As summer approaches, so does day camp, overnight camp, slower paced life, vacations and more. For so many people, summer is a time to rejuvenate, refresh, spend quality time with family members and to do stuff that we might put aside the rest of the year.
Personally, while I love the constant vibrant lifestyle that we have throughout the year, and the constant interactions, meetings, classes, programs and more, I do look forward to the summer months. It is a time when we can slow down, catch our breath, and focus a little extra on family, spend time planning another great year, and enjoy some uplifting and invigorating moments when life runs at a different pace, do extra learning and reading, and so much more.
One of the great but very difficult things that we do each summer, is send away some of our kids to an overnight camp. While they love their time spent in camp and spending several weeks with new friends and having a blast, we as parents, find it hard to send them away from home and parental care, and entrust them with councilors in a camp, hundreds of miles away.
While we are confident that they are in great hands, my wife and myself turn to each other almost every day that they are away, and wonder and hope out loud, about them being okay, having fun, feeling good, making right decisions, and every other situation that they might be having. Thank G-d it has worked out each year and I am sure that it will work out once again this year.
I am also sure that we are no different than any other parents who send away their children to camp, who all share the same concerns, worries and excitement for their children.
While we rely and are grateful to the camps for the wonderful atmosphere that they provide, at the same time as we send them away each year, we hope and pray that our hard work, love, care and values that we seek to imbue them with throughout the year, stands by their side. We hope that all of this helps them be the independent people they need to be, while making good choices and decisions, and sticking to their good moral and Jewish values that they live throughout the year.
In the words of this week's Torah portion as it describes the flames of the Menorah in the Temple, we seek for them to become freestanding flames that are not constantly dependent on being rekindled, but rather are big enough to begin burning on their own.
In Chassidic thought it is explained that just like the Menorah in the Temple, had a body that was the actual seven branched Menorah and then it had the flames that it was kindled with, so too, each person, has a body and a soul. The Menorah by itself, was incomplete, only when it was illuminated by the light of the Menorah did it become a powerful spiritual beacon of light. Likewise, our job is to harness the power and qualities of our body, with the illumination and spirituality of the soul, so that together, they combine to become a beacon of light for themselves and for those around them.
As parents, as well as nurturing our own Menorah, we are responsible for kindling our children's Menorah. Yet the goal is to develop this until a point, when the child's Menorah begins to stand on its own light, and is not constantly being rekindled and lit again.
Good Shabbos
Yisroel