Who’s on your mishloach manos list this year?
Friends, teachers, rabbanim, coworkers. We package ourselves up in cellophane and ribbon and send this little representation to people who fit our status. Then we look at our children, run down the class lists, and prod them to choose the “right” friends to whom to send gifts. We come up with the perfect package for them — not just a theme, a theme with a twist, with color, with originality. And through that package we teach our kids to say without a word, See? I’m one of the cool kids! It’s worth being my friend.
There is the other side of the fence, though. The parents who look at their kids’ school lists and find the little girl who won’t be getting armfuls of packages. They point to the name and they say, “Let’s give to her.” These parents look beyond their instinctive desires and, with sensitivity and consideration, make girls like my own daughter happy.
My daughter is not cool. She is liked, she is sweet, she is awkward. She is learning disabled and manages, with a little extra help, in the local Bais Yaakov.
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