the desert. Accomplishment: a spiritual relationship with God.” This cycle is like their own lives, he told his audience, although for them the desert is a tile-floored school.
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