At one of the stops on my journey as a Jewish educator, I directed a community Jewish Teacher Resource Center housed in the basement of a Day School. We had a basic collection of resources, and coordinated a number of worthy events and programs. However, our main attraction, by far, was a laminating machine. The laminator was an immense, weighty, metal lump of unknown age and origin. There were vague references to a mysterious “grant” and “Soprano” style suggestions that I not delve into the machine’s murky past. Hey! Whatever. With that unsightly device, my resource center could grant eternal life to tattered, but treasured posters, and make modest student art projects look like masterpieces. Best of all, the opaque tangle of organizations and committees that funded the resource center had decreed that laminating services could be offered to religious schools and synagogues free of charge.
Religious school principals from synagogues that had not spoken to each other since Sinai, attended meetings together at the resource center with armloads of stuff to be laminated. Teachers from competing schools eagerly gathered at resource center events with projects for lamination.
No matter what philosophical or theological differences the various Jewish institutions had (and they had many), everyone loved to laminate for free at the resource center. Shalom bayit in the form of a hulking, smoky laminator – who would have guessed!?
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