My daughter’s first week of first grade ended with honey in her hair and a wedding canopy over her head.
Let me explain.
We moved to Israel before my oldest child turned six, so Kita Aleph, first grade in Israel is the only version of this milestone I know. And in Israel, it is a very big deal. Celebrations in Israeli schools have a distinct flavor. Every milestone becomes a tekes, a ceremony: coordinated shirts, songs rehearsed for weeks, families gathered to mark the moment. The distinctly Israeli flavor is almost as if the rhythms of school itself are teaching children how a community marks its milestones together, and Kita Aleph is where that training begins.
There were balloon arches. There were special first grade shirts. There was fanfare built entirely around one message: you are beginning school, and this moment is enormous.
Parents were invited in for a ceremony at the end of the first week of school. The teacher handed each child a card printed with a letter of the aleph-bet, the Hebrew alphabet, and then drizzled honey across it! The children licked the honey straight off the letters, a tradition meant to teach them, quite literally, that the words of Torah should be sweet on their lips. Even at six, sticky-fingered and thrilled, my daughter understood the lesson perfectly. King David put words to that same sweetness thousands of years earlier:
But the honey wasn’t what stuck with me.
After the letters were licked, all the first graders were gathered beneath a massive tallit, a prayer shawl, sewn together into a gigantic chuppah, the canopy under which a Jewish couple stands to be married. Underneath it, we (the parents) sang Hamalach Hagoel, asking the angel who redeemed our ancestors from evil to bless the children, and we said a prayer for the State of Israel.
It was ninety-five degrees outside. The children were hot, sticky, and some, still covered in honey. There are far easier ways to welcome a class of six-year-olds, to initiate them into the next 12 years of their lives. So why a chuppah?
The prophet Isaiah once promised that God would spread a chuppah over Mount Zion, a canopy of protection over the whole community:
A chuppah, in other words, doesn’t only cover a newlywed couple. It covers a people. It is also open on all four sides, and that openness calls to mind the tent of Abraham and Sarah, a home with its flaps thrown open to strangers and family alike.
There’s something else beautiful about the way a chuppah works. It doesn’t hold itself up. In many weddings, someone has to be standing there, holding the poles. One person for each pole. That morning, it was the parents and teachers circled around our childrenm holding the gigantic talit over their heads. Our children are quickly taught that they are never expected to be protected by fabric alone. They’re held up by us. By God.
The tallit came down within minutes, same as the honey got wiped off of the small fingers by lunchtime. And by the end of first grade, my daughter might not even remember any of it. Yet, the letters are already on her tongue.
This first chuppah was not about a wedding. It was about teaching a group of sweet six year old’s that some things are worth building a life around before you even know what “a life” means.
