Columbus Torah Academy: It's Showtime!

Our literature and our religion teach about metaphors. That life is a journey. That challenges are mountains. Difficulties are storms, some of which last forty days and forty nights.

And after we learn those lessons we leave the classroom to live those lessons. We can be told about these things, but some say you don't ever really know a thing until you live it.

And that's why our athletics and our extra curriucluars, in some ways teach lessons that touch us more deeply than any mid term exam ever could.

First of all, our athletics and our extra curriculars teach us pressure, and they teach us performance. In our drama, and our great performing arts, we learn that the show must go on. There's no making up your homework when the auditorium is filled and the lights go on. At that point, when the metaphoric whistle blows, and the ball is tipped, responsibility and accountability take on new, and very real, meaning.

Secondly they teach us perhaps the greatest lesson of all. The lesson that runs through our literature, and is the foundation of our very mission of Torah Academy, and greatest lesson of our Jewish studies. And that is unity.

You see, in a classroom, like it or not, it's every man for himself. In that domain, your classmates are your competitors. We may learn essential skills, and essential lessons. But we do so on our own, each achieving our own individual grade point average.

But a team is different. On the soccer pitch, on the diamond, or on the hardcourt, or on a stage we learn that we are a part of something bigger than us. A team is greater than the sum of its parts. From its star players to the lowliest team managers, a team is reliant on the contributions of all. A dramatic performance is reliant in its writers, its directors, its actors, its stage managers. You don't get individual awards in a baseball game. You win as team, you lose as a team. And you better believe every single member of a cast tastes the glory and the magic that is a public performance.




To be on a team is to fulfill our greatest lesson of all. That is why I'm sure you alumni out there may have forgotten that paper you wrote for Mr. Guinan, or that test you took for Dr. Don. But you have not forgotten the steal and lay up you made against Granville, or the double you hit against Madison. Because not only were those individual achievements, but you made them a part of a community, and so the community shared in your success. And they shared in your defeats. We learn that those things we do that matter only matter because we did it for a greater good. And that's what it means to be on a team, the lesson we teach at CTA.

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