Dolly Parton died this week at the age of 80. Like millions of people around the world, I knew her as the unmistakable voice behind songs like Jolene and 9 to 5. What I did not know until after her death was that Dolly Parton also helped change the way Jewish children learn their own stories. Parton’s father never learned to read or write, something she later said limited a man she knew to be extraordinarily intelligent. So in 1995, she created the Imagination Library, a program that mails free books directly to young children. Her idea was wonderfully simple: put good books into children’s homes, and you give them something much bigger than a book. Years later, Jewish philanthropist Harold Grinspoon heard about her program and had an idea of his own. What if Jewish families received books that introduced children to Jewish stories, traditions, and values? That idea became PJ Library, which today reaches more than 670,000 families in 40 countries. There is something particularly fitting about that story, because long before Dolly Parton, PJ Library, or the concept of a children’s book even existed, the Bible understood something fundamental about children.
If you want a story to survive, you have to give it to the next generation.
There were, of course, no brightly illustrated children’s books in the days of Moses. No board books about Abraham. No alphabet books about the Land of Israel. No bedtime edition of the Book of Genesis. But there were stories. And again and again, the Bible tells us to pass them on.
One of the clearest examples comes immediately after the Exodus from Egypt:
Exodus 13:8
It is such a classic verse. In fact, outside of the Ten Commandments, I think I would rank this as one of the most important commandments in the entire Bible.
Tell your child.
God does not simply command the Israelites to remember what happened. He commands them to become storytellers. Think about that. The generation standing at the Exodus saw the plagues. They walked through the sea. They experienced the story firsthand. Their children would not. Their grandchildren certainly would not. So God built the solution directly into the story itself.
Tell them. Tell them what happened. Tell them what God did. Tell them where you came from. Tell the story so well that a child born hundreds, or thousands, of years later can somehow understand that this is his story too. That idea runs throughout the Bible. Biblical faith was never supposed to exist only in the minds of scholars or behind the walls of a sanctuary. It was meant to move from parent to child, from teacher to student, from one generation to the next.
And children learn through stories. They always have – and they always will.
A child may not remember a lecture about faith, courage, or the importance of the Land of Israel. But tell him about Abraham walking through the hills God promised him, and suddenly those ideas have a person, a place, and a picture. Tell her about Jacob lying beneath the stars at Beit El and dreaming of angels climbing a ladder toward heaven, and suddenly a place on a map becomes part of a story she knows.
Tell them about David looking out over Jerusalem, Ruth walking faithfully with Naomi, Joshua crossing the Jordan, or the Israelites standing at Mount Sinai, and the Bible begins to feel less like something that happened long ago and more like a world they can enter.
That is one of the reasons I have spent so much time over the past year thinking about children’s books. Israel365 has just published a new children’s book designed to introduce young readers to the biblical Land of Israel. It moves from A to Z through the people, places, stories, and verses of the Bible, helping children connect the words they hear in Scripture with the actual land where those stories took place.
I have loved working on it for exactly this reason. A children’s book may seem like something small. A rhyme. A watercolor illustration. A verse on a page.
But that is often how a much bigger story begins. Dolly Parton understood that simply putting a book into the hands of a child could change something. Harold Grinspoon understood that those books could connect Jewish children to thousands of years of their own history.
And the Bible understood it first.
Tell your child.
Because a story that is never told eventually becomes history.
A story that is handed to a child becomes a legacy.
