Graduation gift

Editorial

It's graduation season, a time of ceremonies and celebrations, reminiscences and dreams. For many graduates, it is also a period of underlying uneasiness, as they leave behind the familiar and depart for strange, if exciting, new places.

How to prepare for the journey? Start early, carry a backpack filled with warm family memories and a duffel stuffed with Jewish experiences.

Recall lilting voices singing the hamotzi (blessing over bread) in Jewish pre-school. Remember struggling to sound out the shema (basic Hebrew prayer) in the prayer book. Recall learning to chant your haftorah (reading from the Prophets) and the sticky feeling of braiding the dough for your own challah (egg bread). Find a place to stash memories of holiday foods, such as crispy latkes (potato pancakes), biting horseradish and sweet honey cakes.

Make room for snapshots of summer camps. Stuff in photos also of your high school youth group, your friends from Hebrew school - the inside jokes, the shared annoyances (parents and siblings included), the ineffable security of belonging to a group.

Take with you all that you've learned about your tradition, your history, your faith, your people, wrapping yourself tightly in its folds as you take off to conquer a new world. It will serve you well.

Just ask any of this year's 54 graduates of the Phoenix High School of Jewish Studies. "An outlook on life and a code of values" is what Jason Houck says he gleaned from his Jewish education. "Knowledge and awareness," says Ilana Marks, and understanding that "what is popular is not necessarily right." Being Jewish is a continuing process, "becoming, growing, evolving," writes Josh Sherwin.

Rootedness, self-confidence, connectedness - that is what Jewish learning has given these young people. It is an enduring gift from families and teachers, offering direction and purpose, encouraging them to pursue further opportunities to learn and grow.

What better gift to give - or to receive - at this season?

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