Why are Schechter, Ramah and other schools and camps essential to our Jewish future?

On Passover we read about four types of children: Wise, Rebellious, Simple and the One Who Does Not Know How to Ask. Every child embodies all four traits while growing up, and Schechter and Ramah are uniquely positioned to successfully connect all four to their Judaism.

The Child who does not know how to ask — Children have opportunities to spark new passions and figure out what excites them at school and camp by exploring Torah study, intellectually stimulating classes, sports, arts, nature, Tfillah (prayer), community, and more. Children discover whole worlds they didn’t even know existed.

The Simple Child — Children new to Jewish rhythms become fluent in living a joyful, accessible Jewish life. A Ramah/Schechter graduate can enter any synagogue around the world and feel at home.

The Rebellious Child — Children who question everything and can be rebellious find role models in teachers, counselors and friends who pull them toward Judaism and Israel. At camp and school, it is cool to sing and dance, it is respected to read Torah and being and doing Jewish with your friends makes it more meaningful.

The Wise Child — Children seeking depth and wisdom can explore big Jewish ideas, advanced arts and sports, robotics, Torah learning and more, all with support and encouragement. 

Raising proud and caring Jews is challenging in a world of rising antisemitism and constant pressures. Schechter and Ramah remain safe, joyful places for kids to grow, play, and build identity supported by role models and friends.

This week’s parsha opens with the word tzav: "command." We are most familiar with this root from the word mitzvah. Although we often translate it as “good deed,” mitzvah should really be translated as “commandment.” 

When you think about it, the idea of being commanded is quite different from the idea of a good deed. We do good deeds because we want to. The impulse comes from inside us. We fulfill commands because we have to. They are imposed from outside of us. 

We live in a culture that celebrates freedom above all else. And we define freedom as getting to do what you want, as the absence of constraints. The idea of being commanded, of limiting our freedom, doesn’t sit quite right. 

In this week’s parasha, Vayikra, we begin the Book of Leviticus, which is perhaps the most challenging book of the Torah for us, modern day readers. Page after page describes offerings brought to the Mishkan: bulls, goats, sheep, grain, and incense. For many of us, the detailed instructions about livestock sacrifices feel distant and unfamiliar, even uncomfortable. What possible connection could these ancient rituals have to our spiritual lives today?

Yet at its core, the Book of Leviticus is about something deeply human and timeless: the desire to connect with God. The Book of Exodus ended with God’s presence filling the new Mishkan that was just built, and the Book of Leviticus comes to give us new instructions for communicating with God. 

The sacrificial system described in Vayikra was the primary language through which the Israelites expressed their spiritual lives, back then. A person who felt gratitude would bring a thanksgiving offering. Someone who made a mistake could bring a sin offering. Offerings marked moments of joy, hope, responsibility, and reconciliation. They were not simply rituals; they were structured ways of expressing the full range of human emotion and bringing those feelings into a relationship with God.

While we no longer bring animals to an altar (Thank God!), the spiritual impulses behind those offerings remain very much alive.

This year marks just one year short of the 30th anniversary of my bat mitzvah. Growing up Orthodox in a tight-knit community just outside of Chicago, not only did I have no idea women could become rabbis, I had never heard women chant from the Torah…until one fateful experience which changed everything for me:

Our family was friends with just one family who wasn’t Orthodox. They were Conservative. The first-ever egalitarian service I attended was the bat mitzvah of their middle-daughter at one of the first independent minyanim.  I was instantly mesmerized by the families that sat together and delighted in critical inquiry and spirited singing. The most spiritually meaningful Torah reading I had ever experienced was when Elisheva, the bat mitzvah --who is deaf-- chanted from the Torah, pronouncing every word perfectly and singing on key, using throat vibrations. Elisheva was the first female and deaf person I heard chant Torah. I then spent many subsequent Shabbatot with their family and learned from them that women could be rabbis, lead services, and so much more. All three of their children attended the local Schechter school, which to me, back then, was a totally exotic and utterly intriguing abstraction—a school where girls could—and were expected to—chant Torah and help lead services.

The most well known scene in my Parsha, Ki Tissa, is when Moshe is just coming down Mt. Sinai after 40 days of waiting for G-d to be finished making the tablets (which makes sense, because I guess downloading from the cloud took very long back then), and he sees that the Israelites are bowing down and dancing to a golden calf. He then throws down and smashes the tablets that G-d had just made.

You may think that when he saw what they were doing, he did this because he was so angry, and that he had good reason for doing this, but a close reading of Perek 32 shows that G-d had already told Moshe what the Israelites were doing and that was why G-d sent Moshe down the mountain. 

This is what happened in chapter 32:

In verse 7, G-d tells Moshe what is happening down at the camp. The Israelites, led by Aharon, made a calf, bowed to it, offered sacrifices, and said that the calf is their god who brought them out of the land of Egypt.

In verse 17, on his way down the mountain Moshe encounters his assistant, Joshua, and he tells Moshe that he hears war cries coming from the camp. 

In verse 18, Moshe replies that it isn’t the sound of war cries, but rather singing, so we know he has already started to hear what’s happening even before he can see it.

Finally, in verse 19, Moshe sees the calf and the dancing, and throws the tablets at the ground and they break.

Imagine you are in an arcade. What is your go-to game? Is it skee-ball, pop-a-shot, or whack-a-mole? Personally, I always go to the claw machine. I like it for two reasons. The first is that my mom always says that they are rigged, and that I should never play one because I’ll walk away disappointed. I usually don’t. More importantly, I love all of the moving parts and I want to understand everything about them.

When I was 11, I had the opportunity to create a carnival activity for Hanukkah. I chose to go over-the-top and build my own claw machine. I constructed a wooden box that would sit atop a table, and my dad and I designed a mechanism and a handle that would move the claw around horizontally. We got an electric claw to wire up to a pulley, and made a small box in the front of the machine for all of the electronics. I borrowed my siblings’ old toys to put inside, and just like that, it was complete. I love working on ambitious projects where I get to be creative and use my building and engineering skills. 

We are in the section of the Torah where we learn about the building of the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary for Bnei Yisrael in the wilderness. It was a huge undertaking with a lot of specific details. It was the kind of project I would really like.

In this week’s Torah portion, Mishpatim, we learn a lot of rules. I mean, a LOT of rules. Up until now, the Torah readings from Genesis and the beginning of Exodus have mostly told us stories. These stories teach us lessons and  even convey some rules, but the texts are largely narrative. We meet characters, follow conflicts and witness dramatic turning points. In Mishpatim, we experience a significant shift. The text is still situated within an ongoing conversation between HaShem and Moshe, but what dominates the parashah is a long list of laws about damages, labor, property, justice, care for the vulnerable, ethical speech and community responsibility.

It is understandable if we experience this list as a little bit dry, or even “boring.” There are no seas splitting, no thunder and lightning, no dramatic rescues. But that response is not a failure of our imagination. It may actually be the point! While we all cherish moments of spiritual inspiration and transformation, most of our lives are not made up of mountaintop experiences. Most of the time, we are simply living our regular lives by showing up to work, caring for family, dealing with frustrations, making decisions large and small.

When I studied Parshat Yitro I thought about many life lessons. For this Shavuon, I want to focus on one connected to asking for help in order to take care of others as well as ourselves.

Once Yitro has arrived at the encampment of the Children of Israel, he observes how Moshe spends his day.  Yitro saw that Moshe was the only one who would answer all of the questions that the children of Israel had and the only one who would judge their disputes. Yitro saw that Moshe sat dispensing judgment and counsel all day every day. 24-6. He was wearing himself out. He had no time to hang out with his family, or do anything else he wanted to do. Yitro says to him:

מָֽה־הַדָּבָ֤ר הַזֶּה֙ אֲשֶׁ֨ר אַתָּ֤ה עֹשֶׂה֙ לָעָ֔ם מַדּ֗וּעַ אַתָּ֤ה יוֹשֵׁב֙ לְבַדֶּ֔ךָ וְכָל־הָעָ֛ם נִצָּ֥ב עָלֶ֖יךָ מִן־בֹּ֥קֶר עַד־עָֽרֶב׃

"What is this thing that you are doing for the people? Why do you sit alone while the entire people station themselves before you from morning until evening?"

“A sense of humor is regarded as a sign of mental health—apart from excessive punning, which is another matter entirely,” wrote Helen Cresswell, a 20th-century English television scriptwriter and author of children’s books (67-8).

My former Hebrew school teacher, Mr. Blackman, of blessed memory, was more influential than any teacher I ever had—especially when it came to telling puns. In reality, it started as a competition: I was trying to out-pun Mr. Blackman. But you can’t compete at wordplay without learning to hear language differently. What began as a back-and-forth became a way of paying attention to how sounds can link words and phrases of unrelated meaning. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on which of my students you ask), that legacy lives on in the seventh grade Jewish Studies classroom.

Dr. Edward Greenstein, Professor Emeritus of Bible at Bar‑Ilan University, writes that wordplay was “an important convention of ancient Hebrew composition. The evidence of plays on personal names is particularly compelling” (968). Dr. Everett Fox reinforces this point, noting that “...[T]he Bible, if not an oral document, is certainly an aural one...many passages and sections are understandable in depth only when they are analyzed as they are heard” (x).

On our recent family trip to Israel to visit our son (studying this year at Yeshivat Ma’ale Gilboa in the Galilee), I was reminded of the visceral feeling of Israel running on Jewish time. By that, I don’t mean the custom of being 5 minutes late for everything, but rather, the sense of Jewish rhythm that permeates the land. Even at the airport, we were greeted by blessings and donuts at the El Al departure terminal in honor of the first night of Hanukkah. Arriving in Jerusalem, we were dazzled by huge menorahs on almost every block, a Hanukkah-light show illuminating the city walls, the heaping piles of fresh donuts in flavors that even Dunkin’ Donuts couldn’t imagine, the standing offer to light the menorah in restaurants, and the beautiful array of oil-menorahs in glass cases lining the alley-ways of the Old City. 

As we traversed the country, we experienced Jewish time around shabbat each week, not only in the crowds of people walking to various synagogues and minyans, and in the melodies reverberating from apartments and synagogue alike, but in the reminders among pedestrians and traffic patterns that the weekend for many people starts on Thursday nights and ends on Saturday nights, in the buzz of people shopping and preparing for shabbat, and in our realization that most brunch places closed by noon on Friday, and that by early afternoon, it was a challenge to find a quick bite of shwarma or a grocery store open for some last provisions. 

This week's parsha is Parshat Va'era. Parshat Va'era is a chapter in the Passover story. Parshat Va'era begins with Moshe feeling upset and insecure about himself. This is because in the previous parsha, Moshe went to Pharaoh and said “Let my people go,” and Pharaoh said “No.” Understandably, Moshe is not feeling so great about himself. His confidence is shaken—how will he ever make Pharoah listen? God tries to make Moshe feel more secure by revealing a new name to him. God tells him that he only appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El Shaddai but now, he appears to Moshe as Adonai. But even with God sharing a new name, just for him, Moshe still doesn’t feel ready for this big task of freeing the Israelites and leading them out of Egypt. He makes excuses, saying things like, "I’m not a good speaker,” or "The Israelites won’t listen to me.” Moshe is overwhelmed with self-doubt and anxiety. 

So what happens? How does Moshe overcome these doubts? Well, God gives Moshe the courage and support he needs. He tells Moshe, "I will be with you." God doesn’t leave Moshe alone in his anxiety. Instead, he gives Moshe a partner, his brother Aharon, to help him. God also reassures Moshe by giving him signs, like turning his staff into a serpent and back into a staff, and making his hand temporarily turn leprous and then heal. These signs show Moshe that with God’s help, he can do what seems impossible. And little by little, Moshe finds the strength to stand up to Pharaoh. 

This week's parsha, Parshat Shemot, starts with all the names of the people who came to Egypt, and then Joseph's entire generation dying. Within the first 15 verses: a new pharaoh rises, who enslaves the Israelites and then orders the killing of all the baby boys. In the second perek, Moshe is born, rescued from the Nile by Pharaoh's daughter, and grows up with the Egyptians in the palace. After growing up, he then kills an Egyptian taskmaster for beating an Israelite and runs away to Midian. In Midian, he marries Tzipporah, has children, and then sees the burning bush and goes back to Egypt. In Egypt, he says to pharaoh, let my people go, and then pharaoh says no and makes the Israelites’ work harder.

Reflecting on all of this action, one thing I noticed was that this parsha has a couple of overly violent moments, which all turn out badly. Pharaoh enslaves an entire nation because he was worried they would join his enemies in a war, but they just end up being even more numerous.  At the end of the parsha, pharaoh makes the slaves work even harder, and ends up getting plagued in the next parsha. All of these bad situations had less violent solutions, but sometimes in the moment it's hard to know the right thing to do. This is an issue that everyone struggles with, in stories from the Tanakh and also in everyday life.

By the end of this week’s parsha, Parshat Vayigash, Jacob and his family have arrived in Egypt. What began with a single, seemingly minor decision, sending Joseph to check on his brothers, has culminated in a full family relocation. The immediate frame is one of reunion and relief. Joseph is alive. The family is reunited. Hunger is avoided. And yet the larger context is unmistakable: this moment of healing takes place not in Canaan, but in Egypt.

The Midrash Bereishit Rabbah offers a striking retrospective reading of the entire Joseph narrative. According to the Midrash, the jealousy of the brothers, Joseph’s sale and imprisonment, his rise to power, and even Jacob’s long years of grief were all part of a divine plan to bring B’nei Yisrael to Egypt and set in motion the arc that would eventually lead to the Exodus and the formation of the Jewish people. In this telling, none of the suffering is accidental. It is, one might say, structural.

That explanation immediately provokes a hard question. If this was the plan all along, why did it have to unfold in this way? Why not simply tell Jacob what was required of him? Why not spare him the devastation of believing that Joseph was lost forever? It seems reasonable to assume that Jacob would have accepted personal hardship for the sake of his family, or for the sake of a divine mission,had it been explained to him directly. That is to say, if God had told him the plan, he would have agreed.

Rabbi Adin Even-Israel (Steinsaltz) z’l was a very busy man: He wrote several translations of the Talmud, ran two schools, and did outreach work with Jews in Russia. He was finding it hard to maintain his workload, so he asked his teacher, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, which area he should focus on. The Rebbe told him, “Keep doing all these things, and in fact, add to your schedule.”

In this week’s Parsha, Miketz, Pharaoh dreams of seven cows and seven stalks of corn. What is the significance of seven? Seven represents the natural world, such as the seven-day week or the seven-year agricultural cycle. Pharaoh’s believed the world was run by purely natural forces.

The Shaloh haKadosh, noted for the free kosher-lunch program that bears his name, says the parsha of the week always relates to the time of year where it falls. This week is Chanukah, which celebrates the eight-day miracle of the little cruz of oil burning extra-long. Eight represents above nature. It turns out, there is more to the world than meets the eye.

This week’s parashah is one that is near and dear to my heart.

Selfishly, it is because we named our son Joseph. As we know this is the beginning of Joseph's story.

To catch anyone up who has not been watching the regularly scheduled programming, this is the story where Joseph's brothers throw him into a pit then sell him into slavery in Egypt and then he deals with all sorts of mishegas once he is there with the pharaoh and his wife.

To anyone who feels like they are not parenting well, at least your children are not throwing each other into pets or slavery. #Winning.

One thing that is so interesting about this week’s Torah portion is the fact that we don't really hear a lot about how Joseph was feeling. We hear about his story in the progression of the events, but we do not hear about how he felt. What was it like to be completely betrayed by his brothers? What was he thinking about while he was sitting in the pit? Was he scared when he was sold into slavery in Egypt? How did he feel once he was in jail?

This week’s parsha is very fascinating, but there’s a specific moment I want to look at. When Yakov, who hasn’t seen Esav in 20 years, hears that his brother is heading his way with 400 men, he panics. He sends gifts of lots of cattle and camels to Esav. Amazingly, or not surprisingly, those gifts make all the difference. When the brothers finally see each other, they kiss and Esav does not attack Yakov. Esav initially refuses to accept the presents, but eventually takes them. They each go their separate ways, and all is well.

So, what exactly happened here? There are three ways I can interpret it.

One, Esav was heading over with an army so he could kill his brother. When he saw the gifts Yakov had sent, he thought that maybe he didn’t have to be mad at him anymore. Esav just wanted to fix the relationship, not to kill him. The gifts changed Esav’s mind, and saved Yakov’s life.

Two, Esav was unsure about what to do about his brother. He didn’t know if he should still be mad, or if it was time to forgive him. When the gifts were delivered, it pushed him over the edge. He was touched by this act of generosity and wanted to be on good terms with Yakov.

Three, Esav was not intending to kill Yakov. He came to make peace with him, to put the past behind them. When he saw the gifts, he was surprised that Yakov was asking for forgiveness. Maybe he took it as a sign that Yakov was scared, which of course, he was.

This week we read parshat Vayetzei. In last week's parsha, Yaakov steals the birthright from his brother Esav. In this week's parsha, Yaakov runs away to Haran. While on his journey, he has a dream where he sees angels going up and down a ladder and God promises to continue  the covenant that was made with his fathers. Yaakov comes to Haran and meets Lavan, Rachel and Leah. Yaakov wants to marry Rachel but Lavan tricks him so he ends up marrying Leah. Yaakov works for another seven years and then finally gets married to Rachel.

Leah, Leah’s maidservant, and Rachel's maidservant have 10 kids. After Rachel has her first child, Yaakov asks Lavan to go back to his father’s home. Lavan agrees, and Yaakov and his family leave. Later, Lavan finds out that Yaakov tricked him and took more sheep than he was supposed to. Lavan is angry and chases after them but God tells Lavan not to hurt Yaakov.

They make a covenant on a stone and then Lavan says goodbye to his children and leaves. Yaakov names the place Mahanayim, meaning double camp.

Something that interested me was the vow between God and Yaakov. God says to Yaakov: “I am God, the God of your father Avraham and the God of Yitzhak.” After promising Yaakov land and children, God says “I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” In the morning, Yaakov anoints a stone. After he does this, Yaakov makes a vow saying: 

“If God remains with me, protects me on this journey, and gives me bread to eat and clothing to wear, and I return safely to my father’s house, then God shall be God to me.”

In this week’s Torah portion as Rebecca struggles with her pregnancy, her twin sons wrestling in her womb, she cries out: “if so, why do I exist?” What a question! Why do I exist?

This question makes me think of two of my favorite texts in all of our traditions. First, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov is famously quoted as saying “the day you were born is the day God decided that the world could not exist without you.” And second, in the Book of Esther when Mordechai speaks to Esther about her opportunity to save the Jewish people, he said “and who knows if you reached this royal position for such a time as this.”

I see these two ideas as both answering and not answering Rebecca’s question (how very Jewish!)

Rebecca asks: why do I exist? And our tradition answers: because you needed to exist. The world needed you. Your people needed you. This moment in time needed you.

The next question might naturally be: well, but why? For what purpose?

And that is where the answers stop because there is no one size fits all response, the answer is different for each of us. Judaism fundamentally believes that we have a purpose in the world, we were created for a reason; the “why” is what we discover along the way. Enjoy the journey!

If Disney had to choose a Torah princess, the matriarch Rebecca would fit the bill. In this week’s parsha, Chayei Sarah, we read one of the most well-known tales of courtship, love, and marriage in the Jewish tradition. As a Bat Mitzvah many years back, I was proud to have this Torah portion because in its narrative, I saw rare attention paid to strong heroines. I was inspired by how Eliezer, Abraham’s servant, describes Rebecca as a suitable wife because of her acts of chesed (loving-kindness) in addition to her great beauty. As a young girl, I was moved by the way the Torah describes Isaac’s love for Rebecca: “And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebecca and she became his wife; and he loved her. And Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.*” (Genesis 24:67)

This week, on the 35^th anniversary of my Bat Mitzvah, I read this parasha as much more complex and, in some ways, more tragic. Bookended by the deaths of Sarah at the beginning and Abraham at the end, this is a story of a family beset by complicated attachments, trauma across generations, and unfulfilled dreams. And while the text provides exacting details on prosaic tasks such as burial plots and water for camels, we are left with little information on the emotions of the main characters who are, after all, our very own matriarchs and patriarchs.  Shouldn’t we, the Jewish people, have better access to these individuals who are so instrumental to our tradition?

Last July, while driving, I listened to an NPR interview with cellist Maya Beiser. Her haunting reflections on the story of Lot’s wife stayed with me long after the program ended, and I knew then that I wanted to dig deeper into Parashat Vayera. In the conversation, Beiser shared:

“Of the many stories I learned as a child, one haunted me for months, and eventually for years and decades, the story of Lot’s wife. The woman, unnamed in the biblical tale, is turned into a pillar of salt for eternity after disobeying divine command and looking back at the destruction of Sodom.

I kept thinking, why was she punished? Why was she not supposed to look back? The idea that she was turned into salt for eternity as this sort of punishment for all to see always felt really cruel and unjust to me.”

Beiser centered her latest album around this jarring moment in Vayera, tracing what she calls “an arc of female longing and defiance through the centuries.” For her, it also tells “the story of what it means to be a woman…this idea of bearing witness across millennia, and that we women need to support each other, to acknowledge that we are allowed to feel, to grieve, and to love.”

This last line of Beiser’s captured me. I, too, have always been fascinated by this parasha. What it meant for Lot’s wife, often named Idit in Midrash, to show what I have always seen as deep emotional humanity and connection in her gaze backward to a place where everyone else seems to have moved on—to a place deemed devoid of empathy.