Across Not Down

When we hand the Torah down from generation to generation, we are showing how Torah came down from Mt. Sinai and is still relevant to us here today. But standing at the foot of Sinai was, perhaps, just a single generation, brothers and sisters and cousins, receiving Torah. And so much can happen within a generation that recapitulates our history. In this generation of our family are the children and grandchildren of Holocaust and WWII survivors and Israeli Defense Force veterans. They are doctors and lawyers, artists and musicians, professors and teachers, and students. They come from all parts of the United States, (California, Oregon, Chicago, and Michigan, specifically) and the world -France, Tanzania, Israel. Yael and Leah are the heads of the generation and Celia its tail,  and in between is so much that speaks to Jewish experience that in some ways, handing across the generation provides Celia a modern model of what it means to be a Jew – one that complements and transcends Torah coming down from the generations that precede her.