JCHS Graduation Blessing 5772/2012
© Rabbi Menachem Creditor
in honor of Yael Platt and the entire JCHS Class of 2012
Adonai,
Our graduates have their caps. They have their gowns. Pictures have been taken and have likely already gone viral. We gather together, a community of family, friends, and mentors, to ask for Your blessing.
It is not an easy thing to change the world, but God, these graduates, each of them an empowered image of You, need more support than they are going to receive, and so we turn to You. We ask You to help the world our graduates inherit be ready for the changes and healing they are prepared to bring.
Some of us call You God, and some of us don't, but we all share in the knowledge that blessing depends upon more than any one of us brings as an individual. So Source of Life, Power that Makes for Salvation, Force, Conscience – Adonai – be with our graduates as they take their next steps.
- May our graduates know love. And may that love be free of judgment.
- May our graduates know pride. And may that pride be accompanied by humility.
- May they remember that plans rarely work. And may their navigation of an unpredictable world be supported by the communities they choose to help build.
May they take all they've gained from the Torah and wisdom they've experienced in our school and make that power contagious in a world that is waiting for their gifts.
JCHS Graduates of the Class of 5772, we bless you with these words, written by the great poet Marcia Falk:
Be who you are –
and may you be blessed
in all that you are.
Amen.
------------------------------------------
Rabbi Menachem Creditor
------------------------------------------