OU TORAH of the Sea By Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb

Teaching young children has always been a joy for me. One of teaching’s special advantages is the clarity that emerges from conversation with people under the age of ten. A cute and oft-told story describes the reaction of one fourth grader to the lesson in which he first learned the difference between poetry and prose. He remarked, “Wow! I have been writing prose all of my life and didn’t even know it!” I guess it was in the fourth grade when I first learned the distinction between prose and poetry, and when I became aware not only that I was writing prose, but that much of what I was studying in Jewish day school was prose, not poetry.