Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

Last Sunday I had a chance to read another story for the students of the religious school. As all the good children books related to the High Holy Days were out, borrowed by the students on previous weeks, I selected one about Shabbat. That is an always appropriate topic. The book was titled “Yossef Mokir Shabbos, a Talmudic story from our sages” and besides having big pictures on every page and only a few lines of text in English it also had the story in (pointed) Hebrew. Hence the book is good for studying/practicing Hebrew as well. But be aware that this is not original Talmudic text (from Tractate Shabbos 119, but a modern paraphrase by R. Keren.

The story is simple: a gentile is told by a stargazer that all his money will end up in Yossef’s hands. So he sells everything buys a huge diamond, puts it in his hat that is blown into the river, where a fish gulps it. The fishermen catch the fish; sell it to Yossef right before Shabbat, because they know that Yossef loves Shabbat so much he would buy an extra fish even if it is almost late. The lesson from the last page: “If someone lends to Shabbos, Shabbos will pay him back.”

The children liked the simple, but colorful pictures, learned a few new words (wealth, property) and some of them guessed ahead correctly what will happen at the end.