Our Minute of the Day was about the continued news about world reactions to what many in the world believe to be Iran's ambitions to make nuclear weapons. Today's news story, as reported on Al Jazeera, showed Hilary Clinton, the American Secretary of State, making the announcement that new economic sanctions against Iran are the next step in putting pressure on the Iranian government to fully comply with the UN's oversight of Iran's nuclear program. This is relevant to our introduction to Israel for several reasons as follows:
Israel feels under threat from Iran as Iran's leader has stated in the past that he would like to change the look of the Middle East by "wiping Israel from the map", a Threat and promise of his potential course of action against Israel. Today's reports about new sanctions are, perhaps, the next step in the "west's" lead up to what might be future military action against Iran's nuclear program. We spent a good deal of time on this and then tied it to the teachings of Judaism, notably the promised land, a future of peace and prosperity for Israelis and the will of Jews to do the will of God (live up to the Covenant). It's always very interesting to hear all of your perspectives on the religious teachings that we study and their connections to world events and culture!
Please see yesterday's post for the Intro to Judaism slide show, well, here it is again.
We ended the class today with what I like to call "The Telephone Game." There are enough cell phones and computers in the class that we made teams of 3 or 4 - each team was split and one part of the team was given a list of terms to look up and define but they had to text those terms to the other half of their team for them to look up. This second part of the team then had to text back the answers . . . . we'll begin the class tomorrow by finishing this task! It was a hoot and everyone seemed to enjoy it!
Tomorrow I'll post the list of terms and answers to them.
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