Dear JCC Family,

There are moments in parenting that arrive disguised as logistics: a long drive, a packed car, a desk chair that becomes an urgent matter of self-expression. You tell yourself you are helping her settle in, because tasks are easier than tears. But somewhere between the bedding aisle and the final hug, the truth breaks through: you are standing at the edge of her childhood, watching it turn quietly into her adult life.

This past weekend, I moved my daughter into college for her second year, four years after doing the same for my son. I knew the pride and the ache, and the instinct to stay busy so I would not have to feel it all at once. But this time, something landed differently. For the first time, I felt in a deeply personal way how much a community helps prepare a child to step into her own life, amid boxes everywhere, nervous laughter, and hugs exchanged three times before parting ways.

I have spent thirty years in Jewish communal life speaking about continuity, belonging, and the institutions that hold families through Jewish life. I thought I understood the work. Then I watched my daughter walk away into her sorority house, carrying more than we packed in the car, and I understood it in my bones.

This week we read Parashat Ki Tavo, and this year it landed with a specificity I wasn't expecting. The portion opens with the mitzvah of bikkurim: bringing the first fruits of your harvest to the land, and reciting aloud, in full, the story of how you got there. Not just "Here is what I grew." The Torah asks us to tell the entire journey: my father was a wandering Aramean, we were enslaved, we cried out, and we were brought to this place. Only then do we place the basket down. I don't think that's incidental. You cannot simply hand over what you've grown. You must narrate the years that made it possible, or the moment doesn't mean what it should. That is, I think, exactly what a college drop-off actually is: setting down a basket and finally understanding the whole story that filled it.

College drop-off is not really about drop-off day. It is about suddenly seeing everything that came before it. The young woman standing there with a laundry basket full of shoes did not become herself in that driveway. She became herself over years of ordinary Tuesdays, Shabbat dinners, camp cabins, and youth programs, many of them held by Jewish communal organizations. In that moment, I could see flashes of every age she had ever been, gathered inside the young adult now brave enough to begin again without me beside her.

She learned to swim at camp before she could tie her shoes, and there she learned how to miss home and still be okay, how to make and lose a friend, and forgive. In JCC youth theater and synagogue leadership programs, she learned to use her voice and try again after failing. None of that looked like preparation at the time; it looked like childhood. But Jewish communal organizations have always understood something essential: childhood is formation. A camp bunk, a JCC classroom, a youth group bus, a leadership seminar; these are laboratories for becoming, the sacred and often underappreciated work of Jewish communal life.

Jewish communal organizations do not simply offer programs; we help form people. The early childhood teacher who teaches patience, the camp counselor who helps a homesick child through the night, the youth professional who takes a teenager seriously, all are participating in the long work of raising adults, and at its best, it is character formation.

I have often described the Aaron Family Jewish Community Center as "The Center" of the Jewish community; the place people walk through on their way to deeper connection and leadership. Watching my daughter step deeper into her college life, I felt that personally. The Jewish community had been one of her gathering places, giving her a sense of belonging and an identity sturdy enough to carry with her.

So, to the parents dropping off children at college this month, I see you standing in parking lots, pretending to check your phones. I see you in the campus hotel lobby and waiting at the gate for the flight home. To the Jewish professionals, educators, clergy, donors, and communal leaders who helped shape these young adults: I see you too. Your work mattered, in ways hard to measure and impossible to replace.

When I said goodbye to my daughter, I was not only letting go of more of my child. I was remembering the toddler in the pool, the camper with a duffel bag bigger than she was, the teenager finding her voice, the young woman now ready to make a life of her own. I was sending forward the adult that a whole Jewish community helped form. That does not make the goodbye easy, but it does make it holy.

So, parents, travel home safely, call them on Tuesday, not Monday; give them Monday, even if every instinct tells you to reach for the phone sooner. Then come back to the J, the synagogue, the camp, the organization that helped raise them, with gratitude for what this work means. More children are becoming adults every day, and they will need the same gift we received: a community that believes in them before they know how to believe in themselves.