Back to School, Back to Shul
08/15/2025 12:40:56 PM
The new school year has arrived! With so many of our students beginning classes this coming week, I offer this prayer, written by my colleague, Rabbi Michael Adam Latz:
Source of Wonder in the Universe:
As our children begin school, open their minds and their hearts to learning and books and the exhilaration of discovering something ancient or something new, something ridiculous and something utterly sublime.
Give them verses of poetry to stir their curiosity and teachers intoxicated with creativity and wonder. Make their fingers sticky with the glue of integrity and their toes limber to climb their way through complicated theories and artistic endeavors and mountainous reams of wisdom.
Let them fail regularly and learn the power of compassion and struggling to pick themselves and one another up again. May they eat fresh vegetables and drink a feast of books and color the color of their souls.
Please: Help them be safe enough to take enough risk to learn and stretch their minds and grow their hearts -- and wise enough not to harm themselves or their classmates or teachers.
Most of all, Source of Discovery, endow these children with the deepest love for each other’s beauty -- and their own remarkable creation. Amen.
Back to school season also means back to shul (Yiddish for synagogue). And so we’ll celebrate the start of the school/shul year with an engaging cookout Family Shabbat dinner and service next week on Friday, August 22. The dinner will be at 6pm (registration below and in the weekly Alef-Bet newsletter) and the service will be at 7pm. See your Religious School friends and make new ones over dinner. And join for a musical, family-friendly Shabbat evening service. It will be a great way to start a brand-new school (and shul) year.