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Little Hefker, Dov and Hefker Finder from The Illustrated Mishnah.
Israeli Rabbi From Livonia
Writes Mishnah For Children
RICHARD PEARL
Staff Writer
0
ne lesson former Li-
vonian Don Channen
likes to teach
children is that "not
everything you see is lost."
He knows whereof he
speaks.
In 1973, while the "Jews for
Jesus" movement was claim-
ing a lot of young Jews — in-
cluding Don's brother, Ben —
Don was heading for Israel
and his own eventual
reclamation as a ba'al
teshuvah, or penitent.
Today, the one-time "hippie
college dropout" is Rabbi Don
Channen, 35, principal of two
West Bank chedars for
children of American Jewish
settleis and author/illustrator
of his first book,The Il-
lustrated Mishnah,
a
children's guide to oral inter-
pretations of the Torah, to be
published in English next
year.
Ben, 33, lives in Long
Beach, Calif., where the
pressures of earning a living
may have somewhat
diminished his participation
in the Jews for Jesus move-
ment, according to the rabbi.
"But once that sort of thing
gets into a person, it's very
hard to get it out," he added.
During a visit last week
with his father in his
hometown, Rabbi Channen
recalled how it happened.
A 1972 graduate of
Clarenceville High School,
Channen was studying
microbiology at Michigan
State University when the
Yom Kippur War broke out in
1973.
Like many of his friends,
Channen had quit formal
Jewish studies after his bar
mitzvah a few years earlier.
Prompted by Israel's struggle
as well as his own against the
pull of the "Jews for Jesus,"
he headed for Israel. Arriv-
ing there in December, Chan-
nen was frustrated in trying
to learn about Judaism. The
ba'al teshuvah movement was
just beginning, he said, and
besides, "What school would
teach a hippie? The religious
world was afraid of my
generation, especially in
Israel."
On the verge of giving up
and returning to the United
States, he was invited to at-
tend the Diaspora Yeshiva on
Mount Zion. "Imagine that,"
he recalled thinking. "Jews
for Jews!"
Given free room, board and
classes and finding himself
surrounded by other adults
also searching for their
Jewish identities, Don Chan-
nen stayed in Israel and, in
1978, married Yehudit Jaffee,
an olah and Diaspora Yeshiva
student.
It was then he wrote a story
based on the Mishnah that
would be the basis for his
book.
At first, he set the story
aside. But as his and
Yehudit's family grew — they
now have six children, with a
seventh on the way — Chan-
nen found he had a tremen-
dous desire to make the story
and some sketches he'd done
into a book for the kids.
"The Mishnah is taught in
the schools very dryly," he
said. "And kids today are
bombarded by all kinds of
videos on television — a
secularism that's hard to com-
pete against.
"I wanted to find out how to
get into the kids' heads and
also to make it relevant to life,
because that's what makes it
fun to learn. When they taste
something real, they'll go for
it."
So strong was his desire,
said Rabbi Channen, that he
taught himself to draw, incor-
porating cartooning styles
from Dr. Seuss and Walt
Disney into his work. Each of
the seven Mishnahs is accom-
panied by 21 cartoons and the
book took a year to produce.
"The hardest part was get-
ting the lines to rhyme," said
Rabbi Channen, who got help
from Yehudit. "We almost got
a divorce," he said.
One of the stories is about
finding lost objects, the point
being that "not everything
you see is lost. Money on a
table is not lost, but
something at the bottom of
the sea is lost even if it has a
name," he said.
The story tells about how
little Dov seeks a job from
Hefker Finder and Little
Hefker by looking for a lost