"You Will Tell Your Children" - L'Sasson 2026/5786

Remarks shared on March 22, 2026,  at L'Sasson: A Fundraising Brunch to Support SJCS

"You Will Tell Your Children"

Allow me to begin my remarks this morning reaching back across the sweep of time before returning to the here and now, in our Emerald City, within our sweet, mission-driven, and child-centered SJCS community. 

Today, by the Jewish calendar, is ד׳ בניסן התשפ״ו. The fourth day of Nisan in the year HayTaShPa”V, 5786. If we were to roll the clock back 3,338 years to what we would call today the year 1313 BCE – or, using the nomenclature of our ancient calendaring system –ד׳ בניסן בתמ״ח, the fourth of Nisan in the year BaTMa”Ch, 2448, we might – if I set the time machine correctly – find ourselves three days into a plague of darkness engulfing those around us in Pharaoh’s empire, while we ourselves surely stand mystified and world-weary ... even as we also stand less than a fortnight from liberation, after generations of slavery.

In such a context, we could look to our leader to capture in words a framework that might help us to grasp the meaning of all that was transpiring before us and all that would yet play out. What could our leader, Moshe – a man who described himself as Ch’vad Peh U’Ch’vad Lashon/כבד פה וכבד לשון (“heavy mouthed and heavy tongued”) – put forward as his central theme?

We know the answer to that question because his words have come down to us in passages the Torah records.

Moshe made what we might regard as a surprising choice, emphasizing a theme whose impact resonates across time and reaches us as richly today on the shores of Lake Union as it did millennia ago on the shores of the Nile:

“V’higad’ta L’vincha BaYom HaHu L’Aymor: B’Avur Zeh Asah Adonai Li B’Tzeyti MiMitzrayim.”

״והגדת לבנך ביום ההוא לאמר: בעבור זה עשה ה׳ לי בצאתי ממצרים״

“You will tell your children on that day, saying: ‘We do this on account of what Adonai did for us in our departure from Mitzrayim, the constrained places.’”

* * *

“You will tell your children ...”

Not once, not even twice, but three times over the course of 14 verses, Moshe framed the meaning and purpose of redemption with a focal emphasis on education.

In recent times, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and one of the seminal Jewish voices of our age, spoke and wrote with particular eloquence about the insights of Moshe’s remarkable choice:

“To defend a land, you need an army. But to defend freedom, you need education. You need families and schools to ensure that your ideals are passed on to the next generation and never lost, or despaired of, or obscured. ... Moshe realized that a people achieves immortality not by building temples or mausoleums, but by engraving their values on the hearts of their children, and they on theirs, and so on until the end of time.”

A few years ago, as the COVID pandemic shattered modern conceits that plagues were the scourges only of bygone days, Rabbi Sacks spoke via a cloud-based platform to an international gathering of Jewish day school heads. That day, he emphasized just these same themes and underscored how the circumstances of 2020 only put in them bolder relief. A few months later, in the fall of that year, a cancer that had struck him twice returned for a third time – virulently – and on November 7, 2020 – the 20th of Cheshvan in the year HayTaShP”A, 5781 – his distinguished life of teaching and service came to an end.

While Rabbi Sacks did not live to know the circumstances that faced his people and the inhabitants of this world in subsequent falls, like the fall of 2023, or those that surround us now in the spring of 2026, I feel certain that he would continue to underscore these very same themes:

“If you want to come close to Heaven, don’t search for kings, priests, saints or even prophets. They may be great, but a fine teacher helps you to become great, and that is a different thing altogether.”

This is the sacred work that greets the team at SJCS every school day. We live in times of abundant blessings, notably in the material world, and also in the capacities that we humans have achieved, together with our machines, all so wildly beyond – quantum leaps beyond – what our ancestors could have conceived, even as they witnessed miracles.

Maybe the last six plus years have bestowed on all of us wholesome pangs of understanding that “vaster and faster” are not automatically “better,” surely not in unqualified ways. Maybe we have lost quite a bit as we have gained and gained.

Surely this point holds profoundly true: we still need schools. We still ought to center the core purpose of the freedoms we hold in “engraving our values in the hearts of our children, and theirs on ours.”

״והגדת לבנך ביום ההוא לאמר ...״

“You will tell your children ...”

On that enterprise, I have so much more to share. No topic inspires me more than the students of SJCS and their strides and missteps, their dramas and comedies, their learning and growth – kid-style and extraordinary teachers-style – filling our campus every school day. Please take me up on my open offer, extending to every single one of you, to stroll with me through our classrooms. I can tell you more then about this year’s special Zman Kehillah initiative – the cross-grade “SJCT@SJCS” project. I want to show you the visuals of creativity and inspiration that adorn our walls. I want you to hear the bounty of questions and ideas that resonate within them. I want you to feel the beating heart of our school’s open-armed and open-hearted Judaism, rooted in tradition and celebratory of pluralism.

Having returned from בתמ״ח/BaTMa”Ch (the year 2448), allow this thought to suffice for now: We are, all of us adults, ushering our children – as humans and as Jews – toward times of ongoing uncertainty. The Jewish people have endured uncertainty before. Many of our ancestors experienced considerably darker portents and more malevolent forces, with fewer blessings than ours. And they endured.

Am Yisrael Chai V’Kayam/עם ישראל חי וקיים

(Am Yisrael Lives and Endures)

Yes, this. And also this: our children need our schools. And if we are to provide them with the strongest foundations we can to move forward with lives of meaning and purposes – in thriving Jewish communities – replete with all of their diversity – we need schools like SJCS.

Schools like SJCS can only thrive, can only deliver on their mission in all the ways we need them to with your generous support. We will ask you this morning to dig deep in extending that support. On behalf of our children. For that support, I will be most grateful. On behalf of our children. And with that support, my colleagues and I will carry on and head forward – Kadima! B’Kehillah/קדימה! בקהילה (Onward! In Community) – with spirit and commitment. On behalf of our children.