There is something for Everyone at them JCC Maccabi Pro-sport Camps The BiG Story from page 59 Ages 6-14 WNBA Detroit Shock Girl's Basketball Camp • Golden Bear Oasis Golf • NFL Flag Football • Planet Rock Rock Climbing • JCC Soccer Camp • JCC Tennis Camp • Heavner's Canoe/Kayak • In-Line Hockey at Soccer Zone • Detroit Archery • Carl Childress c& Fred Goldberg Baseball Camp • Maybury Horseback Riding • Renaissance Fencing • Basketball Unlimited • Cheer! Michigan Cheerleading • Oakland Gymnastics • Ken Levy's Coed Kickboxing • NBA Basketball- Hoops 33 • JCC Lacrosse Camp Hurry, spots are filling up quickly! The JCC Maccabi Pro-Sport Camps are the best in town. With over 33 different sessions to choose from, one is sure to interest you! For more information or to receive a brochure, please call (248) 661-1010. There is still a limited number of spaces available for children with special needs to participate in Summer Camp with an advocate. Call (248) 661-7737 for more information. D. Dan and Betty Kahn Building • 6600 West Maple Rd. • (248) 661-1000 Jimmy Prentis Morris Building • A. Alfred Taubman Campus • 15110 West Ten Mile Rd. • (248) 967-4030 191, Q-ro tatectt\-1, PoDd three God, His angels and the rest of the world. One of the more inter- esting aspects of the tagin occurs when all the letters on which they are used are placed together, form- ing an abbreviation for ger tzedek, righteous convert. Tagin were con- templated frequently by one of Judaism's most scholarly and beloved figures, Rabbi Akiva, him- self the son of a convert. * Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet holds a numerical value, with aleph as 1, bet as 2 and so forth. Larger numbers are created by combining two or more letters. The most famous of these combi- nations is, of course, chet and yud. This makes 18 and forms the word chai, or life, inarguably the top charitable gift announced on holidays in every synagogue and temple. Some also believe the yud and chet combina- tion brings good luck, and wear it on embarrassingly large gold medal- lions hanging from their necks. But before you buy your chai charm, take_this into con- sideration: The Torah makes no mention of numeri- cal values for Hebrew letters. In fact, this tradi- tion began around 135 BCE and is based on a Greek custom. * Midrash states that the artist Bezalel was able to complete the Holy Tabernacle, in which the Ten Commandments were contained, only because he knew a magical combination of Hebrew letters. Join us g the grand getaway Summar Foi-Dgy Comp August 6-g, 1999 Butz& Conference Center, Ortonville MI (Only 45 minutes away) ster or for more inform -397-4876 or 248-354- 3/5 1999 62 Detroit Jewish News onnection a community-wide project of Jewi Agency for Jewish Education and Jewish * The Talmud recounts that God formed our world by using the letter hey, then used the letter yud to create the world to come. The two letters combined make one of God's names. * Tradition tells that the letter yud complained to God when it was removed from Sarai's name after it was changed to Sarah. So God renamed Hosea by adding a yud, to make it Joshua_ x Max Gondos provided the first Hebrew shorthand in 1866. What took so long? Until the late 1880s,c__-\/ Hebrew was a language relegated mostly to Jewish texts. Only after World War I, when it was accepted as an official language of Palestine, did Hebrew find any popular usage. x In addition to the regular let- ters, the alephbet consists of five 16;=; ters to be used only at the end of words: chet, nun, mem, tzadee and peh. According to the Talmud, these were created by the prophets and had been known initially only by a select few, including Adam, Abra- ham, Isaac, Jacob ,/ and Joseph, after whose death they vanished. The letters were later revealed to the Jewish people through Moses, who was said to have seen God cr:/ , ating crowns for the letters when he received the Ten Commandments. x A great deal of mystery exists about the letter aleph, which begins the Hebrew c; alphabet. The rabbis stated that while God gave the Ten Com- mandments to Moses, He Himself spoke only the first letter on the tablets — aleph, which begins the word anee, or "I" (from "I am the Lord your God ...") The letter is pronounced rather faintly, not unlike a deep whisper (as with "a" in "April"). Later, the aleph came to be associated with the most secret and unknowable aspects of God.