May our learning be sweet this semester.

When I was introduced to the ritual, the honey cake was carved out in the shape of a Hebrew letter – that my learning for the school year would be sweet.

Since the new school year kind of coincides with Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) it’s a perfect match.

Other variations:

A large piece of paper with the Hebrew alphabet on it. A dot of honey was under each letter. You dip your finger in the honey, lick it, and then trace the letters.

And a apple with honey on it.

Below is a little info I found on About.com. I never did anything this elaborate or “official”. At one point when I was a new Gator, probably 1988 or so, I gave serious consideration to converting to Judaism. (Long-ish story for another post.) This book almost sealed the deal: Julius Lester’s Lovesong.

See a You Tube clip of Lester in my next post.

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(The following is excerpted from http://judaism.about.com/od/shavuot/a/shav_golinkin.htm)

And the rabbi puts a little honey on the slate and the child licks the honey from the letters with his tongue. And then they bring the honey cake upon which is inscribed “The Lord God gave me a skilled tongue to know…” (Isaiah 50: 4-5), and the rabbi reads every word of these verses and the child repeats after him. And then they bring a peeled hard-boiled egg upon which is written “Mortal, feed your stomach and fill your belly with this scroll… and I ate it and it tasted as sweet as honey to me” (Ezekiel 3:3). And the rabbi reads every word and the child repeats after him. And they feed the child the cake and the egg, for they open the mind…

Prof. Ivan Marcus devoted an entire volume to the explanation of this ceremony (Rituals of Childhood, New Haven, 1996). Here we shall only stress that this beautiful ceremony includes three of the basic principles of Jewish education:

First of all, one must commence Jewish education at a very young age. In a fourteenth-century illustration of this ceremony in the Leipzig Mahzor, one can see that the children are three, four or five years old, and this was also the custom among oriental Jews in modern times. A song by Yehoshua Sobol and Shlomo Bar relates that “in the town of Tudra in the Atlas mountains they would take a child who had reached the age of five… into the synagogue, and write in honey on a wooden slate from *Hebrew letter* to *Hebrew letter*. From this we learn that we too must begin the Jewish education of Israeli children at a very young age when their minds can absorb much information.

Secondly, we learn from here about the importance of ceremonies in the learning process. They could have brought the child into the “heder” and simply begun to teach, but that would not have left a lasting impression upon the child. The intricate ceremony transforms the first day of school into a special experience that will remain with him for the rest of his life.

Thirdly, there is an attempt to make learning enjoyable. A child who licks honey from a slate and who eats honey cake and a hard-boiled egg on the first day of class will immediately understand that the Torah is “as sweet as honey”. From this we learn that we must teach children in a gentle fashion and make learning enjoyable in order that they learn Torah with love.

http://judaism.about.com/od/shavuot/a/shav_golinkin.htm