Rabbi Yaakov Green (’98) Head of School I love the windows in my office. They face directly onto what I grew up calling the quad, but now is known as the Ezra Schwartz  zk”l  Field, and it is the heart of the Maimonides School campus. This is where so much learning and play (the very deepest form of learning) take place during a typical school day. Now that school is out for the summer, and camp here at school has begun, there is even more courtyard play and fun to behold.   As our students navigate through the rules of the various games they play, each moment is an opportunity to learn and test the values of fairness, truth, teamwork, winning, losing, grace, patience, and the list goes on. And one of the most important, most easily overlooked moments and values is that of the “do-over.”   Whether it is the sweetness and swiftness of children moving past a disagreement into “let’s just do it over,” or the deepest learning that takes place in failing and losing with g...

Rabbi Asher Lopatin (’82) Many years ago, in the 1970’s, our class (Maimonides ’82) was privileged to learn  Sefer Bamidbar  with a real genius, Rabbi Harold Rabinowitz. If you have any doubts about his brilliance, see the Rav  zt”l ’s introductory note in  The Halakhic Mind  (a very difficult and profound work of the Rav) where he effusively thanks Rabbi Rabinowitz for his help with the book.   Rabbi Rabinowitz wanted to bring to life  Parshat Bamidbar , which deals with counting  B’nai Yisrael  and describing how they camped around the  Mishkan , by infusing the class with  Talmudic  teachings. So he moved tables and chairs around to demonstrate how the tribes and clusters of tribes would move, according to the two  Talmudic  paradigms,  k’koreh  – like a beam – or  k’teiva  – like an ark (or a table). Truth is, I don’t remember much else from that class on  Parshat Bamidbar , but I remember...