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Have you ever been caught off-guard by a child asking a deceptively simple question? Welcome to my week. At the seder table the haggadah shows us how to tailor our answers to each specific type of child. But kids have a lot of questions about a lot of things, and I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but they tend to come at you when you are without a handy written guide of answers. Such was my experience when my almost-seven-year-old niece visited us.

One of the great joys of her visit was introducing her to our Vancouver life, including bringing her to Jewish Federation. We have talked about tzedakah, and she generally knows that it has something to do with Federation’s work, but she doesn’t really understand. So, she walks into my office and, being the confident little New Yorker that she is, looks around and says, “This is a pretty big office. What do you do in here?” (Surely, many of you have wondered the same thing.) Federation is as complex as the community we represent, so explaining our work to a child meant switching gears. My answer to her was, “We help people live better lives. People come to us with challenges, and either we help them or other people we work with help them.”

At the start of Passover, I wrote that it is often the smallest voices that ask the biggest questions. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?” Little did my niece realize, but she essentially asked this question of me. Really complicated questions sometimes need to be explained simply. We help people. Her question prompted me to consider the complexities of our work, and to see its essence with clarity. As so often happens, the adult who answered the question may have learned more than the child who asked it.

One of the ways we help people is by connecting them to Jewish life. Lissa Weinberger, our manager of Jewish education and identity initiatives distills her particular role down to this: helping people create a Jewish identity for themselves and their families. That’s exactly what happened on Saturday night when 140 parents, grandparents and children attended the family-friendly seder at Congregation Beth Israel that our PJ Library program was a part of. The little kids enjoyed story time and songs, the older kids performed a play that told the story of Passover, and the adults schmoozed. The hunt for the afikomen was epic. Many of these families might not have had a family seder to go to that night. Some may be inter-faith families who might not have felt comfortable leading their own seder at home. But they were all interested in connecting with Jewish life. If we can help do that through an early, short, family-friendly seder, it can make a big difference today and down the road. For us at Federation, those connections start with outreach programs like PJ Library.

While PJ Library is an important pathway to Jewish life, many other local organizations, synagogues, and schools have also committed themselves to connecting families, and they hosted their own family-friendly seders. Why? Though we are a complex people and a complex community, we come together because we want the lives of our children and our children’s children to be better than our own. It’s as simple as that.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Pesach Sameach,

Ezra S. Shanken
CEO, Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver