Sukkot Message from Milton
September 23, 2021 by
Our family has moved quite a bit over the 16 years since our eldest was born. This has been the source of some parental hand-wringing, always wondering and worrying about the balance of taking on meaningful opportunities to serve our Jewish communities professionally while also personally building community for our own family. We have become pros at packing up a condo/apartment/house and unpacking our stuff to quickly make a new house look familiar and like our own. But those things are just symbols of history and home, the true measure is how quickly a place feels like home.
This is not only true for those of us who have physically uprooted ourselves. Finding home can also be a challenge when a community changes over time, leadership turns over, cultures evolve – or we evolve! – and need to reacclimate and adjust to make ourselves at home again.
Each sukkot, we are all meant to experience a bit of this uprootedness and push ourselves to find the deep comfort of truly being home without some of the creature comforts of our houses. It pushes us to find that which we take with us wherever we go – the universal commitments of our lives that make us whole. What are those for your family? For us, as a beginning list, they are fellowship with Jews of all stripes, connection to history and ritual, trusting and being trustworthy, engaging in deep dialogue, and immersion in a community of interdependence (oh, and loyalty to Boston sports teams, of course!).
I do believe this is the essence of what we do at Milton. Our mission and work is to give your children – and your families by extension – access to and a love of these Jewish experiences, feelings, connections, commitments, texts, and songs – which will help them to make a Jewish home wherever they choose to go in their lives, to discover their universals despite the changes around them. While our sukkot may be fleeting, what they can embody and represent is timeless.
