The most exciting event of the last few days has to be the appearancehere of Pizmon, the knock-out Jewish a cappella group made up of students from Columbia University, Barnard College and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Our kids - and quite a few of our grown-ups - had the pleasure of hearing their vivacious performance, mostly in Hebrew, on Purim. And when they performed at B'nai Amoona after the delightful USY Purim carnival on Tuesday night, Schechter was heavily represented in that audience, too.
The kids, and adults, couldn't help but respond to the music, an intriguing blend of the traditional and the very, very contemporary. (If you missed them, do yourself a favor and buy their new CD at the B'nai Amoona gift shop. If you heard them, you probably already have.) But even better, perhaps, was responding to these wonderful, immensely talented kids.
Nearly all of them were Jewish day school alumni; many were alumni of Schechter schools. Talk about role models! Imagine, as Pam Appelman put it, the best camp counselors your kids could possibly have, and you have Pizmon. The kids loved them, of course. But in a way, they also were role models for grown-ups - or to put it more precisely, they were hope models.
Raising children today is at times bound to be discouraging to the most dedicated parents. You feel as if it's you against the world, trying to help your child grow up to be smart, of course, but above all, a mensch - and there are so many forces in society conspiring to make that difficult, if not impossible.
Then you see and hear Pizmon, and you say to yourself: Ok, what did their parents do right to create these marvelous kids?
Well, for one thing, they sent them to Jewish day schools.
Obviously, there are no guarantees in life (including, of course, any kind of guarantee that you child will grow up to have a superb singing voice). But there are nevertheless things we can do to improve the odds. I think that many of the parents of Schechter students who enjoyed the concert came away feeling that the odds for our kids were a little bit better than we had ever before dared to hope.
The Thank You Corner
This week it's a biggie - which just goes to show what a thriving community we're privileged to be part of: Thanks to Dick Cohen and B'nai Amoona for bringing Pizmon here. What a great community service!
- Parents' Page, March 17, 1995, Solomon Schechter Day School St. Louis
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