Welcome, Welcome!
The time has finally come — after a year in this position of Executive Director of the Hillel at Miami, I am finally able to experience welcoming a new school year with students in person. While it’s certainly not shaping up to be the Fall semester that we though it would be when we all got vaccinated in the Spring, we are still going to be live albeit, with the appropriate precautions in place to keep our community safe.
I, along with the entire Hillel at Miami team, also recognize that the world has changed. This will be a year of rebuilding as more than half of our students – our first-years and sophomores – have never fully experienced campus life or Hillel in-person. Many of our students are ready to return to a sense of normalcy; others are nervous about how to feel safe, make friends, or how to be openly Jewish. There seem to be more rules to follow in life than ever before and those rules seem to change on a daily basis. How fitting that this week’s parsha, Ki Teitzei, is all about rules, protocols, and policies. Seventy-four of the Torah’s 613 commandments (mitzvot) are in the parsha of Ki Teitzei. These include the laws of everything from the beautiful captive, the inheritance rights of the firstborn, burial and dignity of the dead, returning a lost object, the duty to erect a safety fence around the roof of one’s home, and the various forms of forbidden plant and animal hybrids. One might read this week’s parsha and think, “Woowee, and I thought reading the CDC’s new quarantine guidelines were a confusing!” At least, that’s what I thought as soon as I read this week’s Torah portion. But what are rules but not another word for boundaries? And if you know me at all, you know that I love boundaries. Boundaries provide us with containment—a sense of comfort in chaos. Setting and maintaining boundaries as a parent of young children can assist in building life skills such as patience, problem solving, resourcefulness, responsibility and self-discipline. Boundaries go both ways, of course. If parents don’t respect the boundaries set by their children, they run the risk of devaluing their children’s self worth, which can have devastating consequences for them as adults. The boundaries we’ve set as a Hillel for this year — requiring pre-registration for events, eating outdoors, masks on at all times — these are for the safety and containment of our community. Students and families will know exactly what to expect when they walk in the doors of our Hillel this year and that is a masked staff ready and willing to engage and empower every Jewish student as we welcome them to our open, inclusive and diverse Jewish community.
Welcome Back. We are so glad you’re here.
