I’m beginning to get a clue about how reluctant Adonai is to discipline us, even though he does and must. In teaching the bar- and bat-mitzveh preteens for the past several months, I’ve become close to many of the young ones I help instruct each week. Some, I’ve grown especially proud of for their maturity and earnest desire to do the right thing.

But kids are kids are kids. This week, one of those had an anxious, restless week. He was fidgety in his chair, talkative when it wasn’t his turn, and generally disruptive.

I hate to send kids up to their parents in the middle of service, but sometimes it simply must be done so that our time with the rest of the kids isn’t wasted. After a third “strike” today, I reluctantly told him, “That’s really close to your last strike. I don’t want to send you upstairs.”

As fate would have it, while I was struggling to do what I knew I had to, he stepped up and submitted to the penalty he knew he’d earned.

“I think I better go up then,” he said, knowing it really WAS his third strike for disrupting class.

Wow. Some of these kids may be kids, but in the midst of it, they are closer to the mindset they need to be ready for their bar/bat mitzveh than perhaps they realize.

I’m just glad I was on my game this week, so that my co-teacher and I had a handle on all 15 kids we teach. Last week I showed up, but as I had both a head cold and a migraine headache at the time, I wasn’t much help. That was a bad week, and while I never considered Botox for migraines or anything so radical, I did have to go out and get a new supply of migraine medicine. Yikes!