This is a strange thing to be teaching to kids, so I hope that you will preview it before having them watch it. I am going to teach about what self-denial means by looking at the original Hebrew wording and a parallelism in Isaiah 58. I don’t teach doctrine to kids normally, but I have a lot of parents asking me about helping their kids understand the meaning of the Feasts and how to observe them, so this year I will be explaining what the scriptures call “self-denial” or the “affliction of our souls.” I am also going to talk about the importance of genuine repentance in our lives and how it can change us for the better and help us to grow up.

Click on the blue text for a link to a worksheet to help you understand parallelisms better:

Now is the time to start thinking about Bible Curriculum for those of you who are either new to the yearly Torah cycle (Genesis through Deuteronomy in a year) or want a more structured way to teach it to your kids. My dear sister Sarah Hawkes Valente has updated her already awesome Lessons in Yeshua’s (Jesus’s) Torah for school age and younger kids. It comes complete with lessons, questions, craft ideas and coloring pages. It’s a great way to introduce kids to Torah for the first time.

So, we’re going to bail on the Torah Portion cycle for the rest of the year in order to talk about the Fall Feasts over the course of the next three weeks. We start at the very beginning (a very good place to start) with the Coronation Festival of Rosh HaShanah or Yom Teruah. It is my hope to get the kids excited about celebrating the coronation of our King!

One of my favorite things about the Feasts is listening to a musical group called the Maccabeats. Some are hilarious and some are very touching, but many of them revolve around the feasts. See if you can spot the inside jokes that we see throughout the videos – like the three Greek bullies from “Candlelight” and the NASA space costume from – well almost all of the videos!

This one involves something I just barely mentioned – the books being opened on  Rosh HaShanah. There is the book of life, which we are all familiar with, but Daniel 7 says that there were multiple books! Maybe sometime we will get into those at some point. On Rosh HaShanah, a traditional Jewish greeting is “May you be inscribed for a good year.” There is an extra focus on doing good deeds and focusing on repentance during the ten days between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, which can be a very valuable lesson for the kids – of all ages!