Throughout the year, each unit of TABC’s STEM: Biomedical Sciences course is devoted to another day of creation. Students were tasked with finding plants from the surroundings and classify them with their peers—this is just the beginning of classification and dissections for students which will begin right after Chanukah. In honor of Chanukah, they also had a lesson on oils and how fats can affect their bodies. Building on that, students have a research project due over Chanukah describing the process of obtaining and lighting the menorah in the beit hamikdash. As Rosh Chodesh always falls on Chanukah, students got a quick break from biomedical studies and focused on the sun, moon and stars, with a surprise in-class research project on the origins of Rosh Chodesh and the mitzvah of kiddush hachodesh.

Students worked in pairs researching the basis for the mitzvah from the Torah, how the Mishnayot explained how it was put into practice and eventually how the modern calendar was set on a 19- year cycle by Hillel the Second. They looked up research articles on the Jewish calendar’s accuracy and found out that it is so accurate that it is only off by one day every 14,000 years—that’s pretty accurate for individuals without computers! Students had to do all the research themselves and really came away with newfound skills.