Dear Peanut,
The other day you and I sat on the floor of your room with pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters around us. We were reviewing the basics of monetary value—the nickel was surrounded by five pennies, the dime by ten, and so on. We marveled how the nickel equaled fewer pennies than the dime, even though it is a bigger coin and looks like it should be the quarter’s baby. Up until now, although you know money is exchanged for goods like groceries, toys, and supplies for our home, your only direct experience with money comes on Friday night, just before Shabbat.
It’s odd that Shabbat should be your association with money, because Shabbat is supposed to be an escape from the financial and logistical concerns of all the other days of the week. Yet for you, the appearance of coins is the first tangible sign that Shabbat is about to happen. Every Friday night, even though it is a work night for me, Daddy and I are committed to giving you a sense of the joy and calm of Shabbat. You have added to the pleasures of Shabbat by declaring that Shabbat is “cupcake day”—the one day a week when you’re guaranteed a cupcake for dessert.
And so each Friday night we say our blessings before the meal—over candles, the lighting of which ushers in the restful presence of Shabbat; over you, giving voice to our ineffable gratitude for your life; and over the grape juice and challah, when, for a fleeting moment, we don’t take for granted our good fortune or our full refrigerator. Before any of this however, the coins come jingling out of Daddy’s hand. We take down one of our many tzedekah boxes—most of which are your handiwork—and you distribute the coins among the three of us.
Shabbat is about the intimacy of our love for one another as a family, but in our house, we can’t revel in this love until we remind ourselves that our family doesn’t concern only the three of us. Our love is incomplete if we are only oriented toward the success and comfort of each other. Those tzedekah coins remind us that our family is just a small thread in the grand tapestry of Creation and our lives are interwoven with the life of every other human being, precious few of whom we know and love, most of whom are strangers to us.
So, holding our coins, we talk about the ways we can help fix the broken parts of our world—bringing school supplies to kids in need a few miles away; making sure no one in our town or the towns surrounding us goes hungry; using the money to help people in far away places like Haiti and Japan. Then the coins slip through the slots, you shake the box and we hear the clink of metal, and we make our way to the Shabbat table.
I was not raised with a weekly Shabbat experience, so I don’t know what the long-term impact our Friday night rituals will have on you, but my hope is that they will help cultivate and maintain a spirit of generosity and open-heartedness in you. Rabbi Israel Salanter once taught that the material needs of my neighbor are my spiritual needs. I pray this truth is imprinted on your soul every time you hold a coin, hear the blessings, and take that first delicious bite of a cupcake on Friday night.
At the very least, for a second or two before I dash out the door, I am poignantly, joyously aware that our family is part of something much larger and much more awesome than just the three of us. And for that, I am thankful.
As always, I love you,
Mommy
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