Rabbi’s High Holiday Show-and-Tells Wow Kids

Rabbi Shmuly Gutnick travels around to South Florida schools and temples, teaching children about the Jewish holidays in interactive and quirky workshops that feature bees and traditional animal-horn shofars.

Rabbi Shmuly Gutnick is a one-man, traveling Judaic show.

He juggles, he MCs and he knows how to work a crowd of 50 preschoolers.

“They want to stay all day,” said Gutnick, 31.

Gutnick, more commonly known as Rabbi Shmuly G., visits temples and schools throughout South Florida and leads interactive programs that teach children of all ages about Jewish holidays, traditions and values.

He is the co-director of Florida’s Youth Network at Chabad — an orthodox movement in Judaism known for its outreach efforts.

With Rosh Hashanah — the Jewish New Year — and Yom Kippur — the Day of Atonement —around the corner, Gutnick is extra busy this time of a year and has already had more than 100 shows in September alone.

His performances border theatrical and circus-like, but never leave the realm of educational.

“It’s great for the kids. It’s very interactive and hands-on,” said Janet Kopel, an assistant teacher at Samuel Scheck Hillel Community Day School in North Miami Beach. “He explains how everything works in relation to the holidays.”

The most popular shows on the line-up for the High Holiday season: The Shofar Factory and The Honey Bee Workshop.

“Do you want to hear the shofar blown,” he repeatedly yells to a group of second-graders at Hillel Community School until he hears an appropriately boisterous response.

He pulls out a shofar — an animal horn that is blown on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — and makes the traditional sounds by blowing on the horn, alternating with him mimicking the sounds of a baby crying.

“We’re crying out to God, because we are all God’s children, and we are crying out for blessings for the New Year,” he explained.

Blowing the shofar is just one of the many holiday traditions. Honey is also a Rosh Hashanah staple, as Jews eat this food to prepare and pray for a sweet New Year.

For the honey bee workshop, Gutnick simultaneously plays the roles of rabbi, chef and bee keeper.

He keeps a beehive with close to 40,000 bees in the backyard of his Boca Raton home so he can make his own honey.

“It’s pretty hectic,” he said. “I pretty much become a beekeeper for the month.” He added that his four children, all under the age of 6, love to see their father tend to the hive in a full beekeeper suit.

He brings a couple thousand of his bees with him to his workshops to show and explain to the students how honey is made.

The kids jump up from the floor as Gutnick picks volunteers to reenact bees gathering pollen from flowers. They giggle and point when he puts a beekeeper’s mask, about 10 sizes too big, on 4-year-old Riley Spitz’s head, a student at Rabbi S. Gross Hebrew Academy on Miami Beach.

“Are bees our friends?” he asks the class of preschoolers at the Hebrew Academy.

“Yes,” he emphatically replies, saying that bees are responsible for growing many fruits and vegetables.

Even as Gutnick juggles and eats apples to keep the kids entertained, things get pretty technical while he explains how honey is made and why it is kosher even though insects are not.

Honey, he said, is not actually a byproduct of bees, but comes from the nectar that bees collect.

The kids help churn the honey, and each student leaves with his or her own small container.

“They don’t teach this stuff in school,” Gutnick said.

Students also make their own shofars during the Shofar Factory show. He said 700 shofars are made during the holiday season under his watch.

He typically uses goat horns that he collects from farmers across the country.Gutnick brings a number of mounted, taxidermic animal heads to the presentations and explains the rules in determining which horns can be made into a shofar.

The animal must be kosher — it chews its own cud and has split hooves — and must have hollow horns so that it can be blown into to create the sounds of a shofar.

But a cow’s horn, although kosher, cannot be used because the Jewish people want to be reminded of the good they have done on the holiday. In the Torah, the Jews prayed to a golden calf, something that is forbidden by the Ten Commandments.

A ram, however, is okay because Abraham sacrificed a ram to God instead of his son Isaac.

To make the shofars, Gutnick must first clean the cartilage out of the horn. Then the kids take over from there.

“They measure it, cut it, drill it, sand it, and shellack,” he said.

The younger children receive shofar key chains made from the tips of the horns that are cut to make the shofar.

“When a high school kid makes a shofar, it’s unbelievable, they go crazy with making their own,” Gutnick said.

When Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur conclude, Gutnick’s work isn’t finished. He has about 15 different high-energy workshops that he conducts throughout the year.

For the upcoming Sukkot holiday, he’ll transform his truck into a Sukkah Mobile — a car with a full-fledged sukkah on the back of it. Sukkot is a holiday where observers eat and sleep in outdoor, makeshift dwellings to remind themselves of the poor conditions in which the Jews lived as they were travelling in the desert for 40 years after they were freed from slavery in Egypt.

One of his most popular workshops, Matzah Bakery, teaches children how to bake Matzah, unleavened bread, for the Passover holiday.