What do you see? What do you notice?
Amidst the day-to-day blur of our busy lives, we all too often fail to notice the details around us, details that offer us opportunities for growth, gratitude, and connection. What if we really took the time to slow down and notice the details around us?
Consider Noach for a moment. Hashem tells him exactly how to make a tevah – out of gopher wood, to detailed specifications with three stories of compartments, a skylight, and finished with caulking both inside and outside with pitch. Noach pays attention to the details, loading up the tevah with all the animals, food, provisions, and his family members, as Hashem requires. Attending to the details enables Noach, his family, and the animal world to safely survive the flood and rebuild once the waters receded. When it is all over, Hashem rewards him with a rainbow as a sign of the covenant that He would never again flood the earth to punish mankind for their sins.
Rainbows take our breath away. The joyful display of colors stops us in our tracks and fills us with awe. It is always worth running outside to see! In the moment, we take in the magnificence of the rainbow and remember Hashem’s covenant. And as a reminder to stop what we are doing and be in the moment, we say a bracha: ברוך אתה ה’ אלוקינו מלך העולם זוכר הברית, (ו)נאמן בבריתו, וקיים במאמרו.
Rainbows don’t happen every day, but every day there are details waiting for us to take the time to notice.
One of the most important skills for success in school and in life is the ability to notice the details. Those details can make the difference in our personal outlook, professional success, and in the strength of our social relationships. Teaching children to stop, notice, describe, and make meaning out of what they notice is foundational for the development of strong comprehension skills in all aspects of academic learning. In school, we teach students to distinguish between essential and non-essential detail, notice patterns in the details, and figure out how the details fit together to form a whole.
Teaching children how to notice actually begins, however, when parents take their infants and toddlers out for a walk or when they read a book together. Literally pointing out a bird in a tree and describing what you see, for example, helps the young child develop the cognitive skill of directed attention and the ability to describe the visual-spatial world in language. This skill later translates to tracking and locating information in written text and finding one’s mistake in a math problem.
We model for children how to notice when we help them describe features of a puzzle piece they may be looking for or offer strategies to help them get unstuck when they become frustrated trying to complete an assignment. When we teach our children the language of problem solving, we are helping them develop the patterns of the thought they will need to keep themselves organized, construct a persuasive essay, and handle adversity with flexibility and confidence.
Modeling for our children the practice of noticing the positives in their behavior also shows our children that they are seen and appreciated. Pointing out when they are doing well and making good choices is the most durable (and inexpensive!) reinforcement tool available to us for shaping good behavior.
Noach paid attention to the details and Hashem rewarded him with the rainbow. During this time of our communal pain and anguish, we daven that our attending to the details in providing critical support for our Israeli family; our commitment to tzedakah, tefilla, and chesed; and our teaching our children to live the Torah values we so treasure will bring the rainbow we are deeply craving. May we notice and share the stories of good – they are plentiful and awe-inspiring! And may we as a community continue to bring out the best in one another.
Shabbat shalom!