Can Hot Chocolate Stain a Patio?

February 7, 2022 in Hazzan Asa Fradkin

I’ve never hosted a hot chocolate party before.

It seems like it should be easy. You just take a few kumkum-hotpots full of water, then dump half a container of cocoa mix into the reservoir, and bada bing bada boom, hot chocolate coming out of the spout.

Oops, but someone left a hotpot on “boil” and the thing overflowed all over the table and beautiful artwork made by two JDS fourth graders, depicting which urn contained dairy cocoa and which pareve.

Actually, it was a perfect metaphor for the event we titled “Day School Hot Chocolate and Reconnect.”

It was equally overflowing with families from our day school community, enjoying each other’s company on a chilly but sunny afternoon in which tons of kids drank way too much cocoa, ran around the house (literally, they didn’t go inside), and rekindled an important part of our Beth El foundation, the commitment to a daily Jewish education.

Along with Jon Polon and Judy Liss, we planned this gathering to restart important conversations about how our day school families interact with the larger community and inform its identity.

In the coming months we plan to get this community even more active with our wider Beth El family as we look for ways to re-emerge after the pandemic and start to see one another in person more and more (B’Ezrat Hashem).

We will celebrate our families’ important commitment to Day School education again this weekend when we invite JDS parents and their senior graduates for an aliyah in honor of their graduation.

They will then be off to Israel for the duration of the semester as they live and study in the Holy Land and learn what it means to be Jewish while walking in the steps of our history.

We are overflowing with joy for their accomplishments. And as for the hot chocolate? It comes out with water.