Question: I’m graduating soon. What is a Jewish way to mark this milestone?
Mazal tov on your graduation! Graduating any educational program is an achievement — it involves work, time and expense — and it brings blessings of knowledge, possibility and renewal.
How do we mark an event like this through Jewish ritual? One common suggestion for marking important moments of our lives is to say the blessing known as the Shehecheyanu: “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe, who has kept us alive, sustained us, and brought us to this time.” It’s a blessing with a built-in awareness of time and the calendar cycle: We say it over new fruits, over holiday observances and over moments of renewal. It’s a blessing where we approach God with gratitude, and with the holy awareness that reaching a moment in time is itself a gift.
Although the Shehechiyanu is a common suggestion for celebratory moments, I would like to suggest a different blessing, called, Hatov v’Hameitiv: “Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe, who is good and does good.” Why? The Talmud (Berakhot 54a) tells us:
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On rain and on good tidings, we say: Blessed is the One who is good and does good.
On bad news we say: Blessed is the true Judge.
Hatov v’Hameitiv is the blessing we say upon hearing good news. The other one, known as Barukh Dayan HaEmet, is the blessing we say when we hear bad news, such as news of a death.
This pair of blessings makes an important theological claim. It reminds us that the nature of the world is that both good and bad things happen, and that all of this happens in the same world, with one God. Contrary to some religious approaches in which God is credited for good, and evil deities are credited for bad, we Jews affirm that it all comes from God. This is an emotionally mature religiosity.
All of us, in our lives, will have moments when it is appropriate to say, with sadness, “Blessed is the true Judge.” We encounter loss whether we like it or not.
But we also encounter good things in our world — graduations, for example — and these should be celebrated by remembering that the world is full of good, and that God does good things in it.
Shehechiyanu is a blessing about marking time. This is important, and from one perspective, a graduation is a timely event — it comes up every year. Yet a graduation is not just about marking time, it’s also about marking work and celebrating knowledge. It’s appropriate, therefore, to use a blessing that speaks in a more complicated manner about the world:
בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה׳ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם הַטּוֹב וְהַמֵיטִיב.
Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha’olam, hatov ve-hameitiv.
Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe, who is good and does good.
Rabbi Eric Woodward is the rabbi of Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel in New Haven, Connecticut.
