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By Root 1224 0

on the face, a ruler blow across an outstretched hand, shaking us by the scruff of the neck and banishing us to the playground, summoning our parents, a black mark in the class register, copying out a chapter from the Bible twenty times, writing out five hundred lines: "I must not chatter during class" or "Homework must be done on time." Anyone whose handwriting was not neat enough was made to write pages upon pages at home in calligraphic writing "as pure as a mountain stream" Anyone whose fingernails were untrimmed, whose ears were not immaculate, or whose shirt collar was a bit grimy was sent home in disgrace, but not before being made to stand in front of the class and recite loud and clear: "I'm a dirty boy, being dirty is a sin; if I don't have a wash, I'll end up in the bin!"

The first lesson every morning at Tachkemoni began with the singing of "Modeh ani":

I give thanks unto thee, O living and eternal King,

who hast restored my soul unto me in mercy: great is thy faithfulness.

After which we all trilled shrilly but with gusto:

O universal Lord, who reigned ere any creature yet was formed ...

And after all things pass away, alone the dreaded one shall reign...

Only when all the songs and the (abbreviated) morning prayers were complete did our teachers order us to open our textbooks and exercise books and prepare our pencils, and generally they launched straight into a long, boring dictation that went on until the bell for recess rang, or sometimes even longer. At home we had to learn by heart: chunks of the Bible, entire poems, and sayings of the rabbis. To this day you can wake me up in the middle of the night and get me to recite the prophet's reply to Rab-shakeh, the envoy of the king of Assyria: "The virgin, the daughter of Zion / hath despised thee, and laughed thee to scorn; / the daughter of Jerusalem / hath shaken her head at thee. / Whom hast thou reproached and blasphemed? / and against whom has thou exalted thy voice?... I will put my hook in thy nose, / and my bridle in thy lips, / and I will turn thee back by the way by which thou camest." Or the Ethics of the Fathers: "On three things the world stands ... Say little and do much ... I have found nothing better for a body than silence ... Know what is above thee ... Separate thyself not from the congregation, neither trust in thyself until the day of thy death, and do not judge thine associate until thou comest to his place ... and in a place where there are no men endeavor to be a man."

At Tachkemoni School, I studied Hebrew. It was as if the drill had struck a rich vein of minerals, which I had touched for the first time in Teacher Zelda's class and in her yard. I was powerfully drawn to the solemn idioms, the almost forgotten words, the exotic syntax, and the linguistic byways where barely a human foot had trodden for centuries, and the poignant beauty of the Hebrew language: "And it came to pass, that in the morning, behold, it was Leah"; "ere any creature yet was formed"; "uncircumcised of heart"; "a seah of suffering"; or "Warm thyself by the fire of the wise; but beware of their glowing coals, lest thou be burnt, for their bite is the bite of a fox, and their sting is the scorpion's sting ... and all their words are like coals of fire."

Here, at Tachkemoni, I studied the Pentateuch with Rashi's witty, light-winged commentary, here I soaked up the wisdom of the sages, lore and law, prayers, hymns, commentaries, supercommentaries, Sabbath and festival prayer books and the laws of the Prepared Table. I also encountered familiar friends from home, like the wars of the Maccabees, the Bar Kochba Revolt, the history of Jewish communities of the Diaspora, lives of the great rabbis, and Hasidic tales with the moral attached. Something too of the rabbinic jurists, and of the Hebrew poetry of Spain and Bialik, and occasionally, in Mr. Ophir's music lessons, some song of the pioneers in Galilee and the Valley, which was as out of place in Tachkemoni as a camel in the snows of Siberia.

Mr. Avisar, the geography teacher, would take us with him