Taking Special Care With the Little Details During High Holidays

His arms flecked with red marker, 4-year-old Brandon Kingsley balanced himself on the back of a Lilliputian-sized blue chair in the preschool room and looked disdainfully at his friend.

“I like Yom Kippur better,” Brandon said. “Rosh Hashana isn’t fun.”

“Yes it is,” said his friend, Cody Sprague, tugging on his black Godzilla shirt. “We get to eat!”

A major challenge of the High Holidays is bringing lofty Jewish theology down to a 4-year-old’s level, said preschool teachers at the Jewish Community Center of Orange County in Costa Mesa.

“Children learn through their senses, through things they can taste and touch,” said Teri Ferentz, director of the preschool.

Yom Kippur, celebrated today, is about repentance and fasting. It doesn’t translate as easily into classroom activities as Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, a day of horn-blowing and food.

“Rosh Hashana is easier to teach because it’s full of sensory moments,” Ferentz said. “We have the kids dip apples in honey or put raisins into challah bread to celebrate the sweetness of the new year.”

Nellie Kirchberg, a teacher at the preschool, corralled the kids onto a mat and asked them to ponder how they could improve themselves in the new year.

“How do we become better people?” she asked.

“Don’t hit babies,” one child said. “If you got a blocked nose, get a tissue.”

“Love anyone you like,” another said.

“You don’t go into the potty if someone’s left it unlocked,” a third said.

The kids nudged and prodded each other on the mat, eager to stop brainstorming so they could romp around the playground or chuck balls of blue Play-Doh at each other.

But the mood changed when Kirchberg brought out the shofar--a ram’s-horn trumpet--and asked if anyone wanted to sound the horn for the holiday.

The children perked up and shouted to be chosen, raising their hands and elbowing each other in a munchkin melee.

“I wanna do it.”

“Me, pick me!”

“Hey, you hit me.”

Kirchberg handed the horn to Tom Dagan of Irvine, who blew on it with puffed-up Dizzy Gillespie cheeks until his face turned red. He took a gulp of air and wiped the spit off his mouth with a satisfied smirk.

The shofar was passed among the eager horn players, Kirchberg wiping it off with a tissue between blows.

Hanging on the wall across from the mat was a 4-foot cutout of a shofar, streaked with gold paint and doused with glue and gold glitter. Also posted was a wall-sized cutout of a whale the children had constructed earlier. A stick figure--representing Jonah--was pasted to its belly.

Teacher Pam Solomon said the biblical story of Jonah getting swallowed by a whale is a good one for younger children to grasp--plus it’s a tale read from the Torah on Yom Kippur.

“Jonah prays for forgiveness, and the whale spits him out,” she said.

Ferentz said she’s picky about which tales to tell on the holidays; some biblical stories are laced with heavy-handed examples that may haunt children.

“For example, the Passover story is very scary,” she said. “There are plagues, dead cows and rivers of blood. We need to be careful about what we tell young children.”

For Larry Carr of Costa Mesa, whose son Sam is enrolled in the preschool, nothing can be worse than what his kids have watched on television.

“Kids are so inundated with information these days that they don’t know what to believe,” he said, signing his son out early for the holiday.

He said it’s important to him that Sam is at least introduced to the concept of repentance, even if it doesn’t fully register.

When asked what he was going to do to be a better person in the new year, Sam said he will say yes if someone asks to nap by him during rest time and will share his ice cream.

He said he’d have to repent for only one thing this year: throwing tea in his sister’s face.

According to Sam, he has much less to repent for than his bickering older brother and sister.

“They were fighting again in the car this morning,” he said, his right shoelace dragging in the playground dirt. “My mom said they had to stop.”